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During the month of World Radio Day, we spoke to Rui Tukayana, a reporter, podcaster and true story hunter. For 20 years, he was a journalist at TSF radio station, where he is still editor of Mundo Digital, a daily programme dedicated to new technologies. In 2019, he created the YouTube channel Isto Está Ligado?, also on the same theme, and since September 2024 he has presented Porto no Ponto, the daily podcast about the city of Porto, where ‘there's room for everything, from the cultural agenda to the economy, including the environment, innovation, society and current news’.
Rui is always looking for good stories, and it was no coincidence that he chose Café Dona Mira, in Bonfim, for his chat with Agenda Porto; he found out that its owner, Carlos Fuchs, a musician, music producer and sound engineer, won a Grammy in 2023, and wanted to interview him. It was a meeting that promised to be a ‘two-in-one’.
Born in Angola, he left the country when he was just six months old, carrying with him a ‘very remarkable’ story. He grew up in Aveiro and at the age of 18 entered the School of Journalism in Porto, when he began commuting between the two cities, first by train and then by car. ‘I must have one of the longest records of travelling between Porto and Aveiro!’
Tukayana e Carlos Fuchs © Rui Meireles
Although he wanted to be a journalist, he also imagined other careers: "If things had gone really, really well for me, I could have been a musician, because I had a band and even won a music award. But then I realised that being a journalist during the day and a rock star at night wasn't going to work," he laughs.
The first memory he has of ‘Porto being Porto’ happened on a hot August afternoon in R. de Passos Manuel. "I was walking up the street and overtook a lady of about 80, who was carrying two bags, looking very heavy, very tired. At the time, books were being sold there and a saleswoman asked her: “It's hot, isn't it?” And she replied with a loud 'is hot as f#ck! - And I loved that, because I wasn't expecting an 80-year-old lady to say such a loud swear word, and I thought it was funny," he recalls, amused.
Radio came into his life with an internship at TSF in 2003. "The three-month internship was with João Paulo Meneses who, right in the middle of it, said to me, 'this traineeship is over for me! You have no chance, this isn't going well' - but the truth is that he put up with me for the rest of the internship, and I really enjoyed it; I call him “master” because he was a master to me."
© DR
His first story for TSF was as a correspondent in Aveiro during Euro 2004. ‘When I went to TSF as an intern, it was because it was the radio station I liked listening to the most, and I thought I could learn a lot there, but there weren't many opportunities, at least for me, but then I had the chance to be a correspondent in Aveiro, and this path began.’
His ‘addiction’ to technology, which began when he was still a child with a Spectrum computer given to him by his father, and his ‘technological finger’, as he jokingly puts it, have also allowed him to become head of the programme dedicated to technology, Mundo Digital, which TSF launched in 2007 and which later became a podcast. "It's a daily programme about consumer technology, those little things, I don't talk about satellites; at the time, there really wasn't anything like that. And I'm still happy to do it today."
After two decades at TSF, last year the future didn't look ‘bright’, and the YouTube channel he had created about technology was already providing him with ‘an interesting income’, but he ‘didn't have much time to devote to it’. That's when he decided to ‘think about the future’ and start ‘embracing new things’. And that's precisely when the opportunity arose to present the Porto no Ponto municipality podcast.
Porto is very funny, and I have a lot of leeway to do whatever I want in terms of subjects,’ says Rui, who stumbles across many stories. ‘Today, we have social networks where they appear in front of us, new ideas, people doing absolutely new things.’
And what is a good story? "It's a mixture of things, because there's [a subject] that can be a potentially good subject, and we don't have the luck or the ingenuity, or both, to turn it into a radio programme, into an interesting episode. Sometimes we're more uninspired," he admits. ‘But a good story is something that satisfies me as a listener,’ he says.
Among his favourite episodes of Porto no Ponto, he recalls a conversation with the gravedigger at the Prado do Repouso Cemetery, who revealed unusual cases, ‘of situations where there was a fight’, namely when ‘a man dies, but his wife and mistress come; sometimes more than one mistress’. ‘He told me that the last time he witnessed [such a situation] was more than 10 years ago, at a football player's funeral.’
Rui also remembers another episode that he really enjoyed making, which resulted from a trip to the supermarket: "My girlfriend tells me that the smoked salmon I was looking at is made here in Porto. I automatically thought it would make an article. Porto is the only city in Portugal that has a smoked salmon factory. The owner learnt from his grandfather, who was German," he says.
This podcaster says that he prefers episodes that ‘“bring” the most genuine people’, recalling, by the way, the episode about a knife sharpener from Alentejo who travels the country by bicycle: "I doubt Joaquim is still in Porto, I don't know where he is, but he's a dangerous-looking gentleman, a bit rougher, but he's lovely, very friendly, and it was by chance that I discovered him. I was at home, I heard the sound of the grinder's flute and I thought it would make a great story. I went down the building and when I got to the street I didn't see him any more; I still had to ask people about him, but then I found him..." - This is just one of the many ‘chaste characters’ that Rui has spoken to and that he finds ‘funny’ to bring to the podcast.
‘Simpler people who have funny expressions and a lot of things that make the episode more interesting,’ he says.
© Rui Meireles
In four months of Porto no Ponto, Rui has already discovered and shared dozens of stories that show the more traditional and surprising side of Porto. And he guarantees that he will continue. It's very likely that you'll find him out and about, microphone in hand, ready to capture new stories that connect people to the city.
© Rui Meireles
by Gina Macedo
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