Dear Sven, when and how do you actually listen to the radio?
Radio is an on-the-go medium for me. Whenever I’m in the car or on the train. Radio is fun, and radio can influence moods. And how do you listen to radio?
Funnily enough, I only listen to the radio at off-peak times. So when I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is turn on the radio in the bathroom, and it always puts me in a good mood. I listen almost exclusively to Radio Paradiso. Then I also tune in to our colleagues, for example to consumer advice pieces: What makes good teamwork? Or what helps alleviate back pain? I also listen at weekends, almost only to Radio Paradiso. For example, they have a very great format, namely the listen-in religious service. That means they always broadcast a church service on Sunday mornings from 10 to 12, but not a traditional one, but rather a relaxed conversation with a cleric of their choice. And apart from that, I hardly ever listen to the radio during the day, because I really concentrate more on pictures and videos, which is also part of my work.
Yes, somehow everything is growing together anyway. And that’s why you have been given the new task of being managing director of Rufa and taking care of all audiovisual topics within the dpa team of editors-in-chief. What does that mean to you?
In the new dpa news it plays a very central role. I am convinced that audio and visual belong firmly together and should be at the heart of dpa’s structure. We still have to grow together in this respect. I am convinced that audiovisual topics are becoming more and more important in news reporting. People no longer want to just read about things. People also no longer want to read news in the traditional way in the newspaper. But they also no longer want to consume news on classic news sites but rather watch videos. They listen to podcasts. They also no longer listen to the radio in a linear fashion, but listen to information whenever they want it. Above all, we have to adjust our planning to take this into account.
I’m not as clear about this as you, because I think there is still an audience that looks forward to getting a newspaper in the morning and watching the “Tagesschau” news bulletin at 8 p.m., where world events are put into perspective for them. But of course I agree with you that we have to think and plan issues together. In the spring we had these great get-to-know-you talks with the audio, voice and podcast teams, and the year before that we had the really great on-boarding talks with the colleagues from the video department ... and actually the answers were always much the same: We have our own sound material, we are in the field, we know what interests people. It would be even nicer if the rest of the dpa paid more attention to us and literally listened to us. And I think that’s what we both set out to do!
I think we have a long journey ahead of us since audio and video have been neglected. People no longer restrict themselves to when the newspaper pops through the letterbox or when the “Tagesschau” goes on air. Although of course a lot of people still watch the “Tagesschau”. At these times in which we find ourselves the classification carried out by traditional, public-owned media is enormously important. But alongside that there is a whole new generation of media consumers who often don’t even know when the “Tagesschau” starts and they get their information from many other sources. We have to be prepared for that!
My recent experience fits in very well with this: we literally have a big construction site on our hands right now. I mean the new newsroom that is being built not far from the old one here in Berlin-Kreuzberg. And I recall, when we were sitting together in the planning group, there were many questions about the basic idea behind it: How much of a classic newsroom, meeting place or co-working space will it be? All of us agreed though that the ground floor, the heart of the whole thing, is where the audio studios and the workstations and video studios belong. This makes them visible and is a constant reminder that we are, after all, the ones who fill the timelines! Our content is used to inform people using social media or on the platforms of big media brands.
I was very pleased about the fact that there was no dissent at all and everyone was in agreement. When it was completely different to the situation I found when I started eight years earlier! Back then audio editors were sitting there on the side-lines. The video people were not even there yet. Television was not an issue for us. Podcast started up everywhere else, but not yet at dpa. We’ve really come a long way since then!
I think the best way to get people on board is to keep telling them: Check your own behaviour! Many of us have an Instagram account, each of us has a Twitter account. We all watch the programmes that appeal to us. And if I apply this standard to my work behaviour, we are not far away from what we actually need for the market out there. But what we often do at the moment is: we separate our private behaviour from our professional behaviour. Many of us take great photos and upload them to Instagram, for example. No one thinks of say: Hey, I’m just walking through the forest. That would make a nice weather feature photo for the Bildfunk picture service!
Here’s another question: I envisaged cross-media journalists at dpa, namely male and female reporters who can turn a hand to everything and do so. I’ve moved away from that again. I understood that you are saying the same thing: Just drop it. We have really good photographers. If you plan their schedule properly, they will deliver the pictures, and maybe we can also use the sounds for audio. What do you think? Is expertise not a dead end as I believed a few years ago?
Not at all. I think right now we are in a phase at dpa where it is very important that we work with experts. At dpa, for example, no one had any TV expertise until two years ago, and we bought it in through TNN. With these experts we have to develop strategies together on how to absorb the topic of television more into dpa. And if we plan together and think differently together, then I think the project will turn out to be fine at the end of the day.
Is raw material actually the future for us or our own quality contribution?
In the end it will be both. We notice that even the big digital clients no longer want finished contributions from us. That is because they want raw material, they want to edit the material themselves with their voices, with their way of telling stories. But there will still be enough digital houses that can’t afford their own video department. And that’s where we come in with our finished contributions. Of course, at the end of the day, we have to deliver both. But raw material is becoming more and more important.
How do you juggle your priorities as Head of Audiovisual? You also manage a very large photo team. With the audio and video team, that adds up to more than 100 employees. Now you have a head of photo or photo coordinator, a head of video to support you. What do these roles entail?
Is my job exhausting? Yes, but it’s also incredibly fun. How do I keep the teams together? I don’t know if I am succeeding as well as I would like to. But these teams all have one thing in common: they want to make a good product at the end of the day and they also want to get noticed more. Head of video, new photo coordinator – these are positions or colleagues that we are now bringing in so that at the end of the day we can implement all these strategies from one mindset.
Take our head of video, for example: We can no longer regard video as a separate entity from the rest of the offerings. We need to view and think about the stories we are planning and implementing from a central video perspective. When we create a video, we need a hub that evaluates the topics and the material.
Now you are also the newly appointed Managing Director of the dpa subsidiary Rufa, in which we have bundled our video and audio activities. I thought video is a growth area for dpa, isn’t it?
Definitely!
I am fascinated by the podcast format and have entered a new journalistic world. With Spotify or other platforms, we have to first convince people of an idea before we produce something like a prototype. The fact that dpa is now also learning to develop journalistic ideas on a commission basis is not necessarily the approach we have taken in the past. We are great at describing the world, explaining it and classifying it. But we don’t reinvent the world every day like other brands have to do. I’m very attracted to this different way of thinking about products. Another example is the Audio Hub. At long last we are trying to mine our archive treasure, in this case of original sounds – combined with the new sounds that we deliver.
What you say is right. We have to learn to pitch properly. Above all, we have to learn that you can make money with entertainment, with good entertainment, and that there is strong competition out there. Entertainment is something that dpa is not yet good at, just as the dpa hasn’t learned to pitch for a long time. I only really understood the value of the Audio Hub when we recently had a conversation with a colleague who told us enthusiastically that we have the sounds of the white rhinoceros buried in our audio archive – that species is almost extinct.
There are still two of them around to be precise.
What a treasure trove!
If you look at how we are developing the whole agency, assessment is something very important. You are now Rufa Managing Director and Head of Audiovisual in the editorial department, Vanessa Burghardt is your authorised signatory. I contribute content input, we develop the guidelines for this area together. Measurability is a key for the new dpa. We are currently trying to gauge the success of our products even more precisely in many places. The fascinating aspect about video in this respect is that the sales figures are the most genuine out there. We are talking here about selling material to television stations, aren’t we?
Yes, we go out on the street, produce a TV report, get some raw material or a digital video. Less than three hours later we know whether it was any good or not, because it was either sold or was not. That means we have a very direct customer contact. We know immediately what worked and what we sold. Of course, this is not yet the case with the other dpa products at the moment. To be fair that’s because behind something like the basic German service is a strategy of longer-term evaluation and customer satisfaction.
How would you define dpa’s visual language?
First of all, dpa’s photographic language is informative and very striking. We show on a one-to-one basis just what is happening on the street. Naturally, we also have a lot to offer beyond that, especially in the areas of features and symbolic images. We have great talents who simply come up with different perspectives to the ones we had in the past, and we also give them more space to create.
I’m still looking for a slogan here. Maybe you can help me with your even fresher view of the agency. Take the famous sentence by Augstein for the “Spiegel”: “Just say what is happening.” What would that be for our visual language: “Show what is happening”?
That can be applied across the board to the other way we actually want to get stories across in the future, and not only in a photo context. A slogan that fits dpa’s editorial offices might be: We are where the people are.
Silke Brüggemeier is Deputy Editor-in-Chief and Head of Visual at dpa. She is also Managing Director of the subsidiary Rufa Rundfunk-Agenturdienste GmbH and oversees dpa’s picture, video and audio reporting.
Sven Gösmann has been Editor-in-Chief of dpa since 2014.
The four-member dpa editorial team in the Corona-empty Berlin newsroom: Silke Brüggemeier (Deputy Editor-in-Chief and Head of Visual), Antje Homburger (Deputy Editor-in-Chief and Head of News), Sven Gösmann (Editor-in-Chief) and Jutta Steinhoff (Deputy Editor-in-Chief and Head of the Network), from left to right.