Yesterday I met with Johannes Reimer, who’s been working for DR on-and-off since 1983. I’d asked to speak to him to give a longer-term perspective on DR, and he didn’t disappoint.
Johannes has a slightly awkward schedule, working one week as the program-chief for the early morning 6am to 10am programme, then next week switching over to the afternoon programme from 3 to 6pm, as host. Despite the shifting hours, Johannes likes working in the radio. Indeed, he left a job as communications-chief for the local council in order to return to radio after only 1 1/2 years. I asked him whether he thought having worked as a communications-chief for the council was a help or a hindrance in his role as a journalist. He said that, whilst friends had joked, saying that now they’d be able to call on him to ‘explain’ things better, he was quite clear that that couldn’t happen; and that in any case, it was an advantage to understand how civil servants worked. It was, after all, a relatively common career move.
As with previous interviews, Johannes seemed quite angry with management or board members who caused DR to appear in the press. He still felt proud, he said, but the management involvement in things like Orestaden was either incompetent or wilfully negligent. Certainly, he knew people in Copenhagen who said that they weren’t proud to work for DR any longer, but that was unlikely to happen in Aarhus.
He was partly critical of the recent reorganisation of DR Aarhus, in that, whilst recognising the benefits of building work around project-oriented teams, ‘news’ is an ongoing activity, which can’t be structured like an ongoing project. I certainly found it strange that his boss, since not a formal project-leader, can’t hire or fire or set the budget for the news organisation.
Johannes was quite convincing on the subject of the code of programme ethics, noting that, even if a written version was relatively novel (how novel no-one seems to know), there’s always been some appreciation of fundamental values at DR, part of which comes from journalistic training - and which is therefore not necessarily shared by other programme-workers -, part of which comes from something in the air.
I ended the interview by asking whether one mightn’t get the wrong impression from looking at DR and considering just the period from 2001 onwards, and whether there wasn’t also controversy before in the eighties. He mentioned a campaign in the seventies and eighties looking for “socialist” orientations in DR: so now I have to look up “Aktive Lyttere og Seere” and Erhardt Jakobsen.
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