Yesterday I went to visit Tage Baumann at the new DR-Byen in \Orestaden. I knew I would arrive early, but thought I could wander around the area and grab a bite to eat and a coffee before the interview. Unfortunately, this plan turned out to be a wishful projection based on the experience of BBC White City, dotted with a number of café franchises. The area surrounding the DR-Byen is a bit of a wasteland; the location itself is still a building site. The architecture in the Byen - and indeed in the surrounding area - is magnificent, but perhaps not quite magnificent enough to justify the two-thirds overspend, from three to five billion kroner.
Baumann was a bit more solid and substantial than the DR-Byen. He’s worked with DR since 1987, after having worked, from 1976, for a now defunct trade union newspaper. His former newspaper had been taken over by new owners, and he said that he didn’t appreciate the new editorial line they were going to take. He said that he either wanted to be with a newspaper or company whose editorial line he agreed with, or with a public service broadcaster, where he could be neutral; he wouldn’t fake agreement with an editorial line he disagreed with. I asked him whether, given that he did have strong ideas about the political line his preferred media would take, that meant that he wasn’t just “faking” neutrality.
His reply was pretty pragmatic: “that’s a philosophical question”, he said. Not for the first time, I was reminded of a quote from Dario Papa, Italian journalist who had spent some time in America:
“la differenza tra il giornalismo alla latina e quello all’americana potrebbe esprimersi cosi: che noi siamo una truppa di professori e quelli la sono una truppa di soldati”
[the difference between Latin journalism and American journalism may be put like this: we are a bunch of professors, they’re a troup of soldiers].
Substitute American for Northern European, and the comparison still works.
Baumann’s area of journalistic expertise is, again, more solid and substantial: he’s security and defence correspondent for Orientering, having previously worked on Radioavisen in foreign and security issues. He said that his team on Orientering was subject to a fair amount of criticism: whilst they had previously been in the mainstream, they were now perceived in certain quarters as being on the left; Baumann suggested that was because the country shifted to the right, rather than any leftward shift amongst the fourteen staff with Orientering. Criticism came principally from the Danish People’s Party and occasionally from Venstre, but also from a think-tank called CEPOS.
With the interviw a day after wildcat demonstrations (slogan: “Let DR live!”), we talked a lot about DR’s HR policies and trade unionism. He said that DR was pursuing two policies in particular: differentiation of wages - paying more to those who are tempted to jump ship, whilst lowering the base salary -; and generalism over specialism. Specialist correspondents are expensive, after all.
As Johannes Reimer had suggested the previous day, Tage did agree that those who worked for DR in Copenhagen did not always feel proud to be working for DR. This is perhaps because DR’s follies - a new expensive studio in Radhusplads in the same year as the DR-Byen overspend - are more visible in the capital; or because DR journalists move in more politically connected circles when in the capital. Still, a job in DR for someone coming out of the College of Journalism would still be prestigious, as long as they were prepared to be a specialist in broadcast journalism and a subject generalist, compared to an older generation that had been more likely to have had some experience in print journalism with a subject specialism.
Talk of the journalism school led on to issues of training, and that led on to the issue of the code of programme ethics. Hopefully, this will lead to a meeting with Jakob Mollerup, listeners’ and viewers’ editor.
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