Blogging has been a bit delayed recently with a number of trips to K\obenhavn and back. On one of those trips, I had to travel back to Aarhus to phone DR’s Head of News Ulrik Haagerup, who is, of course, based in K\obenhavn.

As Haagerup’s wikipedia entry shows, he’s risen up the ranks quickly. In response to my rather open-ended questions, he gave well-crafted polished answers typical of other news executives I’ve interviewed. Of course, well-crafted and polished answers are not always the kind of answers that social scientists (or journalists, for that matter) appreciate.

It was interesting to find out that Haagerup had been appointed as Head of News without an open competition. That wasn’t because it was a rush appointment; on the contrary, Haagerup’s predecessor, Lisbeth Knudsen, had resigned some months earlier. Rather, the issue of who to appoint had been mulled over, and Haagerup’s experience in multi-media, and extraneity to DR and the kind of politics that may involve, was an advantage.

When I asked how he would ensure that incidents like Jeppe Nybroe’s footage from Iraq wouldn’t happen again, he gave a perfect answer: he couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t happen again, but part of what he wanted to do was to make sure that DR recruited the best journalists, people who are interested in telling the story rather than (necessarily) career progression. Structures – like the program ethics, like listeners’ and viewers’ editors – were downplayed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about structures in the wake of recent problems in the BBC. Is something like the BBC Editorial Guidelines just a luxury that an extremely large organisation can afford? Are structures like that made necessary by the BBC’s size? Can a smaller organisation like DR rely on hiring policy and on-the-job socialisation to minimize mistakes, or is that just self-delusion?

In any event, it doesn’t seem like DR’s program ethics are filling the same publicity role that the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines are in the UK: Haagerup suggested that few outside of DR were likely to have heard of them.