I believe that good journalism, good television, can make the world a better place.
Christiane Amanpour, CNN correspondent
One story from DR News showed me that we had to change. Not because we ran it. But because we didn’t.
As the new head of news at DR back in 2007, I was increasingly puzzled with the culture and traditions in Danish newsrooms, and I started to talk to my new colleagues about our work and editorial ha-bits. One of the experienced reporters recalled finding some statistics a couple of years earlier which detailed employment rates amongst female immigrants by municipal authority. It didn’t look good.
Unemployment among immigrant women was greater than ave-rage in every single town and city in Denmark, with one exception:
0 percent unemployment among female immigrants in the Danish municipality of Fredericia. The journalist was so surprised that he contacted the city hall to ask whether their data had been entered correctly.
“Oh yes, it’s quite true,” they explained. “It’s the Lene effect.”
“The what?”
“Well, you see a couple of years ago we got a new immigrant con-sultant called Lene. And she just gets on well with these women.
She’s won their trust, and she started to take them out to meetings at companies all over town. She booked herself a meeting with the CEO, kicked the door in and said:
“This is Fatima, she’s fantastic. She can help you do something you need doing. What it is, we don’t know yet. That’s what this meeting is
all about. And what’s the worst thing that can happen? If I’m wrong, it won’t cost you a dime as her wages will be paid by the government for the first three months. Now come on, give her a chance.”
Within 18 months all the women were employed. The reporter enthusiastically called the then TV News Editor with his story about the Lene effect.
“That’s not a story,” was the response. “Where’s the conflict in that?
Why should we give airtime to a commercial for the mayor running that city?” And so the Lene effect story never ran.
That would come as no surprise for Syrian-born Danish politician Naser Khader, who started his own party, only to leave politics again to work for an American think tank in Washington D.C.
Naser Khader is now re-elected to parliament for The Conservative People’s Party (Det Konservative Folkeparti). In 2011, with the help of friends, he organised a conference at the parliament in Copenhagen with more than 100 examples of entrepreneurial immigrants who had started their own business and created jobs. He describes his experience:
“I wanted to show that there is another side of the stereotypical picture of poor, passive or fanatic immigrants we see in the media. We invited all the newspapers, radio stations and TV shows. We sent out press releases, we called them and had the most fantastic people lined up. Do you know how many reporters or photographers came? Not one! Can you imagine the media turnout, if instead we had arranged a conference on the fanatic Muslims group Hizb ut-Tahrir? There are not so many of them as there are immigrant entrepreneurs, but the rest of the population learns only about the fanatics, because that is the story news organisations want to run.”
What’s New?
Hearing about a neighbours’ annual holiday in Mallorca is normally extremely boring:
“First we drove to the airport, and then we took the plane to Palma and drove in the sunshine to the hotel we always visit. And then we
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all about. And what’s the worst thing that can happen? If I’m wrong, it won’t cost you a dime as her wages will be paid by the government for the first three months. Now come on, give her a chance.”
Within 18 months all the women were employed. The reporter enthusiastically called the then TV News Editor with his story about the Lene effect.
“That’s not a story,” was the response. “Where’s the conflict in that?
Why should we give airtime to a commercial for the mayor running that city?” And so the Lene effect story never ran.
That would come as no surprise for Syrian-born Danish politician Naser Khader, who started his own party, only to leave politics again to work for an American think tank in Washington D.C.
Naser Khader is now re-elected to parliament for The Conservative People’s Party (Det Konservative Folkeparti). In 2011, with the help of friends, he organised a conference at the parliament in Copenhagen with more than 100 examples of entrepreneurial immigrants who had started their own business and created jobs. He describes his experience:
“I wanted to show that there is another side of the stereotypical picture of poor, passive or fanatic immigrants we see in the media. We invited all the newspapers, radio stations and TV shows. We sent out press releases, we called them and had the most fantastic people lined up. Do you know how many reporters or photographers came? Not one! Can you imagine the media turnout, if instead we had arranged a conference on the fanatic Muslims group Hizb ut-Tahrir? There are not so many of them as there are immigrant entrepreneurs, but the rest of the population learns only about the fanatics, because that is the story news organisations want to run.”
What’s New?
Hearing about a neighbours’ annual holiday in Mallorca is normally extremely boring:
“First we drove to the airport, and then we took the plane to Palma and drove in the sunshine to the hotel we always visit. And then we
ChapTER 4 a gOOd STORy 73
spent eight days relaxing by the pool …” They are usually not even halfway through their story before we start yawning.
But are we only interested if their story turns out to deal with them forgetting their passports? Or even better, if they forgot the little brother in the airport, their baggage ended up in Kazakhstan, and it snowed on the beach? Wouldn’t we also be keen to learn, that they got a great deal with their hotel, found a smaller airport with free parking, explored a new facility teaching kids the language during the sailing classes, and learning about the new rules, such as how to make airli-nes pay money back when they run late or even cancel flights? That’s why news stories are seldom about normality. A news item is precisely the opposite – a deviation from the norm. So, when most things work fine, the logic is that news is about things that do not. But who told us that deviation from the norm is only of interest, when it’s negative?
The problem first arises when we see the world only through nega-tive eyes, when our vision is distorted. As Danish author and history lecturer, Henrik Jensen, puts it in his book The Dissent Man:
“We – or more properly our media – love people who break estab-lished norms and go over the limit. The aggressive victim who has been beaten down once more by the system. The charming crook. The drug dealer who commits murder, and ends up holding talks about it.
The second-generation immigrant who went off the rails and became a gangster. Plus all the people with unusual diagnoses, the mentally ill, transsexuals, the overweight and the underweight.”
The challenge that every journalist faces is that we know that the man has got a point. When our television, radio and newspapers are constantly braying that bus companies all over the country are losing both money and passengers and have cut their services back as a re-sult and put their prices up, that becomes the norm. And as news is defined by something out of the ordinary, it is actually news, if you can find just one bus service in the nation that runs on time with satisfied customers and even makes money.
Danish broadcaster DR News found one. It was called Bus 150S and it run from Kokkedal north of Copenhagen. And we could do a fantastic report about all the many satisfied customers that used the
route because the bus now ran on time, had free wi-fi and a driver who had learned to smile, clean the bus and to be proud of his job: “I say welcome to my bus!”
It is now proven that it can be done. So, if they can do it, why can’t you?
The New DR
That approach is the direct result of a change in strategy for DR. Until 1988, DR held a monopoly on the TV market in Denmark and no one else was allowed to broadcast TV or radio other than the state owned, licensed and financed Danish Radio Company. A new commercial (but also state-owned) station, TV2, broke the monopoly on 1st October 1988 – a date that older DR employees often refer to as ‘the day the good old days ended’.
It might have been good times for the employees with zero com-petition, but few Danes turned out to prefer the rather dull, slow and grey picture of the world presented on the state-owned, monopoly TV.
In less than six years, DR lost 60 percent of its viewers to a faster and more modern competitor. For decades since, DR tried to come back by copying what its commercial competitor did, but with little success.
As the market for TV changed with many new commercially and in-ternationally owned players, everybody was competing for advertising money, with TV2 being more and more tabloid-like. DR had tried to follow by covering more crime stories, more royalty, more case-driven news stories and cutting down on coverage of complicated subjects such as the European Union and the economy, in an effort to attract more viewers. The tabloid strategy of more drama, more conflict, and the focus of narrow angles on crooks and people to feel sorry for, did not work. Viewership declined even more. A new management team and a new board decided on a different approach and began to ask the simple questions: What is the meaning of DR? Why are we here?
The answer was expressed in a new mission: DR shall inform, chal-lenge and bring together people in Denmark. In short, everything that DR does has to be for the benefit of society. If the children’s programs
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route because the bus now ran on time, had free wi-fi and a driver who had learned to smile, clean the bus and to be proud of his job: “I say welcome to my bus!”
It is now proven that it can be done. So, if they can do it, why can’t you?
The New DR
That approach is the direct result of a change in strategy for DR. Until 1988, DR held a monopoly on the TV market in Denmark and no one else was allowed to broadcast TV or radio other than the state owned, licensed and financed Danish Radio Company. A new commercial (but also state-owned) station, TV2, broke the monopoly on 1st October 1988 – a date that older DR employees often refer to as ‘the day the good old days ended’.
It might have been good times for the employees with zero com-petition, but few Danes turned out to prefer the rather dull, slow and grey picture of the world presented on the state-owned, monopoly TV.
In less than six years, DR lost 60 percent of its viewers to a faster and more modern competitor. For decades since, DR tried to come back by copying what its commercial competitor did, but with little success.
As the market for TV changed with many new commercially and in-ternationally owned players, everybody was competing for advertising money, with TV2 being more and more tabloid-like. DR had tried to follow by covering more crime stories, more royalty, more case-driven news stories and cutting down on coverage of complicated subjects such as the European Union and the economy, in an effort to attract more viewers. The tabloid strategy of more drama, more conflict, and the focus of narrow angles on crooks and people to feel sorry for, did not work. Viewership declined even more. A new management team and a new board decided on a different approach and began to ask the simple questions: What is the meaning of DR? Why are we here?
The answer was expressed in a new mission: DR shall inform, chal-lenge and bring together people in Denmark. In short, everything that DR does has to be for the benefit of society. If the children’s programs
ChapTER 4 a gOOd STORy 75
are not better to watch for Danish children than those being broad-casted on Fox Kids or the Disney Channel, then why should DR be here? If the drama series such as The Killing and Borgen are not of a higher quality for the Danish audience than cheaper TV series from the international electronic bulk market, why bother? And if the news programs now have a higher ambition to entertain, who will then take on the task of informing the many of important matters?
“We are here to throw light. Not to spread darkness and fear,” said the Chairman of the DR board and the former CEO of The National Royal Theatre, Michael Christiansen. He continued:
“Knowledge and insights are the roads to tolerance, and tolerance is the key to a true democracy. It is said that media is in a crisis. I beli-eve that the survival of serious media among other things is founded on a systematic and reinforced belief in the people we are here for.”
In 2012, DR cut down on administration and invested more in quality content, like our news programs, with the ambition of re-establishing DR News as an authority being ‘skilled in what we tell, modern in the way we tell it’. We cut down on the coverage of crime, entertainment and stories that were only fascinating. Instead we in-vested in more skilled reporters on beats like globalisation, business, politics and health. We opened new foreign bureaus and even though we moved our main news show on the main channel, DR1, from 9 p.m.
to 9:30 p.m. and insisted on keeping our news hour filled with daily background magazines on international issues, money and politics, a strange thing happened: Viewers came back.
One of the reasons was that at the same time, we added construc-tive elements as natural stories in our daily broadcast. Every day, we wanted to have at least one story which could inspire by focusing on the things that work or the people, companies or countries who do something out of the ordinary. Let me give you a few examples:
y
The story about a supermarket that employs autistic people as shelf stackers.
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The story about IKEA having started employing older craftsmen, because customers would rather be served by a man with grey hair
who knows how to hold a hammer, than a 19-year-old whose only experience in life is PlayStation games.
y
The report on the municipality that uses money to train pensio-ners to manage their own lives rather than sending home helps out to them.
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The cardiologist who saved his own father’s life with an invention that has gone on to be a huge export success.
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The municipality that has reduced sick leave rates by giving a bonus to staff that don’t report in sick.
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The extensive decline in the number of burglaries as a result, in part, of an initiative taken by the police to send text messages to local residents when criminals have been sighted in the area.
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The care home with a play area that attracts kids from the nearby kindergarten.
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The boom in cycling in Athens, because due to the financial crisis, people have found healthier and cheaper transportation.
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The Mexican city which successfully fights the local drug gangs.
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The successful German idea: A hospice for dying children, who can spend their last months with their family with nurses and personnel trained to help, instead of dying at crowded hospitals or at home.
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And the story from Uganda, where a Danish electricity company has started to hand out solar lamps to replace polluting oil lamps.
That is what the concept of constructive news is all about: Giving the editorial glasses a polish so that we also see the stories about things that work. Things that dare to inspire to be both critical and construc-tive, to speak out about problems and actively search out stories that can contribute to a solution. Constructive news is all about daring to adjust our understanding of ourselves as journalists, so that we don’t just see our task as a notice board for the public’s problems and fears. Rather to ensure that we, to serve our society and the citizens it consists of, are also happy to take on a more active role as a sort of arbitrator in the public debate about the solutions to the challenges we all face.
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who knows how to hold a hammer, than a 19-year-old whose only experience in life is PlayStation games.
y
The report on the municipality that uses money to train pensio-ners to manage their own lives rather than sending home helps out to them.
y
The cardiologist who saved his own father’s life with an invention that has gone on to be a huge export success.
y
The municipality that has reduced sick leave rates by giving a bonus to staff that don’t report in sick.
y
The extensive decline in the number of burglaries as a result, in part, of an initiative taken by the police to send text messages to local residents when criminals have been sighted in the area.
y
The care home with a play area that attracts kids from the nearby kindergarten.
y
The boom in cycling in Athens, because due to the financial crisis, people have found healthier and cheaper transportation.
y
The Mexican city which successfully fights the local drug gangs.
y
The successful German idea: A hospice for dying children, who can spend their last months with their family with nurses and personnel trained to help, instead of dying at crowded hospitals or at home.
y
And the story from Uganda, where a Danish electricity company has started to hand out solar lamps to replace polluting oil lamps.
That is what the concept of constructive news is all about: Giving the
That is what the concept of constructive news is all about: Giving the