'Hopefully people will work together ... because they find it fun'
[NOTE: This blog is in recovery mode with posts exported from another site. I aplologize for broken links/missing files, but plan to have this resolved in the next few weeks.]
VIDEO: Lau Eriksen, a journalist with the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, talks about what he hopes the pending convergence of his organization's radio and television operations will yield, and what satisfying the consumer means in Denmark.
Transcript: Lau Eriksen interviewed by Chad Capellman
LE: Right now I’m at the Radio News and very much working into making several stories for the Radio News. But we are moving together in one big building. Right now, the TV and the radio part of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation is separated. Next year we’ll move in together in one big building and we’re supposed to work together, cross-media.
You could argue that all the big TV networks would be covering the important stories from abroad and then the Danish TV or radio journalists should not be there, but actually I think the opposite is what is happening, that there would be a very high demand from people that we cover it our way. We want the Danish angles. We want the Danes that are affected by the tsunami or by the 9/11 attack; we want to see them. We want to see the Danish interpretation of that. So we want to have our own journalists out there, and we want even more of them than we have seen before.
And we want it out on all platforms. We want the journalists to report for radio, we want them to report for TV, and for the Net. We, of course, have an obligation to reach a lot of Danes. Hopefully we should during the week be able to deliver something that most people in Denmark would like, and they would find it worthwhile to pay the license fee, which is quite a lot actually, $320 a year each household has to pay. And if we are not covering that, if we’re not actually satisfying the population of Denmark, then I’m quite sure that the politicians would say, “We don’t want you to collect the money because you’re not actually doing the job good enough.” It’s in that context, you have to understand.
CC: What types of things are you not doing right now that maybe in three or five years you’d really like to see your converged news operation be able to do?
LE: We are not converged at the moment. We are living in two different houses. We’re living 20 kilometers from each other. There are some teams that will work together -- the finance department, the political team, and we have some other small groups working together. I think that we will see that much more when we actually move together, because I think just that we will be in the same building will mean a lot. So I think we will see a lot of cooperation. I think that many of the worries that people have today will not be there because we will actually sit together, we will get to know the people from TV and maybe find out they’re not to worry about, that they’re actually quite okay to work together with.
I think that will happen, and I think that from that, hopefully people will start working together not because the bosses want them to work together but because they actually find it fun, that they can find colleagues that have the same interests. They can work together doing a piece instead of now where a lot of journalists will be sitting alone and doing the piece and only be committed to that. Hopefully you will see much more working together in teams and cross-media. So if you’re doing radio, you will team up with a person doing TV and work together on a piece.