When Norbert Himmler gave his first interview in the Today’s Journal and on this occasion had twenty seconds to outline the lines of his first term of office, he used a remarkable number of these seconds to Role of culture in public broadcasting to emphasize. They could really use the help from above, in the state broadcasting corporations of the neighboring ARD programs are being canceled that you can hardly keep up with the counting: The NDR is there Book journal set, the WDR wanted to relocate its daily review formatBefore he withdrew again after public protests, the Hessischer Rundfunk felt the same way with the reform of its classic channel HR2, the literary magazine of SWR2 is now less common in the course of the program reform, now it hits, according to SZ information, – again at WDR – the TelevisionBook tips the popular Christine Westermann.
The reasons for all of these reforms, which each amount to a reduced cultural program, are more or less identical belong to the educated middle class. And on the other hand, classic reviews should be replaced by talks and expert discussions, because dialogical forms are considered more lively.
If it is actually a matter of lowering the barriers to entry into book culture, Christine Westermanns will be dismissed Book tips as bizarre: Westermann, one of the nationally best known presenters of the WDR, has been Elke Heidenreich, especially since ZDF Read!-Schöde fell out of the program many years ago, an integration figure, especially for those parts of the literary audience who do not study the feature pages every day, but who would still like to read good books – so it is about the largest part of the German reading audience. In view of the unmanageable number of new publications, Westermann’s orientation function is currently unique in the German-speaking media landscape.
Your book tips are aimed at the majority of the German reading public
Once a month she had five minutes of airtime in the TV magazine Mrs. TV available to talk about two books at a time. So it’s not about airtime that WDR had to painfully cut out of its flesh. However, these five minutes of Westermann’s per month had a significant impact on the circulation of books, which are otherwise rarely noticed by critics: When Westermann recently recommended the everyday observation of a Berlin bus driver, for example, the book immediately sold a thousandfold. Such interventions can finance a whole season, especially for smaller publishers.
The attitude of the Book tips for the moderator herself: Five weeks ago she was from the Mrs. TV-Editorial was informed that the format would be taken out of the program after the summer break, Westermann informed the SZ upon request. The WDR also confirmed the end of the column, after the summer break there will be “changes”. Westermann remains active on the radio with WDR2 and WDR3. According to Westermann, the reason for the renovation was “monitoring”, that is, a viewer survey in which the majority of the participants stated that they were not interested in books. Westermann said she did not know exactly what the numbers would look like, she had never seen them.
Their own experiences point in a different direction: their tours are sold out, their recommendations on television climb the bestseller lists from scratch. There are a lot of people for whom reading is “not a burden, but a pleasure”. Again and again she suggested the editorial team Book tips to modernize, nothing came of it: “The scale of my feelings after I experienced it: first bewilderment, anger, sadness, resignation. Now departure.” Then she’ll do the book tips elsewhere.
It is most likely the German counterpart to the US model of the non-academic book influencer
In the USA, the media figure invented by Oprah Winfrey, the affectionate, non-academic book influencer, is a growth model that is increasingly being copied and, in addition to classic criticism, is building its own literary ecosystem. Actresses like Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Jessica Parker recommend titles in their own digital book clubs that they discuss with their followers and sometimes film themselves. Christine Westermann is most likely the German counterpart to these literary multipliers, who are sometimes handled in a conceited way by the classic feature articles but are highly valued by publishers for their commitment for understandable reasons.
The publishers criticize the decision of the WDR harshly: Christine Westermann is one of the few book personalities who are known to practically all readers in this country, writes the Munich Piper publisher Felicitas von Lovenberg on request, “her empathic, identifying way of dealing with novels talk and inform about new publications “is a fixture of literary life in Germany. Also for Kerstin Gleba, publisher of Kiepenheuer & Witsch in Cologne (and as such, for the sake of clarity, of Westermann’s books), the setting of the book tips is “very bad news”: “Bad for many hitherto little known Authors who, thanks to Christine Westermann’s discovery and recommendation, have found an audience that would otherwise have remained closed to them – bad for the small publishers who, thanks to one of their book tips, saw such an upswing in order numbers that they had a tailwind for further discoveries Bad for the bookstores, who were happy about customers who specifically asked about the book recommended by Christine Westermann, and who were happy about sales that were not based solely on the sure-fire bestsellers I find it scandalous to take public television. “
The fatal impression: Most of the measures are based solely on public surveys
Nobody will deny that cultural reporting has to be rearranged in a digital environment. The fatal impression with most of these measures, however, is that they rely solely on audience surveys and quota measurements and that there is hardly any noticeable conceptual reflection on how the public cultural mandate could be translated into digital formats.
Regional programs and formats in particular come under pressure when they are played out via digital channels. In contrast to VHF, the formats of different broadcasters are in direct competition with each other and if, for example, “Die Literaturagenten”, the literary program of the RBB, gets high online views Diwan – The book magazine in the Bavarian radio inevitably under pressure to justify. And vice versa. The fact that the public can have everything online at any time leads, according to the experience of the unregulated Internet, to a tremendous concentration: If in the end a single digital literature format was left that can be received anywhere anyway, the basic service would theoretically be provided.
Resisting this tendency requires a considerable creative will from those responsible for the program, because the numbers do not lie and the pressure to save is great. Such amalgamations are fatal for the polyphony, the range of the books discussed and the cultural landscape of the country. The fewer programs and popular people there are as intermediaries, the narrower the bottleneck becomes, and the less chance there is for each individual book to achieve the recognition it may have deserved.