Barely in office, Tom Buhrow, the director of the WDR, brought Valerie Weber to Cologne as radio director in 2013. Until then, Weber had worked as managing director of the private radio Antenne Bayern. Weber has never lost the reputation of a radio producer who is only interested in entertainment but not in culture – while she has mainly taken care of the culture in the station. Now she is leaving the WDR prematurely.
SZ: Ms. Weber, your departure from WDR comes as a surprise.
Valerie Weber: Perhaps it is not a learned behavior at WDR that you can walk. But five to ten years is a good cycle for a manager in one position. At the beginning of this year, 500 posts had been cut. In addition, we have cut our total annual budget by 100 million euros over the years. Jörg Schönenborn and I have converted the television and radio directorates into two cross-media program directorates, each for all channels. When that was done, the WDR took over the chairmanship of the ARD. After eight years it is all over, so now is a good moment for someone else to start something new.
Wouldn’t it be logical to try out the new structures yourself?
I did this. In the digital transformation, however, there will no longer be so-called end results, but rather milestones, always new intermediate steps. The program directorates were restructured two years ago, and of course you can see what works well and where you need to follow up. But I would not have found it good to thread in new structures again, for which someone else should be responsible for implementation. The WDR will evaluate the current structure of its program directorates next year. It is important that someone is responsible for this right from the start. For me personally, the point is, when something becomes too familiar to me, it’s time to go.
Do you have a plan for the time after WDR?
Of course, but I like to finish something before I make waves elsewhere, even though I’m not there yet.
Will it be a job for the public services?
I don’t say anything about that.
They caused unrest in the WDR, were brought in to break new ground. You have certainly met people who do not want to go with you. Is this resistance also a reason for saying goodbye?
What actually bothered me was how the subject of “pride and prejudice” hit me when I came from private radio. It took a lot of time and effort to make it clear within the system: I stand for the added value of the high-quality offers and for organizing them and clearing the way.
You have repeatedly been accused of being hostile to culture in particular.
Right from the start, my main focus was to take care of the cultural things in the house. About the radio play. To the orchestra. It is my greatest pride in how the ensembles have developed. We now have more than 26 million video views of our concert recordings and productions in one year, of which more than 17 million only via Facebook. I was brought in because one of my skills is to let myself soak into structures and then to transform them from within together with the teams and specialist editors. And I can be very uncomfortable too, I guess that’s the truth.
In parallel to the internal friction, a great deal of external pressure has built up – in politics and the general public, public broadcasters are sometimes heavily attacked.
By switching from the fee to the budget contribution, the public broadcasters had to justify themselves for the first time, they were not used to that. Internally, it took a lot of persuasion that ARD understood itself as a whole and that we had to flank each other. ARD is not just Das Erste, but much more. And we have to work out our value to society much more clearly today. The question of audience participation is also much more pressing. I find it very largely that we at WDR decided during the pandemic to open an audience format in all radio news – in which a scientist answers a current question from the listeners at the end. Audience interactions are not always games and entertainment, they can be at all levels.
Andrea Schafarczyk, up to now editor-in-chief at Hessischer Rundfunk, will, if the Broadcasting Council agrees, take over your task. What does she urgently need to tackle?
The next generation of executives should develop new products on the basis of this state broadcaster, which has been reduced in costs and personnel, but is somewhat more agile. In my opinion, three big questions arise: How do you organize the dual management of a media company that would like to continue producing the linear offers that are currently very successful in journalism in high quality and at the same time have to develop completely new approaches and ideas for the digital market in a completely different organizational model? The second point is the decision about it: may, yes, one must have a mission? Can you position yourself? The audience wants to have an increasingly strong answer to this question: Where do you stand and what are you doing to change the world – and who are you networked with to make it happen? The third question is: what are the right brands for the future? I am convinced that the classic linear radio brands – such as WDR 2, WDR 3, 4 and 5 – will not survive the digital transformation as individual brands. The public does not look for new digital offers from numbered radio brands on the Internet. We need completely new content-related offers as sub-brands.