Sofia Weissenborn Rodriguez
Kristina Böker reporting about the portuguese elections. Reporting from Lisbon
German TV correspondent Kristina Böker works for "ARD" and "Tageschau", among other German TV networks. She has been reporting on various issues in the Iberian Peninsula for the past few years while living in Madrid with her family. She writes articles for ARD's online portal even if her primary employer is the Television format. I had the opportunity to interrogate her about her multifaceted work.
What does your daily work in the editorial office look like?
My daily work looks different every time and that's what I love about my job, it's simply very varied. On Friday, I was on a shoot about the high price of olive oil and traveled to Andalusia for it. But we also have long-term projects, such as the European elections. So I'm primarily a foreign correspondent, but now we're also doing a lot for social media and most recently I wrote three texts for “Tagesschau” about the elections in Portugal and an analysis of the results after the election. Before that, I filmed something about gas energy in Algeria, for which I also wrote a text. We work with several media outlets and the third topic was Latin American domestic workers in Spain. I did a background article on this on Women's World Day.
Which topics are particularly relevant for reporting from Spain and Portugal?
Two topics have occupied us quite intensively in the past year or year and a half that I've been in the job. One is climate change and the resulting droughts and dry spells in Spain and Portugal. We've already done a lot of reporting on this and it's often about constructive approaches, how farmers or other institutions, for example the states themselves, can ultimately take measures to protect themselves against it. That's one of the major topics that is of great interest in Germany and is also very relevant for us. We buy a lot of vegetables in Germany from Spain, for example, so there is also a great deal of interest in this. And the second major topic that often plays a role in our countries, not so much in Portugal, but very intensively in Spain and in the North African countries, for which we are also responsible, is migration. We have also reported a lot on this in the past two years, including repeatedly on social media and in texts for tagesschau.de, for example. I was on a sea rescue ship in the Mediterranean. I wrote an article about it and also made videos for social media, Reels. And now, from the last report from the shoot, which was about the scarcity of olives and olive oil, I'm also making a reel for our “Weltspiegel digital format”. Perhaps that's a quick summary of our major topics.
What steps does the process of publishing an article involve?
Actually always the same for all our media. First research, then interviews. If it's a visual medium, i.e. social media, Unreal for example, then we use the footage we shoot for TV anyway. Or we simply use our cell phones to shoot something else or something of our own if we're not doing the topic for television. But we usually combine things quite well. And then finally the production. So in the case of the article, that would be the writing.
How long does this process take?
It varies greatly depending on the medium we are working for. If you really only write a text for “tageschau.de”, then it is relatively research-intensive, because these are long texts for which you have to do a lot of research and gather a lot of facts. Then we usually also do interviews so that we can quote the interviewees. You can rarely do that in one day, I would say. I recently wrote an article much faster, but I had already reported so intensively on the election in Portugal that I had already researched a lot of information and was able to write the article relatively quickly, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
How do your colleagues in the editorial team work together?
Cooperation. This is perhaps a bit special in the foreign studio. We work together very intensively within our studio. We are a small team of three correspondents, one radio colleague, two television colleagues, we write social media and articles together, we distribute among ourselves who does what. It's a very close collaboration. And then, of course, we work with the many editorial teams in Germany, who receive films, articles and social media contributions from us. In this respect, there are two different levels. One is internal collaboration and the other is external collaboration. Yes, perhaps that's an overview.
What challenges does fake news pose for journalists?
A big challenge. The rapid spread of news via social media has simply, on the one hand, been very nice, but on the other hand, it has also meant that a lot more fake news ends up somewhere in the world very quickly and we are then faced with the problem of verifying or falsifying it, which is sometimes not so easy. And we are also often confronted with this fake news on the street by people, which happens to me more in Germany than in my job abroad, when people have simply read unverified news and believe the sources where they found it more than us, the public broadcaster. That often leads to discussions. That is also very challenging. So, yes, a big challenge on various levels. And well, I clearly see our job as reporting correctly and always checking everything that comes our way in terms of news and information so that our reports are really accurate.
To what extent can artificial intelligence be useful for editorial work?
Artificial intelligence can help us with certain things. For example, we already use a translation program to translate interviews. Yes, of course, but we always read over it again. And on average, we always check it again with the native speakers to make sure we have translated it correctly. So there's always a small review process. I definitely see potential in pre-sorting information, but in the end, I don't think artificial intelligence can simply take over the final creation of our product.
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