Joseph V. Mattern
2006 Burns Fellow
As I sit here and type this report on election night in
the middle of the CNN newsroom, I am reminded of election
season in Germany while I was stationed at Reuters TV in
Berlin. The elections here seem more mean-spirited than the
ones in Germany, but that may be because I am more involved
in the US elections, and understand them more.
In preparing this report, the memories of my time in
Germany come flooding back to me like the sports montage in
“Rocky III” when Rocky Balboa goes to LA with Apollo Creed
to reclaim “the eye of the tiger.”
It took me a while to
get into the swing of things and there were some struggles,
but in the end I triumphed and, although I didn’t win the
heavyweight title, I am a better journalist for my time
there.
On a personal level, my time in Germany is one I
will always treasure.
When I first arrived, the head of Reuters TV Berlin
bureau was on holiday, so his second in command introduced
me to the news team.
I was assigned to the international
producer desk (the news of Germany which goes out onto the
international feed).
My colleague Claire was great.
She
was friendly and very helpful, showing me the operation, and
letting me pitch in where I could. By the second week, the
head of the newsroom was back from holiday, and I started to
go out on some interesting shoots. Location shoots on which
I participated included going to the Berlin zoo to shoot a
story on “Harry Potter Tours,” another Berlin shoot about
street-legal go-karts that you can rent and drive around
Berlin, covering the local Berlin fussball/soccer team,
Hertha, play in a UEFA qualifying match and traveled to
Leipzig on a shoot of a video game conference, which was
really cool.
As you can see, August was a very slow news
month.
The World Cup had just ended, and everyone was
recovering from all the chaos associated with that.
One of the most memorable professional times for me was
when I got the opportunity to interview Chris Owens, who
plays pro basketball for Alba, the local team in Berlin. I
actually got to interview him twice, the second time on the
track of the Olympia Stadion where, seventy years before,
his Great-Uncle, Jesse Owens, had obliterated the myth of
Nazi athletic superiority when he won four gold medals in
the 1936 Olympics. It was pretty cool to stand with him on
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the track at that stadium. I pitched the story to Reuters,
they liked the idea, and we shot it in two parts. This was
a great example of how things should work, and really made
me happy to be a journalist.
The opportunities and access
that we as journalists are sometime afforded are truly
exceptional, and this fact was not lost on me when we did
this story.
Television is a collaborative medium, and I was never
more aware of that than during my time at Reuters. It was
quite interesting to see how the subscription-based news
service operates, and to compare and contrast this operation
with my home station of CNN in Atlanta.
The atmosphere in
the newsroom is actually quite similar (if a little less
formal at Reuters), which surprised me.
At CNN, we
subscribe to the Reuters feed, and in fact much of the video
you see on CNN is originally shot by Reuters, so it was neat
to see the process at the beginning stages.
It was very
informative to see a story from incubation in microcosm,
after having mostly dealt with newsgathering from the
network side.
The language, or put in another way, my lack of command
of the language, was a big barrier at Reuters. The problem
is, nearly everything was in German (sound bites, etc.) and
so I was quite limited with regard to the amount that I
could contribute to the operation.
Imagine that, German
being spoken in Berlin!
Seriously though, it was a
significant hindrance to me that I was not a fluent speaker
of German.
I was still able to pitch in, in other ways.
For instance, I was still able to create shot sheets, log broll, come up with ideas and news pitches, and help out on
shoots, particularly with regard to doing the English
portions of the interviews with those people who could speak
both English and German, so that these pieces could be sent
out to both German and international clients, via separate
feeds.
I also pitched a bunch of great story ideas during
my fellowship and several of them were done, including the
Chris Owens story and the story of the first post-war
rabbinical ordinations in Germany.
One story that was a
really cool one that we weren’t able to accomplish was that
of the reemergence of wild wolves in eastern Germany.
Unfortunately, due to a lot of governmental bureaucracy, we
were not able to shoot the wolves.
There were a lot of interesting things that I worked
on while at Reuters, but there was also a lot of very boring
time sitting at the computer not doing much.
Mainly that
was because my German skills weren’t good enough, and also
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partly just due to the slow news cycle. Most of the people
were nice and some were even helpful, although most people
were not affected in any way by my presence there. I tried
to contribute as much as I could and connect with the team,
and in fact I did contribute quite a lot, but I never really
felt like part of the team. I think most of my colleagues
regarded me as something more than an intern, but less than
an equal, which is an unfortunate fact but one that did not
stop me from trying to do what I could to help out.
During the slow time at Reuters, I had the opportunity
to do some work for CNN’s Berlin bureau, which is located in
the same building. I did some voxpops and I was also able
to do an interview with a German author during the Gunther
Grass revelation (of his being a former Nazi), which was a
pretty big story in Germany this summer.
Looking back on my time in Germany, I would have to
say that, from a journalistic standpoint, my results were
mixed.
I got to do some great stories, and interview some
interesting people, but also some real hurdles presented
themselves, and I struggled to clear those hurdles.
It’s
neat to be immersed in a different culture, but it can also
make some things you take for granted at home a little
harder to accomplish.
I must say that Reuters was not the
best fit for me, mostly because of the language barrier.
But I made the best of the situation, and, I think, produced
some items of real value.
But the Burns fellowship was
invaluable to me more for the intangible benefits provided
by living and working for two months in Berlin, and for the
contacts I made, many of which will probably turn into great
personal and professional relationships in the years to
come.
Berlin is a great city, and probably the cheapest of
the western European capitals.
I enjoyed the city very
much.
I’m glad I was stationed there.
It’s a vibrant,
living, exciting city.
It was nice to have several of the
other American fellows in the same city, so that we could
meet up from time to time and compare notes on our
experiences.
As those present at Airlie 2006 know, I am a man of
action who is known from coast to coast and around the
world; I must say that it was my honor and privilege to
serve as a Burns Fellow.
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