Back to overview
Gerald Heidegger, Editor-in-Chief ORF.at
#96 Do we know the answer yet?
The ORF must change. ORF will change. ORF has no choice but to change. All of these phrases are well known and most of them are based on the key phrase: the challenge of digitization. Now we have been on the road to this digitization for a generation and a half. Those who started working at ORF.at at the end of the 1990s can now count themselves lucky to have colleagues who grew up with ORF.at, who have absorbed this digital medium like analog mother's milk (to use a very banal, brute image). Now, the old and the young alike are hearing, we are being transformed into a platform company. And we would have to think about this transformation ourselves. This sounds difficult, which is why we ask consultants to give us answers. For example: You need new storytelling. What? we ask, and book the next course. It seems that very old virtues could help us here.
In fact, we do and can do more than we realize. We produce extensively, solidly, light-footedly and equally in depth on three mainstays: radio, television and online.
That's good. And should make us proud. But pride still follows an old logic, namely that a medium produces its environment. The sub-revolution of the digital revolution, so to speak, the digital revolution in a nutshell, is about us being in love with a gadget that follows us wherever we go and that we only put aside at the moment of sleep. The smartphone, which has become indispensable in our lives, has changed everything. It tells us media makers, stupidly: The situation determines the form of the medium I want to use.
Sometimes the situation calls for text and images. Sometimes it allows for video. And sometimes even really loooong audios. The order of the day, to which the old dinosaur ORF should, must, indeed cannot renounce, is: create the right offer for the right situation from your known offer.
A report thus has what one might old-fashionedly call "coupling". It's quicker on topic if it's a video. It is stand alone and in every "sharing situation" understandable, to the point and makes curious. Most importantly, he always has a "partner" with him: for example, a story that just works in the situation where there is no time for the video. But where you stick to the story.
Our future is strong stories. But before we get lost in the many, thoroughly relevant debates about the right storytelling, we need to deliver the basic building blocks for the digital world. And these are bi-media. One time I put my phone across and watch a video. In the other situation, I use it classically horizontally and stick to the text-heavy story. Because the story accompanies me in every situation.
The answer to the digital revolution is simple: stick with it. If a medium never leaves me, I will give it my time budget. And if it's trustworthy, it will keep me safe in a world where everything is changing anyway - and even facts seem to be in the eye of the beholder.
We need to think ourselves into more than one media form if our stories are to be situationally elastic. And we have to think of our stories, whether fictional or journalistic, in serialized form. At any given moment, we simply have too much on offer: so we need to curate our own programming, create orientation and provoke curiosity. If we have the right situational offerings to do this - and multi-parts that make all our volume consumable, we would have internalized the platform world. With the advantage: we would use it rather than fear it.
