I visited the DAAD, the World Culture Center, the German Commission for UNESCO and Duetsche Welle during my Indo-European Research Program. While most of my interactions in these organizations were limited to professionals from the “New Media” teams, they were enough to get me substantial insights.
First, all these organizations have kept pace with the changing times. All have well-established departments for handling Internet communications. All team members in these teams are young and enterprising professionals and are trained to address specific areas of Internet communications. Selecting young professionals is perhaps deliberate given the comfort of the young with rapidly changing technological forms.
The professionals of New Media departments whom I met during my visit displayed distinct professional skills, different from the skills during the earlier Print or television era. Internet professionals such as Internet Editors and Internet content writers in German organizations operate in a new time-space juncture. Internet editors reflected a passion for the Internet media and the way they monitored it on the move and even at different times of the day.
And even when many in the world may go ahead and rate print media editors on a higher pedestal of professional competence, it was clearly evident that the Internet Editors put in far more amount of rigour and competence to their respective roles. Perhaps the fact that the Internet content is so dynamic in the manner in which it changes form, the decision makers cannot judge the effort each of the Internet team professionals put in. The print media editors on the contrary get visibility because of the printed copies of the newspaper or the magazine even while the work was collectively planned and executed with the help of copy-editors etc. Internet Editors do not have the luxury of so much time or getting a second opinion because they operate on the ‘here and now’ world.
The nature of the modern organization is definitely different. No wonder, the global reputation of these organizations depend on the promptness in which information is delivered and attended to. And the New Media teams definitely are the ones who help build this organizational reputation. German organizations definitely understand their media needs better than anyone else.
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| The DAAD headquarters in Bonn, Germany |
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| The Center of World Culture in Berlin |
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| The German Commission for UNESCO in Berlin |
PS: I visited several other organizations in Germany as part of my research project. Also I met several interesting professionals working in the field of the "New Media." Unfortunately I cannot publish the names and pictures of these professionals here because of certain privacy concerns.
