‘We Want to Constructively Change Journalism’

Tenacity, friendliness and a willingness to experiment – for Ellen Heinrichs, these are the basic requirements that a founder should have. She herself is the managing director and founder of the Bonn Institute. Her goal: to constructively shape the journalism of the future.

Werksgelände: What do you actually do as CEO and founder of the Bonn Institute?

Ellen Heinrichs: As managing director, I am fundamentally responsible for ensuring that the Bonn Institute fulfills its founding purpose: namely, to help constructively change journalism so that it is still relevant tomorrow. This means that I am responsible for our strategic direction as well as for discussions with partners, customers and supporters. Day-to-day business also includes all kinds of management issues – from personnel development to budget planning together with our commercial director. However, I particularly enjoy writing our newsletter, lecture texts and articles for specialist journals – this brings me closer to my journalistic roots and I really enjoy it.

What experience or talents should you have for the job?

In my current role, I certainly benefit from the fact that I enjoy talking to a wide variety of people and love networking. After all, the Bonn Institute wants to bring together everyone who is interested in constructively changing journalism so that it is good for our society. It’s important to stay in touch with people from all areas of the media industry and to forge alliances; we work with innovative regional publishers as well as with ARD broadcasters or local, digital or non-profit media organisations in Germany and abroad. It helps that I was able to establish international contacts over many years in my previous role at Deutsche Welle. Other important qualities for female founders: persistence, friendliness and the willingness to keep experimenting and learning. I also find my additional qualification as an agile culture coach very helpful. It helps me to build a modern organization with a constructive corporate culture, because the most important thing is of course: Practice what you preach!

What appeals to you about your job?

There are many things: The opportunity to shape and completely rebuild an organization is a wonderful challenge. Then, of course, our objective: The chance to help shape journalism in such a way that it changes sustainably and provides people with the important and helpful information they need, especially in challenging times, is truly fantastic. I feel very honored to be able to contribute to this together with the fantastic Bonn Institute team by initiating discussions and testing new ways of taking journalism into the future in our workshops and programs with media professionals.

The opportunity to help shape journalism in such a way that it undergoes lasting change is truly fantastic.

- Ellen Heinrichs

What are the biggest challenges in your job?

For a long time, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ applied in journalism – in other words, that bad news is particularly good for making money. This conviction is deeply internalized in the media industry and sometimes makes change difficult – although many journalists absolutely agree with us when we say that people need more than news about crises, wars and disasters in times of crisis. Fortunately, we are increasingly able to show that a constructive change in journalism offers new opportunities for the monetization of media content. In this respect, I am very confident that we will succeed in convincing even skeptical minds with good arguments to tackle the necessary changes.

What has been your biggest flop on the job so far, and what have you learned from it?

At the beginning of last year, we put a lot of effort into designing a workshop concept for constructive war reporting – based on a research paper that we had published shortly beforehand. Unfortunately, only very few journalists signed up for the new program, although many had told us that the increasing news fatigue among the public with regard to the war in Ukraine was a major issue for their newsrooms. But constructive war reporting? That seemed too far away for many. I have learned from this that we have to take one step at a time. Transformation takes time, even in the fast-moving media industry – other workshops are needed now: on solution-orientated local journalism and constructive climate journalism, for example. They are going really well.

Ellen Heinrichs

… is the founder and managing director of the Bonn Institute, which has been promoting and teaching constructive journalism since January 2022. She is the only German to have been a fellow at the Constructive Institute at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. She began her career at the Rheinische Post, from where she worked for international organizations before joining Deutsche Welle. There she initiated, among other things, the founding of the internal network DW Minds and the DW Innovation Lab.

Share this article via: