Deutsche Welle’s Johanna Rüdiger on how newsrooms can make the most of social media

Editor’s note: this interview is part of The Fix’s email course on audience building and engagement for editorial leaders by Emma Löfgren. You can subscribe for free to access the whole course.

Can social media help boost our relationship with audiences or do they put us at the mercy of tech giants? And what do audiences expect from news organisations on social media?

For The Fix’s new course on audience building, I spoke to Johanna Rüdiger, who manages strategy for Deutsche Welle’s culture and documentary department, to get her best tips on how to make social media work for you and your newsroom, not the other way around. 

DW is Germany’s international broadcaster, which reaches people around the world in 32 languages. Rüdiger herself is also a huge name on TikTok, where hundreds of thousands of followers watch her explain German news in English via her personal account.

Could you tell me about your role at DW?

My role is to ensure that our department’s social media channels (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and Snapchat) engage as many users as possible, especially the Gen Z audience, with relevant journalistic content.

In 2020, I launched DW’s first-ever TikTok account, called DW Berlin Fresh. It highlights European culture and lifestyle from Berlin. I am also a news content creator on TikTok and Instagram, with a combined following of over 350,000 users. Through my channels, I offer English-language news updates, giving an international audience insights into Berlin and Germany.

When I started DW’s first TikTok account in 2020, there weren’t many media organisations on the platform, so I didn’t have many best practice examples to learn from. I wanted to learn how to reach young people with journalistic content on this new platform, so I created my own personal account to test and try out many different formats and learn how to connect with this audience – so that I could implement the same strategies in my job. 

I listened very closely to my audience and built a large digital community, even though I never set out to be successful on my personal channels. I’ve learned more from my community than I ever imagined – and I am still learning what topics young people care about and how to tell them. 

This means I have both perspectives: I am a journalist in my day job, and then in my free time I run my personal accounts like a news content creator. That’s why I can relate so well to traditional journalists, but also to the rising trend of news content creators who are changing the media landscape right now. It really helps to have both perspectives, especially when I coach smaller newsrooms on their video strategy. 

Some say social media play a part in rising unhappiness in young people. I would argue that just blaming social media for that is an easy way out. But at the same time, there are undeniably factors that can fuel unhappiness, like their addictiveness, promotion of negativity and hate, the way nuggets of bad news come flowing towards you at a speed that’s almost unstoppable. How can news organisations use their social media presence to help make them a constructive and positive place?

We are always looking at whether we’re providing value for our users. Breaking news works really well on TikTok, but we also want to do real storytelling and provide value and personal utility. At DW, we focus on constructive, dialogue-driven journalism that engages our users and sparks debate. We want to give you information so you can make up your own mind and make better decisions in your life.

An example of educational explainers that really sparked debate was our short-form video series on explaining the Holocaust and concentration camps. We have done long documentaries on Holocaust remembrance before – obviously, as Germany’s international broadcaster, that’s a huge topic for us – but until two summers ago, we hadn’t really done a 30-second explainer series for a really young audience.

But we’d get these questions every time we’d post something and realise that our young Gen Z audience doesn’t really know much about the topic, but they’re really interested in learning more. So we produced an explainer series, and one of the videos became our most viral one. It got over 10 million views on TikTok, similarly on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. 

While we were still debating in our newsroom “can we explain the Holocaust in 30 seconds?” our users were like “of course you can, and I’m on these apps to learn”.

We always try to promote dialogue on these platforms. For example, in our “DW goes to School” series, we had high school students from the United States ask peers in Berlin about school life. This year, we’re facilitating exchanges between students in Ghana and Germany. 

The students speak directly to the camera and thus to the other students. Our role as journalists is to help with filming, scripting and researching topics. It’s content created for and with our Gen Z audience. The first video just dropped on our TikTok, Instagram and YouTube channels.

And we are all about communities: For our DW channels, we often generate video ideas from our audience, they will ask us a question and we answer with a video. It’s the same with my personal channels, except that I also get to meet a lot of people in person, because many of my followers live in Berlin. They actually stop me on the street and tell me exactly what topics they would like to see on my channels, which is very helpful and always a great experience.

You mentioned the close contact with your audience and that’s one of the things that I love the most as well in my own job. But I find that it’s often hard to clearly gauge the benefits of social media. Of course a lot of things can be tracked, but I still sometimes feel like I’m fumbling in darkness. How do you measure social media success?

For us, it’s all about engagement – do we see in the comments that a post is getting people talking?

We’re not trying to get them off our platforms to go somewhere else. This is where we deliver our journalism, and this is where we measure success. 

Even when we do short reels for our longer YouTube pieces, we don’t see them as a sort of trailer to get them to go somewhere else. It’s really about how our journalistic content is performing on these platforms. If we want to reach young audiences, this is where we have to go.

Do you have any strategies for communicating with the rest of the newsroom so that editorial and social media aren’t just working in separate silos?

Our strategy at DW is to produce on-demand first, so there is no separation between social media and editorial, social media is editorial. We have a multi-platform strategy.

I always advise against focusing solely on one platform. In our DW department, while we prioritise “TikTok first”, a TikTok video can also be an Instagram reel, a Facebook reel, a YouTube short, and performs just as well there. Thanks to the “TikTokification” of almost all social platforms, it’s worth investing in learning short-video storytelling as an editorial team. You need a short video strategy that covers multiple platforms.

And yes, “good old journalism” works really well on these platforms. We just have to tweak our storytelling a little bit, but as journalists, we already have all the necessary skills. People still want well-researched facts, a well-told story – all the stuff that we’re already good at as journalists works on these platforms as well. 

I love that. And is social media best used to build broad reach, or can it be used to build deep and meaningful connections with the audience as well, and how do you do that?

You really have to ignite debates, foster dialogue and actively listen to people. That’s what I do on my personal channels, but also at DW we respond to comments and answer questions.

I personally do a lot of content with my followers. For instance, I just interviewed one of my followers who is from India. She is studying in a small town in Germany, so I interviewed her about her experience – because I know I have many followers who are international students and they are very interested in that. 

If you’re a small newsroom which feels like you do have to prioritise your time and resources and make a choice about what forum to be on, how should you think about prioritising TikTok, Threads, LinkedIn, Facebook and so on?

If you have good vertical video content, you can use it on any app. You have to diversify in order to not become too dependent on one external platform. We’ve seen it with Twitter, or X now, that something changes and if you’ve just focused on that one channel, then you are in trouble. 

In any case, relatable short-form video storytelling that breaks down the news and tells you what it means for your everyday life is not going away. For instance, TikTok was banned in India, but now at DW we are really successful with our TikToks or reels on this app called Josh, which is basically a TikTok clone. It doesn’t really matter what the app is called, as long as we as journalists learn the kind of storytelling our audience needs. 

If we learn to listen to our audience when they tell us how they want to consume their news and their journalistic content, then the app might go away or change its name, but we’ve learned how to reach our audience and we’ll continue to reach it on the next app that might take its place.

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