Ta Thi Ngoan

In this installment of Journalists@Work, we’ll introduce you to Ta Thi Ngoan, an editor with Quang Ninh Radio & Television (QTV) in Vietnam. She has worked for this station in the country’s northern Quang Ninh province for almost four years. QTV was DW Akademie’s partner in a three-year project called “Radio for the People” and during these three years, Ta Thi Ngoan took part in a number of our workshops.

Ta Thi Ngoan is now in charge of presenting a live radio program called “60 Minutes You and I”. It’s a call-in program for young listeners and runs every Sunday. She also produces some stories related to tourism, which is a key industry in Quang Ninh province, since it is home to Vietnam’s famous Ha Long Bay.

What was the most exciting topic that you worked on in the recent past?

I am excited about most of the topics I work on. However, the most exciting is “How to overcome failure?”.

Do you have a personal motto for your journalistic work?

Failure is the mother of success.

Is there a situation or interview that has changed your life?

Well, in one of my shows last year, there was a call from a blind person. He was a student at Hanoi Law University. Although he was unable to see, he tried his best to study and to help other sightless people. His story about overcoming difficulties and his positive thoughts about life impressed me very much. After that show, I wanted to change to have a more meaningful life.

Your journalistic dream would be…

That my products would be useful for the audience – that our listeners could take advantage of what we are doing.

Your most important tool is…

Oh, that’s a computer.  It’s always with me – sometimes, we even share the bed together.

Ta Thi Ngoan (center) during a DW Akademie workshop in March 2013

What do still want to learn? Is there a question about your profession that you keep asking yourself?

How to create a lively conversation on air.

How much time do you spend online every day?

Almost 12 hours per day

Do you use social networks? Twitter, Facebook or others?

I use Facebook everyday. I like it because it connects strangers who then become friends. We may not know each other but we can share our thoughts, feelings and ideas about life.

If you could write a text message to the world, what would it be?

Be understanding of other people’s ideas and desires.

The best stories can be found on the street. That’s a well worn saying but it’s true – at least in the eyes of a documentary filmmaker. Some of DW Akademie’s trainees discovered one of those stories waiting in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Mai Thi Sy - Sweet Soup Seller

She’s the “sweet soup seller” and you can’t miss her. She sets up shop outside the broadcasting center and we always see her during our workshop breaks. She packs everything she needs for her “mobile restaurant” in big baskets balanced on a bamboo pole – typical for Vietnam street vendors. Her specialties are sweet snacks and desserts …

It’s more than obvious that the staff at the state TV broadcaster VTV loves her sweet soya broth, green and brown beans cooked in sugar, mango puree with ice and homemade lime custard. At lunchtime her colorful plastic stools quickly fill up and her numerous pots overflow with ingredients. The customer-service concept behind the portable dessert bar corresponds to the well-established western coffee shops and fast food chains in the country: you can have your goodies on the spot or for take away – in a handy plastic cup with a spoon and small bag.

Camera man Pham Quoc Mau

We decide that this hardworking, talkative woman is perfect for one of our hands-on exercises. On the second day of our “Short Documentaries” workshop some participants spend an afternoon observing her with the camera. So far, there’s no storyboard or script: participants have to shoot simple actions in short sequences: A mango puree with ice in three cuts.

A few days later we’re looking for film ideas and everyone’s forgotten the street vendor – everyone except Pham Quoc Mau, a bright young reporter and cameraman. He comes from the remote Phu Yen province where VTV state television has a regional studio.

The last cut was made well past midnight on the workshop’s closing day

“We started talking one lunchtime while I was eating sweet soup,” Mau tells us. “She told me her story after I recognized her dialect. My family comes from the same area.”
Mau then pitches us his story idea the way he’d learned in our workshop: a mother of two kids, born in the countryside, moves into town on her own to make money for the family. She works hard as a soup seller to help her sons graduate and even attend university in the big city. Her name – by the way – is Mai Thi Sy …

The training group quickly agrees that this is a very contemporary, very Vietnamese story: it’s about deprivation and hope, loyalty and responsibility, separation and solitude – and about the dignity and pride of a woman in modern-day Vietnam.

And for us as the DW Akademie project team we’re quietly proud as well – to be part of this joint production and quite remarkable workshop.

By Patrick Benning

“Producing Short Documentaries”, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, March 19 – 30, 2012

These were the key questions for the first German-Vietnamese Media Dialogue in late September 2011. Journalists from different media in both countries got together to discuss the issue in Germany. The German Federal Foreign Office had invited them to the four-day event, providing a forum for discussion, presentations and excursions. DW-AKADEMIE and GIZ-AgenZ planned and organized the event.

There are key differences in how journalists in both countries can cover environmental issues and the effects and causes of climate change. Vietnam is one of the countries worst affected by the impacts of climate change: It has a coastline of more than 3,000 kilometers and is experiencing an increase in typhoon activity, heavy rains and dry spells.

So while climate change is definitely relevant for the people of Vietnam, one of the problems for journalists there is that most of the population lives in rural areas, doesn’t have access to modern communication technology and leads the simple life of farmers. How can you make a complicated and controversial issue like climate change understandable for this audience? That’s a major challenge for Vietnamese journalists.

Journalists in Germany face some of the same problems when they want to report on a complex topic like climate change. But for them, the audience’s awareness level isn’t the biggest problem. What’s lacking instead is interest in the problem because Germany isn’t as directly affected. So German media often only give journalists very limited time or space to cover the issue. The result is often over-simplification.

During the four-day media dialogue, the Vietnamese and German journalists exchanged ideas on how to overcome such obstacles. TV journalists from Germany discussed their working conditions with their colleagues from Vietnamese television; print, radio and online journalists did likewise.

“I think we all learned big lessons when joining this dialogue,” said Nguyen Thuy Mien, who works for Thanh Nien Newspaper. She noted that taking responsibility for what one writes and reports as a journalist can be easily forgotten, but is a matter of serious importance. Another participant, Nguyen Thi Hong Nga, also praised the dialogue in Berlin for being very useful for her work at Hanoi Radio and TV.

The result of such dedicated interaction was a better understanding of how the media work in both countries and how journalists in Vietnam and in Germany see themselves and their work. Presentations from scientists and representatives of civil society helped supply additional knowledge about climate change and other environmental issues.

After spending the first two days in Berlin, the meeting wrapped up on the Isle of Vilm in the Baltic Sea. Vilm is home to the International Academy for Nature Conservation, a center for dialogue about environmental topics. Even though the island is small (94 hectares), Vilm’s oak and beech forests are among the most impressive in all of northern Germany. The first steps to protect these ancient forests from logging were taken as far back as 1812. In 1936, the Isle of Vilm was designated a nature reserve and in 1990, it was declared a Biosphere Reserve.

A guided tour through Vilm’s forest wrapped up the first German-Vietnamese Media Dialogue. But most participants hope that there will be a sequel to this event in Vietnam next year.

This is the blog the journalists from both countries put together during the first German-Vietnamese Media Dialogue: Reporting about Climate Change and Environmental Protection.

The program the listeners of QTV radio in Quang Ninh Province were hearing was “Rush Hour”, a one-hour morning show that the station had just started with the help of DW-AKADEMIE, Friedrich-Ebert Foundation and Vietnam’s Academy of Journalism and Communication.

The idea behind the show may sound simple, yet it was pretty new for Vietnam: Producing radio programs with the listeners in mind. So far, radio producers had mostly just broadcast the views and policies of the authorities – pure propaganda. This kind of radio may have worked until a few decades ago, but in competition with television and the Internet, the radio station had lost more and more of its listeners.

In the end, some people in the province didn’t even know that QTV radio was still on the air.

Photo: Marc Seidel

Audience research conducted by Vietnam’s Academy for Journalism and Communication at the beginning of 2011 confirmed this dismal response from the audience. It showed that radio basically didn’t play a role in people’s lives any more.

The young crew at QTV radio was devastated. No one was listening to their programs. Their work was in vain.

And the authorities weren’t happy either, because they weren’t getting their message across to the people of the province. Something had to change. But what? And how?

The remedy that trainers from DW-AKADEMIE suggested seemed shocking at first: Play music! Play a lot of music. Dare to be funny. And give your audience a say on the air.

Your chances of getting information across are better if you package it in a way that the listeners will actually want to hear. So keep the text parts short, be entertaining and informative and take your listeners seriously. Don’t treat them like little children who must be told what to think and do. They are critical human beings, individuals. And they have the power to turn the radio on or off – depending on whether they like what they hear.

Taking these ideas as their cue, the European trainers and the QTV radio staff developed the structure for a new morning program containing popular music, information and audience participation elements. And since both sides contributed their ideas, the product was a synthesis of Western expertise and Asian knowledge about local listeners’ habits, values and culture.

“Rush Hour” broadcast daily

The new morning show “Rush Hour” has been on the air since May. It’s on from 6.30 to 7.30 every morning. Prime time. It became an instant success, something people talk about in the streets.

Audience research conducted since then has shown that almost all listeners prefer the new radio format over the old style of dreary propaganda radio. The figures were staggering: 200 out of the 202 people tested in a representative sample said they liked the new format better.

For the QTV radio staff, this triumph was a well-earned reward for their hard work. It has given them new self-confidence. And it has strengthened their position within the broadcasting institution.

What’s also good for the radio journalists is that their bosses are fully behind the project. At the end of June, QTV invited local authorities and businesspeople to the radio station for a presentation of the new program. The aim of the meeting was to drum up support for the show. QTV showed them the television presentation you can watch below. We’ve added a rough translation for those who don’t understand Vietnamese. If you’re having trouble watching the video here or can’t see the English summary, you can always visit our Asia blog’s YouTube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoZJGSyyeFU?t=4s

The presentation went extremely well for the “Rush Hour” producers: The guests agreed to contribute to the programs – either financially or by providing content. Local bus drivers and taxi companies, for instance, pledged to call in and report traffic jams and accidents whenever they encountered them. This will help QTV Rush Hour get traffic information on the air even from parts of the province where the station doesn’t have stringers.

Relaunching the morning and afternoon prime time

The next steps for QTV are to expand the new style of programming. The station wants to launch a daily two-hour call-in show during the afternoon rush hour. That’s what the station’s radio staff and the DW-AKADEMIE trainers are working on this month.

Once the new afternoon show goes on the air in September, both the morning and the evening prime time slots will have a completely new sound: More listener-oriented, more entertaining, with more information and less indoctrination.

This success was only possible because everyone involved contributed their share: the AJC researchers testing what local Vietnamese audiences expected from a radio station, the QTV leadership and staff who fully backed the project and invested a great deal of time and energy and the German institutions that supported the project financially, logistically and with their expertise.

What’s ahead for 2012? That’s up to the partners to negotiate. DW-AKADEMIE is hoping that it will be able to assist QTV in reforming the rest of its radio programs in the interest of the listeners. A real “Radio for the People”.

What does it take to produce a successful radio program? And how can you motivate the people in northern Vietnam's Quang Ninh Province to tune in? That's what the radio staff of Quang Ninh Radio & TV and DW-AKADEMIE are exploring at the moment in cooperation with Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Vietnam's Academy of Journalism and Communication.

This week, DW trainers and QTV radio journalists drew up plans for a new morning radio show. It will be called "QTV Rush Hour" and will run between 6:30 and 7:30 every morning. The show will include music, information and audience participation elements.

On Thursday, March 31^st, the Vietnamese journalists recorded a pilot for the new morning show. If all goes well, the show will start airing live next month.

Text and pictures: Thorsten Karg, DW-AKADEMIE trainer