Svitlana Vasylenko interview. Life of Ukrainian Journalist in Germany: “There is life right here and now on the air.”

by Alisiia Khaukha

Svitlana Vasylenko is a Ukrainian media expert, radio and TV broadcaster, and public speaking teacher based in Magdeburg and Berlin, Germany. She moved to Germany three years ago, but she has made a breakthrough in the radio sphere. She has 20 years of experience in conversational journalism and is an expert in speech technique and public speaking. Svitlana is also a guest lecturer at universities and educational projects such as “Kyiv International University,” “Legal High School,” and “Kyiv Boris Grynchenko University.”

Alisiia Khaukha: At university, you studied English and Bulgarian philology. How did it help you in your professional activities as a journalist, and did you receive any education specifically in the field of media and journalism?

Svitlana Vasylenko: I deliberately went to study philology. It was the advice of my editor. I worked on television since I was 13 years old on a small local TV channel. youth editorial office. And when we discussed with him where exactly I should go to study, he advised me to go to study philology, he himself is a philologist, because he said that journalism is not a profession, it is a state of mind. That is, if you are a journalist, then you will be a journalist with any education – economic, physical, in any-any. And the philological base gave me the opportunity to write texts and feel the language. Any language, it actually concerns the knowledge of what language consists of, how it functions, because despite the fact that all languages ​​are different, they have a common basis. And here is the understanding of the processes that occur in language and how words can be combined in order to convey meaning, For this I am grateful to my philological education. Well, plus I started at a time when texts were not written by artificial intelligence, when all information was clearly checked many, many times and when I started my journalistic activity at a time when texts were written and sometimes these texts were for a 30-minute program, for example, these are 8-10. pages of text that you have to write yourself. And these texts were required not only, they must be written correctly in terms of language and stylistics, of course, they must be absolutely unambiguous.First of all, for a journalist, this is very important and for that old journalism. With the advent of bloggers, everything has changed a bit here, because they can carry any nonsense, and then say: “Oh, well, that’s not true. Well, okay, it’s not true”. No, there was a period then when it was forbidden and that’s why I am primarily grateful to my philological education for teaching me how to write texts.

A.K.: You are also an articulation specialist. After moving to Germany, what challenges you faced in the German language? Was it difficult at all to switch and, perhaps, work in German?

S.V.: I do not work in German, German is used exclusively. When I am not understood in all other languages, I use German, although I have a B2 certificate of professional activity, but I do not use it for any such professional work. And I understand that it will probably be more than a dozen years before I will have what the Germans call Bauchgefühl, feel the language in my gut, they say this, but at the same time I use, still use the Ukrainian language as a professional, and with the challenges of the German language in that It is very similar in fact grammatically, a lot of constructions, very similar to the Ukrainian language. But the trick of German is that it is the same dominant language that displaces other languages ​​in your brain, just like Russian. I know a lot of people who forgot English in Germany, knowing it at the B1-B2 level. And this happens very often, because German displaces. And I, unlike other people, on the contrary, improved my English, because the language I communicate with mainly here, the language I communicate with my partner, is English. I thank Germany for my good English. They say that the Ukrainian language is difficult to pronounce. But here you need to understand that for us Slavs, the Slavic language is easier to pronounce .And for Germans, the Ukrainian language is generally a very big challenge, just like for us the pronunciation of these long-winded words of the German language. In fact, they are not long, they are short, it’s just that many words are combined into one and after a while you understand where you need to divide and how to make an accent and emphasis on the voice. In fact, like any other language, when you start it break it down into components and then you build your own German language for yourself, but your own, with your own vocabulary, it is no different from learning any other language. Germans say that Ukrainian is difficult. A lot of Germans in the eastern part of Germany still have their foreign friend study Russian in schools. And this is the pain of many Ukrainians here. But they say that the Russian language is just a gesture, and it is impossible to pronounce these words and understand this grammar. I joke about them quite often. For example, my boyfriend studied the Russian language at school from the 5th to the 12th grade, about 7 or 8 years. And from this he knows a few phrases there, which he can repeat, and not quite correctly. And I say, you say that in 3 years, Ukrainians should be fluent in German, a language that has nothing to do with our language at all, except for dozens of words that are similar there. Why are you not fluent in another language in 7 years at school? The most interesting thing is that they say that your language is difficult and theirs is extremely easy. And this is a very big challenge for Ukrainians here. Because they are constantly forced into this narrative that they are so cool that they should be able to speak German fluently in a fairly short amount of time. From the point of view of philology, this is impossible. There are a few people who very quickly memorize any other languages, including German. But for the average person, learning any foreign language in a few months is impossible. Everything must be in process.

A.K.: After moving to Germany and initially working here, what cultural differences did you encounter? How do you deal with them? Did this help your work or hinder it in any way?

S.V: I don’t know if you know that, for example, in Ukraine, being a journalist, especially a television and radio journalist, is very often a 24/7 job. That is, you can be called at any time, no one will ask you when it is convenient for you to go home. And, for example, an average journalist on the Kyiv TV channel, an average correspondent who does information for the news, must bring a story to the university from one such event, a normal event, sometimes it is just text, sometimes it is text with an expert’s voiceover and “without clarification”. “Without clarification” is just a text, that is, first, when he comes, he writes a short piece of information that he will give to the news, the host or editor will take it to the news for the first time, then during this time for the next hour he must already do a high school, that is, the text and cut a synchronous piece of the interview. And it is desirable that by the evening he also did at least one story. And if there was such a cool topic, then it is cool that he did two more stories. And these stories are on average up to three minutes. Each TV channel has its own standards. And, and also, depending on his experience and the number of events he was at during the week, it is required from the correspondent, preferably one large extensive, and also preferably some kind of investigative story, on a day off, because on a day off, the news there is usually half an hour, forty minutes, such a final issue. In Germany, after working for six months on a TV channel in the Potsdam region, I understood, I was shocked, that is, as if journalists are here and now, at this moment, and a journalist is also obliged to be able to join the live broadcast immediately from the event. This is also like a Must have for a Ukrainian journalist. You have to be very flexible! And what’s more, they were also rotated, periodically put on the air for different sections. That is, today you go somewhere in the field to dig potatoes, and tomorrow you tell a road chronicle. You are not only flexible in that you still have to understand all the topics. That is, you have to prepare quickly. You have 15-20 minutes in the car while you are driving there and back. Kyiv traffic jams add another 30 minutes there. You are a lucky person, you have already written a story. Such is the work of journalists on television, on radio. Before the start of the full-scale invasion, my radio station switched completely to a talk format, news and talk. For example, I have 5 hours of broadcast time. That’s 5 hours of broadcast time without a break. That’s an average of 6-7 guests. Different guests, different topics. And in the process of all this, you have to not ask stupid questions about the guest, you have to be constantly on topic, you have to be constantly in the process of this. But not here. Nobody bothers like that here. They do one story a week. One story a week on a topic that interests them. So they were digging around somewhere and saw that an exhibition of, I don’t know, Lego toys had opened in Berlin. They said, oh, cool topic! I’ll go there, write down a person who goes there all the time, tell me about the tickets and that’s it.There is no fuss, there is no such thing as the presenter appearing in the frame fully prepared not only internally but also externally. I very often see when the presenter has no makeup at all. Clothes not chosen by stylists, which sometimes merge with the background. And this, to be honest, or a guest who came to the air in a tracksuit and comments on some serious things. And this German “laxity” in everything, it most often flows into those industries, including journalism. I’m not saying that there aren’t any professional journalists. They are. But, let’s be blunt, these professional journalists are people under 50, or even under 60. Unfortunately, young journalism, it lost this battle with bureaucracy. If Ukrainian journalism went in the direction of development and television went in the direction of the American one, here and now, as quickly as possible, you have to give as much information as possible, then German journalism went along its own path. This is one of the reasons why there are so many, almost all TV channels here are state-owned, there are no large TV channels, there are no non-state ones. They are not even TV channels. Therefore, I had the opportunity in the year 2022 to attend trainings for Ukrainian journalists in Babelsberg on how to use programs for video and sound and storytelling and the like. I want to say that if an expert came to us and told such and such a volume, it would be his first and last time here. It’s considered wow, but it’s not clear to me that their journalist can’t and doesn’t know how to edit sound, or how to edit video, or how to work with a camera, and usually for them any improvisation is very, very difficult. We once had a very funny story, we were taught by a girl who was taken there at the age of five or so from Ukraine, that is, the mentality is all exactly Ukrainian, and she became interested in mobile journalism, something that was in Ukraine a long time ago, well, that is, everyone a long time ago turn on the phone, transfer all this information still quickly. This information is immediately broadcast live to Germany via Skype, I say: “Oh, that’s so cool, you immediately, for example, transmit this information at a rally,” and she says: “No, you don’t understand, we transmit, but this is a completely different number than, for example, the same ARD uses, while they convert it into the desired format, then they do something else with it, and as a result, no one needs it anymore, because it’s already, well, if it weren’t for the number one news.” And also, German journalists are really lazy. They, they use templates from the German Information Association, I forgot the name, I have one somewhere in a training somewhere, that is, all journalists take information from there, and these are just some standard texts where they uploaded videos. I think they use these videos most often, and they made a piece of this, a piece of that, and this is the plot in them, and if you analyze the news broadcast, it certainly looks like some central TV channel looks like some small town TV channel in Ukraine. There are 1-2 journalists, there is no funding, and they are already filming as they can, and this is actually very offensive, because in a country like Germany, with such an influence of television and radio, it would be possible to do something, something special, larger, and this is used, including by Russia, because there is a huge Russian TV channel in Germany.      I just see how the Germans are changing their approaches very much. They are becoming somehow faster, they are starting to digitize more, they are abandoning some old concepts, of course this is more about business, because business is not about sitting at work for hours, it has to bring money, if business doesn’t bring money, what’s the point of that business, so business in Germany is, it is trying to develop somehow. But all this bureaucracy is stopping it.

A.K.: I saw that you have done more than 100 media projects. Which is your favorite?

S.V.: Since 2007, I have done a lot of different projects in Ukraine, both on-air with different companies, for example, once we did a great project with Kyivstar called “Discovering Ukraine”. There were a lot of interviews with very different people, for example, with the Kapranov brothers we talked about history, with Kokotyukha we talked about Ukrainian literature, with the chief cartographer, we talked about the map, what maps existed and within what borders Ukraine was. There were also short programs, interesting facts about Ukraine. For three years in a row I managed this project, we won the so-called public budget, money from the city, and we organized events for everyone who wanted to study journalism. In addition to everything else, I did a lot of other projects that were broadcast, for example, only on air, in Germany. When I arrived, I spent six months working on a project for Ukrainians in Germany for a Potsdam TV channel (for Berlin and Brandenburg). We helped them adapt, gave them all the necessary information from the migration service, the Job Center, conducted interviews, told the stories of people who were forced to leave Ukraine. It was the Haupstadt project “We are from Ukraine”, and it was included, I think, in the top five projects according to berlin.de. They called this project the best of what they implemented at that time, because it was supported by the national council, like in Ukraine, which controls television and radio broadcasting, but specifically in Berlin and Brandenburg. Since the beginning of the 23rd, we have changed this “The only Ukrainian-language radio station in Berlin tremBEATS.fm”. It was founded in 2018, but there were two hours a month, one hour was conversational, that is, a bilingual interview, and the second hour was musical. Now it is a full hour, if that was the case,  on Ukrainian radio, where there is news, a special topic, where there are at least two guests for an hour. Now this hour a week, like the classic Ukrainian radio that we are used to, informational-music radio, that is, a full-fledged program.

A.K.: Did you already join TremBEATS when you moved to Germany?

S.V.: A little later. I came in February 2023. It was more of a volunteer project. That is, there were no professional presenters there at that time, they were just people who wanted to bring Ukrainian culture, the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian guests, Ukrainian activities to the Ukrainian community. When I arrived, we played around with amateur radio for a bit, but then I got in touch quite by chance with my colleague, who also happened to be in Berlin, and we were starting a professional career together before that, he is no longer a presenter, but a sound engineer. And it was the person who knows how to work with sound that I brought to TremBEATS, and we started making a completely different radio. Then, Grisha, who is the male voice of the radio station, joined us, and now we are mostly on the air together. In 2024, we simply redesigned the radio the way we wanted it. And now we really hope that we will have funding, because after all, this is a volunteer radio. And we will be able to cover the second hour with this funding, because they agreed to give us another channel frequency.

A.K.: What was your happiest moment in your life, related to your professional activities?

S.V.: Probably when I received the title of the best radio journalist in Kyiv. It was just a really cool year, especially spring and early summer, it was 2012, when Kyiv hosted Euro-2012, the European Football Championship. We were like the main partners of everything that happened at Euro-2012. And on Journalist’s Day I received an award. It was just before the start of Euro-2012. It was probably the happiest moment. And yes, there were a lot of them, because, in fact, radio is a completely different story, it’s a completely different life, and you are completely different live, that is, it’s as much as a different life, it’s everything else turns off. As one of my editors once told me: “When you step into the studio, the moment you enter the studio, your previous life no longer exists, there is life right here and now on the air.”

A.K.: What advice could you give to students or people who are studying journalism and media or not studying but want to develop in this field?

S.V.: I have taught radio journalism and broadcasting techniques, public speaking, to students a lot, and I will say one thing: if you don’t get a buzz from it, from what you are doing, then it is better not to do it, find yourself some other field. Because the listener and the viewer, and the one who reads you, clearly understands when the text is written with passion, when you speak with passion, when you show a picture, because you get a buzz from it, it is very felt. And this is for young journalists who often whine when I hand out topics and complain that they are uninteresting. It has already been said 100 times: “There are no uninteresting topics, there are bad journalists.”