"That’s right. In the past, newsrooms hiring young reporters would look at your CV and at what internship you’d done and how much you’d written. And as a rule, the person with the fanciest internship got the job. The problem is that this has led to a situation where the newsrooms of Germany are not very diverse. Because if your CV includes a good internship, that normally means you have parents who can afford to support you during that time. But for working kids or for people from non-academic families, it's often hard to get such an internship. In other words, the newsrooms don’t reflect society. And that’s a problem, and it’s not just me saying this, it’s a big topic of discussion in the German media industry more widely.

This is why we changed our recruitment strategy. The first thing I did was remove the requirement for an academic degree. I mean, I did my internship myself without one. Just because you've gone to university, doesn't mean that you're automatically good at interviewing people, good at teamwork, have good communication skills or are good at finding stories. Having said that, most of the people who apply for our training do have academic backgrounds, though it’s not required. But then we look not just for people who have studied politics, but also completely different subjects; music or wood science – anything. We want diversity in the newsroom, not just from a social or ethnical point of view but also from a knowledge point of view.

But we take it further than that. We look for people with a different approach to life, or a different lifestyle. An example: We have newsrooms in very rural areas, places where a lot of trainees would not necessarily want to work. And yet, we want to find people who do want to work there, not just temporarily, but who live there. So my idea was; there are a lot of women, often mothers, who don’t work living in these rural areas – because Bavaria is very traditional in some respects. I thought; why don't we focus on these people? They are good storytellers, they are good managers, they know what is important and what is not. They are good at explaining, they can multitask, they are reliable – every skill we need in our trainees. So we rearranged our apprenticeship, including making it possible to do it part time, to suit these moms. We can empower women to get back to work through a good apprenticeship while they have kids. And thanks to that, we get new knowledge. I think companies should be more flexible in this way because you benefit from loyal, absolutely interested people that love to work while being moms. You have to set up a flexible infrastructure and then it's a win-win. Including for the child!