To the point: Thank you
Newsrooms can be seen as organized social systems. This is what Manfred Rühl, the German social scientist, said in a book published in 1969.Isabel Imper, a psychology student with a minor in journalism, began working in such an organized social system in September 2008.
As part-time online editor of Werbewoche, she and her two colleagues were responsible for ensuring that the website was constantly fed with new reports. Her tasks were many and varied. She had to make inquiries by phone, follow up by e-mail, request picture material, do research and request new picture material because the one she had received was not printable. She also had to keep up to date with what was going on in the industry and have a feel for what might be interesting. She had to write, struggle with image editing, and try to outsmart the content management system. She organized the messages on the daily newsletter page while putting off impatient people who missed their oh-so-urgent press release. She charmingly made it clear to the angry ones that their message "Groundbreaking innovation for the advertising industry " would be of interest to the readers of Werbewoche. She did all this dutifully, accurately and carefully. She was linguistically very gifted, interested, open to everything new and she wanted to make a career in journalism.
After Friederike Heinrich went on maternity leave, her position had to be filled. Isabel was one of the candidates. I trusted her with the new job, even though she had no actual journalistic training. She also had the confidence to take the step from part-time online editor to full-time print editor. I thought that was good. After a short break, during which she graduated as a lic. phil., she started as a full-time editor in December 2011. At the same time, she took courses at the MAZ to deepen her knowledge and learn new things. She quickly found her feet in her new job. She contributed new ideas and was interested in trying out new journalistic forms. She had a good graphic eye and she soon learned to take photographs as well. There, too, she wanted to know more, she continued her education and was never satisfied with the first picture she saw. As carefully as she formulated her texts, titles, leads and captions, she discussed the design of her articles with the graphic designer. In addition, she still found time to provide impulses to the online editorial team.
After just over five years, Isabel Imper is now leaving Werbewoche. We will miss her dedicated and charming manner. Fortunately, we are not losing her to another editorial team, because that would have been a bit upsetting. She will be joining Accelerom, a research and consulting company. I wish her all the best.
And who knows? Maybe she'll be drawn back to journalism at some point.
Pierre C. Meier, Editor-in-Chief
pc.meier@werbewoche.ch
