Walking on Air

By staff reporter PENELOPE COLVILLE

 

With a little help from her friends – Gretchen Bartelt fills the role of CNC executive producer; shown here with Zhang Yuhong, Director of China Report (left).

SKIPPING the bit where you spend years paying your dues, two young Western women with good enough credentials find themselves cresting the waves of China’s media ambitions. Their “overnight success” at the expanding networks of CNC and Bon Live is being played out against China’s desire to tell its own stories about itself to the world, and at the same time make room for constructive public criticism and uncensored coverage of sensitive topics.

Gretchen Bartelt is a 30 year old who left the USA in 2008 to join the corps of Xinhua, China’s state news agency, with a few years of reporting and on air TV journalism under her belt. When Xinhua launched CNC last month (an IPTV and satellite 24 hour news station), she had been warming the chair of executive producer for a year. Another young woman doing it for herself is Roseann Lake who hosts a show about Tibet on Bon Live, an internet, satellite and cable TV station.

CNC answers China’s ambition to offer the world what Al-Jezeera provides in terms of an alternative to Western media domination. It is carried now on the internet with some limited satellite reach. TV is where Bartelt cut her teeth in broadcast journalism at a local Georgia station – interviewing, shooting and editing her spots in time for the six o’clock news. She welcomed the change of China and couldn’t resist accepting the more global responsibilities offered by the CNC division, and the chance to play career leap-frog.

Experience with an ABC affiliate and its hyper local scope was enough preparation for Bartelt to do much of what she was expected to do at CNC – everything.

Bartelt’s job, leading up to the hair-raising, cross-your-fingers debut of the channel, has been to meet the needs of Chinese journalists working in a foreign language. Five native English speakers are employed on the station’s 60 member staff for this purpose, advising on how to write broadcast style, edit video, convey how an anchor should present, put a show together, and write stories that are going to be of interest to foreigners, yet fulfill China’s need to make itself better known. They pass on all their wisdom about the many aspects of on air and off air operations – often while they are still accumulating it. Bartelt is philosophical about the experience, “There was no detailed plan or a set of instructions for how to do this or that; you just try to help them get to where they’re going.” Experience with an ABC affiliate and its hyper local scope was enough preparation for her to do much of what she was expected to do – everything: marketing, coaching anchors, writing slogans, naming shows, branding the on air look of programs, and writing promotions.