Between excitement and inspiration: A summit as a reality check

Facts or framing - the battle of interpretation in everyday life

Andreas Stuber (SBB) presents a practical story that immediately makes sense in the room: "Silent mail" - media write off each other, contexts shift, errors migrate. In response, SBB establishes the "Fact is" format, a kind of replica mechanism to correct distortions directly. Sennhauser's initial question ("What is fact, what is framing?") thus receives a concrete answer from corporate communications: if the dynamics are faster than the verification, correction itself becomes a format.

The elephant in the room - SRG halving initiative as a sword of Damocles

Roger de Weck dominates here - and deliberately head-on. He calls the halving initiative ("200 franc initiative") a "frontal attack on journalism". His central argument is the "audiovisual gap": High-quality audiovisual production can hardly be refinanced privately, he says. If the SRG had to cut back, the offer would not automatically be replaced by private broadcasters - it would disappear.

Edi Estermann (Tamedia) provides a remarkable industry observation: the initiative is leading to a new "commitment", a solidarity between SRG and private broadcasters. The trench warfare of the past is receding into the background - because the joint pressure now lies elsewhere: in advertising money that is flowing to tech platforms and in an AI-driven transformation that is stressing the entire system.

De Weck has another political point of hope: he points to 18 to 28-year-olds, who have already strongly rejected "No Billag" - and are particularly skeptical about the halving initiative in current surveys.

The end of the youth cliché

On this evening, Jella Hoffmann, CEO of WEMF, is the person arguing with figures against gut feeling. She sets the momentum at which a whole complex of prejudices collapses, and this is: the sober, de-dramatized classification of young people's media use. The sentence "Young people don't read any more" appears analogously - and is just as consistently dismantled. Not with indignation, but with differentiation. Because that is precisely the core issue: teenagers and young adults are not a block. And anyone who treats them as a block is not only measuring incorrectly - they are also communicating incorrectly.

The term that sticks is particularly strong: "News Deprived". This refers to a group of young people who are practically no longer reached by journalistic news. Not because they are too stupid, not because they "only" watch anything - but because journalism is simply no longer part of their everyday lives.

The key point here is that this group is not "the youth", but around a quarter. There are also other milieus: classically oriented users, hybrid users and those who inform themselves exclusively via social media. So the point is not doom and gloom, but precision: three quarters of young people are basically reachable - but in very different ways. And this is precisely why the blanket bashing of young people is not only wrong, but convenient. At a time when political decisions are often based on gut feelings about "the young", this differentiation is almost like a public service in miniature.

The renaissance of depth - why podcasts are suddenly "anti-hectic"

Another point of the evening sounds paradoxical at first: while there is talk everywhere of declining attention spans, podcasts - especially in journalism - show an opposite picture. Fabio Nay (Live Fabrik) brings the number that everyone in the room takes home with them: Listen-through rates of up to 96 percent. So not just use, but Transparencylogic. Not just snippets, but long formats.

The exciting thing here is less the medium than the function: podcasts deliver something that has become scarce in the classic newsfeed - context, rhythm, personality, relationship. And increasingly, audio is no longer just thought of as audio, but as an audiovisual product: Video podcasts as a response to platforms, interfaces and snippet culture. A format that can be long at the same time - and still circulate in short forms. Roger de Weck doubles down: The "presenter on video" is a key success factor. Audio is increasingly being thought of strategically as "audiovisual".

Marie-Françoise Ruesch (Zürcher PR-Gesellschaft, ZPRG) adds to this from an industry perspective: journalism and corporate communications "still have a long way to go", but she believes in the same denominator as several on the podium: Quality winsregardless of the channel. In this context, she also mentions that YouTube channels are becoming established - as an indication that new forms of distribution are no longer marginal phenomena.

Clicks or reading time - the new currency in the newsroom

This is where Joachim Braun gets specific - and contradicts de Weck's criticism of clicks not out of spite, but out of measurement logic. In the Somedia editorial team, he says, they are not interested in click figures, but in "Media Time": the cumulative reading time. Reach can be deceptive - because many people only read the opening credits. Reading time, on the other hand, shows whether content is really engaging.

De Weck, on the other hand, stands by his structural warning: those who maximize clicks slip from an attention economy to an excitement economy. And those who only produce what "works" create uniformity instead of distinctiveness.

Edi Estermann gives a publisher's perspective on this: Tamedia is primarily targeting cost-cutting measures in the commercial sector in order to protect journalism - and sees AI as an efficiency tool (keyword "Storychecker"), but not as a substitute for creativity.

Companies as media makers - corrective or control instrument?

Andreas Stuber describes why a company like SBB is becoming a publisher: Because people want background information - and because traditional editorial teams often no longer have the resources for depth. The SBB Podcast is not an end in itself, but a means of building loyalty and trust.

Fabienne Sennhauser frames this development as part of a shared crisis: journalism and communication are fighting for the same scarce goods - money, personnel, trust. The summit itself thus becomes the answer to her question: trust arises where people clarify what is fact - and where responsibility begins.

Eight voices - a common core, but no unified opinion

This evening is strong precisely because it is not a feel-good consensus. Roger de Weck insists on system issues, the obligation to invest and the danger of the halving initiative. Joachim Braun counters that quality journalism in practice has long been using metrics other than clicks - and that not all editorial offices are running in "excitement mode". Jella Hoffmann provides the differentiation needed for any debate about "the youth". Fabio Nay shows that depth is not dead, it has just changed channels. Andreas Stuber reveals the extent to which companies are reacting to gaps in the media - with their own formats. Edi Estermann describes how the industry is closing ranks. Fabienne Sennhauser uses the question of trust as a framework. And Marie-Françoise Ruesch draws the line forward: it doesn't matter what the channel is - it's quality that counts.

And so, in the end, one sentence remains as the essence, which is repeated several times in different words: trust is not a mercy. It is the result of hard work. Every day. We at m&k try to do justice to this ourselves by providing the necessary in-depth multimedia coverage for events such as the Communication Summit: text, video, audio, photos...