Why should I care?
Gash Worku is a news channel in Amharic for Ethiopians and Eritreans living in Germany. Agents in Ambessa Studio make three short reels a day. The hard part isn’t making a reel. It’s deciding which story deserves one.
German news is written for Germans. A storm on the North Sea coast, a coalition row, a court ruling: all real news, and most of it changes nothing for someone who moved here from Addis or Asmara. A channel that translates headlines would be busy and useless.
One question first
So every story has to answer one question before anything else gets made: why should an Amharic speaker living in Germany care? If the answer doesn’t fit in one sentence, the story is dropped.
The agents read the day’s German news and score each story out of 100. Anything under half marks is skipped. A big headline with low relevance to people here is dropped however big it is. The stories that score highest are the ones that touch papers and money:
- residence permits, citizenship and language tests
- money, benefits and taxes
- work and health insurance
- school, transport and weather warnings
Then the reel has to say it quickly. The hook is in Amharic, and the answer lands in the first second and a half: who is affected, from when, and what to do. Facts only come from the source article. No invented numbers, no opinion, and no urgency the article doesn’t have.
What the critic threw out
Every reel goes past a critic agent before it counts as ready, and a fluent speaker checks the Amharic. In the first full week the critic dropped seven reels. Some of its reasons:
- A flood warning reel said the warning came “this morning”. The article never said when it was issued.
- A reel said three parties criticised a plan. The article quoted one politician from each, and one of those parties is in government.
- A reel about a walking club in Leipzig used photos that weren’t taken there.
None of those are big mistakes. They are exactly the small ones that make a news channel untrustworthy, and a viewer would never tell me about them. They would just stop believing it.
Most of the other drops weren’t about facts at all. They were about the middle of the reel: a nearly empty frame, a hook repeated after it was already answered, a German word the voice mangled. Those are craft problems, and they are the next thing to fix.
What I don’t know yet
The most watched reel so far was about the 72,000 people in Germany who have no health insurance. That fits the rule, but one reel proves nothing. The studio doesn’t draw any conclusion from fewer than 30 posts, and a single post never changes the strategy.
What I do know: the question comes first. A reel nobody needed is worse than no reel.