St.Gallen cantonal police receive prize for their media work

You run the best police media office in Switzerland and the fifth best in the country. How does it feel to play in a league with Zurich Airport, Swiss Post, the Federal Office of Public Health and the SBB, which occupy the top four places in the ranking?

Of course, we are very pleased about our good performance – especially that we made it into the top 5 of all media positions. This shows that our willingness to be there for journalists 24 hours a day, seven days a week is appreciated.

Unlike other media outlets, the St.Gallen cantonal police scores with very active communication. It also provides image material for practically every police report.

Thanks very much! We see ourselves as a service department for journalists. They carry our messages to the population and can therefore expect top service from us.

You have been media chief of the St.Gallen canton police since 2009. What has changed in your job since then?

The need for information, but also the pace. There used to be a fixed editorial deadline: you knew that you had to send this or that piece of information or a picture by 8 p.m., for example. Today is the editorial deadline right now – at the moment when something happened. It’s definitely stressful, but it’s also fun.

The online world is ticking ever faster and more aggressively. What consequences does this have for your work?

The pressure is enormous. Sometimes you almost have the impression that we have to express ourselves before anything even happens … (smiles). In this regard, we can only ask for your understanding that it sometimes takes a little longer before we can say something. For me personally, the top priority is: what we say must be true. We cannot afford to communicate something that we then have to correct afterwards.

Reader reporters in particular are likely to make their work much more difficult by providing the news portals with information, images and videos in a flash as soon as something has happened.

Yes – especially when information or image or video material is circulating on topics that we actually didn’t want to communicate at all for reasons of investigative tactics. Sometimes certain things are simply not right, or the wrong picture is created. Correcting this takes a lot of time and is difficult.

Are there moments when you struggle with your job and the media?

no I have been working in media relations for over 20 years now. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to be harsh with a journalist. They do their job well, we do ours. If both sides can improve it in the future, we won’t have any problems.

A brief look into the future: How will the media work of the St.Gallen cantonal police change in the next few years?

Moving images are also increasingly in demand. I could imagine that we will also start with this. You can also see how the whole thing has changed: When we started making images available to the St.Gallen cantonal police, there was criticism from press photographers who thought that we were destroying their business. And today we are already talking about moving images.