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1. Where are you coming from, what is your background (research, publication, PhD topic)?

Originally from Germany

I am originally from Germany. After high school nearby Düsseldorf and Stuttgart, Germany, as well as in Oklahoma, USA, I studied Business Administration in Ravensburg, a city near the Lake Constance, in Germany. The special thing about this study program was that it had a focus on the media and communication industry, and that students in parallel to their academic learning at the university had to undergo a three-year training at a partnering media and communication company. In my case that meant that I received a three-year traineeship in all relevant departments of the book and magazine publishing house Herder, in the city of Freiburg. The departments that I worked at include, among others, the editorial department, the production department, the legal department, the marketing department, the PR department, and the departments for sales as well as finance and accounting.

Interest in cross-cultural differences in media cultures

After I graduated with a business degree, I moved to Berlin, where I studied media and communications, psychology and cultural anthropology at the Freie Universität. Throughout my studies, which I partly spent at the Uppsala University in Sweden, I had internships in various kinds of media companies, including the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) station KQED in San Francisco, USA. Before I started to write my Master’s thesis, I spent some time in Tokyo, Japan, where I worked for the large commercial TV station Nippon TV. In the midst of the craziness of Japanese TV that was so different from what I ever had experienced before, it was there were I started to become interested in cross-cultural differences in media cultures. I, then, moved back to Berlin to write my Master’s thesis on the entry strategies of some of the world’s largest media companies into foreign TV markets.

I found this topic to be so interesting that, after my graduation from Freie Universität Berlin, I started my PhD studies at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, for which I had a scholarship from the Foundation of German Business. The main research questions that I aimed to answer in my PhD thesis were: How does the culture of the producer influence the nature of the media content produced? How does the culture of the audience influence what kind of media content is selected and enjoyed? And how does this influence the nature and success of international media strategies? In my empirical part, I looked at some of the world’s largest media companies during that time (Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation and Bertelsmann) and their respective strategies in the book and magazine publishing markets as well as TV markets in China, India, and Japan. I was especially interested in learning about if and why and to what extent these companies adapted their content to local audiences in these markets as opposed to following a strategy of global standardization. For my fieldwork, I spent a lot of time in China, India, and Japan but also in Hong Kong and Singapore - where most international media companies have their Asian headquarters - so that I could interview representatives from the case companies on-site. In order to learn more about the local cultures and media markets, I also worked for a while at Sony Entertainment Television in Mumbai, India, where I was the assistant to the CEO, as well as the Communication University of China in Beijing, where I was a visiting researcher and also taught BA students. After I had completed my empirical work, I took up the position of Research Associate at the Institute of Communication Research at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, where I also started to teach media economics. In 2009, I completed my PhD thesis, which I later published as a monograph with the Peter Lang publishing house, titled Cultural Barriers to the Success of Foreign Media Content  - Western Media in China, India, and Japan. When writing this thesis, I was much inspired by two academic institutions where I had spent some time in visiting positions. One was the Jönköping University in Sweden, where I was a visiting doctoral fellow at the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC), and the other one was the London School of Economics of Political Science (LSE), where I was a visiting researcher at the Department of Media and Communications. In the latter, I met my Estonian husband – and it is there where my interest in Estonia started.

 2. What are you doing in Estonia (courses, projects, etc), for how long you will stay? 

Postdoctoral research at the University of Tartu

I moved to Estonia in 2009 when I started to become a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Social Studies at the University of Tartu with a grant from the European Social Fund and the Estonian Research Council through their Mobilitas Program. My postdoctoral project had the title Economic and cultural implications of social network sites: A case study of Germany and Estonia. Questions that I addressed in this project included: How do traditional media companies use social media platforms for audience engagement and marketing? Do users in different countries and from different cultural backgrounds use different social media platforms -  and why or why not? To what extent do social media users share professionally-produced media content with each other on Facebook? For the latter two questions, I conducted a quantitative online survey with Estonian social media users, social media users from the Russian-speaking minority in Estonia, as well as German social media users.

Researcher at the Arcada University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki

After this post-doctoral project, which ran until the end of 2015, I took up the position as Researcher at the Arcada University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki where I worked in a one-year project called Sharing Economy and Media Business Models. Here, I was particularly interested in how practices of collaborative production and collaborative consumption - as key components of the so-called sharing economy -  influence business models in the TV industry.

Visiting Professor of Media Economics and Management at BFM

Since January 2016, I work as Visiting Professor of Media Economics and Management at BFM. I am a board member at MEDIT, the Centre of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture, and I teach BA and MA students. This fall term, I teach the courses Social Media for the BA students in the Crossmedia Production study program, Introduction to Creative Industries for the MA students in TV Production study program, and International Media Studies for the MA students in the Communication Management study program. I also lead a research seminar for the MA students in the Communication Management program who I supervise. Furthermore, I am engaged with the development of a new MA study program, and I organized and manage a grant from Nordplus for this. The project funded by Nordplus, in which we are the lead partner, has the title Connecting the Nordic and Baltic Region for Achieving Excellence in Cross-Media Innovation and Journalism Education. Project partners include Aarhus University in Denmark, Tampere University and Arcada University of Applied Sciences in Finland, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences in Norway, Jönköping University in Sweden, Vilnius University in Lithuania and Rida Stradins University in Latvia, as well as ERR, YLE, the Estonian Newspaper Association, Ekspress Meedia, and the Baltic Centre for Media Excellence in Riga. During our upcoming conference When Media Realities and Media Teaching Meet that will take place at Tallinn University on November 17^th, these different project partners will come together with scholars and media practitioners from also Germany, Brazil, Hong Kong, Namibia, and Mongolia in order to discuss how universities can better prepare their media and journalism students for the contemporary media environment.

President of the European Media Management Association (EMMA)

In June 2016, I was elected President of the European Media Management Association (emma), which is the most established and influential academic association globally in the field of media management. As an international not-for-profit academic organization it supports advancement in media management research, scholarship and practice throughout Europe and around the world. As President, I lead the Executive Board whose members come from universities in Spain, Finland, Sweden, UK, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Also this summer, I was elected to become a permanent Associate Editor of the Journal of Media Business Studies, which is a journal in the 1.1 category and which is published by Taylor & Francis. 

3. How do you feel yourself in Estonia?

Having lived in Estonia for seven years now, and having an Estonian husband and two little children (two and almost five years of age) who grow up here in Estonia, Estonia has become home to me. I am still not fluent in Estonian, and this is something that really bothers me. I can both understand and speak Estonian quite OK, but I am far from being fluent. I try to study as much as possible, but on an every day basis, there is always something else that I need or choose to do rather than studying Estonian: such as working to meet a deadline, or just spending quality time with my children. We have a trilingual household of Estonian, German and English, and Estonian is the language that is spoken the most. There is, therefore, hope for my Estonian language skills – and I will not give up on it.