Corporate Responsibility (6): How Sandra Kathöfer Takes Action

In our Group’s just-published Corporate Responsibility Report 2010/2011, five Bertelsmen and –women talk about how exactly they put Bertelsmann’s corporate culture into practice in their workaday life, and why and how they do so at their company – and often beyond it. We are pleased to introduce these colleagues, whose portraits incidentally grace the five different covers the report was published with.

After RTL TVI presenter Sandrine Corman, Ceneta Lee Williams of Random House New York, and Stefan Neiske, Emissions Control Officer at Mohn Media in Gütersloh, this time Heribert Sangs, Head of Corporate Education at Bertelsmann’s Corporate Center in Gütersloh, this time Sandra Kathöfer tells us about her experiences as a member of the Editorial Documentation team at Gruner + Jahr’s “Stern” magazine.

“I’m what Americans call a fact checker. I am one of seven employees who check every text, graphic and photo to be published in ‘Stern’ magazine, to determine whether the statements made are true. Are the names spelled correctly? Do the numbers add up? Is the elephant in the picture Indian rather than African? The relevant information is written down, checked and may be corrected after consulting the writer and entered into the system. Only then is the spelling and grammar check carried out. All of us are graduates in specialist subjects. There’s a biologist, several historians, an economist, an orientalist, etc. I’m the odd one out a bit here because I actually studied media documentation, and even wrote my thesis on the ‘Stern’ magazine documentation department.

The department was set up in 1960, as the traditional illustrated magazine had become more political and in-depth over the years and it was important that every fact be thoroughly checked. Documentation is virtually a guarantee of quality; it ensures integrity, strengthens credibility and ideally makes ‘Stern’ magazine unassailable. We work in open-plan offices in the ‘Stern’ magazine library, surrounded by about 25,000 volumes. When I started in 1997, we often consulted specialized encyclopedias, often backed up by telephone checks. Today, a lot of it is done electronically. For example, we have access to the Gruner + Jahr press database, one of the most powerful archives in Europe, to which over 1,000 new articles are added every day.

Sure I’ve become a bit more skeptical over the years. Chatting with someone at a party I sometimes find myself thinking, ‘Okay, let‘s check your sources.‘ But I do have a remedy against distrust as an occupational hazard: I love to travel. Then again, maybe that’s not true at all. Maybe travel is just another form of fact checking. I don’t claim to know all that much – I just check everything.”