At this year’s Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum, we met up with Danh-Quy Nguyen, a Vietnamese who studied in Germany and now works as the Deputy Managing Editor for ELLE Vietnam. A few years ago, Danh-Quy was one of the first to receive a scholarship for the two-year Master’s program “International Media Studies” at DW Akademie.

You graduated from DW’s International Media Studies program last year. Now, you’ve been invited back as a guest and expert for a panel-discussion at the DW Global Media Forum. How does that make you feel?

Firstly, I feel great and honored to be invited by my teachers and colleagues. I think it’s an experience that not everyone can have. So I feel very happy. Secondly, I’m also very happy to see my old friends and many colleagues from Deutsche Welle.

What do you miss most about Germany?
What I miss most from Germany is lots of trees, lots of green and the Rhine River.

Can you apply the knowledge that you learned at DW to your work in Vietnam?
Of course! I learned a lot at DW and I use it in my work every day. The most important thing I learned from the DW Master’s program is how to communicate with people from different countries and different cultures. This is very important for my daily job. As Managing Editor, I have to communicate with different editors and people from the fashion industry all around the world.

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A good interview should be informative, authentic, credible and sometimes even surprising. In the past two weeks, the participants in our workshop ‘Advanced Interview Training’ were able to discover the special benefits of this journalistic format.

Together with my colleague Uli Köhler, I am training journalists in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi. Our 15 trainees  work for Vietnam Television (VTV). Most of them are reporters in Hanoi, but we’ve also got the VTV correspondents to Russia and to China in our group. All of our participants are keen to learn more about conducting interviews and recording vox pops.

As Uli and I will leave Vietnam in a couple of days, the trainees are now working on their final productions. Their topic is ‘same-sex marriage in Vietnam’. They chose this topic themselves after an hour-long discussion.

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