Faherty Research Associate Visits with German Media Managers Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the television viewing habits of residents in the former East Germany still differ greatly from their counterparts in the Western part of Europe’s largest country. During a recent trip to Germany, Faherty Lab Research Associate George Daniels got a chance to delve into this issue with executives at ARD, one of Germany’s two public broadcast networks. The fact that most residents of the former East Germany prefer private television stations over the subsidized public stations is a reality that has media managers at Germany’s most watched evening newscast, “Tagesschau” scratching their heads. Historically German residents have been required by law to pay a tax, which subsidizes ARD and Germany’s other public television network, ZDF. Since German reunification, dozens of privately funded broadcast outlets have cropped up and stolen a chunk of the German media market. At the same time, Tagesschau managers are trying to determine what relationship the popular nightly show should have to the staff of what was its companion internet web site. Recently, the staff for the web site has moved from re-purposing content from the news show to breaking their own stories. Should the Tagesschau web site compete with the television show? The web site dilemma is one for which the German media managers have still not found a solution. Daniels joined 14 other American journalists on a two-week exchange program, entitled “Politics, Economics, and the Media in the Unified Germany,” sponsored by the RIAS Berlin Commission and the Washington-based Radio Television News Directors Foundation. He was the first University of Georgia student to participate in the program, which brought four German journalists to the UGA campus for 10 days in October 1999. Daniels was among the hosts for several activities that involved visits to many classes within the Grady College of Journalism, a tour of CNN, and meetings with reporters and editors of Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His two-week trip this summer included tours and seminars in the German cities of Berlin, Hannover, Potsdam, Schwerin and Hamburg. The group also spent two days in Brussels, Belgium where they talked over issues related to the European Union with officials from the European Commission and NATO. |
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