Imagine Nebraska Cornhuskers featured on a German morning show, equivalent to NBC's Today show and ABC's Good Morning America, and you've pictured our study abroad group. We visited the second largest TV broadcasting station in Germany. We arrived and sat in the cafe audience for the final half hour of their broadcast featuring a Israeli born, but German famous musician and news information.
To begin we'll start with a brief history of the station and the show. Zweites Deutches Fernsehen or ZDF, is a German public station that began broadcasting in 1963. The station features content from the sixteen capital cities of Germany. It houses 3600 employees as well as an equal number of freelance journalists.
The production we witnessed featured primarily news stories and packages, but also includes some entertainment pieces. This includes live performances and interviews with stars, but the show focuses heavily on political and government topics.
The station itself wants to provide a top product. Unlike American television, however, a top product is not catered to what the people wish to see, but what the station believes is important and of the highest quality of journalistic reporting.
Ratings in this country are not used in the same way as in the United States. They do not share information to advertisers in order to make a profit from product advertisements. Their revenue is generated from fees collected from every household owning a television. The goal of public television in Germany is to offer information so the people are well informed and can make rational decisions based on the information given by media outlets. Keep in mind, this is public television, which is different than cable networks and other private stations.
Following the show the lead male anchor led us on a brief tour through the studio. He showed us the actual set used for "Das Morgenmagazin" and the control room. Both were very similar to their American counterparts. However, one thing that was especially interesting to us production majors was that the shows are recorded, but are not recoded to a solid location. All of their recordings are saved to a hard drive, and as far as we can tell there were no other backups to this system. He informed us also that the entire system is run by computer, so if the computer fails, the people working on the show must work around the difficulties.
At the end of the tour a member of our group asked for advice about breaking into the journalism field. Our guide mentioned that he started in America and told us to "never accept no as an answer, and to start small."
From this we gathered that you can always dream big, but always begin where you can learn the most and become the most involved with the job.
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