TV, radio stations in Cologne and Mainz

We had three stops in Cologne where we toured Germany's largest private TV network, RTL; we visited Cosmo, an international radio program of the public station WDR; and we talked to the executive director of the Institute for Economic Research (IW).


What surprised many of us on the visit at RTL was the amount of green in their studios. They use green screens for their newscasts instead of a physical backdrop. Every show has a different animation, whereas in some of our stations we typically only use a green screen for weather.

RTL owns 61 TV channels, 30 radio stations and is increasing its digital video production.

At Cosmo, we had the neat opportunity to listen to one of the on-air personalities for Cosmo answer listeners' calls and play songs on the radio. Claudia D'Avino is Italian, reported in Mexico City for some time and speaks German fluently. It was fascinating listening to her on the radio!

Take a listen below:

Cosmo is a very diverse radio station in terms of the topics they cover (focusing on immigrants, different cultures and integration), but also in their staff. Currently, the radio station is listened to by about 55% of the population in North Rhine-Wesphalia region were Cologne is located. That would be about eight million people (the size of New York). Wow!

    

Then at IW, we learned about its research studies on immigration and integration in Germany. Most interesting facts learned:

• Germany has more immigration per capita than the U.S.
• The highest number of immigrants was seen in 2015 (majority coming from Middle East and Africa).
• Germany registered more asylum seekers in Europe than any other nation. 
• About 750,000 seeked asylum in 2016 (the same year, about 85,000 refugees arrived in U.S.)

According to IW, the integration of refugees is going well by providing skilled labor employment, language classes and other resources, but it can be better.

(Our group with Cosmo's Erkan Arikan, former TV presenter)

Moving on to the city of Mainz now in the region of Rhineland-Palatinate, we took a two-hour train ride from Cologne (always taking advantage of escalators while lugging our luggage of course).

Here we visited the second German public broadcasting station, ZDF, and met with some of the on-air talent.

I even did a Facebook live with one of the main news anchors Christian Sievers from Heute newscast (heute means today in German). He talked about the famous green screen in Germany and explained how ZDF is funded.

It's a public station, but it is not like PBS in the states (oops I mentioned that in the FB live). Unlike PBS which receives money from pledges and fundraising, ZDF is funded by every TV household in Germany, which is required to pay about 17 euros a month. The same goes for Germany's first public station, ARD and WDR. There are some commercials, but not many.

 At the end of the two visits in both cities, we met with RIAS German alumni. This provided a relaxing and fun end to our evenings to meet other journalists and their work in Germany (including my friend Martin Richter from Phoenix TV... see previous blog post)!

(The Rhine River at night in Cologne)

(With RIAS alumni, Martin Richter from Phoenix TV,
Nural Akbayir from Cosmo radio and
radio science reporter Michael Stang)