Media School Bayern (M.94.5) Excursion

Last Tuesday, on the 21^st of February, the Professional Communication course provided us an excursion to the Media School Bayern. 

We had the opportunity to listen to Antonia Engelhardt (Toni), who happens to work there, and she gave us a short presentation about how the work is conducted there: everyone who works there is a student and they don’t receive money for it. Instead, they are happy to gain experience and education which they would have to pay for if they were in another media school, as Antonia explained. 

The Media School Bayern has a radio station, which is M94.5. The students there have the opportunity to learn how to work in a radio station. 

The positive aspect of their radio station is that they can have the first work experience, make mistakes and learn with them, since they are not going to be fired for that as they would be if it was in another radio station, as Antonia mentioned. 

The radio station has various podcasts, which seemed very interesting and funny, such as the “Whatts Ab”, “94.5 To Go”, “Buzzer Beat”, “GameFreunde”. They talk about different topics, like culture, politics, media, sports, games and technology. 

Antonia is part of the sports section and she told us that they always talk about the important games and events like the “Tour de France”, for example. And, in two weeks, they will follow the big event that is the Super Bowl.

 What I found very curious about what Antonia told us, was the fact that the Bayern Basketball Team is also very good, just like the soccer team, and that the radio station reports the basketball games.

The Media School Bayern also has a video section in which students are responsible for the Media School’s YouTube page. The thirds section is the online section, in which the students are responsible for keeping the audience informed about the events that are happening in Munich at present time, using social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Antonia also mentioned that the Media School Bayern’s radio slogan is “M doesn’t stand for Mainstream”, since the frequency is M94.5 and that they are not a commercial radio station. In fact, they don’t have commercials on the radio. Instead, they are sponsored by their shareholders and by the state. Antonia explained that taxi drivers used to be the ones who listened M94.5 the most, since they were tired of the mainstream stations. 

Because of that reason, 3 years ago the radio lost its frequency on the radio, since there were commercial radio stations which had more money that wanted the same frequency. 

They lost around 5000 listeners. Nevertheless, the station which took their frequency became their sponsor, which is a positive thing for the Media School Bayern radio station, since they were still given 2 hours slot of broadcast from 10:00pm to 00:00. Plus, they can be listened in several places such as Hamburg and Austria, which is great.

Another positive point about Media School Bayern, is that it accepts interns. Antonia mentioned that if we were interested, we could apply for an internship there, which I found very appealing.

After the short presentation, Antonia gave us a tour around the office, where we were able to actually see how students work there. From my point of view, they have a really good environment among them and seemed all very nice, funny and, especially, very committed to their work. I think it is very valuable the fact that the students who work there, don’t do it because of the money or the listeners they have, but instead, because they enjoy what they are doing, and they want to learn and gain experience.

In the end of our tour, Antonia showed us the recording studio and gave us the opportunity to record something and listening to it afterwards. It was a really funny and interesting activity, since we were able to listen to our voice after being recorded. Some of them were hilarious: our colleague Tomás told a joke he himself invented, our Chinese and Japanese colleagues spoke a little bit in their own languages and Irina, our Spanish colleague, said some words in Catalán.

In conclusion, the excursion was very enriching. I think everyone is now curious to visit Media Schools Bayern’s website and to listen to M.94.5!