News, music and everything else – Bayerischer Rundfunk

On a sunny Thursday morning our field trip group arrived to the enormous, 19-floor Bayerischer Rundfunk building. BR is the government-funded news company responsible for producing radio and online content for the entirety of Bavaria, with its headquarters employing around 6000 people.

Meeting us at the BR building was Bernd-Uwe Gutknecht, a freelance journalist working for BR for the past 30 years. Gutknecht has travelled all over the world reporting on a wide range of topics like politics, sports and music and does for example hosting and writing in addition to his radio work. During our visit he provided us with all the information about BR we desired.

Our visit spanned over two hours walking through the BR building and seeing recording studios, reporters working away at their desks and for example the building’s grand concert hall. BR has two orchestras and one choir with dozens of musicians working full-time for the company. The musicians have always been an integral part of the radio broadcasting experience, as before computers the recording room only had the host and the live orchestra, ready to play on queue. The grand concert hall of the BR building has been said — by the musicians themselves – to have one of the best acoustic environments in Germany.

Strolling through the halls of BR we encountered plenty of posters advertising world-famous musicians’ concerts in Munich. Our host informed us that whenever a famous musician comes to Munich, BR might do a collaboration with them: BR advertises the concert, officially presents the musician and gets press tickets for the concert, getting publicity in exchange. Because of the publicly funded nature of the company, no money is involved in the process, but visibility is worth gold — especially when marketing to the next generation of BR customers.

Speaking about visibility, BR seems to be having no problems with that aspect so far, since our host informed us that at any moment there are about 2 million people listening to BR channels. During our visit we passed multiple studios with hosts who mostly do everything themselves: DJing, mixing the shows and writing the content. Music is only a part of what goes on in BR channels, as we also got to see a glimpse into how a radio news reporter writes their show. The news reporters have access to a news feed with all the news from the area, through which they can hand-pick the news most relevant for the hourly show. The reporter only has time for 3 news pieces for each hour, so the news must be picked carefully so as to give the people only the most essential information. After all, as Gutknecht puts it during our interview, “the 16-year-old girl and the 80-year-old person working for the state – we have to report for everybody”. BR provides this by producing for example the country’s most popular true crime podcast and other online audio content in addition to the traditional radio content.

Our visit ended with grabbing a coffee with Gutknecht on the sunny courtyard of the BR building, chatting about his career and the future of radio. It seems that the “traditional” media field is facing a shift with the transition to more online content instead of live broadcasting and the arrival of AI content, for example, but BR still seems to have a long and prosperous future ahead of it. The journalism students in our group are interested in journalism’s future as a career, to which Gutknecht gives one piece of advice: “Instead of studying to become an expert in journalism, be an expert in the field you want to report about. Working on the field is how you become an expert in journalism.”