My 2 Field Trips: Exploring German Media Houses and their secrets

During these past two weeks, we went on two field trips: the TZ/Merkur press at the Pressehaus Bayerstrasse and the SZ Presshouse.

Both trips were super lovely and compelling, and they showed off a lot of interesting material regarding how news media in Munich, and in Germany as a whole, is produced. The TZ/Merkur press tour was more focused on the news making process: what topics they would choose to consider as news, in which paper they would go, and whether or not they should be seen in the front page, inside of the paper, or even in just an online only article! The staff there was super gentle and very eager to answer our own questions, which were mostly based around how their job works, what they had to do and their potential relationship with future tools, such as AI and other things. They even let us work on a newspaper front page, which was really fun and it taught me how the newspaper format works, especially when it comes to the side content that describes what the other pages in the paper contain: it was all very insightful and interesting to look at!

The other trip was at the SZ Presshouse: the main purpose of it was to show how newspapers were made, as they gave us a trip to the newspaper factory, showing off the printing process and how they also made those flyers that you’d see in your postbox advertising offers and such: we also asked questions to the tour guide, mostly about the production of papers and about how the advertising industry works, as he also told us that he works for that industry.

Overall, both trips have been super lovely: the guides have been really friendly, open and eager to answer all of our questions and they both gave me a lot of insight about how German media works, and as someone coming from Italy, it definitely feels a lot more different than how it works there: Italian media is getting less and less focused on papers and more on digital channels such as television and online news, especially television. This isn’t to say that papers don’t exist, but they don’t get as much attention as the likes of television does.