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Alsleben, left, with Kostorz during a meeting with graduate students. |
Three German Broadcast Fellows
Learn about Classrooms and Newsrooms
The three German broadcast journalists, who spent a week in Georgia in October, attended University of Georgia classes, where they saw students create their own television newscasts and participated in discussions of newsroom management, toured media and cultural sites in Atlanta and relaxed in a long weekend on the coast.
“I enjoyed very much the news class, not just popping in and being around, but there through the show, through the aftermath critique,” said Gabriele Kostorz, one of the three visiting journalists. “I also found it interesting to go into the class and share what we were doing. I enjoyed being part of the campus. I think we got in to it.”
Kostorz, a reporter on the foreign and national news desk of NDR Television in Hamburg, was in the second week of a four-week visit to the United States under the auspices of RIAS Berlin Kommission, which partners with the Radio Television News Directors Association in Washington in the Fellowship program.
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Spengler said he was pleased to have a chance to talk with students about his work in Germany. |
The three journalists came to Georgia on October 7 after a week in Washington. They spent the following week at broadcast stations in the U.S. before moving on to New York for the final phase of the program.
The trio was hosted by the James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research on behalf of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. The Cox Center is the international outreach arm of the Grady College and has partnered with RIAS on numerous exchange programs over the years.
Jochen Spengler from DeutschlandRadio in Collogne said he also enjoyed the interaction with the students in the media management class. “The students were very interested in what we were doing, in how we see things,” he said.
Thorston Alsleben with ZDF German Television in Berlin said he regretted not having even more time with the students. He said he wanted to know what the students do outside class as well as in them.
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Following farewell dinner with Vlad, Alsleben, Becker, Serbian visiting graudate student Danka Ninković Slavnić, Melanie Zuñiga, Spengler and Kostorz. |
The three visitors met with Dean E. Culpepper Clark, with Dr. Horace Newcomb, director of the Peabody Awards Program, and with Dr. Lee B. Becker, director of the Cox Center, and Dr. Tudor Vlad, assistant director of the Center.
In addition to witnessing the production of the daily cable news program NewsSource15 by Grady students, they also visited the independent student daily, The Red & Black. They were the focal point of a pizza lunch for graduate students and a dinner with faculty and students from the College.
In Atlanta, the German broadcasters received a specially organized tour of CNN and met with Angela Tuck, public editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They ended their time in Atlanta at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Center.
The group spent a long weekend in Savannah and the surrounding area–an interlude requested by the RIAS organizers to prepare the group for the second two weeks of their intensive program and give them an opportunity to sample the landscape and culture of Georgia.
