Four German broadcast journalists, guests of the Cox Center and the University of Georgia and participants in a five-week exchange program for German and American journalists, got to know a little about Georgia and its flagship university in the last days of October and first week of November. Jahn and Moll are radio journalists. Lehman and Waldrich are television journalists. Lehman works for SAT 1, a commercial station, while the other three work for public broadcasting outlets in their home country. Other universities hosting the German visitors in the autumn of 1999 were Brigham Young, Florida International, and the University of Hawaii.
German journalists talk about challenges of bringing the east and the west together.
The Cox Center, in collaboration with the Department of Telecommunications in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, hosted the four journalists during their stay at the University of Georgia. Faculty and students from the Department of Journalism in the Grady College also participated in the program. The four visitors were asked about changes in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall in October of 1989 and the unification of the two German states on October 3 a year later. The four found themselves comparing the newsweeklies Der Spiegel and Time in a magazine editing class, coverage of sensational news in an introductory telecommunications class, and the impact of commercialization of the media in Germany in a class on broadcasting production and management. My parents would say that normal people had much more in common then than now.