The event was opened by Assos. Prof. Svetlana Stankova, vice dean of the Faculty, and Christoph Plate, director of the Media Programme South East Europe who recalled that Konrad Adenauer himself was a great admirer of regional journalism and appealed to journalism students to be good at what they do. Special guest this time was Sebastian Turner, former advisor to the media group “Hotzbrinck, former publisher of “Tagesspiegel” and founder of the regional “Table-Media” in Berlin.
Mr. Turner presented the topic “The Crisis of Regional Journalism in Germany and beyond” in front of the many students and university lecturers that attended the event. He talked about the big changes in the media and the shifting of layers in political and economic upheavals after 1989. Mr. Turner pointed out that this is also when the rules change, which is actually an opportunity if it is recognised as such. Otherwise, if a company, media, etc. is not able to remodel - then the crisis is inevitable. Mr. Turner spoke about the mistakes made by German regional media, which have failed to focus on their unique advantages in the regional sphere. He gave examples from a business perspective of how changes and new opportunities the digital world offers should be exploited. Further topics that were discussed were hyper-competition, disinformation and retained trust in regional media in particular. The lecture and the following discussion generated high interest – many questions from the students were posed in the end.