Radio 7 Programmchef Herrmann Orgeldinger wirft das Handtuch
(Aktuell: Mehr über den plötzlichen Abgang von Rick Demarest in der Berg Zeitung von Weberberg.de, bzw. in deren Archiv.; mehr über Radio in Biberach und Radio 7 hier.
Eine Ära geht bei der Radio 7 Zentralredaktion in Ulm zuende: Nach über 12 Jahren verabschiedet sich der Programmchef des Senders, Hermann Orgeldinger. Orgeldinger, geboren in Ehingen, Sohn des ehemaligen Bürgermeisters war 1990 auf Wunsch der Gesellschafter (Südwest Presse Ulm, Schwäbische Zeitung Leutkirch) zu Radio 7 gekommen, nachdem er beim damaligen SDR Leiter der Reise und Verkehrsredaktion war.
Er galt lange Jahre als Garant "seriösen Privatradios mit Anspruch". Mit Orgeldinger verlässt einer der letzten ausgebildeten Journalisten den Sender, der seit rund zwei Jahren mit dem Slogan "der beste Mix, die meisten Hits" für sich wirbt. Auch der Zusatz im Slogan "die neue Vielfalt", seit Anfang des Jahres "on air", verspricht vor allem eins: Mehr Musik, weniger Journalismus und weniger inhaltliches Programm.
Insider berichten davon dass Radio 7 nach einer Entlassungswelle und Freistellungswelle im Herbst vergangenen und Frühjahr diesen Jahres eine weitere Rationalisierungsmaßnahme plant, der bis zu 15 Stellen zum Opfer fallen sollen. Dem Vernehmen nach soll Orgeldinger nicht bereit gewesen sein, dies "weiter mitzutragen". Wie es heißt, sei die wirtschaftliche Situation des Unternehmens die Ursache für die geplante Sparmaßnahme im Volumen von etwa 1 Million Euro, obgleich die Hörerzahlen sich laut Medienanalyse seit 1998 (Stundenreichweite) in etwa verdoppelt haben.
Der ehemalige Programmchef des Senders hat BWL und Journalismus studiert und ist als Dozent an der Universität Hohenheim tätig. Verantwortlich für den abnehmenden journalistischen Anspruch des Unternehmens machen ehemalige Mitarbeiter vor allem den Geschäftsführer Richard William Demarest. Dieser hatte vor seinem Eintritt ins Unternehmen vor rund zwei Jahren beim Münchner Privatsender "Radio Energy" als Geschäftsführer für "Unterhaltung" gesorgt. Demarest, geboren im Staat New York, machte seine Ausbildung bei AFN im Radio "Militärdienst" und arbeitete später für Radio Blue Danube. Fazit seines Wirkens bei Radio 7: mehr als 32 Mitarbeiter des Unternehmens mussten seit seinem Antritt das Feld räumen, wobei sich offenbar weder die Gewinnmargen verbesserten, noch das Arbeitsklima, wie Mitarbeiter des Radiosenders berichten. "Dafür hat die ungemein wichtige Assistentin des Geschäftsführers elektrische Bleistiftspitzer und Hefter auf dem Tisch, dafür ist Geld da.", so ein Mitarbeiter der nicht genannt werden möchte.
Programmchef Orgeldinger in der Radio 7 Redaktion nicht unumstritten, galt auch als Bindeglied zwischen Werbekunden und dem Sender. So fand sein Konzept des "Quellefons" bundesweit Nachahmer. Das Spiel wurde sogar vom Versandhandelsunternehmen bei Radio 7 lizenziert und bei öffentlich rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten als Werbeaktion eingesetzt.
Hermann Orgeldinger war seit 1990 Programmchef bei Radio 7
Konkurrenz von Radio 7 übernimmt Werbespotvermarktung in Bayern:
Am 1. Januar 2002 hat die SpotCom GmbH & Co. KG,
eine hundertprozentige Tochter von ANTENNE BAYERN, für Radio 7 die
regionale Werbezeitenvermarktung in Nielsen IV übernommen. Das
Sendegebiet des Baden-Württembergischen Privatsender mit Sitz in Ulm
erstreckt sich weit über die Bundeslandgrenzen hinaus.
„Die SpotCom erweitert mit der Vermarktung von Radio 7 nicht nur das
Angebot in Baden-Württemberg, sondern kommt damit auch seinem Ziel
näher, der Hörfunkvermarkter in Nielsen IV zu werden“, freut sich
Thomas Kanschat, Geschäftsführer SpotCom. „Mit Hit Radio Antenne 1 und
jetzt auch Radio 7 hat die SpotCom ein Vermarktungsangebot für
Baden-Württemberg, das dem Kunden eine nahezu flächendeckende Belegung
ermöglicht. Klassische Spots und Sonderwerbeformen für beide Sender aus
einer Hand. Das ist für uns eine schöne Herausforderung für 2002“, so
Kanschat weiter.
„Mit der Vermarktung durch die SpotCom positionieren wir Radio 7 als
Werbemedium nun auch verstärkt in Bayern und erhoffen uns dadurch die
Erschließung neuer Märkte“, so Radio 7-Geschäftsführer Richard
Demarest. „Neben klassischer Spotwerbung hat Radio 7 insbesondere in den
vergangenen Jahren mit ausgefallenen Sonderwerbeformen von sich Reden
gemacht und bietet in diesem Zusammenhang natürlich sehr reizvolle
Möglichkeiten, Werbeaussagen im redaktionellen Umfeld zu transportieren“,
so Demarest weiter. „Mit der SpotCom haben wir einen Partner gefunden,
der maßgeschneiderte Vermarktungskonzepte mit uns entwickeln wird und
gerade im Bereich Sonderwerbeformen große Erfahrung hat.“
Richard William Demarest, Geschäftsführer Radio 7, Hintergrund:
Shallowing regional differences
By Rick Demarest
I'm going to risk something... I'm going to tell you how old I am, right in the beginning. 47 years old. That means almost fifty. For all practical purposes virtually retired and almost certainly brain-dead.
The reason for telling you this is so you'll be able to understand how I can be so reactionary and obtuse concerning the future. The future of journalism. The future of media. In fact, the future of the world. You see I am firmly convinced that - despite the constant drumbeat of globalisation - via Internet, digital transmission or satellite - all information needs are local.
When I began my career in broadcasting 32 years ago, I wanted to be a radio newscaster. A broadcast journalist. So I got a job nights and weekends at a local radio station where I answered the phones, played records and read the news. The "News" stories were written by people 500 kilometers away... by "Journalists" at a news agency who somehow magically knew what was important to my listeners and what was not.
The news agency journalists wrote about world economics and about national politics and about important people whose names everyone knows. And I read the words of the mind-reading journalists who somehow knew what my listeners wanted to hear. But they didn't, really.
What had happened was that my radio station management didn't want to be thought of as a "local" radio station. Besides, they also had no intention of spending money on annoying reporters who sometimes bothered important politicians and even irritated paying advertising customers with questions they didn't want to answer. Besides, we were the Numer One Top 40 music radio station in the northeastern United States.
The strategy worked until the early 1970's when radio stations began playing music in FM stereo. The programming became more and more centralized and was increasingly distributed by networks.
Suddenly, where there had previously been two Top 40 radio stations - and both of them on medium wave in mono - there were now 20 stations playing the hits in stereo.
That radio station - WPTR in Albany, New York - survived by switching its programming from music to news / talk. For the past 20 years, that station concentrates on discussing topics that its listeners like to listen to and - above all - talk about: local and regional events, politics and sports, local and regional traffic and local and regional weather. If you can't imagine why the radio station is successful with such boring provincial reports let me ask you a question.
Can you imagine anything more frustrating than to know in great detail that the weather will be sunny and warm a thousand kilometers away but not be able to learn if it will rain on you here today?
When I studied broadcast journalism in a suburb of Chicago, my first radio station there was tiny. Our listeners usually numbered in the hundreds... not thousands. But, the night when the City Council voted to permit beer and wine to be served in restaurants for the first time in 150 years... my college radio station had several hundred thousand listeners because we were the only source of news about something that effected the lives of almost a million people.
During my years broadcasting for the American Forces Network in Munich, the primary purpose of AFN was to provide American soldiers with the music and news that they would have had at home in the United States. But, my job as a broadcaster in Europe was to provide local and regional information, as well. An earthquake in Los Angeles is news that might interest almost any American anywhere . Think about how much more interested my listeners were in the "local" news that the reason they were knocked out of their beds one night in 1976 was due to an earthquake in northern Italy.
From the late 1970's until the end of the Cold War, I worked at Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
The Communist governments of eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union jammed our broadcasts denouncing them as western "propaganda".
The broadcasts of the Voice of America, though, usually went unjammed.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America were both US
government -sponsored international radio stations broadcasting in the
languages of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. One was viewed by the
Communist governments as a threat while the other was not.
The difference between RFE/RL and VOA - very simplified - was that a
Russian listener to VOA heard an American journalist speaking Russian
talking about the latest news of what was happening in the United States.
A Russian listener to RFE/RL heard a Russian journalist speaking Russian talking about what was happening in Russia... that his government was not telling him.
Despite heavy jamming, Radio Liberty had roughly a hundred times as many listeners as VOA. Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II all agree that Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty provided local news to millions of people who could not get that information from any other source. And it was this local and regional awareness that helped speed the fall of totalitarian governments.
Not far from here, in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is a state-wide private radio station called Antenne-Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Schwerin. The station has a market share of close to 40%. Yet only about 50 people work for Antenne MV.
Several hundred people broadcast for other state-wide radio stations in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern but for the most part they don't live there, or know the countryside or the people or their interests... at least not as well as my friends and colleagues at Antenne Mecklenburg-Vorpommern do.
To our south, in the state of Lower Saxony is another private radio station called ffn in Hannover. There about 120 people reach more than a million and a half listeners every day: about the same number of listeners that other stations reach with a staff of thousands. About four years ago, ffn re-oriented itself into a radio station devoted to concentrating on fulfilling the needs and desires of its listeners in Lower Saxony. And its listenership has doubled.
Here in Hamburg, Radio Hamburg has been Number One for almost ten years. Almost one in four people in Hamburg listens to Radio Hamburg every day.
Radio Hamburg's news Claim is: Hamburg and the World on 103.6. In that order. And they have delivered on that promise in their programming for a decade.
Two years ago I became Managing Director of the Radio Energy station in Munich. We did not go from fourth place in Munich to Number One by calling the extremely successful Energy network in Paris and saying: send us the music, news and radio personalities that your listeners in France want to hear. We took Energy Paris' advice on providing the music, news and radio personalities that Munich's listeners wanted to hear.
My current radio station - Radio 7 - is a small network covering about half of the state of Baden-Württemberg, part of Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland. Guess what we are doing there. The weather is different near Lake Constance than it is in Stuttgart so the network stations in the south don't bother telling their listeners about the weather in the north. A traffic jam outside of Zürich doesn't really interest a Bavarian listener hundreds of kilometers away near Nuremberg. The music is the same everywhere because we have determined that there are no major differences in musical taste but there are different information needs. So we try to meet them. And we intend to be even more succesful in the future than we already are.
There is no denying the importance of globalisation. I am deeply interested in many news stories on many different topics from all over the world. I would be lying if I told you that I don't use my mobile phone when I travel to other countries. I want to be as informed and as up-to-date as possible. But if weather forecasters predict floods tonight in both Tokyo and in Hamburg, I believe you know which flood will be more important to me, personally.
And for that reason, I am convinced that local and regional information-gathering and dissemination... in other words, journalism... - no matter via what media or in what form - is and will always remain a profession with an unlimited future.