{"id":13603,"date":"2025-10-16T17:28:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T15:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kultur.ftmk.uni-mainz.de\/?page_id=13603"},"modified":"2025-10-16T17:28:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T15:28:11","slug":"zdf","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/kultur.ftmk.uni-mainz.de\/en\/zdf\/","title":{"rendered":"Public Service Television in Flux: Exploring ZDF from a Media Anthropological Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/jgu-base-heading>\n\n

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Over an entire year, from April 2024 to March 2025, eight MA students ethnographically and analytically explored various self-chosen focus areas under this overarching theme. In the course of the project, we, together with the Center for Audio-Visual Production (ZAP) at JGU, developed an unusual video podcast format, which three work groups each implemented into an episode. <\/p>\n\n

The Second German Television (ZDF) is Germany’s only centrally organized public service broadcaster, in contrast to the federally structured ARD (Consortium of Public Service Broadcasters of the Federal Republic of Germany), and is both an important employer in the region and an iconic flagship \u2013 not least due to the ‘Mainzelm\u00e4nnchen’ \u2013 of the city of Mainz. We approached this institution, which is located above the city on the Lerchenberg and is actually rather difficult to access from a research perspective, by first considering two central current challenges: the ideological questioning of its traditional structure and function, not least due to increasing right-wing nationalist currents in society, and technologically by the demands of digitalization and new formats of media production and consumption. For this, in the first semester, a foundation was laid through a broad engagement with media anthropological and historical approaches, as well as practical material collection. Among the students, thematic preferences already emerged for a) questions of media trust, news production, and digital alternatives, b) everyday consumption, childhood, and memory, and c) representative structure and working conditions. Through very differently structured interviews with members of various editorial departments at ZDF itself, with viewers\/consumers, as well as with members of the Broadcasting Councils and trade unions, the image of a complex contemporary ‘ZDF cosmos’ emerged during the second semester, for which we developed an unusual video podcast format: a self-reflective conversation among the three student groups, incorporating audio-visual sequences of their respective ethnographic research. The three video podcast episodes are self-contained, but especially as a series, they offer a novel approach to an everyday medium in transition. <\/p>\n\n

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