Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 30, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
According to the survey, around 60 percent of respondents said that the new ZDF news studio helps them understand the news content better. ZDF Editor-in-Chief Nikolaus Brender: “With the new studio design, we have clearly come a great deal closer to our most important goal of making news easier to understand. Communicating news is an ongoing process on which we will continue to work consistently.”
ZDF also accompanied the start of broadcasting with an open discussion online. Viewers contributed more than 4,000 posts to the internet forum, making it one of ZDF’s most successful. Unlike the representative survey, the discussion in ZDF’s internet forum was rather critical. Although many forum participants praised the studio as a “modern” and “progressive” form of news communication, critics mainly complained about the poor legibility of the text and the presenters’ insufficient presence in the virtual studio space.
Seven days after broadcasting began, the forum was closed, while ZDF responded to the substantive criticisms. Initial suggestions from viewers are being implemented: the temperature markings on the weather maps have already been enlarged for several days. This coming weekend, the legibility of text in explanatory segments and in the studio is also to be significantly improved, and the contrast of name captions in reports will be increased. Changed camera angles now make the presenters appear more present in the studio. “These changes show that we take viewers’ criticism seriously,” says ZDF Editor-in-Chief Nikolaus Brender. Viewer feedback will also continue to influence the work of the news editorial teams over the coming weeks.
