The fact that the Hessischer Rundfunk closed last year with a deficit of 90.3 million euros could be seen with a shrug if the hr were a privately financed company.
Since the radio contributions make the house a public matter, the question arises whether everything is going well here.
If you read through the annual report, you will come across three topics: On the one hand, there is the pension burden, which other companies are also struggling with in view of the interest rate trend.
There is little that can be done about this in the short and medium term - except that it would have been a duty to take corrective action on the commitments much earlier. But now it is there as it is, namely dramatic. The other two questions are all the more important: Why is the slowing down of the recent premium increase complained about, but not much more sought after in-house savings opportunities? And: Why is the question of what public broadcasting will look like in the future being answered with a digital offensive that specifically attacks privately financed competitors at the core of their business model?
If the chairman of the HR board of directors even connects these two points and complains that there is a lack of money because it is a matter of not getting left behind in the global digital change, then he must be on the alert. Why? With its most abundant resources in comparison to private competitors on the news market, the hr has set up an internet editorial team for its "hessenschau.de" offering including the app that is often only a rudimentary program reference, but writes all the longer texts and an editorially complex live ticker operates. The reward for the effort: More than 600,000 visits on an average day, if you include all information products - including supplies to the Tagesschau app, which is questionable for the same reasons.
The hr achieved these numbers with a product that competes with the online offers of the daily newspapers in Hessen. It undermines the business basis of private media houses, because it will forever remain "free" and - nice too - ad-free, since it is financed by everyone. Anyone who thought that the radio contribution was about such a thing has long been mistaken: It's about reach in the network. This is a mistake that leads to the opposite of what the HR committees hopefully really want: to provide the whole of society with independent, high-quality information.