The news ark systematically collects ARD radio news. Interested parties should be able to get a picture of the radio news from past years. The project was founded in 2003 by ARD news directors in Nuremberg. Since 2017, the project has been continued at the University of Leipzig. So far, more than 500 news broadcasts have been archived. These can be found in the Communications and Media Studies Archive.
Since the summer semester of 2017, the archive "ARD-Nachrichtenarche" has been operated as a central facility at the Institute for Communication and Media Studies at the University of Leipzig under the direction of Honorary Professor Dietz Schwiesau, MDR Head of News Saxony-Anhalt, and Prof. Dr. Markus Beiler. The news ark has been systematically collecting ARD radio news since 2003. Interested parties should be able to get a picture of the radio news from past years. The news ark is invaluable, especially for academic research. The project was founded in 2003 by ARD news directors in Nuremberg. Since 2003, over 500 news broadcasts have been archived. Until now, the broadcasts were stored at MDR in Magdeburg.
Project Idea and Background
A systematic archiving of news broadcasts of German radio since its beginning on October 29th, 1923 did not take place for 80 years until 2003. While recording was technically impossible in the immediate initial phase of radio broadcasting, this was subsequently limited for decades in terms of storage possibilities. Also, in contrast to artistic radio productions, the ephemeral radio message was not attributed great value. Yet radio news are valuable contemporary documents which also document the change in the most important journalistic form of presentation per se. Only occasionally have manuscripts been collected at various broadcasters or recordings of outstanding historical events or individual radio broadcasts been archived. There are also private collections, e.g., of news editors or anchors.
On October 29th, 2003, at a conference of the ZfP "Radio 80 - Zukunft braucht Herkunft" (Radio 80 - The Future Needs Origins), the news directors of the ARD stations decided to create a collection of radio news exactly 80 years after the start of radio in Germany. This should make it possible for future generations to get an overview of the development of radio news and the form of presentation.
Every year since 2003, archiving has been carried out on the key date of November 11th, the day on which the Berlin radio station Funkstunde is said to have broadcast the first news in German radio history in 1923. The 1 p.m. news broadcasts were recorded at each of the ARD stations. Together with the manuscripts and other accompanying information, these were stored at Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) in Magdeburg. At the first deadline collection in 2003, 25 ARD programs participated, in 2010 already 52. In total, more than 500 news broadcasts have been archived so far.
The collection is still in a state of development, although there is already an academic processing of the material on different aspects. For example, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, a systematization of the corpus based on metadata has been developed.
At the Seminar for Speech Studies and Phonetics at the Martin-Luther-University Halle, there were final theses on the collection. However, a fundamental systematization of the material according to communication studies principles is still pending.
The transfer of the "ARD News Ark" archive to the Institute for Communication and Media Studies at the University of Leipzig is intended to provide a permanent home and to develop it further on an academic basis.