Marchand praises rein stop and announces job cuts in Bern

SRF director announced Thursday that plans to move SRF radio studios from Bern and Zurich are largely buried (Werbewoche.ch reported). Various radio editorial teams - including "Echo der Zeit," "Tagesgespräch" and "Rendez-vous" - may remain in the capital. Under the new audio strategy, only Radio SRF 4 and the digital experts are expected to move to Zurich.

SRG is thus giving in to the ever-increasing pressure. At first, the staff fought back vehemently, even threatening to launch a competing product (Werbewoche.ch reported). However, the protests went unheard by the SRG Board of Directors: He decided that the move will go through as planned. The reason: With centralization, SRG could have saved a lot of money and thus implemented the politically decreed savings mandate.

The SRF staff also received increasing support from politicians. The fact that the media are to be increasingly centralized in Zurich is causing a stir in Bern. The Committee of the Council of States for Telecommunications (KVF) At the beginning of May, the Executive Board spoke out againstto thwart the SRG's plans. In mid-May, however, a strong political front formed against the project: Party leaders from left to right requested SRG in writing toto put the train preparations on hold until the situation had been clarified. The talk was of an "affront to federalist Switzerland, the fee payers and the regions".

Then, in mid-June, the definitive turnaround: The National Council approved five identical parliamentary initiatives. These demand that radio information broadcasts continue to be produced primarily in Berne and Lausanne and TV information broadcasts in Zurich and Geneva. The National Council thus decided not only against the Council of States' Telecommunications Commission, but also against its own preliminary advisory committee.

The political tailwind subsequently mobilized the city and canton of Bern. After the "clear signal" from the National Council, the preparations were to be stopped, so the demand. This did not miss - as described at the beginning - the effect.

Now SRG Director Gilles Marchand is taking a stand. In an interview with the NZZ am Sonntag, he writes that a "professional solution was sought and found to get out of a conflict of goals. A conflict of objectives between professional requirements for the development of the media and efficiency on the one hand, and political expectations of federalism on the other".

At the same time, Marchand points out that SRG will continue to fight the law on the locations of public broadcasting. In other words: Once again, the SRG does not want to be interfered with by politics when it comes to economic decisions regarding locations. A law that dictates where SRG has to operate its studios would be "grave" for SRG and "completely anachronistic in view of the development of the media and the digital reality," Marchand said.

In addition, the director announces that job cuts must be expected in the Bern radio studios. In fact, SRG wants to save a total of five million francs in Bern, three of them in radio. "We will probably not be able to avoid effects on jobs," is Marchand's less than optimistic forecast.