German media habits are rapidly changing. More and more newspaper readers are drifting away to the internet. Latest figures show that over 42 million Germans regularly visit internet news portals. The home of Schiller and Goethe seems to be losing touch with the printed word. Is our nation thereby at risk? Meetings and discussions with representatives of different media types, not just the print media, with political experts, and scholars offered the young American journalists many opportunities to form new personal friendships and professional contacts. The visitors not only marveled at the immense changes that have taken place in Berlin since the Fall of the Wall in 1989; during a guided tour through the “Runde Ecke” Memorial Museum and the Stasi Bunker Museum in Leipzig they experienced the harshness and the actuality of recent German history.

Read more about the 2009 Berlin Capital Program in Amanda Vinicky´s participant report.