The Berliner Morgenpost

We have already visited the Cultural Bureau, the Deutscher Bundestag (their parliament), the German Federal Foreign Office, the representative of one of the other federal states that we will visit, Thuringia, the Federal Ministry for the Environmnet, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, their teachers' college, the Goethe-Institut in Berlin, a private charity, the office of the mayor of Berlin, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charley, the bridge where spies exchanged information during the Cold War, the Brandenburg Gates, a Holocaust memorial that took up the space of about half a block, tripping stones, several museums, and one of the daily local newspapers, the Berliner Morgenpost. We have been constantly on the go and are always expected to take notes and ask questions. We have had several lectures already and it is always hard to find time to write, but I will do my best to let you know what new and interesting things I see and learn about every day. I know that I am already behind, but I will touch on only one visit of the three we had today.

The Berliner Morgenpost is a daily local newspaper in a beautiful skyscraper with a gold frame and glass walls. It was founded in 1898. Obviouslý, it is not the original building. There is so much to tell about this important institution, but I will have to give you an earful when I return. To enter the building we had to show our passports, have our backpacks go through a security screen, and we had to go through a metal detector just like the airport. Only this time they gave us visitors' badges with our names and other informaton on them. We had to return the badges at the end of our visit, but I politely asked if I could have the paper insert with my name and the girl at the desk said "Ja" and smiled as she handed it to me.

The heads of the newspaper visited New York and Washington, D.C. before deciding to model their building after the Washington Post. They have 400 reporters, some who work exclusively on line where they keep track of the type of news that their Internet readers like to read. The entire paper is published on the Internet and can be viewed FREE. They still have 155,000 subscribers of the hard copy. Alex Springer, the head of the newspaper in 1965, chose the site for the current building because of its proximity to what use to be East Berlin with the Berlin Wall dividing the two sides. He placed a huge sign (smaller than the one found in Times Square in New York) to give news to the East Berliners. The Soviets responded by building skyscraper apartments to block the view of his messages. He always said that he did it because he knew that one day East and West Berliners would be one again. Many laughed at his dream of reunification. Sadly, he died four years before the two parts of Berlin became one again in 1990 after the wall came down in 1989.

The Berliner Morgenpost is awesome! It has your standard elavators but also an open, constantly moving elevator, just as the one we saw at the German Federal Foreign Service. We were told at the foreign service office that it was so their agents could get on and off from one floor to the next in a hurry. I could see where that type of elevator could be an important part of a newspaper. We were not allowed to ride the perpetually moving elevator at the foreign service office, but the newspaper allowed us to ride that particular elevator down when our visit was over.

Better go. Blog at you later! (I'm getting better at memorizing where buttons are so I can get more out of my minutes.)