On Friday afternoon the decision was clear, 18 to 14 votes, with Florian Hager becoming the new director of the Hessischer Rundfunk. Who is the man who will be at the helm of the station for the next five years?
Florian Hager is 45 years old and studied journalism and film studies in Paris and Mainz. He was deputy program director at Arte in Strasbourg at a time when the broadcaster was modernizing its website. In 2015 he became the founding managing director of funk, the youth service of ARD and ZDF, since 2020 he has been deputy program director of ARD and “Channel Manager”. This means, he is converting the ARD media library like thisthat it should be able to keep up with the streaming services. Or correctly: He is still converting it, because on March 1, 2022 he will replace the previous artistic director Manfred Krupp in Frankfurt.
“I’m very happy,” says Florian Hager.
“He has the experience to advance the restructuring of HR into a modern media company and thus to ensure its future viability,” said the Chairman of the Broadcasting Council, Rolf Müller.
If you ask around from colleagues, they describe Hager as “professional youth”. A man who was always brought to the broadcasters when it came to doing something really different there. A man who can also take the view of people who no longer switch on a certain station at a certain time, also because he does not do it himself. Linear, said Florian Hager once, he mainly watches sports.
He stood for digitization, competitor Weber for the budget. In three ballots: a stalemate
On Friday he competed against Stephanie Weber, the station’s operations director. He stood for digitization, she for the budget, and the importance of both is shown by the fact that it took the broadcasting councils four rounds to choose a winner. In the first three rounds at the end of October, the 32 men and women each voted 16 to 16, a stalemate. Then they adjourned, exhausted.
The operations director of the Hessischer Rundfunk, Stephanie Weber.
(Photo: picture alliance / dpa / HR / SR)
If you ask HR employees, they say: Sure, digitization, budget planning, all of this is important. But it is even more important to keep people together. The one in the Frankfurter Funkhaus, but also the one in the five other studios between Kassel and Darmstadt; those in the props, in the masks, those in front of and behind the camera, the 1,700 employees, the 940 permanent freelancers, the 90 trainees.
One question remains: an extensive program reform is currently underway on ARD, Hager was the third person on the core team, alongside editor-in-chief Oliver Köhr and program director Christine Strobl. How will things continue when he moves to Frankfurt? Hager says that there is no weakening because the task there is not dependent on the person.
And finally, he says, he is also looking forward to the change in his private life, to having more time with his family again, who live in the Rhine-Main area. Although he already knows that this sounds strange: to have more time as a director. But now he could at least sleep at home more often.