The new director of the Hessischer Rundfunk is called Florian Hager. The Broadcasting Council of the Frankfurt broadcaster elected the 45-year-old deputy ARD program director on Friday with 18 out of 32 votes as the successor to the broadcaster’s manager Manfred Krug, who is to step down next February. As a competitor Hagers was the station’s operations director, Stephanie Weber, in HR, for optional. Both candidates were initially so strong that a first election date was canceled at the end of October: the broadcasting councils voted in several ballots with a stalemate of 16 to 16 votes, and the election was postponed.
After the election, Hager thanked him for the trust. He said that for the future viability of HR it will now be important to continue on the path to becoming a digital media company “even under increasingly difficult financial circumstances in dialogue with the employees and the people in Hesse”. He emphasized the importance of a strong regional network and independent programming for all channels. “I have been at home in the Rhine-Main area for over 20 years, anchored in the Hesse family and look forward to this task and the cooperation with all my colleagues in HR.”
Since the beginning of 2020, Hager has been the deputy ARD program director as a so-called channel manager, responsible for programming in the network’s media library that is equivalent to television. Together with program director Christine Strobl and editor-in-chief Oliver Köhr, he recently worked on it one of the biggest program reforms in the ARD. It is unclear who will take on his role in the program directorate.
Hager, who was born in Aalen, was previously, among other things, the founding managing director of the radio youth platform for ARD and ZDF, and learned the trade as a broadcaster strategist at Arte in Strasbourg, first as an adviser to the broadcaster’s president and later as deputy program director for the Franco-German cultural broadcaster.