Klaus Jürgen Schmidt

Klaus Jürgen Schmidt (* 1944 in Bernsdorf / Oberlausitz) is a German radio journalist.

Life

Schmidt got to know young pioneer work and “friendship between nations” à la GDR , later in the Federal Republic of Germany “street revolution” à la 1968 and the struggle for third world solidarity during the editors' march through corridors of public broadcasting houses. A first approach to the foreign came as the winner of the “Third World Journalism Prize” from Terre des Hommes: on the spot in the footsteps of children as victims of the Indochina War (1973). He then wrote radio, film and TV reports from 1974–1979 from Latin America, from countries in Southeast Asia, from the Pacific islands, from countries in North Africa and the Middle East.

Later, as a media consultant and media producer, he attempted to give people of the south their own voice. a. 1980–1982 with his project at the Bremen Übersee-Museum "Matinee in Übersee - An entertaining North-South-Dialogue", with audience participation and with satellite connections to Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Jamaica.

Together with his friend and colleague Michael Geyer, the project “A raft for Europe” was created, the result of a joint reportage trip to war-torn Cambodia, which turned the reporters into participating activists (1980/81).

Schmidt lived and worked among people from other cultures for 40 years, most recently in Africa for 27 years. There he was u. a. From 1985 to 1989 he worked for the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung as a consultant in the development and operation of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation's Radio 4 cultural station in Harare, with a program in seven native languages and with rural women participating in listening clubs.

In 2005, Schmidt undertook attempts as an SES lecturer at the Cambodia Communication Institute / Royal University of Phnom Penh to explore possibilities for introducing a local radio together with Cambodian students.

In 1993, Schmidt developed a training and production offer for African journalists in Zimbabwe, which is intended to empower them to tell and spread radio stories from their own experiences for listeners outside their own cultural area. Radio Bridge Overseas (RBO) developed two new ideas: As the first media organization on the African continent, RBO imparted skills to independent radio producers in dealing with digital audio production and the Internet as an instrument for spreading their own audio stories. RBO internship programs no longer took African journalists to the north for further training, but instead brought young media makers to the south as assistants and first listeners to them. In 1994 Radio Bridge Overseas won the Global Media Award for the best radio program during the World Population Conference in Cairo. In 2000 Radio Bridge Overseas was invited to EXPO 2000 in Hanover as a "Worldwide Project". Domestic political developments in Zimbabwe made it necessary to freeze all RBO operations in the country in 2001.

Series of broadcasts in the Bremer Bürgerradio

Works

Life in the rice field - reports from Vietnam, Laos and Kampuchea , 1984, Peter Hammer Verlag, Wuppertal
The way to Zimbabwe , 1990, Verlag Results, Hamburg
Point ... about attempts to find a home in a foreign country - a balance sheet after departure and homecoming, as a paperback , 564 pages, ISBN 978-3-96103-088-0
Tazara ... by train through world history , as a DVD and web project
It's done over the bridge into Dolldorf to Africa , as a web project
Drumming in the ivory tower - an interactive thriller , as paperback BoD, 2005 / as e-book 2016
The last weir before the sea - Two crime stories from the networked world , as an e-book 2016 ( reading sample , PDF; 111 kB)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Schmidt, Klaus Jürgen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German broadcast journalist
DATE OF BIRTH	1944
PLACE OF BIRTH	Bernsdorf (Upper Lusatia)