The radio news of Swiss Radio and Television (SRF) will be broadcast for the first time on December 1st from Zurich and no longer from Bern. Construction work on the new studios in Leutschenbach began this week.
Radio news and the program from Radio SRF 4 will no longer be broadcast from Bern but from studios in Zurich.
Archive Photo: Keystone
Three studios are currently being built into the existing news and sports center in Leutschenbach, as SRF director Nathalie Wappler announced at a media conference on Thursday. The radio news and SRF 4 news will also be broadcast from here in the future.
Around 70 employees will be moved from Bern to Zurich for this purpose. The construction work is of course made more difficult because of Corona, said Wappler. So that those present would mix as little as possible, work was also carried out at night.
The Zurich location is to become the “center for topicality and digital development”. The editorial offices for background and analysis, including the “Echo der Zeit”, will remain in Bern.
“Technical complexity underestimated”
In this already existing news and sports center, however, little has gone according to plan. These new studios should have been broadcasting for television since November 2019, but the technology is still not working as expected.
“The technical complexity of this project was initially underestimated,” admitted Wappler. The first broadcasts from this studio are now possible “mid-year at the earliest”.
Start of construction for the “Radio Hall”
The second major construction project by SRF, the “Radio Hall”, has now also started. A replacement for the Zurich radio studio Brunnenhof has been under construction in Leutschenbach since the beginning of February.
The conversion of a hall for company vehicles to the “Radio Hall” should take around a year, ie until February 2022. After that, the editorial offices of Radio SRF 1, SRF 3, Virus and Musikwelle will gradually be relocated here by the end of August 2022.
The city of Zurich will then rent the empty Brunnenhof radio studio and set up a school building in it.
Published: 03/04/2021, 12:19 PM
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