Visit of ORF

On 18 March 2025 we visited ORF, the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, including a guided backstage special tour through its headquarter in Vienna and a presentation and talks with ORF Deputy Editor-in-Chief Ms. Inka PIEH.

The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) is Austria’s largest media provider, operating four national television and twelve radio channels, as well as a comprehensive range of websites. 

ORF is formally a foundation under public law and as such must fulfill several duties and mandates laid down in the ORF Act. 

Being a public service radio and television company, ORF is non-profit-oriented, and invests all revenue – two-thirds of which comes from radio- and TV-license fees, the rest from advertising and other income – directly into the programs and services it provides to its ORF audiences. The ORF’s main headquarters and studios are located in Vienna, and the company also operates regional studios in all nine Federal Provinces and maintains a worldwide network of correspondents who contribute to its varied range of programs in all three media. 

For the visit to main parts of the ORF facilities we had a very competent guide and could even enter the main office of the news department including the newsroom, where nearly all daily news are being broadcasted.

The highlight was the conversation with Deputy Editor-in-Chief Ms. Inka Pieh who explained the tasks of the news department, how ORF collects political, economic, cultural and other news and how they are distributed. Ms. Pieh is in charge of planning, co-ordination and production of news in the fields of politics, economy, chronicles, weather, furthermore Breaking News and ORF Online. From January 2021 up to November 2023 she was the ORF-Correspondent for USA based in Washington. 

Despite of Breaking News during our visit Ms. Pieh and a colleague of her from the Economic Department were ready for a discussion about the ORF in general, their current tasks as well as internal experiences. Questions concerned the decision taking for choosing the top news respectively the Breaking News, the sources of news content, the cooperation with Institutes such as WIFO, IHS and Universities experts. Apart of the specific knowledge it is of importance to inform the public comprehensively, to pass on the core message in a short and understandable way. Other subjects were Fake News and the rising importance of social media with ever more unreliable content. In this regard Ms. Pieh pointed out that the ORF has several offices abroad with its correspondents, therefore offering reliable first-hand information. The correspondents of ORF are known for their courage and clear stand. As a consequence for instance the ORF-Correspondent in Moscow, Carola Schneider, got her accreditation revoked in 2024. Finally, Ms. Pieh spoke about her personal experiences when she followed as ORF-Correspondent in Washington the storm of the US-Capitol on 6 January 2021 on the spot, having interviewed some of the rioters, discussing their motives and convictions. In that way we got a lively internal view on the tasks of ORF editors and correspondents.