Third American RIAS alumni program starts in Germany on September 16

September 14, 2023

Third American RIAS alumni program starts in Germany on September 16

A group of 33 RIAS Berlin Commission alumni members from the United States will spend seven days in Germany learning more about the country that they first visited years or even decades earlier on one of the binational organization’s transatlantic journalist exchange programs. The Americans will be coming from across the United States to Cologne from September 16-19 and Munich from September 19-24 to catch up with developments in Germany and to learn more about an important regional election in the southern state of Bavaria in early October.

They will visit journalists and political leaders during their fellowship and especially other members of the German alumni network during the two dozen meetings organized with help from the local German alumni chapters in Munich and Cologne. The goal of the alumni programs, which were started in 2019 in Berlin during the celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, are to build networks amongst American alumni of the more than 70 programs to Germany since 1992 as well as connect the American journalists with their German counterparts.  Several of the American alumni members taking part in the program will also be sending stories back to their home networks in the United States.

This will be the fifth RIAS Berlin Commission alumni program in the last five years. After the first 30 Americans visited Berlin in 2019, another group of 17 American alumni was in Berlin during the German elections in September 2021. A group of 30 German alumni spent a week in New York City in October 2021 just before the United States reopened its borders to European Union visitors after the Covid-19 travel ban on EU citizens and another group of 35 German alumni spent a week in December in Washington DC in  late October 2022 just before the US midterm elections.

Here are the participants: