Life – People, Moments, Stories

Life

Annika Begiebing – Presenter & Journalist

Since the first broadcast in July 2018, Annika Begiebing has been presenting the RTL magazine program “Life – People, Moments, Stories” every Saturday, a third-party broadcast license format from the Lower Saxony State Media Authority, produced by sagamedia. With journalistic clarity and palpable passion, she brings people and stories to the screen – authentically, comprehensibly, and accessibly.

Annika’s media career began with an internship at Radio Mainwelle in Bayreuth. She then moved to 1LIVE as an editor, where she presented daily reports on business, science, culture, people, and entertainment journalism as a reporter and author.
In 2008, she moved to WDR television: For ten years, Annika hosted “Lokalzeit aus Düsseldorf” and for seven years the afternoon magazine show “Hier und Heute” (formerly “daheim & unterwegs”). Annika Begiebing also presented major WDR live specials such as Japan Day in Düsseldorf, the start of the Tour de France in Düsseldorf, and the Eurovision Song Contest for WDR and ARD on television.

In addition to her work as a presenter, Annika has been working as a voice-over artist in radio, documentaries, and image films for over 20 years. As a mother of two children, she also has a keen sense for social issues and the perspectives of families.

“What do I love about my job? Those special moments when a conversation suddenly takes on a depth that you can’t plan for. When people tell their stories that touch you, linger in your mind, and sometimes change your view of the world.”

With her experience, openness, and joy of storytelling, Annika Begiebing has become an integral part of the sagamedia team—and a presenter who conveys stories so authentically that they move and connect people.

Life

Anika Mallmann – Reporter & Editor

Anika Mallmann is an editor, reporter, and substitute presenter on “Life – People, Moments, Stories.” Since the beginning of her career at WDR and later during her traineeship at sagamedia, she has been passionate about telling stories that touch people and make them think. She pays particular attention to people and their unique life stories. With passion and empathy, she brings these stories to television – authentic, accessible, and moving.

Behind the scenes of „Life“

Attention, recording is in progress. We are producing “Life” in three, two, one, and action!

As soon as this phrase is uttered in the control room, the red light on the camera crane comes on and the entire team is highly focused for the next hour and a half. That’s roughly how long it takes us to edit the individual segments of our 70-minute magazine program into a varied overall broadcast.

Now it’s up to me to get viewers at home excited about the stories on our show. To convince them in just a few sentences why they absolutely must watch the following segment. And I usually do that best when I myself am enthusiastic and convinced by the story I’m introducing. And in fact, I look forward to the coming Saturday week after week! Because for me, “Life” is first and foremost credible. It’s also topical, informative, serious, entertaining, colorful, and emotional. I see my challenge as the host of “Life Magazine” as striking the necessary balance in my presentation, varying between serious and lighthearted within a single program, and treating socio-political topics with the same competence and credibility as consumer issues and funny, colorful stories.

How does the broadcast get into the box?

About six hours before “Life” airs on TV on Saturday evening at 7:05 p.m., we record the show in “the green hell,” as the largest of two news studios at the broadcasting center in Cologne-Deutz is called. In the middle of the rounded design of a 410-square-meter, empty room painted entirely in green, I would probably be disoriented—if I didn’t have my little green roll of tape with me, which is always at my feet. To be ready to go on air in the studio at around 12:00 p.m., I sit in Nina Faro’s makeup chair from 11:00 a.m. Hair, makeup, outfit – and off I go to my “dance floor.”

At the start of recording, six people in the control room will ensure that “Life” is produced flawlessly in terms of both technology and content. A small button in my ear, known as an “in-ear,” allows me to communicate with my colleagues in the control room. They play the segments at the appropriate points, change the image backgrounds (screens) in our virtual studio set, and ensure optimal image quality and good sound. With me “in the green room” are two people/colleagues at the cameras, a production manager, a makeup artist, and a set technician.

So, there are many people who change every Saturday. To ensure that as few mistakes as possible are made during the “live recording,” we rehearse the individual positions for the presentations in the studio, including the screens, beforehand. This is because our virtual set offers over 20 different positions, which in turn can be played with different backgrounds.

For example, we have the option of presenting impressive landscape shots on a large screen. On the other hand, we want to present emotional stories that are close to people in a similarly intimate way, so we choose a presentation position that also creates closeness, with me standing close to the screen and perhaps even having the camera zoom in on me at the end. This usually allows us to record our 70-minute magazine program in one take, “live on tape.” Incidentally, I don’t think it’s a big deal if I don’t get the presentation “completely clean” off my lips. We don’t start over, but let it “live.” Fortunately, there’s a human being in front of the camera and not a machine. 😉

How do we find our topics?

We live in a world full of unique stories. To discover them, our reporters don’t just scour the internet, read newspapers, or research video portals. They travel the world and often find stories that have never been seen on television before. Our reporter Svenja Schmidt, for example, was on the roof of the world, Mount Everest, with cameraman Max Biermann. There, they accompanied Shaunna Burke, among others. She is a well-known mountaineer who suddenly has to fight breast cancer and wants to achieve the impossible: the Mount Everest Marathon.

Or Life reporter Nils Reucker, who meets a German dropout in Spitsbergen, exactly three thousand kilometers north of Germany, in complete darkness and minus 25 degrees Celsius. The trained pharmaceutical chemist is actually from Koblenz, but has been living in Spitsbergen for five years and works in the world’s northernmost brewery. Entirely voluntarily – despite the many hardships that life in the Arctic and the three-month-long polar night entail.

And sometimes we don’t have to search long for stories. Events such as the flood of the century in the summer of 2021 naturally call on us as journalists to report on them. I myself was in the flood zone several times as a reporter and got a first-hand impression of the extent of the disaster. This automatically led me to talk to people affected by the flood on the street and meet people who lost their livelihoods in one night. Who lost loved ones. What is moving people right now? What are they talking about? What is on their minds? These are questions we ask ourselves every day as magazine editors.

We take our educational mission seriously and want to send our viewers into the weekend well informed. Through relevant service articles, we also want to provide specific tips that are extremely helpful in everyday life. For example, how can I save money with simple tricks, even though electricity and heating costs are skyrocketing? And did you know that pasta, rice, and potatoes can help you lose weight if you eat them every day? Through extensive experiments, theories become facts, and the results of our consumer tests often put us in a really good mood! Which, of course, isn’t a bad thing for a Saturday evening magazine show. 😉

Are we meeting this Saturday?

“Life – People, Moments, Stories,” at 7:05 p.m. on RTL. I look forward to seeing you!

Yours, Annika Begiebing