heute is a news

News

News is the communication of selected information on current events which is presented by print, broadcast, Internet, or word of mouth to a third party or mass audience.- Etymology :...

 show

Television program

A television program , also called television show, is a segment of content which is intended to be broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series...

 on the German television channel ZDF

ZDF

Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen , ZDF, is a public-service German television broadcaster based in Mainz . It is run as an independent non-profit institution, which was founded by the German federal states . The ZDF is financed by television licence fees called GEZ and advertising revenues...

. The main show is broadcast at 7 PM, or 19:00, consisting of news of the day, weather forecasts and sport. The opening sequence of each broadcast features an analogue clock as a trademark.

History

News broadcasts were made from the day the ZDF went operational, the name heute was decided by February 8, 1963.

heute was originally broadcast from 19.30 to 20.00 CET; on February 1, 1965 the show was split up into two parts - heute (19.30 to 19.45 CET) and themen des tages (19.45 to 20.00 CET). From January 1, 1969 the themen des tages was dropped to let the evening programs start earlier.

In 1973, the programme moved to 19.00 CET, where it is still seen today.

Programming today

The main show is seen at 19.00 CET and usually has a length of 20 minutes (including weather forecast).

Around 21.45 CET, a longer, in-depth show called heute-journal is broadcast, similar to Tagesthemen

Tagesthemen

Tagesthemen is one of Germany's prime daily television news magazines, presented by journalists Caren Miosga and Tom Buhrow. Second only to the 8:00 PM Tagesschau Tagesthemen is the most important newscast of the ARD...

on Das Erste

Das Erste

Erstes Deutsches Fernsehen , marketed as Das Erste , is the principal publicly owned television channel in Germany...

.

Identity

For most of the newscast's run, the programme's title music was preceded by the letters h-e-u-t-e in morse code

Morse code

Morse code is a method of transmitting textual information as a series of on-off tones, lights, or clicks that can be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment...

 (···· · ··- - ·). Since 1998 this was integrated with the title music, although the dots and dashes are not distinguishable.

Since 17 July 2009 a new virtual studio

Virtual studio

The term virtual studio can refer to any number of technological tools which seek to simulate a physical television and/or movie studio. One such use of the term follows....

was implemented with redesigned graphics and the integration of the title sequence to the studio in most editions.