Photo: Marco Verch

There are many secrets behind RTL’s work – some of them are even surprising to RTL itself.

How does RTL do it? Every day, you can find such a wealth of content on their site, including such high-quality articles – and this with such a small number of editors and employees that RTL’s managers are moved to tears during every negotiation with the state. Here we would like to reveal one of the many secrets of our efficiency: the write-off. In fact, this is a very common and usual practice in almost all online media worldwide. You have a subscription to the largest news agencies – dpa, afp, reuters – and are therefore allowed to take over and publish their short reports. As long as you pay for it and cite the source. At RTL, we know: you can save yourself both. Why should RTL pay a flat rate to the agencies and make the most of the sources, when the same news is secretly obtained from other foreign media and then simply translated into Luxembourgish. Not seen, not caught. How is anyone supposed to notice that?

What no one notices is the copying of genuine articles, so-called author pieces. You know: quality media have correspondents in all the major countries and for all sorts of specific topics – economy, sports, education, etc. This of course causes enormously high personnel costs. And if others are already paying for it, you shouldn’t pay twice – but recycle it. That is certainly environmentally friendly.

On December 12, the following article on the topic of „high blood pressure“ by author Julian Aé will appear in Spiegel: Link to Spiegel article. A week later, we translate his article into Luxembourgish and do not give his name as the author, but „RTL“. Only consistent. First of all, no one should notice, secondly, we entered his text into Google Translate and then ran it through the spell checker, and so much work must be rewarded.

So… it would of course be a waste of time if you wanted to adapt the title or subtitle for your own audience. Just flat copy it, that’s it. We only intervene in small stylistic subtleties. The Spiegel quotes a scientist in its article, for example - and thus makes it transparent that these statements were made to the BBC, and even provides a link where you can read it. What nonsense and gossip. We leave out meaningless details. This way our readers could almost get the idea that we at RTL had spoken to scientists ourselves. And that makes quite a good impression.

At the very bottom of the Spiegel page, you will also find the most interesting clue: „This text was first published on July 26, 2023.“ Geez, we almost translated that and wrote it there too. Here you go, now look: The Spiegel text is a good five months old and we published it very fresh with the date 12.12. You can see: We at RTL are not the only ones who like to recycle. And, just like at Spiegel, this small circumstance of course does not prevent us from simply leaving the article’s tagline: „New health study“. New, really very new! Almost as of this morning. You know very well: We always have the latest!