News Xchange, a Eurovision experience, opens this week in Berlin - and for the second year running, the event is a sell-out.  This year’s host broadcaster is EBU Member ZDF.

Running from Wednesday 28th October until Friday 29th October, News Xchange brings together over 500 senior news executives and experts from around the world to discuss, openly and freely, media coverage of the most important issues of the day.

This year topics include the refugee crisis across Europe and many related issues, such as hate speech, how the media covered Charlie Hebdo, bandwagonism, the situation in Afghanistan, the devastating effects of vicarious trauma, and the realities of reporting from the Middle East. German Defence Minister Ursuala van der Leyen gives Thursday's keynote address.

The EBU and its Members, of course, play large roles in the event. Jean Philip de Tender, the EBU’s media director, will introduce News Xchange with a speech “Slow is the New Fast”.

The BBC will produce and moderate a discussion on how the media represents the refugee crisis. This will feature ZDF’s editor in chief Dr Peter Frey and Channel 4 News’s international editor Lindsey Hilsum.  NHK of Japan will present its experience in automating some journalistic tasks in the newsroom and how that frees up reporters to concentrate on other, more complex tasks.  ITN has teamed up with Al Jazeera to explore how the world reports on the Middle East, a discussion to be chaired by UK Channel 4’s lead anchor Jon Snow.  CCTV of China will share its thoughts on reporting from the country. Finally, ZDF’s Elmar Thevessen, the broadcaster’s deputy editor-in-chief, discusses collaboration in investigative reporting, while the editor-in-chief of French EBU Member iTélé shares their experience of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January.

Each session/speaker addresses a difficult and challenging question. Those questions, amongst others, include:

- Whose stories do we tell? Can an image change a crisis? Can a term provoke prejudice?-

- Go with the flow or tame the tiger: where do we stand when a dramatic event of global reach (e.g., Charlie Hebdo) is being shaped by the   immediacy and emotion of social media?

- Does the complexity and danger of reporting from the Middle East mean the old model of foreign corresponding has to be rethought? What gets lost if we shift to a purely local set of perspectives?

- As social media’s importance in news grows, is the quality of news being diminished by opinion’s evil cousin, hate speech?

- If journalists can't keep a secret, why should anyone entrust us with one?

Delegates to News Xchange also have the chance to see, for the first time in Europe, “The Uncondemned” - the story of an underdog group of lawyers and activists prosecuting rape as a crime against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. This documentary has won the Victor Rabinowitz and Joanne Grant Award for Social Justice and the Brizzolara Family Foundation Award for a Film of Conflict and Resolution.

There is no more "perfect" place in which to hold such conversations than Germany and, in particular, in Berlin. With ZDF. Historic reference, yes, but also Germany's leading role in the migrant/refugee discussion, among many other reasons.