Nikolaus Brender

Nikolaus Brender (born 24 January 1949, in Freiburg im Breisgau, then French zone of occupation, today Baden-Württemberg) is a German journalist. He was currently the commissiong editor of the German public broadcasting station ZDF.

After schooling at a Jesuit school in St. Blasien in the southern Black Forest (Kolleg St. Blasien), he studied jurisprudence and political science at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau, Munich and Hamburg, earning a Staatsexamen degree in 1978.

In his youth, he was a member of the Christian Democrat youth organisation, the Junge Union; today, however, he is not affiliated with any party.

Brender has been working as a journalist since 1978, initially for the Zeit, a weekly newspaper from Hamburg (1978–80) and the Südwestrundfunk, the regional TV station of southwestern Germany (Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate) (1978–82). From 1984 to 1989, he worked for the public broadcasting station ARD as a correspondent in Buenos Aires. Following that, he was the head of the foreign correspondents department of the regional TV station for North Rhine Westphalia, the WDR, until 1993. Brender was then head of the department of political coverage at WDR until 1997, before being programme director of that same station. Since April 1, 2000, he has been commissiong editor of ZDF.

Controversially, he had to quit this post in March 2010 after the extension of his contract with ZDF was denied by a majority of the station's administrative board members that are politically affiliated with the German Conservative party (the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)).

He was succeeded by Peter Frey.

In 2014, the constitutional court, found the charter unconstitutional, and gave a deadline of June 30, 2015, for the ZDF.

Brender is married to Carola Brender, they have a daughter.

• Adolf Grimme Award 1988
• Bayerischer Fernsehpreis 1990
• Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Award for Journalism 2009
• Journalist of the Year 2009 by Medium Magazine