Description
DW (Deutsche Welle) is a German public international broadcaster. The service is available in 30 languages. DW's satellite television service consists of channels in English, German, Spanish, and Arabic. While funded by the German government, the work of DW is regulated by the Deutsche Welle Act, meaning that content is intended to be independent of government influence. DW is a member of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).
DW offers regularly updated articles on its news website and runs its own center for international media development, DW Akademie. The broadcaster's stated goals are to produce reliable news coverage, provide access to the German language, and promote understanding between peoples. DW has developed a two-tier strategy to service their audience in the upcoming years: "a global approach aimed at disseminating information to a larger worldwide audience through expansion of international television services in English, Spanish, Arabic, and German and a regional approach focused on providing information tailored to the needs of particular regions, primarily through the Internet."
DW has been broadcasting since 1953. It is headquartered in Bonn, where its radio programmes are produced. Television broadcasts are produced almost entirely in Berlin. Both locations create content for DW's news website.
It is also a provider of live streaming world news which can be viewed via its website, YouTube, and various mobile devices and digital media players.
As of 2018, around 1,500 employees and 1,500 freelancers from 60 countries work for Deutsche Welle in its offices in Bonn and Berlin. The Director-General of DW is Peter Limbourg.
In September 1994, Deutsche Welle was the first public broadcaster in Germany with an internet presence, initially www-dw.gmd.de, hosted by the GMD Information Technology Research Center. For its first two years, the site listed little more than contact addresses, although DW's News Journal was broadcast in RealAudio from Real's server beginning in 1995, and Süddeutsche Zeitung's initial web presence, which included news articles from the newspaper, shared the site. In 1996, it evolved into a news website using the URL dwelle.de; in 2001, the URL changed to www.dw-world.de, and was changed again in 2012, to www.dw.de. Deutsche Welle purchased the domain dw.com, which previously belonged to DiamondWare, in 2013; DW had attempted to claim ownership of the address in 2000, without success. DW eventually moved to the www.dw.com domain on 22 June 2015. According to DW, their website delivers information by topic with an intuitive navigation organized to meet users' expectations. The layout offers more flexibility to feature pictures, videos and in-depth reporting on the day's events in a multimedia and multilingual fashion. They also integrated their Media Center into the dw.de website making it easier for users to access videos, audios and picture galleries from DW's multimedia archive of reports, programs and coverage of special issues.
DW's news site is in seven core languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese for Brazil, and Russian), as well as a mixture of news and information in 23 other languages in which Deutsche Welle broadcasts. Persian became the site's eighth focus language in 2007.
German and European news is DW's central focus, but the site also offers background information about Germany and German language courses. Deutsch, Warum Nicht? (literally: German, Why Not?) is a personal course for learning the German language, created by Deutsche Welle and the Goethe-Institut.
