Deutsche Welle gets new multilingual multimedia service
ABU member Deutsche Welle has received funding from the German Government for a new global multimedia, multilingual news and information service.
Under the agreement funded annually by the Federal Foreign Office to promote the media coverage of Germany abroad, the German Press Agency (DPA) will contribute content provided by the service.
The new DW multimedia foreign language service will distribute daily news and background information from a German perspective to media partners and end consumers throughout the world. The content will be produced in German, English, Spanish and Arabic, including a variety of regionally relevant topics.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier says: “The rapid development in the world of communication has shown how important the way in which and at what speed news shall be distributed. Online and social media are playing an ever-greater role, [for example] ‘breaking news’ often spreads faster now on Twitter than bulletins produced by traditional news agencies.”
“The new service offers the opportunity to distribute up-to-date and high-quality news from and about Germany, and thus to further project a positive image of Germany abroad,” he says.
DW Director General Peter Limburg has welcomed the support from the German government: “The service helps provide a cross-media context to the political and economic weight of Germany in the world. Cultural understanding is a key to long-lasting partnerships. We want to promote this understanding through an honest, independent view of Germany.”
He says the new service combines digital, interactive and traditional formats and is tailored to the specific needs of the respective partners, with selected reports from the news agency in the four languages of the new service, which will be available free of charge.
The agency’s President and CEO Michael Segbers says their reporters and correspondents report from around 60 locations in Germany and more than 100 cities worldwide.