Facts and figures

We have been a member of the consortium of public broadcasters of the Federal Republic of Germany (ARD) for more than 50 years. Like ZDF and the other regional broadcasters in Germany, we are not controlled by the government and work independently. Peter Limbourg has been our Director General since October 2013.

About 1,500 staff employees and hundreds of freelancers from 60 countries work in our headquarters in Bonn and Berlin. Our studios in Washington and Moscow, Brussels and Buenos Aires, as well as our network of ARD correspondents, ensure coverage of events around the world.

We have been on-air since May 3, 1953. More than 30 languages were added to the German radio service by 1980 – including Arabic, Kiswahili, Indonesian, Urdu, Russian, Spanish, English and Amharic. Culture, education and European issues are some of our focal points.

DW ventured into television in 1965, initially by shipping TV cassettes to developing countries. We have been broadcasting television worldwide via satellite since 1992 and the program has been available around the clock since 1996. In 1994, DW became the first public broadcaster in Germany to go online.

Approximately 101 million around the world make use of our journalistic content every week. They value Deutsche Welle as a trustworthy and reliable source of information – making us a strong brand with a tradition going back decades.

DW Akademie establishes a global network

Fostering the German language is part of our statutory mission – and we offer a variety of language courses to German students around the world. We want to make learning easy, which is why we offer free courses in 30 languages for beginners and experts alike. Our full range of multimedia courses includes everything from slowly-spoken news and the “Top-Thema” to a websoap, a language bar and dialect atlas.
For five decades now, DW Akademie has been advising and training media professionals from developing and transformation countries – including journalists, documentary producers, engineers and managers. We rely on long-term cooperation with local partners. The 3,000 participants a year form a global “German” network and many graduates have become decision makers in their homeland, as well as spokespeople for DW.

DW Akademie has also helped develop and run the two-year, bilingual master's program International Media Studies (IMS), a joint project with the University of Bonn and Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences.

Worldwide, Deutsche Welle has approximately 4,400 partners. They integrate programming in their lineups and websites, send guest editors and utilize the training programs that DW Akademie has to offer.