Several daily and weekly products of the Deutsche Welle TV newsroom (pictured) are available to U.S. stations.

German network fills Worldfocus time slot on World channel

Posted by Current, March 24, 2010

Journal, a daily newscast produced by Germany's overseas broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, will fill the slot vacated by WNET.org's Worldfocus next month. Worldfocus leaves the air April 2 and Journal starts April 5.

The half-hour newscast is also available without charge to public TV stations at 4 p.m., live from Berlin, and is carried in about 40 markets, says Greg Fitzgerald, DW programming coordinator for the United States. In some cities, it's carried by the largest pubTV station in the market, such as San Francisco's KQED and Philadephia's WHYY, but in many it's on a less-watched station.

The German service, like other overseas broadcasters, was already contributing English-language reports to the financially squeezed Worldfocus, especially in recent months. Fitzgerald, a Rhode Island-based alumnus of the Christian Science Monitor's bygone public TV operation, has logged DW's reports each morning for Worldfocus editors to consider.

Like the BBC World Service, DW has made available its overseas programming to American pubcasters for many years American Public Television has distributed its weekly feature magazine European Journal. for more than two decades.

MHz Networks' Worldview channel, based in northern Virginia, airs also distributes DW's Journal daily in English at 8:30 p.m. Eastern and in Spanish at 2 a.m., plus European Journal and the relatively new show Global 3000, a report on international development and globalization issues at 4:30 p.m.

Some stations downlink DW programming from the AMC1 and Intelsat 9 satellites.

DW serves up on-demand reports on its website, and offers services for mobile devices, including an iPhone app released in February.

In radio, DW offers NewsLink, a daily hour, and Inside Europe, a weekly hour.

Around the globe, DW broadcasts radio in 30 languages and TV in German, English, Spanish and Arabic. Its budget of 260 Euros is taxpayer-funded through the government.

DW's third annual Global Media Forum will look at climate change and the media this summer. The international conference will be held in Bonn, June 21-23. Speakers include Hermann Scheer, chair of the World Council for Renewable Energy, Bertran Picard, special ambassador for the United Nations, and Peruvian activist and presidential candidate Marco Arana.