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Guido Baumhauer, DW’s Managing Director of Distribution, Marketing and Strategy, was recently interviewed by TV Real Weekly about the upcoming changes at DW.

“This overhaul is actually the biggest in Deutsche Welle’s history,” Baumhauer says. “We are now bringing our multiplatform strategy to life.”

Find out more about what he had to say about the new direction DW is taking here.

Deutsche Welle (DW) will look different on February 6, 2012. We have set a new course for the future by announcing comprehensive changes to our programming structure, design and online services. At a press conference in Berlin on January 31, Deutsche Welle Director General Erik Bettermann referred to the set of changes as “a milestone for representing Germany better around the world.”

New changes to television include an expanded program for Latin America with 20 hours of Spanish programming daily. There will also be a new channel with 24 hours of English programming, broadcast in North America, Africa, Asia and Australia. DW will also offer additional channels in several regions: In North and Latin America and Asia, the second channel will be made up of 20 hours of programming in German and four hours in English.

In the Arab world, there will be a channel featuring 10 hours of Arabic programming and 14 hours of English; and in Europe, DW will broadcast 18 hours of English and six hours of German during primetime.

Along with the new television program and the completely redesigned website, DW will be creating a unified brand identity with a new corporate design.

“What happened in Syria is a catastrophe,” said one of the guests in the first episode of talk show “Rabia Al-Shabab” – a coproduction from DW and Voice of Lebanon (VOL). It might just have set the tone for the entire series, which celebrated its premier on January 17. “Just like in our television talk shows, we are using radio to create a dialogue between young people in Germany and the Arab world,” said Rainer Sollich, head of the Arabic editorial team at DW.

The radio coproduction will be aired every Tuesday on VOL’s  FM frequencies in Lebanon and in neighboring Syria. “We expect controversy and are looking for continued debate on our Arabic Facebook fan page,” said Sollich. Khaldoun Zeineddine from VOL and Yasser Abumuailek from DW hosted the first show, which highlighted the teamwork between the teams in Bonn and Beirut.

 

Yes and no. With the title An invisible woman taught me German, the Slate’s Mark Garrison gives a good overview of what DW offers language learners: “One of the best language lessons of my life came from a randy invisible woman named X, a talking owl with her own creepy theme song, and young sleuths with relationship issues.”

What might sound strange at first only highlights the wide range of German language courses available online from DW. According to Garrison: “Extensive and absolutely free offerings that are quite possibly the most unusual language courses around. They’re well worth checking out if you want to learn German.”