Vienna (OTS) – After carrying out the corresponding tendering process, ORF General Director Roland Weißmann is entrusting the former ORF USA correspondent and foreign journalist David Kriegleder with the management of the ORF office in Israel from July 1, 2024. Kriegleder follows Tim Cupal, who returns to the ORF media campus from Tel Aviv. There are also personnel changes in the Brussels and Rome offices: Verena Sophie Maier will be sent to the EU capital (on September 1st), Bernt Koschuh will be sent to Italy on July 1st. Alexander Hecht and Robert Zikmund also return to headquarters.
ORF General Director Mag. Roland Weißmann: “I am pleased to be able to entrust David Kriegleder, a very committed and experienced foreign journalist, with the management of the ORF office in Israel. Kriegleder played a key role in shaping ORF reporting as a correspondent and in numerous foreign assignments. I am convinced that he will master the challenges at this focal point of world events in the best possible way for our audience. With the further appointments of Verena Sophie Maier and Bernt Koschuh, the ORF is promoting young talent and also relying on experience. I would like to thank Tim Cupal for his excellent work for our audience under particularly difficult conditions.”
Mag. David Kriegleder, MA: “I am looking forward to this new task because Israel has long been a place of longing for me, both journalistically and privately. A country that is not only particularly relevant to Austria from a historical and political perspective, but is also very central to the Jewish and Christian heritage of our cultural area. In these difficult times, in this polarizing conflict region, the ORF can express its public service responsibility and core competence particularly well. I face this challenge with great motivation and even greater respect in order to seamlessly continue the excellent ORF Middle East reporting of recent years for our audience.”
Biography Mag. David Kriegleder, MA
David Kriegleder has been working for ORF for 17 years, for which he has reported from more than 30 countries.
Born on September 25, 1984 in Vienna, he lived with his family several times during his childhood and youth in the United States, where he went to school. After graduating from high school, he completed his first journalistic internships at Ö3 and Kurier. From 2004 he studied political science at the University of Vienna – parallel to this course at the Catholic Media Academy. Further internships followed in the foreign editorial department of “profil”, in the religious department of ORF and at WELTjournal – at the same time freelance work for “Die Furche”, APA and FM4, for the Kriegleder from South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Kosovo, Nepal , Sri Lanka and Cambodia reported.
After completing his studies in Vienna, David Kriegleder lived in Costa Rica for a year in 2011, where he completed a one-year master’s degree with a focus on “crisis and conflict reporting” at the United Nations Peace University; then an internship at the United Nations Media Office in New York. Back in Vienna, he began working for ORF television: first as a freelancer in the ORF religion department and the ORF magazine “Heute Konkret” and then in the foreign editorial department of Zeit im Bild, where he has been working as a full-time editor since 2015. During this time, further journalistic assignments took him to Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Spain, Algeria, Myanmar and Japan.
In 2018, David Kriegleder went to Washington as an ORF correspondent, where he reported on the turbulent years of the Trump presidency and the corona pandemic alongside Hannelore Veit. In 2021 he returned to Vienna, where he continued his work for ORF as a foreign policy editor – with foreign assignments in Argentina, Chile, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. After the terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, David Kriegleder supported the ORF office in Tel Aviv for several weeks.