The Voice of America turned 70 on Wednesday, and VOA Director David Ensor says the international broadcast agency is aggressively moving forward with new programmes that ensure it remains an “information lifeline to people in closed societies like Iran.”

Addressing VOA journalists at the agency’s Washington headquarters, Mr Ensor pointed to a television news show for Burma that began airing in January, a popular video blog that has been viewed more than 7 million times in China, expanded TV broadcasts to Iran, and new health programmes on radio in Africa.  He also described plans for a Russian language TV programme that will harness popular social media programs to make citizen journalists and the audience a key part of the show.

Ensor said the one-time cold war broadcaster is “as relevant today as it was February 1st, 1942,” the date of the first shortwave radio broadcast to Germany.” Created by the US government in the opening days of [US involvement in] World War Two, the Voice of America has evolved into a global multimedia organization, broadcasting balanced and comprehensive news in 43 languages to an estimated weekly audience of 141 million.

The first shortwave radio transmission, spoken in German just weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, began with the words “Here speaks a voice from America.”  The broadcast went on to promise, “The news may be good.  The news may be bad.  We shall tell you the truth.” Mr Ensor, the 28th Voice of America director, says the agency continues to be guided by those words.

VOA radio remains highly popular in many markets, including Somalia, parts of Pakistan and Haiti.  Mr Ensor says the agency is moving forward with new television and Internet programmes that target countries like Iran, where the government restricts the free flow of information.

VOA programmes are delivered on satellite, cable TV, mobile, shortwave, FM, mediumwave, the Internet, and on a network of about 1,200 affiliate stations around the world.  In addition to more than 1,100 employees in Washington, VOA works with contract journalists in trouble spots around the world.  Last month the Taliban claimed responsibility for the murder of a reporter working for VOA in Pakistan.

Inlagt: 2012-02-03
Källa: VOA

The latest edition of the English DX Programme from Radio Bulgaria - the last one to be broadcast on shortwave - confirms that it used to broadcast clandestine stations: “We should mention that from the 1960s to the 1980s, Bulgarian shortwave transmitters were used to broadcast programmes of Radio Moscow and three stations of the communist parties of Chile, Spain and Iran, respectively Radio Magallanes, Radio España Independiente and Radio Courier of Iran.”

Radio Bulgaria will end its shortwave transmissions at 2200 UTC on Tuesday 31 January.

Inlagt: 120131
Källa: RNW Media Network

The Vatican’s news website is getting between 8,000 and 10,000 hits a day with peaks of up to 16,000 hits over Christmas, the head of the Holy See’s social media department said today. The website, which brings together all the Vatican’s official communications and news from the Catholic Church around the world, was launched in June.

The data was announced by archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications at a Vatican press conference. Celli said the average time visitors spent on the site in English, Italian and Spanish was around two minutes, which he said showed that those consulting it were not doing so “by mistake” but were reading some of its continent.

Almost a third of visitors - 27 percent - were from the United States, followed by browsers from Italy, Germany and Spain. There were also many visitors from Canada, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Celli said most the visits to the website were through social media networks - with 65 percent from Facebook and 30 percent from Twitter.

(Source: AFP)

Radio Algeria recently launched a new youth station. Jil FM started broadcasting at 09:00 on Sunday 15 January on 94.7 FM, in the centre and centre-south, on 531kHz mediumwave in the east and south-east and on 549 kHz mediumwave in the west and south-west regions of the country.

Jil FM will be providing its listeners with music, reports, debates, entertainment, comedy and news 24/7. Programming will comprise 65% national and international music, 20% programmes related to socio-professional youth issues, 10% culture and 5% news.

The radio station, located at 12 rue Shakespeare (El Mouradia–Alger) will also be present on all social networking sites.

St Helena is a small island in the South Atlantic Ocean, one of the most remote ones in the world. It is a British overseas territory with a population of 4,000 people, who are dependent on budgetary aids from the United Kingdom (currently more than £11.5 million per year) and from the European Union (currently € 3.1 million per year through the 10th European Development Fund) as the island has a very weak economy.

The average salary is £4,500 per year while food and fuel cost more than in the UK. Due to a lack of economic prospects 20% of the island’s population have already emigrated during the last ten years. In order to strengthen the local economy the government intends to establish and promote tourism on the island. A starting point is the imminent construction of an airport.

Today St Helena’s only link to the outside world is a Royal Mail Ship that travels 5 days to Cape Town, South Africa and supplies all goods for the island’s community. The only internet connection of the island isn’t fast either: 4,000 people share a satellite link of 10 MBit/s. This compares to an average bandwidth of 5.2 MBit/s of a single UK household. As a result internet access is not only very slow but also very expensive. On top of that this satellite link is unreliable due to frequent sun outages which are likely to occur even more frequently due to expected increasing solar flares. Also with local and international telephone calls costing £0.10 and £1.00 per minute, respectively, telephone service is prohibitively expensive and, like internet access, unreliable.

As a consequence the people of St Helena are practically excluded from any benefits associated with today’s information society. Establishing tourism with such telecommunication infrastructure will face serious difficulties. One IT expert believes he has found a solution and has set up a website to explain the proposal.

Christian von der Ropp, an independent IT-consultant from Germany, who has never been to St Helena but nevertheless became fascinated by this beautiful remote island and its small population - through information found on the internet. He became aware of St Helena’s problematic telecommunication infrastructure by a friend, Thomas Fledrich, a German space scientist who had lived on St Helena for a year during 2009. When coincidentally learning about the plans for the South Atlantic Express cable he realized the opportunities a landing of the cable could bring to this isolated island and decided to campaign for it. Christian quickly found support from A Human Right, a UN-supported NGO dedicated to closing the digital divide by connecting those 5 billion deprived people without internet access.

During 2012 one of the world’s fastest submarine optic fibre cables called South Atlantic Express (SAex) will be laid from South Africa to Brazil providing 12.8 TBit/s of total bandwidth. Since this cable and the WASACE South cable, which will unfortunately run far north from St Helena, are expected to saturate bandwidth demand on the South Atlantic route for the next decades, this cable is a unique opportunity to bring enormous internet bandwidth to St Helena.

Routing the South Atlantic Express cable via St Helena would probably increase cable length by just some 50km and would even provide technical benefits for the cable operator as St Helena could feed-in electric power to the cable’s repeaters required every 100km. Furthermore a landing point at St Helena would allow laying a future branch to São Paulo, Brazil’s economic centre, so the cable operator could offer the shortest route from the São Paulo region to Angola and South Africa while also having a redundant route from São Paulo via St Helena to Fortaleza.

I encourage all of you to promote this campaign, and help the people of this beautiful island in the South Atlantic to keep in touch with their family and friends around the world, and to have all the online benefits most of us take for granted nowadays. The campaign website has some suggestions about how you can help.

Inlagt: 120121
Källa: RNW Media Network

Starting today, the Ecuadorian government will install antennas and test radios and frequency bands distributed so far to broadcast through the Network of Radios of the Nationalities to help some 200,000 Amazonian indigenous peoples to preserve their native languages.

Broadcasts for the fourteen nationalities registered - Achuar, Andoa, Awa, Chachi, Cofan, Kichwas, Zapara, Shiwiar, Shuar, Siona, Tsachila, Waorani, and the Association of Indigenous Communities of Arajuno - will help develop their culture and boost exchange among people in the protected region.

Jeanneth Sosa, Communication Consultant from the Secretariat of People, said all antennas must be installed in the first semester of the year. She added that local youth are being trained to work on the project.

(Source: Prensa Latina)

Inlagt: 120116
Källa: RNW Media Network