radiobroadcasting – Radio Reporter

June 1, 2021May 31, 2021

COLOMBIA: The number of peace stations has risen to eleven

With the opening of six more stations, whose broadcasts aim to consolidate the country’s peace process, the turning point has been completed: the target to be reached by 2026 (twenty stations) is now closer

Announced last summer, the six new peace stations went into operation on 21 May 2021. They are stations that teach the pedagogy of peace, trying to mend the divisions caused by fifty years of armed conflict between the army, guerrillas and mercedarios in the pay of drug traffickers. Last year, the locations where they were to be transmitted were defined, then the frequencies were assigned, the equipment installed and the studios set up. These are the frequencies and the localities (department in brackets) 92.6 Algeciras (Huila); 88.9 Arauquita (Arauca); 98.5 Bojayá (Chocó); 92.0 Florida (Valle); 90.1 El Tambo (Cauca); 102.7 Puerto Leguízamo (Putumayo). They join the five other stations already active (there will be 20 by 2026): 103.5 Chaparral (Tolima); 92.3 Ituango (Antioquia); 94.7 Convención (Norte de Santander); 92.2 Fonseca (La Guajira) and 89.8 San Jacinto (Bolívar). All of them depend on RTVC (Radio Televisión Nacional de Colombia) and are professionally organised.

Further details on the project can be read in our article from last year.

April 22, 2021April 21, 2021

UK: BBC shuts down ten more local Medium Wave radio stations

BBC ad alerts listeners to medium-wave shutdown and shows how to inquire about listening alternatives
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Between May and June 2021 the British public broadcaster will switch off the medium-wave transmitters of another ten local radio stations, because the installations on this frequency range “no longer offer an advantageous quality-price ratio for British citizens”. The migration to digital had been announced ten years ago (in 2011): the first closures began in 2018, followed in 2020 by further deactivations in Scotland, Wales and England. Today, all BBC local radio is receivable on digital terrestrial TV and local DAB multiplexes, on FM or online (via smartphones, computers or smart speakers). Abandoning amplitude modulation will be: BBC Essex; BBC Radio Cambridgeshire; BBC Radio Devon; BBC Radio Leeds; BBC Radio Sheffield; BBC Hereford & Worcester; BBC Radio Stoke; BBC Radio Lancashire; BBC Radio Ulster and BBC Radio Foyle. Two other stations, however, will reduce their coverage area: Radio Wales and Radio Gloucestershire. Listeners are provided with a website https://www.bbc.co.uk/reception/ with alternative listening options, a help line and a telephone for listening advice.

April 10, 2021April 9, 2021

FRANCE: The sale of M6 and RTL triggers a media earthquake

Vincent Bolloré is the majority shareholder of the Vivendi group, which, in addition to TF1 (France’s most watched TV channel), owns 28.8% of Mediaset in Italy
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The decision by the German group Bertelsmann to sell two leading broadcasters in terms of ratings (TV M6 and radio RTL are both in second place) has opened up competition between major French patrons. Four bids have already been submitted and the competition is expected to be fierce. There are also political interests: in 2022 there will be presidential elections, and the transfer of the two stations could reshape the media landscape. Especially if Vincent Bolloré, who has changed the political line of CNews (all news network) and shifted it to extreme right-wing positions, wins the elections. Details on the protagonists and the political balances at stake in the article of the Italian newspaper ‘Corriere della sera’.

April 3, 2021March 29, 2021

VENEZUELA: Another uncomfortable voice has been turned off

The repression of President Nicolás Maduro’s regime has claimed another victim: Selecta FM, which operated on 102.7 MHz from Machiques, in the state of Zulia, in the northwest of the South American country. It was deactivated by Conatel (Comisión Nacional de Telecomunicaciones) officials, who seized the equipment on the evening of Friday, 5 March 2021. This was reported by the SNTP (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Prensa), which wrote on Twitter that the station had already been intimidated on 26 February, when its premises were attacked during an interview with an opposition leader. More details in the Swissinfo.ch article.

Selecta continues broadcasting on the web

March 23, 2021March 22, 2021

IRELAND: RTÉ shuts down DAB but channels continue on digital

As we anticipated in 2019 (news here), Ireland’s public broadcaster (Raidió Teilifís Éireann or RTÉ) will switch off the DAB channels on 31 March 2021, but will not close the RTÉ Gold, RTÉ 2XM, RTÉ Radio 1 Extra, RTÉ Pulse and RTÉjr Radio channels, which it will make available on other digital platforms. The decision was taken for three reasons: to reduce costs, the small number of listeners in the DAB band and the fact that RTÉ is the only Irish broadcaster in the digital band. The majority of Irish people (77%) listen to FM radio, compared to 0.5% for DAB. This is according to the latest radio listening survey (JNLR, Radio in a Digital World), conducted by market research institute Ipsos MRBI.

More details here.

March 20, 2021February 23, 2021

UK: The 80s atmosphere of London pirate radio stations comes back to life

Thanks to the patience and intuition of Luke Owen, defined by The Guardian as a “musical archivist”, it is possible to relive the atmosphere of London in the Eighties by listening to the commercials aired by London pirate radio stations between 1984 and 1993, which have been collected on two CDs. Owen in fact recorded the free-range and unprofessional commercials that were aired and that, given the lack of professionalism, were considered a boring interlude between one song and another. And yet, listening to them again, one finds a London that has disappeared, in an era in which there was no web, and in which listeners, in order to be informed about the musical events taking place in the city, had pirate radio stations as their only resource: programming of public or official radio stations was only musical, aiming at the English middle class and did not represent the different ethnic groups present in the capital.

Space also for minorities

On the site of the record label Death Is Not The End you can listen to excerpts from the two CDs, available for £ 8 each
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Thus are curious the advertisements in Greek, the news about raves or the advertisements of stores that allow to reconstruct a map of alternative shops. The two CDs are published by the London label founded by Owen: “Death Is Not the End“, which is also the name of a program broadcast online by the London internet radio station NTS Radio.

USA: In the 1920s, radio was one of the sectors of the new economy

In the Twenties radio was one of the sectors of the new economy — In the roaring years of radio, RCA had a boom comparable to that of technology companies. But this did not prevent it from being overwhelmed by the crisis of 1929, although the purchase of radio equipment continued to grow, as the article of elEconomista.es explains.
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A study of the stock market capitalization shows that in the Twenties of the 20th century the performance of radio companies was comparable to that of today’s technology companies. In the summer of 1920 commercial broadcasters had started their activity in the United States, so it was imagined that the purchase of receivers would have led to a strong development for the industry. The analysis conducted by Jim Reid, a specialist at Deutsche Bank, reconstructs the performance of the stock of RCA (Radio Corporation of America), whose profits had risen from 2.5 million dollars in 1925 to 20 million in 1928, causing the value of the shares to soar by 700% (from cents in 1921 to ten dollars in 1926).

March 9, 2021February 23, 2021

ITALY: Aid to broadcasters should be distributed fairly

The 50 million EUR allocated by the Italian government to support broadcasters affected by the drastic drop in advertising due to the pandemic have not been distributed fairly. Stopping the decision of the old executive (Conte II) is Agcom, the Italian Communications Authority. The “Fund for emergencies relating to local broadcasters” had been established by Article 195 of the Decree Law of May 19, 2020, but the implementing decree had been issued by the Ministry of Economic Development only on October 12, 2020. The text defined the procedures for the allocation of the contribution, reserving 95% of the resources for the first hundred television stations in the ranking, and dividing the remaining 5% among those from the hundredth place onwards. This choice, which had already aroused controversy, was rejected by Agcom because it could create market distortions, and the authority hopes to divide it into two portions: one among all the broadcasters meeting the eligibility requirements, in proportion to the score in the ranking list, and the other, in equal parts among the broadcasters, taking care to ensure that the latter portion of resources has a sufficient amount to guarantee adequate subsidizing for the smaller broadcasters.

March 2, 2021February 23, 2021

FRANCE: Lagardère towards the ”break-up”?

The grip is tightening on the Lagardère Group, propped up months ago (read more about it here) by injections of liquidity by Vincent Bolloré (owner of Vivendi, a multimedia group created around Canal+) and Bernard Arnault (owner of LVMH, an international fashion group). Bolloré would have set his eyes on Europe 1, a generalist radio station very much listened to in France, and would like to absorb it and, in view of the next elections, align it with the positions of Marine Le Pen. Arnault, instead, first hour supporter of President Emmanuel Macron, would be interested in the Journal du dimanche and Paris Match. So in the looming tug-of-war, the money may not be enough to get the radio station into Vivendi’s orbit. An extensive summary can be read on the webmagazine Succede Oggi (in Italian, consultation is free). Prima Comunicazione, on the other hand, also talks about Bolloré’s interest in the French group M6, which the German group Bertelsmann is interested in selling.

February 25, 2021February 23, 2021

HUNGARY: Last independent radio station continues on the Web

Last independent radio continues on the Web — Klubrádió continuing online could have a larger potential audience, because the ERP (effective radiated power) of 2,6 kW that the station used on FM allowed it to be heard only in the Budapest area
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Klubrádió, the last independent Hungarian radio station, switched off its FM transmitter at midnight on February 14th, 2021. It was broadcasting on 92.9 MHz from Budapest: its license was not renewed by NMHH (National Media and Telecommunications Authority) because the station had not communicated in time the contents of its programming. But the station’s director, András Arató, defied Viktor Mihály Orbán’s government by continuing online broadcasting and airing the official anthem of the European Union, a piece from the final movement of the Ninth Symphony composed in 1824 by Ludwig van Beethoven, also called the Ode to Joy, which the EU has adopted since 1972. The EU, through a spokesman, asked Hungary to allow Klubrádió to continue broadcasting on FM.