United Nations Radio
 |
|
| Type | International public broadcaster |
|---|---|
| Availability | International |
| Owner | United Nations |
|
Launch date
|
1946 |
|
Official website
|
radio.un.org |
United Nations Radio is the international broadcasting service of the United Nations and is distributed by partner national radio stations and the World Radio Network (acquired by Babcock International in May 2015), Sirius Satellite Radio/XM Satellite Radio.
UN Radio produces content daily for its websites, weekly features and radio programmes about the work of the UN and its country-members, interviews, and unedited audio for more than 2,000 partner radio stations around the world.
In 2001, the Portuguese Language Service, under the direction of Joao Lins de Albuquerque, and led by Maya Plentz, started a pilot to produce a website and distribute the news via FTP to partner stations - reducing distribution costs significantly. Former Under-Secretary General for Public Information Sashi Tharoor, supported UN Radio efforts to become a digital organisation. At the time UN Radio studios were falling apart, with outdated equipment, and expensive and poorly managed distribution systems that still relayed mostly on sending cassette tapes via regular mail to partner stations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in conflict and post-conflict zones.
The Portuguese Language Radio Service started broadcasting a daily 5-min-bulletin in Portuguese for African Radio partner stations, and another in Brazilian Portuguese for partners in Brazil, Asia, Latin America, and Europe in 2001. The news stories and features are then distributed worldwide through radio partner stations that use the original material produced by UN Radio, these include Radio France International, BBC World News Radio Difusao Portuguesa RDP, Radiobras (now EBC), and CBN.
While other language services continue the 15-minute daily news programme format, these services—in Arabic, English, French and Russian—now also provide individual news and feature stories through their respective websites as well as access to unedited audio from meetings, interviews, news conferences and special events to enable journalists in newsrooms around the world to cover UN activities.
UN Radio produces over 1,200 original features per year, in the six official UN languages, plus Mandarin, Portuguese, Swahili, and Bengali, reaching an estimated audience of 30 million+ worldwide, a week. UN Radio content is distributed around the world via the Internet, FTP, ISDN and telephone lines. Its websites have 100 million+ unique visitors a week.
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