Yesterday I published information as it appeared on our Dutch website and on various Dutch media sites. Since then, RNW’s Editor-in-Chief has issued a clarification:
On Friday, 11 May we will have a marathon [Dutch] radio broadcast in which we look back with pride at 65 years of Dutch radio for expatriates, and which will also serve as the ‘farewell’ broadcast. Activities in other languages, especially those for the Dutch Caribbean and Indonesia, will also be discussed in detail. The choice of date has to do with the preparation time required to produce the radio marathon.
The activities of the Dutch department will be phased out, but the timetable will depend on the progress of the reorganization and the available manpower needed to guarantee the quality of the programmes. No formal decision has yet been made about the date of the final Dutch radio broadcast. However it is extremely unlikely that Dutch language radio broadcasts will continue through the summer.
(Source: RNW Editor-in-Chief)
PS: I apologise to several people who left comments after the original item, which I had to remove to prevent it being picked up via the RSS feed etc. As luck would have it, I had to work a shift on the website today at short notice due to a colleague having the flu. I should have kept the original page, and changed the text and publication time, thus preserving the comments. But I had to rush to make the change before starting my website duties.
on Feb 9th, 2012 at 21:11
RNW Dutch was often a very cheesy sounding radiostation.
I remember listening to a live football match report in de 1980\’s , it was broadcasted during the night programme, it must have been an international tournament match, as only international games were seen as broadcastworthy.
But the programme was only an hour long. At the end of the first half, they wished us good night, because they had to close down the transmitter, and we could hear the results of the game in the next morning when the regular morning show started.
In recent years this has improved, however, the only good programmes were the prgrammes they rebroadcasted from national radio 1 and 2. RNW\’s own produced programmes were in my view always inferior sounding to the national radio 1 shows.
Now they will stop broadcasting in the dutch language. I think this is a big disgrace. I don\’t mind they have to stop employing a lot of personell, as i did not care much for their programmes anyway, but the state should provide analog broadcasts in the native dutch language, accesible to anyone, albeit in the desert of Morroco, the brazilian rainforests, a little ship on the ocean or in a luxury hotelroom. Shortwave radio always works when all other means of communication fail. The transmission costs are not that high, and the prgrammes are already being transmitted on national fm, just connect an fm radio to the shortwave transmitter and let us Dutchspeakers enjoy radio 1 all over the world.
on Feb 10th, 2012 at 16:40
Journalists and managers of national networks, such as Radio 1 in the Netherlands, don\’ t care for distribution, as long as they can hear themselves on FM. And they dont like the costs for distribution.
RNW wil be dismantled since all listeners use new digital tecniques such as Internet. If this is right we can consequently switch off all FM and MW transmitters, since the programmes they carry also can be obtained via Internet and other digital ways.
on Feb 10th, 2012 at 18:23
I fear you may be right.
If we continue this line of thinking, all media will in the future come to us through a very complicated and relatively vulnerable infrastructure of fiberoptics, point-to-point relays, local accesspoints, all constructed to pay back the investments so users will have to pay for access. Believe me, i am not against this, i welcome it, but i find it hard to believe that nobody will remember how \\
on Feb 10th, 2012 at 18:29
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on Feb 10th, 2012 at 18:30
simple and radio used to be……..