Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 1, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
With numerous microtransmitters and an audio stream, Free Radio will be receivable in Berlin from January 1 to 9 – without a licence, but completely legally. To demonstrate how diverse and lively Free Radio stations are in all parts of the world, selected programmes will be relayed, reports and radio plays broadcast, and the respective media-policy debates presented. “With each day of broadcasting, we move closer to Berlin in the programme,” says Heiko Thierl of mikro.FM. During the final two days, the focus will then turn to Berlin radio history and initiatives. “Berlin and Brandenburg simply lack a Free Radio station,” says Heiko Thierl about the background to the campaign. “What has been civil-society practice in other federal states for years fails here because of political will – not because of a lack of frequencies!”
Berlin and Brandenburg are linked in media-policy terms by a joint state media authority (MABB). The Berlin House of Representatives had already approved the amendment to the joint state media treaty, but the State Chancellery of the State of Brandenburg had so far not been willing to make Free Radio possible.
For years, both advertising-financed and public-service radio stations have been losing “market” shares, especially among young listeners, who feel neither understood nor represented by the programme makers and prefer to gather around the social networking offerings of Web2.0. Free Radio stations, with their programmes shaped by diversity, offer a genuine alternative here: They create a public space in which subcultures and minorities can exchange ideas and present themselves. Operated by volunteer enthusiasts, male/female, without economic interests, Free Radio stations are less competition for cherished private-radio pojects than sources of ideas and mediators of cultural techniques.
With the call “Let a thousand radio stations bloom”, the project aims to stretch a network of radio hot spots across Berlin. Accordingly, a soldering workshop for microtransmitters will take place on the second day. Supplied via an audio stream, these will then offer samples of what is commonplace elsewhere (from Latin America to East Asia, from Rostock to Freiburg [im Breisgau]): Free Radio.
Programme overview:
1.1.’08 – Radio plays and 24 broadcasting breaks
2.1.’08 – Asia and soldering workshop
3.1.’08 – Africa and Latin America
4.1.’08 – North America
5.1.’08 – Western Europe
6.1.’08 – Eastern Europe
7.1.’08 – Germany, Austria and Switzerland
8.1.’08 – German History of Free Radio
9.1.’08 – Programmes by Berlin radio groups
Frequencies:
95.2 Mhz // 107.1 Mhz // 107.7 MHz
