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Re: BBCWS dropping shortwave to USA, Canada, Australia
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Kim Elliott
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May 08, 2001 08:21 PDT
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Here's the BBCWS statement about this:
"BBC World Service is committed to meeting the needs of all its
audiences.
It has record numbers of listeners (153m a week) because it has been
agile
in delivering its services in more ways, with better audibility, to suit
their individual needs over recent years. Audiences in these particular
regions have already voted with their dials by migrating to higher
quality
FM broadcasts in their areas while the growth of online listening to
World
Service, particularly in America, is outstripping comparable internet
growth
rates. We will be doing all we can to help audiences find a better way
to
listen which suits them through trails, online information, helplines
and
information in our magazine On Air. We recognise that short wave will be
the
major way most of our audiences listen to our services for a
considerable
time to come and it would be wrong to portray this as a retreat from
short
wave broadcasting.. World Service has already announced major investment
in
short wave, such as the new transmitter currently under construction in
Oman
which will enhance reception quality for millions of listeners from the
Middle East across Central and South Asia. We also modernising our short
wave transmitters in Cyprus and Singapore.
For further information. In the US for example, over 200 public radio
stations carry BBC programmes in America - three times as many people
listen
to us on FM as on shortwave and one and a half million users access
online
each month. In Australia, listening to shortwave has dropped by
two-thirds
over last eight years, as listeners migrate to FM rebroadcasts via ABC.
Mike Gardner
Head of Media Relations, World Service
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an e-mail to cwsch-@voa.gov .
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Kim Andrew Elliott
Producer and Presenter
Communications World
VOICE OF AMERICA
330 Independence Avenue, S.W
Washington, D.C. 20237 USA
Telephone: +1-202-619-3047
Fax: +1-202-260-8319
E-Mail: k-@voanews.com
Web site: http://www.trsc.com/cw
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