Return to Åland’s Radio

I had another meeting today with Astrid Olhagen at Åland’s Radio. Bignazari Behrang had decided that he would take the 15 minutes offered to him at the earlier meeting for a broadcast in Kurdish. He has the equipment needed to record a demo programme, with the exception of a microphone, so we either needed to borrow one or get him some time in a studio to record the programme. I understand that they expect what they broadcast to meet certain standards, so the important thing is to produce a demo. Then we have something concrete and the ball is back in their court.

Astrid has conceded that informing listeners in another language falls within their public service remit. And what’s more, those who don’t speak Swedish pay license fees too (no taxation without representation and all that). However, they don’t seem so very enthusiastic about the whole idea. Apparently, there wasn’t a microphone there that we could borrow. Likewise, we will find out sometime next week about an eventual studio time. In the meantime, I shall be exploring if we can borrow a microphone from somewhere else.

During the meeting, it came up that representations had been made before by others who wanted to broadcast in Finnish. I don’t know the details, but we don’t have anything broadcast in Finnish, so I suppose they must have given up. We are not going to give up.

Radio Åland Update

Well, I’ve had that meeting with Astrid Olhagen today and it was interesting to hear what she had to say. She had actually read my blog post from last week (please feel free to comment on this if you are reading it, Astrid), which was a bit of a surprise, and while saying that I had oversimplified the arguments somewhat, she offered variations on them – concern over monitoring the content of broadcasts / where will it end, there are 74 languages spoken on Åland, we can’t give them all a slot.

There were a couple of positive things to be taken away from the meeting though. The first is that no decision has been taken that broadcasts cannot be made in other languages, so in principle it is possible. In practice, it appears it’s up to Astrid herself to decide if it actually happens. The second positive point was that, without promising anything, she conceded that a 15 minute slot might be possible. She emphasized that it was a question of resources. So the 15 minute slot is her – in my view not too unreasonable – opinion on what an acceptable resource allocation would be. I shall keep you posted on further developments.

Public Service Radio?

Yesterday, I met and chatted with Bignazari Behrang. He is originally from Iran and has been living on Åland for over a year. Before moving to Åland, he lived in Sweden for 10 years and during his time there did some radio broadcasting in Persian and Kurdish.

There is a small (Kurdish) Iranian community on Åland and he wanted to do something similar here for them. Behrang took his ideas to Ålands Radio, the public service broadcaster, but they turned him down. Bignazari told me they had refused him because they didn’t have a slot for his broadcast. Looking at the programme listings on their website, this just doesn’t seem like a credible excuse. They usually don’t broadcast anything after 7pm and many programmes are repeated to fill earlier schedules.

As I see it, public service radio has a duty to inform and it will do this better by broadcasting in other significant minority languages on Åland. Why don’t Ålands Radio want to do it then? Well, I’ll be meeting with Astrid Olhagen next week to find out. She’s responsible for the content of what they broadcast, so it will be interesting to see what she says.

My own suspicion is that it will be “if we start broadcasting in Kurdish/English/whatever, then we won’t be able to say no to broadcasting in Finnish.” I also suspect that they are a little worried about controlling the content of what is broadcast in non-European languages that are not understood outside their minority communities.

I’ll let you know what happens next week.