Global Panel Event

Leave-taking of the retiring President of
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Mr. Thomas Dine

Venue: Restaurant Bellevue, Thursday 27 October

Participants:

Joan Dine

Marc Ellenbogen

Barbara Day

Ivan Bohácek

Oldrich Cerný

Margaret Rauch

Jana Šilhanová

HE Federico Salas

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A Talk with Thomas A. Dine, RFE/RL President

RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY

Staying Relevant After 50 Years

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has existed for over 50 years and, like any company of such vintage, we periodically have to reinvent ourselves in order to remain relevant and successful. With the advent of the digital camera, Kodak has been forced to look beyond film as a source of revenue. With the iPod eclipsing the Walkman/Discman, Sony has had to search for its next big moneymaker. Although RFE/RL is a non-profit corporation (funded solely by the U.S. Congress), we too must adapt to the marketplace in order to survive. If, for instance, the U.S. taxpayers were not to get any bang for their buck, Congress would stop its funding and we would cease to exist. As Tancredi, the young aristocrat in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s great novel, The Leopard, puts it, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change!”
Some people think of RFE/RL as a Cold War relic; some wonder why a company whose purpose was to fight Soviet Communism is still operating. As President of the company, I am often asked, “But isn’t Europe already free?” The reason we still exist – and are in fact thriving – is that, while never straying from our core mission of broadcasting objective news to countries lacking a free press, we have reoriented and expanded operations to remain every bit as relevant in 2005 as we were in 1985 or 1955.
Since taking the helm at RFE/RL in 1997, I have overseen two tectonic shifts in our company that have kept us not only relevant but at the forefront of U.S. public diplomacy.
The first of these has been driven by political changes. RFE/RL is an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, and until 1989 the top priority of that policy was to contain and undermine the empire run from Moscow. Our broadcast portfolio, therefore, reflected that priority – we beamed radio programs not only to the Soviet Union but to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the other Soviet satellites in Central Europe. It was the Iron Curtain that represented the symbolic focus of our attention.
Today, with the Berlin Wall gone, with Eastern European countries in NATO, and with the E.U. flag flying across the former Warsaw Pact, RFE/RL’s broadcast portfolio looks much different. For almost three generations, the preeminent global battle was the struggle between democracy and Communism, but today it is the war of ideas within the Islamic world – the struggle between those who advocate a hateful, intolerant, and violent Islam and those who envision an Islam that accommodates and even encourages freedom, democracy, and tolerance.
RFE/RL has reacted nimbly to this reality by moving east and, especially, south. We call this change our “southern strategy.” Thanks to the successful implementation of this strategy, RFE/RL is now a key player in the war of ideas raging in the Muslim world. We currently broadcast in 28 languages (none of which is English), and 19 of them are directed at majority Muslim populations. We broadcast to 10 countries whose populations are predominantly Muslim: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. And of the six different languages in which we broadcast in Russia, five are focused on Muslim groups – for example, the Chechens.
In accordance with this southward shift to the Muslim world, RFE/RL unveiled a new logo on March 31st. For 50 years, our logo had been the Freedom Bell (based on the Liberty Bell of Philadelphia), rendered in America’s colors of red, white, and blue. However, in our efforts to gain traction among Muslim audiences, we discovered that our audience did not connect intellectually or emotionally with that logo. The Liberty Bell symbol, while very evocative for American audiences (including myself), means next to nothing to the people of Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan or Afghanistan. Accordingly, like any business, we had to change and we did so. Our new logo, a torch in orange and grey, better sells our twin products of freedom and democracy.
While shifting more resources east and south, however, we have not forgotten Europe. After all, despite the skepticism of the people I meet, Europe today is not free. People often forget that the eastern border of Europe is not Belgrade or Bucharest or even St. Petersburg – it’s the Ural Mountains, two time zones east of Moscow. To put it another way – the geographic center of Europe is not Germany or Austria. It is Ukraine. And many countries in the eastern half of Europe still lack one of the most critical prerequisites to a functioning democracy: a free press. Most of the former Yugoslavia is politically and economically crippled; corruption is pervasive; the emergence of a free press has been stunted; and, most alarming, the odds of further ethnic bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia are high. With the exception of the three Baltic states, the European parts of the former Soviet Union have not fared much better. Moldova is the poorest nation in Europe, and in 2001 it became the first former Soviet state to elect an unreformed Communist president, although there are recent signs of improvement coming from Chishinau. Belarus is run by a psychopath named Alexander Lukashenko, who openly admires Stalin and who did business with Saddam Hussein.
Thanks to the inspiring “Orange Revolution” late last year, Ukraine may finally be on the right track. But Ukraine still desperately needs a trusted source of news and information to serve as a north star so that its newly free media can steer a course towards genuine independence. Finally, Russia, after experimenting with partial democracy, has reverted to autocracy. My Moscow colleagues tell me that they have not felt such a climate of enforced orthodoxy since the 1970s. Television and radio are now little more than arms of Putin’s Kremlin. These European countries are not new to us at RFE/RL; we have been broadcasting to their citizens for a long time now. But sadly, after decades of oppression, they still need us.
The second tectonic shift I have overseen is just beginning now: RFE/RL is in the process of converting itself from a radio broadcaster to a multiple-media organization. We aim to move beyond radio, to present our unique product (truthful reportage that can not be found anywhere else) on television, the Internet, and even mobile phones.
Remember that, although the word “radio” is enshrined in the name of the company, RFE/RL did not at the outset adopt radio for the sake of doing radio. Radio was simply the medium that afforded the best prospects for success in reaching populations over large distances, across closed borders in societies where repressive authorities did not permit free access to information. Satellite dishes and the Internet were decades away.
When the Internet took off in the 1990s, RFE/RL introduced Internet-based information products. This strategy is flourishing: in fiscal year 2004, the average number of visits to RFE/RL’s 21 Internet websites grew by more than 16 percent over the previous year, to over 2.1 million visitors monthly. Just last month, RFE/RL’s websites reached an all-time high in number of hits.
The media business is in transition worldwide, including the traditional target areas for RFE/RL radio broadcasting. Our challenge is to maintain RFE/RL’s high standards and value-added style of journalism in the expanding world of information products in the broadcast region. While not losing sight of our priorities and core strengths, we are trying to shape an information company that is relevant and responsive to changing markets, featuring a wide array of delivery platforms to deliver our quality products. The word that we use to summarize this goal is convergence.
Convergent journalism can be more powerful because it reaches more people at more levels and in more ways. News stories typically evolve through four phases: breaking, developing, following, and resulting. No single medium handles all four phases equally well. Convergence means an organization can apply the most effective, appropriate medium or combination of media to the story at each stage.
The starting point for this process is to identify and understand the potential audience in each broadcast country or region, and then to evaluate the feasible options for reaching those audiences. Editors begin by considering audience research, and then they evaluate a wide range of local factors in order to determine the optimal mix of media platforms (radio, TV, Internet) for each target audience.
Having begun this process earlier this year, RFE/RL has already identified many exciting new ventures: partnerships with television stations in Georgia, Ukraine, and Tajikistan; new websites for consumers in Russia, Iran, Belarus, and Azerbaijan; and the launch of a pilot SMS service project in Ukraine.
As if to commemorate this fundamental change in our methodology, RFE/RL, which has had its headquarters in Prague since March 1995, is finalizing plans to move to a new building within Prague’s city limits. This will serve as its new, modern headquarters. (As many Prague residents know, we currently reside in the former federal Parliament building atop Wenceslas Square, but in the wake of 9/11 the Czech and U.S. governments agreed that RFE/RL, a frequently mentioned target of terrorist plots, should relocate to a more secure location.) In light of our convergence initiative, the timing of the move could not be more fortuitous, for we can design the new facility so that it is suited for a fully converged news organization. It is my hope that RFE/RL will soon have one of the most state-of- the-art 21st-century newsrooms in the world. With a new building graced by a new logo and humming with the energy of new ideas and noble purpose, RFE/RL is poised to remain an important organization for decades to come.

An Article from the Club Magazine Prague