From Radio Delta to RFI România, 30 years of radio born with democracy
Audio 20:27
From Radio Delta to RFI România.
© RFI
By: Steven Jambot Follow |
Simon Decreuze Follow
24 mins
30 years ago Radio Delta started broadcasting in Romania.
This experimental radio station, carried by students from Bucharest, was created in partnership with Radio France internationale.
It is now called RFI România.
“The Media Workshop” tells you its story.
Publicity
December 1989. A coup d'état puts an end to the Communist Regime in Romania.
Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife are sentenced to death and shot on Christmas Day.
In a few days and at the cost of several hundred deaths in repressed demonstrations, Romania has just experienced a revolution whose images are circulating around the world via television.
In the following months, it is the effervescence in the country.
We are working hard to build a new Romania, to build a society more open to Europe and the world.
The birth of Radio Delta
At the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, a handful of students supervised by a few professors from the Faculty of Electronics have a concrete project: to launch a radio station with Radio France internationale.
Like Radio Free Europe, the BBC and the Deutsche Welle, RFI was already broadcasting programs in the Romanian language from abroad.
During the summer of 1990, rooms on the Leu student campus were refurbished to accommodate their radio premises.
The partnership with RFI materializes with the arrival of equipment as well as training provided by journalists and technicians from Paris.
On December 1, 1990, a first test broadcast was heard on 93.5 FM in Bucharest.
Radio Delta was born, and an extraordinary spirit of free radio animated it.
They tell 30 years of RFI in Romania
This episode of “The Media Workshop” looks back on thirty years of history of a radio station that was born and raised with democracy in Romania.
Cornel Ion
, current director of the radio, shares his memories.
He was 20 years old in 1990, was a 4th year student at the Faculty of Electronics.
He was one of the first students to take part in the Radio Delta adventure.
“We were the 4th independent radio station a few months after the fall of communism,” he explains.
"
Luca Niculescu
is now Romanian Ambassador to France.
But at the age of 21, he knocked on Radio Delta's door to get an internship as a journalist.
He did not know then that he would stay more than twenty years in this radio, becoming the editor in chief of the station.
Ina Dumitrache
arrived at Radio Delta “by accident” in 1994. The one who is now deputy director of RFI România says that when she arrived she had the difficult task of selling advertising for a young radio station whose antenna had the particularity of being bilingual.
RFI România in 2020
RFI România has a team of 25 people in Bucharest, two journalists in Paris and a network of correspondents around the world.
Together, they offer 13 hours of programming each day in the Romanian language.
RFI România has transmitters in 6 cities across the country where it is listened to every week by nearly 10% of the population and 80% of executives and managers, which is in fact a benchmark radio in Romania where its expertise is doing is recognized.
It also relies on around sixty partner radio stations across Romania and a frequency in Chisinau, Moldova.
It still seeks to further increase its radio broadcasting but has been able to negotiate the shift to digital, with one million unique visitors each month to its website.
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