On 1 June 1927 Queen Wilhelmina officially inaugurated international radio broadcasting from the Netherlands with a speech to listeners in the Dutch colonies. This transmission attracted attention from all over the world as it was one of the first times that sound had been transmitted via radio waves across such a distance. In the decades that followed Dutch radio-makers continued to play an important role in international broadcasting, experimenting with new technologies and programming formats. Exactly seventy years after the Queen’s speech, the symposium ‘Keep in Touch with the Dutch’ took place at the University of Amsterdam to highlight several themes from this rich history and to think about a research agenda in this field and new broadcasting techniques in the digital age.
Bas Agterberg, a specialist in media history at the Dutch national audiovisual archive Beeld & Geluid, gave an opening presentation on the relevant collections that the archive possesses. In the past years, the administrative archives and thousands of hours of recordings from Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep (1947-2012) - Radio Netherlands Worldwide - have been acquired. However, much remains left to do to index them so that they can be properly used by historians at Beeld & Geluid. Agterberg also highlighted the personal archive of Eduard Startz, the legendary announcer of the Happy Station (1928-1970) who coined the catchphrase ‘Keep in Touch with the Dutch’. Beeld & Geluid recently published an online longread on Startz which hopefully will be followed by more publications in the future.
The next speaker was Jonathan Marks, former program director of Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep and presenter of the radio-show Media Network – known for its broadcasts on radio history. Digging from his extensive online Media Network Vintage Vault, which contains a wealth of podcasts on various topics, Marks took the audience on a whirlwind tour through a century of international broadcasting from the Netherlands. In this talk, he focused on the pioneering role of Dutch radio-makers in finding new radio-formats in order to engage with audiences around the world. An interesting shift occurred in the 1970s when Radio Netherland Wereldomroep increasingly moved away from the light entertainment that Startz provided to more serious forms of journalism – with a particular focus on the Third World.
Also in the digital era, many different organisations in the Netherlands today reach out to global audiences via broadcasts. Alec Badenoch, special professor in Transnational Media at the Vrije Universiteit, presented the online tool Radio Garden, which is the result of a co-operation between the HERA-project Transnational Radio Encounters in which he participated and Beeld & Geluid. He told the audience how this tool, which provides an interactive world map with links to current broadcasts from online radio stations, went viral after it was launched in December 2016. This unexpected success shows that radio is still a popular medium across the world. Badenoch also highlighted other features on the site, including interviews with people talking about their listening experiences, and historical jingles.
The last speaker of the day was Leon Willems, managing director of the Amsterdam-based NGO Free Press Unlimited. This organization reaches out to audiences in areas of the world where it is difficult to obtain reliable information, such as conflict areas and countries with authoritarian regimes. During his talk Willems focused on Radio Dabanga, a successful FPU-project directed towards Sudan, a country that suffers from ‘information drought’. Using a hybrid strategy with different technologies, including shortwave broadcasts and whatsapp groups to provide feedback and local information, people working at FPU provide the Sudanese people with the information they want. In the discussion that followed it was emphasized that this cross-media strategy, based on intensive direct contacts with audiences, holds great promise for the future of global broadcasting.
Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, co-investigator