Page 17 - AIB | The Chanel | Issue 1 2012

▼
IN CONVERSATION | THE CHANNEL
hrilling, exciting
and very fast
moving. My arrival
here at the BBG
corresponded with
the appointment of
our new board of
governors, a very powerful group of
volunteer citizens with impressive
track records both in media, industry
and government. They immediately
took a fresh and very comprehensive
look at US international broad‐
casting and subsequently tasked us
with attempting to implement a
very aggressive plan to grow our
audience around the world.
And the events that unfolded so
rapidly in the Middle East during
the past year have been an astonishing
series of opportunities for us.
How has the Arab Spring impacted
US international broadcasting?
Alhurra is one of the success
stories, as is Radio Sawa. Both had
incredible audience growth,
Alhurra’s weekly audience in
Egypt jumped to nearly 8m viewers
and recent research has shown our
Alhurra audience has grown
exponentially in Egypt since the
uprising there.
We have been in the market of
course across North Africa, we had
an emergency broadcasting
operation going during the entire
NATO led effort in Libya, we now
have an FM in Benghazi and soon
will be in Tripoli so we are seeing
very good progress outside Egypt.
The ability to measure
audiences in countries like Libya
has traditionally been difficult and
we now are going to get over there
to determine what our reach and
our impact are in those places.
How successful have you been in
replacing shortwave audiences?
We are having good response on
other platforms. The secret is to go
where the audience is. We have had
important successes with FM
broadcasts and TV affiliates in key
markets. We have had a terrific
amount of success with getting
satellite programming into Iran ‐
we have to be creative in places like
Iran where our satellite TV is
frequently jammed. In addition, we
have got some very successful
websites up in almost all the
languages that we have going here,
and social media has played an
important role for us. The legacy
media platforms still attract the
biggest chunk of our audiences and
will for the time being but we have
to plan for a transition from radio
to TV and the new platforms.
How do you overcome jamming?
It is an ongoing struggle in some
countries. One of our success
stories is a weekly TV programme
produced by the VOAʹs Persian
News Network called ʹParazitʹ –
political satire which is hugely
popular in Iran and on social media
around the world. It is fed by
satellite into Iran, so in spite of the
jamming we are having good
success there. We are also using
internet circumvention tools to try
to get through the firewall in Iran.
We are working with our partners
in the DG 5 in a unified effort to
end satellite uplink jamming in Iran
and need all involved, including
the satellite companies to voice
their opposition to the interference.
How do you get around Internet
firewalls?
Over the past eight or nine years
we have had a great deal of success
workingwith private sector companies
that have developed software and
tools to break down some of these
firewalls, using proxy servers,
VPNs, in order to find audiences
and enable them to reach the
internet. We provide freedom for
these audiences by getting them to
the rest of the world, in China, Iran
and other places.
We beta‐test many of these
things before we employ them, so
we find them relatively safe right
now and we are trying to make
sure we protect anyone using this
equipment. We just received an
additional $10m to pursue our
efforts to combat censorship and
firewalls that are up around the
world, so we are moving very
aggressively on that front.
What are you doing for mobile?
Our office of new media are
working on innovations in that
area, and we have created an
T
CONNECTENGAGEAND
Richard Lobo is the man who has interviewed Fidel Castro, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X,
François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, Robert Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller - now the seasoned
journalist, news director, bureau chief and station manager is at the helm of the International
Broadcasting Bureau. The IBB is part of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the independent
federal government agency that oversees all US civilian international broadcasting operating in
a wide range of conflict zones. How has his first year in office been?
THE CHANNEL | ISSUE 1 2012 | 17
“
We probe
the use of
cellphones
in our
national
survey
research
in nearly
60
countries
every year