No alcohol advertising between 06.00-22.00 on regional radio?

The "Walla Branja" site

http://b.walla.co.il/?w=/3050/1622629

reports that the Second Radio and TV Authority is thinking of restricting the advertising of alcoholic drinks between 06.00-22.00 on the regional radio stations here in Israel -this in order to stop encouraging Israeli youth to drink alcoholic beverages.

The head of the radio branch of the Authority has sent a letter to all of the regional stations asking their opinion in writing in the matter until the end of the month. It is also under consideration to require the regional stations to broadcast messages of how dangerous alcohol consumption can be, during the programs that actually advertise commercials for alcoholic drinks.

The Second Radio and TV Authority have, in the same letter, reserved the right to ban altogether commercials for alcoholic beverages, but this option is not being looked at at the moment.

Taken from "Walla Branja" http://b.walla.co.il/?w=/3050/1622629

There is a serious drinking problem amongst Israeli youth, with alcoholic beverages easily obtainable from kiosks. Many lame laws are in the process of being introduced to try and stop the sale to minors, and the limitation of advertising on radio won't stop it either - but it certainly can't harm.

Commercials for smoking have been banned for years on Israeli radio and TV - could alcohol be next?

Eco 99FM

A new station hit the airwaves this week - Eco99FM - an "enviromental" radio station. Whilst reading the various Israeli radio forums and the critical revues it has received, I must admit, the little I have heard, I like.

I was listening this afternoon, and there was veteran broadcaster Ronit Kfir. Ronit was one of my favorite lecturers when I was doing a brush up course at Radio Tel Aviv in 1999. She was interviewing people of how to build houses that are friendly to the enviroment and that save money in electricity. Nothing really earth shattering here, but was better than Didi Locali that was being syndicated on nearly every other station (see a previous post).

As I am 50+ I like the music as well, although there are some that yearn for BU99, the station for "youngsters". I must say, hearing dance and trance music throughout the day is certainly not my cup of tea!

But what Eco99FM plans to do in the future beats me. How long can you talk about the enviroment in each day, and if you don't (they have sports programmes as well), well that doesn't justify winning the tender on the enviromental ticket.

As I said, I for one like what I hear at the moment, it's like a pool of sanity in a world of either phone in programmes, agony aunts, or current affairs and news programmes - oh and did I say I liked the music?

Radio All for Peace splits its transmissions

The Israeli - Palestinian radio station " Radio All For Peace" coming out of Jerusalem, but with transmitters and a license from the Palestinian Authority have split its broadcasts into two different frequencies.

Radio All For Peace continues on 107.2FM in Hebrew throughout the day, and in the evening has programmes from the Voice of Russia in Russian, the Voice of Poland in Hebrew, and from 22.00-24.00 Radio Netherlands and the Voice of Japan in Arabic.

On 89.3FM there are programmes in Arabic throughout the day under the name ZAIN FM.

AFP's 107.2 programmes are a mixture of current affairs and magazine programmes, and a lot of good music.

For those of you who like "Mizrachi" music, the former offshore DJ Benny Shimoni has a programme everyday between 12.00-13.00.

The station can also be heard through the Internet at: http://www.allforpeace.org/

The Voice of Peace returns, but must not live in the past.

This is a copy of a post that I left on the new VOP forum:

If there is any criticism that I have heard, it is that the station is living in the past - the same jingles, same presenters, same music!If you/we want this station to take off, you will have to get presenters that are in tune with what the listeners want, up to date music, and maybe new jingles - yes - new jingles. We all love the old jingles, it takes us back 20-30 years, but we aren't there anymore.We cannot live in the past.

The original VOP was the best thing that happened to Israeli radio, but that ended in 1993. We are in 2009, and the station must adjust itself.As one who worked on an English language radio station here not too long ago (RAM FM), I have the experience and knowledge of what it takes to make it work. RAM FM played a mixture of oldies and newies - an A/C format, and it was a huge success. We were often compared to the VOP.

I am prepared to share my experience with you all.In my opinion, this is the way the VOP should go. It has to revamp itself, get rid of the cobwebs, and get itself up to date. There are some great new songs out there, perfect for the A/C format.Of course the listeners will decide in the end, because if the VOP pulls in the more "mature" audience, then that is the way the station will go. You will have to decide on who your target audience is, otherwise the station will sound like a salad - all mixed up.

And please, less of the Shalom/Salam that I heard last night, it sounds corny. Who is the station aiming at? Israelis? Arabs? The world? If all of these, then instead of saying Shalom/Salam, start playing Arabic pop music, have an Arabic presenter - be real!!! I cringed last night when I heard the Shalom/Salam thing, it sounded so out of place.Yaniv, you can tell us how many listeners the station has in the Arab world - and if it does, and you want to build on it, then start catering to them as well. Then, and only then, will the station be a VOICE OF PEACE.

The Voice of Peace returns - through the Internet

From somewhere on the Internet, an online version of the Voice of Peace is to start broadcasting this saturday at 2pm local Israel time.

Comprising of ex VOP personnel and other ex offshore radio presenters, the station is not to be live at the beginning, but a series of recorded links made by the presenters.

Presenter include:

Geoff Fitch
Kevin Turner
Chris Phelan
Linda Maison
Pandora
Paul Douglas
Guy Starkey
Brian Matthews
Tami T.
Mark Stafford
Yaron Zamir
Andy Jones
Yaniv Dayan

Graham day

and the mastermind behind it all, Doug wood.

Many people have asked me why I am not on the above list. My main reason is that I am so busy these days, I have no time to breath, never mind make links for the station. I WAS asked by Doug to make links, but for reasons I wish to keep to myself, I declined.

I wish the new VOP the best of luck, and lets hope we will be able to hear them on a FM frequency soon....

Shake up at Radio Tel Aviv - 99FM's gain

According to the Israeli newspaper Maariv, the popular breakfast programme duo of Tal Berman and Aviad Kisos are leaving Radio Tel Aviv 102FM, and will be joining the Sharon area station 99FM. They are due to start there at the beginning of next year.

Berman and Kisos have been presenting their programme on Radio Tel Aviv for the last seven years, taking over from the equally popular duo Shai and Dror, who now present their show on the rival "Non-Stop Radio" station 103FM. The owners of Non-Stop Radio recently purchased 99FM, and have just won the license to broadcast for the next 12 years. 99FM is due to undergo an overhaul of their programme schedule, and Berman and kisos seem to be part of the plan.

A footnote to this story: The Station Manager of Radio Tel Aviv Shai Ben Maor has also recently tendered his resignation, and Radio Tel Aviv's Programme Manager Liron Te'eni left at the beginning of October.

The Afternoon Show - Mike And Arda

Taken from the RAM FM Internet site that showed the on air presenter at a certain time.







After Hayat Alami went to work in Ramallah, I presented the Afternoon Show alone for a week or so. At the end of September/beginning of October Arda Aghazarian joined me instead of Hayat. The Afternoon Show became known as the Afternoon Show with Mike and Arda.

Some minor changes were made, like the Lunchbreak (between 12-1pm) became a competition, and listeners had to guess what year we were playing the songs from, along with clues that we were giving every 10 minutes or so.

As I said last time, the 12-3pm spot is not one of the best daytimes spots to have on radio, and at first we were told to only ask people to e-mail us the answers. The response was low - only 4-6 e-mails per day. Then one day the computer was down, and we got permission to tell people to call. Again the response was only marginally better - about 10 calls per day. We were told not to worry, the more the people hear about the show, calls will grow.

This is exactly what happened, and by the time the raid happened, we were getting between 20-50 calls in the Lunchbreak hour. We had a golden rule at RAM FM, whoever won a competition, couldn't enter again for 30 days - to give others a chance of winning. But this didn't deter our faithful listeners - and we had many. People just called us for the fun of it, they said, "I know I cannot win, but the answer is ......"

The show was getting bigger everyday, and more and more people were calling and e-mailing us outside of the competition hour. We continued to have the magazine format, and each day Arda and I concentrated on a different theme. We began interviewing experts here and there instead of talking about the subjects ourselves, and listeners who were experts at what we were talking about, called or wrote in giving their knowledge.

Everything was perfect, it couldn't be better. Our audience, as well as RAM FM's was growing by the day. I heard RAM FM in cars, taxis, bakeries, flower shops and my barber! We were getting e-mails from all over the world. People were listening to us online, so it wasn't afternoon in a lot of places. But they say all good things come to an end, and so they did on April 7th 2008, and fittingly, it was during our show - at about 2.25pm. I won't go into the details of the raid again, I have already written about it in a previous post.

After the raid, Arda went to Ramallah to present the show, but I as an Israeli couldn't go there. Arda continued to present the show alone until RAM FM's closure on August 7th 2008 - exactly four months after the raid.

I think we (Hayat, Arda and myself) proved that it doesn't matter WHAT time a show is broadcast, if it is interesting to the listener, they will listen.

The Afternoon Show - Hayat and Mike

One of the worst spots on daytime radio is the 12.00-15.00 spot. People at work are eating lunch, mothers at home are fetching their children, and then giving them lunch etc. So it is not the best of times to broadcast - so I thought!

The original RAM FM line up had me between 9-12 in the morning, and Hayat Alami between 12.00-15.00. RAM FM's Station Manager, Maysoun Gangat had an idea of pairing a Palestinian (Hayat) and an Israeli (myself) together on one show and talking about everything under the sun - EXCEPT politics!

A show that was a normal magazine show, just presented by an Israeli and a Palestinian, without any who-ha around it. It worked, and well - very well. On September 1st 2007, the first show hit the airwaves. Hayat and myself got on very well together, and the show was a success. At first we had the Lunchbreak - 45 minutes of songs from a certain year. The Lunchbreak was to go on to be competition, but more about that in my next entry.

From 1pm-3pm we had a different theme each day. We would talk about health, hobbies, travel,

numerology, dreams and plenty more.

For reasons I won't go into here, Hayat and I only broadcast a month or so together, and Hayat went to Ramallah to be a producer.

After Hayat, there came Arda, and the Afternoon Show became The Afternoon show with Mike and Arda - coming up next ......

RAM FM - April 7th - August 8th 2008

The empty Jerusalem office - apart from my computer
















From April 7th no broadcasts originated from Jerusalem anymore. Anybody who could, went to our Ramallah studios to broadcast. Whilst we were in house arrest and the week after that, The Afternoon Show was not broadcast. Martin Bee went to Ramallah each morning to do his show, Raf Gangat (Morning Show) and Kevin Lee (Drive) were already in Ramallah.






When we were allowed to return to work, my co-host Arda went to Ramallah everyday to present the Afternoon Show. I went to our Jerusalem office to "produce" the show, and come up with new ideas. I used to come on air through the telephone once or twice during the programme, but after the line was so bad, after a week or so, this was dropped.

So there I was, along with two new members of the news team (Ami and Heather) alone in Jerusalem. RAM FM was more or lessed based in Ramallah from now on. People did come to visit every now and again, but more or less we were alone. I no longer felt part of the station I had been with since its inception.



There was not much anyone could do as far as I was concerned. I am Israeli, I could not go to Ramallah to present the show. Arda was now presenting the show alone, and when it became clear that Jerusalem was not going to open again, my name was taken out of the programmes ID's - that hurt!

After a couple of months we were told that the main offices and studios in Jerusalem were going to be closed altogether, and we were to move into a room in the office next door to us. This also didn't happen, and in the middle of July we were told that with great sorrow, we were being let go. That was it, 18 months was now coming to an end.

During those remaining weeks, all the RAM FM staff were resigned (sorry for the pun!) to the fact that the station was to close, and people started looking for alternatives. The date we were giving was somewhere between September and December 2008, so I was quite surprised when a listener called me on August 8th saying that the station was to close down the same day - we the staff were not even told of the decision! I knew there had been a Board Meeting a day or two before, and we knew it was something serious, but we didn't think the station would close so fast. So fast that even Martin didn't get a chance to say goodbye to his listeners. There were no goodbyes from any of the RAM FM presenters, and only a short announcement repeated throughout the day by Raf Gangat.

At 7pm another short announcement was made by Raf, and 18 months of a wonderful idea, and hundreds of thousands of faithful listeners went down the drain.

The day the music died/the beginning of the end for RAM FM

Before and after the raid. The studio as it normally was, and after the equipment was confiscated.

Monday April 7th 5.30 am. Everything normal, my alarm went off, I got up with a smile becuase I was doing something I loved. What more could I want, I was a presenter on one of Israels most listened to radio stations.

I got to the studios in Jerusalem about 8.30am, and along with Arda, my co-host, we set about, working against the clock, to prepare the days programme. Nothing out of the ordinary, we were preparing, Martin Bee had just finished the Breakfast Show, came out of the studio and greeted us warmly as he always did.

We went on air at 12.05 just after the news. Today's programme was our health day and it was about tea. Everything proceeded as usual, and after the 2pm news I asked the listeners to call or e-mail us to answer my question "When is tea not tea"? I never got the chance to answer it, because at 2.25 we saw that there were a lot of people in the office (we had windows in the studio that faced the office).

During a music break I went out to see what was going on - we often had people come to see the studios etc, so I didn't think anything special was happening. A man in a yellow shirt came up to me and asked me if we had finished talking on air. I thought to myself "Who the heck are you to ask me such a question". I didn't get the chance to answer, when he continued "I am from the Communications Ministry, and these people are police officers. We are closing you down for broadcasting illegally"

To say I was flabergasted was putting it mildly. What? We are broadcasting illegally? No way! You have a mistake! But they were not to be dettered, and they claimed that RAM FM was operating an illegal transmitter inside the State of Israel. I cannot go into more details, because I am still under investigation by the police - 18 months later!!!

Because we had cameras in the studio, our colleagues in Ramallah saw what was going on, and our programme was stopped, and continuous music was played until 3pm. At 3pm Kevin Lee presented his programme as usual from Ramallah as if nothing had happened. The first thing the listeners knew anythinghad happened, was the RAM FM news at 5pm, saying seven staff members were arrested, and the Jerusalem studios closed down.

As one of those arrested, I must say, that we were treated well at all times. The communications Ministry officials dismantled our equipment along with our technician gently. I saw reports that the equipment was torn from the wall - this was not so - the opposite is true. Special boxes were brought to take the equipment away.

We must have waited over an hour for everything to be dismantled, and then we were taken to a Jerusalem police station for questioning. The people arrested were reporters Ashira and Tyson, News Manager Mark Klusner - all journalists with Israeli journalist cards, Arda and myself, Francis our technican and IT guy, and Maysoun, our Station Manager who rushed to the studios as soon as she knew what had happened.

We thought we would be questioned and released, in fact that is what we were told by the Communications Ministry officials. But we weren't, and we were sent to the Russian Compound to spend a night there - not a nice experience by any means.

To cut a long story short, the next day we were released to House Arrest for eight days, where we weren't allowed to be in touch with each other, or anyone else at the station, and only after 14 days were we allowed to go back to work.

In the next post: Isolation in Jerusalem, all of my colleagues went to Ramallah to broadcast.

Pictures - Bus campaign/Happy 1st Birthday RAM FM

Here is a picture of the RAM FM advertising campaign on the buses -March 2008.

A birthday cake for our first birthday

A picture that was above my desk in the office

The golden months / The advertising campaign

Most radio stations have their golden years, but as RAM FM was only on the air for 18 months, I will say that we had our golden "months".

Without much advertising, and most of it going by word of mouth, RAM's popularity spread fast at the end of 2007. A lot of places I went into (flower shops, bakeries etc) were playing RAM FM in the background. I even became a semi-celeb at my barbers, who always had RAM FM on when I came to have a haircut (whether he changed the station when I went, I don't know!).

At the station we could see it by the amount of people who were calling in and e-mailing us. When I changed the Breakfast Show's engineer (Francis) when he went on holiday, I saw there were over 100 calls coming in. Even The Afternoon Show - not one of the most popular spots on daytime radio, was getting close to 50 calls during our Lunchbreak competition between 12.00-13.00.

The word was spreading, and our audience was growing by the day. Then in March of 2008, the station had an advertising campaign that cost between $400,000-$500,000 ( figures taken from the press). All of sudden you could see Bob Marley, The Beatles, Madonna and Kylie Minogue made out of stamps (not the ones you put on letters). "Passports" were distributed in Tel Aviv, and huge posters were hung in Tel Aviv and Ramallah. There was a really nice sign on the Ayalon Freeway going through Tel Aviv. All these brought us new listeners.

The fact we had no advertising brought us listeners from Radius 100 which broadcasts in the Sharon area just outside of Tel Aviv, and has an intolerable amount of commercials every hour.

RAM FM celebrated it's first birthday on Feb 21st 2008 by cancelling all of its regular programmes, and just had dedications all day. During the Afteroon show we had hundreds of phonecalls, and Arda and I had to get help to answer the phones, we just couldn't keep up!

The golden months of February and March was followed by Black April - April 7th, the day the music died in our Jerusalem studios .........

Why weren't there any commercials?

A question I am always asked is why weren't there any commercials on RAM FM - and a good question it is. Well at the beginning there were - four commercials each hour - for Dove, Coca Cola, Western Union and Dallah Rent a Car.

As far as I know, these slots were given either free of charge or for very little money for six months on a trial basis. As we know, none of the above continued to advertise on RAM FM, the reason (to me) not known. In fact nearly very few companies advertised on RAM FM and the question is why?

I can think of a couple of reasons - at least from the Israeli advertisers point of view. RAM FM was a Palestinian radio station. The stations license came from the Palestinian Authority, the transmitters were in Ramallah, as was the head office. I suppose it would be very hard for an Israeli company to advertise on such a station. I do not know the terms of the broadcast license, so I do not know if it was forbidden to receive advertising from Israel or not. I DO know that in the beginning at least, the stations focus was on multi-national companies.

I also heard (and I do not know if this is true or not) that the station wanted equal advertising - meaning the same amount of commercials from Israel as from the P.A. This never happened, so there was no advertising at all. This could have been another reason for the lack of advertising.

Towards the end, we did get sponsorship from Cheerios cereal and from the "Curves" gym, I still remember the boxes of cheerios piled up in the Station Managers office - wonder what happened to them?

The lack of advertising may have been "one" of the reasons leading to the closure of RAM FM in August 2008. I can completely understand the investors when they put out so much money on the station, and didn't get anything back in return.

The Rise and Fall of RAM FM - Middle East Eye Witness News

The profressionalism of the on air staff at RAM FM really shone through when it came to its news team. Now those who listened to the bulletins either loved or hated it. Both "sides" said that the news was biased towards the other side, so I guess they were doing something right.

Middle East Eye Witness News (taken from the South African model) hit the airwaves on Dec 1st 2006, whilst RAM FM was testing. There were three bulletins a day, at 9am,1pm and 4pm, presented by the News Manager Andrew Bolton and News Editor Mark Klusener. They were five minute broadcasts, including local and international news, weather, and the price of a barrel of oil, gold, and the dollar rate.

At 6am on February 21st, Andrew Bolton opened the official broadcasting of RAM FM with the first news of the day. From that day on, news was broadcast 13 hours a day - from 6am-7pm. During the breakfast and drive time shows, news was broadcast on the half hour as well.

The news team were split up between the Jerusalem and Ramallah offices to maintain a fine balance of news coverage. The news was usually broadcast from Jerusalem in the mornings 6am-12pm) and from Ramallah in the afternoons (1pm-7pm) - although the listener had no idea that this was happening.

In all my years in radio, either on air or reporting about it, I must say I have never met anyone so professional as Andrew Bolton. He was utterly dedicated to the news dept. and made sure that everything ran smoothly. He was often very critical about his own news broadcasts, and I witnessed a few incidents when he got angry with himself when things didn't go exactly as he had wished them to go - such is the man!

Although Andrew is a very modest man, he was not a one man show, and had a very dedicated professional team behind him. In Jerusalem there was Ashira, Tyson, and later on Ami and Heather. In Ramallah there was News Editor (and later News Manager) Mark klusener, Abdullah and Shireen.

When the Jerusalem studios were raided by the police, most of the news dept moved to Ramallah, but Heather and Ami remained in Jerusalem to keep me company - the only RAM FM staff that remained in Israel.

To end of course, we must not forget the news jingles before and after the bulletins that became their trade mark - In touch, in tune and independent, 93.6 RAM FM ......

Middle East Eye Witness News was a big part of RAM FM, which had many scoops and three of the seven staff arrested on that fatal day in April were MEEWN journalists .....

The Rise and Fall of RAM FM - Part 1

Where to start? So much to say.

I must first say that prior to my arriving at RAM FM, I had a weekly interview programme in English on the Israeli/Palestinian radio station Radio All for Peace, that broadcasts to this day on 107.2FM to the center of the country and the P.A.

I must thank the then co-directors of the station, Maysa Baransi-Siniora (Maysa is director today) and Shimon Malka for giving me the chance to return to the air after a long break, and also ex AFP producer and RAM FM reporter Shireen Yasin, through her I heard about RAM FM

When I listen to my earlier shows for AFP (and I was there for three years) I shudder - they were terrible, but getting the old confidence back, the more I broadcast the better I got. I am sure that without my three years on AFP, I wouldn't have been accepted at RAM FM.

I joined RAM FM in January 2007, but only went on the air on March 1st because the studos in Jerusalem were not ready. After nearly 9 months of tests RAM went on the air from Ramallah on Feb 21 2007 at 6am. From March 1st, the programme schedule was as follows:

06.00-09.00 John Berks

09.00-12.00 Mike Brand

12.00-15.00 Hayat Alami

15.00-19.00 Barry Hill

19.00-06.00 Continuous music

As you see, I presented the Morning Show. At first it was just all music, starting off with the Classic 9@9 - nine songs at 9am with a theme running through all the songs. Later on the 9@9 turned into a competition. There was also the odd interview now and then, but the emphasis was on the music.

In August there was a change in programming. Raf Gangat took over the Morning Show, and I moved over to the Afternoon Show. I presented the show alone for a few weeks, and then I was joined by the very lovely Hayat Alami. For reasons I won't go into here, our partnership lasted only a month or so, and Hayat was replaced by Arda. Arda and I continued to co-host the programme until the raid on our Jerusalem studios in April 2008 by the Israeli police and Communications Ministry officials. By the way, the raid took place during our programme - but more about that another time.

The move from morning to afternoon was the best thing that happened to me. The afternoon show was a lighter format, more informal, and Hayat, and then Arda, were great co-hosts, and we light heartedly "put each other down" every now and again.

RAM FM started off pretty slowly, but at the end of 2007/beginning of 2008, the station was gaining more and more listeners by the day. A poll taken in March 2008 gave us between 500,000 - 750,000 listeners in Israel and the P.A. I think this was a bit exaggerated, but even so, the3 amount of listerners was growing everyday.

There were many reasons for our popularity I suppose. Maybe the main reason was that we had no commercials (a subject for a future post). We played only English language music - new and old. We were playing new songs weeks before they reached the other Israeli radio stations. But of course, we also broadcast only in English.

We had South African Icon John Berks who presented the Breakfast Show, and then Martin Bee. We had Barry Hill from Australia, Barry, along with Martin were two of the nicest guys I have ever meant - and so modest! We had the most modern of equipment and studios, we had great offices, and our staff were some of the nicest people you could ever meet.

Next time - Middle East Eye Witness News and one of the most professional news men I have ever met

"Local" radio stations in Israel

A smile always comes to my lips when I read about Israel's "local" radio stations. Way back in 1995 when we finally got commercial radio, each station said on their opening days (and I have it on tape!) that they will serve the community, have local news, and be active in local matters.

GIVE ME A BREAK!!

How many of Israel's local stations have a local news broadcast today? How many stations are active in the community? Not many I can tell you. Oh and by the way, they are not called "local" radio stations anymore, but "regional".

Without naming names, and leaving myself open to being sued, can anyone tell me how many radio stations in Israel are actually focused on their community? How many have local news? How many even have a "What's on"!!

What angers me is that the Second Radio Channel Radio Authority, who are responsible for the oversee of these stations, doesn't do anything about it. There are many stations in the center of the country who just play music all day (great if you like 20 minutes of music and 40 minutes of commercials!). Now THAT is what I call local radio.

And what about actually catering to your local audience? Let's take the area where I live - the Sharon area just outside Tel-Aviv. This area is full of English speaking residents. When I left RAM FM, I went to these stations and offered them a programme for these people - a programme where they could get nowhere else. ALL the stations turned me down, saying that they didn't want a programme in English. "We live in Israel" they said, the language is Hebrew.
Here I must raise my hat to Israel Radio that have programmes in Russian and Ethiopian most of the day. Also Radius runs an all day Russian language radio station on 89.1FM.

But English? Hey, we are a cultured lot we are, we won't cause any trouble. I think the huge success of stations like the Voice of Peace, Radio West in Jerusalem, and most recently RAM FM proves the English speaking needs to be taken more attention of.

But hey, wouldn't that be catering to your local audience?

Syndication

To those who are reading this blog abroad, you will certainly know the word "syndication", but to us Israelis, who are way behind the times, it is quite new to us. But we learn fast, and without us knowing, we have the same programme on six different stations at once.

A prime example of this is Didi Harari, whose show goes out on no less than six of Israel's regional commercial radio stations - The Voice of the Red Sea in Eilat, Southern Radio in Bersheva, Radio Jerusalem, Non-Stop Radio in Tel Aviv, Middle of the Way Radio in Hadera, and Radio Kol Rega in Afula. Meaning, I could go from the south of Israel to the north and not miss a minute of Didi Harari (whether I want to do this is another matter, but let's say I do).

Does this mean that these stations don't have enough original material of their own? Or is the programme THAT good that they don't want us to miss it wherever we are. I suppose a bit of both. Two other examples that come to mind are Shai and Dror, and Tal Berman and Aviad Kisos.

With the strong stations buying out the weak (Non-Stop Radio now has three stations in Israel - The flagship Tel Aviv station, Non-Stop Radio North, and most recently 99FM in the Sharon area near Tel Aviv)

Do we deserve more, or as usual, does the apathetic Israeli listener just accept whatever is thrown at him?

The new Voice of Peace

Many articles and comments have been written about Doug Wood's project to bring back the Voice of Peace through the Internet. Some have been good, others not so.

Some say the return of the VOP with the old jingles etc and some of the original presenters is just living in the past. I spoke to someone recently, who looked after Abie Nathan for years, and he preferred that the VOP just be left in the past - or as they say in Hebrew, Haya Tov, vetov sheh haya - or, it was good, and good that is was. In other words, let sleeping dogs lie.

Others say, and I tend to agree with them, that there is nothing to listen to on Israeli radio these days, so reviving the VOP can't be a bad thing. The only minus at the moment is that it is on the Internet, and cannot be heard on a "normal" or car radio. But technology is changing fast, and soon we will all be able to buy Internet radios for a decent price (current price for an Internet radio here in Israel is about NIS800 or about $200).

At the moment the VOP is testing on www.thevoiceofpeace.co.il.

I hope that in the spirit of the original VOP, both new/current songs as well as oldies will be played. There are plenty of "gold" stations around on the Internet. Also, at the beginning at least, all the links will be recorded, so there will be no time checks or very little live.

Love it or hate it, I for one commend Doug and his team for bringing back English language radio to Israel - if for the moment, only through the Internet. I for one will be waiting for the launch in a couple of weeks time.

The "All New" Radio Jerusalem

A couple of weeks ago, and after many attempts by the previous holders of the Jerusalem license to stop them, the "All New" Radio Jerusalem 101FM went on the air. Radio Habira, as they started out (Radio Jerusalem 101FM today), went on the air from their studios on the 11th floor of the Technological Garden building opposite the Malch Mall.

This has great sentimental value for me, as for 18 months I worked in exactly the same place as a presenter for the now defunct English language radio station 93.6 RAM FM. When I saw the video of Radio Jerusalem http://www.haflla.com/template/default.aspx?PageId=332, I must admit, a lump came to my throat. The studios and offices became a part of my life for one of the most wonderful periods of my life. But more about RAM FM another time.

Radio Jerusalem have not had good reviews, and have been called a station for Jerusalems taxi drivers. The reception is sometimes non-existent in the center part of the country, with 101FM off the air more than it is on the air!

So let's hope it is teething problems, and they get on to full power soon. As for content? Not for me. I suppose I will keep on listening to 88FM, Radius and SAMA FM - the station that took over the 87.7 and 93.6 slots from RAM FM