Radio Liberty was founded in the 1950s to broadcast American views into the former Soviet Union when the Cold War was at its peak. Radio Liberty transmitted on short wave, and the Soviet government did all it could to jam the broadcasts.
But after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin granted the service permission to open a Moscow bureau and broadcast within the country on AM radio.
Now, after two decades of broadcasting, Radio Liberty's AM signal is about to be turned off. The service will continue to be heard on shortwave, but the plan is to move most of the operation to the Internet.
Radio Liberty executives say they were stymied by a recent Russian law that forbids foreign entities from owning a majority stake in any Russian broadcast license.
Steve Korn, the president and CEO of Radio Liberty and its sister service, Radio Free Europe, acknowledges that the law in the United States is similar.
Korn says Radio Liberty has tried to find a way to keep broadcasting, including looking for Russian partners who might be willing to take over the license. He says nothing worked.
"Rather than treat that as a calamity, we chose to treat it as an opportunity," Korn says, "because we felt that we could be reaching a much better and more effective, more targeted audience in Russia than we had [been] reaching."
Turning To The Internet
What Korn had in mind was a service that would be focused more on the Internet and social media. He says the company's research in Russia shows that many more Russians go to the Internet for information, rather than going to AM radio or radio in general.
What Korn sees as an opportunity, however, turned out to be a calamity for some 40 staffers at Radio Liberty's Moscow bureau.
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