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Kazan English-speaking educational FM-radio project

The project is directed at establishing a long-term linguistic and cultural framework to support youth aspiring to be competitive internationally through efficient use of their human capital. This is to be achieved by establishing a local FM radio-station to rebroadcast educational, cultural and informational content in English. It is meant to provide an accessible channel for local youth to get on-going access to a diversity of ideas and approaches to problem solving, expose to variety of leading worldwide practices - thus raising the value of their personal human and social capital, as well as those of the region at large. The target auditory is high-school and college students, as well as young professionals.

Requirements: Any long-term programs targeting this audience should have relatively low barriers for entry and relatively high cost/results ratio for potential participants to draw and keep their attention.

Implementation: Broadcasting at FM frequency is currently the most accessible way in Russia to reach target auditory, which is most active and mobile segment of population with great many ideas on how to spend their time and where to direct their efforts.

Content: The station is to rebroadcast educational, scientific, cultural and informational programs prepared for local audience of an English-speaking country, recordings of which are already publicly available for listening/downloading from the Internet in form of mp3-podcasts. Programming in English is expected to attract attention of a significant part of the target audience. Strong sides are diversity of high-quality public content, as well as universal acceptance that knowing English gives advantages for successful career. The content would consist of programs, prepared by the Russian Federation and foreign radio-stations broadcasting in English, that would meet the programming requirements - that of NPR.org (a network of independently owned and operated local stations in U.S. that join together to produce world-class programs that can compete with large private or state-owned media corporations), BBC, Voice of America, Australian ABC etc.

Potential partners: Embassies of the English-speaking countries to the Russian Federation, Republic of Tatarstan agency on print and mass media, Republic of Tatarstan agency on promotion of international cooperation, potential broadcasters.

With a parity of Muslim and Christian cultures and 2 state languages (Tatar and Russian) having equal legal rights in the Republic, Tatarstan is the most culturally tolerant region - thus best place for such a pilot project. On top of local priorities, Tatarstan has a wide range of international relations that will motivate local authorities in Kazan to provide political sponsorship.

Currently there is no English-speaking news/analysis channel widely available in Kazan (except for satellite dish owners and cable TV subscribers), whilst broadband is still expensive, and mobile internet (G3/UMTS standards) is unreliable and expensive.

Project environment analysis

Knowing some English is currently viewed as a de-facto advantage for advancing in government jobs - with city mayor and Prime-minister of the Republic and their staff setting the examples. President of the Republic of Tatarstan many times stated that people of Tatarstan need to preserve own identity, whilst being competitive on the world arena. To achieve this, he recommended the youth of Tatarstan to master 3 languages, namely: Tatar, Russian and English, and requested regional government to work out necessary measures to support this. Tatarstan is now sponsoring programs for college students and young scholars/professionals to attend training programs abroad. But this is only covering the tip of the iceberg.

All exchange programs target groups of individuals with specific skills/experiences. Since budgets are limited, the number of finalists is significantly lower than the applicants, thus many are not directly affected. Because of the lacking cultural context, follow-on programs are forced to be mainly information-sharing, with some artificially engineered experience-sharing exercises. This issue can be significantly resolved by establishing an educational radio that will be setting background linguistic and cultural context. Thus participating audience will be more perceptive to more specific information/experience sharing, thus ready to hit the ground running.

Currently Moscow is the only city in Russia, where foreign radio broadcasts are available at relatively accessible radio-waves. BBC (UK), RFI (France) and Deutsche Welle (Germany) continue broadcasts there over AM wavelength stations, whose signal can be received by some mobile radio units. The largest known U.S. presence on the radio-market in Russia is via Russian service of U.S. Congress-supported RFE/RL network (broadcasting 24/7, at AM frequency in Moscow, at short-waves, on the Internet and via Satellite radio). Daily 1 hour Tatar-Bashkir service of RFE/RL is being broadcast from the radio’s Prague headquarters (via short-waves, internet and Satellite radio).

Only comparable (news/talk) format Russian station broadcasting in Kazan of FM frequencies is commercial “Echo of Moscow”. There are plenty of other commercial Russian-speaking news/entertainment format stations, majority ran and programmed from Moscow. Jagna Gasyr, the only station that provides comparable content in Tatar (news/entertainment) is financed mainly from the state budget. As for the children's education/entertainment radio segment, the only Russian broadcaster is Detskoye Radio, which provides Russian programming similar to BBC for Kids.

Kazan insisted on the “Third Capital of Russia” status ever since the phrase was first publicly used by Vladimir Putin during 2005 celebrations of the city's millennium anniversary. The brand was formally approved by Russian patent authority on April 2, 2009. Local authorities try to use any opportunity to improve the city and region’s competitiveness. We have first operational E-government project in Russia, leaders in techno & innovation parks, holding more and more all-Russian and international events. The next big one is Universiade 2013 (International students games), with over 100,000 guests to be coming to the city at once. Kazan is also a de-facto Muslim capital of Russia, home of Russian Islam University and an annual Golden Minbar International Movie Festival. Ex-mayor of Kazan is serving as permanent representative of Russia (observer member) in the Organization of Islamic Conference.

In a more distant future the project could further develop by introducing local news in English for both citizens and guests of Kazan, and possibly their internet-broadcasting.

The project is at the idea stage and requires further development. Any comments and proposals are welcome.

Initial idea by Farkhad Fatkullin

Email: frhdkazan@gmail.com mobile/Kazan: +79274158066 Facebook Вконтакте вОдноклассниках Мой Мир Мой Круг Skype, ICQ, Yahoo!Messenger, GoogleTalk: frhdkazan

©2009 Farkhad Fatkullin - consecutive and simultaneous interpretation.