Friday, February 16, 2007 - 13:41
> Timor Leste Radio Connect

Timor Radio Connect

Internews connecting Timorese community radios and the Diaspora...

Internews Europe in partnership with the Timor Leste Media Development Center (TLMDC) Timor and Intercooperação e Desevolvimento (INDE), Portugal is starting a 2-year project that will launch a new international market for Timor Leste by putting Timor’s 14 radio stations online on a platform which enables them to collect advertising and sponsorship over the Internet from Timorese diaspora individuals and businesses worldwide into some of the most remote parts of the world.

The overall objective is to create a permanent new source of revenue for local radio stations in Timor Leste, and make a critical difference in the sector’s struggle to become a viable private sector activity. By helping the stations onto an online ebusiness capable platform, they can get direct exposure to the Timorese diaspora in Portugal, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and elsewhere worldwide, as well as to the significant community of international citizens who continue to be interested in Timor Leste.

In Timor Leste, the Timor Leste Media Development Centre, a Timorese NGO actually active since 2000, will work with the radio stations, already long-time partners, to construct a website and updating mechanism adapted to very basic IT capabilities. In many cases, the stations themselves will remain out of direct access to the Net, but burn audio and text material onto to CD, to be sent to Dili and uploaded there.

Internews Europe will put the ebusiness platform in place, adapting one of the many open source Content Management Systems that now exist, and adding securitised elements from ecommerce platforms as needed.

INDE (Portugal) will promote the system to the likely demographic attracted to the service – the diaspora and others interested in Timor, with a series of public events and publications.

Interested parties will be approached in at least three different ways:

  •  Individuals and companies can buy advertising space on an individual station, sending the text of messages they would like to be read out. The market exists at two levels, a business-to-business market of enterprises run by the Timorese diaspora, and a consumer market of individuals in the diaspora who would use the system to place advertisements which in Europe would more readily be classified ads in print media, such as family announcements, requests for music, and so on. “Many people from Baucau are now working as laborers in Ireland and England. They would want to send messages to their families or dedicate music to them because they miss their families,” says Caetano da Costa Freitas, Secretary for Radio Comunidade Lian Matebian Baucau.

    Businesses or individuals will also be able to buy sponsorship of a specific radio station, or a program it plays. As the stations gain in confidence and sophistication, they will also post sponsorship and e-patronage campaigns around particular goals, such as a motorcycle to enable reporting, or an extra computer to help editing.

  •  Gathering content in Timor Leste
  •  Marketing among the Timorese diaspora: A series of face to face meetings profiling interesting programs and providing information about Timor’s radio sector will be organised in Portugal and around the 25 countries of the EC where there are significant Timorese diaspora (notably also the United Kingdom and Ireland). There will also be two exchange visits between Timor and the European hosts.
  •  A general donation to the radio sector, which performs a vital social function in Timor. Using a credit card, Paypal, or other widely accepted forms of e-payment, any amount of funds will go into a fund passed through to TLMDC in Dili and administered quarterly to support the radio sector. Over the course of two years, the project will build for the sector revenue streams which are small compared to many businesses, but which will make a vital difference to a key sector in Timor Leste, just as it searches to find its financial feet.
    This project is co-funded by the European Union
    • Timor Leste, Economic Development, Media And Society, Media Professionalisation, Technology