Vatican communications undergo changes in response to new technology
(June 13, 2012) Vatican Radio will end its short and medium-wave broadcasts to Europe
and North and South America July 1, and a month later the Vatican press office will
close the Vatican Information Service, VIS, a multilingual daily summary of papal
speeches and appointments. Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican
press office and of Vatican Radio, announced the changes on Tuesday (June 12), saying
they were responses to developments in technology and would save the Vatican money.
The changes at Vatican Radio, he said, should save the Vatican "hundreds of thousands"
of dollars just in electricity bills each year. But the radio station is not reducing
the number of programs, or the 40 languages in which the programs are produced. The
decision to stop the short and medium-wave broadcasts reflect the fact that Europe,
North and South America, are well covered by local radio stations that re-broadcast
Vatican Radio programs and a large portion of their populations have access to radio
programs via the internet. Short and medium-wave broadcasts to Africa, parts of the
Middle East and Asia will continue, Fr. Lombardi said, because fewer people have
access to the Internet there, and most of the stations rebroadcasting Vatican Radio
programs are located only in big cities. Fr. Lombardi said ending the
broadcasts to Europe, North and South America would cut in half the hours of transmission
from the Vatican's antenna field at Santa Maria di Galeria outside Rome. He said the
decision was motivated strictly by the fact that new technology has made the broadcasts
superfluous and had nothing to do with concerns about the potential health dangers
posed by electromagnetic emissions from the transmission center. VIS. which provides
summaries of Vatican news in daily English, French or Spanish emails to 60,000 subscribers,
will be replaced by a multilingual summary of the Vatican press office's daily news
bulletin, he added.