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.