Paris English-language radio granted AM licence

PARIS, Jan 3 (AFP) – France’s first English-language radio station is to start broadcasting on AM this month after signing a partnership deal with another station it hopes will boost listeners and advertisers, the Australian owner of the station said Monday.  

“We should be on air around January 20 or 25,” Ian de Renzie Duncan of Paris Live Radio (PLR) told AFP.  

“It’s the next step. We get on and make a go of that, and then the whole FM issue will get fluid next year,” he said.  

His station aimed at expats and anglophile French started operating on the Internet in May 2004, beaming out a diet of music, news and chat. Its DJs are American, Australian, British, French and Irish.  

But Duncan, a former Sydney barrister who moved to Paris four years ago with his French wife, said getting AM – and eventually FM – play is vital to attracting advertisers and becoming a “100 percent professional” station.  

So far, “we’ve very well received, with around 30,000 listeners a day,” he said.  

Negotiating French bureaucracy and getting business backing has been “a steep learning curve,” he said.  

Even getting on AM was an uphill affair. The deal struck will see PLR relegated to a 8:00 pm to 7:00 am slot on a frequency shared with a daytime French station, Radio de la Mer, which holds the broadcast licence.  

Outside those hours, PLR continues to be available via Internet, cable and satellite.   PLR is targeting the estimated 400,000 English-speaking residents in Paris, plus the millions of tourists who flood into the French capital every year.  

It sits alongside an array of other stations catering to languages ranging from Arabic to Serbian.

© AFP

Subject: French News