Radio Radicale

Radio Radicale is the official radio station of the Italian Radical Party. 
Founded in 1976 along with the "Free Radios", it has no commercial adverts and is partly funded by the party, however the Italian government funds the broadcaster according to an agreement for the broadcasting of Parliamentary sessions.
Despite being an official political party organ, Radio Radicale dedicates its airtime to broadcasting parliamentary live debates from the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the Italian Senate as well as important court cases. It broadcasts Italian political party conventions of all political spectrums, from far right to far left. The remaining airtime is used for programmes about actuality themes relevant for the political beliefs of the Radical Party.
In December 2008, Radio Radicale was awarded by "Italia Oggi" as "best specialized radio broadcaster".
History.
Radio Radicale was founded between 1975 and 1976 by a group belonging to the Radical Party in a small apartment near Villa Pamphili, in the Gianicolense district of Rome.
Following the liberalization of radio broadcasting by the Constitutional Court between 1974 and 1976, during the spreading of private radio stations, Radio Radicale was characterized by low-budget instruments but it stood out for its particular philosophy. Radio Radicale decided to realize a valid public service alternative to the state broadcaster RAI. The broadcaster decided to use the name “Radicale” (Radical) not only in reference to its role of party branch but also for its editorial policy characterized by impartiality, professionalism and innovation.
Along with the news about the party, Radio Radicale began a schedule dedicated to the main events of the Italian institutional and political life: since the beginning, its main distinctive traits had been the live broadcasts of parliamentary sessions, congresses of the main parties and important trials, making them accessible to the wide population without cuts and journalistic mediations.
The radio station introduced press reviews, direct talks with politicians, interviews through the streets and broadcasts for immigrate communities in Italy.
In summer 1986, the broadcaster risked closure for lacking funds and in this period received thousands of calls which were aired without filters. This new kind of broadcast originated "Radio Parolaccia" (Radio Swear Word), an original programme where listeners could express their opinions about various themes. The programme was interrupted by the court after one month and the deputy prosecutor Pietro Saviotti signed a seizure decree of the answering machines on 14 August, because listeners had committed crimes like contempt of the institutions and apology of fascism. After two months, the Parliament intervened and extended the public funding for Party publishing to the radio stations, forcing Radio Radicale to become officially a Party branch. The initiative of free phone calls was replicated in 1991 and 1993.
The official website was created in 1998 and expanded the radiophonic broadcasting with multimedial contents. The whole wide library had been loaded online and it can be consulted freely.
Recent events.
In 1997, the Prodi I Cabinet refused to renew the agreement with Radio Radicale for the broadcast of parliamentary sessions and Rai began to develop its own dedicated radio station after 7 years since the law which instituted it. Important cultural and political personalities asked the government to consider decayed the disposition of the "Mammì bill" which obliged Rai to create a parliamentary radiophonic channel, to extend the agreement with Radio Radicale for another 3 years and to assign the convention with a call for tender in case of renew.
Following a political debate with demonstrations and nonviolent initiatives by the Radicals, the Parliament approved the law Nº 224 of 11 July 1998 on "Radio broadcasting of Parliament's work and benefits for publishing". The law confirmed the call for tender with which stipulate the agreement and renewed the contract with Radio Radicale for another three years, Rai's obligation to broadcast parliamentary sessions was kept but the public company was prevented to extend its radiophonic network until the entry into force of the telecommunication general reform.
In 2001, 2004 and 2006, the agreement with Radio Radicale had been renewed according to the dispositions inside the financial law. The contract excepts that RR has to broadcast, between 8 am and 9 pm, at least 60% of the annual total number of hours dedicated by the Parliament to the sessions in the chambers. Those broadcasts cannot be interrupted, preceded or followed, for a period of thirty minutes from their beginning and their end, by commercial or political adverts.
Renewal of the agreement (2010-2013).
For 2010 and 2011, the agreement prolongation with the Ministry of Economic Development excepted a €9.9 million funding for Centro di produzione S.p.a. For 2012, two laws of 2011 allowed a total expenditure of €10 million and for 2013 the same amount was confirmed in 2012.
Renewal in 2018-2019.
Until 2018, Radio Radicale received €8.2 million, according to the agreement with the Ministry of Economic Development for the broadcast of parliamentary sessions, and another €4 million as contribution to the publishing activity.
The 2019 budget law has prolonged the agreement for the parliamentary session broadcasting by Radio Radicale for only one semester, allocating €5 million gross (€4 million net) for the year 2019. After the deadline on 20 May 2019, Radio Radicale will not have enough resources to go on.
Governance.
Centro di Produzione SpA is the publisher of Radio Radicale, its archive and of its website. The company, headquartered in Rome, has the following shareholders:
Technologies.
Owning 250 plants for terrestrial broadcasting, Radio Radicale covers 75% of the Italian territory and reaches 85% of the population in AM and FM. Furthermore, the broadcast via satellite Eutelsat Hot Bird 13 East has allowed to expand the audience all over Europe and in wide areas of Africa and Asia, including the Middle East, with a potential audience of 98 million households.
RR is available also in streaming through the website and the official app for smartphones, offering also additional multimedia contents.
It is a member of the consortium DAB Italia for the developing and diffusion of DAB technologies in Italy.
Organization.
Hours of audio and video recordings are made every year through a system of connections with public institutions and events. Signals are received through fixed or temporary lines by wire, radio, satellite or telematic and, when using analogue telephone lines, recordings are immediately digitalised by an encoding system which produces ten channels at the same time around the clock. Once the main headquarter has been reached, different signals are spread for different uses through an active matrix which allows the distribution of 128 signals.
Centro di Produzione S.p.A. is the owner of the seat where Radio Radicale operates, and includes three studies. Two of them have an independent Radio direction, while the third is connected with two directions and it is mainly dedicated to the post-production. All four directions can broadcast.
In addition to the main studios, the broadcaster has four production centres where transfers, little editing and telephonic interviews recordings are made. Telephonic lines used for conversations to be aired are digitalised and all productions have been made in mp3 since July 2006.
Radio Radicale is organized through the following division in sectors:
In addiction to employees, these sectors make use of cooperation of collaborators and consultants.
Archive.
The constant work of document collection and preservation done by Radio Radicale during its activity has allowed the creation of an important and wide archive, defined in 1993 by the Archival Superintendency as "of a remarkable historical interest". In the same year, the archive was quoted in the volume "Fonti orali: censimento degli istituti di conservazione" published by the Italian Ministry of Cultural and Environmental Heritage, while in the following year it was a subject of the "Congresso sugli archivi dei partiti politici" (Congress About Political Parties' Archives) organized by the Central Archives of the State.
The archive can be consulted freely and by everyone.
In May 2007, during the congress "L'archivio multimediale di Radio Radicale: un patrimonio per la storia, l'informazione, la democrazia" (The Multimedial Archive of Radio Radicale: an Heritage for History, Information, Democracy), organized by the RR along with the Doctorate of Research on European History and the Archivists and Librarists Special School of the Sapienza University of Rome, various critics and archivist agreed in recognizing not only the historical and social value of the archival production of Radio Radicale, but also its complementarity with the main collections of Italian documents, first of all those belonging to RAI. The former manager of Rai Teche, Barbara Scaramucci, stated that:
Other evidenced the particularity of the public service done by a private radio station like Radio Radicale. Paola Carucci, councillor of the President of Italian Republic for the Historical Archive, claims:
The choice of Marco Pannella to preserve, catalogue and archive all the recordings without any manipulations on tapes allows the citizens to consult 430 000 documents (cassettes, tapes, mp3, mp4, RealAudio and RealVideo), which contains the most important events of the institutional, political, social and cultural history of Italy: there are full recordings which allow to everyone to know and relive an event in its entirety. The archive of the radio is in continuous expansion and receives every day tens of new documents which are added to those already existing.
History.
The history of the archive is closely linked with Radio Radicale which preserved every cassette and tape of the aired programmes since its first broadcasting in 1976. However, the archive owns also some records done before 1976 and precisely 52 tapes and 216 cassettes for the period from 1967 - 1975, in addition to some tapes of 1941 (a radiophonic interview in English recovered by Ernesto Rossi where Gaetano Salvemini comments the obtaining of the American citizenship), some of 1960 (the recording of a concerence held by Ernesto Rossi in Florence entitled "L'antifascismo in carcere e al confino") and others of 1966 (Ernesto Rossi's "Salvemini maestro ed amico").
The proper archive thought of as a service with its own specialized staff was established three years after the start of Radio activities, so that the sorting of collected recordings has started since 1979. In 1987 the classification and archive changed with the introduction of computer systems and today the analog documentation is at an advanced digitalization. The director of the archive has been Gabriella Fanello Marcucci since 1992.
Contents.
Documents preserved in the Sound Archive of Radio Radicale can be classified in: Institutional Archive, Judicial Archive, Political Parties and Movements Archive, Associations, Unions and Movements Archive and Cultural Archive. The archive has a total of 430,718 recordings, 196,101 speakers and 662,404 media, including over 85,000 interviews, 21,000 hearings of the most important trials, 3,000 congresses held by parties, associations or labour unions, more than 26,000 debates and book presentations, over 6,000 political rallies and demonstrations, 19,500 press conferences and more than 13,000 conventions.
Official website.
Online since 1998, the website of Radio Radicale has been one of the first in Italy to stream actuality videos on the web and nowadays political, social and institutional events of the past and of recent times are always available for all the citizens.
History.
Between February and March 1998, Radicals organized a convention entitled "Quali lotte e leggi subito per la rivoluzione tecnologica, per la rivoluzione liberale" (Which struggles and laws to be done immediately for technological revolution, for liberal revolution), attended by the major Italian entrepreneurs of ITs and telecommunications, lawyers and other specialists of that field.
During the convention, a plan of funding for the construction of a new society of information was proposed to institutions and companies, through the application of new technologies to the democratic activities. In particular, along with the introduction of the electronic vote and of the telematic official notice board, computer literacy in schools, liberalization of telematic publishing and commercial companies, the main proposal was about the online networking of public institutions.
Contents and goals of the congress formed later the foundations of RR website with the guide of Rino Spampanato; the broadcaster realized the first Italian webcast system making freely available the sessions of all the Italian Parliament's broadcast and archived sessions.
The website of Radio Radicale made possible the streaming of the sessions held by the European Parliament, Court of Audit, High Council of the Judiciary and other institutions.
Computer technologies.
The website is made using mainly free software like Linux, PHP, Apache HTTP Server, Apache Solr, MariaDB, Varnish, Nginx and Icecast. It is managed with the open source CMS Drupal, published under GNU GPL licence.
All the hardware units of the content archive and distribution system are allocated in Roma into two different server farms located in the headquarter of Centro di Produzione Spa.
The first server farm holds the racks of the SAN storages with mp3/mp4 files and online distribution systems of audio and video streaming (Icecast and Wowza respectively), set up on Dell servers with the Linux OS Slackware. The SAN is formed by EMC, Dell and Qnap storages with RAID5 discs interconnected with the iSCSI technology for a total space of 170 TByte.
The second server farm is mainly dedicated to the interconnection of network devices and the supply of web services through firewall, switches and routers made by Cisco.
Both server farms have UPSs, generators sets and air conditioning systems to guarantee the management of the operative continuity at a steady temperature and humidity.
All the hardware is redundant to guarantee optimal levels of fault tolerance eliminating the main single points of failure.
The internet connection happens with two fluxes on optic fibre of 1,000 Mbit/s each from two different ISP with that Centro di Produzione Spa has autonomous system relations.
To prevent control and managing activities of the computer network, Centro di Produzione Spa uses software like Nagios and Netflow which can promptly report every possible logical or functional anomaly of the services supplied.
In December 2015 the experimentation for the transition to IPv6 begun through the address assigned to Centro di Produzione by RIPE NCC. Since February 2016 the website is available in dual-stack IPv4+IPv6 with the HTTP/2 protocol.
Since 2016, Radio Radicale has used a content delivery network developed by Google through the Project Shield technology, an initiative by Google Ideas (now Jigsaw) intended to prevent possible Ddos attacks.
Creative Commons licence.
All files published on the website of Radio Radicale have a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Italy (CC BY 2.5 IT) licence, which allows the free reproduction, distribution and adaption of the material along with the appropriate credit and the reference to the licence itself as only obligations.
CC licences represent an important instrument for the realization of the main purpose of Radio Radicale concerning the publicity of democratic decisional moments, the promotion of the access to direct knowledge about political events for the largest number of citizens and the free circulation of ideas.
"Videoparlamento".
The "Videoparlamento" service publishes on the web and makes available to citizens the full audio-video documents of all the sessions which has been done in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate of the Republic since November 1998.
After the live streaming, the Parliamentary sessions are shown in sheets which respect the various phases of the parliamentary work and allows a direct access to a single intervention or phase. Updating occurs in real time since September 2001. The search engine allows also to do organized searches through all available sessions. The start of the experimentations of these multimedial service was required by law n. 350 of 2003.
"Fai Notizia".
In 2006 the editorial board of "RadioRadicale.it" created "FaiNotizia.it", the first Italian website of citizen journalism: based on Newsvine, it was intended as a social and journalistic experiment and an attempt to use the new free and collaborative attitude of the new media at the time, creating a new model of information.
On "Fai notizia", registered users could collaborate in searching and writing the news, loading texts, videos, photos, evidencing interesting news found on other websites or blogs. Users commented and voted the reports made by other members and could start collaborative investigations. All the content had been published under Creative Commons licences.
In 2012 "Fai notizia" was completely renewed and transformed into a format of investigations distributed by Radio Radicale, which offers now little payments for who collaborates in creating reports about great issues of public interest.
Funding.
Radio Radicale receives every year a public funding of €8.33 million according to the agreement with the State for the broadcast of parliamentary sessions, and €4.431 million from the publishing funding due to its nature of branch of the Pannella List. In August 2008 Radio Radicale was the only broadcaster to be excluded from the public funds resizing for the publishing due to its nature of private radio broadcaster active according to law no. 230 of 7 August 1990.
The law recognizing "private radio broadcasters which do activities of general interest information" was approved in 1990 to recognize the radio broadcasters which had broadcast "own information programmes about political, religious, economical, social, unions related or literary events for not less than nine hours between 7 am and 20 pm" and "extended the number of plants to the 50 per cent of the provinces and the 85 per cent of the Regions".
Among with the other entities receiving public funds, Radio Radicale is the only one having a national network and spends over €3.7 million every year just for the technical management, and it is also the only one which dedicates almost all the schedule to broadcast service public programmes.
Schedule and programmes.
The schedule revolves around parliamentary sessions accordingly to an agreement with former Ministry of Communications (now part of Ministry of Economic Development), covering over 60% of sessions of both Houses through the 8-20 time slot. During the residual time, Radio Radicale tries to document also the activities of other institutions (Communal Councils, Court of Audit, High Council of the Judiciary, European Parliament), as well as congress, festivals and major meetings of all political parties, those organized by trade and labour unions, demonstrations, important press conferences, debates and book presentations.
News bulletins are broadcast every day and they are built around interviews and reading of news provided by press agencies.
Space dedicated to the politicians and parliamentarians in particular is a typical characteristic of RR, tough it is a party branch and so it can not respect the "par condicio", and offers a certain balance across the political groups. Politicians often participate in a programme, called "Filodiretto" (Direct line), where they dialogue with listeners without access limitations but with only a bond of 40 seconds for each call. In recent years these programmes are reduced but the Radio invites a politician every week.
An historical programme of Radio Radicale was "Conversazione settimanale con Marco Pannella" (Weekly conversation with Marco Pannella), aired from 2001 to January 2016. Former director of the Radio, Massimo Bordin, (alternating with Valter Vecellio) interviewed Marco Pannella about themes regarding politics and initiatives of radicals.
At midnight there is the reading of front pages of the newspapers of the following day and this programme starts the night schedule, when events not broadcast in the daytime schedule are aired along with recordings taken and selected from the archive.
Closed.
Since 1980, Radio Radicale has broadcast pieces of requiems during the breaks between programmes as a symbol of mourning, and protest, in front of deaths for hunger which occurs every day. The most used are those from the Requiem in D minor, composed by W. A. Mozart, but other classical music pieces are broadcast, like the "Dies Irae" from "Messa da Requiem" by Giuseppe Verdi and rarely the "Sanctus" from the Requiem by Gabriel Fauré.