IDC to launch Israel's first bilingual student radio station

Guest experts and lecturers, as well as politician and business moguls will participate in various shows.

By MEL BEZALEL
IDC students at the radio station 248.88 (photo credit: Courtesy)
IDC students at the radio station 248.88
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Israel's first student-run bilingual radio station, IDC Radio 106.4FM, is to be launched by the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya's Sammy Ofer School of Communications in two months. The station, to be run in cooperation with Israel Radio, will feature Hebrew and English talk shows, as well as music, and will be produced and presented by the school's Israeli and English-speaking students, airing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fifty students from the communications school will run the station in the first semester, and management will then open it up to the whole IDC student body. Students will be in charge of all editing, technical work, music editing, production and broadcasting. Plans to broadcast shows in Spanish are also under way, though a launch date for this venture has not yet been set. In addition, an IDC Web radio station is in the pipeline, to be produced by the Rafael Recanati International School, which will broadcast content to Jewish communities around the world. Around 1,000 IDC students (one-fifth) are from 60 countries outside of Israel. Seventy percent of the school's foreign students eventually make aliya. Although the schedule is still being finalized, shows that have been commissioned include a debating show that will showcase the university's international award-winning debating team, and an English feature currently titled "Time out," which will connect IDC students with peers around the world on issues such as Israeli politics and the Diaspora. Guest experts and lecturers, as well as politician and business moguls will also participate in various shows. Radio station manager Guy Eitingon, who is also director of content development and business initiatives at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications, commented: "We're going to be bilingual, which is a first... and we also have cutting-edge equipment. One fifth of students at IDC are from abroad, so it's a very impressive project, especially on this magnitude." IDC Radio will benefit from nine impressive studios, one including an audience gallery and two fitted with cameras. The studios received a citation from the Globes Real Estate Conference under the category "engineering project with creative solutions" in April this year.