Vietnam: “Rush Hour” on the radio
Official, wordy and aloof – that has been the sound of Vietnamese radio to date. The tone has tended to be didactic rather than entertaining, boring instead of witty and above all, has been peppered with propaganda in place of information. The regional radio station QTV recently ventured on a new path and at the beginning of April launched a new morning radio show called “Rush Hour”. Since then listeners in Quang Ninh province have been waking up to a different sound. “Rush Hour” offers music, information, entertainment and service segments. Listeners in the northern Vietnamese province can now play an active role as well, voicing their opinions in on-the-street interviews, calling in with traffic news and taking part in listener campaigns and quizzes.
“The idea to introduce an interactive format came from the station itself,” says project manager Thorsten Karg. “Those in charge realized that they didn’t really have any listeners left.” The first workshop module lasted two weeks. During this time the QTV journalists together with Karg and DW-AKADEMIE trainers Aarni Kuoppamäki and Marc Seidel developed the “Rush Hour” concept. “We received a lot of support from the station’s management in this,” Karg adds.
That the concept would be a success was clear to all those involved when the program went on air for the first time. “Listeners called in to take part in the listener polls,” says Karg. Participant feedback was also very positive. Journalist Tran Thuy Lien said she had been working at the station for a long time but had rarely listened to its programming. “It was too boring and I always turned it off. Today, though, I would have enjoyed listening to the show for two or three hours and not just one.”
That is precisely what the team and the workshop participants are aiming for in the next module. Starting at the end of June they will be working on extending “Rush Hour” to two hours. DW-AKADEMIE will again be supported on location by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Hanoi and the Vietnamese Academy for Journalism and Communication. The institute had conducted research on the use of radio in Quang Ninh province prior to the project’s start and will be monitoring listener acceptance of the new morning show in the upcoming weeks. “This,” says Karg, “will determine how we’ll proceed from here.”