I'd like to begin by clarifying something that came up on the newsgroup
rec.radio.shortwave earlier this week. Someone asked whether Radio
Netherlands had stopped carrying news bulletins. We have, but only in our
evening English broadcasts to North America. The recent budget cuts by the
Dutch government forced us to make some difficult decisions. The overnight
live news/continuity shift had to be abolished to save money. Unfortunately,
that encompasses our midnight, 0100 and 0400 UTC English transmissions to
North America. We discussed whether we should replay older news summaries,
but it was felt that our listeners in western North America particularly
would get a poor deal, with a bulletin that was 7 hours old. We came down on
the side of offering expanded current affairs analysis, something that has
been requested by many of our North American listeners.

Our 1100 UTC transmission to North America still includes a news summary,
but if you can't tune into this, there is now another option: we have a new
E-mail news service for our English-speaking audience: our news items will
be E-mailed to you once a day, seven days a week. A fresh E-mail bulletin is
sent out every day at around 0430 UTC. This service is free of charge, and
you don't even have to give us your full name if you don't want to - just a
valid E-mail address. To sign up, go to
http://www.rnw.nl/cgi/index.php?app=...ews&page=index or click on the
E-mail news link in the top left hand corner of our English home page at
www.rnw.nl.

You can also check our online audio service for the latest broadcast news
bulletin:
http://www.rnw.nl/distrib/realaudio/html/english.html

(Andy Sennitt)