Radio ain't what it used to be. Time was, its ability to conquer distance was balanced by an ephemerality that made the sounds snatched from the ether precious. You had to be there, squarely on frequency, when the station ID, the news programme, the No. 1 song was broadcast or it was gone forever; lost in the atmosphere. Not any more.
The rise of the Internet and the rapid adoption of streaming audio and video on the Net made it possible for RTE last week to launch what is effectively a new channel with very little cost or effort. RTE News Online, a major addition to the station's Internet presence, provides an archive of its main news output each day: Morning Ireland and the 1 p.m., 6.01 and 9 p.m. television news bulletins, plus Questions and Answers. These are available as RealAudio and RealVideo clips to be played back hours, days or months after the broadcast. This in itself is a big advance, making these news programs available world-wide over the Net, live or as an archive. For ease of use, the programs each have an index, which means that individual reports within a program can be played back. In Questions and Answers, for example, single questions can be chosen, and any panellist's response chosen individually.
The new site goes beyond giving radio and television news a "memory" accessible to users, however. From 8 a.m. each day, connections to www.rte.ie/news bring up a Web page listing the headlines of the day. These headlines are linked to quite detailed text reports, which in turn carry links to the audio and/or that was broadcast on the subject. The reports also link to other reports on the same subject, so a news event that runs over several days can be followed.
The site is also searchable, with results ordered by relevance or by date. The headlines page, reports and audio/video links are updated regularly through the day until 8 p.m. It is the sum of all this: multimedia news, cross-indexed, searchable and updated continuously that makes this more than just a new website. RTE is making a strong bid for the attention of anyone interested in news from Ireland.