For ten minutes each day for about two weeks this summer, Adventist World Radio (AWR) will add something new to its regular broadcast. It will broadcast highlights of the Seventh-day Adventist Church's General Conference (GC) Session.
In keeping with its mandate to share the Adventist hope in Christ with the hardest-to-reach people groups in their own languages, AWR will work with a team of other Adventist media outlets to produce daily reports of the church's largest business meeting which will be held in St. Louis, Mo., June 30–July 9, 2005. The reports—to be produced in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili—will be broadcast across AWR's global network. Two or three additional ten-minute daily segments will be created in Spanish.
Greg Scott, AWR senior vice president, says he is especially excited about the Swahili segment. "It will be a GC Session first," he explains. Covering GC Session in Swahili reflects the phenomenal growth of the Adventist church in East Africa, says Scott. "We try to look at where the biggest demand would be. We offered to sponsor production of news bulletins in Mandarin for those in China but the Chinese producers in Hong Kong didn't think it was needed." Scott explains that AWR works closely with church leadership to decide what languages are needed for coverage.
Creating the reports will be a team of 15 AWR producers, engineers, and volunteers at the AWR production center in the America's Center exhibit hall. "The production center will be fully outfitted with two production studios and four editing workstations, with the capacity to add four more laptop workstations," said Scott.
AWR's GC Session multilingual news broadcasts will be available through different mediums based on region. English, French, and Spanish will be broadcast on shortwave, satellite, and local radio stations in Europe. Swahili, English, and French will air on local radio stations and shortwave in Africa, and Asia will receive English via shortwave.
Portuguese will air on local radio stations in Brazil and Portugal. The additional Spanish segments will be broadcast on more than 50 local stations in Spain, Central, and South America.
Each news segment will be archived on the Internet at www.gc2005.awr.org.
GC Session News, May 2005
