Saturday, Nov. 17, 2018 – Saturday, Nov. 17, 2018

01:00 PM – 02:00 PM
US/Central

Public radio educates us about the world not just in the United States, where many of us listen to National Public Radio (NPR): it does this in many of the world’s 200 other countries. In Europe, national public radio companies arose in the 1920s, half a century before NPR in America. We can find them all in the European Broadcasting Union at www.ebu.ch/about/members. One of them is Český rozhlas (Czech Radio) at www.rozhlas.cz. Today ČRo offers us 602,000 audio files online, and it adds a hundred or more new ones each day. It’s an enormous body of journalism about our world from one small country in Europe, the work of thousands of people who speak to us about their knowledge, lives, ideas and perspectives. We can listen to their stories whenever we want. We can even download many to our smart phones and carry them with us.

For the many Texans interested in the Czech Republic or the Czech language, ČRo can be a life-changing resource, companion and community. But even if you have no special interest in things Czech, join us for a discussion about Czech Radio as one example of how the global information revolution offers us access to radio journalism around the world and in other languages, and how we can use it to change ourselves and our world for the better.

About the presenter: David Chroust, PhD, is a historian on the faculty at Texas A&M University Libraries. He is interested in the global information revolution and global migration. He speaks Czech, English, German and Russian, and he has lived, worked and traveled in many countries, from Russia and Japan to Guyana.