Radio College Park

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Radio College Park [1] is the oldest operational Persian podcast in the entire world[citation needed] and a weekly audio program produced by a group of Iranian graduate students at the University of Maryland at College Park. The subjects of the programs of this podcast include science, society, art, entertainment, history, literature, interview, and report. Each program is constructed of 3 to 5 parts each produced by one of its collaborators.

Contents

[edit] History

The idea of Radio College Park first started in Spring 2005 when a group of graduate students at the University of Maryland discussed how to create a podcast to share some of their ideas with the other members of the Iranian community at the University of Maryland in particular and the other Persian speakers in the world in general. The technical issues were investigated and addressed, and the idea was spread out to include other Iranian graduate students at the school. Sections of the first few programs were also produced and the date of the first program was announced through the listserv of the Iranian graduate students. Finally, the first program of the Radio College Park was broadcasted on June 24, 2005. In its first year of operation, Radio College Park had 52 weekly programs and one special program for the occasion of Nowruz, the Persian New Year.

[edit] Sections

The website of the Radio College Park has different sections. In its home page, weekly programs can be accessed and the complete audio file for the programs as well as the individual sections can be listened to. The programs are presented in several audio formats including mp3, real and zip. Also programs are recorded and presented in two level of quality where the lower quality version is smaller and easier to download and is useful for people with low-speed Internet connection especially those in Iran.

In another section of the website called as Photo Album, a series of photo albums are generated with narration of the camera person. This helps the user to know more about the subject of the pictures by hearing about them.

Audio Book is another section where different books and novels read by some of the collaborators of the radio are presented.

News feeds generated using the RSS (file format) technology is another section of the website where the latest news headlines are gathered from several respected new agencies and radio and TV channels.

[edit] Seasons

The planning for the radio station is performed on a seasonal basis. Each season consists of 13 programs and the interval has a perfect mapping to the seasons of the nature. For example, the first season (program 1 to 13) started in the begging of the summer 2005 and ended in the end of the summer.

[edit] Featured Programs

Besides the individual sections, the radio has had a set of programs presented as a series. In the longest series, Amirali produced programs on the cultural- and art- related news of the Washington, DC area, the Metropolitan area where the University of Maryland is located. In another series, graduate students of different schools in the U.S. introduced their own schools, the presented programs and also the Iranian communities on their campuses. Also, in a series of interviews made by Bahman, graduate students of the University of Maryland talked about their fields of research.

[edit] Media Coverage

Radio College Park has received a certain amount of attention in the news media and on the Internet. Links to some of these reports can be found in the External Links section. Also, at end of the Persian year 1384 (late March 2006), Radio College Park was selected as the second best podcast of the year after Podcast of the journalist Masoud Behnood, in an online poll conducted by the internet magazine "7 Sang".

[edit] References

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[edit] External links

[edit] Coverage on Weblogs