THE GOODS : Bringing World News to Your Ears

And now for the day’s top stories:

“Lawyers defending former president Kamuzu of Malawi, on trial for murder, say the accused will not testify in court.”

“Two Dutch researchers say Prince Bernard, the father of Holland’s Queen Beatrice, was a member of Germany’s Nazi party from 1933 to 1937.”

“The Czech Minister of Health admitted that all medical personnel should be receiving higher salaries.”

Didn’t catch these stories earlier this week? You’ve got a good excuse, even if you’re an international news hound. Each of these stories were of such great interest in various parts of the world that they headlined a country’s shortwave radio news broadcast.

But over here, it’s a good bet they were not even mentioned on the radio, just as stories of great importance to us didn’t merit any time on Channel Africa News, Radio Netherlands or Radio Prague.

Until very recently, if you wanted to monitor these and other broadcast services, you had to be an avid follower of shortwave schedules and be willing to put up with static and other forms of interference. This might have made you more a citizen of the world, but it didn’t leave much time for a social life.

I, however, was able to listen to all three of these shortwave broadcasts, plus several others, in one sitting at my desk. The Internet, which has already given us the ability to access text and graphics from all over the world, now also allows us to hear the world’s news broadcasts.

Welcome to World Radio Network, a London-based Internet site (https://town.hall.org/ Archives/radio/ Mirrors/WRN/audio.html) that offers computer users, with the click of a mouse, access to news broadcasts direct from the English-language services of 19 shortwave outlets.

They include, in addition to the aforementioned, KBS Radio Korea, Radio Austria, Deutsche Velle from Germany, RTE Irish News, the Voice of Russia, RadioVlaauderen of Belgium and the Voice of America.

All you need is a connection to the World Wide Web with a fairly fast modem--a 14.4 megabyte baud speed is the minimum needed for comfortable listening--and a piece of software called RealAudio. You can download that software, for free, from a site easily accessed via the World Radio Network page. One caveat: If you get to the Internet through online services such as America Online, you may not be able to use RealAudio, yet.

With the software in place, you simply go back to the WRN page and click on the radio broadcasts you want to hear. The audio is far from digital quality--because RealAudio signals have been compressed to make them instantly accessible, the sound is a bit distorted. Actually, the sound is very much like shortwave broadcasts tuned in on the radio, but without the static.

WRN was created four years ago by three ex-BBC executives who wanted to explore alternatives to shortwave. “We saw a movement away from shortwave in international radio because of its limits as a delivery system,” said WRN manager, Karl Miosga, in a telephone interview from London. “The programming is very interesting, educational and makes the world a smaller place, but it took such an effort just to hear it.”

He and his colleagues established an international public radio service that took English-language feeds from various broadcasters, all of whom paid a fee to support the service, and edited them together to produce a 24-hour a day, satellite feed. The sound on the satellite service is digital quality, but the listener has no control over which country’s broadcast he or she will hear at a given time.

WRN launched its “audio-on-demand” Internet site in July, and it quickly became popular. “We started with 50 to 60 visits a day,” Miosga said. “Now it’s up to a thousand a day.” WRN plans eventually to put broadcasts in languages other than English on its satellite and Internet services.

I’d like to tell you more, but I’m eager to tune into Channel Africa’s newscast to see if anything happened today in the trial of the former Malawi president accused of murdering four political rivals. The trial has been going since July, there are teams of lawyers on both sides and more than 100 people have testified so far.

Sound familiar?

* Cyburbia’s e-mail address is David Colker.latimes.com.