On November 1st, World Radio Geneva will become World Radio Switzerland. For many years, World Radio Geneva has served yours truly as the "official sound track". This site has linked to their live audio stream and my better bits of code have all been written under the influence of "88.4 FM WRG".

Over the past years, WRG has been operating as a privat local radio station. With the change to WRS, it will become a national public radio station. The new WRS station will have had a turbulent history, if you count all the different bits together.

The swiss public service broadcaster SRG SSR has statutes very similar to Britain's BBC and originally applied for an FM license for WRG with the intention of mainly re-using content produced by Swiss Radio International. However, the license it finally received from the federal government mandated that the station had to be commercial, limiting the ability to re-use Swiss Radio International content.

Swiss Radio International was later forced to focus on internet content, becoming swissinfo , and the SRG SSR made its Radio Suisse Romande (RSR) subsidiary the principal shareholder together with Reuters and the BBC. Recent changes in swiss law made the involvement of the SRG SSR in a commercial radio station again more troublesome and the SRG SSR was forced to either sell WRG entirely or absorb it into its public service structure. The latter is what has happened and as a result WRG will go national as WRS with the blessing of the federal government.

World Radio Switzerland could become a small but important puzzle piece moving us closer towards an anglo-professional and one day maybe an anglo-official future. Switzerland has a unique opportunity in this regard since it does not have to protect its current official languages to the extent necessary in nations like France, Germany and Italy for cultural reasons. Lifting the status of English in Switzerland will have a unifying effect and will re-energize the evolution of our political principals.

Now, on one hand, I'm really excited about the potential of what World Radio Switzerland could become. A WRG-FM equivalent for all of Switzerland would be a fantastic thing to have. It would be the radio channel of my dreams and, more importantly, it would be exactly the medicine Switzerland needs to move its collective consciousness forward in the right direction.

On the other hand, I'm really worried that they'll screw it up and miss that opportunity, because I don't know if they understand themselves what it is that makes WRG-FM tick and whether they can properly translate and scale that to a national level. Assuming the current management of WRG does in fact "get" it, will they be able to defend the genetic code of WRG against the infectious influences that they will be exposed to from other interest groups inside and outside of the SRG SSR?

With the start of World Radio Switzerland, Switzerland is at a cross-roads between ...ehm... no change, and leveraging that media to develop a higher level of self-awareness. Will we miss that opportunity?