Popular Solomon Islands radio presenter Linton Kereone says it’s important to connect with his audience and to service the community.
“Factual information is very vital in our society,” Kereone says.
“We need to share information that is important for our living, news on happenings, especially the national government and other issues such as the weather information, that I have just talked about, which is very important to save our lives.”
Kereone works for the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC) whose radio arm – dubbed the ‘voice of the nation’ – serves a population of around 800,000 and has been doing so since 1977.
SIBC’s headquarters is located in the suburb of Rove in Honiara with programming from its four radio stations reaching the country and the whole of the Pacific via terrestrial signal and online.
“Our radio is on our website and anybody around the world can listen,” says CEO Johnson Honimae.
“And now we have a lot of our workers in Australia and New Zealand, they send us a line every now and then and they’re listening here, so it is basically not only in Honiara, the capital, but for the radio, in the rest of the country.”
SIBC’s team of reporters and producers work through the day and into the evening to meet their deadlines in English and in the local pidgin language.
Journalist Alfred Pagepitu is kept busy updating the daily bulletins.
“So we prepare our news and then we put it on our news preparation, after that and then they send it for the 10 o’clock news bulletin and also 6 o’clock,” he says
“So after the news we have another programme there, our current affairs. That’s when we detail the story for our listeners.”
Government owned, SIBC receives around 30% of budget from the state with the balance coming from advertising and other commercial activities, events and promotions.
“Even government departments, they have to pay whether they’re running a show or one of the special events like a day, where we charge them that commercial rate. So that’s basically how we get funded.” says Honimae.
Since November 2023, SIBC has also branched into providing a television service with many staff juggling roles to meet their programming needs.
With his multi-tasking team hard at work, the expansion into television has successfully progressed, with future plans to produce more homemade content.
“One or two from technical… and forming a TV team that would do nothing but produce TV programs,” Honimae says.
“So we’re getting there slowly but surely.”
And SIBC’s TV news offerings can sometimes be spotted on Tagata Pasifika weekly news wrap from the Pacific Islands.
