Euronews to begin 24-hour broadcasts in Turkish starting January 2010

This is a bit of an update to a post here back in March on the same thing, but in some more detail on the role TRT (Turkish Radio & Television) is playing in acquiring shares of the company. The original article in Turkish is here.

TRT has acquired a 15.7% share in the international news channel Euronews. In the agreement signed, Euronews will have a 24-hour Turkish broadcast starting in January 2010, its ninth language. The other eight languages Euronews broadcasts in are German, Arabic, Spanish, French, English, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. With this TRT has become the fourth-largest shareholder in Euronews after France Télévisions (25.37%), Italy's RAI (22.84%), and Russia's RTR (16.94%). Starting in January 2010 the Turkish Euronews will be broadcast to the entire world through 34 satellites.

The article also mentions that with this it will now reach 293 million people in 150 countries, compared with the current numbers given on the Euronews Wikipedia page that give 248 million in 135 countries.

The first link to the post in March shows why Euronews is great for learning other languages - all the articles on their site are perfectly synchronized, meaning you can simply hit the button at the top to read the exact same article in a different language without having to find it yourself.

Also, on a political note: for those in the northwest of Iran (Azerbaijan), this will be another way to get news from the outside. BBC Persian does the best job at this, but for those that understand Turkish it will be another way to get another perspective besides the government (Seda va Sima) line.