This post can help to provide you with additional audio material if :

1. You are looking for various opinion-pieces to help round out your views about what many people are talking about in Québec, and

2. If you are learning French, working to improve your French, or are are looking to improve your comprehension of (a) informal French, (b) Joual, (c) street expressions, (d) every-day colloquial accents.

RadioEGO (Ego Radio) is a website which accepts and collates submissions of short radio segments and interviews from around Québec’s world of radio – be it mainstream professional radio stations, or amateur web-based “radio” stations.   The segments are made available for everyone to listen to.

In this sense, RadioEGO could be the equivalent of a “Québec Radio YouTube”.

The website is http://www.radioego.com/

When you open the main page, you will notice it is divided into three sections.   You can chose segments from any of the three sections.   There is also a “search” option for any topic of your choice (just like YouTube).  You can open additional pages at the bottom of each of the three main sections.

If you search for “culture”, for example, you will get a ton of segments.  The results can be quite varied (ie: an interview with the minister of culture, or a segment about a cut in funding to a music conservatory, or perhaps a segment about a summer concert, etc.).  The same goes for any type of topic search.

A growing number of people have started their own “amature” radio stations – and they turn to RadioEGO as a platform on which to post various segments of their radio programs.

There are also other people who are well-known to the public (such as the columnist and blogger Joanne Marcotte) who are regularly invited guests on mainstream radio stations (such as Québec City’s CHOI FM), and who also post their radio-segments on RadioEGO’s website.

Certain mainstream radio stations, such as talk radio Radio9 in Montréal, talk radio CHOI FM (Radio X) in Québec City, 93FM (Québec City), CKOI FM (Montréal) will also post segments of their radio programs (there are other mainstream radio stations which also post their segments)

What is good about this website is that you can sift through tons of radio segments to listed precise topics of interest.

Example:  Let’s say you’ve been following the Parti Québécois leadership race… you may find the radio interviews of Pierre Karle Péladeau, Bernard Drainville, or Alexandre Cloutier to be of interest (all three were leadership contenders).  The audio segments have self-evident titles “Interview with Alexandre Cloutier” or “PKP” or “Drainville”.   The date is provided, as well as the number of other people who have listened to the audio clip (ie:  if you see that 3500 other people have listened to the clip in the last week, chances are that the clip is much more interesting than one which was listened to by only 15 listeners).

Topics are all over the map:  Politics, sports, society, and economics – you name it.

A WORD OF CAUTION:  The contributors are radio columnists/opinion-makers.   None of the programs are to be considered unbiased or objective (although you will run across some interviews and programs which try to bring a more balanced approach).   The website is open to all who wish to contribute their radio programs and segments, but the tendency is that programs are most often a bit towards the right (although there are programs / segments which are a bit more in the centre, and sometimes further on the left end of the spectrum).

With that said, I think there is still something for everyone.  I’m a firm believer that it’s always good to listen to all points of view from all over the spectrum.   That’s how you round out and form your own views, thus allowing you to feel better informed and more comfortable in your own viewpoints.

Bonne écoute !!!