THERE HAS BEEN LITTLE we at Cartt.ca have written about over the years that has garnered the volume of feedback as our series about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which we’ve published over the past six weeks through our Cartt.ca INVESTIGATES portal.
Unsurprisingly, most of that feedback has been sent to us tagged “not for publication” or “not for attribution.” However, while we’d like to publish, verbatim, some of the responses we’ve fielded, we don’t mind unpublished chit-chat. It’s informative, helpful and often entertaining. We note at the bottom of many of our stories that if you want to talk to us electronically – or over the phone – we’ll talk with anyone and keep your name out of it if or when we publicly fulminate on the ideas people leave with us, on any topic.
So below, you’ll read some of those ideas about and for the CBC which have found their way into our e-mailbox, interspersed with a couple of our own. The vast consensus is the Corp is probably doing the best it can, given its history, its size, the vast constituency is must serve, the always white-hot political climate surrounding its news coverage and sometimes its existence – all while facing the many variables every media company must deal with. Its digital moves, such as CBC Music and its impending digital station launch in Hamilton have been met with praise – while criticism has been reserved only for the perceived slowness of the Corp’s digital embrace so far.
However, the federal government’s choice to cut the CBC’s parliamentary appropriation by $115 million (which CBC management says will amount to $200 million) over the next three years should dramatically accelerate the digital push and leads us to our opener.
1. Shutting the 620 analog TV transmitters which the CBC had not upgraded to digital (and truthfully, had no plans for) was the only choice that could have been made. Sure, places like Timmins, Ontario, Brandon, Manitoba and Baie Comeau, Que., won’t be able to get CBC TV off-air by midsummer, but the number of people who watch traditional terrestrial TV off-air is awfully small.
I used to dispute that, predicting doom for the industry as analog transmitters were shut off, but if there were a great many people watching off-air TV, we would have heard a far louder hue and cry on September 1, 2011 when the transmitters whose signals cover the most Canadians were permanently switched to digital.
Plus, closing the transmitters was the only choice the federal government left CBC management.
2. Why not drop English language supper hour newscasts in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver? These are expensive shows to produce, earn little revenue and the markets are already very well-served by the private broadcasters (overly-so in Toronto). We’re not saying pull out of those big markets and do no local news. Far from it, actually. We’re saying let’s really go digital and take the news off TV, show something else and go fully online.
This is what the corporation is doing in Hamilton, for example, building and launching a digital-only station. Digital stations is what it will build in Kamloops, Kitchener-Waterloo and other places, as well.
CBC News could then forget about holding things for six o’clock or putting together packages of news which need to fit neatly into the same tiny slots that every other broadcaster is doing. Why be a “me too?” So many of the supper hour broadcasts are identical. The broadcasters show up to the same news events, ask the same questions and put out the same length of stories in almost the same order.
It would be liberating for the journalists and producers and CBC News consumers to be free of the six o’clock rat race where fewer and fewer Canadians tune in for news at that time anyway. Instead of cramming an item into a minute-thirty and waiting for it to air then, it could be, say a five minute segment, featuring more content, then posted and promoted whenever it is ready – scooping the privates by potentially, several hours.
Not surprisingly, the CBC’s head of English Services, Kirstine Stewart, disagrees. “Today, we still find ourselves in a world where people still largely want the half-hour news hit at the end of the day,” she told Cartt.ca when asked about thinking this far out of the box, this soon. “We’re not ready yet to abandon the traditional methods because Canadians don’t seem to be willing to let it go yet.
“We’re living in a world of transition right now and not one we can totally let go of the tradition of a half hour newscast… “Canadians still think the CBC’s news is different, whether it’s six o’clock or ten o’clock.”
3. Keep Jeopardy at 7:30. This decision has already been made. Stewart is on record saying it and Wheel of Fortune are toast. Yes, they’re American shows (cue evil-empire soundtrack…) but the Alex Trebek-helmed program provides, still, a strong lead-in to the CBC’s evening line-ups. BBM ratings through the first week of April show Jeopardy rating much higher than Coronation Street (the show preceding it) while the programs which air right after it, like Mr. D. on Mondays, holding that audience, in the tough 8 p.m. slot.
After arguing in favour of moving more quickly to digital and dumping the local supper hour newscast to take it online, it may sound quaint to now say that ratings are still kept and shows built by the fact that people don’t change the channels between them, but it’s true. As Stewart noted, we are still in transition here.
4. Petitioning the CRTC for the right to carry ads on Radio 2 and Espace Musique is a half-measure likely to be turned down by the Commission. The private radio broadcasters with their effective lobbyists and lawyers will see to it this idea is torpedoed by the Regulator. Besides, the revenue potential of ads on these secondary CBC Radio brands seems pretty small to these eyes.
Better would be to ask for advertising on the station which is the ratings leader in so many markets: CBC Radio One (yes, I know, “gasp! Ads!”). However, the ask would not be for the right to cram the much-loved CBC Radio stream with innumerable 30-second spots, but to ask the Commission for something untraditional – for the right to sell sponsorship – with limits on how much ad time it can air.
The compromise may mollify the private broadcasters (okay, maybe not) and would give the Commission a way to allow the CBC to pursue more revenue in a way that will lessen the impact on the privates in their local markets. Sponsorships and the limited ad time would be positioned to clients as the premium product it really is. Q with Jian Ghomeshi brought to you by Chapters.ca. Sudbury’s Points North with Jason Turnbull brought to you by Xstrata, for example.
5. Why are there ads on The National? The surest way to differentiate that news broadcast from every other one – and everything else on at 10 p.m. – would be to drop the advertising. I don’t pretend to know how much The National brings in, but it can’t be megabucks. No ads on The National would make it stickier (maybe making it a better lead-in for George Stroumboulopoulos’s lightly watched late night show), and give it far more time and freedom to explore, to perhaps add more news items – some maybe even gleaned from the CBC`s many digital reporters spread in smaller regions all about the country.
6. Why doesn’t CBC experiment more? I asked on Twitter last week why the CBC doesn’t have a group of young media mavens working on the next thing, making videos, doing news, comedy, whatever. Just throwing digital stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks? I used Burlington’s Corey Vidal as an example when I put the query out there.
Vidal gained fame a few years ago with his a capella Star Wars mashup (16 million-plus views), but he’s not some one-hit YouTube wonder (as he was accused of after speaking on a panel at the CMPA Prime Time Conference a couple of years ago – a comment that put a bit of a chip on his shoulder about this industry). He has taken that initial notoriety and built a business. He now employs 16 (including writers, producers, technicians) in what is essentially a new digital production company. They do what they think is fun or interesting or funny and are 100% Canadian content. Vidal’s ApprenticeA Productions group makes their money sharing ad income with YouTube and shooting edgy, advertising or promotional videos for clients like Google and Lucasfilm. He says he doesn`t care about being on TV.
Why can’t CBC fund something like this? Of course, a group like this couldn’t be employees, because I doubt there are slots in the Guild’s job descriptions for a bunch of twentysomethings who all live in the same house together, do what amuses them/makes them some money (like videoing themselves playing video games) while getting up at the crack of noon.
But could the CBC set aside a million dollars as a kind of CBC Venture Fund and learn from a young, dynamic team pushing the boundaries? This is part of the new face of Canadian content, after all.
7. Run the CBC like CPAC. Our Cable Public Affairs Channel is funded by Canadian cable companies and left alone by those funders. It has a ton of programming obligations (like airing the House of Commons debates) but is carried low on the dial by everyone in both languages and has no advertising at all. What if the private broadcasters were asked buy the feds to form a public-private consortium, given the same billion dollars to run the CBC with all of its existing assets – but with a programming mandate to be as different from the privates as possible and to develop and air programming that is nowhere else on the dial?
Now that`s a radical idea. What would the CBC look like then?
As you can see, there are as many ideas for what the CBC can be or should do as there are people working in this business. What do you think? Are these ideas astute or asinine? Let us know at editorial@cartt.ca.
