SO THE QUESTION NOW IS, will Hubert Lacroix, Heather Conway and Louis Lalande be able to move the internal mountains necessary to transform the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from a traditional TV and radio broadcaster to a mobile and digital-first outfit?
Thursday’s announcements surely talked a good game (from an outsider’s point of view anyway. We know those of you inside are looking at 1,500 more lost jobs and are not viewing that as anything approaching “good”), but can the CBC really view everything it does through the viewfinder of a smartphone camera and find, as its new strategy is called, “A space for us all"?
CEO Lacroix says he is done with having to make cuts every year just in order to make budget. In April he was forced to eliminate another 657 positions, and said during a press conference Thursday afternoon that about a third of the 1,000 to 1,500 jobs to be lost between now and 2020 will happen in the next 12 to 15 months.
A smaller CBC will continue with radio much as it has, but TV will be pared back to the essentials of news and current affairs. Some supper hour newscasts will be cut to 30 minutes from their current 60 or 90. More and deeper partnerships with independent producers will become the norm. Two million square feet of real estate will be sold off. Conway, Lacroix and Lalande say their content will be geared towards digital and mobile distribution and less around the traditional outlets. Already, more than half of the people getting CBC news online do it with a mobile device, said Conway.
“We’re not shutting down our over-the-air transmitters.” – Hubert Lacroix, CBC
However, the public broadcaster will not be taking other cost-saving steps some have suggested, such as turning off its TV transmitters or getting out of kids programming. “We’re not shutting down our over-the-air transmitters. As you know we have a regulatory system in the country that forces us to have them up if we want to be distributed in the places where we do original programming,” said Lacroix during the press conference. Indeed, cable, IPTV and satellite companies must carry all off-air broadcasters in their territories, but if those broadcasters have no transmitter, that requirement for the carriers goes away.
Lacroix added though, that he has thought about shutting the transmitters which, according to broadcasters we have talked to, can cost anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000 a month to power. “The conversations over the next years, I hope, will be focused on (the OTA carriage requirements) because as you know, 90-some percent of Canadians pick up their signals through a cable or satellite company, so that’s to come. But, in the context of this plan”, Lacroix added, the transmitters are staying.
“We will not abandon radio and television as platforms that are really key to Canadians,” he added later.
Also staying is children’s programming. Critics (like us) have noted there are myriad ways both inside and outside of Canada for parents and their kids to find entertaining or educational content and perhaps it’s an expense the CBC can cut. “There is no plan to get out children’s programming,” said English Services chief Heather Conway. “We’re successful in children’s programming. We focus on educational children’s programming… we have a very successful digital children’s offering as well and there was no reference to children’s today because there is no plan to change it for the forseeable future.”
“I have a six-year-old and a three-year old… and you know what, they would be really upset with me if we did anything to children’s programming at CBC or Radio-Canada.” – Lacroix
Besides, added Lacroix, “I have a six-year-old and a three-year old… and you know what, they would be really upset with me if we did anything to children’s programming at CBC or Radio-Canada.”
Another key aspect of this new strategy is the fact that the CBC will be creating its own financial buffer – so that it can better deal with ongoing shifts in the media landscape that may require the CBC to staff down, or up, as required. It will now set aside 5% of its commercial revenues (ad dollars earned plus the subscription revenue from the likes of CBC News Network, RDI, artv and the Documentary Channel) per year – about $25 million to $30 million, says Lacroix, to create its own “line of credit”. As a Crown corporation, the CBC is not allowed to go to the bank and ask for such a facility.
“Every time we lose a dollar of revenue, one of two things happens,” Lacroix told the presser, “we either have to take that expense and push it into the next year, where we postpone it or, we make a cut of a dollar. In our environment, 60 cents of every dollar invested in CBC/Radio Canada is a person, a job, so when you take a dollar away, you need to increase severance.”
When realities change in media, so do staffing and other investment requirements and the CBC needs a fund it can call upon that will pay for these alterations on the fly as a normal course of business. So, it has decided to create its own. “We don’t want to be in a position where we always can’t react to this. We want to be able to expand, to contract, based on our management of those situations. We’re simply giving ourselves a management tool. If we are able, and the environment is stable, we’ll reinvest all of those dollars… in our content, or anything that is close to our content that can make our content better,” Lacroix added.
The pain isn’t over at the CBC, (and with so many cuts in private broadcasting over the past while, pain isn’t exclusive to the public broadcaster), but there is now a blueprint, a plan, as Lacroix told staff yesterday, to do things better.
Below is the text of the short e-mail memo sent to staff Thursday evening, after the interactive town hall within the CBC which was reportedly quite heated..
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We asked a lot of you today. We asked you to look at our role differently. For some of you this meant taking some of your deepest and long held beliefs about public broadcasting and turning them on their heads. That’s not an easy thing to do.
I want to reaffirm that I truly believe that the course we have set today will ensure our long-term future. The reality is, as things stand, we are not sustainable. By 2020, we’ll have more control over our destiny. That’s my promise to you.
As we embark on this strategy, content remains, more than ever, the heart of what we do. It is what we do best. It’s where we want to put all our energy. Our job is to provide the highest impact Canadian content out there, and to share it with as many people as possible. We now have a plan to do that better, smarter and longer-term.
I know that some of what you heard today must have come as a shock. So I invite you to read the full plan. Take a look at the video. Despite the understandable focus on cuts, you’ll see that our strategy brings hope. I also want to stress that this strategy will be achieved over time, in many stages and with much further careful consideration and planning.
I heard loud and clear that you want more communications, more information, more time to soak it all in. I know we didn’t get to all your questions. Message received. We will act on that. Meantime, I invite you to ask your questions. Please continue to use questions@cbc.ca – and we’ll do our best to respond. We may not have all the answers right away but as the plan becomes reality we will work together to transform this place, and secure its unique place in the Canadian media landscape of the future.
Cheers,
Hubert
