TORONTO – Henry Champ is the 2009 recipient of the Radio-Television News Directors’ Association of Canada (RTNDA) President’s Award.
The RTNDA’s “highest honour” is presented annually to recognize individuals or groups that have brought distinction to, or made major contributions to broadcast journalism.
Champ’s career began over 40 years ago as a newspaper reporter in Brandon, Manitoba. He has been an investigative reporter for CTV’s W5, worked for NBC News, and in 1993, moved to Halifax to join the anchor team of CBC Morning News, before becoming CBC Newsworld’s correspondent in Washington, DC. While recently retired, Champ still writes…
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TORONTO – We know you’ve heard this before, but Canadian radio executives believe that they are well-positioned to weather – and then quickly recover from – the recession, because of… their local focus.
That was the message Thursday afternoon during the radio executive session at Canadian Music Week at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. On the panel were Denise Donlon, CBC’s executive director of radio; Paul Ski, head of Rogers Radio; CHUM Radio EVP Chris Gordon; Newcap CEO Rob Steele; Corus Radio Ontario head Chris Pandolf; and Ian Lurie, who oversees Astral Radio’s English language stations. CBC journo…
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CANADIAN HERITAGE MINISTER James Moore told reporters at the Canada Media Fund announcement that CBC will receive "record" funding from the government this year, something his parliamentary secretary – Dean Del Mastro – later repeated in the House of Commons.
Sort of true.
In 1990-91, the CBC received $1,078 billion from the government. In today’s dollars, that would be $1.5 billion. Those were the days when the public broadcaster still had a very strong presence in local markets across the country. And because of the apparent lack of flexibility from the government this year, the CBC will likely have…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC will hold a public hearing to determine whether the way that CBC re-branded specialty channel ‘Country Canada’ to ‘bold’ has negatively impacted “the integrity of the licensing process”.
CBC re-launched its category 1 specialty Country Canada as bold on March 27 2008, after telling the Commission that the change could be done without amending the nature of service of Country Canada.
That channel’s description at launch was as follows:
The licensee shall provide a national English-language Category 1 specialty television service for rural Canadian families, with a focus on adults 25-54. The service will provide information,…
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TORONTO and OTTAWA – Television industry stakeholders continue to weigh in on the new Canada Media Fund (CMF) announced Monday.
CTV said in a statement that they “welcomed” the Fund, and “applauded the proposal (for) striking down antiquated rules that prevented broadcaster investment in the creation of high-quality Canadian programs for both broadcast and digital platforms.”
"Congratulations to Minister Moore for recognizing the importance of audience success and for putting the audience first in the creation of this fund. All of us in media exist to serve the audience," said Ivan Fecan, president and CEO…
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TORONTO – The first casualties of CBC’s long-rumoured programming cutbacks have been identified.
The public broadcaster announced Tuesday that it will drop two of its daytime shows. Lifestyles program ‘Steven and Chris’ will go “on hiatus” until next season effective April 15, while ‘Fashion File’, which has run for 19 years, will wrap up production at the end of this month, and not return next season.
CBC’s executive director of network programming, Kirstine Layfield, said in the release that the decisions were made “as a result of our current financial situation”, and both shows will air in repeats as part of a revamped afternoon schedule.
"We remain committed…
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TORONTO – Getting funding to make television in Canada is about to get a whole lot different.
Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore announced today the Canadian Media Fund, a combination of the existing Canadian Television Fund and the Canadian New Media Fund.
The new fund, according to the Minister will be “reformed and rebranded” through a radically different partnership with the groups who provide the funding (government, DTH, cable and telco TV providers) and those who spend it (the production community). Its mandate will be to ensure the production of quality content and to make it available on multiple…
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TORONTO – Reaction to the new Canadian Media Fund (CMF) was predictably mixed, but the consensus seems to be that the distributors got what they wanted.
For starters, the CMF’s new “streamlined” and “independent” board will be made up of seven members – two appointed by the government, and the other five nominated by the fund’s five largest contributors, namely Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Videotron and Cogeco. The old board had 21 members, and was dominated by producers and cultural groups.
Minister Moore confirmed that the five members cannot be current employees of these companies, but, as to whether they…
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OTTAWA – We’d almost forgotten about it, but the federal government just might release its decision on the Canadian Television Fund next week.
A source with knowledge of the decision’s timing told Cartt.ca this week that Heritage Minister James Moore may have an announcement as early as Monday.
The fund has spent a lot of the past 24 months defending itself and making a few changes in the way it does things. This impending release and any potential changes in how the $250 million in annual TV production money is collected and doled out was spurred on by the…
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MONTREAL – Saying it’s “deeply concerned about the public broadcaster’s future”, the Syndicat des communications de Radio-Canada (SCRC) is calling on the federal government to provide “adequate funding for CBC/Radio-Canada, even in these difficult times.”
In a statement entitled “Don’t Strangle the CBC”, the SCRC said that the Canadian government “is placing the CBC/Radio-Canada under unacceptable financial pressure” by allocating only $34 per taxpayer to public broadcasting per year, and “countries that care about their national culture”, such as the U.K. and France, spend four to five times as much in order to maintain a strong public broadcasting system….
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