TORONTO – Visitors to the CBC’s popular web source, www.cbc.ca, over the past few days will have noticed a dramatic overhaul of the service.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the public broadcaster’s site was due for re-design and this one began over a year ago, with a survey of more than 5,000 audience members, asking what people liked and disliked about the web site. The results of that survey, combined with the feedback CBC.ca gets daily through e-mail, phone calls and online forms, formed the basis of the redesign project, says a press release.
Since there is a large appetite…
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MONTREAL – The Alliance for Children and Television handed out its annual awards for excellence in French language youth television in Montreal on Thursday.
A total of 10 awards were given out.
The grand prize for best program, sponsored by CBC/Radio-Canada, is Zone3’s Cotoons (which aired on Radio-Canada). The show is a 3D program for preschoolers, blending live-action and animation.
For the full list of award-winners, click here.
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TORONTO – Krista Harris, executive director, digital programming and business development for CBC’s English Networks, died suddenly on the weekend in her home town of Barrington, N.S. She was 42.
This comes as a great shock to all of us," said a CBC memo from radio head Jane Chalmers and CBC TV chief Richard Stursberg. "Krista was a cherished colleague and a fervent supporter of CBC and of public broadcasting, one who had worked her way up through the ranks of the corporation over the last twelve years, first in the Maritimes and then at the network."
Since joining…
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FORT MCMURRAY – OK Radio’s Fort McMurray country station 93.3 CJOK this week refused to run a series of spots that Economic Development Lethbridge tried to purchase, reports cbc.ca.
The series of ads targeted Fort McMurray’s hyper growth rate – driven by the expansion of oil sands development – by saying the town wasn’t better than Lethbridge, just more expensive – urging people to think of Lethbridge instead, which is nearly 1,000 kms from Fort McMurray.
A Lethbridge spokesperson said that the ads were meant as a humorous jab at Fort McMurray, and reminding Albertans about the province’s…
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VANCOUVER – Tens of thousands of Telus customers in British Columbia and Alberta lost their voice mail access this week, say reports.
On Tuesday afternoon this week, says cbc.ca, about a quarter of Telus customers were without access to voice mail for six hours. Callers could leave messages, but they couldn’t be retrieved, nor would the recipient know a message is there.
According to the cbc.ca story, the system went down again Wednesday morning, affecting 250,000 customers.
Telus blamed the problem on faulty software and said that no messages were lost.
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TORONTO – For two days next week, dozens of CBC Television and Radio personalities from across the country will lend their voices to VoicePrint, the specialty service that provides full-text audio broadcasts of the most popular newspapers and magazines to millions of vision impaired Canadians.
The two days of reading, which will happen May 31 and June 1, are part of VoicePrint’s Celebrity Reader Days, designed to build awareness for the national service and will be heard on VoicePrint July 4th to 7th.
CBC hosts, including George Stroumboulopoulos, Roger Abbott, Mark Kelley, Jeannie Lee, Terri Campbell and others, will donate…
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OTTAWA – Distributing separate feeds simultaneously is currently a no-no for national sports service The Sports Network, the CRTC said today.
In January, the CBC complained to the Commission that CTV Specialty’s TSN had breached the conditions of its licence by broadcasting NHL hockey games using two simultaneous, national feeds on at least three occasions between October 2005 and December 2005. These games were distributed by cable companies (BDUs) on an analog as well as a digital basis.
The Commission agreed with CBC and found that TSN’s use of two simultaneous national feeds when broadcasting a pair of games…
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TORONTO – The senior executive shuffles continue at the CBC.
Last week, the Corp announced that Sally Catto is returning to CBC Television as Creative Head of Drama, replacing Susan Morgan, who quit last week. Morgan was in the position since 2003.
From 2001 to 2005, Catto served as an executive in charge of production for drama at CBC Television and was responsible for the development, licensing and production of a broad menu of drama for broadcast, acted as story editor on projects in development, selected submissions from writers and producers to become part of our development slate, and supervised…
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SUDBURY – The Radio-Television News Directors Association of Canada presented its Central Canadian awards at the Regional Professional Development Seminar in Sudbury Saturday evening.
The 2005 TELEVISION winners are:
Bert Cannings Award – Best Newscast
* A-Channel London for Lynda Shaw’s Killer – (Medium Market) * CTV Montreal for CTV NEWS AT 6 The December 16 Blizzard – (Large Market)
Charlie Edwards Award – Spot News
* Global News – Ontario for Man on Fire * CTV Toronto for The Boxing Day Shootings – (Honourable Mention)
Dan McArthur Award – In-depth/Investigative
* City TV in Toronto for Fabry’s Drug…
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TORONTO – Corus Entertainment and the CBC announced today that the public broadcaster will purchase Corus’ 53% ownership in The Documentary Channel.
As CBC/Radio-Canada currently owns 29% of The Documentary Channel, this agreement will give it majority interest and control of this digital service, currently available in approximately 950,000 Canadian homes. The National Film Board of Canada (14%) and four Canadian production companies – Omni Film (1%), Cinenova Productions (1%), Barna-Alper Productions (1%) and a numbered company (1%) – also have minority positions in the service.
"This is excellent news for CBC/Radio-Canada. Documentary programming is a core part of…
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