TORONTO – As Shaw Communications continues to examine its new TV broadcasting division, the former Canwest Global, a number of executives will be leaving the company, or have had their roles downgraded, Cartt.ca has learned.
According to sources, among those departing are long-serving executives Brett Manlove, VP of Global TV’s British Columbia stations and general manager of Global B.C. (26 years); Karen Gelbart, SVP lifestyle specialty channels, who came to Canwest with the Alliance Atlantis purchase, a company she had been with since 1997; and Patrick O’Hara, vice-president of Global TV’s eastern stations and general manager of Global Toronto (20-plus years).
Shaw has hired management consulting firm Boston Consulting to work the management team announced last month to determine the structure of the rest of the organization.
There are “definitely a bunch of changes to roles and titles,” said a source who asked not to be named. “Everyone has moved down a level on titles – very few VPs left.”
In a memo to staff circulated Monday (which didn’t say who, exactly was leaving) Shaw Media president Paul Robertson noted that the ongoing changes “will bring together the unstoppable combination of content and distribution,” but also that the company is only “part way through the organizational design process.”
The memo also reads:
• In order to create a more focused organization and support effective decision making, the reporting structure for our local stations is shifting to a functional orientation. For example, News – local and national – will form a single team under the leadership of Troy Reeb, and Sales – both local and national – will form a single organization under the leadership of Errol Da-Re.
• The Content group will also reorganize around function to emphasize and give maximum support to the key disciplines that build our audiences – the acquisition of content, commissioning of original programs, and scheduling.
• In News, we are working to build a newsgathering network that can serve our audiences original and locally relevant information at any time on any platform. To this end, we have created a single news management team. It will be the first time that a single team has worked to develop all of our resources – national, local, online and current affairs.
Further organization changes will be announced by the end of January, added Robertson.
