TORONTO – Since acquiring Canwest Global in late 2010, Shaw Communications has not been shy about spending money on its Global Television news department.
Buoyed by the benefits package it agreed to when buying the broadcaster, specifically $45 million worth of commitments to launch morning shows and expand news operations nationally, Shaw Media has dramatically boosted its local Cancon with a morning show in Toronto as well as other public affairs shows in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In all, 110 more hours of news was aired on Global Television this year compared to last, said Shaw Media president Paul Robertson, speaking to media Wednesday morning at the company’s Toronto headquarters. Robertson, content chief Barbara Williams and senior vice-president news operations Troy Reeb all met the media to talk up the mid-season moves of the broadcasting company.
While Williams focused on the second season of Bomb Girls coming up, Big Brother Canada, some additions and deletions on the fall schedule and shows like Slice’s Real Housewives of Vancouver on the entertainment side, Shaw’s news department continued its rapid growth pace.
January will see the opening of a brand new TV studio and morning show in Halifax, a new morning show for Montreal as well a new half-hour national morning program. The company has also targeted March as the launch for its new 24/7 news channel for British Columbia, Global News BC 1. Once all of these new stations are running, the company will have hired over 150 new people on the news side in the two years Shaw has owned the broadcaster, Reeb (pictured speaking to we scribes), told Cartt.ca in an interview.
None of this could have been done, ironically, without the prior work of Canwest in consolidating its master controls in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto. “A lot of that groundwork was laid by Canwest when they were going through all their financial troubles,” noted Reeb, who did much of that himself while in charge of news at the old company. “From a Canwest perspective, it was entirely a cost-cutting exercise, but it has created the most efficient production system that we can find anywhere.
“We use time zones to our advantage, and the control room in Edmonton is the best example. It switches New Brunswick, followed by Halifax, followed by Montreal, followed by Edmonton and then it starts it all over again,” he continued. “What that really allowed us to do was to make an investment in HD control rooms and crews – and to be able to monetize them across multiple stations and multiple platforms the way you couldn’t if you were a standalone.”
The fact that the company has multiple stations all with their own local morning shows (or about to have their own morning shows) led Shaw Media to push the news envelope a little farther with the launch of a half hour, national show which will air from 9-9:30 am. It will be less about hard news and more about discussion and guests and will air on all Global stations. While it will be live at 9 a.m. (ET) and 8 a.m. out east, The Morning Show will be tape delayed, airing at 9 a.m. Central, Mountain and Pacific.
“This is a fantastic way to aggregate what is the largest 25-54 year-old audience in the country (who are watching Global’s breakfast shows),” added Reeb. “If we can even keep 75% of that audience and engage them with a really interesting national show, we’re going to be doing really well… We think that it is positioned differently enough so that is becomes a really good network extension of the morning shows in our markets.”
The show will be up against the U.S. heavyweight of that time slot in Kelly and Michael, as well as Citytv’s Cityline – and the move caused the program that has aired at 9 a.m. on Global seemingly forever, 100 Huntley Street, to be cut to 30 mins, starting at 9:30.
As for Global News BC 1, Reeb believes the new news channel will quickly gain a following and, if it makes business sense, serve as a template for the company to launch similar news channels in other regions. “We’d love to. We’re going to take a look and see how well BC One does first and we’ll have an indication pretty early on what we exepect it to be and if so we’ll look at it as a model for us,” Reeb added.
– Greg O’Brien
