WE ALL KNOW SUN TV (formerly Toronto 1) has had a terribly rough go of it since its launch in September of 2003.
Maybe the CRTC shouldn’t have granted a license for this one. Craig Media got it, went deep into debt to launch it – so deep it had to sell the whole company to get out of it. So, CHUM Ltd. bought Craig, keeping the A-Channels and selling off the new Toronto stick to Quebecor Media – owners of the super-popular broadcaster TVA in Quebec – and a company which has been looking for a way into English broadcasting for some time.
The station has been a ratings dud since launch, featuring old movies and TV shows while trying to carve out a news and information niche in one of the most media-saturated markets in North America. But, changing the name to Sun TV last summer, after Quebecor Media’s Sun Media newspaper empire, specifically The Toronto Sun, was the beginning of a change.
The TV station is to be a key component of a cross-platform convergence of the company’s media outlets – along with the newspaper and Canoe.ca, it’s super-popular web portal. Sun TV officially announced the launch of Canoe Live Monday as its centrepiece current affairs show to go along with sports show Grill Room and somewhat more high profile U.S. shows such as The West Wing and Scrubs.
Heading into the launch of Canoe Live, Sun TV vice-president and general manager Jim Nelles (pictured) and programming general manager Don Gaudet chatted with cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien last week. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: Jim I wanted to start with you first of all. You’re 13 months into the lead job here right?
Jim Nelles: I actually came over originally in the sales area to head up sales and marketing. And then late last March of ’05, I was appointed (general manager).
GOB: How’s this job compared to others you’ve had? Toronto’s a pretty tough market for a TV broadcaster.
JN: I’m having a ball. I’ve always wanted to be in radio and television broadcasting and my background is 10 years with Rogers and also TSN, where I was for three. Before that, I worked in specialty television, radio and conventional television, largely on the sales and marketing side.
GOB: What’s been the most challenging part of the job at Sun TV?
JN: I think it was the recognition that this organization at one time was part of a group of television stations, and so when it was sold to TVA, what we really had to do was go back and develop a station as a stand-alone.
You weren’t looking for Calgary or Edmonton or Winnipeg or Brandon for sharing resources, you were accountable to yourself with the expertise, certainly of the team in Montreal, which has been invaluable. So, I think it was an opportunity, effective in September of last year to start with a blank piece of paper and build a schedule and everything that is required to support it.
GOB: Okay. So, with that blank piece of paper, what’s been some of the best things you’ve drawn on that?
JN: Initially it was to see what things we did right and what things we did wrong. If we have a local program, such as the Grill Room. Should we run it at 10:30 or as we’ve more recently experimented with 11? You know that you’re going to plant a lot of crops, and you’re just not sure, exactly, which ones are going to take root most effectively. So, we have the luxury now of knowing what worked over the past year, to answer your question.
Clearly we see some of our local shows have worked. Some of the other programs that we acquired have worked well. We continue to do movies. We don’t do nearly as many as we used to. I think we were up around 12 movies a week whereas now we’re more or less around five. And some of our acquired programming from U.S. distributors and so on has worked well. We’re building a schedule and I think as we move into what you accurately describe as a very competitive market, we’ll not only be able to optimize some of the programs that we already have, but we’ll look to replace others as they become available.
GOB: What did you learn from the Inside Jam experiment?
JN: I think we learned it was quite effective program. It’s a lot of content to produce every day for, as I say, a stand alone station.
I think our colleagues at other networks like CanWest and CTV and our friends at CHUM would probably say the same thing, that these are ambitious programs. But, it was a lot of fun and we probably would have continued to do it (but) with our decision to embark in this new world on the Canoe Live program, we just couldn’t do both.
GOB: Last year it was said that Sun TV was going to concentrate more on entertainment and sports, is that still what you’re looking at, even with the switch to Canoe Live?
Don Gaudet: Canoe Live is really a current affairs show, in the broadest sense of that word. And I think it can still embrace what we like to call our three pillars of: current affairs; sports; and entertainment. So, it could have a discussion that was sports related, or it might touch on something of an entertainment nature.
But we do want to stay focused on those three key pillars or lighthouses.
GOB: I saw a clip of Canoe Live at the speech that Mr. Peladeau recently made and want to know if that clip is mainly how it’s going to look.
DG: It’s evolving. That clip was what you would see if you were watching it on the net with all the surrounding elements and so on and the broadcast in the middle. That was basically as you would see it, when you stream on Canoe web site.
The program itself will have a lot of those elements, but won’t be as cluttered, per say, within the TV box. Certainly the content, in terms of interaction with our audience, hopefully viewer input, comments, you know, interest from cell phones, things like that, is a big part of what we’re trying’ to do and build citizen journalists out there.
When you start a show from scratch that, obviously, won’t be there on day one, but that’s our intent is to develop that…
JN: I think Pierre Karl mentioned it as a beta phase until we get further down the road perhaps as we go into the fall, so..
GOB: I also wanted to ask you about that too, because when I was down at NAB, one of the suggestions was that TV stations should be a non-stop beta mode where you quickly input and discard things that work and don’t work into the broadcast and on line.
JN: I wouldn’t disagree with that at all… I certainly would agree that for conventional television stations, particularly to be relevant in their communities, they need to be reaching out to those communities and, in fact, this new digital world allows us to not only reach out, but have others reach back to us in a way that never would have been the case in the past.
GOB: How much of the program do you expect the viewer created content will be? The clip I saw showed some minor hockey stuff – some video shots from the stands I guess. How much of the online material do you expect that type of content to be?
DG: Again, I think it’ll develop (but) to start with, probably not a lot. As it grows, the intent of the show is really to use those as the jumping off point for discussion.
But eventually a good percentage of it will be – a good percentage – will be (viewer-created) content. And then when viewers go to the Canoe web site, that’s where they would then be able to go and see, hopefully, lots and lots of content supplied by our viewers.
GOB: Will the style of Canoe Live stay the same as the clip I saw? It was very quick. It went from place to place to place at quite – what I’ve described as – a breakneck speed.
DG: To start with, probably not – and maybe it will never get quite to that speed. You know, that was a demo. It was also done almost two months ago now and its evolved a lot since then.
I think as we get into the show and start actually producing this program day in and day out, things will evolve naturally. We do have a lot of good television professionals putting this together that will look at it and see what works and doesn’t work and take feedback as well.
GOB: Okay.
JN: I suspect (the daily broadcasts) will be guided by a certain issue and how the content and commentary for that issue is delivered. It could very well be somebody commenting in the studio and which sparks some video content the next day that comes into the community. So, we then repurpose it for the television program. On any given day, there could be a variation between how busy the show is.
GOB: Do you anticipate getting from viewers their own Dick Smythe commentary kind of thing? Or are you looking for more news footage from people?
JN: Strictly speaking we’re not a news show. There are a lot of other folks in the marketplace that do news and do it very well and they sort of have heritage positions in this. So, I think, who knows, it could be closer to the Dick Smythe position than say a conventional news, which we know its not.
GOB: Now, you mentioned a little bit about the input from the Toronto Sun. And in the clip I saw it also showed some Toronto Sun editorial meetings. And as you’re probably aware, as other people have mentioned as well as myself, that gets into that bit of regulatory wording that your license has, where you’re supposed to keep the Toronto Sun newspaper and the Sun TV newsrooms separate. How will you address that?
DG: We’re in full compliance with that and we’ve talked to the CRTC. The wording is that our editorial control has to be maintained at the individual operations, which it certainly is. So, just because we’re showing some content from the Toronto Sun editorial meetings, we don’t have the editor of the Toronto Sun saying okay here’s the top story that we’re going to have on our show. That’s being decided by our editorial staff.
Because of the type of shows, what shows up on the front page of the Sun on any given day will probably not be the top story on our show. It may be something from page 10 of the Sun. There will be content overlap for sure, but the editorial control and the decision making in terms of what structure we run and what stories we decide to run with will definitely be controlled on this side of the road.
JN: …it’s not a case of one medium compromising another, but by virtue of the fact that in our case we’re corporately under the same open umbrella, we’re sort of feeling our way into working side by side. And if the Sun has something which we think we might be able to compliment in a slightly different way, but nevertheless, use the idea, then we might go that route.
GOB: I was wondering if you could give me an example of your treatment of a news story, like the budget, which was a top story everywhere this week. Would that be something that leads Canoe Live or would you put a different spin on it?
DG: If it’s a story like that that everybody’s covering, chances are it would be a primary story on Canoe Live as well. But this show is more about public opinion and issues, as opposed to reporting the news. What it would be is going to the street to talk to people about what the impact is on them, and talking to columnists and talking to, financial people, whatever we can do in terms of sourcing resources to talk about what the impact is and assessing it from that side.
GOB: So, you won’t necessarily have a guy in a suit doing’ a standup from Parliament Hill kind of thing?
DG: We’ve actually said we never want to see that on Canoe Live. And I’ll stand corrected if it happens. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
JN: But we’re not news. We don’t want to be traditional, we don’t want to be perceived that way. There is—research shows that about 30% of the viewing audience at 6:00 at night watch the traditional newscast that are currently in the market.
We want to go after that 70% that’s not watching. So, we’re not trying to go compete head to head for viewers of news. That’s why we want our show to be a lot different.
GOB: How much of the TVA infrastructure will you be calling on for programming and news gathering I guess?
DG: For this program, very little if any.
GOB: Okay.
DG: TVA does have a news bureau in Ottawa. If we want a comment from there, we may have, you know, use their physical line to get comments, but it’s not using their people and their resources, you know what I mean?
GOB: I assume there’s been a number of new hires with Canoe Live coming on stream, given the recent layoffs?
DG: We let some people go for Inside Jam. We still do have some staff, ‘cause we’re still producing that as a weekly show and we have a made a few hires. Obviously a host for Canoe Live has been hired, and then we’ve hired a rich media producers that’ll help aggregate that content and actually pull it from the stuff we get from the web site and so on that has to be converted to, you know, TV content of course.
GOB: Tell me a little bit about your additional sort of programming because you’ve got some multicultural sort of you know things that you’ve got to include as well.
DG: Local in-house productions as you know, are Canoe Live, the Grill Room, and Inside Jam which we’re continuing all of those. Then, we have commissioned several independent productions. Echo is a magazine format program which we were very proud of and it’s very unique in that we brought producers together from three different ethnic groups, black, south Asian and east Asian.
We’re quite proud of what it’s doing and what it’s done for the community. Another show is Street Eats, which is a little different slant on your traditional sort of cooking or travel type of show where the two hosts go out into the community here and talk about each show, highlights a different restaurant, but not a fancy sit down.
GOB: The upfront sales market for the fall is coming soon. What’s the message you’ll be carrying to that buyers?
JN: I think there probably several messages. To some extent, one of the senses that we would have is that we have over the past year or so been able to offer them a much more secure environment.
Whether it’s for retail advertisers or national advertisers, we have a pretty broad selection right now, and I think there was a time, I’d rather not go back into it, but there was a time when advertisers didn’t know whether or not, you know, their campaigns would go to air. Nobody knew what was going to happen to the station. But, that level of confidence has changed dramatically to the positive.
GOB: But, you’re still sort of emerging from the negativity that surrounded the launch of Toronto 1 and its lack of success right away.
DG: This year though, we’ve been realistic and I think that’s what the ad community appreciates that we’re meeting and in some cases, exceeding our estimates, which is you know instills confidence that we’re not coming out saying we’re going to be the number one station ‘cause we know we’re not at this stage.
GOB: Do you intend on making a big splash in the fall by getting any sort of large name American programming or show?
DG: I don’t know about a big splash, but we’re certainly looking at that as one of our strategies is can we acquire—I mean we did last fall, we picked up a new US show, Freddie Prinze.
GOB: Last question I had for you was one I ask every broadcaster is your HD plans and where you’re at with that for higher definition?
JN: Well Don may want to follow this, as far as HD is concerned, one of the luxuries, I guess, of this facility built in the last few years is that we’re fully HD ready. We’re already broadcasting some of our programming in HD and we’ll look to broadcast more of it if as and when it becomes available. So, we’re good to go on that one.
GOB: Okay. But no special big push to do Canoe Live or Grill Room or anything like that in high definition yet?
JN: No, I think I defer to the type of operational experience on that one.
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