I suppose this would better fit under the Cheap Plugs category here, but I guess I’m feeling generous. Even though Santa didn’t bring me the Xbox 360 like I asked him. Asshat. (Hat tip to Darren.)
     On CBC Radio One, join hosts Paul Grant and Roy Forbes for Snap, Crackle, Pop – a feast of obscure and fascinating music rescued from bargain bins, thrift stores and basements at 6am (all times a half-hour later in Newfoundland). Then, former CBC journalist and now Governor-General Michaelle Jean will deliver her official New Year’s Greetings at 8:27 a.m. Why that exact time? I have no idea.
     On The Current at 8:30, Jeopardy wiz Ken Jennings will discuss if the Internet made us more knowledgeable. Bill Richardson steps in after 10, filling in for Shelagh, to talk with John McLachlan Gray, who created Billy Bishop Goes to War and other fine musical plays.
     At noon, John Lagimodiere asks if we can actually enjoy the holidays — with all the hustle and bustle and all. Freestyle, with new co-host Marsha Lederman, steps in to check out their list of the top Canadian CDs of the past year. If Uncle Seth isn’t on there, I’ll cry.
     Now here’s where it gets good. At 4pm, my colleague Sook-Yin Lee and Wab Kinew present From the First – two hours of music and conversation celebrating “new experiences and fresh starts.” Find out how Adrienne Clarkson’s first job prepared her for her role as Governor General, for example, and how Billy Bragg’s first crush inspired his songwriting career.
     That night at 7:30, The Debaters rolls out a couple of resolutions. First, just how sick is Canada’s healthcare system? Should it be privatized? And this, believe it or not, is a comedy show. On Outfront at 8:45, part one of “The Busker and The Diva” — a boyfriend and girlfriend who drifted apart and lost touch. One becomes a busker, the other a concert pianist. What happens when they meet up again?
     On Ideas at 9pm, host Paul Kennedy convenes an Ideas levee, at which various contributors discuss the year just past, and the one just beginning. And on The Arts Tonight, Vancouver writer Ryan Knighton reflects on the surreal, mundane, and hilarious aspects of living with blindness, in an interview with Don McKellar conducted onstage at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. That’s after the 10pm news.
     Finally, Between The Covers starts the new year off with Trevor Cole’s “witty yet probing novel” (I just report this stuff; I don’t write it) called “The Fearsome Particles.” In this story, a window screen manufacturer is trying to keep his family together . All the while he has to deal with middle class angst, the realty market and Canada’s role in Afghanistan. It starts at 10:43 pm then end your first day of 2007 with Northern Lights and an hour of music from Vienna, including waltzes by Strauss and Lanner, plus music by Beethoven.
     And at some point, one of the hosts will say the phrase “wankel rotary engine” — if you hear it, call in, and you’ll win a car. Supplies are limited.

I dunno. Is this too pluggy? Maybe this kind of stuff shouldn’t be on the blog. Let me know what you think — too promotional, or do you like this occasionally?

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	CBC Radio 1	Posted at 3:55 pm (29 Dec 2006)

Three Stanley Cups. 22 NHL seasons. 1,755 points. CBC’S HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA heads to the Motor City on Tuesday, Jan. 2 to bring Canadians exclusive live coverage of Steve Yzerman Night, as No. 19’s legendary jersey is lifted to the rafters in Joe Louis Arena, beginning at 7 p.m. ET (available in High-Definition).
     Ron MacLean will be in Detroit alongside Don Cherry for coverage of the presentation honouring Yzerman, followed by a must-see Western Conference match-up featuring the Red Wings and league-leading Anaheim Ducks. Detroit, currently sitting in second place in the Central Division, will be looking to knock off the NHL’s first place team and avenge a 4-1 loss suffered at the hands of the Ducks in October. Bob Cole and Harry Neale will call the action from the Joe Louis Arena broadcast booth and will be joined by rinkside reporter Elliotte Friedman.
     Hockey fans can also visit cbc.ca/hockey 24 hours a day, seven days a week during the 2006-07 NHL season for comprehensive coverage, including weekly columns from analyst Scott Morrison, breaking news, in-depth reports, broadcast schedules and more.

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		Posted at 7:47 pm (28 Dec 2006)

CBC Toronto radio legend Bruce Smith, whose deep voice was heard on the city’s airwaves for more than 30 years, has died. Smith, who became host of the local morning show Toast and Jamboree in 1947, died on Boxing Day. He had been diagnosed with cancer. He was 87.
     CBC.ca has an article with memories from past colleagues.
     Smith hosted the radio program in the morning timeslot until the creation of the current program Metro Morning in 1972. He then went on to host The Bruce Smith Show in the afternoons until he retired in 1978.
     A memorial service will be held in Burlington next week.

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	Obits	Posted at 1:06 pm (28 Dec 2006)

CBC’s communications folks are revamping the CBC’s intranet after learning from a survey of 1,900 employees that the current site is “not considered a go-to destination.”
     So they plan to add a whack of stuff, including “a tool that will help you manage day-to-day stuff: tasks, careers, well-being, etc.” Wow. That’s quite the goal. A team of personal concierges at our beck and call? Well, maybe not. But the new intranet will allow for personalization, private team spaces to share information, documents and files, and — Allah be praised — a solution to mass-distributed e-mail overload.
     But they still desperately need one thing: A name. No, scratch that — a good name. Left to their own devices, CBC people tend to go with super-creative names like “Employee Portal” or “CBC Research and Planning” (I’ll let you figure the acronym out yourself.) The new intranet name has to work equally well in English and French. If you’ve got any ideas that you’d like to suggest, send them to Kevin Payan (in Groupwise) by next Friday.

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	Workstations and Desktops	Posted at 12:50 pm (28 Dec 2006)

Thanks to everyone who alerted me to the Daily Dose of Imagery blog that posted an amazing photograph of the Barbara Frum Atrium at the Toronto Broadcast Centre. It’s not an easy task to photograph the atrium from top to bottom. Daily Dose of Imagery is Torontonian Sam Javanrouh’s blog. If you like this kind of material, he’ll email you a new photo every day if you sign up for it.

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	Toronto	Posted at 12:36 pm (28 Dec 2006)

As some of you have noticed, I have begun tagging (putting one-click searchable keywords on) each post. But I’m unclear about the net’s informal standard for people’s names. Full name or last name only? Anyone?

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	About This Blog, Asides	Posted at 11:44 am (28 Dec 2006)

This is a video of a guy listening to CBC Radio in his car. He posted it himself. I wish I could describe it with more excitement but, really, that’s all it is. Somebody unplug the cables. Clearly, the net video revolution has gone too far.
     He’s listening to As It Happens interview Frederick Forsyth about when he wrote “The Shepherd” and how the story came to be. It continues into the full telling of “The Shepherd” as read by Alan Maitland.
     Please stop the Internet. I want to get off.

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	As It Happens, The Odd File	Posted at 11:40 am (28 Dec 2006)

CBC Radio’s national arts reporter, Marsha Lederman, is Freestyle’s new co-host. Lederman replaces Kelly Ryan, who will return to her previous role in CBC Radio news.
     Lederman has read news on the CBC Toronto morning show, hosted Ontario’s morning show and ran the radio newsroom in Vancouver. Before joining the CBC, Marsha worked in private radio – ultimately hosting her own talk show in Toronto.
     Lederman is also a freelance writer and has been published in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the National Post, among other publications. She is a graduate of both Ryerson University and York University.

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	Freestyle, Personalities	Posted at 11:29 am (28 Dec 2006)

I’ll be doing a bit less blogging here next week during the holiday break — of course, if something newsworthy happens, it’ll be here. Have a restful and safe week, everyone.

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	About This Blog	Posted at 12:48 pm (22 Dec 2006)

BBC to Sell TV Shows via BitTorrent

The popular BitTorrent client, Azureus has just struck a deal with the BBC to offer TV shows on its recently launched content store/website, Zudeo. ZudeoZudeo is Azureus’ new video sharing website and content store. It implements many ‘Web 2.0′ features like the ability to rate content, leave comments, share torrents and links to submit content to popular social bookmarking sites like digg.

Torstar cutting jobs in newspaper division

Torstar Corp. said Wednesday it is cutting 85 jobs at its newspaper division as the company tries to grapple with a tough market. Prior to the opening of stock market trading, the company said the reduction will come through voluntary and involuntary cuts. The company’s newspaper holdings include the flagship daily Toronto Star, the Record covering Kitchener-Waterloo and Cambridge, the Hamilton Spectator, plus dozens of other smaller and community papers.

Alliance Atlantis signals it is for sale

Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc., whose holdings include half of the CSI franchise, said Wednesday it’s for sale. The Toronto-based entertainment firm and its controlling shareholder, Southhill Strategy Inc., said they recently sought expressions of interest from selected potential buyers. But Southhill may decide not to sell its interest, which would make a full takeover unlikely.

CBC TV shows top two of Canadian television: CP

CP entertainment reporter Lee-Anne Goodman has ranked The Rick Mercer Report and Intelligence as among the best in Canadian television. “Week after week, Mercer continues to delight with his alternately giddy and cutting political humour. His legendary rants are usually scathingly bang on,” she writes.

ACTRA negotiations break down

Negotiations between ACTRA and producers have broken down after producers tabled an outrageous pay offer and demanded free internet rights. No new negotiations are scheduled. ACTRA is in a strike position in most of Canada starting in January 2007.

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	Todbits: Notes from the Outside	Posted at 12:41 pm (22 Dec 2006)

CBC’s head of news, Tony Burman, has an interesting article out which details what he believes are the five most important media changes in 2006. They are:

• The rise of blogging and citizen journalism
• The trend toward smaller staffs in newsrooms
• Convergence and concentration
• Social networking web sites
• News reporting/anchoring with too much emotion

It’s a great read and has links to follow for more information on the five trends he outlines.

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	News & Journalism	Posted at 12:28 pm (22 Dec 2006)

Here is a quick rundown of how news is published to CBC.ca.

The Software
CBC.ca uses a piece of software from Interwoven called TeamSite which is internally branded and referred to as EPT (Editorial Publishing Tool). It was purchased to replace a home grown solution that was buggy and unreliable. It has two main components:

• TeamSite which runs on Windows Server 2003 and MSSQL
• Open Deploy which runs on Linux

The purpose of Open Deploy is to take the content from TeamSite and publish it to our web servers. EPT allows the news writers to focus on writing news without having to worry about HTML or layout.

The writer is presented with a bunch of fields that must be filled out, such as:

• Headline
• Byline
• Keywords
• Deck
• Body
• Related Links
• Media (Images or Video)
• Category

Once the story has been written it is saved for the copy desk to review and make changes as needed. Only the copy desk can publish stories to the website.

The Lineup
A story can be published to the website but nobody will know about it unless it is in the Line Up. The Line Up is a list of stories that appear on the CBC.ca front page, or the News Page for each section.

The line up builder is a tool inside EPT that allows the news writer to adjust which stories appear on the landing pages and in which order.

The photo illustrates what a line up is. You can see how that line up is edited inside EPT by taking a look at this screenshot.

The Deployment
Once a story is ready to be published the Open Deploy component reads the data from TeamSite and writes the HTML files to the web servers.

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	CBC.ca web site, Under the Hood	Posted at 1:11 pm (21 Dec 2006)

So I was reading through my CBC all-staff emails this afternoon, and ran across this:

Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe Christmas Pageant…Whaaaa!? Stuart McLean…on the television!? Believe it. From the Empire Theatre in Belleville, Ont., Stuart takes to the stage determined to bring a good old-fashioned Christmas pageant to town. Airs Friday, Dec. 22 at 7:30 p.m. on CBC Television. Then, the very next day, tune in for the Vinyl Cafe’s 2006 Christmas Concert, 10 a.m. on CBC Radio Two. Also heard Sunday, Dec. 24 at noon on CBC Radio One.

Radio on television. It’s always been a tenuous balance. Some shows I wonder why they’re not on prime-time on television. (I know, there aren’t THAT many of science nerds to support a Quirks and Quarks TV show, but still, I would love to watch…)
     One of my favourite radio shows is This American Life in the U.S. It’s an incredible show, and I hear they’re producing a TV show. God love them.
     I would love to see Dave and Morley on TV succeed too, but historically radio shows don’t translate to visual images well.
     What are we missing?

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	The Vinyl Cafe	Posted at 4:55 pm (20 Dec 2006)

BBC begins to sell its TV shows online
The popular BitTorrent client, Azureus has just struck a deal with the BBC to offer TV shows on its recently launched content store/website, Zudeo. ZudeoZudeo is Azureus’ new video sharing website and content store. It implements many ‘Web 2.0′ features like the ability to rate content, leave comments, share torrents and links to submit content to popular social bookmarking sites like digg. The BBC will sell the following shows on Zudeo: Red Dwarf, Strange, Invasion Earth, Little Britain, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, Coupling, Keeping Up Appearances, League of Gentlemen and Ideal. Ironically, British customers will not be able to purchase any of the shows as they will only be available to U.S. customers. The rest of the world is going to have to wait for now. One of the BBC’s most popular shows, The Office is missing from the list.

Torstar slashes news jobs
Torstar Corp. said Wednesday it is cutting 85 jobs at its newspaper division as the company tries to grapple with a tough market. It says the reduction will come through voluntary and involuntary cuts. Torstar expects to take an $11 million restructuring charge in the fourth quarter. The company expects the cuts will help it save about $5.5 million annually. An executive office shakeup at the Toronto Star and a tough conditions in the newspaper market had raised fears among employees that job cuts were looming at the company.

Alliance Atlantis For Sale?
Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc., whose holdings include half of the CSI franchise, said Wednesday it’s for sale. The Toronto-based entertainment firm and its controlling shareholder, Southhill Strategy Inc., said they recently sought expressions of interest from selected potential buyers. But Southhill may decide not to sell its interest, which would make a full takeover unlikely.

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	Todbits: Notes from the Outside	Posted at 4:41 pm (20 Dec 2006)