A Cape Breton newspaper columnist is calling on the CRTC to deny a CBC request to switch frequencies of its Sydney NS station, until the CBC extends its Sydney programming to all parts of Cape Breton. (Right now, people living in south and west Cape Breton receive programming from the Halifax station.)

Bill Dunphy wants the broadcast transmitter in Mulgrave to be switched from Halifax programming to Cape Breton programming. (The Mulgrave transmitter is actually on the mainland, but the local community has an affinity to Cape Breton Island.)

* Note: The photograph of Cape Breton in this image has been digitally altered.

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	CBC Radio 1, Maritimes & Nwfld., Transmission	Posted at 2:18 pm (29 Apr 2007)

Selected portions of the Globe and Mail article on CBC Chairperson-designate Timothy Casgrain:

Heritage Minister Bev Oda seems to have been looking for corporate-board experience, rather than a background in media or the arts, with the appointment of the new chairman of the CBC.

Montreal-born Timothy Casgrain, 58, who is currently chairman of the aviation company Skyservice Investment, was named the CBC’s new chairman Friday.

…

When asked about an affiliation with the Conservative government, he said that he supports the Conservatives in his local Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence.

…

“My role as chairman is working with the board, working with Mr. Rabinovitch and his team, and helping move the whole CBC mandate forward,” Mr. Casgrain said Friday. “I’ve always had a great love of the CBC…It’s there. It’s part of our fabric.”

As whether he foresees any major changes at CBC, he said, “I’m not in a position to answer that question just yet. Ask me in six months’ time, when I hope I’ll be well versed and able to give a good response.”

However, he added that he sees the position as a challenge, particularly given the highly varied way in which media is now distributed and the difference between how the young and old access media.

Mr. Casgrain still needs to be sworn into the new job and expects to begin some time in May.

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	Board of Directors, Parliament	Posted at 5:48 pm (28 Apr 2007)

Montreal-born executive Timothy W. Casgrain has been appointed as the CBC’s new chairperson.

Since 1997, Mr. Casgrain has been Chairperson of Skyservice Investments Inc., a wholly-owned Canadian aviation company. From 1976 to 2002, he was Executive Vice President of Brascan Financial Corporation. Between 1988 and 1995, he was seconded to NBS Technologies as President and Chief Executive Officer.

Born in Montreal, Mr. Casgrain began his career overseas as a teacher in Chad, Africa from 1969-1971. Shortly thereafter, he became an accountant with Deloitte & Touche, and he later assumed the position of Executive Vice President at Brascan Financial Corporation.

A news release from the federal govenment described Mr. Casgrain as “an avid supporter of arts and culture,” though the only arts-related experience listed in the release is that he received a Bachelor of Arts at McGill University. It does not appear as if he has any direct broadcasting experience.

In 1976, he became a member of the Order of Chartered Accountants of Quebec. He holds appointments on several boards, including Century II Holdings Inc. and the Toronto Rehab Foundation where he is Vice Chair. He is also the Chair of the Canadian Foundation for Economic Education and President of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.

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	Board of Directors, Executives	Posted at 1:01 pm (27 Apr 2007)

One of the great things about the Internet world (that our TV and Radio departments are envious of) is that we can get statistics about our visitors in real time. All of these statistics are anonymous, they don’t contain information such as your address or your name. We can, however, mine some pretty interesting information from the log files that our web servers generate.

It’s a Windows World
I’m sure its no surprise that the majority of our users are browsing the website using a windows machine and Internet explorer. In fact, 75% of hits to CBC.ca were done from users running Windows XP. Similarly, 72% of the hits to CBC.ca were done from Internet Explorer. Take a look at the breakdown for Jan 1st, 2007 to April 1st, 2007:

Visitor By Browser:

Visitors By Operating System:

How We Get This Information
Every time your browser fetches a page from CBC.ca the web server tracks that “hit” in a log file. Here is what an example log entry looks like:

69.17.178.81 - - [24/Aug/2005:21:03:17 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1"

200 4532 "http://www.google.com/"

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rev:1.7.0)

Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6"

Without going into too much detail, you can see the following information:

• The date and time the request for the page was made
• If the user came to this page from another one.
• The browser version, type, and operating system
• The size of the page the user downloaded

Using the information found in these log entries, we can come up with quite a few types of statistics, such as:

• What country the user is coming from
• What the busiest time of day for CBC.ca is
• What the most popular pages are
• What 3rd party websites are generating the most traffic to us
• If there are any broken links on our site
• What language the user ‘s operating system and/or browser supports

How CBC.ca Uses This Information
Understanding who our users are and what type of browsers and operating systems they use is an important part in designing the services that are offered on CBC.ca.

We also use this information to do something we call “dayparting”. If we discover that the majority of the traffic to Business/Money section of the site during the lunch hour, then we may change the way items are displayed in the line-up on the front page. For example, we may promote more “business” related stories.

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	CBC.ca web site, Under the Hood	Posted at 4:22 pm (25 Apr 2007)

There’s somthing wrong with the blog today — the full article/comments pages don’t seem to be working. I’ll be working on it today. Bear with me.

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	Asides	Posted at 7:42 am (25 Apr 2007)

Stuart McLean captures third Leacock medal
CBC radio host Stuart McLean has captured his third Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for his book Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe. McLean was named the winner at a luncheon Wednesday at the Stephen Leacock Museum in Orillia, Ont. He joins former CBC radio host Arthur Black as a three-time winner. McLean’s other wins were for Home from the Vinyl Cafe and Vinyl Cafe Unplugged. The Leacock award, worth $10,000, was first handed out in 1947. Past winners include Mordecai Richler, W.O. Mitchell, Farley Mowat, Roch Carrier and Will Ferguson.

Toronto Broadcasting Centre awarded ‘Go Green Plus’ certification
The Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto has been awarded ‘Go Green Plus’ certification from the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) of Canada. This unique national certification program recognizes environmental leadership within the commercial real estate industry by measuring each building’s energy use, indoor health and environmental performance, against the best industry operation and management practices. The Broadcasting Centre scored particularly high marks for energy efficiency features (HVAC systems, lighting, boilers, etc.) as part of this evaluation.  In qualifying for ‘Go Green Plus’, the Broadcasting Centre becomes the second CBC/Radio-Canada location to achieve this status, and joins Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal (‘Go Green Plus’, 2006) and the Vancouver Broadcasting Centre (‘Go Green’, 2005) as outstanding examples of CBC/Radio-Canada’s continuing commitment to environmentally responsible building management.

CBC nominated for 2007 Banff World Television Awards
CBC programs have received five nominations for the 2007 Banff World Television
Awards. An additional five programs have been selected for out of competition (hors concours) recognition. The annual Rockie Awards honouring excellence in international television will be handed out during the Banff World Television Festival, June 10 to 13.
For a complete list of the CBC honours, visit this page [only works inside CBC firewall].

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		Posted at 1:43 am (25 Apr 2007)

The theme to CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada, considered by some Canadians to be Canada’s other official national anthem, is now available on iTunes.

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	Asides, Hockey Night in Canada	Posted at 1:41 am (25 Apr 2007)

I just found this interesting program online. It lets you listen to CBC Radio on Sirius (okay, any Sirius channel) on your Mac. If you have a Mac and a Sirius satellite subscription, try it out and let us know if you like it. [discussion board]

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	CBC Widgets	Posted at 3:02 pm (24 Apr 2007)

Phil Keoghan, host of the popular reality show The Amazing Race, will bring his spin-off show No Opportunity Wasted to the CBC in October — and casting has begun for that series. In each half-hour episode, two people get challenged to set aside fears to achieve a specific task. Keoghan says he came up with the idea for the series’ philosophy after a near-fatal scuba diving accident in his native New Zealand when he was 19 years old.The search for show participants occurs:

• May 8, 10 am to 12 noon at Chapters, 70 Kenmount, St. John’s
• May 8, 6 pm to 8 pm at Chapters, 41 Mic Mac, Dartmouth
• May 9, 6 pm to 8 pm at Indigo, 1500 McGill College, Montreal
• May 12, 1 pm to 4 pm at Indigo, 55 Bloor, Toronto
• May 13, 1 pm to 3 pm at Chapters, 1225 St. Mary’s, Winnipeg
• May 14, 6 pm to 8 pm at Chapters, 2625 Gordon, Regina
• May 15, 6 pm to 7 pm at Chapters, 9631 MacLeod Trail, Calgary
• May 16, 7 pm to 9 pm at Chapters, 788 Robson, Vancouver

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	No Opportunity Wasted	Posted at 1:44 pm (24 Apr 2007)

Executives at CBC.ca admit they made a mistake in not selecting the right version of a photograph apparently showing pollution in Toronto, but they say it was not “misrepresentation” nor an attempt to mislead. Here is what CBC.ca chief Sue Gardner told Inside the CBC:

We made a mistake.

The photo shows smoke billowing from stacks at the old Lakeview coal-fired generating plant in Mississauga, once said to be the world’s largest. The Ontario government called it a heavy polluter when it was shut down a couple of years ago not only because of the quantities of greenhouse gases it produced – difficult to photograph – but because of the noxious fumes and particulates that contributed to the murk obscuring downtown Toronto seen in the photo.

The stacks were demolished a few months ago but it remains a powerful image of the kind of emissions the Kyoto Accord wants to limit and that is why we used it in the April 19 story on John Baird’s concerns about the “risks” of meeting Kyoto.

It was the right photo, but not the right version.

CBC.ca uses images in number of ways: It is our policy not to alter those accompanying news stories and depicting actual events or people. Those used as graphics in promos or to illustrate feature stories, columns or the like may be changed in minor ways – slightly heightened contrast, different colour filter, slight cropping – to enhance their visual impact and appeal.

In this case, the original image was treated with a “warming filter,” which gave it the sepia tone, and cropped slightly to use as a graphic image. Fair enough, except it was – mistakenly – dropped in a file accessible for use with news stories and subsequently posted with the Baird story.

It was an inadvertent error, but I should also point out that the “dramatically different” versions the blogger found are, in fact, exactly the same photograph both showing exactly the same thing – emissions from an acknowledged heavy polluter. There was no “misrepresentation” and no attempt to mislead.

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	News & Journalism	Posted at 11:18 am (24 Apr 2007)

Hockey Night In Canada‘s Saturday night time slot will be back for the upcoming round of Stanley Cup playoffs. The NHL opted to hand NBC the lucrative slot because the network wanted to showcase Penguins star Sidney Crosby. The CBC draws a larger audience on Saturday nights than it does for afternoon telecasts.

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	Asides, Hockey Night in Canada	Posted at 11:10 am (24 Apr 2007)

DNTO‘s pop culture professor and neurotic jock, Nick Purdon, is working on a brand new radio show — and he needs your help!

But first, some background. The show is called “Hidden City,” and it willl air this summer on CBC Radio One. The idea is to explore the hidden things — unwritten rules, behaviours and activities that most of us don’t notice but are integral to life in the city. It is about exploring the life of that unique human creature known as the “urbanoid.”

One of his episodes is about noise in the city, and he’s interested in exploring it at the micro-level — as in, the noise that drives neighbours crazy. So he and his production team are looking for people who are currently at war with a neighbour about loud music, barking dogs, shrieking kids, or any of the gazillions of noises that drive the modern urban dweller batty. They want people who’ve been feuding for a while. People who’ve tried to reach out to their neighbour, to no avail. People who are at their wit’s end.

Do you know of such a person (or maybe it’s you!)? Email Sara Tate at sara_tate@cbc.ca with the subject line “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!!”

* Note: The term “whack,” of course, coming from the Latin whackus, meaning “to air a radio story about.” Has nothing to do with mobsters.

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	DNTO, How Shows Work	Posted at 2:58 pm (23 Apr 2007)

CBC Radio’s Radio Noon program in Newfoundland and Labrador is losing its well-liked host. Ann Budgell will retire on Friday. She’s been with the CBC for 34 years and has held pretty much every job in the book: Reporter, first female host on ‘The Fisheries Broadcast’ (if you’re “from away,” it really can’t be explained how big and important this show is), host of several CBC TV shows, and eventually was tapped as executive producer of radio news and current affairs.

As the popular local blog Meeker on Media notes:

As the host of the call-in program Crosstalk, Budgell figures that “by now she’s probably spoken to you on the air and if not you, then someone in your family.”

Although she is well known for her aggressive interview style (when it is called for), Budgell also has a soft side which is apparent whenever she deals with sensitive or light-hearted subjects. The recent Crosstalk about ‘What Makes You Happy’ (March 26) was pretty off-the-wall and had the potential to fall on its face, but Anne pulled it off in style, delivering one of her most entertaining programs ever.

In other CBC Newsfoundland news, the radio and TV units are finally merging. CBC will close the radio building on Duckworth street in downtown St. John’s on Friday; those people will move in with the TV folks who have a building out in the boonies.

Kinda sad. I really think we should have more CBC locations in front of people and on the “main drag” like CBC Edmonton (in a mall) and CBC Ottawa (right downtown).

Thanks to Peter Cowan for sending me news from his region! If you have any news from your region you’d like to get out, please drop me (Tod Maffin) a line in Groupwise!

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	Maritimes & Nwfld., Personalities	Posted at 2:52 pm (23 Apr 2007)

The folks at CBC Radio 3′s HQ in Vancouver had to move offices, recently, so they did what any other self-respecting, over-worked, under-paid civil servant would do — they trashed the place. You can watch the fun on CBC Radio 3′s first episode of its video podcast. Subscription information at http://radio3.cbc.ca

P.S. Be sure to watch to the end (or skip to it if you must) to see what CBC Radio 3 host Grant Lawrence discovers while poking around his old office’s remnants.

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	CBC Radio 3, Podcasting	Posted at 1:17 pm (23 Apr 2007)

Is it just me, or should we be somewhat concerned that this seems to be the current main page for the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage?

Update: Turns out this is an old page (though, oddly, the first result that the government’s search engine returns when you search for the committee). Here is the proper URL.

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	Parliament, The Odd File	Posted at 12:54 pm (23 Apr 2007)