Don Chevrier, a popular sports announcer best known as the original television voice of the Toronto Blue Jays, died on Monday. He was 69.

Chevrier, who was born in Toronto but lived in Palm Harbor, Fla., suffered from a blood disorder and was recently admitted to hospital before being released a few days later.

A legendary figure in Canadian broadcasting circles, Chevrier amazed colleagues and television viewers alike with his unique voice and encyclopaedic knowledge of sports.

“I first met him when I began my career in the early 1970s and the thing that immediately struck me about Chevy was his voice. That voice of his was just incredible,” current CBC Sports broadcaster Steve Armitage told CBCSports.ca.

In a memo to staff issued this afternoon, CBC Sports head Steve Moore said “I worked with Don on the 1991 Canada Cup of Hockey for CTV. He was a consummate pro, and one of the great storytellers in our industry.”

More at cbc.ca
Photo: Steve Nesius/Canadian Press

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	Obits	Posted at 3:40 pm (18 Dec 2007)

One of the great things about running this blog is moderating the comments. I love seeing how people respond to stories, and ones that were posted long ago that are still on people’s minds. They are alternately funny, thought-provoking, irritating and occasionally downright rude, but they are your views and that’s what this thing should be about.

This blog, like CBC.ca, has a fairly straightforward comments policy. It’s usually okay as long as it’s polite, on topic and legal. On both sites, comments are generally not edited – they are either approved or denied based on the policy.

Still, it takes time – comments to this blog come in at all hours, and since they are pre-moderated (they don’t appear online until we approve them) I feel badly when they sit waiting in moderation for long stretches.

CBC.ca, obviously, gets many, many more comments than this site does. And that’s about to explode exponentially.

In the near future, CBC.ca is going to implement software from a company called Pluck that will potentially allow comments on every story on the site. That’s a lot of comments – how to moderate?

According to Karen Wirsig at the Canadian Media Guild, CBC.ca has entered into a contract with ICUC Moderation of Winnipeg for web moderation services. The idea is to outsource the moderation of comments based on CBC’s policies, to ensure that turnaround times are reasonable, and the site can keep up with radically increased workloads.

CMG is concerned, however: for a decade now, this work has been done by journalists at CBC. Marc Philippe Laurin, CMG president of the CBC branch says he has asked for more information.

“We want to find out what’s the nature of the work, and exactly what these people will be doing, and what they define as moderation,” he said. “Whenever it has to do with content, it’s Guild territory. I understand that it’s not quite the same thing on the internet, with viewer feedback.” But he pointed out that shows like As It Happens, which use talkback lines for listener feedback, are handled by CMG staff. “We want to know why our folks couldn’t do it ourselves,” Laurin said.

Should comment moderation be done by trained journalists, or is this a waste of resources?

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		Posted at 12:49 pm (18 Dec 2007)