Simon Lee had been slated to work as musical supervisor for the Toronto production, the same role he served for Webber's British revival. (CBC)

Simon Lee, the longtime Andrew Lloyd Webber collaborator charged with assault in Toronto on Sunday, has a problem of his own.

Webber’s London production company says it dropped the 46-year-old as musical supervisor for the Toronto run of The Sound of Music, still slated to begin in October.

Lee was one of three judges for Tuesday night’s CBC-TV’s reality competition How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?  Viewers were told that Lee’s absences for the last two episodes was for “personal reasons.”

Lee was arrested and charged with assault and forcible confinement after an incident at a Toronto hotel on Sunday morning. He was released on bail and is scheduled to return to court on Aug. 27.

The veteran British conductor, who has performed with top orchestras around the globe, has served as the musical director or supervisor on projects ranging from the opening ceremony of the 1998 Nagano Olympics to both theatre and film versions of Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar.

More at CBCnews.ca

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	Personalities	Posted at 1:36 pm (31 Jul 2008)

Yes, the boat from The Beachcombers is still alive, if not actively combing any beaches off the south-west coast of British Columbia. This photo of The Persephone was taken four weeks ago in Gibsons B.C. where the show was shot.

The series ran from 1972 to 1990 and is the longest-running dramatic series ever made for Canadian television. In all, 387 episodes were produced. During the final season, the show’s title was shortened to Beachcombers.

Photo by Katakandian, used with permission.

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	Beachcombers, Vancouver	Posted at 12:11 pm (31 Jul 2008)

Just a quick reminder to CBCer that owing to the civic holiday on Monday, some operations (known internally as “Shared Services”) will be closed or operating under reduced hours:

• Human Resources: The HR Infoservice Centre will be offering its services, under reduced hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET. Regular business hours (8 a.n.-8 p.m. ET) will resume on Tuesday, August 5.
• IT Support: The IT Service Centre (ITSC) remains accessible 24/7.
• Payments: The National Payment Centre will be closed and regular business hours will resume on Tuesday, August 5.

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	Asides	Posted at 12:05 pm (30 Jul 2008)

Long-time CBCer John Raw Rae died in Toronto July 22.

Rae began his career with CBC in Vancouver in 1942 and moved two years later to Toronto. Rae spent 37 years with the CBC until he retired nearly 30 years ago.

Since then, John had been enjoying exploring his love for classical music, travel, food. An obit published by the Globe and Mail yesterday described some of his post-CBC activities:

Until the age of 82 he periodically maintained his hand at shaping new broadcasting talent with his ‘On Air’ presentation training in his home. For the last 8 years he has organized a monthly luncheon of an evergrowing group of former CBC employees called the ‘Walking and Chowder Club’.

A Memorial Service will be held on Wednesday, August 6, 2008 at 3:00 p.m. at the R.S. Kane Funeral Home (6150 Yonge St., at Goulding, south of Steeles) with visitation from 2:00 p.m. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Sue and John Rae Endowment Fund c/o North York General Hospital Foundation.

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	Asides, Obits	Posted at 12:01 pm (30 Jul 2008)

CBC Van + Citizen with Cameraphone + Flickr account = See below.

Photo by “Green Colandar” and published under a Creative Commons licence.

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	Fun Stuff	Posted at 10:31 am (30 Jul 2008)

The final episode of CBC’s reality show How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? airs tonight. Turns out, Maria is solving a few problems of her own.

Faced with capped funding and more competition for ad dollars, CBC Television has lately been shifting programming to shows which which people watch (ratings = ad dollars), or, depending on your outlook, drowning in a tidal wave of American cultural. Choose your own moniker.

Say what you like about reality television (and, okay, even Eyewitness News openers), the ratings seem to like it. With “One” notable exception, our ratings have quite strong for Maria, No Opportunity Wasted, The Week the Women Went, Dragon’s Den, and others.

CBC has received criticism that we’re simply importing rather than inventing Canadian content, but Kirstine Layfield says being able to adopt the just-add-content model is helping the CBC. Layfield, head of CBC Television’s network programming, told InsideTheCBC.com today that Maria is a good example of how public broadcasters can share shows. (In the case of Maria, the CBC imported the highly popular BBC format, adding homegrown Canadian content and contestants.) “After all, the BBC is a public broadcaster too,” Layfield said, “And we’re a public broadcaster. We’re really just sharing good ideas.”)

And it’s not just one-way. The CBC is exporting our own home-grown productions.

• BBC Worldwide is picking up The Session, a time-drama commissioned by the CBC (produced by the same company that makes Maria.) The show airs this Fall.
• Later today, CBC Television will announce that ABC is co-piloting romantic comedy 18 To Life.

As for tonight’s show, Elicia MacKenzie and Janna Polzin are the last remaining contestants, hoping to headline an upcoming production of The Sound of Music. Yesterday, Jayme Armstrong of Richmond, B.C., was eliminated at by none other than musical impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I guess if you’ve got to go down, that’s a pretty nice way to do it.

BONUS FACTOID: People erroneously credit Survivor as being the first reality-TV show. In fact it started airing in 1999 as Expedition: Robinson, a Swedish program. As noted in the comments, I had this wrong. Turns out MTV’S Real World preceded even Expedition.

Expedition‘s very concept was actually born earlier in England. Britain’s Pop Idol became American Idol, then “(Insert Your Country Here) Idol“. And the reality train was unstoppable.

1 CBC would prefer you call it Factual Entertainment. Then again, the CBC also wants you to calling them “Castro Caps”.

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		Posted at 3:01 pm (28 Jul 2008)

Last Friday, CBC/Radio-Canada and CMG completed a second full week of meetings designed to improve the relationship between the parties.

The meetings, which included facilitator Warren Edmondson, were initiated by executives of the CMG and the CBC/Radio-Canada and were the product of several joint discussions held between February and May.

During these two full weeks, the parties tackled number of hot topics including Temporary Employment and Contract Employment. Several grievances have been resolved and they’ll set a precedent to future temporary employment situations. CBC says more details are coming in a few weeks.

More meeting dates are scheduled in the Fall.

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	Labour/CBC Unions	Posted at 8:30 pm (23 Jul 2008)

This past week we released a new version of the CBC Program Guide. This was a much needed upgrade as the old version was virtually useless because it constantly crashed.

The Nitty Gritty
This new version is written in Java using Struts and Hibernate. These are enterprise frameworks that eliminate the need to create custom libraries. These “custom libraries” are what caused a lot of the instability with the previous version of the Program Guide.

The previous version stored all of its data in an Oracle database, with no expiry policy. This means that you could go back years to see what was on CBC Television in 2003, for example. The new version stores all of its data in a PostgreSQL database with an expiry policy. There really is no need to know what was on CBC.

The new guide is also extremely extensible. Able to output in multiple formats including HTML, XML, and JSON. This allows other CBC developers to leverage the data located in the guide.

Quick Rundown
Program Guide information is available for all CBC properties: Television, Newsworld, Radio One, and Radio 2. It also includes A to Z guides of all CBC Programs and Personalities. The new guide has been redesigned so that it is easy for you to view what is currently on air right now, which is highlighted in blue.

You are able to “segment” your day into early morning, morning, afternoon, or evening. So you only can only see 5-8 hours blocks at a time. You are also able to view the full day, or a schedule for the entire week. Clicking on a show title will bring you to the program page which will allow you to see air times, plus a description about the show and its personalities. You can also filter your schedule by program category. So you can only see Sports, Comedy, Drama, etc.

The print friendly version of the guide is well formatted and easy to read.

The Future
With the new Program Guide framework we are able to provide a lot of new features. Some ideas floating around include RSS feeds of your favorite show (air times, descriptions, etc..). The ability to include program/personality information in our search engine is also a possibility.

The new Program Guide will be used during the Olympics to allow you to know exactly what event will be on-air when. You will be able to access this information from the Olympics page or the Program Guide main page.

Expect to see more features and pages that utilize the new Program Guide in the near future!

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	Under the Hood	Posted at 2:34 pm (22 Jul 2008)

UPDATE: The “starts right now” intro was curtailed in October. The corrected text below reflects change.

Pity Natalie Clancy.

She’s one of CBC TV News’ rising stars — formerly a reporter in the CBC Vancouver newsroom; today, after a stint co-anchoring at CBC Newsworld in Calgary (and before Calgary turned into Toronto), she’s anchoring the late-night Vancouver at 11 newscast. And she does a stellar job at it.

The CBC has been using Vancouver as a kind of testing ground for launching new ways of programming and promoting its newscasts.

Several months back, at the top of the show (after what we in radio call the “billboards” — I have no idea what you TV people call them), the camera would cut back to Natalie, zoom in dramatically in Colbert Report style, and she would deliver the line “Your five-minute B.C. news, weather, and sports starts right now!”

Dear God. (This practice was curtailed back in October.)

It’s not Natalie’s fault, of course. I’m sure she loathed saying it as much as many cringed when they heard it. It was said to be part of the Frank Magid school of programming. Magid developed the Eyewitness News format years ago in the U.S. and has been retained by CBC to consult on our newscasts.

Even David Letterman, years ago, warned Canadians about this “eyewitness news” format in an interview on CBC when Carole Neilson Taylor (who would go onto to become CBC/Radio-Canada’s chairperson).

But maybe it’s our best option. If all the other networks and stations are going with this style of “everything is breaking news” breathless urgency, perhaps we need to compete with them? That argument really is at the heart of so many CBC policies these days: Do we:

• Program more American shows and compete thematically with private stations and networks so our ratings go up… we prove we’re being watched by more Canadians…. and thus are more relevant… and thus need more funding; or
• Stick to programming in the school of sober second thought, where our modesty stands out among the clutter… meet (arguably) our responsibility to the Broadcasting Act to reflect Canada and its unique nature… and thus deserve more funding.

Say what you like about the policy choices being made at the top floors of the Death Star. You have to admit the decisions are not as cut-and-dried as some out there would have us believe.

What do you think?

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	News & Journalism, Vancouver	Posted at 12:36 pm (18 Jul 2008)

Some people have asked if I can dig out some specifics of CBC’s recent commissioning of new musical works.

Here is the information provided to me by the CBC’s radio music department.

Hi Tod, Since 2005, we have engaged such notable composers as:

Tanya Tagaq, Veda Hille, R.Murray Schafer, Chan Ka Nin, Bernard Falaise, Owen Pallett, Phil Dwyer, Sarah Slean, Jonathan Goldsmith, Dinuk Wijeratne, Jesse Zubot, Martin Tielli, Odario Williams, Kyrie Kristmanson, Gavin Bryars, Waboowe Whitebird, Taqralik Partridge, Gary Kulesha, Kati Agocs, Robert M. Lepage, John Southworth, Glenn Buhr.

Commissions have supported CBC Radio 2 specials including Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Shostakovich Centenary, Glenn Gould 75th, Stolen Children: Truth and Reconciliation.

Commissions are very broad in their activity, ranging from orchestral commissions to jazz, and from world to and pop.

At a glance for fiscal 07/08:
Total # of contracts: 57
23 classical genre, 34 non-classical genre

Total # of minutes of music contracted: 416

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	CBC Radio 2, Changes to CBC Radio Two, Music	Posted at 4:31 am (18 Jul 2008)

UPDATE: CBC responds. See below.

Contrary to most leading opinion in the space, traditional media is not, in fact, being threatened by technologies like Internet television and iPods. Further, it would be a waste of time to create Internet-only content if the goal is to generate advertising revenue.

That’s the CBC’s official position, as articulated in a submission last week to the CRTC titled Reject Old Assumptions About New Media.

The document is a short 13-page PDF document. Here is my summary of its main points.

(CBC management: Like all carbon-based life forms, I make mistakes. I’ve made several here before. If I’ve misinterpreted something, please join the discussion in the comments. And hey, just for fun, shall we assume silence means I’ve got it right? <grin>)

1. Traditional TV and radio usage is not being displaced by the Internet.
2. Amateur video will never be a substitute for traditional media, particularly entertainment programming.
3. It would be a waste time for traditional media companies to create Internet-only content if the goal is to generate advertising revenue.
4. Most Canadians use the Internet primarily as a communications and research tool (Ed: Implying that most Canadians do not use the Internet for entertainment.)
5. The trend is towards personalizing and controlling media, not developing new ways to consume it.

The points argued by the CBC in its submission appear diametrically opposed to the opinions of most thought-leaders who work in new media and broadcasting. The Corporation, downplaying the amount of opinion to the contrary, admits it stands largely alone in its assessment of the current landscape:

“There appears to be an assumption in some [Ed: Emphasis added] industry literature that broadcasting content found on new media is reducing the consumption of traditional radio and television…. This broad assumption is false, and empirical data refute this hypothesis.”

My opinion: One can’t dispute the hard numbers — they’re sourced from reputable organizations like BBM Neilson Media Research. (Although I’m afraid I just can not accept the stat quoted that fewer than 1% of Canadians watch broadcast television over the Internet.)

More than that, I’m concerned that the submission illustrates only the current reality — there’s no articulation of any vision for the future here.

• We have producers who are winning prestigious international awards as they develop new forms of entertainment media. Did we ask them where they think we should be going? I’d rather put my money on the “gut feel” of those folks than statistical forecasts generated from surveys and focus groups conducted months ago — remember “months” is an eternity in today’s new media world.
• We have an industry-leading media research team in Toronto. Were they tasked to chart out likely scenarious using widely available results from other public broadcasters around the world? Did we meet with the BBC or ABC or NPR to get a sense where we’ll be in ten years? If so, what do they think?

The conclusions in this submission seem way off base to me, and it lack of vision scares me.

Then again, I also have a mortgage to pay. So I’ll shut up now and turn it over to you.

What do you think?
Note: If you’re a CBC insider, consider posting your thoughts from your home computer. I’m just sayin’. Besides, shouldn’t you be working right now and not reading the semi-coherent ramblings of a freelance radio producer?

CBC’s Response

Hey Tod,

I am worried that some of your contributors may be taking your synopsis of our submission, which highlights only a couple of its points, as the sum total of our position.

To be clear, CBC/Radio-Canada believes that the new media world is a large and important part of its future. It is a central pillar of the strategic themes identified in the Challenge Us! process. Providing space for Canadian expression on the maximum number of platforms that Canadians want to use to consume media is, we believe and multiple Parliamentary committees have confirmed, now part of our mandate. As you know, we are expending a lot of energy and creativity on developing new ways of providing that space either using current resources or by finding new ways of generating funds.

Last week’s submission was not our last word on the subject. The Commission will initiate a broad review in the fall and we intend, as usual, to submit a fully developed, forward-looking position that describes our role and how it fits into the larger system.

Last week’s filing was a preliminary one, in response to the CRTC’s initial question of whether it was framing the issues properly. We did not want the public debate to move forward and public policy decisions to be contemplated based on what we perceived to be two faulty assumptions in the Commission’s framing of the issues. And those are:

1. That the consumption of broadcasting content found on new media is replacing the consumption of traditional broadcast media, particularly television; and

2. That new media represents a major business opportunity for Canadian broadcasters.

Today and, to the extent that we can foresee, into the future, the vast majority of high quality broadcast content found on any platform is going to be produced by traditional broadcasters. Public policy decisions based on the assumption that that supply of quality Canadian content will be financed by a one-for-one shift of revenue from traditional to new media would lead to a severe weakening of the country’s main creators of Canadian broadcasting content.

That is not the CRTC’s intention and we want to ensure that the debate from the outset reflects not only the future potential but the current reality of the new media universe.

Thanks,

Steven Guiton
Regulatory Affairs

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	Technology, The CRTC	Posted at 2:31 pm (17 Jul 2008)

If you were one of the suckers people like me who lined up at 4:00 a.m. just to buy a cell phone last Friday, you are probably still stroking the glistening plastic of your new iPhone.

If you can tear yourself away from Super Monkey Ball for just a moment, you may be interested to learn that CBCnews.ca has just launched a special web site for iPhone users. Just point the Safari browser on your phone to cbc.ca/iphone and you can get the lastest news from CBC.

iPhone users have always been able to see the CBCnews web site, but it’s just been a minature display of the regular site desktop users see.

If, on the other hand, you’re a rational person and didn’t spend nearly $3,000 over a mandatory locked-in three year plan, you can see access CBCnews.ca on your cell phone by pointing your phone’s browser to m.cbc.ca.

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	CBC Mobile, News & Journalism	Posted at 12:20 pm (15 Jul 2008)

Happy Monday, CBC fans and fellow comrades employees alike. It was a quiet week last week in the world of CBC news, but news is a-flowin’ a bit, so enjoy the ride.

I’ll be a little slow in replying to your emails as I’m out of town on a sabattical (think monk clothing, Tibetan bells, and hours pouring over LOLcats) but I’ll still be scouring the blogs and receiving tips from you on CBC news.

In just an interesting side note, I see that last week, the CRTC granted a former Vancouver radio personality a licence to operate a local radio station for the “Tri-Cities” region of greater Vancouver (Port Moody, Coquitlam, and Port Coquitlam). While it’s not CBC news per se, it’s interesting (and, I think, encouraging, to see the CRTC responding to regional growth). CBC Radio in Vancouver years ago led the way by launching a full news bureau in Surrey, a rapidly growing region of the area.

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	About This Blog, Vancouver	Posted at 2:15 pm (14 Jul 2008)

CBC Radio in Vancouver is on the hunt for a Host for its afternoon program, On The Coast. Guest hosts like CBC Television reporter Belle Puri and civic reporter Stephen Quinn have been filling the role until now. Priya Ramu, formerly a senior CBC Radio producer, has held the position after moving to Vancouver several years ago. She will stay with CBC as a local reporter in radio news.

This position hosts a daily current affairs program, including doing interviews, introducing segments, and shaping the program on air. The host is also responsible for writing scripts and continuity, booking interviews, selecting music and sound effects, and researching. This… wait for it… a contract position. (Does anyone actually get a full-time job at the CBC any more?)

Look for the position on the CBC’s job web site.

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	Personalities, Vancouver	Posted at 4:33 pm (02 Jul 2008)

The CBC’s Peter Mansbridge will become an officer of the Order of Canada, according to a list of 75 appointees released yesterday by Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean.

Mansbridge, the chief correspondent of CBC News, anchors the flagship nightly news program The National and also hosts Newsworld’s Mansbridge One on One.

Born in London in 1948, the newsman — who turns 60 on Sunday — was educated in Ottawa and served in the Royal Canadian Navy in 1966 and 1967.

His career with the CBC began by chance when someone from the public broadcaster overheard him on the public address system at an airport in the town of Churchill, Man., where he was working for the airline Transair, and asked him to come work at the local radio station. He was 19.

More at cbcnews.ca

I wonder if Canada is recognizing journalists and story-tellers as becoming people who actively shape the nation, as opposed to “just” reporting on it? Should our role be simply to reflect the changing nation, or do we have some responsibility to participate in that reshaping? I mean, I’m totally happy for Peter and the CBC, but — and I can’t quite put my finger on why — but this one’s not quite as cut-and-dry for me.

What do you think?

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	Awards, Personalities, The National	Posted at 4:21 pm (02 Jul 2008)