On July 28th the CBC announced a new schedule. The highlight of the schedule is that CBC local news would now be expanded to 90 minute newscast, instead of the current 60.

The new schedule is an expansion of the news coverage, especially local news coverage, but one self-described CBC news staffer criticized the move. The concern is that the under the new schedule the newscast will start in a ratings lull at 5 p.m. and never get out of it, thereby dooming the entire expanded newscast. “In effect moving the local newscast to a dead zone where it will be unlikely to ever get a significant audience ever again,” the anonymous critic wrote yesterday on a new blog Medium Close Up.

The author of the blog then goes on to say “The work that goes into making a daily 60-minute newscast is enormous. The tension, stress and competitiveness is a grind that is every bit as difficult as any in the journalism or entertainment business. Making a 90-minute newscast for a few thousand people will destroy whatever little bit of morale still exists inside the CBC.”

The entire post is here. The cbc.ca story on the new schedule is here. What do you think of the schedule changes?

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	CBC Television	Posted at 12:01 am (31 Jul 2009)

This comment on the CBC’s unofficial Facebook page struck a chord with me, it’s from Julie Parna

Driving across Canada with a 9, 12 and 15 year old, listening to CBC comedy shows, the news and the local reports which changed in each province. And the kids saying “CBC sure is better out west than at home!”

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	Asides	Posted at 9:26 pm (30 Jul 2009)

In a press release issued this morning CBC News announced that Peter Armstrong will be the new host of World Report on Radio One and Mark Kelley will host a new prime-time show on Newsworld.

The full press release is available after the jump. What do you think of the announcements?

[Read more →]

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	News & Journalism	Posted at 10:33 am (30 Jul 2009)

Yesterday I wrote a post outlining some of the concerns arising from the newsroom integration process. In that post I highlighted the point of view of Peter Rukavina, a CBC Radio contributor in Prince Edward Island, who said that the integration model will result in “poorly reported,” uninformative journalism.

Today I’d like to discuss the flip side of the issue. In a post published today, Alfred Hermida, an assistant journalism professor at the University of British Columbia, writes about the experience of his former colleagues at the BBC – an organization which started integrating their newsroom in 2005, and which helped inspire the CBC’s integrated model.

At the BBC, the newsrooms have now been integrated, and the staff are sizing up the changes. Hermida writes about a former colleague, Rory Cellan-Jones, a self-described BBC lifer, now working the technology beat.

Hermida says Cellan-Jones used to consider himself a TV correspondent, “but, over the past few years… [he] no longer sees himself as just a TV reporter, but rather as a journalist with audiences on TV, radio and online.”

Cellon-Jone himself talked about the impact of the BBC’s newsroom integration during a round table discussion with The Guardian:

It has forced me to reinvent myself. I spent most of my career as a daily TV journalist serving big audiences on lunchtime news bulletins and having very little engagement with the audience. I’ve got a much more rewarding job now serving audiences online, on radio, on TV, at the same time, and having far more engagement through all these social networking tools.

That sort of sentiment would be music to the ears of Peter Horrocks. Having lead the integration of the BBC’s radio, TV and online services, Horrocks says that journalists at the BBC were also concerned about the impact of news integration. In a critique that sound very similar to Rukavina’s concerns of producing “generic slop” from a “content-massaging machine”, Horrocks says BBC journalists were concerned about producing “bland ‘news nuggets’ in a news factory.”

Horrocks says the BBC addressed that concern by ensuring that the basic news content (press conferences, speeches, raw material etc) is gathered efficiently so that resources can be freed up to tailor that content to specific mediums and shows. Centralizing the gathering of raw material also allowed the BBC to meet one of primary objectives of the integration process – better serving the audience.

He wrote in a book entitled The Future of Journalism that the audience is increasingly consuming news from the internet, on aggregate sites like Google News and Digg, and often don’t know, or care, which show made it. They were blind to the organizational structures that would silo content within a particular program and withhold it from the rest of the network. He wrote that the under the new integrated structure at the BBC:

Barriers and secrecy within the organisation have been torn down… In determining whether a piece of information or content should be held back from another part of BBC News or shared, we apply the test of a notional member of the audience looking at us. In almost all cases that mythical BBC licence payer would want good journalism shared as widely as possible.

According to Horrocks, to properly serve that wider audience “BBC journalists must realise that they have a wider purpose than just to sustain their own programmes and content. They have a wider responsibility to audiences to direct them to the best content, wherever it comes from,” he wrote.

It’s a different point of view from what we explored yesterday, and it speaks directly to the benefits an integrated approach, but the central question is the same as yesterday’s post: Is it possible? What do you think?

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	News & Journalism	Posted at 4:11 pm (28 Jul 2009)

Keith Boag, the CBC’s outgoing chief political correspondent, told the Hill Times that the changes at the CBC’s parliamentary bureau  are “probably the most sudden and dramatic change that we have ever seen in the Ottawa bureau.”

“There are big changes coming but I think there are lots of reasons to be excited about that, and optimistic about it. Change is good,” Boag said.

Boag also praised his replacement, Terry Milewski, “When Terry is on you have a tendency to turn the volume up, not down,” Boag said to the paper.

For his part Milewski said he wasn’t relishing swapping Vancouver’s climate for Ottawa’s, “A thrill doesn’t run down your spine when you get the news that you’re to be condemned to five months of hellish winters,” he said. Nevertheless he told the Times that he’s looking forward to the prospect of a “juicy period” in politics.

The full Hill Times article his available here.

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	Ottawa, Parliament	Posted at 9:49 pm (27 Jul 2009)

For the last couple years the CBC has been pursuing a multi-platform content strategy. The strategy is based on transforming the CBC into a content company that publishes on multiple platforms, the web, TV, and radio. A key plank of the strategy involves integrating the news staff from the three services together.

The embodiment of that strategy is now being hammered out, sometimes literally, in newsrooms across the country as the radio, TV and web departments cram into the same space.

Some see this integrated approach as a mistake.

Peter Rukavina, a CBC Radio contributor in Prince Edward Island, thinks the CBC’s integrated content strategy is misguided. Content is not “generic slop that you ladle out of the universe, pass through a magic content-massaging machine, and then distribute on multiple “platforms,” he wrote on his blog on Sunday. Under the new process “we’re going to end up with is a gelatinous mass of poorly reported “content” that is capable of truly informing absolutely no one.”

Rukavina says the the reporting process itself is what creates the content. “Most importantly the medium-specific reporting process, is what conjures this thing called “content” into being,” he wrote on his blog.

Rukavina even put together some graphics to illustrate his argument. He writes that the integrated model looks something like this:

The problem with that, he says, is that “radio, television and the web are reduced to lowly status as “content delivery vehicles”. He says the integrated newsroom approach “ignores the notion that, dare I say it, the medium is the message and that the storytelling capabilities of each medium each have unique qualities.” According to Rukavina a better approach would for the three services to create their own unique content, with separate structures for radio and TV and the web.

Rukavina’s blog post illustrates some of the problems under the integrated structure. He describes an incident from last week in which a TV story ran on the radio that pointed to things that you need to be able to see.” Another example had a radio reporter referring to someone in a ‘black shirt.’ Rukavina says these are a “glaring demonstration of a larger underlying problem.” But is that true?

Obviously as we integrate the newsrooms there will be bumps along the way. The question is whether these problems will damn the process entirely, as Rukavina suggests, or whether they are merely transitional issues that will eventually be trumped by the benefits an integrated approach.

What do you think?

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	News & Journalism	Posted at 1:32 pm (27 Jul 2009)

The CBC is integrating its radio, television and online resources across the country in order to renew the news gathering process. As the previous post shows the nuts and bolts of the process are starting to come together in Toronto. In Vancouver the construction of the integrated newsroom is almost complete. Tod Maffin recently toured the new set up with Johnny Michel, CBC’s regional director for British Columbia.

^{From Tod Maffin on Vimeo.}

What do you think of the integration so far?

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	Behind the Scenes, News & Journalism	Posted at 12:27 am (26 Jul 2009)

The construction of the ‘hub’, a new integrated assignment desk for the news department, has begun. The producers in the area have already started decorating.

By the way, a ‘chaser’ is shorthand for a chase producer. They chase down guests and book them to appear on air.

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	Asides	Posted at 8:56 pm (24 Jul 2009)

The previous post on the CBC’s social networking strategy elicited a strong reaction from both staff and the public. So it’s worthwhile looking at the issue further.

Currently (at least to my knowledge) the CBC does not have a set of guidelines for social networking. Yet the number of CBC staff on these networks, and the number of followers these individual accounts have, has created is a massive opportunity for the CBC to dialogue directly with the audience. But it also poses risks.

Here’s an example. Jacques Poitras, a provincial affairs reporter for CBC News in Fredericton,  has a Twitter account. “I use it in my role as the lead political reporter in New Brunswick to send headlines, live updates and story links to a growing list of followers,” he wrote in the comments yesterday. Poitras started that account on his own initiative. Now he’s got 343 followers.

Jacques Poitras is hardly alone. The CBC has hundreds of staffers with Twitter accounts, from Jian Ghomeshi, to Zulekha Nathoo, a TV reporter in Calgary, to an intern at the fifth estate, Amber Kanwar. Together these accounts probably have hundreds of thousands of followers. If I were a manager at the CBC, which I’m not, that would make me a little nervous. What are all these people saying?

The debate is very similar to the ruckus that erupted over the CBC blog guidelines, which resulted in the staff-written CBC Blogging Manifesto. That manifesto some good advice that equally applies to Twitter, “Use common sense and don’t do anything stupid. Blog to make the CBC better, not to kill it,” one sentence reads. Another says “For better or for worse, you are representing the CBC when you blog [tweet] about it.”

These accounts are usually personal initiatives, but they are also inexorably linked to the CBC. Many of them use the CBC acronym in the user names. Poitras’ user name is “PoitrasCBC”. Now if Jacques Poitras’ tweets were offensive or stupid, which they are not, then the CBC would have a problem. And this gets to the point that Jill Atkinson was making on Wednesday, when she said “I get bothered by… a lack of discipline with the content.”

The point is, if you’re identifying yourself as being affiliated with the CBC on your social networking accounts, act accordingly, you’re representing the corporation.

Now that sermon is out of the way, let’s look at the opportunity here.

Poitras wrote yesterday that he finds his Twitter account “ideal because it gets news out quickly, extends our brand to a new audience, and takes very little time to maintain and update.”

Poitras is one of dozens of innovative reporters that realize the potential of social networking sites like Twitter. It “gets news out quickly.” If a reporter is on the scene for a story, sees something newsworthy, and tweets about from a Blackberry, I bet they would beat the wires 9 times out 10. That’s an immense opportunity for a news organization and a great way to provide immediate breaking news updates for the audience.

Multiply that opportunity by the number of reporters that use Twitter and you get a sense of what a news gathering organization could do with a platform like Twitter.

But in order to really seize the opportunity, it needs to be organized. First you need to know which reporters are Twittering, and Twittering professionally – as opposed to personally, then you need to gather their updates on a web site and categorize them so the information is digestible for the audience.

If you do that then you’ve essentially created a breaking news feed, that’s organized, is faster than the news cycle, and provides promotional opportunities.

Let me give you an example. Just a few minutes ago Poitras wrote on his Twitter account “Breaking: Enviro Minister TJ Burke resigning from cabinet. 4 wks ago he described being shuffled to enviro as an “elevation.”

That story is not yet on Google News, nor is it on CBCnews.ca. So not only did Poitras beat the news cycle with his tweet, but he also promoted his newscast. It makes me want to tune in to find out what’s going on with the environment minister in New Brunswick. Additionally if CBCnews.ca had a page that aggregated all the tweets from reporters in the field, CBC News would have that story on their site already. So not only would Poitras be first with the story, but so would the CBC.

That’s the opportunity of using social networking sites like Twitter. But in order to take advantage of the opportunity it’s got to be organized and follow a set of guidelines.

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	CBC Policies, News & Journalism	Posted at 1:40 pm (23 Jul 2009)

As social networks grow, and the time spent on these networks increases dramatically, it’s worth considering the CBC’s strategy on social networking sites.

First let’s look at some background on social networks. The number of people using social networking sites is increasing. A recent study in the U.K. found 80 per cent of that online population visited a social networking site in May. In March, Nielsen published a report that found that two-thirds of the global online population spent time on social networking sites or blogging sites.

But even more dramatic is the increase in the time spent on social networking sites. The Nielsen report said social networking sites now account for 10 per cent of the total time spent online – and it’s growing dramatically. The report says that “time spent on social network and blogging sites is growing more than three times the rate of overall Internet growth.”

Television networks in the United States are trying to capitalize on this trend by using social networks to promote their fall lineup in the summer, often months before their conventional promotional campaigns start. “TV networks are trying to determine whether promoting new shows earlier can bring them bigger audiences come September and October,” an AdAge article from a days ago says.

The U.S. television networks are using sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to post early peeks at upcoming shows. The idea is that this promotional material can build a community of die-hard fans that will translate into larger audiences in the fall. ”What we’re doing now gives us four months to try to get people to sample and come on board,” Joe Earley, a communication executive at Fox said.

Recently the CBC started to try to mimic that strategy with their fall launch communication plans. For instance the CBC created an official Facebook fan page yesterday. The idea behind that page is to do something similar to what NBC is doing with their network page on Facebook: to give the entire network a voice, highlight content, and provide an entry point to the various NBC shows.

Currently the CBC’s social network strategy is ad-hoc. It’s essentially a victim of its own success. CBC shows, and many CBC staffers have been early adopters on Twitter and Facebook, and as a result there are hundreds of different accounts with different agendas.

This doesn’t sit well with Jill Atkinson whose working on the communications strategy on social networks. “There are way too many CBC Twitter accounts,” she said, “the volume of CBC sites *is* massive, and should be culled.” Atkinson said there’s nothing wrong with individual shows having social networking accounts, but they need to reflect the CBC’s priorities, “not just because it’s a cool thing to do,” she said.

While she was digging around the various social networks Atkinson found that the CBC already had both a Facebook and Twitter account. Neither had posted anything. “We had a Facebook page with 400 plus followers, there was zero content on the page,” she wrote in an email “And we said ‘come on,’ what a missed opportunity.”

Atkinson wants to correct that. “The plan is to reflect… our television priorities and to create a community that acts as a conduit to the show’s individual promotional websites,” she wrote.

It’s an area that has lots of potential for community building and communication. Currently the CBC communicates primarily through newsletters, and although they can reach tens of thousands of readers, a newsletter once a week does not compare to a large Twitter account, like say Anderson Cooper’s, which has almost 300,000 followers, blasts out dozens of updates a week, and  allows for back and forth conversations between the viewers and the show.

The trick is to balance the CBC’s adoption and innovation on these networks, without overloading the audience, “In a nutshell the whole point to doing this is to value add for the audience,” Atkinson said on the phone yesterday.

What are your thought on the CBC’s social networking direction? Are there areas we miss, stuff we need to work on, or converselly pull back on?

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	CBC Policies, Marketing/Promotion, Programming	Posted at 2:21 pm (22 Jul 2009)

Evan Solomon will host a new political show from Ottawa beginning this fall. Joining Solomon in Ottawa will be award-winning CBC reporter Terry Milewski as CBC News’ new senior correspondent in the political bureau.

In his new role Solomon will be taking over the anchor chair from Don Newman, who retired in June. The show will broadcast from 5 to 7 p.m. ET. Solomon previously hosted CBC News: Sunday, which broadcast its last episode last month.

Terry Milweski move to Ottawa should be interesting. Milewski is a pit bull of a reporter who has not always had cordial relationships with politicians. His reporting on 1997 APEC summit got him into hot water when Prime Minister Jean Chrétien accused him of bias. Milewski was later cleared of that charge by the CBC ombudsman who described him as an “aggressive and critical” journalist whose work served the public interest.

Other CBC staffers taking up new assignments include:
-Keith Boag is moving to Los Angeles as the new U.S. West Coast correspondent;
-Susan Bonner is moving to the Washington bureau;
-David Common is heading to New York City, after a stint in Paris.

The moves are partly driven by the news renewal process and partly by the retirements. Jennifer McGuire, general manager of CBC News, made the announcement on Wednesday.

The full press release is available after the jump. What do you think of the moves?

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	CBC Newsworld, News & Journalism	Posted at 3:19 pm (15 Jul 2009)

Steve Pratt, the boss at CBC Radio 3 says that Radio 3 isn’t really a radio station, “It’s more like we try to be experts and help people discover new Canadian music,” he said recently in the free daily Metro.

Pratt says that Radio 3 is more like an ecosystem – an organic community. “A lot of the tools on the website are designed to help people discover and get to know artists and then be able to share stuff they like with their own social networks,” he said.

There is no doubt that Pratt believes in strongly in online distribution, but only to an extent. For instance, he doesn’t believe the web should be a dumping ground for content.

He said on his blog in May, regurgitating TV or radio content online is a bad strategy because it doesn’t necessarily address what the audience wants. “It is this ease of ‘copying and pasting’ content on the web that often leads to a lack of thinking about serving the unique needs of the audience online,” Pratt wrote.

All of this puts Pratt in an interesting position. As the director of CBC Radio 3, he wants to avoid being saddled with corporate-wide solutions that don’t met his needs and he wants to try to experiment as much as possible. This sometimes puts Radio 3 at odds with CBC corporate mandates. But as Pratt says “a one-size fits all solution for the creation and distribution of digital content isn’t sufficient and can possibly hamper your success and growth.”

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	CBC Radio 3	Posted at 6:34 pm (14 Jul 2009)

The digital programming department unveiled a new iPhone site yesterday.

The site improves the navigation, includes more visuals, and has the ability to share stories via Facebook, Twitter and email.

If you’re having trouble with CBC content on your iPhone, the CBC also redesigned the support page.

Both the iPhone and the iPod has become extremely popular platforms for the CBC. Richard Stursberg said a few weeks ago that the CBC served 787,000 podcasts in May, and the iPhone site clocked 920,000 page views.

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	CBC Mobile	Posted at 3:25 pm (10 Jul 2009)

In a ruling yesterday the CRTC reversed its opposition to fee for carriage for conventional broadcasters.

Conventional broadcasters have been lobbying the CRTC for a charge from the cable companies for carrying their channels, known as carriage fees, for a few years.

“We’re pleased that the Commission has committed itself to rethinking the model for conventional television broadcasters,” Hubert Lacroix, the president of the CBC, said.

Yesterday’s ruling may give the CBC a bit more money to work with in next year’s budget, but it depends how the fees are negotiated. The CRTC ruling did not set the fees outright, instead it said that broadcasters and cable companies should negotiate the size of the fee.

Yesterday’s ruling also increased the funding for local programming. The ruling increased the amount handed over to a local broadcasting fund, the Local Programming Improvement Fund, from 1 per cent of gross broadcasting revenues to 1.5 per cent. That will make the fund worth about $100 million a year.

“The Commission’s commitment to supporting local programming is very important at this time given the state of the economy, and is a critical first step to resolving the broader economic issues facing conventional broadcasters in Canada,” Lacroix said in a press release.

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	The CRTC, The Media Landscape	Posted at 11:39 am (07 Jul 2009)

Jian Ghomeshi spoke about the situation in Iran recently with the web site rabble.ca. In the interview Ghomeshi said the Iranian people are “inspiring the world right now.”

Ghomeshi said the a lot of people are suprised at how connected the Iranians are, “they’re tapped in… I’ve been on the internet with my cousins in Iran in recent years, we’re talking about Radiohead. They know what’s going on in the world.”

“They also know they can’t express some of what they believe or how they want to express themselves in the streets of Iran,” the host of Q said.

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	Q	Posted at 10:30 pm (06 Jul 2009)