^{Science & Sons}

Science and Sons, a Toronto design shop is working on prototype of a radio that only gets two stations – CBC Radio One, and CBC Radio 2. The prototype is called ‘RADIO CANADA’, and is “a homage to the cultural significance of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.” The design was inspired by dedicated CBC listeners who are permanently tuned to CBC Radio.

The prototype also acknowledges two different broadcast eras, on one side is an analogue tuning gauge, while the bottom has an electronic display and dial.

^{Science & Sons}

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	CBC Radio 1, CBC Radio 2	Posted at 2:31 pm (28 Jan 2010)

In the excerpt below, Shelagh Rogers remembers an excursion with Paul Quarrington, and reflects on the man himself:

Paul made a lot more noise on board the ship. He played music till long after midnight and would still be up for a 7:15 staff meeting the next morning. He never missed one. He was dealing with stage four lung cancer. And anyone who read the paper or listened to the radio knew it. But if you didn’t know, you would never have guessed it.

Her full blog post is here.

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	Asides	Posted at 4:09 pm (27 Jan 2010)

To get their hands on local foods this winter, downtown workers in Toronto — including lucky CBC staffers! — will have a new market to get a fix of meat, cheese, produce and and baked goods.

Starting on Thursday, Jan. 28, the Regional ‘n’ Artisanal Food Market will take place once a month until April in the Barbara Frum Atrium at the CBC Broadcast Centre. Toronto is already well served by winter farmers markets, but only this one will happen during the week in the downtown core, appealing to workers in surrounding office towers who don’t otherwise have easy access to local foods in the winter.

via Food Bytes ‘Market day at CBC’.

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	Asides	Posted at 1:12 pm (27 Jan 2010)

The guys at CBC Vancouver are looking for the unofficial sock puppet mascot for Vancouver as the city readies to host the Olympic Games.

The CBC site says:

Create a sock puppet mascot that you think best represents the city. It can been a sporty spirit booster or an irritable ironic icon!

To Enter: Design and make your sock puppet mascot and send it to us. Make sure you tell us the character’s story in 100 words or less. What’s his motivation? Where does she come from?

The entry deadline is Feb 8th at midnight. Go here for more information.

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	Asides	Posted at 1:00 am (27 Jan 2010)

This week Q makes its American radio debut. The hit CBC Radio show is being broadcast as a one-week pilot run on WBEZ, the public radio station in Chicago, as well as other Public Radio International affiliates in the United States. The WBEZ blog says “We’re testing out a show on our air and asking you to share your thoughts on it… We want to know what you think of this show.”

The CBC and PRI haven’t yet decided to offer this show full-time to public radio stations – and we’re not certain whether we’d take it if they did. That’s where you come in. We’d love to hear what you think – good or bad.

So far the comments on the WBEZ blog have veered between “hating it” to “love it” to “the show’s ok.”

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	Q	Posted at 3:59 pm (26 Jan 2010)

**UPDATE** The Globe is reporting that Gillis (or someone from the Canucks organization) will meet with the CBC this week to discuss the spat. “We’re going to meet with them and we’re going to see what their reaction is and go from there.” Gillis said today.

The ongoing spat between the Vancouver Canucks and the CBC is dragging into a second week, with Canucks General Manager Mike Gilles saying yesterday that he doesn’t know if he will make Vancouver Canucks players available for CBC interviews this weekend.

“I don’t know yet,” Gillis said when asked if he would make players available for Saturday’s Hockey Day in Canada game. Scott Moore, the boss over at the sports unit, said an apology might be forthcoming after he talked with Gillis on Monday. “The only thing I’ll say is we’ve had very good discussions,” Moore said to the Province.

The row started last over a segment and interview on Hockey Night in Canada on the Alex Burrows-Stephane Auger affair. The controversy is over Alex Burrows’ allegation that a Stephan Auger, a referee, was out to get him. MacLean’s segment on the incident infuriated the Canucks management. The segment is below.

What do you think? Should the CBC issue an apology?

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	Hockey Night in Canada	Posted at 2:42 pm (26 Jan 2010)

An ice sculpture of Rick Mercer at the Rossland Winter Carnival, which bills itself at Canada’s longest running winter carnival. Mercer was in town filming an of the Rick Mercer Report. The photo was uploaded to Flickr by UrbanWorkBench.

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	Asides	Posted at 12:16 pm (26 Jan 2010)

Friday’s English Haiti telethon raised more than $13.5 million, add to that another $6.7 million raised in Quebec for the French telethon, and double it with federal matching funds, and the grand total raised is over $40 million for Haitian relief efforts.

For me, the highlight of the show was K’naan performing his hit song from Troubadour, ‘Waving Flag’.

Funds will go towards a coalition of Canadian NGOs, including Canadian Red Cross Society, Care Canada, Free the Children, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam Quebec, Plan Canada, Save the Children Canada, UNICEF Canada and World Vision Canada.

Over two million people tuned in.

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	Programming	Posted at 4:00 pm (25 Jan 2010)

An unprecedented cast of Canadian superstar musicians, athletes and film and television celebrities has been confirmed for the ‘Canada for Haiti’ telethon. The number of stars involved in this broadcast is unbelievable.

The broadcast will feature live performances from The Tragically Hip, Metric and K’naan, with appearances by Céline Dion, Nelly Furtado, Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, Simple Plan, David Foster, Chantal Kreviazuk, Raine Maida, Justin Bieber and Measha Brueggergosman.

They will be joined by a cast of film celebrities including: James Cameron, Michael J. Fox, Ryan Reynolds, William Shatner, Rachelle Lefevre, Joshua Jackson, Pamela Anderson, Jason Reitman, Eugene Levy, Norman Jewison, Tom Jackson, Will Arnett and Sandra Oh. In addition some of Canada’s best known television stars will also appear on the one hour commercial free simulcast, including Brent Butt, Hugh Dillon, Mike Holmes, Rick Mercer and Alex Trebek and humanitarian Craig Kielburger. Star athletes that have been confirmed thus far include Steve Nash and Wayne Gretzky.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Governor-General Michaëlle Jean will also have special messages for Canadians. The show will be jointly hosted by Cheryl Hickey, Ben Mulroney and George Stroumboulopoulos and will be broadcast on Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time on CBC Television, CTV, Global Television, MTV, MuchMusic, and National Geographic Channel.

Canadians can show their support by donating:

Online at CanadaForHaiti.com
Toll-free at 1-877-51-HAITI (42484)
Text AID to 45678 (carrier charges may apply)

Funds will go towards a coalition of Canadian NGOs, including Canadian Red Cross Society, Care Canada, Free the Children, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam Quebec, Plan Canada, Save the Children Canada, UNICEF Canada and World Vision Canada.

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	Programming	Posted at 2:07 pm (21 Jan 2010)

UPDATE: The lineup for the Haitian relief ‘telethon’ will be announced tomorrow at noon in Toronto. A just-issued press release says: “Canadian broadcasters have received an outpouring of support from Canadians in the music, film and television industry.”

Canada’s big three television networks are joining forces to help in the Haitian relief effort.

The three broadcasters will be collaborating to produce ‘Canada for Haiti’, a hour long commercial-free broadcast that will air immediately prior to George Clooney’s ‘Hope for Haiti Now’ broadcast this Friday, Jan 22nd at 7 p.m ET/PT.

The ‘Canada for Haiti’ broadcast will be hosted by Cheryl Hickey, Ben Mulroney and George Stroumboulopoulos. It will explore Canada’s close relationship with Haiti and will feature performances from Canadian musicians. There will be more details on that in the coming days.

Donations accepted during the broadcast will go towards a coalition of Canadian NGOs, including Canadian Red Cross Society, Care Canada, Free the Children, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam Quebec, Plan Canada, Save the Children Canada, UNICEF Canada and World Vision Canada.

The U.S. broadcast, ‘Hope for Haiti Now,’ will feature George Clooney in Los Angeles, Haitian-born Wyclef Jean in New York City and CNN’s Anderson Cooper in Haiti. It will be simulcast on CBC Television, CTV, Global Television, MTV, MuchMusic, and National Geographic Channel.

I’ll provide more details about the show as they are firmed up.

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	CBC Television	Posted at 6:35 pm (20 Jan 2010)

Shortly after the earthquake struck in Haiti, Kim Fox, the social media producer at CBC News, started working on a photo site to help friends and family in their search for loved ones.

The site currently has 315 submissions, and it not only does it put a human face on the scale of the disaster in Haiti, but in some cases it has also helped find the missing.

“We have these tools, we use them everyday to get content, as far as I’m concerned if I can leverage the CBC’s web site and it’s traffic to help get the word out, you never know how you’re going to connect people.” she said, adding that some of the people in the pictures have been found alive and some had been found dead.

The project is a novel example of the ability of the internet to crowd-source content and make connections. “That’s what this project is about. It’s about really trying to create a common space to communicate and share information.”

“On the gallery we’re just trying to provide the service, we’re not rescue workers, but we’ve sent emails to rescue organizations to try and spread the word.”

The Google Person Finder is another site that news organizations are using to help connect families with victims of the earthquake.

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	News & Journalism	Posted at 6:27 pm (20 Jan 2010)

^{That’s a lot of changes!}

This is a script for the upcoming episode of Test the Nation: IQ. Katie Gennaro is the script supervisor for the the show. In the excerpt below she describes the process:

Basically, what happens is, a rundown is created for the show, with all the items timed out. From there, the writers create the blocks of script. My job is to take their blocks of script and format them. Then through a series of several meetings, rehearsals, etc, various changes come about to improve the script (whether it be for blocking or for the actual words that will be said, or any other reason). Once we have a white script, we begin to make changes on a new colour (ie pink), so that the entire script doesn’t have to be reprinted every time changes occur – just the particular pages that change get printed.
Those pages then get stuffed into the script, replacing the previous colour.
Changes go through the colour wheel (white – pink – blue – green – yellow, and then back to double white), basically right up until show day.

Test the Nation: IQ airs on Sunday January 24, 2010 at 8pm.

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	Behind the Scenes	Posted at 5:39 pm (20 Jan 2010)

Allan Gregg recently turned the tables on Peter Mansbridge on his TVO Show ‘Allan Gregg in Conversation’. The interview coincides with the launch of Mansbridge’s first book Peter Mansbridge One on One.

In the video Mansbridge discusses an interview he was trying to arrange with Karlheinz Schreiber, he says “everybody’s got an agenda, almost everybody. What am I doing? I’m selling the book.”

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	Personalities	Posted at 5:27 pm (20 Jan 2010)

The CBC recently dropped the windows file format it was using for its live audio streams and switched to the mp3 file format, an iTunes and iPhone friendly format.

The switch means that tons of CBC Radio One and Radio 2 live feeds are now available on iTunes (under the Radio directory) and the iPhone app.

The switch was made over the last month. “The reason was simple,” Angela Misri, the manager of digital radio, said “we wanted to deliver a more robust, expandable, browser/OS agnostic listening experience.”

Misri added that this is the first step “in making it easier for everyone to listen,” and that they are still working on a few bugs but are happy with the switch so far.

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	CBC Radio 1, CBC Radio 2	Posted at 2:10 pm (19 Jan 2010)

Corrections: The excerpt below, from Jeffrey Dvorkin’s blog, ‘Now the Details‘, is inaccurate. It refers to an incident in which the hub in Toronto ordered a show in Montreal to lead with a particular story. I was told over the weekend that  that the hub is an assignment desk, and as such it doesn’t decide the lineup of individual programs – that is left to the sole discretion of the shows. So it’s not inaccurate to say the hub in Toronto “ordered” what a Montreal show should lead with. Also Dvorkin refers to a radio series on Russia that was vetoed by the TV side, apparently this never happened, the series was simply put on hold because of the earthquake in Haiti. The original excerpt is below:

CBC Montreal’s local supper hour newscast had an exclusive interview with a former Mafioso. A good local story since an organized crime turf war has broken out and the son of a jailed don was shot to death recently. The Montreal show led with that story.

The “Hub” in Toronto had ordered that the lead should be the death in Ontario of a child with H1N1. When that order was ignored, the executive producer in Montreal found herself reprimanded by management.

The worry among the demoralized staff is that a bureaucratic mechanism has now imposed itself with the effect of stifling journalistic initiative. Stories that might make good radio but without a visual component are rejected. A radio reporter proposed a series of stories from Russia, but without the agreement of the tv side, it was vetoed.

An excerpt from well known journalism professor Jeffrey Dvorkin’s blog, ‘Now the Details‘ about the CBC news renewal process and how it’s working out for the people in the trenches. I can’t comment on the accuracy of the post, I just found it interesting. The blog post also mentions that there are obvious synergies/efficiencies from the hub approach.

What’s your experience with the hub so far?

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	Media Coverage	Posted at 3:28 pm (14 Jan 2010)