CBC News Toronto’s election coverage marked a couple innovative milestones last Monday.

They inaugurated an application that allows a host to control on screen graphics themselves, instead of having the control room do it. And they marked the first use of the immersive graphics at the CBC.

The first innovation allows the host to control the graphics presentation via an iPad in real-time.

“We were the first station in North America to the app on air,” Allan Giacomelli, a senior character generator at the Toronto Production Centre, said. “Usually the control room controls the graphics, now the anchor can control them.”

“It allows the host to tell the story they way they want,” Giacomelli said from his development lab.

As you can see in the video above, they also rolled out immersive graphics, which allows graphic elements to be layered onto a set.

“The next step is to integrate more technology into the newscasts,” Giacomelli said, “we have a lot of innovative ideas that we are planning to try for the next federal election.”

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	Behind the Scenes, Programming	Posted at 9:52 pm (27 Oct 2010)

As the case against Russel Williams unfolded in a Ontario courthouse last week, there was no shortage of horrifying details.

But thinking back to the blanket of media coverage, there was one single piece that really stood out in my mind, and it avoided the graphic details altogether.

It was a live piece of talk-and-tape with David Perry, a professional interrogator, on The National last Wednesday. The piece explained the interrogation techniques that broke Williams and lead to his confession.

The piece also broke format.

In a world where news stories are often two to three minutes long, this piece weighted in at more than 18 minutes.

Some of the single clips alone were five minutes long – unheard of in news.

On top of that the footage was poor, it was from surveillance cameras, no close ups, often you can’t even see Williams’ face.

But not only that, the clips were almost all silence.

In some cases 20 seconds or more of silence hang between the interrogator’s questions and Williams’ answers.

Put that all together and it’s hardly the sort of stuff you usually see on a newscast, yet the team on The National ran with it.

“We didn’t want to overproduce it,” Lara Chatterjee, the producer that put the piece together said. They let the tape speak for itself, without sensationalizing it.

It was a real gamble.

Not only was the piece live to air, but the clips were long, and Chatterjee insisted on not editing them down.

“I went through the entire two hours and forty minutes… and it was awful.” she said. “I sat at my desk with my arms around me… but we had to figure out how to make sense of it.”

She said the tapes, as raw and bare as they were, provided insight into Williams’ character.  She said “we got a look inside a number of things that we don’t normally have access to, the interrogation process, the mindset of a criminal, we tried to make sense of how this whole thing came about.”

The gamble to run with the tapes paid off, the ratings were the highest The National’s seen in months.

“Everyone that worked on that show that night, really took a risk and it really paid off,” Chatterjee said. “We did something really different and we really committed to it.”

It’s a great piece of journalism.

See for yourself. The video of  the first part of the “Interrogation of Col. Williams”, is here. The second part is here.

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	Behind the Scenes, News & Journalism, The National	Posted at 9:50 pm (26 Oct 2010)

If you’re a fan of Rex Murphy on Cross Country Checkup or The National, you’ll have noticed that he hasn’t been on air for the last couple months.

According to The National’s blog, Murphy is dealing with some “minor medical issues, and he’s decided it’s best to take a break from the studio until the end of the year.”

We wish him the best in his recovery.

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	Cross Country Checkup, The National	Posted at 7:27 am (26 Oct 2010)

Video of the CBC’s annual public meeting is now online.

You can watch video of the event here.

Speaking notes of the speeches are also available here.

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	CBC Policies, Executives	Posted at 7:10 am (22 Oct 2010)

Over the last month you’ve probably seen a few emails from your boss exhorting you to fill out the Dialogue survey. Today’s the last day to do that.

To be blunt, this isn’t another bullshit survey that will end up in some dusty filling cabinet.

Here’s why.

Since the layoffs, CBC President Hubert Lacroix, has taken a really active role in managing the corporation. Richard Stursberg’s dismissal was one example. But there are many others. My god, he showed up unexpectedly at a meeting I was at last week.

He’s now in the process of crafting the vision for the CBC for the next five years. This comes at one of the most important times in the CBC’s history.

In the next five years we’ll face a new era of broadcasting: online TV, transmedia, cross-platform convergence, digital radio, internet enabled televisions, mobile devices, the latest Apple gadgets.

All of these are going to more profoundly affect our industry than they already do.

Add to that the painful reality that our funding hasn’t increased in real dollars since the Liberals were in power, and you get a sense of the urgency of setting the right priorities.

This is your chance to provide your input into those priorities.

Thousands of CBC employees have already filled it out, if you haven’t, I suggest you do the same. Find the latest email about this in your inbox, or go here and follow links. Thanks.

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	Behind the Scenes	Posted at 6:30 am (22 Oct 2010)

The current edition of The Walrus has a feature-length look at Richard Stursberg’s time at the CBC. It’s worth a read.

The article describes one of Stursberg’s last quarterly updates to staff, in which he announced CBC Television’s strategy would be to focus on entertainment.

Here you get an image of CBC collectively sunk to its knees, holding its head in its hands, keening in memory of its lost golden age, when the network’s news resources were the envy of broadcasters around the world, when it had more African bureaus than anyone but the bbc. Gone, all gone.

It describes another incident during the layoffs in 2009, in which staff from the Fifth Estate and Marketplace and Stursberg got into a argument:

“Hold my jacket now; we’re going to take this outside,” Stursberg said at one point, according to a transcript of the event. “I think it is invidious and unfair to start this kind of conversation.” Moments after the proceedings concluded, he did in fact take it outside, marching up to Findlay and Docherty before witnesses in the cbc atrium and, with his finger wagging, furiously accusing them of undermining him in front of employees and the press.

But for all his faults, Stursberg also wasn’t shy about making tough choices. “If there were hard decisions to be made, decisions that were going to make him enemies, Stursberg wanted to make them,” it reads. It also says:

Even some CBCers are now willing to admit that, in the face of the network’s harsh realities, Stursberg’s pursuit of ratings success for the public broadcaster was the only logical, perhaps the only responsible, choice.

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	Executives, People	Posted at 9:50 pm (21 Oct 2010)

Ryan Couldreyis a photographer working at the CBC. In his own time, he’s made a concerted effort to document all of the old analogue equipment that’s scattered all over the place, yet is a vital part of the CBC’s legacy and broadcast history, which he calls the ‘Broadcast in Analogue’ series.

Here’s his take on an analogue zoom camera, as he says:

Back in the day broadcast cameras didn’t necessarily have fancy zoom lenses, so if operators wanted to get in close they’d have to physically switch lenses, or use one of these bad boys. This is part of the Broadcast in Analogue series.

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	Programming	Posted at 9:19 pm (21 Oct 2010)

The headline says it all. Bravo to the 22 Minutes crew.

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	Asides, This Hour Has 22 Minutes	Posted at 8:59 pm (21 Oct 2010)

Have you ever wondered why the CBC does some of the things that it does?

Maybe you’re puzzled at losing the hockey anthem, or you’ve still got a bone to pick about the new format on Radio 2?

Maybe you’re wondering what direction the corporation will take in the future?

Now you’re chance to put your questions directly to the CBC executives that run the corporation.

On Wednesday between 11am and noon (ET) the corporation is holding its Annual Public Meeting by webcast.

The speakers at this event include Hubert Lacroix, the president and CEO, Timothy Casgrain, the chair of the board of directors, and Suzanne Morris, vice-president and CFO.

You can submit questions in advance via a form here. You have to register to submit a question.

Here’s what I sent in:

What does Richard Stursberg’s departure mean for the future of the CBC; will there be less of a focus on the size of the audience, and a renewed focus on “programming that informs, enlightens and entertains,” as defined by the Broadcasting Act?

If you’re keen to see this question answered, or if you have your own question, sent it in, the site says that if they can’t get to it during the alloted 60 minutes, they’ll post answers to the most “frequently asked questions” on the site following the meeting.

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	CBC Policies, Our Mandate	Posted at 9:15 pm (18 Oct 2010)

The power has been fully restored to the CBC building in Toronto.

Employees should report to work as usual.

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	Behind the Scenes	Posted at 7:12 am (15 Oct 2010)

A power outage that has dragged on for over 12 hours crippled the CBC’s broadcast centre in Toronto for most of the day.

The outage occurred early this morning and is suspected to have been caused by flooding at a local power station.

Toronto Hydro said power was restored at 8:25 this evening. By midnight Julie McCambley, the director, operations and contingency planning, said in an internal note said that “full power is now available to the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, and is being phased in through the building overnight.”

McCambley said all staff should come in to work today as planned.

The outage resulted a surreal day within the CBC. Whole floors were virtually emptied. Meanwhile emergency crews ran cables from a generator truck parked outside, all the way up through the atrium, to the tenth floor in an effort to restore power to critical broadcast units.

Many staff were sent home because they couldn’t turn on their computers. Staff in other areas were able to access some electricity from backup generators. They jury rigged together rows of laptops running on extension cords and power bars to get shows on the air.

Although there were reports of some programs going off the air for a while, incredibly, all the regular programming made it to air, with the exception of Radio One’s The World This Hour.

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	Behind the Scenes	Posted at 10:50 pm (14 Oct 2010)

The CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada attracted the largest debut audience in the program’s history last Saturday.

On average 2.3 million viewers tuned in for the first game; either a ‘Battle of Ontario’ match up between Ottawa and Toronto or the Habs taking on Pittsburgh, depending on your location.

The ratings for the first game were up 34 per cent from last year.

The second game, Vancouver against L.A. attracted 1.4 million people, up 26 per cent from last season’s Saturday night broadcast.

Unlike many other big TV events, Hockey Night’s record audience isn’t due to the new measurement system, as the system was already in place for last year’s season debut.

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	Hockey Night in Canada, Sports	Posted at 8:59 pm (12 Oct 2010)

The CBC has released the largest study ever of its news coverage.

The study was months in the making. It looked at whether the CBC was balanced in over 15,000 stories on TV, Radio and online. It also involved polling almost 3,500 people.

Jennifer McGuire, the GM and editor-in-chief of CBC News, said this afternoon that the objectives of the study were to better understand:

What Canadian news consumers understand by “fair” and “balanced” news coverage; [and] the degree to which Canadian news consumers feel these principles are being demonstrated through the various CBC News delivery platforms and competitor news organizations.

It’s a big study and I’ll spend some time going through it and provide my thoughts later this evening tomorrow.

In the meantime, take a look for yourself, and if anything jumps out at you, please leave a comment below.

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	News & Journalism	Posted at 4:33 pm (05 Oct 2010)

The image above shows the colored stages of three script elements for Battle of the Blades.

Katie Genaro, a script supervisor, took the image.

In a previous post, she explained how the process worked for Test the Nation:

Basically, what happens is, a rundown is created for the show, with all the items timed out… 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.

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	Behind the Scenes	Posted at 6:57 pm (04 Oct 2010)