As some listeners know, some CBC Radio podcasts have sponsorship messages at the start of the content. I’ve received a lot of questions about why that’s happening, and asked Steve Pratt, head of CBC Radio’s digital initiatives, to explain the rationale.
Do we really need to have sponsorship messages in CBC podcasts? Isn’t CBC Radio supposed to be non-commercial?
CBC Radio is only funded for terrestrial (AM & FM) broadcasting. All the money to make our podcasting a reality is cobbled together at the expense of our ‘traditional’ radio programming.
There is a significant amount of effort going into the creation of the podcasts. CBC Radio produces over 40 separate podcasts a week, almost all of which need to be edited to fit a podcast format, or to remove material that we do not have the right to put in a podcast. We also produce several original ‘podcast-only’ programs that are not broadcast on terrestrial radio.
In all cases, this production takes time and money that we don’t have and can’t sustain. (As you know if you check out iTunes, our podcasts are extremely popular, and every download consumes bandwidth, too.)
So CBC Radio has made the choice that several other public broadcasters have made - to include sponsorship messages to help pay for these increasing costs.
So why have podcasts at all?
We feel it’s vitally important for the future of CBC Radio that we provide our programming as podcasts. More and more audiences are choosing to consume content on platforms other than a traditional broadcast, and as a public broadcaster, we need to do what we can to make our content available on these platforms or risk losing relevance and value to our audiences.
But I thought the CBC gets new money from Parliament every year?
CBC has not had a substantive funding increase in some time, and if we waited to be given money to do new things, we’d very quickly fall behind the needs of our audiences. We would not be in a position to consider alternative sources of funding should our funding increase to reflect the new realities of podcasting and other multiple platforms. I sincerely hope that in the future our funding will reflect these new realities.
In the meantime, though, I think it’s far more important that we find ways to distribute our content where it matters to our audience instead of staying out of the game entirely because we can’t afford it.
We conducted a survey a couple years ago in order to gauge interest in podcasts and it provided some strong guidance as to how we should proceed with respect to sponsorship. An overwhelming percent said they wanted CBC podcasts and that they wanted them to be a free service from their public broadcaster. They told us very clearly that they did not want to pay for podcasting themselves. We have to respect that.
Do the sponsors have any control over the content?
The sponsors have no say, and will never have any say, in the content we produce. That has not happened at the CBC in television, it does not happen on the website, and it will not happen in radio.
As always, please weigh in with what you think. Faced with limited options (no podcasts, charging listeners for podcasts, or permitting sponsorships), did we make the right call?
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huh. given the sheer number of staff Steve has, and the fact that they’re no longer burdened by doing a Radio 2 show, maybe he should consider trimming some fat from his budget before adding sponsors.
I stopped subscribing to the Hour Podcast because of the ads. The beer they wanted me to consume didn’t fit my tastes and I got sick of hearing the sting at the start of each episode. But I would much rather hear an ad then have to pay for my podcast.
The big question for me from this post is, If CBC only receives funding for the AM & FM broadcasts how to they fund the Sirius broadcast and anything on cbc.ca or cbc radio3?
National Public Radio podcasts have always had sponsor messages on them. I’ve never found it a great hardship to ignore them.
Sirius is subscription-based, cbc.ca is chronically underfunded but money is scraped together wherever possible (mostly an infinitesimal slice of the English television budget, but also ad revenues, sponsored content etc.), and I don’t know about Radio 3, I’m guessing it’s an even smaller slice of the radio budget.
I’ve had my issues with the Hour’s sponsorship choices too, but like the interviewee says, the CBC really needs to be doing podcasts. They’re turning radio back into an active medium, and not just something that people have on while they do the dishes, so to ignore them would be death. Unless of course all you want from radio is a string of the last 3 decades’ hits strung together with inane chatter and the occasional eye in the sky report.
Personally, I do not find the ads that annoying. As someone has pointed out they are on all NPR podcasts as well. My choice would be to continue to have the ads if that is the only way we can have free podcasts.
Sirius, as a paid service, should be *making money*, not going around looking for subsidies. Why would we subsidise a paid service?
If by no funding in a while you mean 30 years, and even then not a cost of living, people will get the picture.
New media is funded on shoestrings and gum. Make revenue, or at least try, or you won’t even get looked at. It’s not a policy choice, it’s just reality and responsibly spending your remit.
The sad part is that the incoming prez has not made it an immediate priority, but then it’s an appointed position.
I listen to the Radio 3 podcast religiously and it hasn’t had any ads yet. I don’t think I would mind too much if it did as long as it came at the beginning and was clearly separate from the show, and was an appropriate product, like the ads I’ve been hearing recently on Ideas podcasts. If it allowed them to expand what they do and perhaps to add a show where they have interviews with current pop culture news makers that would be a good trade off, imo. The Hour is basically a gussied up cable Toronto show and I have no interest in it either on air or as a podcast, so I haven’t heard those ones.
Thought this was about podcasts, not Sirius. I’m not privy to the details of its funding but as far as I know CBC’s slice of the subscription pie goes to its operating costs. So I doubtr there’s much in the way of subsidy.
As to why you’d subsidize a paid service, I have no idea. Why does Canada prop up private broadcasters, cable providers, independent productions (film, TV, and Web), Canadian musicians, or the arts in general? Maybe there’s some 800lb media gorilla out there that would otherwise McFlatten the cultural landscape? (Bit far-fetched, I know, but stranger things have happened.)
hey Anon - a ’shoe string and gum’. Really ? If you’d like to share the actual budget number I’m sure most people would be surprised.
Over all budget numbers are public though:
In 2006-2007 CBC got 974,323 from the gov’t.
That’s just under a billion dollars.
Advertising (this includes TV) brings in 330,735
Real estate brings in 7,332 (wonder if it’s worth all the hassle to employees for 7k?)
Transmission and distribution brings in 7,339
Galaxie (that’s the cable audio) brings in 21,449
and ‘other revenues’ bring in 192,155 (newsworld,rdi,cbc country canada)
for a total in 067-07 of 1,533,333
(source, CBC corporate web site, financial overview)
Why doesn’t the CBC have adequate funding for podcasting? It’s a national public service, most of us pay copious tax, and, like public libraries and public radio, podcasting deserves to be supported by taxes. It’s culture; podcasting helps citizens stay informed, educates some, and entertains others. Time to rattle a finance minister.
I didn’t mean to steer this discussion towards Sirius but I was curious as to how new radio like services have been added to the CBC if only AM and FM are funded.
As I said I don’t mind ads in the podcast if it keeps them free. I just wish I could choose what was being sold to me.
It’s too bad that our government doesn’t see the opportunities to embrace new forms of communication for Canadians through increased funding of the CBC.
One last Sirius comment, I don’t think satelite radio is going to last.
there’s lots of subsidy for satellite radio, since satellite radio has yet to turn a profit.
as for NPR having sponsorship on their podcasts… well, there’s a red herring, NPR has sponsorships on the air! We’re not NPR. We can do better.
as someone who works on the podcasts, the ads are not there to subsidize the amount of time the people who work on them. they are expected to produce the podcasts on their regular work time. they don’t get paid anything extra to produce them, nor are they given extra time.
besides, most of the content of the podcasts is culled from material that was already broadcast - so the taxpayers already paid for the content.
i think the money goes to pay for the huge bandwidth costs, gigs and gigs worth of data every week. i would suggest maybe cutting back on 40 (!) podcasts and then not having ads. i hate them personally.
Why not put them all on YouTube and let Google worry about it?
Steve Pratt gives a thorough and clear understanding of the CBC’s podcasting efforts. And a convincing defense of their attempts to keep up regardless of the obstacles.
Grumpy’s numbers are off, by a decimal place in some areas. If you look at the annual report under financials (.pdf) you’ll see advertising revenues listed at $329 million, not thousand.
YouTube is streaming, not downloading, which is what podcasting is all about. Though I don’t doubt there are third party sites that would cover the costs… probably by inserting advertising of their own. YouTube’s free, as long as you don’t mind banner ads and sponsored videos, and whatever else is going to be “Powered by Google.” Not sure that’s much of an improvement.
how does new media get funded? By cutting other services of course.
It’s no coincidence that radio was getting cut all the years that new media was being built up.
Regardless of the excuses, the ads are inappropriate. If I heard something along the lines of “This podcast is sponsored by Shell Canada” instead of “this podcast is brought to you by the all-new Cadillac CTS. Be an original, visit cadillac.gm.ca for more details,” I’d be less unhappy. It’s not the ads themselves, but the dumb taglines that I don’t care for. I would assume that the average Current or As it Happens listener does not care for a stupid car.
The ads on the podcats do not bother me an iota. I am happy to receive the free podcasts, and i know things like that cost money. Advertising makes perfect sense.
One comment though, please have “search engine” and “spark” change their podcast promos. I listen to a number of cbc podcats, and the promos for those two programs have been the same for over a month and they are getting very annoying.
Other than that, if you need to raise a few sheckles to make it available free, then advertise away!
Grumpy,
All I meant was that new media does not get defined, new money. Last time I checked, 30 years ago there was no web.
The point being that in order to do new things, you need to stop doing old things. Or get separate, new funding and have it written in your mandate. No such language for internet service, so cbc.ca and all new forms are built with the understanding that people need to fold it into their existing work, or it makes some kind of money.
Something certainly ought to be done to remedy this situation. I’m still not happy at the ads on the News site existing at all, if I might resurrect an ongoing concern.
Amy, most if not all of the new media slice of the CBC budget allocation comes from English Television, not Radio, as CBC.ca is a part of ETV.
…“this podcast is brought to you by the all-new Cadillac CTS. Be an original, visit cadillac.gm.ca for more details,” I’d be less unhappy…
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, your perfect recall of this ad will probably make a marketroid very very happy.
Kev, there are lots of links between radio and the web. Lots.
Radio3 was mostly a webpage for a long time. And it was a very expensive webpage, with total costs, without exaggeration, around a million dollars a year. One Million. There were a couple hours of radio a week that came out of that department; but it doesn’t take a million a year to do a weekly radio show.
So, the ads pay for the bandwidth and don’t offset production costs. I’m still ok with them, as long as they don’t interfere with the content. I wish every Ideas show was available on podcast, for example. I’m not always able to hear the ones I’m interested in, and even when do catch them I often wish I could re-listen to a part of the show, or even the whole show. If these kinds of ads could make that happen then I’m all for them.
I’m very surprised to see that some people here would cut back on the podcasts rather than have the ads, though. I can’t understand that at all. It doesn’t seem consistent with the objectives that the CBC is supposed to be pursuing with respect to serving the Canadian public.
Obviously, individual departments and shows shoulder a lot of the cost in terms of workload and money for their own projects. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise (so I probably should have left in the line where I explicitly mentioned that).
It’d be hard to argue against spending that much on Radio 3 though, it definitely has a niche.
Turnip is quite right, those are x 1k - in my haste I just grabbed them from the page.
(it’s here)
though the html file doesn’t display on a mac
so you might want to grab the pdf.
I think the point here really is that as the service evolves it will spend money differently than it did 30 years ago - 1.5 billion is still a hefty amount of money.
and just for the record, alan newsworthy is a bit off. radio 3 produced well over 30 hours of network shows on R1 and R2 and lots of special projects for CBC over the years as well as coproductions with CBC TV. It also won over 30 international awards and drew attention to CBC’s obvious world-class productions.
I’d rather they’d kept Brave New Waves, frankly.
BNW > Radio 3
Does anybody bothering checking which ads go with which programming? To hear a car manufacturer’s ad ahead of a Q&Q’s piece on global warming is a very mixed message. Might even explain why this planet has a problem.
mr. newsworthy
for a million dollars I will do a DAILY radio show. And you will listen and you will like it.
What waste of space Radio3 has been.
Who couldn’t come up with ridiculous radio like that.
The stricture would appear to be that Radio3 must be different from 1 and 2, or no funding.
There’s not really much of a market for trance music, or a Yoko Ono retrospective. Except maybe in trendy clothing stores as Muzak.
I mean, it’s just bad, dull, meaningless radio.
Oh wait, it’s one more CHOICE for bad, dull, meaningless radio.
Ads in Podcasts are freaking you out?
What crybabies.
You have no problem paying money to Rogers and Shaw for your internet connection, but demand podcasts to be free and commercial-free.
I’d rather have ads (that the CBC earned) than pay more taxes.
Would you have less of a problem if it were ads by Marc Emery and his products than Wayne Gretzky and the new Chev Olds?
Or just government life-style reminders paid for by money that was funneled through a scam ad agency with a kickback to party coffers and cash payments to Brian Mulroney for … just for being such a nice man.
Every media in this country has commercials, except CBC Radio.
Yet we’ve survived, as a nation able to cope with annoying and unwelcome and distracting changes of topic and mood.
And with the latest, cutting-edge technology, and a simple but powerful weapon, a little button called Fast Forward, we will … overcome.
Brave New Waves and Radio 3 are very different animals, and BNW played a very different kind of music than Radio 3 plays. BNW might well fit as a late night show and podcast on Radio 3, though. That’s not a bad idea, in fact. If I had to make a comparison I would say that Radio 3 >>> BNW, however, and I was a fan of BNW.
Allan: Trance music, or a Yoko Ono retrospective?? I take it you’ve never heard Radio 3 before? Radio 3, Norris aside, is GREAT. It’s one of the very best things the CBC has going right now. Unlike Q and The Hour, both the people (except Norris and his sidekick) and the content at Radio 3 are true representations of the pop music and culture scenes in Canada, which is one of the leading scenes in the world right now, btw, and has been for much of the last decade, and this is something that Canadians should have been hearing about but haven’t been, at least not though the CBC. If the CBC genuinely wanted to produce top quality truly national pop cultures programs it would cancel Q, The Hour, DNTO and maybe some of the Radio 2 shows and pump that money into Radio 3, and then condense and spin off some shows from Radio 3 for Radio 1 and Radio 2. You’re not going to get real, adult, pop culture info from an ex-MuchMusic VJ who has never lived anywhere but Toronto and who still hasn’t been deprogrammed from that extremely formulaic 1990s MuchMusic mentality. That is obvious to most, I hope. What you see on The Hour, and hear on Q and DNTO, is not a true representation of the real Canadian pop culture scene, I hope you understand. This issue relates to advertising too, so I think I’ll do a longer post tying it all together.
This thread is a good illustration of the CBC elitist attitude. Capitalism bad - Socialism good. When will I be able to opt out of funding this crap?
I don’t want to be too long winded, and I will bring this back more directly to advertising, but context is very important to this issue and I’d like to address it for a moment using the Radio 3 example. I think Radio 3 is a key part of what the CBC has left for true national pop culture programming. I haven’t heard the numbers since Radio 3 started broadcasting its hosted shows over the internet but I would bet that Radio 3’s combined numbers would now be close to the numbers that either Q or The Hour are generating. Grant Lawrence’s show Thursday also had 52 responses on the Radio 3 blog. (And many more will have been emailed to him because that blog is virtually impossible to log on to. I’ve never been able to log in successfully and they’ve acknowledged that this is a problem and they always give several ways to respond.) Compare that to Q which seems to have shut its blog down in July because only a handful of people had ever posted responses to the show, and Ghomeshi’s personal site just as dead. The Hour’s blog gets a few more responses but it looks like they get around 50 in a month, never mind for one show.
This is happening in large part because Lawrence has a lot of credibility with the national pop culture audience, and Jian and George don’t. Grant is a very knowledgeable individual who knows the Canadian and global pop music and culture scenes very well, and the responses he gets everyday from all over Canada show that Canadians know this. Jian and George, otoh, are culturally very narrow individuals who clearly have rarely ever even looked outside of Toronto, culturally speaking, and who, therefore, have very little credibility with a national audience. I’m sure that much of their audience is made up of the 50 somethings and older and others who don’t know anything about pop culture in Canada but who still trust, mistakenly, that the CBC is giving them the goods with these shows. These people show up in the numbers but they don’t know enough about the subject matter to engage in discussions, so they don’t blog. If Lawrence was hosting the Radio 1 afternoon show, otoh, he would be generating dozens of blog responses every day because he does know what he’s talking about and his national audience knows this and has a huge amount of respect for him and what he has to say.
This context puts a big twist into the question of advertising. There are big issues at the CBC and large amounts of money are being poured down the drain on shows that aren’t even close to being quality national shows in line with CBC’s mandate. And then you have this little gem tucked away in the back that has very relevant and very good pop culture programming. Context is everything, and in this context I think you need to do whatever you can to make sure that that little gem survives and thrives. In another context I may well not want any ads attached to CBC programming in any way, but in this context I think ads would be a small price to pay to solidify, and perhaps expand, Radio 3 if such an opportunity exists, and the same goes for other quality CBC shows. I honestly no longer believe that the CBC can be trusted to act in the best interests of all Canadians, at least not as it’s been managed in recent years, so I think these shows need to be resourceful to survive and thrive. In this context I, a person who has never voted for a conservative party in my life, am much more open to the possibility of forming ties between the corporate world and Canadian cultural institutions. Could Radio 3 even be branched off from the CBC and run independently? What must we do to protect and honour and develop our Canadian culture in this new context? To me, at this stage, if the opportunity exists then ads seem like a small price to pay to defend and advance true national Canadian art and culture programming.
More to Allan’s point - I will host a show daily and you will listen (or not) and like it (or not). It doesn’t matter whether you listen or like it because you WILL pay for it. HA HA - suckers!
I am 22 years old, and never listen to CBC Radio or watch CBC TV, but I am a huge podcast fan. I am the future - any device which makes them financially viable is a good thing!
Mike: When Canada becomes a corporate-oligarchic state.
Grumpy, if you’ll check the history, there were several years when Radio 3 was 120seconds.com, justconcerts.com, and newmusiccanada.com, and was not yet responsible for the Saturday & Sunday shows. There were, if you remember, plans for a third terrestrial network (even though, as if it were a moment of insanity, there were no actual FM frequencies available in most big cities.) Rabinovitch killed off that project when he came in, but it continued on as a trio of websites.
At any rate, even after “Radio3″ became a radio show on Radio2 (the most confusing name for a show ever), the R3 budget was massively weighted towards online rather than radio. Eventually there was a re-org, complete with a Monday afternoon massacre: some staff (and management) disappeared and there was a push from on high to actually do more broadcasting. Some of the survivors left behind had to learn how to do radio shows, because many of them never had.
Now of course there is no terrestrial R3 anymore. And the numbers for Sirius are actually hard to track. Sirius Canada is a privately held company. Even the auditor general doesn’t see their books. But it’s certainly not making any money, and it probably won’t for a long time.
And why mention Sirius or Rad3? The Radio3 podcast is the cbc’s most popular. This is where a lot of the podcasts and some of the corporations’s online presence are coming from. And that’s the department Steve Pratt is running.
No, you’re the present, Padraic. When the future comes, the CBC will be trying to appeal to an age demographic much younger than you!
The great thing about computers is that if you really want to, you can fast-forward through the ads really easily.
It’s dawning on me that a number of people here don’t know what Radio 3 is. Radio 3 is 6 hosted 3 hour shows per day, 24 hours per day of content, about a half dozen podcasts (most of which are weekly I believe), a live concert archive, plus it has also now merged with New Music Canada and has thousands of songs and videos by Canadian indie artists available on demand, plus the blog, and plus a number of other features as well. To those who aren’t familiar with it, please have a look at the Radio 3 site for 10 minutes. Look through the links at the top of the page and listen to the show that’s being broadcast over the net while you do it, and then come back and say whether you think you could provide all of that for $1 million per year.
And I don’t understand the comment that Radio 3 isn’t making any money. How would it make any money given that there is no advertising? Its function is not to “make money”. Its function is to fulfill CBC’s mandate, and it’s one of the few high profile national CBC projects that is actually doing this, and it’s doing it very well indeed. They have the top podcast. I haven’t heard a recent number relating to its internet audience but it was over 100,000 not long after it started streaming the hosted shows over the internet. Heck, even its Facebook page has over 4000 members now. Radio 3 may well be just about the last real national pop culture programming the CBC has left, and Canadians are tuning in in large numbers.
I don’t really understand some of David’s comments.
Radio3 is a pay service on Sirius, why shouldn’t it make money? Yes I realize there is a free internet feed, as well as podcasts. But if it’s so central to the CBCs mandate, why isn’t it actually on the air?
$1million is the old R3 budget, which included only a few hours of broadcast, and mostly went to supporting a webpage This meant, of course that “Radio 3″ was at the time largely not a radio service. There was even a faction around our Vancouver office that was simply anti-radio, I can’t believe some of the stuff people would say about radio, cbc radio in particular. There was even a brief era where they were producing their radio show without hosts (despite have a huge staff on hand). Let me tell you how well that went over.
So I’m happy that’s they’ve refocused on doing radio, whatever technology they’re using to do it. I don’t know what the budget is now. And we’re not even allowed to know the budget for Sirius Canada, even though it’s partly owned by the cbc.
My only real complaint is that the traditional services have been cut back to fund the new media projects, with an obvious loss in quality. And that doesn’t seem right to me. And I’m not sure it jibes with the mandate, either.
Dwight Williams: as opposed to a socialist welfare state?
exrad3: Radio 3 may be on Sirius but how many people listen to it there? I don’t and neither do a hundred thousand + other people. Does anyone have any recent numbers? I’ll bet that it’s significantly higher than that now. Sirius was a way to get it on the air, but now I’m sure that a large majority of the listeners listen on the net. And the issue of the CBC largely abandoning its mandate has been discussed here and is central to this issue as well. I’ll give a partial repeat of something from another thread but it’s relevant here too. The CBC’s mandate says that it is to:
- Reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions.
- Actively contribute to the flow and exchange of cultural expression.
- Contribute to shared national consciousness and identity.
- Reflect the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada.
And yet with respect to its pop culture and arts programming Q, The Hour, DNTO and GO are all hosted out of Toronto by culturally very Toronto hosts. George and Jian are so regional that they have literally never lived anywhere in Canada other than Toronto. They grew up in Toronto, went to school in Toronto, and have spent essentially their whole working careers in Toronto, and yet they’ve been handed jobs as hosts of perhaps the CBC’s two top “national” pop culture shows.
How can the CBC possibly claim to be reflecting its regions by having all of its major pop cultures shows hosted out of Toronto by very regional Toronto personalities? How can it claim to be contributing to a flow and exchange of cultural expression if all of these programs speak with a mono-cultural voice? Clearly it can’t. Rather than making any attempt to comply with its mandate it has in recent years been hiring unqualified and unsuitable friends and neighbours of the Toronto insiders for these plumb jobs instead.
I can’t speak to your other comments to any great extent because I don’t have any inside knowledge. My understanding was that Radio 3 was on Sirius with hosted shows at the time that the Radio 3 show was on Radio 2. And I’m not sure that funding is the biggest problem at the CBC. How much is being spent on The Hour and Q, for example? These shows work against the CBC’s mandate and should never have been approved. I would think that the CBC could cancel those two shows and maybe DNTO as well leaving GO as Toronto’s pop culture representative on the CBC. Then they could put that money into an expanded Radio 3, perhaps by expanding Radio 3’s presence in Montreal to cover that scene and the French Canadian scene better, and expanding it more on the pop culture side, some of which it does already. Then it could condense the content of the new Radio 3 and produce shows to replace Q, The Hour and DNTO. These would be largely summary shows from Radio 3’s weekly programming for the CBC’s other audiences. DNTO used to be a hipster show and you could run something very close to Grant Lawrence’s podcast and become a hipster show again. You could have a show very much like The Hour but based in Vancouver or Montreal, and with a qualified and credible national host and not someone who’s never lived anywhere but Toronto in his life. Likewise you could do an afternoon show perhaps out of Montreal again with a qualified, nationally respected, host and all of these shows could draw off all of the pop music and culture programming and research that Radio 3 does for its shows all week long. Radio 3 has and has had working for them people like Buck 65, Grant Lawrence, members of Sloan, Tariq Hussein. These are people who are right in the scene and who represent the Canadian pop culture scene from coast to coast. It’s seems like a perfect fit, don’t you think? But if course this doesn’t further the careers of the Toronto based managers and their friends, and that I’m sure is why we have people like George and Jian and Sook-Yin, who all represent Toronto’s pop culture sense and for the most part only Toronto’s pop cultures scene, hosting their shows all from Toronto
David,
Toronto Broadcasting Corporation?
Gabriel,
Can anyone argue otherwise? What has happened in the national CBC in recent years is so extreme that I don’t think there is a credible argument to be made otherwise. Jian is the most unqualified and inappropriate host I’ve even seen the CBC hire, and George is not far behind him, and those two combined with Sook-Yin and Brent, all of whom do their shows out of Toronto, really amount to systematic attempt by the CBC to suppress Canadian culture and to replace it with Toronto culture. Maybe it’s time for concerned citizens to be more proactive and to start a campaign to raise Canadians’ awareness about what is happening, and perhaps to get a public boycott of these shows going.
Well, there certainly is less local programming in Winnipeg. And our last two local news anchors (Diana Swain and Krista Ericson) were transferred (promoted) to Toronto. I imagine Richard Stursberg would refer to this as consolidation.
But I don’t infer any malicious intent.
Unqualified and inappropriate by whose lights?
Not necessarily mine.
What would qualify Jian Ghomeshi to host a national pop culture show? Consider the CBC’s mandate and please try to explain how his show, with him as host, is in any way consistent with the CBC’s mandate. If anyone can come up with such an explanation I’d be very interested in hearing it. And if no one can then what does that tell you?
Even beyond that the CBC had a long tradition of hiring people who had lived in various parts of Canada for significant periods of time to host such shows, because they clearly understood that it is essential for such a host to have some kind of awareness of the diversity and nature of the broader Canadian cultural context. Is this not common knowledge? Is this not common sense? Can you name for me another host, past or present, who has never spent any significant amount of time in any other Canadian city or part of Canada other than the he one he now lives in an hosts his show from, other than George S.? Ghomeshi is so culturally regional, and therefore culturally uneducated in general, that he has made several openly derogatory comments about various parts of Canada on his previous guest hosting spots, and he’s consistently shown a strong bias toward Toronto and southern Ontario content and culture, and a lack of awareness that he was showing this bias, and why wouldn’t he? It’s all he really knows about Canadian culture, after all.
*skullclutch*
Even for someone living in Ottawa, there’s only so much Toronto-Hate a guy can take…
I am a Canadian currently residing in Australia. I rely on the CBC web site and podcasts to keep in touch with what is going on in Canada. I am very disappointed by the amount of space devoted to advertisements on the web site - it is hard to see the news for the ads. While the ads on podcasts are somewhat "discrete", they must still work, or GM would not be paying for them.This is all in marked contrast to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation web site and podcasts where there is NO advertising whatsoever. The same is true of the BBC.Why can’t the CBC do the same - all 3 broadcasters rely on government funding, and all 3 claim to be underfunded. Why does the CBC have to be the odd one out?
I live in the UK for over a year and loved the BBC, so many TV channels and even more radio stations, all ad free, same goes for the website. Now they do have a licence fee, but so do we, its just our comes from taxes, and government sets that amount.
During the CBC strike of the summer of 2004 or 2005, ads were put onto the website, they were never there before. I thought it was a temp. thing because of the strike, well the strike was resolved and the ads stayed.
I’m starting to feel that the CBC is a bit of a joke, we call it a public broadcaster, but only Radio 1 & 2 and normal CBC tv is free, the rest (CBC Newsworld, The Doc Channel, CBC Country Canada) we must pay for, either our cable or satellite tv company, or pay Sirius for Radio 3.
I wish this government would give the CBC more money so that it can be half the corporation the BBC is.
The BBC only shows ads on its website if you are browsing it from another country, this is to pay for their bandwidth, since UK resident are paying for the BBC, so that is fair.
ABC gets comparable (actually, about 25-30% more) public funding than CBC/SRC, but of course the CBC/SRC funding is effectively split across two languages. The BBC’s license fee-based funding is at least double what the CBC gets, and has the benefit of being slightly more stable.
The media environment is also different - the BBC doesn’t suffer as much from multiple 800-lb gorillas for neighbours pouring hours and hours cheap syndicated TV into a group of heavily subsidized but incessantly whiny private networks (ditto for ABC).
As always, if you want to see the CBC improve, it will need funding. You should bear that in mind when voting, and make sure that your sitting representatives know that you consider better funding for the CBC to be a worthwhile priority.
(Personally I’d prefer to see it funded by TV license fees, but that’s a big conversation that I don’t think Canada is ready for.)
Kev,
I keep forgetting about the SRC since I don’t watch it. And you are right about the American content being syndicated, while in the UK they show much less American shows, culturally more different than we are to the US, I suppose.
The BBC does get about 4 Billion pounds, plus they make about 2 Billion pounds from selling their shows abroad, BBC World News, BBC America, BBC Canada, etc.
I doubt the CBC sells much abroad.
CBC has always been one of my reasons for voting for a party, was quite scared Mr. Harper was going to chop it, but harder to do with a minority I think.
I found this article, was written back during the CBC lockout of 2005, has some interesting points, I agree with some of the things he has written, except of course the large cut in funding.
I just wish that I could hear Radio 3…my tax dollars support it, but we don’t even get to listen to it without having to pay a subscription fee to an american company.
I think that the CBC should eventually embrace the youth culture (similar to what BBC Radio 1 does in the UK) and combine Radio 1 and 2 together on AM…and make Radio 3 available full time on FM. How much opera do we really need to listen to anyways?
http://radio3.cbc.ca/
I haven’t had any problem listening to Radio 3 via iTunes whenever I can get to a broadband connection. No subscription to US satellite services needed.