Yesterday, the Globe published an article by Guy Dixon about staff changes at CBC News arising from the news renewal process.

The article was mostly correct, but this one line stuck out:

Newsworld, which is one of the CBC’s few areas which attract advertising revenue, will be up for a licence renewal before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission next year.

What a strange thing to write. For the record CBC pulled in $329 million in advertising revenue in 2008, and I suspect most of that wasn’t attracted to Newsworld, that is unless that Lakota guy is forking over bags of cash.

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	Behind the Scenes	Posted at 10:20 am (17 Jun 2009)

A group of about eight ravens has taken up residence on CBC’s transmission tower in Aklavik, N.W.T.

Local CBC technicians have tried to evict the birds, they’ve even solicited the help of local firefighters who tried to blast the nest out with their hose.

But, as the local renewable resources officer said “The fire truck didn’t have enough pressure to blow the nest out. Didn’t even have enough pressure to reach the nest up in the tower. It was too high,” Ian McLeod said.

Aklavik is located 55 kilometres northwest of Inuvik and about 1,150 kilometres northwest of Yellowknife.

A cbc.ca story on the birds is here.

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	Behind the Scenes	Posted at 3:42 pm (03 Jun 2009)

After eight years on the air, CBC News: Sunday taped their final morning show in front of a full house in the atrium of the CBC building in Toronto on Sunday.

You can watch the show here. Here are a few pictures of the event.

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	Behind the Scenes, CBC News: Sunday	Posted at 11:56 am (02 Jun 2009)

This photo was on Kevin McGrath’s Facebook page with the caption “Erin Karpluk is pretty flattered after we inform her that she is the next Carrie Bradshaw.” It was taken during the CBC’s ‘Doors Open’ event on Saturday, an annual event in which the public is invited to tour the CBC facilities.

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	Behind the Scenes, Being Erica	Posted at 12:15 am (26 May 2009)

The long-announced layoffs have finally begun.

Some members of the news department were being told informally about their fate late last week. Now formal layoff notices are being sent out this Wednesday and Thursday.

On the bright side, the total number of layoffs is a bit smaller than expected. CBC managers originally expected to have to cut 393 jobs on the English side. But with around 100 people having applied for the retirement package, only about 180 workers are facing losing their jobs at this time.

This is going to be a depressing week.

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	Behind the Scenes, Layoffs	Posted at 12:25 pm (25 May 2009)

Two CBC reporters won individual awards for their work at a gala ceremony in Ottawa last night.

The award for Excellence in Science and Technology Reporting from the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance in English language media went to Peter Nowak. He wrote about the award on his blog. He said “the award is particularly satisfying because it’s a stamp of approval on the type of journalism I try to do, which is issues-based rather than so much of the product-based tech reporting out there.”

Reporting on important consumer issues such as net neutrality, copyright reform and competition problems - like the woeful state of Canada’s cellphone market - often rubs those in power the wrong way, especially when exposing a lot of the bull that goes on, so it’s nice to see some back-up from the people who matter most: the readers.

The same award for French language media also went to a CBC reporter, Bruno Guglielminetti, according to Nowak, Guglielminetti said it was ironic that two CBC reporters grabbed the top honours, while the corporation is laying off hundreds of people: “The CBC, if you haven’t heard, is cutting 800 people, most of whom (myself included) are anxiously waiting until next week to find out if they have jobs or not,” Nowak wrote on his blog.

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	Awards, News & Journalism	Posted at 10:35 am (20 May 2009)

CBC’s senior management will update staff on the fourth quarter this Friday from 1 to 2:30 p.m. ET.

As Hubert Lacroix said last week the fourth quarter finished a bit better than expected, although the numbers were then not finalized. Expect more solid numbers this Friday.

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	Behind the Scenes	Posted at 3:25 pm (19 May 2009)

^{Credit: Graham Hughes for National Post}

The National Post published a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at a Hockey Night in Canada broadcast over the weekend.

The action on the ice was furious, but things were equally hectic within the Bell Centre. Inside the Hockey Night in Canada production trailer, producer Doug Walton and director John Szpala sat in front of a wall of 22 monitors that showed the play from all angles. It was their job, with a crew of about 40 technicians, cameramen and announcers, to transform on the fly the jumble of images into a seamless broadcast.

The article has a great graphic of the camera angles at Montreal’s Bell Centre and a look into the HNIC production trailer. Click on the image to see the full graphic.

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	Behind the Scenes	Posted at 9:32 am (27 Apr 2009)

The CBC staff photo competition is closed. There’s some really great shots spanning decades of work by staff, from Brian Stewart’s shots of the Ethiopian famine, to the Tsunami relief efforts, to behind the scenes shots from the daily grind. 

There were 192 entries submitted, you can view them all on Flickr here.

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	Behind the Scenes	Posted at 8:49 am (15 Apr 2009)

^{This photo was submitted by Eric Foss, a producer with Sunday}

If you’ve got some shots from work lying around on your hard drive you should submit them to the CBC photo competition. Winners will entered into the CONTACT photography festival.

The deadline for the competition is Friday 5 p.m. ET. To date there’s been 98 pictures submitted. You can see all the submissions here.

To submit, email your pictures to photos@cbc.ca and fill out and send the release form. This competition is only open to CBC employees, for the full guidelines see here.

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	Asides, Behind the Scenes	Posted at 11:20 am (09 Apr 2009)

In case you haven’t heard about this yet Billy Bob Thornton and his band The Boxmasters were on Q with Jian Ghomeshi this morning. The interview, uh, ahem, well, it didn’t go very well.

Billy Bob said he was upset because Ghomeshi referred to his acting career in the introduction to the interview. He said he’d told the producer to focus on the band and not mention his acting.

The highlight was when Ghomeshi asked him about his former and current tour-mate Willie Nelson, and Billy Bob replied that he’d never met him.

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	Behind the Scenes, Q	Posted at 3:19 pm (08 Apr 2009)

CBC President Hubert Lacroix’s recent online Q & A session (here, or here) yielded some interesting insights into CBC’s strategy.

Lacroix said that priority will go to “things that enable us to become a content company, to become the most important creator and distributor of Canadian content across all platforms.”

Those comments align with several comments that both Lacroix and Richard Strursberg have made over the last couple years about producers becoming content creators on multiple platforms instead of being radio or television or online producers.  That dedication to content producing was reinforced when cbc.ca was spared any layoffs in last week’s cost cutting.

Now on the face of it, this seems like a smart move. However the view from the trenches is a little different.

Outside of news on cbc.ca most of the online content creation - ie the guys that put content onto multiple platforms - is done by online producers. For the most part these producers are attached to shows. Cutting the production budget of shows, will put pressure on their online budgets, which means less, not more, content on multiple platforms. This will actually move the corporation further from creating and distributing content on multiple platforms effectively.

Take the show Being Erica for instance. This is a show with a innovative online presence. The main character of the show ‘Erica’ is online, in character, and uses the internet to interact with the audience and advance the storyline. As I said before this is an innovative strategy. But cutting back on episodes of the show will put pressure on that strategy and I worry impede the progress CBC has made as multiple-platform broadcaster.

For the CBC, how this tension between strategic direction and actual implementation plays out will have significant impact due to the recent amalgamation of the Canadian Television Fund and the new media fund. In the future all shows seeking Canadian Media Fund money will require significant online components. “Doing something interesting online will be a must-have if you want to get CMF cash,” a comment from Kev on this blog says.

Newslab also an article on the subject here.

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	Behind the Scenes, How Shows Work	Posted at 9:15 am (02 Apr 2009)

Ever wonder who transfers all those CBC archival tapes into a digital format? Erich Schmidt is your answer. The CBC has hundreds of thousands of beta tapes and film canisters; some of which are slowly getting transferred to digital format and published on the internet as part of the CBC’s digital archives project. It’s an amazing project, but encoding and transferring beta tapes is a time-consuming process.

Paul Gorbould took the image for the CBC’s photo competition.

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	Archives/Vintage Media, Behind the Scenes, People	Posted at 6:04 am (05 Mar 2009)

A small fury erupted at the parliamentary press gallery meeting on Friday, when it was revealed that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had been tipped off in advance about the questions to be posed by Canadian journalists.

The Canadian press gallery had a strict limit of two questions, which they negotiated in advance.  The CBC covered the negotiations on a live blog. The debate elicited a lively reponse from the online audience, but it appears that one of Harper’s aide was also online, and tipped off the Prime Minister. The Globe’s Hill correspondent Daniel Leblanc has more.

Well, I guess we learnt our lesson on that. But kudos to the news folk for the live blogging. It was really an innovative way to cover the Obama visit.

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	Behind the Scenes	Posted at 6:00 am (03 Mar 2009)

Three CBC hosts are up for Juno awards in different categories.

Molly Johnson, the weekend host of Radio 2 Morning, has been nominated for Vocal Jazz Album of the year. Pat Carrabré, the Friday to Sunday host for The Signal, has been nominated for Classical Composition of the year. And George Stroumboulopoulos, host of The Hour, along with his fellow co-worker Alex Liu, have both been nominated for best music DVD of the year.

The awards will be held on March 29th. For a complete list of the nominees, go here.

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	Awards	Posted at 10:21 am (05 Feb 2009)