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.”

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.

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.

Employees should report to work as usual.

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.

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.

The re-organization left Steve Billinger, a key executive during Richard Stursberg’s tenure at the CBC, without a position.

His department will now be split into two units, a revenue unit will fall under to the CBC’s sales and marketing department, while the digital unit will fall under the media operations and technology unit. About 100 staff members are being shifted around as part of the re-organization.

Kirstine Stewart, Interim Executive Vice President of English Services, indicated on the internal employee portal that the move was made to better serve programming objectives. “By consolidating our operations we are better able to react quickly and take advantage of technology changes which benefit all areas of CBC. Digital is not to be viewed as separate; it is in fact central to how we conceive and deliver the best-made programming in Canada,” she said.

The move comes after a similar overhaul was pushed through the CBC’s French services, in which some members of the digital department were assigned to the sales and marketing end of the business. Some insiders think the success of that move prompted the re-organization on the English side of the house.

This was Stewart’s first quarterly update following Richard Stursberg’s departure, and it had a distinctly different tone.

Although Stewart kicked off the presentation with an update on the revenue picture, the discussion quickly turned to content.

“The CBC is here to reflect Canadians, and what it is that they want to talk about,” she said before turning over the microphone to the heads of the radio, television, news, and the regions to elaborate on the content picture.

Denis Donlon, the general manager of English Radio, said radio is still on a roll “virtually all of our morning shows, which is prime time on the radio, are top three in their markets.”

Donlon added that CBC Radio now has 13 shows that are broadcast internationally, and radio is well positioned to respond to the new multi-platform world. “The Debaters is going to television in January,” Donlon said, and Canadians are downloading 1.2 million podcasts every week. “We will thrive in the world of choice.”

Christine Wilson, the interim general manager of CBC Television, said the TV side has had a number of big successes recently, pointing to Dragons’ Den, Battle of the Blades, Being Erica syndicating in 40 countries, the Nature of Things’ 50th anniversary season and the upcoming premiere of the the Queen in 3D, on September 20th.

Jennifer McGuire, the general manger of CBC News, also focused on the content, “enterprise journalism defines us as a public broadcaster,” she said, noting that the news department had broken an unprecedented number of stories this spring and summer.

Concerning the news renewal process, McGuire acknowledged how difficult it has been, calling it a “tremendous upheaval,” that had challenged all the assumptions about how the department operates.

McGuire said “It was necessary to take a good hard look at what we do,” and “work on ways to better serve our audiences.”

She added that there are still tweaks to make as part of the renewal process, “but the emphasis this year for CBC News now shifts to content.”

In response to a question about the ratings for The National, McGuire said “Specifically with News we need to shift the narrative not only to an audience-revenue narrative, but also in terms of the value of the journalism.”

McGuire said CBC News set the news agenda a number of times recently, and that contribution needs to be acknowledged.

The shots above are from Tyson Williams, a local blogger and photographer, who was sitting in the audience for an interview with Danny Boyle. There’s more on that on Tyson’s blog here.

If you work in TV in Canada, or even know people who do, you know what that means.

The Gemini nominations have been announced.

The ceeb picked up a ton of nominations this year, 151 in total, topping last year’s count of 142 nominations.

Surprisingly, given the public reaction to the new format, The National was amongst the top nominated shows with a total of nine nods, the rest of the list includes a number of perennial fan favourites and a couple of docs and mini-series. They are:
The Summit (9);
Guns (9);
Love, Hate and Propaganda (8);
the fifth estate (7);
Keep Your Head Up, Kid (7);
Being Erica (6);
The Tudors (6);
Republic of Doyle (5).

CTV show led the pack in terms of total nominations for individual shows. Their Olympic coverage picked up 13 nods, while the cop drama Flashpoint, garnered 15 nominations. Flashpoint will face off against a couple CBC shows in the best drama category, rookie nominee Republic of Doyle and veteran The Tudors.

The corporate website also said the “CBC swept five categories—guaranteeing wins in best local newscast, small market; best host or interviewer in a news info program or series; best news anchor; best performance by an actress in a featured supporting role in a dramatic program or mini-series; and best news information series.”

Vote For Your All-Time Favourite Canadian TV Show
If you’re feeling left out from this year’s crop of nominations, this year you can still participate in picking your all-time favourite TV show. Starting on September 15, nerdy couch potatoes will be able to vote from a list of 25 shortlisted programs for their all-time favourite pick. You will be able to vote on this site, or on Twitter and Facebook.

Why do I have the feeling that the Beachcombers are going to win this?

From talking to some of you over the past few days, I know that you are wondering how the senior management changes will affect CBC News — the news renewal process, our budgets, the renewal of our journalistic policy book, and how we do our journalism and programming daily.

The short answer is, nothing changes.

It’s important to remember that we’re on a course that we set for ourselves to better serve Canadians. There is still a lot of work to do, but we are already seeing great success. We have had some hallmark moments this year. Here are just a few examples:

On The National, we broke powerful stories about CSIS and about the RCMP mutiny. And who could forget Bob McKeown of the fifth estate chasing down Graham James? Peter Mansbridge landed definitive interviews with newsmakers such as Helena Guergis and British Prime Minister David Cameron. On Radio, The House did an outstanding job with its Quebec special, which resonated across the country. The Charest interview was picked up by all of the major English daily newspapers and much of the French media in Quebec. These are just a couple of examples of journalism that had impact. There are many more.

And we are gearing up for an impressive fall. The investigative unit is delighted to welcome Diana Swain. It is pursuing several stories, and its work will be a high priority in the months ahead.

This will be the second season for the new local news formats and late night newscasts. It will be a great chance to build on our success in these areas. Local programs have seen strong ratings growth, and ensuring that they are able to deliver more original and enterprise journalism will solidify the gains. To support this, we have launched a local investigative initiative out of Winnipeg.

In the fall, we will continue the development of local radio news. We have new research that gives us insight into the radio news programs, and how Canadians use them and feel about them. As you know, local radio is an incredible strength for CBC Radio and CBC News. It is important to invest in the continued success of these newscasts. I will be sharing more details about this work soon.

Fall will also be critical for the renewal of our digital platforms. We plan to launch changes to breaking news online in October, and a more extensive change to CBCNews.ca in January. You can get a glimpse of some of the new territory by checking out some of the impressive work done during the G20: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/g20/index.html

We continue to commit to innovation and have started a push to develop new programming initiatives. We have a series in the works on volunteering. The Marketplace team is working on a project about hospitals and healthcare that will be featured on The National. We will continue to explore new program ideas in current affairs. Make the Minister Work will get a run as a series. The fall will also see CBC News Network going more often to the stories that matter to Canadians, just as it did when Mark Kelley traveled to the Gulf of Mexico to cover the oil leak or when Heather Hiscox was in Vancouver for the Olympics.

In newsgathering, we are looking at how we organize breaking news coverage. The Hub will sharpen its focus on this to better serve CBC News Network, radio hourly newscasts and our digital platforms.

All this to say that CBC News is on track and still moving forward. I hope everyone has been enjoying summer. I look forward to a great fall.

Jennifer McGuire
General Manager and Editor in Chief, CBC News

It’s official, there is no such thing as a ‘quiet time’ in our world, no matter if the summer beckons with promises of vacation and time off, the CBC never really takes a holiday.

As you know, last Friday our President, Hubert T. LaCroix, announced a major change in leadership in English Services with the departure of Richard Stursberg.

I am used to writing these notes in times of celebration and in honour of the many achievements of our great team here at CBC. And although this is a different occasion, I think that it is our progress and those great markers of achievement that are important for us all to focus upon during this period of transition.

The CBC is a collection of remarkable people working in collaboration in every region of the country across each of our centres – from the front-line staff putting shows to air, to our managers, our leaders, and our talent. Together, we deliver the best of Canadian programming.

We are all moving ahead as we do our work for the CBC. Despite media speculation regarding the change that has just happened, Hubert made it clear to me that he supports our programming and is a fan of the shows that we make.

We do our best work when our programming on radio, online and on television, created by the CBC and its partners, reflects and engages Canadians. Our relationship with audiences has been deepening as of late with more people tuning into CBC’s multiple platforms to enjoy our great sports coverage, our in-depth first class news analysis, our challenging documentaries and current affairs and our engaging music and entertainment shows. Hubert has reinforced with me that he does not want that momentum to slow down or risk being lost.

We have an opportunity going forward, to build on the legacy of programming developed both in CBC’s past and in its present, the best of both survive and thrive to combine and give Canadians a broadcaster they can truly relate to, and one that they can absolutely rely upon. And it’s time to seize that opportunity, to prove again and again that Canadians want to see and hear their lives and priorities reflected in the programming CBC gives to them.

As we head into our 75th year, and with Canadian private broadcasters calling for reductions in their commitment to Canadian content, we are alone positioned to take up that mantle. And we will succeed by engaging and entertaining people across the country, whether they argue out loud with Anna Maria Tremonti’s latest guests on The Current, or with Peter Mansbridge and The National’s At Issue panel; whether they cheer on the Leafs, Habs or Canucks, or their favourite hockey player battling to figure skate; whether they laugh with Rick as he shows us the funny side of our Canadian lives, get confounded by Pat and Peter on This is That, or triumph with Erica as she battles through her own life in a way people can all relate; whether they discover new favourite bands with Rich Terfry, or get their 24-hour news fix from CBC News Network, and at the end of their day watch their local news report. We are CBC and we are here to remind Canadians why they are special. And we are here to learn from them and now more than ever we have the chance to listen in as well as we broadcast out.

Here’s to a less eventful rest of your summer. I’m honoured to be in a role currently where I get to work with all of you together as we move the CBC forward. I thank Hubert for the opportunity, his direction and his support. And as he has said – ‘full steam ahead’.

Best,

K

Kirstine Stewart

Interim Executive Vice President

English Services

He sparked a revolution within the corporation. His departure is going to have a huge impact. It’s what everyone was talking about on Friday, and I’m sure it will continue this week.

So what does his departure mean?

Why don’t we sort through a few of digital tea leaves to find out.

First, let’s start at square one. What happened?

Was he pushed or did he jump?

Apparently he was pushed: “The decision was made by Mr. Lacroix,” CBC spokesman Bill Chambers said.

On the cusp of leading the Crown corporation in drafting a new five-year strategic plan, CBC president Hubert Lacroix felt the time was right to “bring in new leadership.”

Ok. So when and how did this happen? The Toronto Star says it happened after: “a meeting in Toronto late Thursday between Stursberg and Lacroix.”

“There were lots of debate, but no fisticuffs, I’m afraid,” CBC vice-president of communication Bill Chambers said of the final tête-à-tête.

So after a late Thursday meeting, that’s it.

So what does it mean?

Most Significant Development at the CBC in Years
It’s obviously a big indication of some competing visions. “I can’t think of a more significant development at the CBC in years,” Lise Lareau, President of the Canadian Media Guild, said on her blog on Friday.

In order to figure what his departure means you’ve got to look at his legacy. Lareau says:

Stursberg took the CBC — our public broadcaster — down a very commercial road. It was his way of dealing with tepid funding and unreliable support from the federal government. Programs were judged as successful only by ratings, not by the value they may contain for public discourse or the public record.

She makes a good point there.

The Tightrope
Stursberg was walking a tightrope.

He was getting less assurance from the government, and he had to shore up the dike.

His tried to replace depreciating public money with ad money. But to get ad money, you need eyeballs, and that’s what he was after, and that’s exactly what he delivered.

The Ottawa Sun crunched the numbers, and during his time the TV ratings went up, way up, gaining 52 per cent.

So Stursberg saw a problem – dwindling tax dollars funding the mother corp – and he sought a solution: more ads, and more expensive ads.

Unfortunately for him, and for the CBC, bringing in more ads doesn’t help much when you have to defend the importance of a cultural institution in a committee room on Parliament Hill.

“Richard Stursburg’s departure came about because his vision for the CBC and the traditional mission of public service became increasingly irreconcilable,” Jeffrey Dvorkin, a former CBC Radio executive said on his blog.

That was, in essence, the sword that Stursberg fell on. He was a victim of his own success.

Does this mean the CBC is going to reverse course now that he’s gone? Are we going back to more arts programming and longer stories on The National?

Mr. President, over to you.

Ever wonder what it feels like to sit through a satellite interview? This is what the guest on TV sees.

I found the photo on Kevin O’Leary’s photo stream. “What it looks like when you are in front of the camera doing live Tv. I have to use a little powder on my head!” O’Leary wrote.

Don’t you just love the glamorous world of television!

The story is now closed for commenting, but in the weeks after it was published it received a whopping 3,244 comments.

That means Swain will be leaving her anchoring duties at the supper-hour newscast in Toronto.

Swain has been hosting CBC News Toronto for the last six years.

I’ve loved my time on CBC News Toronto establishing a strong relationship and growing the audience for the last 6 years,” Swain says. “This new opportunity to do high-profile investigative journalism on a national stage will build on that. We have an exceptionally strong investigative team and I’m excited to get started.

Employees can read the full post here.

On June 26th the final episode of Go hit the airwaves. As Brent Bambury wrote on the show’s website, the show had two guiding principles “We didn’t quite know what we were going to do. And… we could do anything we wanted.”

Bambury called the show a “long crazy ride of fun and laughter.” A new show is currently in development to replace Go. It is slated to launch this fall.

In the months since the October relaunch, The National has in many ways returned to a calmer format. The new set remains, but the stories and nightly lineup have strengthened. The choreography has largely been done away with in favour of the camera focused on Mansbridge standing behind the desk. This can be credited to the show’s leadership under Harrison and Whitten, both of whom Stewart says kept the show functioning during the relaunch. Plus, they have succeeded in breaking away from what Whitten calls the traditional newscast format of intro, item, repeat. The National has been flashy, yes, but it’s also been consistently interesting.

Harrison and Whitten are both sensitive to the impact on the audience, but they also feel the show had to respond to the times if it were to continue. Whitten points to The National’s website and 10-minute downloadable podcast (updated every weekday at 6 p.m. ET before the main broadcast) as examples of the show’s attempts to adapt to the times. “It’s recognizing that, 10 years from now, are people really going to be still sitting waiting for 10 o’clock at night to get the news? And The National is a hugely important brand for CBC, so why have people wait until 10 o’clock at night?” Whitten says. “This was a pretty wide-ranging change in the way we do things. It didn’t really involve the set and whether Peter stood or not. And I think that gets kind of lost in a lot of the hubbub.”

The whole article is available here.

The Arts and Entertainment and Factual units are looking for pitches for new shows and series, and they’re hitting the road to do it. First stop was Vancouver yesterday, then on to L.A.  ”We are open for business. We are the only people who make Canadian prime-time series and we’re looking for the best of the best,” Kirstine Stewart said to the Toronto Star yesterday.

Heading to Los Angeles to find Canadian talent may seem odd, but to some, like Donald Martin, a Canadian writer working in California, it makes perfect sense.

It makes good creative sense, and makes good business sense, because a lot of the Canadians in Los Angeles are people who are doing very well, in whatever medium that they are in.

Stewart also hinted that the broadcaster might be bit more adventurous with what it looks at:

What is the next step in what people want to see reflected on their public broadcaster? Now that we have had some success in building a basic kind of audience, and a basic relationship with the public, we’re looking for where we can go that might be a little more experimental, or a little more interesting.

The survey results paint a dispiriting picture of morale amongst national radio news reporters.

The survey revealed that 90 per cent of the reporters feel that the ‘radio culture’ is much worse than it was a year ago, many of them felt that the storytelling ideals of depth, intelligence, and investigation were disappearing under the news integration process.

The radio news division has for years maintained a strong concept of a unique radio ‘culture’. Ninety per cent of the reporters said this culture is an important factor in the success of the service. But they also said it’s in jeopardy. “Our culture is dying,” one reporter commented.

Most of the comments revolved around the loss of radio craft, the increased workload, and the perception that TV staff don’t understand radio and yet they’re swamping radio positions, especially senior positions.

Now before everyone gets the impression that this survey is indicative of a crisis at CBC News, it’s worth noting that this was a survey of less than 30 national radio reporters.

It doesn’t paint a picture of morale at the CBC in general, or even at CBC News in general. Nevertheless it does point to a problem in some quarters.

“The problem is not the HUB per se. The problem is that radio news has been overwhelmed by TV and no one up there seems to realize it or more importantly, care,” a reporter commented.

The survey was done in the wake of the news integration, in which the assignment desks for radio, online and television were brought together under the same department, called the Hub, to better coordinate and assign the news gathering process.

Cathy Perry, the Executive Producer of CBC News, was instrumental in creating the Hub.

“We’ve all been through a tremendous amount of change. And not all of it has been easy,” she said.

Perry, who worked in radio news for years, also said “radio assignment was the thing we changed the least… We hoped to protect radio in the issues of assignment and craft.”

“We still have radio reporters whose primary responsibly is radio. And TV reporters whose primary responsible is TV, because we want to protect their craft,” she said.

But she admitted that the integration has been hard, “It’s a learning process for everybody,” she said.

That sentiment was echoed last December by Todd Spencer, the Executive Director of News Content in a note to staff. He said the Hub had notched some significant achievements since it launched, but “it’s not perfect.” He wrote that there are no overnight successes in a change of this magnitude.

Perry said that the management team within news is reacting to the survey. She said they had a conference call about it, and they’re trying to make some immediate changes to address the concerns of the radio reporters. She said there are ongoing discussions about other changes.

“We’re talking about how to make the hub work better for everybody.”

We’ve had a bit of revolution, we brought everybody together. it hasn’t been easy, but the hub is only six months old.”

I asked her if these issues are growing pains, or something else. To which she replied it’s hard to tell. “If we’re still having this conversation in 5 years, then we’ll know.”

Perry said that she thought it was unfortunate that the survey ended up online. “I think we just hurt each other here,” by doing that, she said. “We should be able to have these debates and share opinions without having it go out on the internet.”