Several CBC employees recently took part in Movember, a mash up of November and mustache.

According to Wikipedia Movember is “an annual month-long event involving the growing of mustaches during the month of November… to raise awareness and funds for men’s health issues, such as prostate cancer and depression.”

Ryan Couldrey, a CBC employee who also works as a photographer, captures the hair-raising results in Toronto. Click here to see the individual profile shots.

There were also Movember events in Ottawa and Vancouver.

In Vancouver, participants got the Mayor to officially proclaim the month of November as Movember. They even managed to persuade the mayor to grow his own mustache.

In Ottawa, “Stu Mills was also a participant in the Movember festivities, growing his very own “Stu Manchu” and drawing attention from the likes of singer-songwriter Jim Bryson.” Bod LeDrew a former CBC staffer and contributor, said in the comments, “Stu was the top Movember fundraiser in Ottawa, with more than $11K raised!”

In total Canadians raised $19,890,551 during the Movember fund-hair-raising drive.

Congratulations to all who participated.

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	Community Events	Posted at 8:11 am (03 Dec 2010)

By simply sending an email, CBC employees can support military families that have been afflicted by war.

To support a family all you have to do is send an email to remembrance.souvenir@cbc.ca with your name and employee ID number (it’s on your security pass).

When you send the email a one-time donation of $11 will be made to the Canadian Military Families Fund (MFF). Your donation will be deducted from your December 2nd paycheque and a charitable tax receipt will be sent to your home address.

Founded by General Rick Hillier, the fund helps children who have lost a parent or whose parent has been seriously wounded while serving this country.

The deadline is this Friday, Nov 12th.

Fred Parker, the chief director at The National, is the man behind the initiative.

“Throughout the years I’ve spent covering Remembrance Day ceremonies at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, I never cease to be touched by the faces of the victims of war and by those who are wounded by the loss or the injury of a loved one.

Up until last year, I kept thinking that there had to be a way to show support to the families of those who make the ultimate sacrifice and put themselves in harm’s way for the love of their country. Thinking back, I wonder why no one ever thought of supporting the families of the victims of war in this way, sooner.

It’s such a simple initiative – all it takes is 11 dollars to begin to make a difference in the lives of those families touched by war – but its impact is profound,” Parker explained on the internal employee portal. “I really feel that this could help military families heal in a way they otherwise might not be able to. And we would have a hand in that recovery.”

The funds go to after school programs, counseling services, or any other program designed to help a child who has lost a parent or whose parent has been seriously wounded while serving this country.

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	Community Events	Posted at 10:39 am (11 Nov 2010)

Ryan Couldrey, a part-time photographer working at the CBC, is posting a series of shots of “retro, lo-fi audio gear,” on his blog.

This is the first in the series. It’s an Ampex 351 reel to reel recorder. The intertubes tells me that this machine is from the 1960′s. There’s a video demonstration of one of these in action here.

Anyone have any stories/memories of using this gear?

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	Archives/Vintage Media, The Exit Interview	Posted at 7:17 am (10 Aug 2010)

CBC/Radio-Canada launched an initiative in the lead-up to Canada Day with the idea of “Celebrating Canada” What does that mean to you?”

To date there’s been 182 photos uploaded, and while a bunch of them are, ahem, pretty stereotypically Canadian… you know pics of Mounties, maple leaves, and cottage scenes; some of them are really unique and surprising.

The picture above was submitted by M. Christine Duncan. It was shot last year at Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, Ontario.

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	Community Events	Posted at 6:09 pm (20 Jul 2010)

People living near Sackville, New Brunswick sometimes hear voices.

Little, faint whispers from the kitchen.

A bit of a hum from the office.

Sometimes the voices are in English, sometimes Asian or European tongues.

Yet they’re not crazy, and their houses aren’t haunted.

So what’s going on?

The residents of the area are the audience for an unusual phenomenon known as “external rectification,” where metal objects pick up radio frequencies and act as a speaker.

‘Here’, a local paper, recently wrote an article on the effect:

“The plumbing acts as an antenna,” area artist and burgeoning historian Amanda Christie said. “When two pipes cross, the appliance ends up acting as a gramophone speaker. All of a sudden, people will hear the radio coming from their sink, but this happens with other things, too, that have pieces of metal touching at the right point.”

The reason residents hear Chinese, Swedish or German voices is because the frequency is from the nearby CBC Radio Canada International transmitter, which is also used by a bunch of Asian broadcasters, Radio Sweden, the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle as part of a transmitter time exchange agreement.

The transmittor is pretty powerful. It’s Canada’s only shortwave transmitter station, broadcasting to Europe and South America.

Christie is working on an art installation based on the effect:

“It’s a part of the history of the region that isn’t written anywhere. Seems that if you live here, you just know about it,” she said. “There’s mythology, too. Some say the radios affect their dreams. Others say they keep people in Sackville, while some say they force them away. Like a magnet – it attracts and repels.”

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	The Odd File	Posted at 6:32 pm (22 Jun 2010)

^{Some of the pins in Chris Piecuch’s CBC collection}

Chris Piecuch is putting together one of the biggest, if not the biggest, collections of CBC swag in the country.

He says it all started rather innocently. “When I first worked here [CBC Toronto] in 1998,” he said “I purchased and blue, red and white CBC Sports lanyard at the CBC Shop.”

“From there, the ‘obsession’ grew and through many gracious colleagues, personal volunteer efforts and just plain asking people ‘where did you get that?’ or ‘is there any extra/leftover?’ my collection grew.”

Piecuch says he’s always looking to add things to his collection. Right now, he’s on the hunt for any pins or other gear from the Olympics.

To date his collection includes pins, t-shirts, lanyards, hats, scarves and bunch of CBC posters among other things. There’s a couple more pictures after the break.

If you’ve got any CBC swag lying around your office, I’m sure Chris would be delighted to take it off your hands.

[Read more →]

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	CBC Merchandise	Posted at 5:06 pm (13 Apr 2010)

There aren’t many corporations that I have committed my entire heart to for life. But the CBC is special to me in so many ways. It is partially what makes me a Canadian—literally. I wouldn’t have been born here if it weren’t for the CBC. My father, who’s an editor and filmmaker, had the opportunity to work in London, England on the film “Jesus Christ Superstar.” (It was also shot in his home country of Israel.) While working in London, he met a Canadian who immediately saw his talent and encouraged him to relocate to Canada, where he was assured, he would be hired with the national broadcaster. He did and he was. And he stayed, and then had me. So thanks CBC, without you, I probably wouldn’t have been born here.

Elianna Lev describes what the CBC means to her in a preamble to an interview with Steve Pratt. He father, Avi Lev, worked as an editor and producer at The National, The Fifth Estate, and the Journal. Now he’s working as an independent filmmaker. “He’s currently working on a film about the depletion of the Himalayas,” Lev said.

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	Fanatical Fans	Posted at 4:06 pm (04 Feb 2010)

CBC News recently launched a Blackberry widget. Once you’ve registered for the service an icon will show up on your desktop. When there’s a breaking news story the icon will change colour.

To sign up for this service go here.

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	CBC Widgets, News & Journalism	Posted at 10:44 am (05 Aug 2009)

^{Roy Harris at the CBC Archives}

The CBC Archives department picked up two awards last night at a ceremony in London, England.

The Digital Archives website won for Best Use of Footage on Non-television Platforms, and long-time CBC’er Roy Harris won a lifetime achievement award. Harris thanked the CBC “for understanding the importance of bringing our collective history to new audiences on new platforms.”

Paul Gorbould, senior producer for the digital archives project, said the award was “really gratifying to win,” because he says archival work is crucial, “an archive has no value if nobody sees the footage it contains.”

The CBC has an amazing legacy, “There’s a great opportunity, now more than ever, to bring all this great material back into the public eye, to see how our collective history unfolded,” Gorbould said.

The award is one of many that the CBC archives has won over the last couple of years. They’ve also won awards from the American Society of Archivists – a first for a Canadian institution – an EPpy, a Webby Award, A Prix Italia and several others.

Unfortunately, their work is under financial pressure. The digital archives site was launched in 2002 with money from the Department of Canadian Heritage. The federal government discontinued that fund in 2009. So now it’s up to the CBC to keep the project alive. “As you can imagine, it’s not a great time to look for new money. We’re working… to find ways to keep it going.” Gorbould said. “Fingers crossed.”

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	Archives/Vintage Media, News & Journalism	Posted at 3:58 pm (06 May 2009)

A group of concerned citizens are holding a ‘Save the CBC’ rally in Calgary this Friday.  The Facebook page for the event says “In 2009 CBC announced because of declining advertising revenues, and after being turned down by their sole shareholder – the Canadian government – for a short term loan, they would be shedding 800 jobs across the country, in all divisions. But where were the rallies?”

Turns out this is actually the fourth rally in the last couple weeks, following rallies in Sudbury, Thunder Bay and Sydney.

The cuts in Calgary will be felt more acutely since Newsworld cut back on the local presence there last year. “We’ve already been cut to the bone. We’ve already tightened our belt…. We’re very lean, and we provide a whole lot of content with actually not that many people,” CBC reporter Carolyn Dunn said.

The rally will be held on April 17th outside of the CBC Calgary office on Westmount Boulevard.

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	Fanatical Fans, Layoffs	Posted at 11:28 am (14 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)

Thousands of children are enslaved by fisherman on Lake Volta. They spend their mornings on the water casting nets and their afternoons and evenings picking the minnows out of the nets and hanging them to dry.

CBC Reporter David Gutnick sent this picture for the CBC Employee Photo Contest. To submit your own photos send them to photos [at] cbc.ca. The full guidlines for are here.

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	Community Events	Posted at 11:15 am (11 Feb 2009)

Is it just me, or have the the fine folks in the CBC Bureau of Name Allocation* stopped adding a little, er, “inspiration” into their morning coffees?

We’ll soon have CBC Canadian Songwriters and CBC Canadian Composers as names of web radio streams and Radio Two Morning and Radio Two Drive for the…. well, you know.

Fair enough, the rationale is hard to argue with. Simple, descriptive names make it easier for the audience to remember. Besides convenience, that can pay off for us during the ratings weeks. Unlike television, where viewership is measured by a monitoring device attached to TVs, radio listenership in Canada is measured by surveys asking participants to remember what station they listened to and when. This is why private radio stations will tell you the name of their station every three seconds: (“You’re tuned to 92FM where 92FM time is just past noon. 92FM Weather in a moment, but first to Anna with 92FM Traffic.”)

And true, CBC Radio Two Morning will indeed be easier to remember than something “clever” like The Forenoon Acoustics, but seriously, do we have to be so… so… bland?

• Could the late ground-breaking Brave New Waves have been as adored by fans as it was with a name like CBC Eclectic Overnight?
• Would science geeks rally as devotedly around Quirks and Quarks as they would around CBC Science On The Radio?
• Could Definitely Not the Opera and its predecessor Brand X have captured the hearts of Canadians as CBC Pop Culture Saturday?
• Would ratings improve if we changed The Vinyl Cafe to Stuart McLean Reads Loudly From a Book?

Given time, this infection of blandness might even spread to the junior service with shows titled CBC News: Sunday, Steven and Chris, and The CFL on CBC?

Oh. Right.

Your thoughts and further “improvements” to show names welcome, in the comments.

* Incidentally, there is no longer a CBC Bureau of Name Allocation. Budget cutbacks, you know.

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	Fun Stuff	Posted at 10:21 am (27 Aug 2008)

A few months ago, when Rhiannon Agostinho tried looking for a group on Facebook where she could chat with people about the CBC and its happenings, she came up empty.

So she started her own. Today, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation group is one of many of Facebook groups where thousands of fans gather.

Rhiannon, an editor at CBC Newsworld, says the group was originally meant for CBC employes, but “Since then, other people have joined and given feedback which is great; I want more of that.”

Raised in Burlington Ontario, Rhiannon has worked at the CBC since May 2006.

An interview with Rhiannon about her earliest CBC memories and what her dream job would be appear below the fold.

Two other Facebook groups have emerged as gathering points for people interested about the Corporation — the CBC fan page was started by Inside the CBC editor Tod Maffin. The other discussion group is I Heart CBC!. Both have about 14,000 members and neither has any official connection to the Corporation.

[Read more →]

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	Fanatical Fans	Posted at 5:00 pm (19 Aug 2008)

Any other retro gold out there on YouTube et al that might might be fun to share here?

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	Retro	Posted at 11:38 am (13 Aug 2008)