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.

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.

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.

What’s your earliest memory of the CBC?
Watching the Kids in the Hall. I was very young and probably really didn’t understand it all that much but to this day I love that show. So when I found out it came from a station called “CBC”, I knew then I wanted to work there more then anything. However my earliest memory of working at the CBC was my interview. I was so scared and nervous. I was sitting in the atrium and was informed that someone would meet me. Then some man peered through the door and looked at me. He yells out my name and completely butchers the pronunciation of it but I knew he was there for me. We walk to the elevators and down many halls. As we were walking, he started telling me there is going to be 10-15 people in a board room that were going to be asking me a lot of technical questions and that I better of studied. So I was terrified! He showed me to a board room, there were a lot of chairs. He told me that they would be with me in a few so just to sit down. As he was shut the door he popped his head back in and said “ Oh and by the way, I was totally lying, there are only 3 ladies and their really nice, so calm down, hope you get it” . Needles to say I got the job and those ladies are now my bosses. Also that man is still to this day one of my favorite people I work with.

Ever been in front of the camera?
I have been on CBC by accident. Not CBC’s accident, but my own, I walked through the news room where all the writers are and was caught on take, but I am not sure that counts or what you were looking for. Other then that, back in the day I asked a question on Jonovision. And as well that doesn’t really count either. I would LOVE to be on a CBC show. News would not be my strong point but after getting a lot of tips from the reporters, I think I could maybe do a story that airs over night……..

If you could create your own job at CBC, what would it be?
I would love to write. I would love to write for shows like The Hour, or Rick Mercer, Or Air Farce. With my background in comedy, its just natural for me to want to. Maybe if George Stroumboulopoulos needed a correspondent or something along those lines to go out and find interesting or weird stories, give them a comedic point of view and report back. I could and would love to do that. Or maybe host a show on CBC3. I always have that channel on. At work, at home, in the car, everywhere. Such great programming!!!! And those would be my dream jobs at the CBC.

If you are on Facebook, just visit the CBC News Facebook page and click the button on the top right that says “Become a Fan” of CBC News.

According to Jon Dube, director of digital programming,

Doing so will add a link to the CBC News page to your Facebook profile, and let you participate in the conversations on the page and new features that we may add to it down the road.

Among other things, we hope you will use the page to post your suggestions for how we can improve CBC News, as well as to share and discuss interesting news stories you hear or watch on CBC or read on CBCNews.ca.

So far it’s mostly a headline distribution and discussion mechanism, but who knows what it will turn into?

(To my surprise, seven of the first 10 user comments on the announcement on the CBC News Editor’s Blog were pretty negative – to which I say, “what’s the harm?” Facebook is not exactly expensive, is it?)

I should point out that this is the officially-sanctioned CBC Facebook entity. A couple of weeks ago, Tod wrote about a different Facebook CBC fan page. That one is unofficial. This is the official one.

So, since you’re a fan of the CBC (aren’t you??), be sure to
add yourself as a CBC/Radio-Canada fan now!

Now, whenever he clicks on that icon, it takes him directly to the video streaming file of The Hour.

Talk about branding. Imagine how many times a day this guy sees Strombo, which serves as a fantastic reminder. An icon right on our listeners’/viewers’ desktop. You can’t buy that kind of advertising.
This is a cool idea. It wouldn’t take us much time (a day, max) to make icons for our top radio and TV shows and put simple instructions on how to link the icons to the streaming or podcast file of the latest episode.

Anyone? Bueller?

When CBC Television sold off many of its props from the Toronto broadcast centre last June, bargain hunters and CBC employees (er, not that the two are mutually exclusive!) picked up plenty. And now, some of them are getting sold on eBay.

These two bizarre foot-high statues were, the seller claims, used on a Kids in the Hall episode. The auction ends Friday in case you’re interested.

He started it when CBC dropped Saturday Afternoon at the Opera from its AM broadcast. “That’s the only show that I listen to religiously,” he told a local paper. “So I got pissed off and bought a radio transmitter and a satellite dish.”

Pearson used to operate the station from his home, but later moved it to improve the signal’s reach. Still, on rainy days, some people in Iqaluit have trouble picking up the signal. It operates on only 1.8 watts of power, although the actual broadcasting licence he has is for 1/600th of a watt. “The same as your toaster,” he lamented.

Pearson says he’s never been hassled about the station, despite it being illegal.

CBC Radio now has a new station in Iqaluit, at 88.3 FM. Pearson says he’ll leave his station running anyway.

Photo: “CBC recycled” by CAZASCO

CBC Edmonton staff recently set up bleachers for people who wanted to stop by and watch the FIFA Under 20 World Cup a while back. CBC Edmonton is located in City Centre Mall.  (Photo: simonerose)

A whopping 2,413 of them have Facebook profiles and have joined the CBC network (and who knows how many more haven’t joined.) That’s 22.5 per cent of the entire staff, and climbing.

Yet for all those 2,413 members, the network page itself is a wasteland: two discussion topics, and 17 wall posts.

(By way of comparison, that’s less activity than the group I set up for the CBC.ca softball team, of which there are 12 Facebook members.)

Now, there’s also a CBC group on Facebook (a group is different from a network) with 345 members. And, to my unending dismay, its full title is “CBC (Canadian Broadcast Corporation)” – it’s Broadcasting, kids! But that group has a meager three discussion topics, 11 photos and 86 wall comments.

Which is pitiful.

Now, CBC’s audience is much more active – the fan group “I Heart CBC!” has 3,199 members, 48 photos, 57 topics and 291 wall posts. The group “I love ‘The Hour’” has 2,596 members, with 43 topics, 50 photos and 355 wall posts.

Granted, there are more fans than employees – and thank God for that! But why is the group and network we created for ourselves so barren?

CBC’s audience is busy on Facebook, and we’re pretty good at encouraging them to be (see the Great Canadian Wish List.) Based on raw numbers and personal experience, CBC employees do use Facebook, frequently. But we suck at representing the CBC itself.

Granted, it’s better to have an audience that talks about us than for us to be talking about ourselves (hey wait, what am I doing right now?) But I read in yesterday’s Globe that increasingly, corporations are using Facebook to talk up their companies and attract young talent – for example, the Ernst & Young Careers group alone has 8,485 members. (The same article does give the CBC credit for its YouTube video promoting what a great place it is to work… it appears to have been posted by one Tod Maffin. It’s also available via the CBC.ca/jobs site here.)

Should CBC make more of an effort to promote the corporation online? How? And whose job is it – the employees, or someone in Corporate Communications?

-PG

Photo: “me and my CBC” by girldiplomat

1. Who are you, really?
I’m a 35-year-old gay man living in Toronto. As you can tell from my Wikipedia username, some people know me as bearcat; in real life, others know me as Craig. I’m between jobs at the moment, so Wikipedia fills up a fair bit of my time (perhaps too much.)

2. Why the fascination with the CBC?
I’ve always been a bit of a media junkie. Canadian media topics (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, etc.) in general are probably the area in which I do the bulk of my Wikipedia editing, and the CBC is obviously a part of that. As well, since I almost always have my radio tuned to one of the CBC Radio networks these days (commercial radio is pretty much unlistenable crap), to a significant extent I’m just following the principle of “write what you know”…which is a pretty obvious maxim to stick to when you’re contributing to an encyclopedia.

3. How many articles do you write or edit every month about the CBC on
wikipedia?
I’ve never really kept count. I don’t generally plan my editing sessions on Wikipedia in advance — for one thing, as a person with administrator privileges, it’s hard to plan sometimes because you never know when some situation is going to come up that requires your attention and thus distracts you from other tasks. But even if that weren’t the case, my editing patterns are fairly random — I’ll usually work on anything that fits within my areas of expertise whenever I happen to run into it, so sometimes that means I’ll work on several CBC-related articles in a short spurt, but other times I may be off doing something completely different and hence don’t touch the CBC articles for several days at a time. So there isn’t really a set number I can give you.

4. Have you ever gotten into any Wikipedia fights with other editors about the content? If so, what was it about?
As I’m sure you know, though some of your readers may not, each article on Wikipedia has a talk page, and some of the disputes that arise can be utterly fascinating and hilarious to watch.
     There was an American editor who first popped up during the CBC labour dispute last year. He didn’t know very much about the CBC, but seemed to have heard on NPR that there was a labour dispute, and this somehow inspired him to make a complete muck of CBC articles on Wikipedia. First he *removed* the program schedules from the articles, and then asked us why the articles didn’t provide detail on CBC’s programming. Then he started writing articles himself on CBC programs that didn’t have articles yet; naturally, given his lack of knowledge, they mostly consisted of vague equivocations like “Music and Company is a program on CBC Radio Two that probably plays classical music.”
      He also tried more than once to propagate the theory that Toronto’s CFMX (Classical 96) should take over CBC Radio Two, which he did mainly by changing the call signs of CBC stations to make it appear as though his fantasy takeover had *already* happened. More recently, he popped up again, claiming that the R2 station in Vancouver had been converted to a rebroadcaster of WFMR in Milwaukee.
     Over the course of the dispute, I also had to explain to him that (a) Canadian temperatures are measured in Celsius, so a daytime high of 30 degrees in the summer does *not* mean there’s still snow on the ground, and (b) the CBC is not a National Public Radio affiliate.
     Wikipedia, needless to say, can be a real education in human psychology at times.

Amazing what you’ll find by subscribing to the CBC tag in Flickr.

Photo: “Final Result” by gnb