For the first time, the CBC has responded publicly to Quebecor Media’s campaign against CBC-Radio Canada.

This media slap-fest has been ongoing for a while, and it’s about the dullest fight in town.

Since 2007 Quebecor has been trying to inflict death by a thousand paper cuts on the ceeb.

Its lawyers have been filling hundreds of access to information requests, getting entangled in legal fights, and this week they launched series of thinly-veiled Sun Media stories and editorials.

Although this whole thing started in Quebec, it’s since spilled into English Canada.

This week, Brian Lilley, of Quebecor’s-Sun-Media Parliamentary Bureau, lead the charge.

Early in the week he wrote a story of the CBC’s ‘anti-Americanism’, then followed that followed that with another story about how many trucks are in the CBC fleet, and finished off the whole week with a story on executive salaries.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that the journalism in the stories isn’t solid.

There’s a good deal of important information in the Sun Media stories; the fact that CBC executives paid out $800,000 in bonuses just prior to laying 800 workers, as Lilley uncovered, is alarming, as is some of the other stuff he’s dug up.

But the larger question I ask myself is what’s the motive?

Is this journalism in service of Sun Media’s readers? Or is this journalism in service of Quebecor’s business objectives?

I’ll leave that question for you to decide, in the meantime, here’s what the CBC’s Bill Chambers, the VP of communications, said this week:

We have not always had a perfect record on Access to Information, nor do we now. In the first weeks of being subject to the Act, we received approximately 400 requests from David Statham, Michel Drapeau and their partners, who have publicly acknowledged working for Quebecor Media. The extraordinary circumstances caused by this unprecedented volume has been recognized by both the Office of the Information Commissioner and the courts, including the Federal Court of Appeal in a judgment rendered last week against Mr. Statham.

Chambers went on to say:

As part of our belief in freedom of the press, we affirm fervently Quebecor’s right to pursue information relevant to the public interest, even from within CBC/Radio-Canada. As stewards of a public institution charged with “informing, enlightening and entertaining” Canadians, we will, in the same breath, try to ensure that the public is aware when anyone’s treatment of that information is distorted or misrepresents the truth. The Sun Media series has demonstrated how easy it is to select and twist facts to further a self-interested campaign.

What do you think?

	28 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 9:30 pm (03 Dec 2010)

Norman Spector, Brian Mulroney’s former chief of staff, says Sun Media is waging a war against the CBC.

In a piece in the Globe’s blog today, Spector says to the long running feud between Quebecor and Radio-Canada in La Belle Province, “now includes Anglo journalists who’ve been drafted in support of Quebecor’s war against Radio-Canada.”

The piece was prompted by an article in the Sun today about the CBC’s efforts to fend off a bunch of access to information requests, some of which were filed by Sun Media.

In case you were uncertain about Sun Media’s stance on the issue, the online article was accompanied by this clever little graphic.

Spector didn’t point out that this war of words with Sun Media has been going on for quite some time now.

In April last year, Sun Media published a series of articles on expenses of senior CBC executives.

Prior to that in February, CBC President Hubert Lacroix got into a tit-for-tat with Greg Weston, a reporter with the Ottawa Sun. At the time Lacroix accused Weston of “horrendously distort[ing] the facts,” saying his reporting of issues were “distortion of facts or are flat-out wrong.”

	12 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 10:45 pm (22 Nov 2010)

I was recently asked to put together a list of innovative ways that the internet has been integrated into television or documentary narratives. Since I thought this list could be a thought starter for producers, I thought I’d share it here.

Note that I purposely didn’t include some of the more obvious and well known examples, like Xenophile Media’s work on the first couple season’s of Regenesis, or say Jamie Oliver’s online presence, because, well, most producers already know about those projects.

Also I was trying to find examples that extended beyond simple marketing or Facebook integrations, or simple viewer voting mechanisms like American Idol.

1. The World Without Oil – Smart, Participatory, Fun, Awareness-Raising

‘The World Without Oil’ was an online project by PBS in 2007. It really broke new ground by incorporating an alternate reality narrative with social media participation to answer a simple question: “What if there was an oil shortage. Starting today, how would your life change?”

Over 1,800 people participated in this make-believe world without oil. They simulated the first 32 weeks of a global oil shortage by writing blog posts, shooting videos, images and leaving voicemails.

The participants really got into the spirit of the simulation, they stopped driving, pretended they had blackouts at home, and imagined a future where food choices were limited because of the lack of fertilizer.

PBS packaged the submissions into videos that explored questions about energy use, sustainability, the role energy plays in our economy, culture, worldview and history.

2. One Day on Earth – Great concept, results remain to be seen

I love this project because it plays to the strengths of social media participation online – it invites input from around the world. The challenge will be to try to funnel that into a single narrative.

The aim is to create a time capsule for the whole world to better understand itself. As their site says: “We strive to find out who we are as human beings because it is beneficial to our sustainability as a species.”

Will it work?

Remains to be seen, the documentary will be released on October 10th.

3. AgendaCamp with Steve Paikin – A social media conference that was the springboard for a television series

AgendaCamp was a series of conferences that took place in Ontario in 2010. Under the banner of Re-inventing Ontario in the face of the recession, they sought to answer these questions:

What directions are key to strengthening Ontario’s future? What role should government play? Where do new citizens fit into the changing economic landscape?

The camps were organized as a road show, with a local focus for different cities and towns. As their web site says “It’s all about face time with fellow citizens, local and regional decision makers, thinkers, questioners, way finders, underwriters and implementers. Ideas are challenged, validated, recalibrated; understanding develops, plans on common cause may be sketched out, and all of it happens in real time.”

TVO captured this conversation, added interviews and other elements and packaged it as a road show series on TVO. It was definitely cerebral, but it was also an illustration of the possibility of combining a traditional conference format, capturing that on social media and repackaging it for TV. Did I mention it also marketed itself on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube?

4. Social Media and TV: There’s an App for That

The U.S. science fiction channel Syfy recently teamed up with Shazam to integrate some of their television content with their online content.

Syfy has taken a really simple, yet innovative approach here.

Shazam is an iPhone smart phone app that is normally used to identify the name of a song and the artist singing by listening to it. But instead of music, Syfy is using the app to engage with a TV show.

Under the deal, viewers can use the Shazam app to listen to one of two Syfy shows in order to unlock hidden online content.

This approach requires that viewers watch the show on TV to unlock hidden content.

Pretty smart.

5. Being Erica

When the CBC comedy Being Erica launched in 2009, the producers used social media tools to extend the narrative of the show.

A month before the show launched the fictional ‘Erica’ starting writing her own blog.

The blog turned out to be a prequel for the television show – an attempt to hook the viewers before the show launched. It served to set the stage for some of the story lines and introduced the quirky character. Then once the show started the action moved to Facebook, where the ‘Erica’ character made friends with viewers and discussed the story lines.

This same kind of approach has been very successful in the U.S. with Heroes and Lost.

By blurring the lines between the fictional characters and reality, the producers make the characters more multi-dimensional than they could ever be on TV alone. It’s strategy that also creates an emotional investment in the story and can result in loyal fans.

What Do You Think?

Have a missed a few obvious choices? Are there other examples that I’ve overlooked? Any radio projects that spring to mind?

More generally do you think these kinds of projects are even worthwhile in the broadcast world, or maybe they’re just pointless experimentation?

Let me know your thoughts.

	5 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 11:16 pm (13 Sep 2010)

The deal that Bell announced with CTV this morning is rattling the media industry.

From the CBC’s point of view the new Bell-CTV company looks like a major new competitor, especially in the online and mobile space.

But it’s not that the CBC will be left out in the cold on this.

In May the CBC signed a major deal with Rogers that sees the corporation provide Rogers customers with access to the CBC’s TV shows (including hockey and the world cup) for its on-demand, digital cable, and mobile platforms.

The fruits of that deal were evident during the world cup when Rogers customers could watch games on their smart phones. Remember that ‘Gooooooal’ commercial with that shirtless guy running around in his office?

So the CBC has gone with Rogers.

And now CTV has gone to Bell.

It’s a big realignment.

The industry newsletter for CARTT wrote this afternoon,”the new company will bring under one roof the top broadcaster and specialty service company in Canada, our biggest ISP, largest traditional telco, second-largest wireless provider, third-largest TV carrier and several of the most popular web destinations in Canada (sympatico.ca, ctv.ca, tsn.ca, rds.ca).”

That’s a lot of properties and platforms – all together under one company.

Now that the different carriers have pretty much caught up to each other in terms of their platforms and speed, it looks like they’re going to compete on content.

For the CBC, which produces or owns a lot of its content, that may be a good thing. We’re content rich.

On the other hand if Bell starts limiting access to its online and mobile networks, or even if it starts to show preference to its CTV content, that could spell trouble for the CBC. It would essentially prevent us, or hinder us, from reaching a chunk of the market on Bell platforms. We’ve already seen a bit of that last  week with the fight over local satellite signals and now there may be more to come.

What do you think of this deal?

Leave a comment with your thoughts, I’d love to hear your perspective on the deal.

	5 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 6:01 pm (10 Sep 2010)

The CRTC has denied a request from Sun TV News for a mandatory license.

The license, if approved, would have forced cable and satellite company to carry the upstart station as part of the basic cable package, and forced consumers to pay the licensing fee.

The fees could have been substantial. CBC News Network earns up to $65 million a year from cable fees. Both CBC News Network and CTV News Channel currently hold the mandatory license, but they are being unwound.

Granting the license would have been an embarrassing about-face for the CRTC. They have previously said they would not grant any more must-carry licenses for news channels.

It would also have cast doubt of the CRTC’s independence given that Sun TV News is being headed up by Kory Teneycke a former high-level Tory operative.

For the CBC, the license decision means that CBC News Network will compete on a level playing field with Sun TV News once the CBC’s license is unwound.

Teneycke discussed the application with Kathleen Petty on her show, The House, in a testy interview last on June.

	16 Comments »	Email This Post
	News & Journalism, The Media Landscape	Posted at 4:10 pm (16 Jul 2010)

The CBC’s partnership with the National Post is getting broader.

Under a new deal announced Thursday the National Post is set to become the CBC’s preferred print partner, while the Post will give clients the option to run ads on the ceeb.

The deal was reported yesterday in the Post, here’s what they said:

“I think it will drive revenue for both of us,” said Paul Godfrey, president and chief executive of the National Post. “There will be CBC advertisers that want a print component, and there will be people that want exposure on the broadcast side.”

The deal is non-exclusive and will see revenues from “joint sales packages” split, said Richard Stursberg, executive vice-president of English Services at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

This deal follows a content sharing arrangement that was announced last October, and other smaller commercial partnerships.

	6 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 8:20 am (28 May 2010)

The silly season.

It’s a term that journalist sometimes use to describe a summer lull during which people go on vacation, hard news gets rare and the bizarre or the frivolous rises to the top of the page.

It seems the silly season came early this year.

A number of commentators have weighed in recently with their two cents to explain a spate of bad press about the CBC.

John Doyle, normally not one to defend the network, said on Monday “the Conservative Party’s current obsession with the CBC borders on buffoonery.”

His thoughts follow an article in the Globe on Friday about the CBC using some song from a band with separatist leanings in a hockey game montage, which may or may not have been edited when it ended up online. Or something like that.

The article was of the tempest-in-a-teapot variety, which the Globe’s readers duly pointed out.

“The attention paid to the CBC by the Globe and Mail is bordering on stalking…” one commentator wrote, while another added: “Every time I log onto G&M, there’s a new CBC ‘embarrassment’ to report on, and they seem to be getting more and more trivial.”

Those comments generally take the same tack that Vince Carlin, the CBC’s ombudsman, took yesterday, when he released his findings on conservative complaints that one of the ceeb’s pollsters is partisan.

It is an unfortunate fact of political life that in the term of a minority government – any minority government – with a fractious Parliament and an election ever-impending, rational discourse is often the first casualty.

Carlin, whose career in journalism is a long one indeed, then goes on to add:

Having observed Canadian public affairs and journalism, CBC journalism in particular, for a long time (going back to the Trudeau governments), I can say that every government − Trudeau, Clark, Turner, Mulroney, Campbell, Chretien, Martin and, now, Harper – has seen the press, and the CBC specifically, as “hostile” to their intentions.

Terry Milewski made a similar point. And if there’s ever a journalist who knows, understands, and appreciates, the notion of government hostility, it’s likely him.

Milewski, you’ll recall, ended up in a grueling battle with Chretien’s Liberals about his reporting on the 1997 APEC summit in Vancouver. That ordeal resulted in Milewski getting suspended, then investigated, then cleared, then re-instated.

None of which has silenced him.

Yesterday Milewski echoed Carlin’s thoughts, although much more succinctly. “If you stick around long enough, the differences between governments seem to fade,” he wrote, adding:

This kind of flashback makes it easier to remember, now that the CBC is being damned as a Liberal propaganda machine, that the Liberals in their day were equally incensed that it was, apparently, an anti-Liberal propaganda machine.

To underline his point Milewski noted that the cartoon at the top of this post – which the globe ran recently to illustrate the Conservative furor at the CBC – had already ran in the paper.

Eleven years ago.

To illustrate the Liberal furor at the CBC.

To which Milewski asked:  “if the cartoon works no matter who’s in power, and if the parties take turns at damning the CBC … isn’t that more or less the way it should be?”

	9 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 7:56 am (19 May 2010)

In an editorial in the National Post today Hubert Lacroix explained his frustration with the CRTC’s decision to exclude the CBC from carriage fees that stand to benefit private broadcasters.

We hear the CRTC chair state to the media that “there was just too much on the table to deal with in one sitting, so we decided to deal with the private broadcast system before turning to the public one.” Unfortunately, words said in a scrum will not fix our broken business model. The CRTC’s decision makes no commitment. We can only deal with what we know to be true, and that’s that we’ve been shut out. We are left with an advertising market under severe pressure, a 30-year history of stagnant public funding punctuated by periodic major cuts and a cost base that is increasing at 6.7% per year.

Over the last decade, my predecessor at CBC/Radio-Canada implemented permanent cost-reduction initiatives to generate $78-million in ongoing annual savings. Last year, I was forced to make cuts of $171-million, cancel programs and lay off nearly 10% of our workforce. This year, we’ve had to sell $155-million worth of assets to balance our budget — selling the furniture to pay the mortgage.

I think we can be forgiven for being a little skeptical of fine words and a little overheated at the thought of more delays. CBC/Radio-Canada’s business model is not sustainable. It would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise. One thing that our history proves is that words won’t fix our financing model.

	3 Comments »	Email This Post
	The CRTC	Posted at 11:14 pm (31 Mar 2010)

Now that the dust is settling on the CRTC’s non-decision-decision yesterday, I few choice analysis pieces are rising up to the surface. Here’s a few quotes.

Denis McGrath has an interesting take on it from a TV writer’s point of view:

One of the worst parts of it is that there’s now another one-year push as people figure out the rules. Hearings will happen next year. Which means that no changes will be concrete til 2012. Which means that by that time the Domestic TV industry will have endured about 5 years of complete violent uncertainty. I don’t know if there’s anybody who can hang on that long.

I guess Canadian TV will eventually drive you insane. There’s no way around it…
Not saying it’s the end of anything. But not saying it’s not. Welcome to the age of uncertainty. Try to look natural. Smoke’em if you got ‘em.

Meanwhile over at Medium Close Up, Howard Bernstein parses the decision with a grizzled eye of a retired news veteran.

I don’t know if the commission is still gunshy from its poor decisions to allow the cable companies to rape and pillage Canadians in the past. I am not sure whether the terrible rulings in the past that allowed Canadian broadcasters to undermine content rules and kill local television make the current CRTC fearful of their own decision making ability. Maybe they are afraid of a government that stomped on their last mobile telephone decision. Whatever the case, the current ruling that the networks can claim money from the cable and satellite companies for what are by license free over the air services will lead to no easy resolution of the ongoing battle.

Of course the happiest people of all with yesterday’s ruling were likely the lawyers. The CRTC decided to ask the Federal Courts to figure out their position, and the cable and satellite guys told the Globe they’d beat them to it..

“This isn’t over,” said Lawson Hunter, a former federal regulator and communications lawyer with Stikeman Elliott LLP.

So while the lawyers were licking their chops at the prospect of fighting over the revenue scraps of the broadcast industry, perhaps the biggest news of the day was coming out the polling firm Ipsos-Reid far from the CRTC lockup.

The average Canadian now spends more time on the Internet than watching television, according to a new survey from Ipsos Reid, a shift in digital habits that reflects the increasing prevalence of computers in our lives…

Canadians now spend more than 18 hours a week online, compared to just under 17 hours watching television.

	11 Comments »	Email This Post
	The CRTC, The Media Landscape	Posted at 5:45 pm (23 Mar 2010)

The CRTC reached a decision today on the acrimonious fee-for-carriage fight.

And the CBC is the odd man out.

The decision released this afternoon allows private broadcasters to negotiate with cable and satellite companies for fees for this signals, just like the specialty channels higher up on the dial.

But the CBC has been denied the same right.

The CRTC said the CBC can’t participate in the negotiations the process could results in broadcasters pulling their signals off the air, and that doesn’t fit with the CBC’s mandate.

This latest development will be a bitter pill for CBC executives to swallow. And they seem angry.

“The CRTC’s decision defies logic,” CBC President, Hubert Lacroix, said. “The Commission wants to save Canadian programming. CBC/Radio-Canada invests more in Canadian programming than all of the other broadcasters combined.”

The decision is especially difficult because, despite some reservations, the CBC joined forces with the private broadcasters last September under the Local TV Matters campaign. And while that campaign probably helped sway public opinion and encourage the CRTC into making this decision, the CBC gained nothing.

“This will solve the economic problems of private sector players but will not bring the system back into balance. It leaves the player who delivers more than anyone else in the system without a viable business model.”

Lacroix added that the decision will impact CBC finances and operations.

“One thing is clear: this will force us to cut programs and services, and our ability to fulfill our mandate has been compromised. The independent production sector, the cultural community, and the public will all suffer as a consequence. But we need to study the decision in more detail and present a plan of action to our Board before I can share more,” Lacroix said.

For quotes from people on every side of the issue, check this page from the Winnipeg Free Press.

For more on the today’s CRTC decision, see this page on cbc.ca.

	5 Comments »	Email This Post
	The CRTC	Posted at 8:54 pm (22 Mar 2010)

Cable and satellite companies pulled in some handsome revenues last year, while private TV networks lost millions.

Last year, in the middle of a recession, the cable and satellite firms saw revenues rise by nearly 12 per cent.

On the other hand revenues for private TV networks took a hit, sliding nearly 8 per cent. Their revenues are down $143 million from the year before. Despite trimming costs with cuts and layoffs, the networks still lost $116 million in 2009.

These financial results are sure to add fuel to the fire-fight between the cable companies and the networks.

Both sides have been arguing for months over whether the cable companies should be paying broadcasters to carry their signal.

“The conventional television financial model in Canada is collapsing,” Hubert Lacroix said to the CRTC last November. He insisted that conventional TV broadcasters should get paid for their signal on cable and satellite services.

But the cable and satellite companies said they couldn’t afford to pay for conventional TV signals. They said they’d have to pass on the extra cost to consumers.

These results seem to belie that argument.

The CRTC stats show they made a 25 per cent profit margin last year.

The CRTC released the results today, a few days before it releases its decision on the fee-for-carriage issue on Monday.

	Add Comment »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 6:07 pm (18 Mar 2010)

For the eight year in a row, the CBC received its “one-time” funding of $60 million from the government today.

CBC President Hubert Lacroix confirmed the funding in a note to staff this afternoon. This year the funding announcement was confirmed quite quickly after the budget. Last year staff endured several weeks of nail-biting before we found out if we’d be getting the money.

I’m starting to think that the Conservative government may actually like the CBC.

	4 Comments »	Email This Post
	Parliament	Posted at 8:21 pm (10 Mar 2010)

This is the complete text of CBC President Hubert Lacroix’s note to CBC staff on the federal budget that was tabled yesterday. Lacroix says he’s pleased that the ceeb’s budget wasn’t cut like other departments, however there are other issues affecting the CBC’s finances.

March 5, 2010 – The Federal Budget was tabled yesterday. While we’re still studying details, I wanted to share my initial response to what the Budget means for CBC/Radio-Canada.

First and foremost, I am very happy with the Government’s support of CBC/Radio-Canada in the context of the Strategic Review initiative. As you may remember, we were asked to review the performance of all of our services and to identify 5 per cent of our budget that could have been reallocated elsewhere by Government. After reviewing us, the Government concluded that, “…reallocations were not necessary as programs delivered by [CBC/Radio-Canada] are aligned with the priorities of Canadians.”

This is good news for us. You should know that our Minister, the Hon. James Moore, really went to bat for us on this file and supported our position; I am very grateful to him (and his staff) for standing up for us in these difficult economic times. I’m also very pleased with the government’s endorsement of our services. It’s a great vote of confidence that I think we can all be proud of.

The continued stability in our funding will help us complete the two-year recovery plan we implemented last March.

You have no doubt heard about the Government’s three-year freeze on funding for salary increases. We understand that this measure will extend to CBC/Radio-Canada. It means that each organization will have to find its own way to manage the budget implications of this freeze. We will be studying what that means for us.

There are a number of other issues affecting our finances that we should learn more about in the coming weeks, but I wanted to share the conclusion of the Strategic Review with you immediately.

Cheers.

Hubert

	2 Comments »	Email This Post
	Parliament	Posted at 4:56 pm (05 Mar 2010)

The CBC dodged a bullet this afternoon. The federal budget that was released today spared the CBC, and three other crown corporations. CBC staff widely feared this budget would include some painful structural cuts.

The worry arose from the strategic review process that was launched last May. That process could well have resulted in deep budget cuts to the corporation. According to the review guidelines as much as five per cent of the CBC’s budget was at stake.

The first two years of the strategic review process has already resulted in cuts of almost $1 billion. The federal budget released today, identified another $287 million in cuts from 12 different government departments, but the CBC, The Canada Council for the Arts, the National Film Board of Canada and Telefilm Canada all escaped unscathed.

CBC staff were relieved this afternoon as details of the federal budget emerged. The budget document itself doesn’t elaborate on why the CBC was not forced to cut programs under the review process, simply stating that “reallocations were not necessary as programs delivered by these organizations are aligned with the priorities of Canadians.”

Lise Lareau, the president of the Canadian Media Guild said “That means the dreaded and secretive “strategic review process” that the government began last fall and which could have wiped away as much as $50M from the CBC’s allocation is OFF.”

However Lareau added that the CBC is not out of the woods yet, “whether there will be some collateral damage from some broader departmental cut, it’s too early to say,” she wrote in an email, “I find that we rarely find out the (usually bad) details until the supplementary estimates come out, and that can take days or weeks.”

	2 Comments »	Email This Post
	Parliament	Posted at 6:55 pm (04 Mar 2010)

Denis McGrath, a Canadian TV writer, says last night’s ratings for four Canadian comedies, 18 to Life and Little Mosque on the Prairie on CBC, and Hiccups and Dan for Mayor on CTV proves that, *gasp*, Canadians actually watch Canadian TV:

Almost two million five hundred thousand Canadians chose to watch Canadian-produced comedies on the TV last night, in the eight o clock hour. If you look at that in terms of Canada’s population, that’s about 10% of the people who speak English as a first language. 1 in 10…

Six months from now we’re going to have license hearings at the CRTC and the same old people are going to traipse up there and talk about how Canadians don’t want to watch Canadian shows.

It sounds to me like that’s just not the case.

Both Dan for Mayor and Hiccups drew 1.9 million viewers, which is big in Canada, 18 to Life and Little Mosque drew 558,000 and 404,000.

	4 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 8:44 am (03 Mar 2010)