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)

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)

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)

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)

Both the New York Times and the Globe and Mail had interesting articles yesterday on record ratings for big events like the Olympics and the Superbowl and how the internet is helping drive those ratings. To some this may come as a big surprise.

The Times article rightly pointed out that a few years ago the dominant worry in the TV industry was that the internet would cannibalize TV, or YouTube would kill TV, or the internet would fragment the audiences into tiny little bits etc, etc, etc.

Well it’s not happening.

CTV is getting huge ratings for the Olympics; the Canada-U.S. hockey game was the most watched sports program in Canadian TV history. The Superbowl drew even bigger ratings. It was the most-watched program in U.S. history.

The Times says that “television executives are crediting the Internet, in part, for the revival.” The Globe story said essentially the same thing: the internet isn’t killing TV, it’s helping it.

Social Media Driving the Ratings
“I don’t believe that one is cannibalizing the other,” Alon Marcovici, vice-president of digital media and research for the Olympic consortium said to the Globe. “They’re really hand-in-hand … Television is made better by the ability to get additional content through the other platforms.”

Jon Gibs, a vice president at Nielsen, the ratings company, added: “Increased usage of social media is definitely driving the ratings.”

Both the Times and the Globe story, used similar examples to illustrate the point, people in different cities, thousands of kilometers apart, using social networks to come together to share the experience of a television broadcast.

Of course all of this is perfectly natural. People want to share in what they’re experiencing. Twenty years ago people would get together to watch Friends in college dorms, now they do that on Facebook or Twitter.

Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC Universal, told the Times, this effect is “important for all big event programming, and also, honestly, for all of television going forward.”

It’s About Community
The effect partly explains why some people, myself included, have been thinking recently about building communities around media, as opposed to being primarily focused on distribution channels and platforms.

Community is the most important plank of an online presence. The distribution channel is the vehicle, the means of consumption, the plate for the meal, the community is the meat, it is the experience. And it drives what advertisers are increasingly attracted to: engagement.

But some people argue that this is crazy because the online communities are so small compared to TV. To that I would say ‘yes, but no.’ That’s because online communities exert what the military calls force multipliers. They punch above their weight. Let me explain.

According to a general rule of thumb TV audiences break down according to the 90 – 10 – 1 rule. Ninety per cent of the audience is watching passively on TV, 10 per cent watches online, while 1 per cent actively engages.

That 1 per cent is a disproportionately powerful minority. Here’s why.

Dual Screeners
The Nielsen Company found “that one in seven people who were watching the Super Bowl and the Olympics opening ceremony were surfing the Web at the same time.”

These are known as dual screeners. They’re on their iPhone while they watch TV – hence dual screens. These people can exert a powerful marketing function. If they’re chatting about what they’re watching on TV on social networks, not only are they chatting with a few other friends who are also watching, but are essentially spreading word-of-mouth marketing to all of their friends, hence they are force multipliers.

CNN used this idea to great effect when they collaborated with Facebook for the Obama inauguration, and smashed their video streaming record, more than doubling their previous high.

That’s why shows like Lost, Heroes and even the Olympics on NBC have spent so much effort on their online strategy. It’s also why talk-show hosts like Stephen Colbert, Conan, Jimmy Fallon and dare I say Rick Sanchez, spend so much time interacting with their online communities. They know that the community is where it’s at. It’s their leading edge, their most engaged fans, their Colbert army.

I recently interviewed Don Tapscott, who told me about a meeting he had with some CBC people. Tapscott says he was being told about the CBC becoming a content company to which he replied that this was old thinking, that community is where it’s at now. I have to say, I agree with him.

When a community is engaged they’ll champion the content, they’ll tell their friends, they’ll write blog posts about the show, they’ll become brand ambassadors, in effect, a marketing army of the show. And just as important, they’ll coalesce around the brand online, driving engagement and loyalty.

Take, for instance, what one Jimmy Fallon’s Twitter followers wrote as Fallon prepared to host ‘Late Night’ last year:

I kind of want him to do well, and I kind of want to protect him from those who would tear him down… He seems kind of cool. You want to like him.

That sentiment is called ‘investment.’ Fallon created a community around his show that was/is invested in it, and therefor wants it to succeed. As NBC learned in the Conan debacle – an invested community can be a powerful force for better or for worse.

So where does this leave us? I think the CBC could spend more effort on our community, we have half a million people signed up in the member centre, but they can’t do much other than comment on the site. There are very few shows that have real community area online, and our social media efforts, whether it be on Facebook or Twitter, are general geared towards promotion instead of conversation. In short, with a few exceptions, we haven’t spent the same time and attention to community building that some of the American broadcasters have, and I fear it’s a missed opportunity to create a community that’s invested in the CBC brand.

What do you guys think? Can you think CBC shows that are leading the way? Are other broadcaster doing stuff that we could learn from? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

	11 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 6:03 pm (25 Feb 2010)

On Monday the internet research firm comScore published a review of the major digital trends of 2009 in the U.S., and, although internet usage in Canada can be quite different, the report still has some interesting insights for digital producers at the CBC.

1. Video Viewing is Fragmenting: Video viewing is still growing dramatically, “The average online viewer consumed 187 videos in December 2009 (up 95 percent vs. year ago), while the duration of the average video viewed grew from 3.2 to 4.1 minutes,” the report said. This growth is reflected in sites like Hulu.

^{A great big blue hill of growth}

The growth of sites like Hulu, and many others, reflects the fragmentation of the online video market. Although Youtube still accounts for more than a quarter of video viewing, you see the long tail effect taking hold, for the first time the majority of online video viewing is happening on sites that aren’t the top 25 video sites. This could have an impact on video portals like the CBC’s Video page, and much smaller show sites as the online video consumer becomes more accustomed to viewing video on many different sites.

2. Myspace is Still Huge, Twitter not so Much: The other major point that surprised me is how much of the social networking pie Myspace captures. The view that Myspace is on its way out seems pretty common these days, but as you can see the graph below, it’s still huge (at least in the U.S., in Canada it’s probably different), and it’s way bigger than Twitter.

For the CBC this raises a couple important questions: how many Twitter accounts does the CBC have? More than a 100 I’d guess. How many Myspace pages? I bet less than ten.

Further to this point the young end of the Myspace audience is growing “people age 24 and younger now comprising 44.4 percent of the site’s audience, up more than 7 percentage points from the previous year,” the report said. The percentage of Facebook visitors in the same demographic actually declined 5 per cent from 2008. This is key information you’re trying to attract younger viewers and you’re scratching your head on the best approach. It’s also makes you wonder whether the CBC is devoting too much energy to Twitter and too little to Myspace.

3. Smartphones: The final point that jumped out was the market switch to smartphones, and how that will impact online content consumption in the years ahead; but I’d rather not comment on that too much because the smartphone market in the U.S. is way different from Canada. Maybe someone can point to some good Canadian research on this?

	6 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 6:35 am (11 Feb 2010)

The CBC Digital Research Blog pointed me to this story in the Guardian about Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News.

BBC news journalists have been told to use social media as a primary source of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News who took over last week. He said it was important for editorial staff to make better use of social media and become more collaborative in producing stories.

“This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary”, he is quoted as saying in the BBC in-house weekly Ariel.

For BBC news editors, Twitter and RSS readers are to become essential tools, says Horrocks. Aggregating and curating content with attribution should become part of a BBC journalist’s assignment; and BBC’s journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback for a better understanding of how the audience is relating to the BBC brand.

	2 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 10:51 pm (10 Feb 2010)

The ongoing fiasco unfolding over at NBC over their late night schedule contains a lesson for all broadcasters, “mess with the inertia of viewing habits at [your] extreme peril,” as David Carr writes in a New York Times piece today. He added,  “not since New Coke has a storied brand been so thoroughly maimed.”

Looking at the mess NBC has managed to make of it’s schedule I can’t help but think of the fury the CBC provoked when it made changes to the news format, particularly at The National, not to mention a similar reaction to the changes to Radio 2 a few years ago.

It’s fair to say that the reaction to changes at The National, particularly as seen from inside the corporation, surprised a lot of people. Similarly the ongoing resentment over the changes at Radio 2, which are just as vociferous three years later, always surprise me.

And I’m sure the executives over at NBC are now surprised by the scale of the reaction to their switcheroo, which now includes multiple campaigns to save the Conan O’Brien show, having their email addresses posted online, and likely many other things I don’t know about.

As I write this, the debacle accounts for fully half of the trending topics on Twitter, which is five times more than the earthquake in Haiti today.

It makes me wonder why making changes to a broadcast schedule evokes such an overwhelming reaction. I don’t mean to dismiss it, I simply think it’s puzzling, I don’t get it. It seems so disporportionate to what’s happened.

Maybe you have an explanation? Maybe there’s some psychology to this, or the fact that TV is one of the few truly universal mediums, it still touches millions of people at the same time. Maybe it’s because you get a sense of personal investment in a show when you watch or listen to it at home. I don’t know. Maybe you have an explanation, because I don’t. All I know is that you mess with viewing habits at your extreme peril.

	2 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 7:06 pm (12 Jan 2010)

This transition to consumer choice in television viewing via Internet isn’t a matter of ‘if’ anymore but rather of ‘when’ and who is going to be the first to cross that line. It will result in the biggest transition in television that we have ever seen and it scares the hell out of the networks because they will not have the same control anymore.

Steven Hodson, a tech veteran, blogger and writer, writing in the Inquisitor about the big shake-up coming to television, namely television delivered via broadband internet.

As Hodson says, when viewers have the ability and inclination to watch individual shows via the internet, it will have a profound affect on the industry.

Right now both the cable companies and broadcasters are jockeying for position in the online TV space. The CBC launched a video portal a couple months ago, and at the end of November Rogers debuted its online TV portal. Both moves seek to capitalize on the popularity of online video, and mimic the success of NBC’s Hulu, which is now the third most popular video site on the internet.

“I think we’re turning a corner,” Mark Tauschek, a senior research analyst with Info-Tech research group told the CBC in June. “We’re just on the tipping point of it being available… My intuition is that we’re on the cusp of really big changes.”

But as Hodson points out, as both broadcasters and cable companies try to capitalize on online TV, there will be friction. To make a full transition to internet TV will require more broadband capacity, and the cable companies hold the keys to the pipe.

Right now the cable companies have been using tactics to cope with the growth of online video, from traffic shaping, to introducing billing tiers based on how much video you watch, to introducing video portals. Hodson says “both the television industry and the broadband provider business are trying to position themselves where they are still in control.”

Maintaining control is crucial because the stakes are very high. Online video is still in its infancy and no-one has yet figured out how to make any real money. At least not the kind of money you can make from conventional television advertising or from cable subscriptions.

For cable companies like Rogers, with 3.7 million subscribers paying monthly fees that are usually north of $50, the growth of online video is as much a threat as an opportunity. If people start pulling the plug on their cable subscriptions because they can get the content for free online, Rogers will see its lucrative customer base eroded.

It’s not an idle threat. The CEO of Roku–a device that streams movies and shows from the Internet to your TV screens – said in Wired in September, “Our goal is to have everyone cancel their cable subscription.”

The race among cable companies and broadcasters to capitalize and protect themselves from the gradual shift to online TV will be a dominant story next year, and will have lasting impact on broadcasters like the CBC, as consumers shift over to a new medium.

	5 Comments »	Email This Post
	The Media Landscape	Posted at 3:30 pm (23 Dec 2009)