Tom Harrington, a four-time Gemini nominee, and an all around class act, is moving to Marketplace.

In the news department Harrington has made career out of covering the issues behind the latest sports scores.

Jennifer McGuire, the general manager of CBC News said the department is looking forward to the “rigour” Harrington would bring to the show.

Rigour. That’s a good word to describe his work.

He’s won a bunch of awards, but to me what stands out is a brief conversation I had with him in the elevator a couple years ago.

It was when the Leafs were in total disarray; on the cusp of setting a record for most consecutive games lost. On the sports channels it was a huge story, covered around the clock.

I asked Tom what he thought about it.

He said to me, ‘I could care less.”

Leaving aside the fact that he used an expression that’s always been a thorn in my side, I thought about what he meant after the elevator doors closed.

What he meant was that he wasn’t interested in covering the daily hum and grind of the sports industry. What he cared about, and cares about, is the journalism, which isn’t scores and stats, it’s stories. Yes, Harrington loves sports, and he loves sports journalism, but if he had to pick one, I’d bet it would be journalism.

If you’ve heard him guest hosting the Current or As it Happens or seen any of his numerous pieces on The National, you’ll know what I mean.

He said as much a last year, in a response to Howard Bernstein (a former CBC news exec), who was making the argument that today “sports journalism on television is an oxymoron.”

This is what Tom wrote in response:

Hi Howard:
I must say I found it a bit depressing reading your piece lamenting the lack of broadcast sports journalism in this country. So I just wanted to weigh in on my own behalf because I doubt anyone else will.

For more than 20 years on both CBC Radio and CBC Television, I’ve taken great pride in a body of work that includes 7 seasons as host and lead correspondent of the Gemini-Award winning SPORTS JOURNAL, 5 years as the first ever sports correspondent for THE NATIONAL not to mention the journalistic chops and versatility to host AS IT HAPPENS, THE CURRENT, CROSS COUNTRY CHECK-UP, CBC NEWS SUNDAY and a variety of other important CBC News programs.

I’ve been nominated for 4 Gemini’s, almost all of them for my journalism, had a documentary on the 2nd ever episode of CBC’s Radio’s INSIDE TRACK in 1985…met students who say they want to emulate what I do after watching my career..in fact I might be the only reporter to ever host THE CURRENT and lead THE NATIONAL with a sports story on the same day!!

It’s a solitary line of work because so few in the industry want to do this sort of thing, so few in the sports media seem to value it, and notoriety (as your article shows) is so rare.

Still my record stands and I think what I’ve done matters.

Well said, and best of luck with the journalism Tom. The sports world will miss it.

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	Personalities, Sports	Posted at 10:12 pm (26 Aug 2010)

After a long and rocky search for a host to replace Mike Finnerty as host of CBC Montreal’s morning show Daybreak, the CBC has found the perfect candidate.

Mike Finnerty.

Finnerty had hosted the show before he left for a job in London last summer.

After he left Nancy Wood stepped behind the mike, but the CBC let her go after a few months. The decision caused a bit of uproar in the local media in Montreal and disappointment among regular listeners.

I mean it wasn’t Conan vs Leno by any means, but people thought that Wood should have been given more time.

Now Finnerty has decided to return to Montreal and take up the hosting job again. He’s signed on until 2014.

Yesterday the CBC’s Steve Rukavina asked Finnerty about the controversy. “Here’s what I would say. It’s really not my place to say anything about what the CBC did and how the CBC acted,” Finnerty said, adding, “I completely understand that there was a lot of upset and I followed it from afar, and in many ways it broke my heart. Because I love that show. I love Daybreak. It was really hard to see the program coming under such trouble and listeners being upset.”

Now a corner has been turned, and whatever you thought of the last period, and whether you were a big fan of Nancy’s or not, now things are moving in another direction.

“I think we can rekindle the magic that we had,” Finnerty said.

The whole interview is available here.

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	CBC Radio 1, Montreal, Personalities	Posted at 6:25 pm (21 Jul 2010)

Debbie Travis is coming to CBC Television.

The home-makeover queen’s show will hit the prime-time schedule this fall and Travis is looking for community heroes.

The new show will focus on “that person in the community who devotes their time and energy to helping others.” If you know someone like this you can nominate them on her site.

Travis, best known for Debbie Travis’ Facelift and Debbie Travis’ Painted House, is also the executive producer of several other lifestyle shows including Buy Me, Property Shop, Income Property & Maxed Out.

This new show represents a new direction for Travis, in that it expands her roles on as lifestyle host, but isn’t directly based on home renovations.

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	Personalities	Posted at 10:10 pm (08 Apr 2010)

After 26 years with the corporation, Barbara Budd is leaving the CBC. She’ll hand over the microphone at ‘As it Happens’ on April 30th.

Budd, whose cheerful voice has enlivened the show for the last 17 years, made the sudden announcement on the show last night.

The Toronto Star is reporting that Budd fell victim to a shake up at the show. Budd told the Star “The CBC is always trying to make things better, its programs are always evolving, and after 40 years they want As It Happens to grow.

“I don’t fit in with that plan.” She added that CBC management wants to flesh out the roles of the hosts.

But Budd added that she doesn’t have any ill will. She said shows and hosts constantly change in this business, and the brand of ‘As It Happens’ will endure regardless of who is behind the microphone.

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	Personalities	Posted at 11:05 am (30 Mar 2010)

Lloyd Robertson quashed rumours that he was feeling overloaded by the Olympics and planned to retire. Robertson called the rumour a “a fascinating work of fiction,” that isn’t true.

The rumour was first published on the Medium Close Up blog yesterday.

Robertson quashed the rumours today on the Bill Good Show, a Vancouver news talk show.

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	Personalities	Posted at 2:33 pm (16 Feb 2010)

Allan Gregg recently turned the tables on Peter Mansbridge on his TVO Show ‘Allan Gregg in Conversation’. The interview coincides with the launch of Mansbridge’s first book Peter Mansbridge One on One.

In the video Mansbridge discusses an interview he was trying to arrange with Karlheinz Schreiber, he says “everybody’s got an agenda, almost everybody. What am I doing? I’m selling the book.”

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	Personalities	Posted at 5:27 pm (20 Jan 2010)

Tod Maffin, the previous author of this blog, has created a Twitter list of CBC personalities.

The list includes a bunch of notable CBC types who Twitter including Jian Ghomeshi, Randy Bachman, Strombo, Jonathan Goldstein, Susan Ormiston, Wendy Mesley and many, many more.

If you’re interested in Twitter updates directly from CBC journalists, there’s a list for that too, click here.

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	Personalities	Posted at 1:25 pm (01 Dec 2009)

CBC journalist Linden MacIntyre has won the Giller Prize. He won the prize for his book “The Bishop’s Man” about sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

MacIntyre was considered to be a bit of a dark horse candidate for the honour. He said his success was due to an “an accident of consensus.”

MacIntyre is well respected at the CBC for his journalism, for which he won nine Gemini awards. He has been co-hosting The Fifth Estate for almost 15 years, prior to that he worked on the Journal.

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	Personalities	Posted at 12:04 am (11 Nov 2009)

Veteran CBC broadcaster Don Newman has announced his retirement. Newman was well known for his work on Parliament Hill over many years – as much for his distinctive trademark drawl as his lack of patience with political rhetoric and his uncompromising interviews.

His interview with Jean Chrétien in the wake of the former Prime Minister’s retirement stands out as one of his many memorable interviews.

Newman told CBC News that he’d continue hosting the Newsworld show Politics until June. According to the CBC he has decided to take the retirement package.

Newman’s career spanned 40 years and included reporting on events from the Watergate scandal to the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. A member of the Order of Canada, he has been working from the CBC’s parliamentary bureau since 1981.

During his show yesterday Newman addressed his retirement with characteristic professionalism, saying that he had become something no “that no reporter should – a story himself.”

“I very much appreciate all the kind comments and good wishes that I have been receiving. But I am going to be here for another seven weeks and there is lot of political news still to report.”

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	News & Journalism, Parliament, Personalities	Posted at 11:35 am (05 May 2009)

It seems some prankster has created a parody Twitter account for Peter Mansbridge.

The account is using the handle “petermansbridg.” It’s obviously a joke. For instance one of the fake updates after the Billy Bob Thornton interview says “Ghomeshi needs all the help he can get. I beat him in an arm wrestle last week at our local on Front – didn’t even loosen my tie.”

Another tweet written after the layoff announcements reads “Helping 800 CBCers pack their desks. Many have never witnessed a grown ‘Bridge cry…until today. Farewell noble colleagues!”

There’s been a whole bunch of fake or parody Twitter accounts pop up in the last few months, a practice known as Twitter Jacking or Phweeting (phony tweetering). The list of people with parody accounts includes among others: Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Dick Cheney, David Letterman, and Lindsay Lohan.

All parody aside, there is some risk to these kinds of phony accounts, especially when they are being used to write to real people. The fake Mansbridge account includes one reply to Ian Capstick, a communications consultant and blogger in Ottawa. The post reads “your bio pics are dreamy. who did them? i need some done.”

To which Ian Capstick replied in the comments below “You know, I’ve never laughed harder at an @reply on Twitter before…and I’m not sure there is any risk of folks mistaking @petermansbridg for the real one for long; speaking of which I hope the real Peter Mansbridge sees that @PeterMansbridge seems to be available. We would love to see him on Twitter.”

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	Asides, Personalities	Posted at 10:46 am (28 Apr 2009)

Post City Magazines has an interesting article on Peter Mansbridge; how he got his start in broadcasting, and went to become the CBC lead anchor:

“One day I was announcing a flight in the terminal. A guy heard me. He was from the CBC and he offered me a job there,” Mansbridge says.

Mansbridge began by working the late shift as a DJ. He admits he wasn’t very good at it, but it built his confidence to the point where he could be a radio broadcaster.

“I had never thought of it as a career. At the time, they didn’t have a newscast, so I started one,” he says.

The full article is here.

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	Personalities	Posted at 8:03 am (24 Apr 2009)

Joe Schlesinger has earned a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Journalism Foundation.

I must say I can’t think of anyone at the corporation more deserving on this award. Schlesinger has worked for the CBC since 1966. I can still vividly remember his reports from Czechoslovakia and Hungary as the Soviet Union crumbled.

He covered wars and conflicts, from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, and examined Canadian foreign policy under prime ministers stretching from Pierre Trudeau to Jean Chrétien.

For more on the award and Joe’s remarkable career click here.

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	People, Personalities, Working for the CBC	Posted at 1:06 pm (26 Feb 2009)

Carol Morin, a familiar face to many northern television viewers as the former host of CBC Northbeat, has won a National Aboriginal Achievement award.

Morin was the first First Nations person to anchor a national newscast in 1989 on CBC Newsworld. Since then she’s been recognized as a role model in the First Nations community, and has worked as a host on several networks, “Morin has helped make First Nations peoples of Canada more prominent and visible to the general public,” the awards committee said.

Last year she left Northbeat to run unsuccessfully as an MLA in the N.W.T. assembly. She has since returned to Northbeat as a producer.

Morin won the award in the media & communication category. She will receive the award at the ceremony on March 6 in Winnipeg.

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	North, Personalities	Posted at 11:48 am (29 Nov 2008)

CBC journalist Mellissa Fung was released into the custody of Canadian officials in Kabul on Saturday, four weeks after she was abducted.

Fung was taken by armed men who approached her in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul on Oct. 12. The journalist, who was stationed at the NATO military base in Kandahar but was visiting the Kabul-area camp to report on a story, was then taken to the mountains west of the Afghan capital.

As news of her release emerged on Saturday, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that she was in good health and undergoing a medical examination.

News of the abduction had been kept secret over concerns about her safety.

“In the interest of Mellissa’s safety and that of other working journalists in the region, on the advice of security experts, we made the decision to ask media colleagues not to publish news of her abduction,” CBC News publisher John Cruickshank said. “All of the efforts made by the security experts were focused on Mellissa’s safe and timely release.”

“Fung’s family was in daily contact with the team at CBC that was trying to negotiate this and help this go forward to the successful conclusion,” said CBC journalist Susan Ormiston, who has also filed stories from Afghanistan.

Ormiston said several other reporters have gone into the same camp where Fung was taken. Fung was visiting the camp for internally displaced people to report on refugees who have streamed back into Afghanistan from Pakistan and Iran.

“It’s a difficult situation. It’s a management of risk all the time, and it’s something that we journalists do on a regular basis,” she said.

Fung herself first alerted authorities about her kidnapping on her portable phone. Her captors were not Taliban militants, she said, but unaffiliated bandits.

Adam Khan Serat, spokesman for the provincial governor in Afghanistan’s Wardak province, said the journalist was freed after tribal elders and provincial council members negotiated her release.

“I cannot offer any detail about how the negotiations were managed in any respect,” Cruickshank said. “We can’t discuss any demands or promises made to secure her release, except to say it is the policy of the CBC not to pay ransom, and we followed that policy to the letter.”

“She sounded terrific, and she said she hadn’t been harmed in any way,” CBC president Hubert Lacroix said. “She said she was sorry for all the trouble she caused.”

Harper thanks Afghan government

Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters that no ransom was paid. He also thanked all those who “worked so tirelessly” to help win Fung’s release, singling out Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

“I spoke with President Karzai immediately following her kidnapping, and he assured me of the full co-operation and engagement of his government, and he has delivered,” Harper said.

“This is wonderful news for her family, for her colleagues and for all Canadians,” the prime minister said.

Lacroix thanked Canadian and Afghan government officials, as well as dozens of media organizations in Canada and around the world that agreed not to publicize the abduction during the reporter’s month-long ordeal.

“Mellissa is now safe and in reasonable health, given the more than four weeks [she spent] in these difficult circumstances,” he said at a news conference Saturday afternoon.

“She is being examined by Canadian medical staff in Kabul and soon she will be flying to another location in the Middle East in preparation for her return to Canada.

“Plans are being made to reunite Mellissa with her family as soon as possible,” he added.

Lacroix said employees at the public broadcaster prepare “rigorously” for the possibility that a journalist may be abducted in a conflict zone, but no amount of planning or training could prepare them for the feeling of “hopelessness, anger and dread” they felt after hearing about Fung’s abduction.

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	Personalities	Posted at 4:58 pm (08 Nov 2008)

Richard Terfry will have a regular day job soon.

The musician (who plays under the name Buck 65) will be the host of Radio 2 Drive when the show launches next week. The Halifax Chronicle-Herald profiled Terfry Tuesday and got his thoughts on what you’ll be hearing starting September 2:

We kept it real simple, something punchy, think­ing about the fact that we’re going to be reaching a lot of people during their afternoon commute and we’re going to be providing a soundtrack for that….

As for the description of Drive as a “songwriters’ show,” Terfry hopes that the term is inclusive enough to reach as many listeners as possible, while opening up the spectrum of musical guests that will join him in the studio every week to talk about the creative process and even play a song or two.

“It’s really broad,” he admits. “We use that designation fairly loosely. There’s a lot of talk of songs, and a lot of singer-songwriters pop up on our play­list, as far as I can see it doesn’t really exclude much from what we can play

We’re playing a lot of Canadian stuff, 75 to 80 per cent, but a lot of stuff from around the world in practically every genre you can think of. [We'll play] some hip-hop, which may not be the first type of music you’d think of froma singer-songwriter perspective, but there’s also been those artists you’d ex­pect like Ron Sexsmith and Kathleen Edwards and Neil Young. Neil’s like a holy figurehead around here.

The full article is here.

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	Personalities	Posted at 12:12 pm (28 Aug 2008)