^{Image from kongming9234′s Flickr photostream}

The CBC is throwing it’s support behind Culture Days, a six-day celebration of the arts in Canada.

Today in Toronto, the CBC hosted a series of events around the theme ‘the art of broadcasting.’ A number of CBC radio and television personalities participated in the day long series of events.

That culminates in a one-hour special tonight at 7pm hosted by Jian Ghomeshi, George Stroumboulopoulos, and Bob Mackowycz featuring Great Lake Swimmers, Bedouin Soundclash, and Sloan.

Then in on September 25 CBC Ottawa studios will hold an open house. Visitors can get a glimpse inside the newsroom, sit behind a TV news desks, and read scripts into a microphone like a radio personality.

On Saturday, CBC St. John’s is holding an open house. Finally, on Sunday September 26, CBC Vancouver audiences will have a chance to meet stars of CBC shows like Heartland, Battle of the Blades, Being Erica and radio personalities like Rick Cluff, Margaret Gallagher and Sheryl MacKay.

The idea of culture days is to to raise awareness and accessibility of the arts, and to celebrate the creative spirit and vitality of communities across the country through thousands of free, interactive events that unite artists with their public.

There are more photos of the Culture Days events here.

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	Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver	Posted at 5:49 pm (23 Sep 2010)

If you live in any one of a number of medium-sized cities across the country, like say Edmonton, Windsor, or Fredericton, and you happen to be a Bell or Shaw satellite subscriber, you’re likely getting stiffed.

And there are thousands of people just like you.

That’s the message coming from the CBC over the last few days as the corporation ramps up an effort to lobby the CRTC to force satellite companies carry more local signals into local markets.

It’s an odd situation, but under current CRTC regulations satellite providers can decide that they’ll only carry one signal from a broadcaster for each time zone.

Which means that if you happen to live in Edmonton, and you have Bell feeding your dish, you will only get the local Calgary CBC feed. Because that’s all Bell currently carries.

Now if you’re a big fan of the Oilers, sitting down on Saturday nights and having to endure another Calgary game is probably enough to make you want to lose your nuggets. The same situation happens in Charlottetown, Windsor and Regina.

But that’s not all.

What about news? Most of these markets have local news teams dedicated to covering local stories. For instance, Edmonton is about go into an election. There’s a bunch of big, local news stories that demand coverage, which local viewers can’t get from their dish CBC TV channel.

“To me, it’s an important point for democracy,” Judy Piercey, the regional managing director of English radio and TV in Edmonton said. “There are lot of important issues coming up as the city grows,” she said, “when we get into our election coverage… people who don’t get us, won’t get it.”

Piercey said that although there were alternatives to CBC News, both on TV and online, she said loyal CBC viewers are constantly frustrated with being denied the local CBC signal.

She said when she sent a note to her staff on the issue, “people in the office were cheering, because everyone out there has answered the phone from viewers who were complaining.”

Silencing the local signals also hampers the CBC’s efforts to strengthen it’s local news coverage, which is a key plank of the CBC’s renewed mandate to serve local markets that was announced last year.

Since then, CBC has been redoubling its efforts to provide local news coverage, but again, if you are a satellite subscriber with a carrier that doesn’t carry the signal and you live in Edmonton, Fredericton, Saint John, Charlottetown, Windsor or Regina, or almost all of the towns and smaller cities in Quebec outside of Montreal, you won’t get a single frame of it.

In Alberta Bell only carries the Calgary feed. In Quebec Shaw only carries the Montreal feed – for the entire province.

Piercey said in a note to staff “that satellite TV subscribers account for around one-third of viewers across Canada, the current CRTC regulations have left many CBC stations out in the cold across the country.” She added that on Sept 8th the CBC will file a brief with the CRTC to complain about the issue. For more on that go here.

Sorry Oilers fans, but this one’s not the CBC’s fault. If you really want to fix the situation, I suggest you head over to the CRTC web site and leave a comment with them. To do that find the gray button labeled “2010-488″ on this page and write your comment.

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	CBC Television, Centres, Programming	Posted at 1:12 am (01 Sep 2010)

Alan Neal will replace Adrian Harewood as the host of CBC Ottawa’s afternoon drive show All in a Day.

Harewood left the show to join the local TV evening newscast.

Neal will be a familiar voice to listeners. He formerly hosted Bandwidth and Ontario Today. He has been a ‘guest’ host on All in a Day for some time.

Neal believes in reaching out to his audience, he’s a regular at community events, and connects with listeners through his Twitter account. He says using social media brings immediacy to the show. ”In a world of instant communications, the program needs to reflect peoples’ desire to interact in the moment — and that’s what I try to do from the hosting chair,” says Neal.

Once the news was announced, an number of people on Twitter congratulated Neal. “He was the obvious choice really,” Bob Durie, a local listener, said.

The show is on top-rated drive show in Ottawa.

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	CBC Radio 1, Ottawa	Posted at 9:49 pm (24 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)

First the G20, then the earthquake, then the baby blackout.

Now absolute mayhem!

Every summer the CBC Kids department holds a Kidsummer event. Staffers that have offices close to the atrium get an earful, but everyone else delights in the mayhem of hundreds of kids descending on the CBC Toronto mothership.

The event continues tomorrow in Toronto from 10am until 2pm.

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	Toronto	Posted at 2:53 pm (07 Jul 2010)

Philippe Morin, an associate producer on the CBC Radio program ‘Northwind’, has been making sound slides – short radio documentaries accompanied by a slide show – and he wants to know what you think about the format.

“Should we keep making more? Do you prefer a video? What feedback do you offer?” Morin asked on a CBC Facebook fan page today.

Here’s the slideshow, take a listen and leave a comment below with your opinion, or go to the Facebook page and comment there.

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	North	Posted at 6:20 pm (08 Feb 2010)

^{Andy Barrie is passing the Metro Morning torch to Matt Galloway}

Matt Galloway is to replace Andy Barrie as the new host of Metro Morning.

Galloway already hosts the Toronto morning show every Friday. Additionally, since 2004 he’s been hosting the afternoon drive show in Toronto, Here and Now, so he’s familiar with both the show and the city.

Barrie announced he was retiring from hosting the show last week. The full press release of the announcement is after the break. [Read more →]

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	CBC Radio 1, Toronto	Posted at 9:43 am (08 Feb 2010)

Keith Boag, the CBC’s outgoing chief political correspondent, told the Hill Times that the changes at the CBC’s parliamentary bureau  are “probably the most sudden and dramatic change that we have ever seen in the Ottawa bureau.”

“There are big changes coming but I think there are lots of reasons to be excited about that, and optimistic about it. Change is good,” Boag said.

Boag also praised his replacement, Terry Milewski, “When Terry is on you have a tendency to turn the volume up, not down,” Boag said to the paper.

For his part Milewski said he wasn’t relishing swapping Vancouver’s climate for Ottawa’s, “A thrill doesn’t run down your spine when you get the news that you’re to be condemned to five months of hellish winters,” he said. Nevertheless he told the Times that he’s looking forward to the prospect of a “juicy period” in politics.

The full Hill Times article his available here.

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	Ottawa, Parliament	Posted at 9:49 pm (27 Jul 2009)

The supper-hour news show in Vancouver just celebrated a significant milestone, co-host Gloria Macarenko had her 20th anniversary. The guy at the show put together this highlight reel (there’s a bit of an audio sync problem).

Macarenko has twice been nominated for the Gemini Award and her most recent honours include a Jack Webster Award for “Best News Reporting” in 2002 and in 2004 and a Leo Award for “Best Anchor in a News Program”.

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	CBC News at Six, Vancouver	Posted at 10:11 am (26 May 2009)

Conway Fraser, a CBC Radio producer, warns that news coverage in the Sudbury area will be seriously affected by the layoffs.

Fraser and his colleagues protested the cuts on Friday in front of the CBC’s local office.

Fully half of the Sudbury staff are facing layoffs. The final decision on how deep the cuts will be won’t be made until the retirement incentive package runs its course. 

Fraser told the Northern News “he felt as if he had been punched in the stomach,” when he heard about the cuts.

“We kind of thought our share would be a position or two based on the proportion,” he said.

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	Layoffs, North	Posted at 7:38 am (31 Mar 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)

The CBC is planning some big changes at its Montreal HQ. The building is surrounded by a four hectare lot. According to the Gazette, the CBC plans to build 2,000 new housing units on the site and move its operations to a new building.

The project is projected to cost about $1.6 billion, all of which is planned to come from private developers – no taxpayer dollars on this project. The plan also entails opening up a few streets that the current lot blocks off.

Montreal employees, what do you guys think about the plans?

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	Centres, Montreal	Posted at 12:34 am (20 Nov 2008)

Having worked at the CBC building in Toronto for several years, I’ve always been amazed at the number of pedestrians that stop to pose for pictures with the Glenn Gould statue in front of the building.

In the summer it’s literally a constant stream of people snuggling up to silent Glenn. In fact in the last few years he’s had so many people sitting on his lap that the bronze is totally worn down. It’s smooth and shinny. I’m sure the famous recluse would be amused at the irony.

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	Toronto	Posted at 12:01 am (20 Nov 2008)

CBC Radio in Montreal is looking for a new host for its Radio Noon show.

Besides about five years of on-air or equivalent experience, you’ve got to understand the culture of French Canada and have extensive knowledge of current affairs, in particular of Quebec public affairs.

Your English musts be very goods and the Frenchs pas le mal.

Finally, in a requirement that seems to rule me out of all CBC work these days: “Extensive general knowledge.”

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	Getting a Job, Human Resources, Montreal	Posted at 12:45 pm (18 Aug 2008)