According to Ian Morrison, a spokesperson for the group, “A full 25% of CBC’s prime time schedule is now devoted to foreign, mostly American, programs.”

^{A graph showing the number of hours of Canadian content on CBC TV during the spring season.}

Morrison made that remark on June 30th as the organization released a report examining the amount of foreign programming on the CBC between Feb 21st and March 13th, 2009.

What the report didn’t say however, is that the amount of foreign programming on the CBC varies widely according to what’s on the schedule in any given week. Although it’s true that there was 25 per cent foreign content on the network during the weeks they studied, more half the time that percentage drops to about 18 per cent.

It all depends what’s movie is playing in the Sunday night movie slot. If it’s a foreign movie, running for two hours, then you get 25 per cent foreign content for that week. If it’s a Canadian movie, which more than half of them are, then the amount of foreign content drops to 18 per cent. (Click here to see the Spring 2009 schedule).

The report also says “Canadian content during prime time on CBC English TV has reached a 20-year low.” But it’s worth noting that the real low point for foreign programming on the CBC was reached in 1981, 28 years ago, when more than 40 per cent of the schedule was foreign (click here to see the 1981 schedule).

In the eighties the CBC schedule looked a lot like an American network with shows like M*A*S*H, WKRP, Three’s Company, Mork & Mindy and Happy Days filling almost half the slots.

By the mid-nineties, the CBC had reversed course and introduced an all-Canadian lineup, but the prime-time audience share suffered, which is why CBC executives made the decision to bring back some American shows into the lineup.

What do you think? Should the CBC go back to airing as much Canadian content as possible, or should it stick to its current approach of about 80 per cent Canadian content?

The California-based search and web services company made the decision to shelve Maven last week. The sudden move will force the CBC to find a new video software provider by year-end.

The CBC had entered into a relationship with Maven Networks prior to the later’s acquisition by Yahoo in 2008 for $160 million.

Now the CBC must scramble to switch several thousand videos to a new content provider and figure out a transition plan in next several months. Nevertheless, the move is being well received at the CBC, many of the producers that used the Maven product were unhappy with it.

What did you think of Maven?

In a note to staff today, Jennifer McGuire, the general manager and editor in chief of CBC News, outlined some of the changes that are underway at the news department. As McGuire explains the news operations of radio, television and online will start to merge into a single news-gathering hub, which will be divided into content units that serve the needs of the three different platforms.

The news-gathering hub “will be the engine that drives our newsgathering “as it happens” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” McGuire wrote.

She also outlined some major changes at Newsworld, including more immediacy and breaking news “but offering it up in a way that engages viewers and has authentic personality,” McGuire said.

McGuire also unveiled more details on the Newsworld schedule, including an expanded two-hour politics show from Ottawa, a new business show that starts at the market close, a prime-time two hour flagship news show, a documentary block airing seven days a week under the umbrella of the Passionate Eye, and finally more international coverage around the clock.

The changes at Newsworld will affect many of the producers working there. Previously Newsworld producers would usually be assigned to a single show, now they “will ideally be assigned to a story,” McGuire said “and will follow that story through all of its incarnations throughout the day.”

McGuire said the “task we have taken on is nothing short of monumental. It is complicated and time intensive,” but McGuire added that she hoped “to be ushering in a new era at CBC News.”

Do you work in the news department? What do you think of the changes at CBC News?

This is to one of the findings from a new report by Nielsen. According to the study television viewing rates among teens in the U.S. have actually gone up 6 per cent in the last five years, despite the growth of social media networks and video sites like YouTube.

The finding call into question the general assumption that the internet is eroding television audiences and reducing the amount of time that people watch TV.

The full report is available here, and TechCrunch summarizes some of the key findings here.

When you look at the blurry, shaky, low-resolutions videos that have dominated coverage of from Iran recently, you may be looking at the future of broadcast journalism.

“I’ve never seen anything to this extent - the Mumbai attacks had some, but not this amount, day after day,” Leigh Felesky, the senior producer for user-generated content at CBC News said today.

The lock-down on mainstream media in Iran, combined with vivid accounts captured by Iranian citizens, has propelled user-generated content to the forefront of many newscasts - and has blurred the line between professional and amateur coverage.

“It think it’s crossed over into that area where there’s no distinction anymore,” Felesky said. “It’s part of the everyday telling of the story, and it’s incorporated into the story-telling.”

In Iran, restrictions on traditional media have forced many broadcasters to turn to the internet for content. Producers are looking to Twitter and YouTube for updates on the story, while their reporters are stuck in hotel rooms; and that’s changed the role of journalists.

“We used to have to make a lot of phone calls… Now it comes to you,” Esther Enkin, Executive Editor at CBC News said.

According to Rachel Nixon, the new director of digital media at CBC News, journalists are increasingly “taking on the role of authenticators and verifiers.”

Although the situation in Iran is unique, the advent of user-generated news content creates opportunities across the board.

The reality is that no news organization is staffed to cover every story, in every location. But user-generated content “allows news organizations to get coverage from the scene, even when they don’t have their own reporter on the ground,” Nixon added.

The advent of citizen journalism also creates opportunities for professional journalists to build relationships with their audiences “by reflecting the world as they see it,” Nixon wrote in a email this afternoon.

“Our audiences are telling us that they want to participate,” Enkin said. The audience then “becomes partners on some levels,” she added “It’s not just a compelling images, it’s also a resource that we can use to tell the story.”

But as journalists rely more and more on user-generated content, there’s also risks. The content is hard to verify, the sources are often anonymous and when the material was shot is usually not clear. The New York Times highlighted this problem on their blog recently, when they pointed out that at least four videos appeared on MSNBC recently that were dated inacurately.

“We know we can’t verify this stuff,” Felesky said, and that creates a obligation for professional journalists. Felesky said that the online audience can provide a solution. She said users will often correct errors and can help in authenticating clips.

Nevertheless, especially with stories like the protests in Iran, where tons of material is being uploaded by motivated activists, there is obvious risk.

“The duty to ensure that we are not being manipulated is even greater than it was… but the upside is well worth the risk,” Enkin said.

Despite a celebrity-studded lineup that included the Jonas Brothers and Lady Gaga, the ratings for the Much Music Video Awards weren’t very impressive.

As Bill Brioux explains on his blog, the awards averaged 219,000, around half of what TSN drew for the U.S. open at 423,000, and a quarter of what CBC got with a re-run of Happy Gilmore.

THURSDAY UPDATE: Looks like the banding operation may be underway. I saw a couple of safety lines near the nest this morning. Yesterday the site said the “banding of the three peregrine falcon chicks will happen Thursday morning (weather permitting).”

Today an update on the site reads “The banding of the three peregrine falcon chicks will happen at 11:00am Thursday morning (weather permitting).”

Since it launched on May 18th, the page has become one of the most popular at cbc.ca, averaging about 50,000 views a day. About a week after the page launched the falcons hatched three chicks.

Newman is widely respected for his parliamentary analysis and long-standing coverage of Parliament Hill. In 1989 he helped launched CBC Newsworld, since then he’s covered every political story and scandal under the sun. It’s rumoured that some Prime Ministers used to call him directly, sometimes when he was on the air, to tip him off about breaking stories.

You can submit your questions in advance, or log in and ask questions live during the Q & A session, by going here.

“We will be there on whatever platform you need us to be on,” Stursberg said at a Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto on Tuesday.

Strursberg highlighted a couple portable platforms that have become immensely popular with the public, the iPhone and iPod. The CBC served 787,000 podcasts in May, and the iPhone site clocked 920,000 page views.

He also said the web site has almost doubled its audience, from 2.23 million unique visitors five years ago, to 4.45 million uniques today.

Stursberg also tackled the cannibalization argument - the fear that offering too much content online will diminish a television audience.  He said the CBC was concerned that its heavy online offering for the Olympics would cannibalize its television coverage, but it never happened. Instead the reverse occurred; viewers found the online coverage complementary.

It is the first confirmed case amongst CBC employees, Michèle Parent, executive director, organizational health and wellness said “There are a few other suspected, but unconfirmed cases there too, and one possible case at the Toronto Broadcasting Centre.”

“All affected employees have been asked to call their family doctors to arrange for testing if required, and are to stay home, up until tests results are proven negative, or if they are positive, up until their doctor finds them well enough to get back to the office. Workspaces have also been disinfected. Even though everyone has to be sensitized on proper hand washing and respiratory hygiene, there is no cause for alarm,” he said.

The internal link to the full intranet article is here. Unfortunately it is only available with a CBC login.

The article was mostly correct, but this one line stuck out:

Newsworld, which is one of the CBC’s few areas which attract advertising revenue, will be up for a licence renewal before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission next year.

What a strange thing to write. For the record CBC pulled in $329 million in advertising revenue in 2008, and I suspect most of that wasn’t attracted to Newsworld, that is unless that Lakota guy is forking over bags of cash.

Paddi-Anne Crossin is putting together a small package to send to Daniel, “to let him know that we’re thinking of him,” she said in an email. Contact Paddi-Anne for more information.

It’s generally assumed that a viral video is a momentary diversion. It’s something that pops up out of the blue, entertains you for a few minutes and then disappears as quickly as it arrived. But what if you or your show is the source of that video? Can a video gone viral have a lasting impact? Well over at Q the answer to that question is yes.

It’s been over two months since Oscar winning actor and musician Billy Bob Thornton’s disastrous interview with Jian Ghomeshi. That’s two months for the senior team at Q to assess the impact the video has had on their online properties.

“In the first 24 hours our (YouTube) channel had over one-million views. It was the number one video in all of Canada and I saw it hit number three in all of YouTube, although it may have gone higher. In that first day we also had over 1,200 people subscribe to our channel going from 2204 to 3409. The numbers continued to be astronomical for four days until they dropped below 250,000 views a day,” wrote Ben Aylsworth, senior producer of Q on Bold TV in an email.

Arif Noorani, Q’s executive producer said that their website went from an average of 20,000 page views a week which is high for radio programs to 300,000 during the initial week. The Q audio podcast on iTunes we went from being ranked anywhere from 20th to 50th, to being in the top five of all podcasts for that week. The video podcast made it into the top ten.

But here’s the interesting part. While the numbers have dropped down since their initial spike. They have stayed higher than they were before the video went viral.

“All our numbers are higher than they were before the video and this is two months later. We have definitely expanded our core audience and broadened the number of loyal viewers/listeners…(our website) regularly ranks in the mid-30,000s. Q is often the top-ranked or second-ranked program site in radio,” wrote Noorani.

Aylsworth said that Q’s YouTube views are on average 50-75% higher than they were before the video.

So what steps did they take to capitalize on the video as it spread?

“We made sure that the video of the interview was up as soon as the show was over both on the CBC site as well as Q’s YouTube site. Q’s goal is to be cross platform and provide our content in as many places as possible. We also Twittered the link. We didn’t editorialize around the interview, just pointed people to it and let them judge for themselves,” wrote Noorani.

“I would also add here, immediately after the interview we discussed strategy for getting this material out there. We decided to contact all of the major global media outlets, including CBC, to see if they were interested in footage, embedding, linking, etc…,” wrote Aylsworth.

Jian also did interviews with other media outlets about the Billy Bob meltdown.

So the lesson here is that it’s not enough just to hope a viral video will work magic for your show’s numbers. Q was proactive. They encouraged the video to spread by featuring it prominently on their sites and they pushed out outward by making clips available to whoever wanted them.

If only every bad interview had such good consequences.

This one’s pretty wild, it’s from 1978 when Knowlton Nash was still anchoring the broadcast, the description says the announcer is Allan McFee, but I can’t vouch for that.

Seven years later and the look had changed dramatically. This is a bumper for CBUT Vancouver and the opening for The National from 1985. Reminds me of Tron.

Here is a 1992 opening in which both The National and the Journal share the headlines

This is from 1996, with a headline style, more full screen viz and longer voice-overs. Both The National and The Magazine share the headlines.

Then this a year later, from 1997, the voice-overs now much shorter with sound-ups, and animations frame the visuals.

By 2002, new animations, but the same headline format with short voice-overs and quick sound-ups.

The description says this is from 2003, this may be from Newsworld, I like the sense of momentum in this version - follow the dot.

Finally the current version, thanks to Ivan for the audio version.

Which is your favourite and why? Do you favour certain elements and not others?

In Current TV will be joint venture between Al Gore’s Current TV channel and the CBC. According to the CRTC decision the CBC owns an 80 per cent interest of Current TV’s Canadian branch corporation.

Current TV is a hybrid television network and web site that airs both content submitted by users and professionally produced content. The web site ranks the online submissions. The most popular have the greatest chance of making it to air. To comply with the CRTC license, 35 per cent of the user-submitted content must be Canadian.

CBC now requires approval from the Treasury Board in order to proceed with launching the channel. This application is expected to take place in the fall.

The full details of the license decision are available here.

Two of the appointments were in the news department as part of the renewal process.

“Neil Morrison will move into a major program development role with CBC News.” Jennifer McGuire, general manager of CBC News, said in a note to staff. “Later in the week, we will be announcing more details about the Newsworld schedule with more information about Neil’s new role. Stay tuned for that.”

As part of that announcement McGuire also said “Liz Hughes has agreed to take on Neil’s role as Director of News, Centres. Liz will take on the on-going development of local news across the country.”

In Nova Scotia Tom Murphy has been named chief correspondant for the province, he’ll also anchor the CBC News provincial supper hour newscast. CP reports that Murphy will “also become co-host of a new CBC news program that will begin Aug. 31.”

Finally Jill Spelliscy has been appointed managing director for Saskatchewan. In making the announcement Jill Troyer, executive director, CBC centres, said ““With her many years of experience and keen understanding of the province, Jill will bring strong journalistic and programming leadership to the position of managing director—and this will be a homecoming for Jill, as Saskatchewan is her home base, and where she started her career with CBC on local radio and television.”

MONDAY UPDATE: The results are in. Radio 3 listeners have voted 77% to 23% in favor of a 100% all Canadian CBC Radio 3.

For the last few days a debate was raging over at CBC Radio 3 about how much non-Canadian content should be on the “air” at their single surviving station. As John Paolozzi wrote on the Radio 3 blog “Currently we have two separate radio stations. One web. One satellite. Due to budget cuts we will merge the two stations into one on Monday, June 15th.”

The web station currently features a 100% Canadian mix, whereas the satellite feed is an 85% Canadian 15% international mix.

The question is… which path do we follow? Do we include some international music on our web stream, or do we change our satellite station to 100% Canadian?

However as the North by East West blog explains, this isn’t a final decision, but while be taken into consideration by the Radio 3 management.

Wether it’s final decision or not, you have to admire the way they make decisions over there.

Saunders: It’s been a tough couple of weeks, can you give me a sense of where we’re at?

Lacroix: It’s been really tough at CBC/Radio Canada. We all realize that, me the first.

First off, let’s talk about the redundancy notices. They have been given out… the famous pink slips. I was listening George Stroumboulopoulos who was interviewing our minister on his show a couple weeks ago, and I think he was interviewing him on the day where notices went out. Interesting coincidence.

So 250 notices went out. About 170 in English and 60 in the French network and about 20 across the other corporate components. That’s going to start the bumping process under the collective agreements. We figure it’ll take the whole summer to go through the bumping process and by the end of September we’ll have seen all the departures.

Saunders: In March there was talk about doing everything we could to reduce the number of involuntary departures. What have we managed to accomplish on that front?

Lacroix: Well, we were happy, in some ways, if you could say we were happy about introducing voluntary retirement incentive programs, but we did that. And through the leadership of Katya Laviolette and her team and people in culture there was about 300 people or so that we were able to see the requests met.

Add to that our year-end numbers, March 31 2009, which were a bit better than expected by a couple million bucks. That allowed us to reduce some of the cuts that we had planned, particularly in the regions, so we saved a few jobs there.

We continue to work with the unions, and with the work that we’re doing in reducing our expenses, because I really believe that every job counts, and as I’ve told the world since I walked in here, my first “p” of my three priorities is people, and we are trying to look at every single job and keep it inside our company instead of trying to eliminate it.

Saunders: Obviously it’s been an emotional time for all of our employees. Can you give me sense of how you are feeling about all of this?

Lacroix: I’ve been tough, I know that. You were saying a few seconds ago that this weekend you had to say goodbye to five or six people that you had been working with for 10 years at CBC-Radio canada. A lot of that. A lot of that is happening on each one floors that I walk around on.

So yes, it is difficult. It’s difficult for the people that leave, because I think it’s a great place to work at CBC/Radio Canada. We are a great institution.

It’s difficult for the people that stay on, because they see their friends leave and they also are concerned about the kind of work and stuff they have to do to compensate for these departures.

But that’s where we are right now. The people that stay here, we have all sorts of support that we’ll put in place for them. Whether it’s career counselling or programs of that kind.

I’m looking forward to stop being a number number-cruncher and spreadsheet person because I’ve been doing this non-stop for six months now. So I’m looking to September or maybe end of summer to start visiting the centres again.

I look forward to sitting down with our people, and listening to how they’re dealing with this and wether they have some things to say to me. But in the meantime, as I’ve been finishing my notes with, we have to hang tough. We will survive this and you’ll see CBC Radio Canada will be very strong when we finish this exercise.

Newman said the shows maintains a comfortable ratings lead over its time slot competitors, and his advice to the network is that “if it’s not broke don’t fix it.”

Although the show is not going to be canceled, as was rumoured, according to CBC spokesperson Jeff Keay, it will undergo “substantial changes” as part of the news renewal process.

Newman also touched on the budget squeeze being felt at the CBC, saying:

With its Parliamentary grant unchanged for at least a decade it’s been a bit like an old age pensioner living on a fixed pension and every year there’s inflation and less money to go around, so it really squeezes.

The full article is here. Don Newman is also the guest on The Hour tonight at eleven.

Fast Company recently called NPR “the most successful hybrid of old and new media,” speculating that the organization may well end up “saving the news.” A recent post in Mashable titled “Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media” takes the same tack.

Both articles commend NPR for a strategy that puts the audience first while embracing new media. “They’re on a trajectory that will make them a media powerhouse in the future, though, and it is in large part due to their culture of open access,” Mashable’s Josh Catone explains, “The blueprint that NPR is drawing for the future is very promising.”

So how does the CBC compare to NPR? And what can the CBC learn from them?

NPR’s blueprint is actually a three-pronged strategy. They are fanatically devoted to local news, they’ve jumped head-first into social media, and they are commited to open access - putting the content where people consume it.

On the first plank of NPR’s strategy, the CBC compares well. The CBC is again committing to local news, it already has a large local footprint - CBC Radio One alone operates 36 stations across the country.

So the CBC is well positioned to take advantage of what NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller calls “big, gaping hole” in local coverage. Schiller says that “commercial radio has abandoned the local market,” local newspapers are in trouble and large media organizations like the New York Times can’t cover all the local markets. This creates an opportunity that both broadcasters can exploit with high-quality local content.

The CBC also mirrors NPR’s strategy for social media. Both broadcasters have a big presence on Twitter, Facebook and iTunes; the “ceeb” ranks 11 podcasts in the top 100 in Canada, way more than any other Canadian broadcaster.

But it’s on the third prong of NPR’s strategy where the comparisons begin to break down. NPR is commited to open distribution “they have an organizational level commitment to allowing listeners and readers to access their content on their own terms,” Catone writes.

On the face of it that strategy sounds a lot like the CBC mantra of delivering content “when, where and how you want it,” but NPR’s commitment goes much further than the CBC’s.

For the last several years, and the last two or three in particular, there’s been quite a bit of tension at the CBC between those who feel that the CBC content should be seeded all over the web, including external sites like YouTube, and those that feel that the wider web should be used to drive the audience back to cbc.ca.

“To grow audiences and to stay relevant, media companies have to reach audiences where they are – and they are all over the place,” Steve Pratt, a CBC Radio executive wrote in May, illustrating one side of the argument. On the other hand, others at the corporation feel that this strategy is both time-consuming and provides no revenue. They would prefer keep the content on sites where it can make the most money.

At the CBC this debate between having the content follow the people, or the people follow the content has not been resolved, different shows follow different strategies. At NPR, by contrast, the debate is over.

NPR’s news boss, Ellen Weiss said “We need to put NPR wherever the audience is, and that has to happen online and has to happen on the radio.”

As Schiller explains NPR’s strategy extends beyond it’s own website, “I want the traffic to increase, but to me the ultimate goal is not just bringing people to this walled garden that is NPR.org,” she told mediabistro.com in April. “The idea is to create this network. And then once that is set up, I want to count traffic for the whole thing, and aggregate that into one number.”

Unlike the CBC, NPR is committed, from top to bottom, to going to its audience rather than making its audience come to them. “We have to skate where the puck is going,” Schiller said in a Fast Company article in March. And for a company as cash-strapped as NPR, it’s worth noting how much they’ve committed to the digital strategy. Last year they introduced a open platform to let listeners mix their own podcasts, and, get this, they are putting all of their employees, every single editor, producer and reporter, through multimedia training.

Training all of their content producer’s in multimedia goes way beyond the CBC’s strategy of beseeching us to “think” of ourselves as content producers for multiple platforms. NPR is actually showing all their content employees how to do it.

“It’s got very smart people thinking about its online strategy,” media pundit Jeff Jarvis said about NPR “Like the BBC, it sees itself as a public trust, so its aim is to get its content distributed as widely as possible. Old media expected us to come to them. Now they need to come to us.”

The strategy is paying dividends, traffic to npr.org went up 78 per cent between 2007 and 2008, and since 1999 it’s radio audience has nearly doubled.

But the consequence of how this debate is resolved at the CBC goes beyond audience share and site traffic, it speaks to the relevancy of the entire organization. As consultant and social media strategist Justin Beach wrote recently, “One day the old guard of Canadian media will wake up and realize that rather than lock the barbarian hordes out, they’ve locked themselves in and by then the ‘hordes’ will not longer care whether the gate is open or closed.”