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

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

Say you’ve got a great story idea.

You know it will hit a nerve with the public.

So how do you prove it to your boss?

There are several tools on the internet that you can use to back up your story pitches. They provide a gauge of what the public is concerned about; a way to listen in on the water-cooler conversations.

These tools provide a view of what Canadians are searching for, talking about, and telling their friends. They can also find the best reference material on the web.

Let’s look at them each briefly, and then we’ll look at how to use this stuff in your pitches.

How to Listen in on the Water Cooler

Number 1: Google Insight
Google Insight shows what people are thinking about, by exposing what they’re searching for.

Have you missed the boat on your story? Maybe you’re a bit too early? Google Insight may be able to answer that.

Here’s an example of Google searches for the term “Toyota Recall”. You can see that interest peaked and is now waning.

Number 2: Google Trends
Google Trends is a slightly different view than Google Insight. Insight shows you what people are searching for over time and place. Trends shows you what people are searching for in comparison to all Google searches.

You can also use trends to compare different searches. This could be useful to compare different angles on a story.

Number 3: Twitter Search
Twitter Search shows you what people are saying about a given topic. It’s a very powerful way of crowd sourcing story ideas and finding out what people are talking about. It is much more immediate than Google searches. I often find out about breaking news on Twitter’s trending topics before I see them on TV.

Number 4: Delicious
Delicious is a web tool used to save bookmarks. The Delicious Search engine shows what web sites are getting the most bookmarks. Since most people only bookmark relevant content, this search function can be useful to find the best resource material on a given subject.

Number 5: IceRocket
IceRocket is a one of many social media monitoring tools that aggregates conversations on many networks (Twitter, Blogs, etc) into one place. I use IceRocket instead of say Radian6, because it’s free. This is a handy way to monitor a news beat, check out the conversation on the blogosphere or to get a general sense of what’s trending on the internet.

How to Use This Stuff in Your Pitches
You can use the data from these tools to gauge the response to your story idea. For instance another story on the Toyota recall might not be the best idea. Interest in the story is waning. There have been far fewer searches. Unless you’ve got a strong news peg you may want to give this story a pass.

On the other hand there’s been lots on interest in virtual assistants lately. It’s one of the top 10 search terms on Google today. Maybe that’s a topic worth considering.

But these tools are not only useful for testing story ideas. They can also be used to come up with pitches.

The Twitter Search Engine is a powerful tool. It’s like an early warning system for breaking news. It’s constantly providing new story ideas. And it can be used to follow leading thinking on a particular beat.

Frankly I couldn’t live without it.

Is there any tool out there that you can’t live without?

Have I missed something? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

According to Henry Aubin, at the Gazette, the CBC decided not to renew her hosting contract two weeks ago. She has not been heard on the air since. Aubin added that Wood has since been hospitalized for a few days for stress and anxiety. Renaud talked to a couple CBC insiders in Montreal, and their take was that Wood’s one-year contract wasn’t renewed because the show’s ratings hadn’t gone up since she took the helm in late August.

Given the circumstances the CBC isn’t saying much on the issue. Wood’s photo was apparently removed from the Daybreak homepage, but there has been no further response, nor has a replacement host has been named. The lack of explanation has seemed to have galvanized her fans and local journalists. “As a result of the handling of it, the egg on the Mother Corp’s face is building up in layers,” Matthew Cope, an upset fan wrote on Facebook today.

In addition to the Aubin piece in the Gazette, which was headlined “Bring back Nancy Wood,” another article in the French-language La Presse today said it was unfair to have dropped Wood after so little time. Not surprisingly, a Facebook group has sprung to oppose the decision. They are directing members to write letters to CBC management, and contact the president’s office.

Former Gazette staffer, and blogger Steve Faguy has more on the issue here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers.

Hubert

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Here are a couple pictures from the reception this morning as Andy Barrie, the long-standing host of CBC Toronto’s Metro Morning, passed the host chair to Matt Galloway. As you can see in the picture above, a lot of people showed up wish Barrie well.

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.

If you’re trying to phone the CBC in Toronto, try emailing instead.

Apparently the phone lines in the whole Toronto building are out. This just came into my inbox, “The telephone situation has degraded to a system-wide outage. However, cell phones are working as are power fail lines that have been installed in critical areas. Please be patient as the telecommunications and Telus people try to resolve this issue.”

This explains the busy signal if you’ve been trying to call CBC Toronto.

Anybody got a carrier pigeon?

In a post on the MacLeans blog Dunn says:

Known mainly for her work on CBC’s Marketplace, and a regular contributor to The National, Mesley has that extra something, that star quality that Mansbridge has always lacked. Armed with all of the credentials for the job, including three decades of reporting experience, Mesley also connects big-time, diving headfirst through that lens and into the hearts of the audience… Crusty old judges and mean-spirited spinsters all like Mesley. A modern day Mary Tyler Moore—warm and human, making the occasional flub, as she tilts her head one way, then the other with that disarming grin, anchor Mesley keeps gaining fans.

What do you think of Mesley’s work on The National or Marketplace?

In case you don’t know, a green screen, or sometimes a blue screen, is used in digital editing to replace one background with another. It’s commonly used in weather forecasts where weather images are overlaid on the green background.

Radio 3 has more hipster approved swag than any other department at the ceeb, the ironic cardigan, the tuques, the scarves, and now the buttons.

The CBC intends to aggressively push its content onto multiple digital platforms by negotiating deals with the cable and satellite companies while building on partnerships with the major digital players like iTunes and Google.

“You gotta be in all these places, because that’s where the audience is going,” Richard Stursberg, the executive vice president of English programming, said as he laid out a multi-pronged digital distribution strategy for the corporation last Thursday.

Stursberg said the CBC will have to transition from being a radio or television company to a content company, because content – whether it be TV, radio, or online content – is increasingly untethered from it’s originating platform. TV content is now watched on multiple devices, not just a television screen. He said this has resulted in the decline of appointment viewing, as viewers can watch or listen to content when they want. He said both developments will affect the way the CBC distributes content.

You have to start thinking very hard about the order in which you release your content. Because if it can be on all these different platforms, the question is in what order does it go to the different platforms. And you want to determine the order in which it goes to the different platforms on the basis on how are you going to get the most cumulative viewership or listenernship, and how are you going to maximum the total revenues that are available.

Stursberg said the switch to a multi-screen broadcasting environment won’t happen overnight, and many question remain, “We don’t know what will work,” he said, “One of the big outstanding questions is how long content will live on various platforms.” But he reiterated his commitment to pushing content onto new platforms regardless, “We’re gonna have to absolutely be there,” he said, if we don’t move to these new platforms, “we just lost all our viewers.”

The content strategy update was not entirely groundbreaking. The CBC is already executing many parts of it, like publishing on iTunes and pushing content to video on demand services. However it does represent a sea change in the thinking at the CBC over the last few years. Less than five years ago many producers, and the corporation in general seemed concerned that putting either radio or TV content online would cannibalize their core audience, and hurt ratings. Those concerns are now obviously no longer current.

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.

A couple of CBC employees toss paper airplanes off the 9th floor atrium balcony in Toronto yesterday. The annual event is a fundraiser for charity.

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?

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.

When the show launched in October the Lang and O’Leary Exchange ran half an hour between 4:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern, not an great TV time slot. Now, starting March 1st the show will run a full hour between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. The new prime-time spot for Lang and O’Leary means Mark Kelley’s show Connect, will lose an hour, chopping its original two hour slot in half.

Additionally Lang will also provide a business update at 4:30 during Carole MacNeil’s show, which was also given an extra half hour. Lang seems to have made a positive impression at the CBC since she joined the corporation, she frequently appears on The National and has hosted the flagship news program several times since she came over from BNN last fall.

Jennifer McGuire, general manager and editor-in-chief of CBC News didn’t say what prompted the change, but did say in a press release that “Viewer feedback to the new CBC News Network has been extremely positive.”

Now before you dismiss the quote from McGuire as spin, I should tell you that I spoke with CBC spokesperson Jeff Keay to find out where McGuire was coming from. Keay said that despite the the reaction online, the CBC got “extremely positive” feedback from a bunch of focus group testing after the relaunch.

If you think you’ve got the next million dollar idea, or you’ve invented a better mouse trap, or even some wacky board game, you could pitch it on Dragons’ Den.

The hit CBC show is holding auditions across the country. A post on the show’s web site says, “due to overwhelming demand, producers are expanding the search to over 40 stops.”

The full schedule for Dragons’ Den auditions in all the cities hasn’t been figured out yet, but some have already been arranged starting in early March.

Need a little help with your pitch? Dianne Buckner is offers up tips for pitches, and the late Dragon Laurence Lewin, shared the following wisdom, “It is not up to me to understand the entrepreneurs business. It is up to the entrepreneur to explain it clearly to me.”

This could be big.