The secret to our future success: Weather Presenters?
Their loss, our gain…
The Bureau of Broadcast Measurement‘s spring ratings are out – and ratings are up for the Montreal newscast by 28%; 22% of those are new viewers.
This article speculates that some of those viewers may have jumped ship with Frank Cavallaro, an award-winning Weather Specialist who just joined the CBC earlier this year when the CTV news team did not renew his contract. Cavallero was voted the World’s Top Weather Presenter at the International Weather Festival held in Paris in 2002, and has been forecasting since the late 1980′s.
Incidentally, if you’ve always wanted to be a weather forecaster on the CBC and live in Calgary, that very job just got posted on the CBC jobs site this morning.
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| CBC News at Six, CBC Television, Montreal |
Well there are a couple factors here. One is that there’s nowhere to go but up. If you only have 4 viewers, adding a 5th will boost your numbers 25%. I haven’t seen the stats on Montreal, but like the rest of the country, they can’t be good.
The secret to our success will be Wheel of Fortune, as one Regional Director has already said publically. We’ll get a good lead in, our numbers will go up, and the all staff note will congratulate us on our excellent work and tell us that this is a sign that audiences love our new action news style presentation.
I want our numbers to go up, I want as many people as possible to be tuning in to CBC for high quality news, but doing it through Wheel of Fortune seems dirty, like it’s cheating. We can’t get away from the fact that we’ve under resourced our supper hour shows. Now we’re expecting people to do more with less and focusing on style over substance. Oh and we’ll steal some resources from radio through integration.
In moderation all those can be healthy, but we still need to take the time and energy to produce high quality journalism. Our audiences aren’t dumb. If we don’t deliver the goods behind that snappy headline our audiences will see through it and switch back to CTV our City which can out hype us any day of the week.