Tag Archives: CBC-Radio

| Radio

CBC cuts first half-hour of Quebec AM

Susan Campbell's morning show on CBC Radio One will start at 6am instead of 5:30

Susan Campbell’s morning show on CBC Radio One will start at 6am instead of 5:30

Quebec AM, the CBC Radio One morning show heard throughout Quebec outside of Montreal and Gatineau, will be starting later in the morning, at 5:57am instead of 5:30am, starting Monday.

The change, which is permanent, is based not so much on saving money, though CBC is in the middle of some deep cuts, but rather on audience.

“Morning radio listenership dramatically increases at 6am,” explains Debbie Hynes, CBC Quebec’s communications director.

The move makes sense. The number of people listening to CBC Radio One in English outside of Montreal before 6am is pretty low. You don’t have the people in Montreal suburbs who have to get up that early because of the long commute. You don’t have early-morning joggers getting up before civilization to take advantage of quiet roads and parks. Though you might have some farmers getting up with the sun who now have half an hour less of regional information on the radio.

Montreal’s Daybreak, hosted by Mike Finnerty, retains its 5:30am start time.

“Quebec AM made this choice in order to better serve its audience with stories that run in peak listening times,” Hynes said. And people wanting local news will still get that at 5:30. “Shawn Lyons will still do a hit at 5:30am with a local newscast. From 5:30-5:57am, listeners will hear the overnight service.”

As Hynes points out, 6am start times are common for CBC Radio One local morning shows in Canada. Most stations either carry regional programming from 5:30 to 6am before starting a local show or carry the overnight service, which broadcasts best-of-CBC and public radio shows from the BBC and other international broadcasters.

| Montreal, Radio

Mike Finnerty returns to CBC Daybreak (UPDATED)

Mike Finnerty ad from his last Daybreak stint

Mike Finnerty, who left his job as host of the morning show Daybreak on CBC Radio One to work at the Guardian newspaper in London, and was replaced by Nancy Wood, who was turfed only a few months later by management, settles back into his old chair starting Monday morning at 5:30am

Well, maybe not the old chair. The CBC radio studios have been moved to the basement of the Maison Radio-Canada, to share space with CBC television and better integrate the two newsrooms.

It’s been more than two months since it was announced that Finnerty would return. That gave him some time to finish up at the Guardian, fill in as a host of The Current, move back to Montreal and get back up to speed with his Daybreak team.

I asked him about his impending return, and he sent me a really long email, most of which I’ll share with you here (slightly edited).

Quite a few changes, actually. It will definitely sound different. I take responsibility for the different mind and voice, but Daybreak has a new senior producer Meredith Dellandrea. It’s a team effort, but she’s been working on this re-launch since I was hired in July.  She’s very good.

  • It will sound a lot pacier and more nimble
  • It will deliver more of the crucial Montreal info you need more efficiently, and it will frontload that information tucked up to the end of our half-hourly newscasts
  • It will update you more regularly
  • It will retain the same team, and I like to hope the same magic/spontaneity/cheekiness we’d achieved before I left
  • There will be a focus on interviewing, getting the Montreal players on air and on the record

We’ll continue to push ahead on the tech front – you may not hear it first day, but we’ll start making use of how easy it’s become to send quality audio files over the Web/Twitter.

The premium on audience interactivity continues — we consider they co-own the show (because they do lol), so you’ll hear their story ideas, their comments and even direct participation in the storytelling. We’ll up our game on social networking, especially Twitter. (ED: They use their Facebook page a lot too)

The 5:30 half-hour will be spruced up a bit for our early-morning listeners.

The podcast stays and you’ll hear in different ways that we’re keenly aware of how much the audience is interacting with us digitally through the Internet.

As for me, I’ve just come back from 15 months at guardian.co.uk — a news organisation with complete clarity about its brand and what it stands for:  it makes an impact, is thoughtful, colourful, cheeky, provocative, interactive, creative, and seeks out viewpoints from across the spectrum of thought and opinion Those are all values I sign up to, so I hope they’ve been reinforced in me and you might even hear more of that on air.

Is it just like riding a bicycle?  You’ll find out tomorrow from 0530.

Finnerty's new face on the Daybreak home page

Finnerty’s guests his first week include Mayor Gérald Tremblay, Canadiens captain Brian Gionta, McGill principal Heather Munroe-Blum, CBC boss Hubert Lacroix, some “surprises”, a longer interview with police chief Marc Parent (he presented an excerpt last week), and as usual the stars of the latest news cycle who are willing to wake up at 7am for a radio interview.

UPDATE: I listened to the first complete show with Finnerty as host, and I have some initial reaction on the subject:

  • I rarely listened to the first half-hour of Daybreak – only insane people are up at 5:30am – but it’s really really dead. They’ve replaced the “Daybreak playback” with a press review, which is Finnerty and Dimitri Katadotis reading off the headlines of the newspapers that have just arrived. It’s pretty well as boring as it sounds. The rest of the half-hour is a daily chat with the folks at Quebec AM in Quebec City. I realize you’re not going to get many interviews for 5:40am (getting interviews for 7:40am is hard enough), but people who wake up at this time of the morning need much more energy than this.
  • Finnerty is well aware of his reputation for being a confrontational interviewer, and only time will tell whether he’ll mellow out in the long term, but this interview with Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay is interesting in how cordial he is. Certainly Tremblay has had some questions to face over the past 15 months, but Finnerty is practically lobbing softballs at the guy. He also interviewed Christian Paradis over the Tory minister’s recent political troubles, and the interview was fair. Finnerty didn’t ask him 10 times if he was going to resign. Maybe he was unusually happy this day, maybe self-conscious about people’s criticisms of him, or maybe he just hasn’t found an issue to be really fired up at yet. We’ll see.
  • A lot of the show is spent previewing itself. Here’s four minutes of Finnerty just doing station IDs and talking about what’s coming up in the program. Get rid of that and you can have a whole other segment.
| Radio, TV

CRTC Roundup: Details on CJNT/CHCH sale

The CRTC has called a hearing for Aug. 24 to hear Channel Zero’s proposal to buy CJNT Montreal and CHCH Hamilton. The application includes some goodies we didn’t hear about in the announcement in June.

The purchase price for both stations is $12, specifically:

  • Land $3.00
  • Buildings $3.00
  • Other Fixed Assets $3.00
  • Goodwill $3.00

The stations would be financed through a loan of $4 million from CIBC and Brian C. Hurlburt, and $3 million from Channel Eleven. That would go to increasing the size of CHCH’s newsroom and creating a new production facility at CJNT, plus eventually changing both stations to digital.

Canwest can pull out of the deal if CRTC approval is not given by Aug. 31. Channel Zero expects the CRTC will make a decision on the same day as the hearing, I guess.

The proposed programming grid for CHCH would be as follows:

  • Weekdays: News and local progamming from 5:30am to 7pm, followed by two movies, news from 11-12, a repeat of the prime-time movies and a really-late-night movie from 4am to 5:30am
  • Weekends: News and local programming from 6am to 1pm, followed by two movies, a one-hour 6pm newscast, two more movies, a one-hour 11pm newscast, and then three repeats of movies shown that day

The proposed programming grid for CJNT would look like this:

  • Local ethnic programming in the morning and during the evening supper hours (four hours a day total)
  • Music videos during the day
  • International ethnic movies during prime time
  • Movies (it’s not clear if this would be ethnic or not) overnight

On how they’ll bring the stations to get rich quick modest profit:

A short answer is that we will, if the application is approved, focus each of these stations on their core competency; news and local programming at CHCH and relevant and local multi-cultural programming at CJNT. We will not be relying on expensive first run U.S. programming and therefore we can bring the stations to modest profitability in a relatively short time frame.

A table of financial projections optimistically shows CJNT showing a profit as early as fiscal 2011, mainly due to the assumption that local advertising sales will have more than tripled by then, from $1.2 million a year to $4.3 million, despite the fact that they’re replacing first-run U.S. shows by less-expensive movies in prime-time.

Similarly, ad sales at CHCH are expected to recover to $43 million a year (on par with pre-recession levels, optimistic since more than 80% of that advertising came from non-news programming which Channel Zero would be getting rid of), which combined with spending $30 million a year less on programming expenses, and the CRTC’s new taxes on cable companies, would result in seven-figure profits beginning in fiscal 2012. Without its projected $4 million a year from fee for carriage (it predicts a “75% likelihood” for that “by 2011”), the station would stay in the red until 2014.

Channel Zero is also asking for changes to the licenses for CHCH and CJNT. Among them:

  • Deletion of a requirement for CHCH to have a minimum level of “priority programming” (things like Canadian dramas and news magazines). It argues such requirements are not asked of small stations, only of large broadcast groups.
  • Deletion of a requirement at CHCH for an independent monitoring committee, since these are related to Canwest’s cross-ownership of various media which Channel Zero does not have
  • Deletion of a requirement for CHCH to air four hours a week of described video (with the understanding that the station would use described video where available)
  • Removal of a requirement for CHCH to have distinct programming from Global’s CIII-TV Toronto, which becomes moot if CHCH isn’t owned by Canwest.
  • Deletion of a requirement for CJNT to make sure 25% of its films are Canadian (Channel Zero argues there aren’t enough foreign-language Canadian films to make that feasible – and it will abide by other Canadian content requirements)
  • Deletion of a requirement for French-language non-ethnic programming. Canwest twice asked to be relieved of this requirement, and was turned down twice by the CRTC. Channel Zero argues the station must focus on one market for non-ethnic programming, and the French market is already saturated here. It’s hard not to agree with that logic.
  • Increase in minimum requirements for local ethnic programming from 13.5 hours to 14 hours per week

The Canadian Media Guild’s Lise Lareau looks a bit skeptically at Channel Zero’s plans for CHCH in Hamilton, notably the requested license amendment to remove the requirement to air Canadian dramas and movies in prime time.

UPDATE: The CHCH union, which has agreed to support the sale in principle, is grieving Canwest’s plan to wind up its pension plan before the sale.

Campus/community radio review

The CRTC is undergoing a broad-based review of its policies for campus and community-based radio stations. Among the questions it’s asking:

  • Should campus and community stations be treated differently?
  • Should high school stations be licensed?
  • What kind of programming requirements should they have?
  • Should low-power “micro” radio stations be licensed or exempt from license?
  • How much advertising should they be limited to?

The deadline for comments is Sept. 11. The hearing is Nov. 30 in Gatineau.

Not so bold

After being slapped on the wrist for violating terms of license, the CBC has made good on its promise to request an amendment to change the nature of its specialty channel known as Bold. Formerly called Country Canada, the channel was licensed as a network for rural Canadians from a “rural perspective”, but since its transformation into bold (they don’t capitalize the B, so as to remain edgy or something) it’s basically been a network to throw leftovers at. It airs everything from drama reruns to soccer games.

The CBC’s argument for the change boils down to this:

There is insufficient programming from a “rural perspective” to program the service.

Sorry farm people, but you’re just not interesting enough for a whole channel, even with Heartland and Corner Gas.

New programming categories

Since the CRTC announced that it would allow specialty networks access to all programming categories when asked, they’ve gotten some requests for exactly that.

Astral Media is asking for access to all programming categories for Canal Vie, Canal D, Historia, MusiMax, VRAK.tv, Ztélé and MusiquePlus

TVA has received approval for Les idées de ma maison to air up to 10% animated programming. Argent and Mystère have access to a slew of new programming categories, everything from religious programming to feature films and music videos, so long as they fit with the channels’ themes and don’t compete with other networks and don’t go above 10% of the broadcast day. Prise 2 also gets categories added (see below)

Prise 2 must keep its CanCon

Prise 2 can now air TV programs that are as little as 10 years old (the previous minimum was 15) and movies as little as 15 years old (previously it was 25), as well as access more programming categories (documentaries and live sports, limited to 10% of the broadcast day). A request to reduce their CanCon requirement from 35% to 30% was denied.

Télé-Québec, Canal Savoir stay on the air

While the major networks (TVA, CTV, Global) got one-year license renewals as they sort out that fee-for-carriage thing, the smaller non-profit networks are being renewed for the full seven years.

CFTU (Canal Savoir) has been renewed for seven years with no changes to its conditions of license (except a reminder that it will need to transition to digital by August 2011).

CIVM Montreal (Télé-Québec) and its retransmitters across Quebec were also renewed until 2016, with some considerations about representation of minorities but otherwise no changes.

Corus gets more steamy

Corus Entertainment has come to an agreement to buy Sex TV and Drive-in Classics, two specialty channels, from CTVglobemedia. The next day Corus reported a $145-million quarterly loss. Last year Corus bought CLT from CTV and rebranded it VIVA.

In other news:

| In the news, Montreal, Opinion, Video

ALD for NDP

The NDP has apparently chosen its candidate for its next most likely by-election pickup in Quebec: the downtown riding of Westmount-Ville-Marie. No, it’s not the guy in the above video (though he sounds like he’d be awesome), it’s CBC Radio Noon host Anne Lagacé Dowson:

(Note: May not be exactly as pictured)

I worked with Anne during my very brief stint at CBC Radio. Considering how incompetent I was, she seemed like a pretty nice person. The fact that she’s running for office under the NDP banner is hardly surprising (though I doubt she and Jack Layton agree on every issue)

Now the NDP seems to think that after their stunning win in Outremont, getting a broadcast journalist on board is the magic ticket to a second win in Quebec.

Unfortunately, it’s no guarantee. Just look at Peter Kent, former Global National anchor who lost for the Conservatives in Toronto (he’s trying his luck again in a much more affluent York riding). And he was at least on TV. (Get Mutsumi Takahashi or Nancy Wood to run and we’ll talk)

Even worse, her opponent is another star candidate (albeit another failed one), former astronaut Marc Garneau.

The riding, which mainly covers Westmount and western downtown (plus a bit of eastern NDG) could be hard to predict, with a mix of rich anglo Westmounters and poor hippie Concordia students. But the federal riding covering Westmount has been Liberal since 1962, and that’s a lot of history to overcome for a party that hasn’t done better than third with 15% of the vote.

Due to a conflict of interest, Lagacé Dowson has taken a leave of absence from CBC Radio, and the latter immediately scrubbed all mention of her from its website.

UPDATE (July 7): It’s “confirmed” apparently (as if there was doubt). Lagacé Dowson is, as usual, humble:

“I am not falling on my sword in Westmount,” she told a handful of supporters. “This liberal tradition isn’t serving us very well, and we don’t like what the Conservatives are doing to us. I am not running to make a good showing; I am running to win. If Barack Obama against all odds can capture the leadership of the Democratic party in the United States, who says a woman can’t capture the hearts and minds of Westmount for the NDP?”

I’m not quite sure how this relates to Barack Obama, nor being a woman (especially since the riding’s former MP, Lucienne Robillard, has two X chromosomes last time I checked), but don’t let that interfere with the historicness.

Meanwhile, the other parties have filled out their candidates. Just to show how confident the Bloc Québécois is at winning a seat in Westmount, they’ve nominated Charles Larivée, who according to Google is the president of the McGill Political Science Students Association.

| Media, Montreal, Opinion, Radio

Vogels to talk dirty on CBC Radio

Ex-Montrealer Josey Vogels, who was replaced as Hour’s sex columnist in October but is still doing weekly columns on sex and dating, will be joining CBC Radio One, where she gets her own “sexuality” show called Between You and Me.

That was part of a lineup announcement that included an interesting-obit show hosted by Gordon Pinsent, as well as a multiculturalism identity show hosted by CBC Montreal’s Geeta Nadkarni (CBC’s article calls her “Geeta Nadkami”).

The news about Vogels’s new show comes coincidentally at the same time we hear that Torontonian sex superstar Sue Johanson will be hanging up the dildo and retiring from full-time sex advising and ending her show’s run on the Oxygen network.

Roberts revisited

Speaking of Vogels, her replacement at Hour, Laura Roberts, asked me to critique her column. I admit that I’ve stopped reading Hour and Mirror regularly because they don’t have RSS feeds and have a very small news-to-advertising ratio.

So I perused through the archives, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. It’s a bit wordy, a bit opinionative (in the sense of spouting opinions without much analysis or research to back them up), and a bit too focused on the author’s personal life. These are all fairly common for new columnists still trying to figure out what works, and even then it may appeal to others more than it does to me.

In the end, even though it’s been six months already, it’s still a bit too early to tell if the column works or not. It’s definitely not Josey, nor should it be.