Heated townhall sets the CBC's agenda through 2020

[kal]

An interesting read here of the CBC's president attempting to defend the moves he's been charged to make over the next six years. As the union president points out this was an extremely emotional and heated townhall session.

http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/cutting+back+evening+news+inhouse+production+shift+towards/9976962/story.html

As noted elsewhere some of the moves have already been felt here at the CBC TV Vancouver location.

[jon]

CBC cutting back evening news, in-house production in shift towards digital
By Laura Kane, The Canadian Press
June 26, 2014 11:10 AM

TORONTO - The CBC is slashing 25 per cent of its workforce over the next five years, while cutting back evening newscasts and in-house production in a bid to shift its focus from radio and television to digital and mobile services.

The public broadcaster announced its five-year strategic plan Thursday as it grapples with a $130-million budget shortfall due to federal cuts, flagging advertising revenues and the loss of hockey rights to Rogers Media.

By 2020, the broadcaster plans to slash 1,000 to 1,500 jobs, although it says that goal will in part be fulfilled by retirements and attrition. These staff reductions are in addition to the 657 job cuts it announced in April.

In a heated town hall with employees, CBC president Hubert Lacroix faced calls to resign. He said the broadcaster must transform itself from a "producer to a multi-platform broadcaster" in order to stay afloat.

He said that advertising revenues have shifted to global players like Facebook and Google and financial support for public broadcasters has decreased. Even conventional private broadcasters are not profitable, he said.

"The system is broken," he said. "Meantime, as these shifts are happening, large numbers continue to watch television and listen to radio in traditional ways. In fact, Canadians on average are watching more television, not less.

"So these services will continue to be relevant and essential in this new media universe. We're actually moving from a conventional world whose model is declining towards a new world that cannot yet pay its own way."

The CBC is aiming to double its digital audience so that 18 million Canadians — or roughly half of the country — use its online or mobile services each month by 2020.

"As the media universe becomes more crowded, Canadians need a space they can call their own. We will be at the heart of that space," Lacroix said.

He said the broadcaster will not close any stations across the country, but 90-minute evening television newscasts will be cut to 30 or 60 minutes.

The move to "significantly" reduce in-house production will not include news, current affairs or radio. The CBC says fewer documentaries will be directly produced by the broadcaster but it did not say whether it would contract out all documentary production.

Heather Conway, executive vice-president of English Services, said the documentary unit would "change" but that it would not reduce the number of documentaries on air.

"The issue around docs is not an isolated decision. If you look at the strategy, what we've said is we're going to exit in-house production," she said. "Transforming ourselves from Canada's public producer into Canada's multi-platform public broadcaster requires that we make that kind of a shift."

CBC personalities including Peter Mansbridge, David Suzuki and Linden MacIntyre have signed a petition to CBC executives opposing the cuts to documentaries.

The broadcaster also plans to cut its real estate presence in half by approximately two million square feet. In Montreal, there will be a reduction in square feet, while the Toronto studio will acquire new tenants.

After programming cuts in April hit small communities hard, the CBC promised Thursday to preserve its geographical presence to be "even more local, but at reduced cost."

During the raucous town hall, Lacroix was grilled by employees. When union president Carmel Smyth suggested he "resign in protest" of the Conservative government's budget cuts, several cheers could be heard.

"Resign in protest," he repeated incredulously. "Let's put things in perspective. The last time CBC/Radio-Canada had an increase in budget was 1973. All the public broadcasters in the world have the same kinds of issues we have."

Lacroix said that he asked Minister of Canadian Heritage Shelly Glover for a line of credit and one-time funding to deal with severance costs, but the government declined.

In an interview, Smyth said that Thursday's town hall was the most heated she had ever seen.

"Normally we're very polite and diplomatic. But at this stage, people are so disappointed," said Smyth, national president of the Canadian Media Guild, which represents most CBC workers.

"We're looking at a dramatically different CBC. I hope the board is comfortable dismantling a national institution. At the same time they're selling it as good news, a great plan for 2020."

[jon]

The CBC’s a service, not a business
Wade Rowland
Contributed to The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Jun. 26 2014, 4:53 PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Jun. 26 2014, 5:00 PM EDT

Wade Rowland is the author of Saving the CBC: Balancing Profit and Public Interest. He teaches in York University’s communication studies department.

The CBC’s strategic plan to shift priorities from broadcast to digital services and outsource virtually all but news and current affairs programming is, on the whole, a sensible strategy – from a purely business perspective. It saves money by reducing production and distribution costs. Shedding more jobs will further enhance the bottom line between now and 2020; as many as 1,500 positions will be eliminated in the plan announced Wednesday.

The thing is, however, that the public broadcaster is not a business in any conventional sense. It exists not to make money or to satisfy financial goals, but to fill a public need – one that is not being served by private media outlets. The CBC is a public good, like the school system, like medicare, like our universities and colleges, our public museums and galleries.

In a world of commercial sponsorship of media, both broadcast and online, the CBC’s purpose is to serve its audiences as citizens, rather than as consumers. Its purpose is to create news, information and entertainment that’s judged for its creative, intellectual and artistic integrity, rather than its ability to attract large audiences that can be sold to advertisers.

What CBC management has delivered is not a public broadcasting strategy but a business plan, one that further distances the corporation from its public-service mandate.

For example, most people who study digital online media recognize that one of its impacts is to atomize audiences. Where traditional broadcasting creates a kind of congregation, a community of interest, the fragmented, specialized nature of Internet content tends to encourage individuals to focus on their own established interests. There is certainly a place for this, but it runs counter to the community-building remit of public broadcasting.

Another example: Nowhere in Wednesday’s in-house town-hall webcast, nor the accompanying documentation, was the issue of whether the public broadcaster ought to be carrying advertising even mentioned. The best of the world’s public-service broadcasters (PSBs) carry no commercials. Their involvement means engaging in the ratings game, which pushes programming toward the lowest common denominator in tastes and interests. This is why commercial-free subscription television services such as HBO and Netflix, like true PSBs, tend to produce superior programming.

One of the reasons why CBC is anxious to accelerate its shift to online services is because that’s where advertising revenue is moving. It hopes to cash in on the bonanza. But a reliance on ad revenue from online services is just as corrosive to PSB values and goals as it is in conventional TV and radio, for the same reasons.

If 70-odd years experience with the CBC to date proves anything, it’s that the public broadcaster can’t serve two masters. It should leave commercial sponsorship to the private media, which exist to serve advertisers, and it should focus on its public-service mandate exclusively.

Can the CBC survive without advertising revenue? That’s like asking whether the public school system can survive without corporate sponsorship. Of course it can – as long as that’s a public priority, as it ought to be.

At present, the CBC receives an annual parliamentary appropriation of about $1.34-billion. This puts Canada third from the bottom of the list of OECD nations’ support for their PSBs. A subsidy of $3-billion would boost us to around average. That level of funding would make it possible for the CBC to produce television programming matching the highest international standards, and to continue to finance an exceptional radio service while providing online services as the market – rather than internal balance sheets – dictates.

A dedicated 5 per cent to 7 per cent impost on what the CRTC calls Broadcast Distribution Undertakings – the big, vertically integrated and enormously profitable Internet/wireless/telephone/broadcast providers like Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Quebecor – could bring CBC funding up to a level that would allow it to properly do its job of providing an alternative to commercial media.

It could put the CBC back in the business of being an authentic public-service broadcaster, beholden to no vested interests, commercial or political. It’s what the country needs and deserves as a culture and a community – more so than ever in the evolving digital era.

[jon]

Opinion: CBC's broadcast days may be numbered
As many as 1,500 workers to get the axe
By Scott Stinson, Postmedia News
June 27, 2014 7:26 AM

I don't imagine that when Maslow composed his Hierarchy of Needs, he gave much thought to putting "public broadcaster" on there.

But, here we are in 2014, and the CBC is not just insisting that it still maintains a purpose in the modern media landscape, but a vital one.

Not only does the five-year strategy outlined on Thursday aim to make CBC "the public space at the heart of our conversations and experiences as Canadians" - no small feat, that - but it also vows that, in 2020, "three out of four Canadians will answer that CBC or Radio-Canada is very important to them personally."

Not unless the Canada of five years from now is one in which its citizens are prone to excessive hyperbole.

These grand statements of vision were presumably meant to soften what was otherwise a difficult day of news at the public broadcaster, one in which its executives said it will transform itself into a considerably smaller organization that prioritizes investment in digital and mobile platforms over traditional media.

In announcing that he was tired of overseeing annual budget cuts, president and chief executive Hubert Lacroix announced a massive cut: as many as 1,500 employees or almost 20 per cent of the workforce over five years, though a lot of that, it is hoped, will be achieved through attrition.

The scythe will be taken most significantly to the local news and sports operations, with dinner-hour newscasts pared from 90 to 30 minutes and sports productions taking an inevitable hit from the loss of NHL broadcast rights to Rogers.

But while Lacroix and executive vice-president Heather Conway explained that the CBC is flipping on its head an investment structure that currently puts money in TV first and mobile last, the details aren't quite so simple. In the short term, anyway, the broadcaster plans to spend as much or more of its billion-dollar budget on original television programming as it does today, with a particular focus on quality. It also plans to outsource as much television production as it can, including for the original documentaries that have come in for much hand-wringing lately, even among CBC luminaries.

A lot of this makes sense. The CBC doesn't need to spend as much as it does on local news, not when those dinner-hour shows are routinely thumped in ratings by private competitors. And creating original programming that is "distinctive from the privates, creatively ambitious and risky" is exactly what the public broadcaster ought to be doing.

Lacroix said on a conference call that while the shift to mobile is inevitable, "we will not abandon radio and television as platforms that are important to Canadians."

There is no such thing as a risk-free transformation, though, and certainly not this one. Because the CBC and its government minders have left the broadcaster's fundamental model untouched, it still faces the difficult - perhaps impossible - task of trying to make enough revenue to meet budget needs while still meeting a public-service mandate.

Critics like me can bleat about how the CBC should aim big with its prime-time programming and produce the kind of shows that HBO and AMC make all the time, but a large number of viewers may not agree. Will advertisers be interested in a lineup of programs that attract boutique audiences?

There's also the much larger, and longer-term, question of where a pivot toward mobile and digital news ultimately leads. It is true that audiences are already moving to mobile with great haste, but it's also true that the more the CBC heads down a path that is already littered with private competitors, the less there seems much of a point in having a public broadcaster operating there.

At its essence, we think of the CBC as being the vehicle through which people could stay connected with the world in even the far-flung corners of the nation. It had transmitters that went where private broadcasters didn't, or wouldn't.

But more than 90 per cent of Canadians who receive a television signal do so through a cable or satellite provider today, a number that is marching inexorably toward 100 per cent. And anyone who has an Internet signal or a smartphone has the ability to reach not just the CBC's offerings, but countless others from across the globe. The CBC will respond that its news operations, being "public," are an unimpeachable necessity, uncorrupted as they are by the influence of a profit mandate.

But when the CBC is looking to outsource where possible, to form partnerships with private producers and broadcasters when it can, and to find new opportunities for "branded content" - all of which it has said it is doing - can we really still pretend that it doesn't share some of the same motives as the rest of the "corporate" media?

The shift toward digital is no doubt a natural survival instinct. But when the next five-year plan comes out, is there a reason for a public broadcaster if it doesn't, you know, broadcast?