re: Budgets … you speak from 17+ yrs of experience of working in radio, watching bugets and quality shrink. that’s fair enough. but in a billion dollar org, you cannot look at your budgeting in such a narrow sense. CBC has a mandate to produce good Canadian content, and spread it to Canadians (among other things). so you have to look at the whole operation and ask: does this help us achieve our mandate or not. i argue that ignoring the web is suicide, and probably illegal (cf the Canada broadcast act). so if you can’t ignore it, you have to do something with it. with TV Radio and Web, you have 3 divisions, serving different markets, with different purposes. But those 3 distribution means are a reality, and to ignore one because you’ve always had the other 2 is short-sighted, and … well … bad.

eg, R3 is consistently one of the most popular podcasts on the net - at least in Canada, promoting all sorts of canadian indie music across the globe. good on them. their website may have been expensive - too expensive, sure - but it was innovative and interesting. it needed to change anyway, to evolve with the web - and ditch the flash. instead it got canned (more or less). was it worth a million bucks? probably not. but R3 in general probably is.

but as mentioned previously, i have a few radio shows i’d hit with a scalpel without any qualms. i don’t know enough about TV to say.

but i would suggest that having a public broadcaster pumping out purchased foreign commercial content, in order to sell ad time (competing w commercial broadcasters), in the age of cable, probably doesn’t make much sense.

ABC Australia makes the most boring radio shows ever. And the CBC rebroadcasts the worst of them on the overnight service.

And when I say that the online services rob from the core services, I speak from experience; I’ve been on the radio side for 17+ years, and I can tell you that the funding for new media has been carved out of the other services: cbc budgets have gone down, not up.

Please hazard a guess at, for example, the annual price tag for the old Radio 3 webpage. And then multiply it several times: we’re talking at least a million dollars. Now ask yourself: have radio shows been getting better in the past 10 years, or worse?

I make a mean molotov… ;)

Let’s you keep programs for a short time - not burn them to disk though. (Win XP only at the mo - so I can’t try it. Many deeply resent this WinXPness)

I’d be interested to know if a Canadian could get it working.

BBC don’t give their stuff away on YouTube - I suspect that they show it free-to-air in the UK, and then subsidise costs by selling it abroad. YouTube would kill that. They also have to pay the actors repeat fees.

HM: if by “non-starter” you mean no one has bothered to make this a priority to figure it out, i would agree. if by “non-starter” you mean “it cannot be done” then I disagree. It’s at #1 for a reason, because I think it is a fundamental requirement of a public broadcaster to broadcast its wares to the public. and the internet is probably the most powerful means of distribution we’ve yet seen. so it should be top priority to make sure that CBC understands and uses the internet intelligently. (vs investing in a commercial venture like satelite radio).

So if there is negotiation to be done with ACTRA, SOCAN etc, then lets get going, at the highest level. But anything not caught under those silly rules should be slapped on the web post-haste.

Oh, and how about special copyright rules for CBC - as they have with other public broadcasters in the universe.

HISJ: “as for (1), the rights issues haven’t been resolved, and they probably won’t be anytime soon. You can probably get stuff like The National and The Fifth Estate up and going online okay, but anything else will just be cannon fodder for lawyers.”

HM: so: lets get the easy stuff up right now, and get our sleeves rolled up to deal with the other stuff now.

HISJ: “However, a simple one-week radio archive would be nice. Surely SOCAN would be able to find a way to agree to this sort of thing.”

HM: you are hereby invited onto my negotiating team.

HISJ: “as for (2), the fact is that campus stations in Canada *don’t want* CBC programming. Their mandate, unlike many US college stations, is to be an alternative to what’s on the dial already. (and you’ll probably find that a lot of campus/community radio staffers hold the cbc in high contempt… either that, or they wind up quitting campus radio to work for the ceeb.) An early inception of Radio 3 tried offering a show (for free!) to campus stations across the country. Guess how many accepted?”

HM: interesting. i don’t know anything about this… but I was just pleased that in the US that good NPR content seemed to be available all over the place. I’d sure be sad to see the crap (freestyle, Q, SLC) getting on campus stations, but it’d be nice to have Ideas, Writers & Co, etc…but I bet you dollars for donuts that campus stations can’t just start broadcasting this content without getting written approval of CBC. which is what I think should happen.

Also a note: NPR seems to know what it’s doing. it makes good programming, across a range of topics etc. but it makes sense, and 9 times out of 10 an NPR station is going to feed you something worth listening to. CBC, on the other hand, gives me maybe a 2:10 good:bad ratio. CBC seems to want to be everything for everyone, and so ends up being not much to mostly nobody. why? bad programming decisions fostered by uncertainty about what the hell CBC is doing, exacerbated by a desire to make “commercially-viable programming.” which, of course, it mostly is not.

so: make good content, and make it available as widely as possible.

HISJ: “I’m puzzled, because most radio production is done in-house, and it’s television where stuff gets farmed out more. So the situation you’re looking for exists already.”

HM: this comes from a couple of good radio shows (O’reilly on advertising, and White Coat, Black Art) both of which i *think* are external productions, both of which are excellent, better than most programming on CBC radio. It comes from the belief that probably a management-heavy beast like CBC is not very good at coming up with innovative programming, though when they get good things, they do it well. or, CBC is making bad programming decisions … and maybe freeing things up to get more fresh voices in there would be a good idea.

i have no comments really about TV, as it’s a mystery to me.

HISJ: “As for the internet, I have an even more radical proposal: enough fooling around with wepages, and get back to broadcasting.”

HM: OK I think all has been said above already. But to reiterate: the CBC’s job is to provide important Canadian content to Canadians, generally of a stripe that is not available thru commercial providers. So, firstly, the web is a distribution channel like any other, and anything CBC does should be put on the web. Otherwise, CBC is not doing its job of broadcasting to all Canadians (for instance, me).

as for “enough fooling around with web pages” … show me a successful news-based company/entity who takes this approach, and I will show you a company/entity that will be gone in 5 or 10 years, if it has not already faded into irrelevance. the web is not some “other” and unimportant sidelight, it will become (is becomming) the prime means of all media distribution in some form or other, eventually. to ignore it is suicide.

if CBC’s core services are getting cannibalized by anything, it’s by shitty productions of shitty shows targeted to an non-existent audience.

Or, enough fooling around, lets get back to making the best stuff in the world, and make sure it gets to people in whatever medium they choose to get it.

And to reiterate: there are many successful public broadcasters doing all sorts of much more interesting things than CBC, namely: Australian Broadcasting Corp (whose line-up of excellent podcasts should make CBC weep with shame), BBC, NPR, Radio New Zealand. Let’s talk more with them, and see if CBC can’t help map out a strategy to make public broadcasting stronger and better and more important for all the citizens of the globe.

I’m sure both numbers have fluctuated, and new media is responsible for its share of those employees that keep the whole corporation afloat, but still, you could shelve the whole online operation - web pages, streams, archives and podcasts and the rest - and it wouldn’t change the financial picture much. And that doesn’t even account for the revenue it generates, or the eyeballs it reaches.

I say: wtf? you must be joking!

Jer is exactly right - there is a need to meld together the audio/video/text together better, but that really is the gist of what’s going on - take the things the corp is good at and put it onto the platforms people are migrating to. You have to be careful about bandying about the word “print” like we’re making newspapers and straying completely from the mandate (which was mostly written before any of us were born.)

And cost is all relative - a web reporter probably makes the same as a radio reporter, but it’s a little alarmist to say the web is “stealing” from core resources. The entire new media operations combined make up a little over 1 per cent of the total staff.