SO I SET MY PVR to record about two and a half Saturday afternoon hours of CTV Newsnet (CTV News Channel, as of this morning) this past weekend in order to watch the charade I expected to see.
Heading into the weekend, viewers of CTVglobemedia properties were fed a steady dose of some very one-sided ads promoting the company’s cross-country open houses meant to help “save local TV”, along with a web site of which the best one can say tells a very incomplete story.
While it wasn’t the travesty I had assumed was coming (far from it, actually), some of the reporters were apparently fresh from the Sideline Reporter School Of Terribly Obvious Questioning, and posed utterly inane queries like: “How important is local TV to you?”
Guess what? The answer was usually something like “oh gosh, very important.”
At least the local leaders the reporters chose to interview were far more interesting and lucid than sweaty hockey players stuck in a hall between the second and third periods.
My weekend viewing reinforced a lot of what I know about local TV: At its heart and if done well, it’s a good thing; average, middle-aged Canadians place a lot of value in it; politicians love it; broadcasters and their employees give very generously of their time, effort, money and air to help myriad local charities and other causes across the country.
Mayors, councillors, MPs, MPPs, charity drive leaders… All insisted local TV is a must-have. Who would argue with these very earnest local leaders?
“We wouldn’t be able to contact the public directly,” said Halifax mayor Peter Kelly, referencing the city’s recent forest fire.
“We need that pipeline between the community and the police,” said Ottawa police chief Vernon White.
“It’s not an option, it’s a necessity,” added Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz.
“How tragic would it be if local TV weren’t around any more,” said Manitoba premier Gary Doer. “Local news… informs democracy. We usually catch the grenades from reporters so we are speaking out for the desire to keep catching them because that’s important for our democracy.”
Viewers on the weekend heard about how many tens of millions of dollars broadcasters help Canadian charities earn year-round from Canadians by those leaders who were worried they’d lose their broadcast partners.
“We rely on local television to get our message out,” said John Wilson of Toronto’s Variety Village. “Without local television it would be much more difficult.”
Let me reiterate that I think the charity work done by Canadian broadcasters should be commended. It’s wonderful what they do. And the concerns expressed by local politicians and other community group leaders are legitimate. I’d be worried too if I ran the Saskatchewan Kinsmen and was told by my broadcast partner they might be going out of business.
But all this is still not a good reason to throw hundreds of millions of more dollars at conventional broadcasters.
The 150-minutes I express-watched Saturday with the help of my PVR (I skipped the ads – one of the many revolutionary problems, and this is a relatively established one now, facing traditional media companies for which we have no easy solutions) was also rife with memories of broadcast days gone by.
These little vignettes are nice, but a really counterproductive thing to put on the air during such a broadcast. All it did was reinforce the “old fart media” image Canadian broadcasters want to downplay. All I saw were much-loved-and-since-discarded local brands that the middle aged folks identified with, and old shows that young people (if any were watching) would just laugh at, like the Popcorn Parade on the old CFRN-TV Edmonton.
Northern Ontario reporter Michelle Toner added that many people had been to the open house in Timmins recounting their old memories “of visiting the TV station.” Um, that’s about all they would have there since the TV studio there has long since been closed.
And speaking of young people, I don’t recall seeing a single person under the age of, say, 40, interviewed by the CTV reporters, save a young Boy Scout from Vancouver who was too afraid to squeak out a word.
Surely there were some 25-year-olds at these Open Houses who could have been corralled and asked questions about local TV. Here’s one: Would you pay a few dollars more a month to Rogers Cable to keep CKCO Kitchener going?
I would have loved to hear some answers to that question. But we got none of that.
But that isn’t to say it was a one-sided broadcast, however. It actually would have been quite enlightening to the average viewer, if they watched as long as I did, anyway. To the producers’ credit, and despite the distributors’ highly publicized complaints about editorial integrity, Newsnet offered up three folks with decidedly contrary opinions on local TV and the problems it faces right now, each gamely interviewed by Jacqueline Milczarek.
In their pleas for a fee-for-carriage or some other bailout, Carleton professor Christopher Waddell chided CTV and Canwest for “making a selective argument that in many respects isn’t putting the whole issue in the proper context. On a whole bunch of levels.”
For example, the broadcasters’ contention that they get “nothing” for their signal does not reflect the regulatory benefits of mandatory carriage, basic channel placement and protection from competition for local TV advertising.
Waddell also criticized the entire industry for engaging in such a bitter debate without placing much emphasis on the content found nowadays in local programming, “which I would argue has been going down a lot as we’ve been seeing cutbacks in newsrooms and staff and so on,” said Waddell.
Why give broadcasters “a bunch of money” to keep doing what they’re doing, when even they say that it no longer works, he added.
Consultant Eamon Hoey told Milczarek that broadcasters should be thinking about “who are our viewers and who will they be tomorrow,” and “should CTV be in the news business?” He suggested that maybe CTV Newsnet is a good enough news effort.
The third contrarian was Shaw Communications EVP government affairs and regulatory Ken Stein. He adamantly re-iterated the distributors’ concerns that a fee for carriage is just a tax by another name. “We think they should pay us,” he said about the direction any funds should flow.
“We fundamentally believe in local television. We think that it’s the most important thing that exists. Look at the people who came today to CFTO television in Toronto. People love television and are excited about it,” added Stein.
“We’re excited about the future. We think there’s a terrific future for television and a terrific future for local television and we need to have good business models that have to emphasize Canadian production and we’ll do just great.”
On a basic level, everyone is in agreement: Local TV is a good thing. From a personal standpoint, cutting back on local programming is the exact opposite of what a broadcaster should be doing.
But the way local news is created and shown now does not look to be able to stand up to the future that appears to be coming. All television has to work much, much harder at gathering viewers and building relationships. Real, one-on-one relationships.
For example, CH news anchor Nick Dixon and I follow each other on Twitter (assignment editor Christine Cho, too). I learned of Dixon’s recent one-on-one interview with RIM CEO Jim Balsillie, the guy trying to bring the NHL to Hamilton, on Twitter. I also learned he has blisters on his feet from a pair of too-loose golf shoes and he had to do the six o’clock in his suit and flip flops yesterday.
These tweets have actually had the power to shift my habits a little of late so that I have begun thinking more about tuning into CH News – something that was a rare occurrence in the O’Brien household up to now.
I made a point to PVR CH News the day Dixon mentioned the Balsillie piece. And this begs a different question, too. Why do I have to do that? Why isn’t CH News at Six available after my kids are in bed and I have a bit of time to watch the news? I don’t really want to watch a few bits of it on my laptop. I want to be able to call it up using my remote control, on demand, on TV.
But the less it’s available on TV, the more I turn to the web. And the more I turn to the web, the less I turn to TV. For everything. Not just TV news. I spent half an hour last week trying to find the “Celebrity Jeopardy” bit from the last Saturday Night Live of this season. NBC.com or Hulu and some others won’t show it in Canada. YouTube had pulled it down and Globaltv.ca, which owns the rights to the show in Canada and has some SNL stuff on its site inexplicably didn’t have it. I found it though, on what looked like a Russian web site, in English, and with pretty good video quality.
In 2009, why on earth isn’t something as simple as this bit of video easily findable on the web in Canada? And if I’m willing to search for the damn thing for 30 minutes, you can extrapolate from there that I might be okay viewing a few ads in and around the clip – even on the web.
These are just a few tiny examples of why positioning fee-for-carriage as a cure-all for what ails broadcasters is a terribly shallow argument.
The problem is, I’m not everyone. I’m just me. The six McMaster students around the corner from my place will want a completely different experience. And that’s why it’s going to be so much more difficult for broadcasters as we continue down the path we’re headed towards far more personalized media, personalized expectations, personalized devices. Killer, must-have content will still rule, but broadcasters are going to have to work much harder to get an audience.
Tweeting what you’ve got on at six barely scratches that surface.
If the Commission wants to throw the doors open for broadcasters and distributors to negotiate a carriage fee, as CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein told the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage Monday afternoon, that’s all well and good. But no matter how much the broadcasters get, they won’t draw a single additional viewer without a huge shift in how TV is done, recognizing what a challenge it is – and how much more difficult it is going to get – to attract eyeballs.
The smartest thing I heard Saturday actually came from a politician, Timmins James Bay NDP MP (and member of the Heritage Committee) Charlie Angus, who said: “Local is where people interact with the news and we have a problem and it has to be addressed…
“Let’s stop throwing rocks at each other. Let’s make something happen and make local television the priority of where we need to go in terms of broadcasting in Canada.”
