TORONTO — Juggling the daily demands of directing one of Canada’s major national news organizations, while also overseeing a structural migration to digital and maintaining journalistic integrity in the face of internal and external attempts to influence editorial decisions, is keeping the country’s top news executives on their toes.
The heads of the three major Canadian television news organizations (two of which are also the biggest radio operators) took part in a panel discussion Friday that kicked off RTDNA Canada’s annual conference in Toronto. The special “Bear Pit” panel, moderated by Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien, featured a lively and wide-ranging conversation that touched on the challenges presented by digital, shrinking revenue, increased public scrutiny, sticky conflicts of interest, and CRTC decisions related to the Let’s Talk TV hearings.
Referring to the industry-wide move to digital as a “disruption” to traditional TV news broadcasting, Jennifer McGuire, general manager and editor-in-chief of CBC News, said it’s requiring her organization “to reset our newsrooms and our news gathering operations to accommodate a real sort of shift in audience pattern.” Instead of the collective experience of viewing traditional broadcast news, people want an individual experience, with more customized news delivery across different platforms whenever they demand, she said.
“We’re a highly integrated news operation. So we have radio, TV, the online and even the digital space is shifting from a desktop experience to largely a social and mobile experience,” McGuire said. “It’s changing at a rapid, rapid pace. We’re trying to organize ourselves to respond to how the audience is guiding us to how they want their information, but also maintaining our traditional experiences. Television still drives revenue, and there are still significant audiences in television. So you really have to be able to do it all.”
Troy Reeb, senior vice-president of news and station operations for Shaw Media’s Global News, said although his organization has reduced its overall head count as a result of a “dramatic restructuring”, it is now undergoing a hiring round to add journalists with the new skill sets needed for today’s newsroom. There’s a lot of inefficiency in traditional television news gathering methods, which often creates a delay between when an interview is conducted by a reporter and when the news piece actually gets to air, Reeb said. That time must be shortened.
“Where we’ve really seen the shift is a need for employees, news gatherers, to actually be able to create finished content on their own, and to not have that lag time and that inefficiency,” Reeb said. “What we’ve really been working toward is breaking out the inefficiencies and giving more creative control to the individual news gatherers, to be able to get that content on the multiple platforms faster.”
“If you can’t get the managers and supervisors onside first, you are destined for failure.” – Troy Reeb, Shaw Media
He added it has been a challenge for certain employees and managers to embrace the technological changes in the newsroom. “A huge cautionary note for anybody looking to do this: if you can’t get the managers and supervisors onside first, you are destined for failure,” Reeb said.
Wendy Freeman, president of Bell Media’s CTV News, said her company has been going through a process of automation across the country, which has so far been a positive thing. “Of course, there are some who embrace it, and others who don’t, but overall, everyone clearly understands what’s going on,” Freeman said, adding that the shift from traditional media to new media is only about finding new ways of doing things.
“It’s just seeing how to do things differently to attract new viewers, millennials especially,” Freeman said. She added that although cutbacks at CTV News have been a reality recently, the company’s TV news ratings have actually gone up in the last year in the 18 to 39 audience demographic.
“So if anybody thinks the younger generation is not watching traditional news, they are,” Freeman said. She later added that her 19-year-old son gets some his news via a CNN headline newsfeed on Snapchat.
When asked by an audience member about efforts to capture more viewership among millennials, who often complain that TV news is “too vanilla” or formulaic and sometimes lacking context, Freeman responded by saying that CTV News avoids giving opinion in its newscasts in order to present balanced and fair reporting.
“I do think moving on, there may be sub-brands to our (CTV News) brand that will do this sort of thing for millennials,” Freeman said. “But the CTV News brand, as long as I’m here, will not.”
“Certainly in the digital space, CBC does do analysis pieces, but there’s a journalistic frame around that. We’re not in the opinion game.” Jennifer McGuire, CBC
McGuire said good reporting does provide some context and analysis, but is fundamentally based in fact. “Certainly in the digital space, CBC does do analysis pieces, but there’s a journalistic frame around that. We’re not in the opinion game. Analysis has to be based in fact and argued in fact,” McGuire said.
Reeb, however, added “there is nothing in the RTDNA code that specifies vanilla is the only flavour” but also pointed to the recently deceased Sun News Network as an example of an organization that pushed the opinion envelope on air – albeit too far for most viewers.
“I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but Sun TV, I don’t think they played within the same set of rules, but they weren’t called out on it. They certainly were within their licence as far as the Commission goes, so there clearly are ways you can push the envelope,” Reeb said, adding that the online side of a news organization provides a lot of room for experimentation.
All three national news organizations have come under scrutiny recently regarding matters related to journalistic independence and integrity. In the case of Global News and CBC News, on-air news personalities Leslie Roberts and Amanda Lang, respectively, were embroiled in conflict of interest controversies, resulting in the resignation of one (Roberts) and the internal vindication of the other. At CTV News, now-former Bell Media president Kevin Crull’s interference in the broadcaster’s news coverage of the CRTC’s pick-and-pay TV decision in March eventually led to his departure.
O’Brien pointed out that in the history of media, proprietors have traditionally had some kind of say in what news is covered and opinions expressed. He asked what role the proprietor of a news organization should have in what goes on air in radio or TV.
“It’s up to us to decide. It’s up to the editors. It’s up to the people who are in charge of the news. None. We’re not like newspapers, where we can take a stand either way or endorse a public figure.” – Wendy Freeman, Bell Media
“None,” Freeman responded. “It’s up to us to decide. It’s up to the editors. It’s up to the people who are in charge of the news. None. We’re not like newspapers, where we can take a stand either way or endorse a public figure. We’re balanced and fair, and nobody should be telling us what to do, except for our news editors and the people in charge of the news.”
McGuire agreed, saying: “I think it’s a public trust, and the editorial frame defines the decisions of the day. That does not mean that there aren’t people around us every day who have strong opinions about what we should or should not be doing. But it’s our job, certainly as leaders of the news organization, to protect the independence and the values of the news organization.”
Reeb said Global News is blessed to have Brad Shaw as its parent company’s CEO, “who is a huge believer in an independent news organization and reinforces it in every conversation that I’ve ever had with him,” he said. He echoed Freeman’s point that TV news broadcasters operate differently than newspapers.
“We just live in a bit of a different world than the newspapers do. We do hold public licences and we abide by something really important called the RTDNA code,” Reeb added. “That is the code that very clearly lays out the criteria for fairness and it’s echoed accordingly in our news organizations.”
McGuire explained that all of the news broadcasters have “very vigorous” ethics and rules framing their journalism methods while other newcomers often do not. “There’s a whole other subset of the media now, who are bloggers, who aren’t framed by any of the same standards that we operate on,” McGuire said.
In the new age of “citizen journalism”, the Internet provides the ability to spread both true and false stories far and wide, which has opened up the journalism profession to more public scrutiny, Reeb added. “I tend to agree with critics who suggest that a little more journalism scrutiny is needed everywhere, including in this country, to ensure that ethics are above board,” Reeb said.
McGuire acknowledged that traditional news organizations can learn some lessons from online news sites such as Buzzfeed and Gawker, saying they’re certainly more nimble in reacting to what their audience wants. “So you learn from your competitors. I learn from CTV and Global, all of our competitors. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m trying to copy them,” McGuire said.
“I think the nimble nature in which they quickly respond is often because they don’t run it through any journalistic filters.” – Reeb
Reeb added: “I think the organization of the content holds lessons for all of us, and I think the nimble nature in which they quickly respond is often because they don’t run it through any journalistic filters.”
With regard to the CRTC and its Let’s Talk TV decisions, Freeman said a lot of good came out of the process, and some bad. In terms of the impact on news organizations, Freeman said: “News really matters to the CRTC, so as far as news is concerned I think it’s been good for us…It’s very important to the CRTC that local community news stays strong and exists.”
Reeb said both winners and losers emerged from the Let’s Talk TV proceedings, and throughout the process it was clear from the Commission that “innovation and that which the consumer chooses is what will win the day.” He added that he believes the playing field is not level between over-the-top players and “those of us which work in the licensed environment, in terms of mandated spend and those kinds of things.”
With players such as Google, Facebook and Twitter providing “almost limitless inventory online”, Reeb said due to basic supply-and-demand issues, broadcasters can’t charge what they used to previously for advertising.
“The challenging thing for the news organization is that the revenue has scattered to places that no longer support news necessarily,” Reeb said. “The days of internal subsidization are fast coming to an end. That is a very scary prospect, not just for me as someone who internally subsidizes a lot of our smaller newsrooms, but it’s a very scary prospect for any news director who runs a newsroom in a radio station or anywhere in this country, because the ability of the rest of their station to hold up the news organization is fast slipping away.
“News is going to need to stand on its own two feet and I don’t have an answer yet about how that’s going to happen, other than it needs to be leaner, it needs to be more efficient, it needs to be on all platforms at all times of the day.”
