GATINEAU – A new fund or reallocated money dedicated to supporting local news, would do little to provide a long-term solution to the financial situation facing local TV, Shaw Communications and Telus told the CRTC on Tuesday.
Telus noted in its opening remarks that any funding for local conventional stations to subsidize their news productions shouldn’t come at the expense of community TV and the diversity it provides to the system. As well, “subsidizing the commercial business models of traditional television stations will not incent the innovation required of these stations to provide sustainable programming opportunities in the long run,” said Ann Mainville-Neeson, Telus’ vice-president of broadcasting policy and regulatory affairs (pictured).
For Shaw, creating a local news fund would fix very little in the system and only open the door for broadcasters to come back to the CRTC for more money down the road. “We see it as a model to sustain the status quo for a little bit longer and then we’ll be in front of you again asking for different funds,” said Morgan Elliott, Shaw’s senior VP of regulatory and government relations, in offering his opinion on the Rogers Communications funding model presented last week.
Giving vertically integrated broadcasters the ability to move money around to address the circumstances of specific markets could also present problems, argued Shaw. “I think there’s a real likelihood for Bell or Rogers to devote a lot of money to their OTAs which could create a lot of distortion in the market,” said Dean Shaikh, VP of regulatory affairs at Shaw.
“It could potentially put the Global stations at a significant disadvantage in certain markets,” added Troy Reeb, Shaw’s senior VP of news and stations operations, noting that Rogers could allocate substantial monies to Toronto “whereas we may not get that benefit from Shaw in the Vancouver marketplace.”
As a way to address the financial situation of local news, Shaw adopted a centralized approach news production, dubbed Multi-Market Content (MMC). News for Halifax, New Brunswick, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon and Kelowna is all produced at one facility. And while the company acknowledged this was about cutting costs, it was also about ensuring there were sufficient local journalists on the ground reporting on stories.
Throughout the hearing, several organizations have suggested that community TV can fill the local news gap in smaller markets. And while there have been some successful cases – Eastlink’s coverage of local sports is one example – it may not work in all situations.
“I think we would evaluate it in the same way as we would evaluate carriage of other channels, other news services,” said Jay Mehr, executive VP and COO, in response to a question from CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais. He added that while this is something the company could look at, it may not best suited for a linear TV environment because of a lack of capacity, and that there is a lot more flexibility to air such programming on an on-demand platform such as its Free Range TV.
“Some views in this proceeding are very much based in the 1980s where the need was very different for editing suites, the equipment and the studio facilities, which is not the same reality that we have today.” – Ann Mainville-Neeson, Telus
Still others have argued that community channels need to be managed by not-for-profit boards and that local studios need to be established to support community TV production. Telus suggested that this was an outdated way to look at community TV.
“Some views in this proceeding are very much based in the 1980s where the need was very different for editing suites, the equipment and the studio facilities, which is not the same reality that we have today,” said Mainville-Neeson.
Ramin Eshraghi-Yazdi, an independent producer of the comedy series Cowtown on Telus’s community TV service, added that those types of resources already exist in communities. “I’m not too sure what setting up other ones would really do in terms of efficiency,” he said.
One of Telus’s main principles to support local TV is giving broadcast distributors operating in small markets the flexibility to direct the full 5% of their revenue to the creation of local programming by the community channel. These small markets would get the same benefits of exempt BDU communities. “Whether served by licensed or exempt BDUs, small communities shouldn’t be required to fund large national objectives, such as those of the CMF, to the detriment of the needs of their own local communities. The harmonization we propose would not have a significant impact on the CMF funding but would have a very positive impact on the production of local programming in small communities,” said Mainville-Neeson.
Under questioning, she acknowledged that getting this money would require the community channel to produce certain types of programming, including news, but added that the content could be more than CRTC defined news.
“We believe that a more flexible approach needs to be taken to what constitutes programming that will lead to a local informed citizen,” she said.
