By Steve Faguy
“THE SYNDICATION OF LOCALIZED programming is nothing new,” says Troy Reeb, executive vice president broadcast networks at Corus Entertainment. “My career began at 17 years old at CFOK in Westlock, Alta., which was a hub station for a network of rural stations across Alberta and northern B.C., where we had this primitive robot — it was huge, it took an entire room and it looked like something out of Space Odyssey. It had reel-to-reel tapes that turned off and on automatically, and clackity cart machines, and it would deliver differentiated programming and weather forecasts and everything else to all of these small-market stations. So I would sit in Westlock and I would record a different weather forecast for Slave Lake and a different one for Athabasca, and some of the programming would be common and it would run through this primitive robot that would have me talking about Athabasca in Athabasca and talking about Westlock in Westlock. And that was such an innovative but family-run business.”
CFOK and most of those other rural Alberta stations have changed hands several times since then and moved to FM. They’re now owned by Stingray, operating under the Real Country and Boom brands. They still share common programming, including the same morning show — The Real Wake Up with Vinnie & Randi.
But while common and syndicated programming have been a necessary fact of life for small-market stations for decades, recently we’ve been seeing them used as cost-cutting measures at stations in larger markets. As radio tries to keep costs down to stay profitable, large ownership groups are trying to figure out ways to maximize programming efficiency while keeping stations connected to their local communities (and avoid angering the CRTC).
“I think that we’re still seeing this at more of an experimental stage,” says Kevin Desjardins, president of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. “Radio stations are facing a lot of challenges and have to find ways to be innovative and to balance out the local versus broader interest programming.”
He gives as an example Roz and Mocha, the morning show at Rogers-owned Kiss 92.5 in Toronto. As of fall 2020, Rogers now uses it on Kiss stations in Kingston, North Bay, Sault Ste. Marie and Timmins (having let go of the local talent then), and a version of it for an evening show in Ottawa.
“There still is some local flavour,” Desjardins says, “but if you can find something that is successful and that works really well, you know that helps you compete with whatever it is, whether it’s Spotify or Marc Maron or Joe Rogan, and yet is still able to help you to get that local flavour or the essential local information out to your listeners. I can’t blame any broadcaster who’s trying to find a way to thread that needle.”
At Stingray, Canada’s second-largest radio broadcaster by number of stations, “we’ve also embraced the idea of repurposing content,” says Steve
Jones, senior vice-president of radio. Mauler, Rush and Jenni, the morning team at Hot 89.9 in Ottawa, also provides the morning show for Hot stations in Charlottetown, Wainwright, Alta., and Bonnyville, Alta., as well as Giant 101.9 in Sydney, N.S. Katie and Ed, the morning show at 90.3 AMP in Calgary, is repackaged as the Night Show with Katie and Ed on stations from Vancouver to St. John’s, where Jones says it performs “extremely well” in the ratings.
Corus does something similar with Willy in the Morning, out of Rock 101 in Vancouver. It’s used on Calgary’s Q107 and Edmonton’s Chuck 92.5.
“It’s very slickly produced, we put a lot of investment in it,” Reeb says. And it’s customized for each market. “We have producers in each of those locations who help to develop the content for them the next day,” he says.
“When you’ve got a show that talks about what happened in Hollywood yesterday and talks about what happened in Washington in one break and in the next break they’ll talk about something that happened locally in Vancouver, well they also produce a break where they talk about something that happened locally in Alberta. So you take the common content and it goes to all three stations, and you take the unique local content and that goes only to the local station… And then of course we insert local news and local traffic and weather from each of those locations with a newscaster who’s there.”
“It’s less syndication and more customization.” – Troy Reeb, Corus Entertainment
It’s not just a question of saving money, it’s about using money more efficiently to build “network-level shows” that run in multiple markets.
“It’s less syndication and more customization,” Reeb adds. “There’s a centralization aspect to it but then you’re customizing to maintain the local flavour. And that’s something that Spotify and others simply can’t do.”
Jones compares high-quality network shows to great music.
“When you think about it, if Led Zeppelin only recorded Stairway to Heaven once and you could only ever hear it once, that’d be kind of sad,” he says. “And one of the weird things about radio is that traditionally it’s happened in the linear way where if you didn’t hear it, you missed it.”
As large radio owners have developed national brands, they’re also introducing national programming in late-nights and weekends which used to be homes for reruns or foreign-sourced programming.
In 2018, Corus introduced an overnight show called The Shift to its Global News Radio talk stations. This month, Bell made a similar move with The Late Showgram with Jim Richards.
“To be frank, you wouldn’t be able to run an overnight local talk show even in a large market like Toronto,” Reeb says. “You just can’t make the economics of that work with the ad dollars that are available in overnight radio. And if you’re going to invest in the talent, then why would you not allow it to be a national conversation? And so that’s what we did with both Charles Adler Tonight and The Shift.”
“It just doesn’t make a ton of sense for me to pay them money to access Ryan Seacrest when I’ve got talent on my team who could be the Canadian version of Ryan Seacrest.” – Steve Jones, Stingray
Another factor in this decision-making is that the hot U.S. shows are syndicated through Orbyt Media, which is owned by Bell.
“It just doesn’t make a ton of sense for me to pay them money to access Ryan Seacrest when I’ve got talent on my team who could be the Canadian version of Ryan Seacrest,” says Stingray’s Jones. “And I think we do that with our country stations quite well. The two biggest radio personalities and Canadian country music are probably Paul McGuire and Casey Clark because both of them were nationwide hosts on CMT when CMT was a thing, and now Paul McGuire does the daytime show on all of our country stations and Casey Clark does the evening show on all our country stations, and I like that idea more than going to get Bobby Bones out of Nashville.”
Corus’s Reeb says Orbyt being owned by Bell hasn’t been an issue for them. “We buy programming from it. They run it as an arm’s length business.”
One program distributed by Orbyt is Brooke and Jeffrey, an iHeartMedia show out of Seattle. Corus’s Jump! 106.9 in Ottawa, which had less than half the market share of Stingray’s Hot 89.9, made it the morning show in 2018.
“We had gone through a number of different local morning shows on the station,” Reeb says. “We made the decision that we needed something that would cut through, something different, and particularly the younger audiences were not as tied to having to hear someone that came f
rom down the street if they could hear someone who was entertaining and have programming that made them laugh in the morning.”
Since then, other stations in Canada have added (and some subsequently dropped) the show.
“It worked for us in Ottawa, and it continues to,” Reeb says. “Has it made us number one? No, but has it made us more successful than we were before? Yes, because it cut through and it offered something different from what the competitors were doing.”
A similarly controversial move happened at Stingray’s Flow 93.5 in Toronto. In March 2020, it announced it was replacing morning host Mastermind with The Breakfast Club, a syndicated show out of New York featuring Charlamagne Tha God, Angela Yee and DJ Envy.
Days later, Canada entered a pandemic, and the change was delayed until May. In October, Stingray reversed course, bringing local hosts Blake Carter and Peter Kash back to mornings.
“The timing was just absolutely terrible, that’s for sure,” Jones says. “Two things that made the timing bad: The onset of the pandemic created a situation where local news and information was really, really important, more than it would have been at any other point in time. And then the pandemic combined with the American election cycle took The Breakfast Club show in a direction that they had to go in, and when the George Floyd killing happened and the Black Lives Matter protests became huge news culturally, The Breakfast Club was central to that and they were making news and they were leading the discussion on that. But not all of that discussion translates well into Canada.”
“Our hope all along was that The Breakfast Club would represent hip-hop culture really well in Toronto, and what it ended up doing I think was bringing too much American political content. It just didn’t resonate and we decided to move on relatively quickly after that.” – Jones
Jones is careful not to criticize the show, but says it stopped being a good fit.
“Our hope all along was that The Breakfast Club would represent hip-hop culture really well in Toronto, and what it ended up doing I think was bringing too much American political content. It just didn’t resonate and we decided to move on relatively quickly after that.”
Since dropping the show, Jones says the station’s ratings have gone up, though they’re still well below most other Toronto music stations.
“I’m pretty proud of the fact that our team was able to admit they made a bad call and make a change,” Jones says. “The human mind has a way of doubling down on sunk costs. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is say ‘I’ve put enough effort into this, it’s not working, I’m going to move on.'”
Reeb agrees the political climate has made U.S. programming less attractive for Canadian broadcasters.
“I think particularly when it comes to information radio, we’ve seen a real divergence over the last few years between a Canadian mindset when it comes to news and information and the American, and many of the shows that used to be on North-America-wide radio in the news and information space simply aren’t good fits for the Canadian media environment any more. In the entertainment space, jokes are more borderless and entertainment is more borderless, as the popularity of American primetime programming on TV would demonstrate, so I think you’ll continue to see some experimentation.”
Regardless of the source of programming, everyone agrees radio must provide local information, local news and vital information in emergencies.
“The number one answer has been the same since 2004: people listened to radio stations for one thing — local news. That’s number one.” – John Pole, My Broadcasting
“Since 2004 we’ve interviewed our audience,” said Jon Pole, president of My Broadcasting Corporation, which owns small-market stations in southern Ontario, mainly under the MyFM brand. “We asked them why they listened, we asked them what they want, we asked them what we can do better. The number one answer has been the same since 2004: people listened to radio stations for one thing — local news. That’s number one.”
Technology drives the hybrid
At Stingray and elsewhere, technology has helped to create hybrid programming that combines syndicated programming with local.
“In the cases where we’re using out-of-market programming, we always try to build in a contingency plan to allow our staff to interrupt whatever syndicated programming might be on the air to provide urgent local coverage,” says Jones. “A good example of that is in rural Alberta, where we have a ton of small-market radio stations serving communities of anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 people.”
Those stations, he says, couldn’t survive if they had to do all their own local programming, “but using syndicated programming or regional or national programming we can do that viably.”
How it works is different from the mechanical systems of Reeb’s time at those small Alberta stations. Now, there is what Jones describes as “a matrix of staff” covering the stations that can step in when needed.
Every 20 minutes or so in their computerized playlists, there’s a blank audio file. If something happens of local relevance, like a tornado 
warning or an Amber Alert, staff can update that file, even from home or a mobile device, and record a break for that station, and the computer takes care of airing it automatically.
“I’m not going to try to pretend that that’s as responsive as somebody sitting behind the console with a microphone in every market, but we feel that using technology effectively, it’s a pretty good alternative,” Jones says. “And so that’s the model we built out at a lot of our extremely small-market radio stations.”
At MyFM in Ontario, it’s a similar setup, with stations sharing branding and playlists. MyFM’s announcers do regional breaks but also voice-track local updates for multiple markets.
Pole says he understands the need for local news, but he doesn’t get the focus on local programming.
“I was always confused. I can play The Rolling Stones for four minutes and no one’s got a problem with that, but as soon as I play Ryan Seacrest for four minutes, I’m the devil. It doesn’t make any sense.” – Pole
“I was always confused. I can play The Rolling Stones for four minutes and no one’s got a problem with that, but as soon as I play Ryan Seacrest for four minutes, I’m the devil. It doesn’t make any sense. All of the music that Virgin plays in Montreal is not from Montreal. It’s not a secret, everyone understands that. They don’t go out of their way to search out a great Montreal artist, they literally just take the (playlist) from Toronto and they play it.”
Radio executives believe it’s time we change the mentality around local, and they intend to bring that up with the CRTC during its commercial radio review.
“What you used to constitute local — even in the last radio review (in 2006) — I think all of that is really pre-social media and most of the regulations overseeing broadcast were written, for the large part, pre-internet, and what constituted local in let’s say 1995 is very different from what constitutes local now,” says Jones.
“While local is the thing that differentiates radio, it doesn’t mean that radio needs to be forced to only do local programming.” – Reeb
While local audiences might be interested in Covid-19 statistics and local traffic, they’re also talking about U.S. politics or global issues, he says.
“All station owners need to be given the freedom to be able to experiment as to how to best reach the audience,” says Reeb, “and while local is the thing that differentiates radio, it doesn’t mean that radio needs to be forced to only do local programming. Canadians don’t only have an appetite for local programming, and if you have 20 stations in Ottawa and they all only do things that are hyperlocal, then you’ve got a problem, you’ve basically surrendered all of the much larger market for bigger entertaining programming to Hollywood and other players.”
In the end, the free market will ensure audiences get what they want, Reeb says.
“You’re not going to get an audience if you’re not connected to them, and that’s to the detriment of the station. Some owners will make the tradeoff of saying we’d rather take the big-time show and the big-time talent and try to customize it locally, and others will say no we’re happy to have a small-time show and small time-talent and be 100% local. In the end, it’s the ability to serve the local audience that’s going to determine whether that station succeeds or fails.”
Please click here for part one of our series on Canadian radio.
