Since its founding in 1936, the cbc has routinely been accused of stodginess. But as the broadcaster adapts to changing media conditions and grows more elaborate, it harbours ambitions that threaten to outstrip its own ability to define itself. Jeffrey Dvorkin, once a managing editor of cbc Radio News and now head of the journalism program at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, puts it this way: “When media organizations lose sight of their purpose, they embrace technology without really understanding what it is.” It’s important to note that despite the cbc’s cutback targets—it aims to shed 1,150 full-time positions by 2020—it also plans to hire 300 new employees “in the next years” to improve the company’s digital skills. Whether that will mean more coders, more interactive journalists, or more thought leaders who would help shape the company’s ultramodern ethos remains unclear.
For programmers at the cbc, the message is simple: Think about digital. All. The. Time. But making radio and TV with that in mind is more challenging. A radio producer I know there tells me that, so far, she’s had little guidance about how to, as she puts it, “up the digital game.” The company should appeal to younger listeners, one manager told her. That same manager said, vis-à-vis the vision thing, that in five years people will be using driverless cars, so the cbc needs to think about creating programming for people who are in cars but don’t have to focus on driving. “I have honestly tried to understand our mission or mandate,” she says, “but the message from management has been vague and confusing.”
All she knows, she says, is that every Friday, she gets an email announcing the top digital stories for their division (often the quirky ones), and that everyone wants to be mentioned in this report and are gutted if they’re not. “Our numbers suck,” she says of the radio show she works on. “So a group of us tried to figure out how to better market our show. We’re not marketing experts, but no one else is doing it for us.” They hashed out ways to make Twitter more effective in boosting their numbers. But, she asks, “Are we even making radio anymore?”
[URL]www.cbcExposed.com[/URL]