What Bill Chambers Needs to Know About Public Broadcasting
CBC brass, apparently stung by criticism of its plans to pull out of production and focus on digital, mobile media, have taken to lashing out at critics in an unseemly way. The latest example was posted Thursday night on the corporate website, and it is highly revealing. In an otherwise mostly ad hominem attack on one of the many critics of the corporation’s survival plan, Bill Chambers—who bears the title Vice-president, Brand, Communications and Corporate Affairs, CBC/Radio-Canada—makes the following statement: “There is no archetype of public broadcasting. Public broadcasters...
Read MoreLetter from Former CBC Board of Director Members to Current CBC Board
Here is the complete text of the open letter to current CBC Directors from nine former members of the Board of Directors, released July 13, 2014. Note: I had no role in the origination or composition of the letter, or in the soliciting of signatories. I am publishing it here simply to make it as widely available as possible. –wr July 14, 2014 Monsieur Rémi Racine, Chairman Board of Directors, CBC/Radio Canada CBC 181 Queen Street C.P. 3220, succ. « C » Ottawa (Ontario) K1Y 1E4 Re » Future of CBC/Radio Canada Dear Mr. Racine, We the undersigned, former members of the Board of...
Read MoreCBC President Lacroix Should Face the Music and Resign
Since CBC President Hubert Lacroix announced plans to “ensure the sustainability” of the public broadcaster by radically reducing staff and shifting its focus from television and radio to various forms of internet delivery over the next five years, there has been a rising chorus of voices calling on him to resign. “Focused, smaller, more mobile, more relevant,” is how Lacroix describes the new CBC he envisions. He calls it a “public media company [that] focuses on partnering to develop content” as opposed to a conventional public broadcaster. And he says that, in the face of...
Read MoreIs Subscriber-TV a Solution for Beleaguered CBC?
As the CBC and its supporters search with growing urgency for solutions to the public broadcaster’s critical funding problems, an idea gaining some traction is that CBC television be dismantled, and spun off into a clutch of subscription-based cable specialty channels. That way viewers could select what they want to subscribe to, rather than paying for the public broadcaster as a monolithic institution. And there would be no need for advertising, which most advocates agree is antithetical to the goals of public service broadcasting. It’s an idea that has strong initial appeal. For one...
Read MoreThe CBC is in Crisis: Canadians Deserve to Know Why by Wade Rowland
CBC VP Kirstine Stewart resigns: Debriefing, please. © 2013 by Wade Rowland What does Kirstine Stewart know about the future of the CBC that the rest of us don’t? Why does anyone leave a position as the most powerful and influential media executive in the country to —as tech columnist Jesse Brown describes her new job—sell ads for Twitter Canada? And why leave immediately, without prior notice? Stewart has spent seven years as a senior executive at the CBC, hired by the much-maligned Richard Stursberg to head up CBC television. She wound up replacing her boss as vice-president of...
Read MoreAbout Wade Rowland
Ranked among Canada’s leading literary journalists, Wade Davies Rowland has written more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from television journalism, organized crime, and international environmental law to his current concerns, which include communications technology, the philosophy of science, and technology and human values. Full author bio.