The death of Canada’s local TV affiliate Articles / Editorial Posted by Steve_Hat on Dec 14, 2002 - 11:57 AM (An opinion piece by Steve Hatton [1], including interviews with past and present local station owners.) Have you noticed something slowly disappearing from the television schedule? In the midst of media convergence, hundreds of new digital channels, the upcoming arrival of high definition TV, it seems that there’s rarely a dull moment in the Canadian broadcasting industry. But who pays the price for all these sudden changes? An examination of Canada’s broadcasting landscape reveals a shift away from small town coverage. Local stations all across the country are dying. Your local television station may be next, and the smaller the market you live in, the more likely your station may or may not have already been affected. On May 31st, 2002, an independent TV station in Swift Current, Saskatchewan shut down and 15 employees lost their jobs. Julie Forst owned the station throughout its entire 45-year existence, but she said times have changed in broadcasting and it's now more difficult than ever before to make money in a small market. “To be able to keep up with the advancement in television, we would have to switch to digital equipment,” Forst said. “That would be cost-prohibitive in Swift Current.” While the Swift Current case may seem like an isolated incident, it isn’t. In 1997, Global took over control of CKMI-TV, the CBC affiliate in Quebec City by joining forces its owner, Le Groupe TVA. CKMI then expanded to Montreal and Sherbrooke and became what is now known as “Global Quebec.” Its Quebec City signal moved to channel 20, allowing its old allotment of channel 5 to continue to carry a CBC signal, albeit from Montreal instead. Quebecers now had an additional English language network but at the expense of the province’s only private English language television station outside of Montreal. Also in 1997, when Chum Ltd. took over CHRO-TV in Pembroke, Ontario, the station dropped its affiliation status with CTV in order to become a little less local by setting up a repeater station in nearby Ottawa. It had transformed itself into an Ottawa superstation with a new name, The New RO. It also had a new program schedule that was almost identical to three other Chum-owned stations. There are several contributing factors to the decrease of local content. It started way back with the arrival of cable TV. Viewers suddenly had more choice and a small-town station like CHRO Pembroke found itself having to compete against much bigger Ottawa stations. A few minor adjustments to its programming strategy had to made. Today, add specialty and pay-TV networks, direct-to-home satellite, the new digital channels and the internet to the equation and the results are hardly surprising. But modern technology is not the only factor involved. Government deregulation also plays a key role. The purchasing frenzy of CanWest Global and Baton Broadcasting in the eighties and nineties indicate almost no limit to the number of stations that one company can own. The CRTC has only intervened in cases of blatant conflict of interest. For an example CanWest Global sold CFCF 12 in 2001 because it knew that the CRTC wouldn’t let it own all of the English local stations in Montreal. Also, at about the same time, CTV was forced to sell its share of Sportsnet to Rogers because CTV now owned TSN. Yet, the CRTC also did little to stop Global or Baton, now part of Bell GlobeMedia, from buying up stations throughout the entire country, in addition to several specialty channels. “You can fit everyone who controls significant Canadian media in my office,” Vince Carlin, chair of the School of Journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, said in the January 27th, 2002 edition of the Washington Post. “This is not a healthy situation.” Many argue that it is also not healthy for local television. Even in cases where local stations are still operating, they are rarely locally owned. Programming decisions are made to reflect the ownership instead of the local market. In 2001, CanWest Global took over CHCH-TV in Hamilton and simplified its name to CH. The logo is also changed to feature a Global crescent while executives at CanWest promised that CH wouldn’t become part of a “semi-national system.” A few months later, CHEK-TV in Victoria also changed its names to CH and took on the same logo and schedule as CHCH. Meanwhile, CJNT, a multilingual station in Montreal, became CH as well and began to carry some of the American programming carried by CHCH. Also in 2001, changes to CFCF-12’s operations indicated just how centralized a corporate control system can be following the station’s purchase by the CTV Network. On November 19th of that same year, the CFCF-12 and Pulse logos disappeared from the airwaves. Instead the station now uses a generic CFCF/CTV logo, the same type of logo used by all CTV owned and operated stations. Even the opening and graphics used for CFCF news, weather and sports are now identical to those used by other stations. But the changes go far beyond the superficial look. They affect the programming as well. Cuts to local news were made in Midland Ontario not long after the MCTV regional network was purchased by the network. MCTV consisted of four local stations each with its own 6 PM local newscast. But in November of 2001, local news was cut back to short segments inserted within a regional newscast. Those cuts are the main reason why the Dougall family, station owners of CHFD and CKPR in nearby Thunder Bay, refuse to sell their stations. They are convinced that local news in Thunder Bay would suffer the same fate. The Dougalls are not alone in that belief. “Networks would not produce local programming in small markets,” said Ken Ruptash, program manager of CITL and CKSA in Llyodminster in a recent email interview. “It would be more regional or national.” However, not everybody agrees that a lack of local ownership is bad thing. Debbie Millette, Citytv Vancouver Programming Manager, believes the recent transformation of CKVU under CHUM enhances the station’s local content. “The way we do television is the same as the way Citytv Toronto does television… but this formula hinges on the content being local,” said Millette in an email interview. “Speakers Corner, for instance, is a concept used at CHUM stations across Canada. But the shows that result at the individual stations are very different. Each reflects its own community. It's the way all our programming works. It's all about empowering individual stations to focus on the local. That's why we can have Citytvs in Bogota and Barcelona, and have them work perfectly in the local cultures.” Citytv Vancouver also has plenty of local programming to back up her argument. “We already do a lot of local shows: a 3-hour live show 5 days a week, a 1/2 hour local cooking show 5 days a week, a local multicultural music video show every weekend, and a ½ hour local talk show every weekend.” CHUM seems to have proven that the bigger markets, at least, can be immune to local cuts. But not even all big-market local stations can share the same experience. CFCF in Montreal experienced numerous employee layoffs, and cuts to local programming when the station was purchased by WIC and again when later purchased by CTV. Until 2002, CFCF carried only forty hours of network programming, per week, from CTV and that included American content. Today, that figure is closer to 100 hours, as everything on CFCF originates via CTV in Toronto, with the exception of local news, Access Hollywood and a few local shows. Forty hours of network programming used to be the norm at all CTV stations. But that changed as Baton slowly took control over the network, by buying up as many affiliates as possible. By the 2001/2002 TV season, NTV (CJON) in St. John’s, Newfoundland was the biggest of only four CTV stations to remain independently-owned and carry only forty hours of network programming per week. And St. John’s is far from being the biggest market in the country. Yet even NTV began to experience problems with the new centrally-controlled CTV. The network’s former affiliates used to back each other up, but once NTV was almost all by itself as an independent, it found it extremely difficult to negotiate with CTV. The small St. John’s affiliate was now expected to pay for programming it was used to getting for free. As a result, in the fall of 2002, NTV ended its close to forty-year-old affiliation status with the network. CTV News and Canada AM are currently the only two CTV programs left on NTV and it is expected that they won’t remain much longer on the line-up consisting of CanWest Global programming. “Canada is a small country. [We’re] only 25 million,” said former president of CJNT, Marie Griffiths. That was her explanation for the current status of Canadian television, in a recent phone interview. “Being part of the big guys has its advantages.” At the same time, she also believes that there are some cases where a station’s success can lie partly in its local charm. “The way how the market is set up [is a factor],” she also said. Perhaps it’s something she learned the hard way. CJNT went bankrupt under her control and had to be taken over by CanWest Global in 2001. “The general [feeling today] seems to be that maybe [convergence] hasn’t been the greatest idea of all,” she said offering some hope for the future. “Being independent allows more creativity.” Could she be right? In 2002, the big guys, Global and BCE found themselves selling assets instead of buying them. Perhaps it not to late for local television to make it come back after all. Bibliography Government of Canada, “Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2002-145”, The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). http://www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/eng/Decisions/2002/db2002-145.htm (CRTC). Kenward, Joe, “Last Day For CJFB”, Swift Current Online, May, 2002. http://www.swiftcurrentonline.com/news/articles_files/3869/news_0_3869.shtml (Wavefire). Winter, James, “Canada’s Media Monopoly: One perspective is enough, says CanWest”, Extra!, May/June 2002. http://www.fair.org/extra/0205/canwest.html (FAIR). Chen, Jennifer and Graves, Gary, “Media Ownership in Canada”, CBC News Online, May 2001. http://cbc.ca/news/indepth/background/mediaownership.html (CBC). Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Asper wants CBC TV out of sports, local news”, CBC News Online, March 2002. http://cbc.ca/stories/2002/03/01/canwest_cbc020301 (CBC). Simon Fraser University, University of Windsor and the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), “Canada's Media Monopolies”, NewsWatch Canada, October 27, 2002. http://newswatch.cprost.sfu.ca/pcc/94-12.html (Simon Fraser University). Brethour, Patrick “Media convergence strategy praised; Firms here seen reaping benefits quicker than in U.S.”, Globe and Mail, April 25, 2002. http://www.montrealnewspaperguild.com/convergencelinks.htm (Montreal Newspaper Guild). Dias, David “Leonard Asper's Master Plan for Global Domination” Ryerson Review of Journalism Online, October, 2002. http://www.ryerson.ca/rrj/content/print/2001/summer/dias.html. (Ryerson University). Zerbisias, Antonia, “Taking aim at the CBC; The debate reaches fever pitch”, Toronto Star, March, 2002. http://thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1016104554242&call_page=TS_News&call_pageid=968332188492&call_pagepath=News/News (Toronto Star). CanWest Operations, “Television Broadcasting”, CanWest Global Communications Corp., October, 2002. http://www.canwestglobal.com/operations/television.html (CanWest Global). This article is from CHANNEL CANADA   http://www.channelcanada.com/ The URL for this story is:   http://www.channelcanada.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=138 Links in this article   [1] http://www.geocities.com/tvhatton