CBC cuts target local news, docs
PLANS TO CUT 1,500 EMPLOYEES Public broadcaster to shift focus to digital and mobile from TV and radio
The CBC announces a five-year strategic plan to shift priorities from radio and TV to digital and mobile services, at the expense of supper-hour newscasts, in-house documentary production and 1,000 to 1,500 jobs.
TORONTO — I don’t imagine that when Maslow composed his Hierarchy of Needs, he gave much thought to putting “public broadcaster” on there.
But, here we are in 2014, and the CBC is not just insisting that it still maintains a purpose in the modern media landscape, but a vital one.
Not only does the five-year strategy outlined on Thursday aim to make CBC “the public space at the heart of our conversations and experiences as Canadians” — no small feat, that — but it also vows that, in 2020, “three out of four Canadians will answer that CBC or Radio-Canada is very important to them personally.”
These grand statements were presumably meant to soften what was otherwise a difficult day at the public broadcaster, one in which its executives said it will transform itself into a considerably smaller organization that prioritizes investment in digital and mobile platforms over traditional media.
In announcing he was tired of overseeing annual budget cuts, president and CEO Hubert Lacroix announced a massive cut: as many as 1,500 employees or almost 20 per cent of the workforce over five years, though a lot of that, it is hoped, will be achieved through attrition. The scythe will be taken most significantly to the local news and sports operations, with dinner-hour newscasts pared from 90 to 30 minutes and sports productions taking an inevitable hit from the loss of NHL broadcast rights to Rogers.
But while Lacroix and executive vice-president Heather Conway explained that the CBC is flipping on its head an investment structure that currently puts money in TV first and mobile last, the details aren’t quite so simple.
In the short term, anyway, the broadcaster plans to spend as much or more of its billion-dollar budget on original TV programming as it does today, with a focus on quality. It also plans to outsource as much television production as it can, including for the original documentaries that have come in for much hand-wringing lately.
A lot of this makes sense. The CBC doesn’t need to spend as much as it does on local news, not when those dinner-hour shows are routinely thumped in ratings by private competitors. And creating original programming that is “distinctive from the privates, creatively ambitious and risky” is exactly what the public broadcaster ought to be doing.
Lacroix said on a conference call that while the shift to mobile is inevitable, “we will not abandon radio and television as platforms that are important to Canadians.”
There is no such thing as a risk-free transformation, though, and certainly not this one. Because the CBC and its government minders have left the broadcaster’s fundamental model untouched, it still faces the difficult — perhaps impossible — task of trying to make enough revenue to meet budget needs while still meeting a publicservice mandate.
Critics like me can bleat about how the CBC should aim big with its prime-time programming and produce the kind of shows that HBO and AMC make all the time, but a large number of viewers may not agree. Will adver- tisers be interested in a lineup of programs that attract boutique audiences?
There’s also the much larger, and longer-term, question of where a pivot toward mobile and digital news ultimately leads. It is true that audiences are already moving to mobile with great haste, but it’s also true that the more the CBC heads down a path that is already littered with private competitors, the less there seems much of a point in having a public broadcaster operating there.
At its essence, we think of the CBC as being the vehicle through which people could stay connected with the world in even the far-flung corners of the nation. It had transmitters that went where private broadcasters didn’t, or wouldn’t.
The shift toward digital is no doubt a natural survival instinct. But when the next five-year plan comes out, is there a reason for a public broadcaster if it doesn’t, you know, broadcast?