Bob Babinski
can finally tell his friends he has a job here, even though the media veteran never left the city.
“I think Breakfast Television in Montreal has to be about English and French coming together.”
CITY MONTREAL TV HEAD OF LOCAL CONTENT BOB BABINSKI
There were plenty of good reasons for Bob Babinski to take the job as head of local content at the brand new City Montreal TV station.
It’s obviously a great opportunity to head up local programming for a major new player on the Montreal TV scene. But talking to the media veteran the other day, he also says he was just tired of people asking him if he had moved to Toronto.
Babinski — you may remember him from his stint as a sportscaster on CBCTV’s Newswatch back in the second half of the ’90s — has spent much of the past decade working on highprofile projects with the national CBC network, most notably toiling as a senior producer for Hockey Day in Canada.
But all that time, he never made the move to Toronto. He was always still living in N.D.G., albeit with plenty of commuting to the country’s biggest city. So when a great opportunity came up in the TV milieu right here in his hometown, it was quite simply an offer he couldn’t refuse. And now he can finally tell his friends and neighbours that he has a job in Montreal.
“One of the things that I was drawn to was the attitude” of Rogers Media, City Montreal’s owner, Babinski said. “They want to do programming in Montreal that is Montreal, and they think they can do programming that’s successful.”
City Montreal will be producing two shows. There will be a Montreal version of Breakfast Television, which is the City morning show at all its stations across the country, and a weekly sports show called Connected Montreal. The sports show will hit the small screen in the late spring, though Babinski wouldn’t say where it will fit on the City Montreal schedule. Babinski has hired former CBC-TV sportscaster George Athans to produc ethe show and they already have one reporter, Alyson Lozoff, who is a Montreal correspondent for Sportsnet, which is also owned by Rogers.
Breakfast Television, which will air 6 to 9 weekday mornings, will be up and running in the late summer, and that show will be broadcast from a local studio. Babinski was tight-lipped on where it will be produced, though he did say they hoped to have a storefront-style street location downtown à la City’s HQ on Queen St. W. in Toronto.
City Montreal has also commissioned Only in Montreal, a weekly show from producers Whalley-Abbey Media to be hosted by Matt Silver, Tamy Emma Pepin and Dimitrios Koussioulas. This could feature items on everything from popular local food trucks to homegrown roller-derby stars.
When Babinski went in for his job interview with Rogers Media broadcast president Scott Moore, he ad- mits he tore a leaf from this very column.
Before the meeting, he wrote a little summary of what he thought Breakfast Television should be, and he titled it Breakfast Television Chez Nous.
“It was slightly inspired by you,” Babinski said.
“That’s a great Montreal thing. I think Breakfast Television in Montreal has to be about English and French coming together. It’s not just about anglo Montreal. It’s about all those things that make this city great, and there’s a certain magic when the cultures come together.
“I really sense it in the summer when you go to the festivals. That’s what makes us different. And I think there’s an opportunity to do that in our programming and also an opportunity to reflect the great things about our urban life. So that was part of my original pitch to them and I was very happy that they were totally open to that.”
City Montreal won’t have much local competition in English in the morning. Neither CTV nor CBC do any local morning programming. Global has recently re-introduced a Montreal morning show, but it has yet to make much of an impact.
The Rogers executives believe the morning is where there’s an opportunity in Montreal. When the Rogers executives appeared before broadcast regulators, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, last year at the hearing into the proposal for Rogers to buy ethnic channel CJNT and turn it into City Montreal, the Rogers folks said they felt supperhour news was already well served by the other players here. (The CRTC approved the $10.7-million purchase in late-December.)
“We think we have a pretty good brand in Breakfast Television across the country and we think it’ll fit well here,” Babinski said. “And we think it’s the best bet in terms of getting audience reach and serving the community.”