Dialling for dollars

When I was but a fresh-faced miss, my mother would always issue her standard just-before-a-date warning: "Remember, why should he buy the cow if he gets the milk for free?"

This was supposed to have some powerful prophylactic effect, if you get my drift.

Her cautionary words have been on my mind for many reasons lately, especially as I continue to receive more and more emails from locked-out CBCers who are taking to the Internet and college radio to produce their newscasts and other programming.

Next week, a daily online news service is set to start up. No URL just yet.

And, for those Toronto area listeners who are missing their Andy Barrie, Metro Morning is doing a dry run on Monday on CIUT 89.5 FM, and is set to go live Monday to Friday 6:30-8 starting Labour Day.

It's great that these dedicated CBCers want to continue practising their craft and serving the public interest, even as management is disregarding it. But aren't they concerned that, by doing all this work for nothing (or even less if they have to pay for programming expenses out-of-pocket), they're showing that CBC can get by with less taxpayer funding?

I wonder.

Comments

[Jay Currie]

Which is, of course Antonia, my point. The CBC could, if it was innovative, dumped a lot of its loser television programming, contracted out to freelancers way more, sold its real estate and shed several layers of entirely "in the way" management be run for a tenth of the 1.5 billion it currently gets.

That is a lot of money to pay for an operation which has virtually no independent foreign news gather capacity, an FM network which can literally be replicated in someone's basement - see pod casting - and entirely banal news reporting.

A couple of months of no CBC and everyone will be wondering what, exactly, we are missing.

[Mark Federman]

Which is, of course Antonia, my point (http://whatisthemessage.blogspot.com/2005/08/cbc-is-dead-long-live-cbc.html). CBC as a provider of content is anachronistic - the relic of an age when the mass media was media for the masses, as opposed to media by the masses that is the dominant form under conditions of ubiquitous connectivity.

The role of any country's national broadcaster needs to be questioned, and refocused, to provide a vehicle where people throughout the country can tell more of their own stories, and sources of raw materials like the exceptional CBC archives can be opened up for remix. (Rightly, the copyright is owned by all of us.)