The CBC Lockout
The podcast and the picket line
I've got a love hate relationship with the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Other than Dr Who, a BBC import, I seldom watch the CBC television networks and probably wouldn't notice if they ceased to exist. As a taxpayer I'd like to see the television side sold off.
CBC Radio, on the other hand, regularly gets my attention. I enjoy listening to several programs and even check out the news broadcasts occasionally. If anything, I would like to see more public money put into audio programming, including the auxiliary web sites on the Internet. Commercial radio, with a few exceptions, is so appalling that no argument for privatization can be taken seriously.
If there were one thing I could change about CBC Radio it would be to make all the non-music programs accessible as podcasts; downloadable mp3 files that I could play on my Mac or iPod, escaping forever from the tyranny of the schedule.
As a test the science program Quirks and Quarks has been podcasting for the past few months. Its broadcast time on Saturday afternoons wasn't that good for me. I do have software, an application called Audio Hijack Pro, that will capture the internet broadcast, if I take the time to set it up and if the station I select provides a good stream of data. A lot of times the CBC servers don't seem up to the job. My copy of iTunes, however, will automatically download the Quirks podcast whenever it becomes available. If the server is overloaded iTunes will try again later. As a result, I've gone from listening to Quirks every now and then on Saturdays, mostly in fragments while driving, to playing all the segments I want to hear whenever I want, usually when I go out for my daily walk.
There are other CBC radio programs that at least provide on demand streaming files. But the intellectual flagship of the English network, Ideas, is only streamed live over the Internet. They used to have an archive of some shows but have gone back to just selling cassette tapes or cds. This is so last century.
The big news at the CBC right now, of course, is that management has locked out 5,300 producers, journalists, and technicians, union members in English broadcasting who have been without a contract for over a year. The bosses want to replace a lot of full time positions with contract workers. They say this will give them needed flexibility in these changing times. Nonsense. They want to be able to get rid of people without going through the hassle of firing or laying-off. As they say in business speak, contracting out work makes sense when the tasks are outside of an organization's core competency. That is not the case here.
While management is filling the airwaves with old shows and canned music some of the employees on the picket line are using podcasts to stay in touch with their audience. Tod Maffin, a technology reporter whose /Nerd radioblog is the other half of the CBC's podcasting experiment, has set up a blog, I Love Radio.org, and a podcast feed, CBCunplugged.com, for lockout news from the rank and file. The latter's homepage declares "Transmitters? We don't need no stinkin' transmitters."
He notes that there is some concern that competing with the CBC by keeping union broadcasters "on the air" may seem counterintuitive in a labour dispute. Certainly if my union goes on strike next month we won't start building our own line of cars. But many things are possible on the Internet that you will never see in the material world.
There is a theory that podcasting will eventually be the death of public radio, the way some predict that web logs will replace newspapers. More likely the older media will continue to adjust to the newcomers. For example across the border it looks like NPR is going to embrace podcasting as one more service it provides to its listeners. I hope the CBC comes to its senses, makes peace with its employees, and joins the podcasting bandwagon as well.
Other than Dr Who, a BBC import, I seldom watch the CBC television networks and probably wouldn't notice if they ceased to exist. As a taxpayer I'd like to see the television side sold off.
CBC Radio, on the other hand, regularly gets my attention. I enjoy listening to several programs and even check out the news broadcasts occasionally. If anything, I would like to see more public money put into audio programming, including the auxiliary web sites on the Internet. Commercial radio, with a few exceptions, is so appalling that no argument for privatization can be taken seriously.
If there were one thing I could change about CBC Radio it would be to make all the non-music programs accessible as podcasts; downloadable mp3 files that I could play on my Mac or iPod, escaping forever from the tyranny of the schedule.
As a test the science program Quirks and Quarks has been podcasting for the past few months. Its broadcast time on Saturday afternoons wasn't that good for me. I do have software, an application called Audio Hijack Pro, that will capture the internet broadcast, if I take the time to set it up and if the station I select provides a good stream of data. A lot of times the CBC servers don't seem up to the job. My copy of iTunes, however, will automatically download the Quirks podcast whenever it becomes available. If the server is overloaded iTunes will try again later. As a result, I've gone from listening to Quirks every now and then on Saturdays, mostly in fragments while driving, to playing all the segments I want to hear whenever I want, usually when I go out for my daily walk.
There are other CBC radio programs that at least provide on demand streaming files. But the intellectual flagship of the English network, Ideas, is only streamed live over the Internet. They used to have an archive of some shows but have gone back to just selling cassette tapes or cds. This is so last century.
The big news at the CBC right now, of course, is that management has locked out 5,300 producers, journalists, and technicians, union members in English broadcasting who have been without a contract for over a year. The bosses want to replace a lot of full time positions with contract workers. They say this will give them needed flexibility in these changing times. Nonsense. They want to be able to get rid of people without going through the hassle of firing or laying-off. As they say in business speak, contracting out work makes sense when the tasks are outside of an organization's core competency. That is not the case here.
While management is filling the airwaves with old shows and canned music some of the employees on the picket line are using podcasts to stay in touch with their audience. Tod Maffin, a technology reporter whose /Nerd radioblog is the other half of the CBC's podcasting experiment, has set up a blog, I Love Radio.org, and a podcast feed, CBCunplugged.com, for lockout news from the rank and file. The latter's homepage declares "Transmitters? We don't need no stinkin' transmitters."
He notes that there is some concern that competing with the CBC by keeping union broadcasters "on the air" may seem counterintuitive in a labour dispute. Certainly if my union goes on strike next month we won't start building our own line of cars. But many things are possible on the Internet that you will never see in the material world.
There is a theory that podcasting will eventually be the death of public radio, the way some predict that web logs will replace newspapers. More likely the older media will continue to adjust to the newcomers. For example across the border it looks like NPR is going to embrace podcasting as one more service it provides to its listeners. I hope the CBC comes to its senses, makes peace with its employees, and joins the podcasting bandwagon as well.
Posted: Mon - August 22, 2005 at 12:10 PM
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Published On: Sep 12, 2007 03:13 PM
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Published On: Sep 12, 2007 03:13 PM