Bigger picture still in question as CBC cuts deep

As CBC/Radio-Canada on Thursday announced another round of job cuts and other reductions throughout its organization, observers expressed impatience over the lack of a fundamentally different vision emerging from the public broadcaster. CBC said Thursday that more than 650 jobs and $130 million in spending would be cut over the next two fiscal years. Hubert Lacroix, CEO of the CBC, said in a press release that the cuts announced represent an “accelerating the process of reinventing Canada's public broadcaster to meet the future needs of Canadians, taking into account a much lower revenue base." Among the other details coming from CBC Thursday, it said it will no longer compete for the rights to professional sports, and even coverage of amateur sports would be reduced. It also said 573 of the 657 planned job cuts would happen in the current fiscal year, which started April 1. “This new strategic framework, which we will announce in the coming months, will guide the corporation’s evolution towards a smaller, more nimble and more open public broadcaster,” Lacroix said in the statement. “It will ensure that the services we provide, and the operating model that supports those services, evolve in tandem with the changing expectations of Canadians and the movements of our industry.” France Belisle, director of public relations at the CBC, said in a phone interview on Thursday that the CBC will update its strategic plan, Strategy 2015, to reflect the cuts, although she would not give a timeline beyond saying that current work on a successor to the previous plan would be “fast-tracked.” “I can’t give you a specific date, but I don’t see this necessarily taking too long,” she said. While appearing before a Senate committee meeting in February dealing with the challenges faced by CBC, Lacroix said the new long-term plan would be released before the end of 2014. In a conference call on Thursday afternoon, Lacroix said the next strategic plan will be a reimaging of the CBC as a “smaller, more focused, more agile public broadcaster.” Belisle said the broadcaster currently has about 8,200 employees, roughly 7,000 of them permanent and the remainder on contract or temporary. She said that if the CBC is to continue producing the kind of content Canadians want, it has to make difficult choices given limited revenue. "It's a really sad day, as you can imagine," she said. "We didn't have a choice. The margin is very thin, there was no space to maneuver or make decisions other than this one." Barry Kiefl, president of Canadian Media Research Inc., said in the run-up to the town hall meeting CBC had with employees Thursday, it seemed it would include the announcement of a new strategic direction rather than “housekeeping.” Many of the announcements, such as the move away from professional sports, were easy to foresee, he said, adding that the significant staff cuts weren’t unexpected either. “If they don’t bite the bullet and figure out that they have to be more distinctive, at least in English TV, it’s going to be a slow continuation,” he said in a phone interview. Ian Morrison, spokesman for the Friends of Public Broadcasting, said he didn't feel Lacroix, an appointee of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, had done enough to defend the public broadcaster's role. "Ever since this president has been around, the strategic plans have always been moving CBC more in the direction of commercial broadcasting," Morrison said in a phone interview. "It clearly isn't working. It's reducing CBC's distinctiveness from private broadcasting. All this talk about reimagining the CBC seems just that." Morrison said he had "very little confidence" in Lacroix. "The result could have been much more audience-friendly with the right people in charge," he said. The cutbacks, Morrison said, reflect the government's skepticism about the value of the CBC. "This is Harper's work showing up in what people get to see and hear on their radio and television," he said. The loss of ownership of a contract for coverage of National Hockey League games was cited as among the factors causing the financial strain at the CBC. In November, Rogers Communications Inc. announced that it had secured the exclusive national broadcast rights to NHL coverage in Canada for 12 years for $5.2 billion. Rogers has agreed to allow CBC to carry Hockey Night in Canada on Saturdays and throughout the playoffs for at least the first four years of this contract, though Rogers retains the advertising rights for those games. “The loss of the hockey contract is significant but is only one piece of a much more complicated puzzle,” Lacroix said at the meeting on Thursday, according to the official CBC Twitter feed. The federal government cut $115 million in CBC funding over three years in the 2012 federal budget, as well ending a $60-million content-creation subsidy funding that it had been getting every year since 2001. In its most recent quarterly report, for the period ending Dec. 31, 2013, the CBC said it lost $40 million on revenue of $190 million and government support of $230.6 million, with expenses of $461 million. In 2012, CBC announced 650 job cuts following funding cuts in that year’s federal budget. According to numbers tweeted by Kiefl on Tuesday, CBC cut 8.3 per cent of its staff from 2009 to 2013, with the biggest cuts, more than 20 per cent, coming from CBC Radio. Kiefl posted a chart on Twitter than showed CBC TV has seen the smallest cuts between those years, at 3.1 per cent. According to numbers provided by Kiefl, CBC television’s advertising revenue was $200 million in 2013, less than the $248 million it made from TV ads in 1998. Kiefl estimates that, without the NHL, TV ad revenue will drop to just $100 million by 2015. Lacroix told the Senate transport and communications committee earlier this year that Hockey Night in Canada was generally generating between $125 million and $150 million a year. According to a report prepared by Nordicity for the CBC in 2011, the Canadian public broadcaster receives, at $34 per person, less public money per capita than the public broadcasters in 15 other countries including much of Western Europe, Japan and Australia. Only New Zealand, which gives $27 per person, and the United States, where public broadcasters are supported by direct donations and non-government foundations, gave less, the report said. Canada’s $34 was less than half the average of $87 in the 18 countries surveyed in the Nordicity report. — With reporting by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Bigger picture still in question as CBC cuts deep

Broadcast | April 10, 2014

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Bigger picture still in question as CBC cuts deep

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