CBC ‘can’t stand still,’ Lacroix says on shift to digital

MONTREAL — As technological change accelerates, CBC/Radio-Canada has to keep pace, according to CEO Hubert Lacroix, who said Thursday “we can’t think of the public broadcaster as one driven by legacy assets.” “We can’t stand still,” Lacroix said in an interview at the Public Broadcasters International conference, which is being hosted by CBC in Montreal this week. The focus for this year’s two-day event is how public broadcasters can reach the digital generation. Despite the shift in the federal government following last year’s election, CBC is sticking to the objectives in the five-year plan it released in 2014, which involved refocusing its priorities on its digital and mobile presence. Some critics have called for that plan, developed while the Conservative government was in power, to be revised in light of the change of government and the resulting increase in funding. Lacroix said Thursday that when the plan was developed, while a part of it was about adjusting to the budget cuts imposed by the Conservative government, the “vision of the digital shift and what we wanted to do was ours at that time.” “The government of the day had no vision for the broadcaster, no vision for culture. The fact that we saw that shift and we wanted to work on it has nothing to do with any influence from government at that time,” he said. The previous governments’ attitude to the public broadcaster stands in contrast to the current Liberal government and Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly, who Lacroix said shares a similar perspective to the CBC. “The fact that this government now has a policy for culture, actually cares about culture, looks at what we have put in and says ‘yes, you know what, this works’ and supports it… says that we had great insights in 2014,” he said. While the increased funding the Liberal government had provided to the CBC was “spectacularly important to stop the erosion of our business model,” what’s almost more important is the support of a heritage minister, Lacroix said, citing Joly making a speech at Thursday’s conference and her statements about the public broadcaster. “All of sudden, we’ve got a partner and we actually can look to the future in terms of trying to build a sustainable broadcaster,” he said. The government is currently conducting a sweeping review of Canadian content in a digital age, which will involve potential changes to the CBC, as well as a slew of legislation and institutions. Joly is “extremely brave” for reviewing the 1991 Broadcasting Act as part of that process, Lacroix said. “Nobody has wanted to do this. I’ve been putting my hand up for nine years now, saying, ‘folks, in the 1991 act, there’s not a single word about what we do every day. Nobody wanted to touch this with a 10-foot pole.” Lacroix said that digital is key because “if we don’t understand, and if we don’t relate, if we’re not relevant in this environment, we’re not going to be perceived as being at the heart of Canadians’ conversations.” One theme that came up repeatedly in the day’s discussion panels at the conference was partnerships between public broadcasters and new tech and media players, like Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc., something that Lacroix said is also part of the broadcasters’ plans for the digital age. “We can’t do this by ourselves,” he said, giving the example of CBC partnering with Netflix Inc. to produce a series based on the Margaret Atwood book Alias Grace. It also includes partnering with private broadcasters, like CBC did for the summer Olympics with BCE Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc. “I think we did a hell of a job covering the Olympics, and we could not have done it without Bell and Rogers. And I’ll challenge them to say—I’m sure Guy and George would say the same thing—they could not have done the kind of job we did without our participation in that environment.” During the Olympics, he added, CBC produced content for Snapchat Inc.’s platform and Instagram to expose its content to audiences on those platforms. At the conference, Lacroix also announced the creation of a new experimental initiative that will allow a group of millennials to develop “new ways of enhancing and sharing news and public affairs content for digital natives.” “This was not on my radar screen six to nine months ago, or 12 months ago. But I’m sick and tired of thinking Vice owns that environment,” Lacroix said. “Vice doesn’t own this.” CBC can learn from the success of youth-oriented Vice Media Inc., Lacroix said, citing comments by Vice founder Shane Smith who is “challenging the world and saying we have not been giving good television to people and to this next generation and that’s why they’ve gone somewhere else. I will take that as ‘yep, that’s true.’ Doesn’t mean that we’re going to stay there and and not do anything.” Despite the new funding and friendly relationship with the government of the day, Lacroix said there’s still room for improvement, given that “the business model of CBC/Radio-Canada is still broken,” citing a funding system that is based on 12-month increments as well as falling advertising revenues. “We didn’t know before this government what the next one was going to be. We went 12 months to 12 months in an environment that keeps changing. We saw many of those dollars go away. So what we’re talking about, what we need is predictable, stable and multi-year funding,” he said. While the 2015 budget provided some stability by mapping out funding over the next five years, Lacroix noted that the BBC just received a charter that maps out its funding for the next decade. “Imagine, the runway and the ability to create content for all of that time,” Lacroix said. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca

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CBC ‘can’t stand still,’ Lacroix says on shift to digital

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