No News

Well, strictly speaking, there hasn’t been any news on radio or TV since Christmas Eve either. So if no one is out there gathering news, I guess there’s nothing to put on the site. I’m trying to decide if this is a Good Thing (as in the media gets too wound up for it’s own good and it’s nice to have a little break) or a Bad Thing (as in major transgressions could be occuring without the benefit of John Jeffrey to explain them to us).

They seem to feel there is no weekend Island news as well.

The world is missing the riviting tale of all of the province’s gambling machines being hijacked by their owners to some South American consortium. So do the Tories now go out and actually buy new machines to ensure the addicts get their fix?

Yep..and they will probably hire Cleeves Theeves to run the machines.

Does news exist if it is not reported. We know ourselves through the news so maybe Islanders are losing touch without those roving reporters! A gap in coverage! Politicians, farmers, and mostly everyone is off work so what would they fill the half-hour with anyway - Boomer singing carols? Please God no!

Summer past, I emailed the folks down at CBC here in Charlottetown and made a little suggestion. I thought it would be nice if on Mondays, they would spend that extra 8 minutes at the end of the program on weekend news review. Typical, I never received a response.

I think a lot of islanders would like to see my idea put to work.

On a side note, Happy New Years. We made it!

Just so folks not listening to 96.1 FM know, there is CBC radio news on the weekend which does include PEI news but it is from the Halifax, Nova Scotia studio of the CBC. While it tends not to include the loss of pets (a subject taking an identifiable percentage of CBC PEI’s news) it does include the oft not locally reported (apparently drunk) driving deaths in PEI.

Folks… c’mere fer a second and normal up a bit here… what’s really at issue is what happens if / when the Civilized Broadcorping Castration decides that regions = markets and PEI doesn’t pull any gravity. Isn’t that what you were saying OGGuru?

CBC is a bonus to our tiny isle but then they also have CBC in Iqaluit where carrots come by post.
You know at 5:59pm Global news starts first, then ATV at 6:00, then CBC and it’s interesting to compare what news headlines each opens with. Charlottetown news is usually always different than the others especially when there’s a teacher strike in St John or a forest fire in Quispamsis or throughout the Poulain trial.
We’d not rank too high among mainland maritime news, so our politics would be darker lit. Maybe CBC is the institutional opposition to frame our provincial government. The weezy lung to the legislature’s heart.
CBC keeps them honest and on the air.
If we lost CBC TV in Charlottetown, we’d be closer to maritime union under the Irving government.
If we wanted to whine we have to take it to Halifax, the future capitol of MaritimeUnion.
Our highways would decay and wealthy Haligonians would buy up all the shoreline properties.
So normal up and realize CBC isn’t market driven.

You point is made, Peter, by today’s posting as a news item on CBC PEI of a story that is acknowledged to have run last Sunday in the Halifax Daily News - five days to find out that once again the carrot of the Q league is being waived before our eyes. I can’t tell whether the Charlottetown page of Canada.com was more timely in covering this tale but I do note that they have more stories today than CBC PEI.

I can assure you that, here at CBC news in Montreal, our website also seems to think that nothing importnat happens for the two weeks around X-mas, something of which I am personally ashamed as a CBC employee. I imagine if I was sitiing at home on New Year’s day wondering what’s going on I might cehck with my local ZCBC website only to find NOTHING. One of the few CBC websites that does not take the holidays off is that of my former employer, CBC Saskatchewan (an award-winning site at that). The reason for the discrepancy seems to be an internal power struggle at CBC. Most locations now have a dedicated web person, from the IT department. In Montreal this person controls all web content. Up until recently, CBC sask was training it’s reporters, the people who actually gather news, to post their own stories on the web. Not only was this more efficient but it allowed the people who did the reporting to have some control over it’s final appearance on the internet. Recently though the centralized-in-Toronto “new media” department has closed ranks and has been insiting that only trained “web experts” can post content on CBC websites. I would support this if the so-called “web experts” were generating any new, web-specific content. But I don’t see why we need them and only them to re-write stories and post them on the internet.

The “IT lads” control of content makes its appearance beyond the CBC and is mystifying. Its like the typesetters union controlling the editorial room. “Web experts” are, as you say, no better. Any reasonable publishing system in any media should not be primarily defined by the media.

Heard Steve on CBC Radio while spending Christmas at a remote frontier outpost in Northern New Brunswick, where 4 channel TV reception is the norm, 3 of the channels are french, and 2 are CBC. For a unilingual American news fan,it was a change, but makes me realize how appreciative people in remote areas must be for CBC.