Welcome to Anna-Maria Tremonti and CBC Radio's The Current, visiting Prince George this week and hosting a public forum tonight at the Civic Centre on the Highway of Tears.
This is the kind of valuable community work we should receive from our national broadcaster on a far more consistent basis. This is exactly what was promised last year in the CBC's five-year strategic plan: improve regional coverage, engage audiences with outreach programs and do a much better job reporting on the country's indigenous population.
Sadly, the rest of the CBC's strategic plan undercuts that commitment, starting with its title - Everyone, Every Way. The very first paragraph recognizes the CBC can't be all things to all people but then spends the next seven pages insisting it should still try to be relevant to everyone, just like the old days.
In the current media landscape, the only constants are audience and relevancy.
For private sector news media outlets, like The Citizen, Vista's two local radio stations and Pattison's two radio stations and TV station, the business model is to generate revenue and profit by selling advertising products and services on the backs of those two constants. The size of the audience is larger than ever but so is the fragmentation of the audience. People receive information through multiple channels, both physically and online, making it increasingly difficult to put a value on reaching people.
It's relatively easy to measure the size of the audience reached but it's far more difficult to gauge the value and validity of those numbers. Just because someone sees a story or advertising on Facebook or on an online news site doesn't mean that person actually read it.
Relevancy is virtually impossible to measure but it's the most valuable asset the news media has left, in both the public and private sector. Staying relevant means being a trusted, timely source of breaking and important news, while remaining top-of-mind to audience members when they are looking for news and information.
So many times in so many ways, the CBC has lost its way over the years and continues to waste time and money on overvalued talent and initiatives that are outside of their core mission and/or steal audience and revenue from private sector news media companies like The Citizen.
The reason The National has fallen well behind Global and CTV's national evening newscasts in audience size is because the private sector media see people as their audience while the CBC sees Canadians. Peter Mansbridge is paid more than Dawna Friesen and Lisa LaFlamme combined to lecture Canadians each night on what are the proper important issues Canadians should care about.
Working at the CBC does not give Mansbridge or anyone else who works there special insight on what's good for Canada and Canadians but the Mother Corp. continues to pursue a national agenda radiating outwards from the centre of the universe located at 250 Front Street West in downtown Toronto.
Fortunately, Tremonti and numerous other hosts, along with the producers of The Current and several other shows - almost all on the radio side of the operation - know that the best way to hold on to audience and relevancy is to tell stories about people (who happen to be Canadians) and where they live (which happens to be Canada).
The tragic story of the Highway of Tears is a story about women, a story about First Nations and a story about Northern British Columbia. That's what makes it a story about Canada and Canadians.
Put another way, the outside of the wheel, not the hub, is what touches the ground. The CBC is better placed than any other media organization to focus on the regions and on rural Canada, far away from its urban broadcast centres. Slash staffing levels in Toronto and Vancouver, then go on a hiring binge in those regional centres across Canada - Prince George, Grande Prairie, Prince Albert, Brandon, Thunder Bay and so on.
Those locations may not be as glamourous as the bright lights of the big cities but there is more to Canada than the 604 and the 416.
And there is more to Northern B.C., to aboriginals and to women than the Highway of Tears. Those stories deserve to be heard by national audiences, too.
