Today Sun Mon
It is forcast to be Mostly Cloudy at 11:00 PM EDT on May 26, 2012
Mostly Cloudy
27°/17°		 It is forcast to be Chance of Rain at 11:00 PM EDT on May 27, 2012
Chance of Rain
26°/20°		 It is forcast to be Chance of a Thunderstorm at 11:00 PM EDT on May 28, 2012
Chance of a Thunderstorm
32°/20°

3 Comments

news

Tough Love at the Mother Corp.

By Hamutal Dotan

The CBC is just wrapping up a town hall meeting for its staff, held so that the corporation’s president, Hubert Lacroix, could outline the plan for tackling a major funding shortfall. The key announcement: eight hundred jobs need to be cut, to be divided more or less equally between the English and French services, with seventy of the positions coming from the corporate side. The majority of the cuts will be in television, and radio will stay commercial-free. Asset sales are also planned, though they will not be enough to rescue any of the jobs slated for elimination.

Filed under: , , ,

Report error Send a tip

Comments

  • http://null Chester Pape

    I don’t know if this improved over time but when I was in the biz it used to be obvious what was wrong with the CBC. Doing media events the other TV people would show up with 2 or 3 people, one reporter, one cameraman and sometimes a sound guy. Usually the interview would be run through twice, once with the camera on the interviewee and once with it on the reporter. CBC would arrive with a small army, all of the above plus a producer or two, frequently two cameras (at least that way only one run through the interview) crew assistants and always at least one person who’s only job seemed to be to flip pages back and forth on a clipboard and fetch coffee for the techs. You could also tell the CBC from the rest by the quality and relative newness of their stuff, always this years model of the top of the line Sony ENG cameras (which back in those days were well over 6 figures each).
    I know they’ve cut back since then but I get the feeling it’s like a 700 pound man who’s lost 300 pounds, that’s a great achievement but he’s still morbidly obese.

  • http://null kstop

    That’s not been my experience over the past 3 years here, I’ve always worked with cast-off and legacy equipment (I recently got an appropriation for a low-end mac mini through though – it took 6 months). I don’t even have it that bad, I know people whose departments go whole quarters without budget for toner cartridges.

  • http://null spacejack

    I’m sure it depends on what department and what show your working on. I saw some shows produced on a shoestring with a skeleton crew, edited on a laptop, while others got the full big budget treatment with more money, people and equipment than they could possibly use. Some parts of the building had people crammed in like sardines while other parts were practically vacant.