A screencap of YolkRegion.ca, as it appeared earlier today.

Aside from our brief flirtation with the likes of RebelMayor, the 416 just hasn’t had any ongoing political satire of note (arguably it hasn’t needed it lately, but let’s put that aside for now). And yet, quietly, upon our northern border, the 905 seems to have spawned its own, Onion-style blog.

The anonymous “Heironymous Bouche” launched YolkRegion.ca less than two years ago. Since then, what once seemed like a niche venture has managed to establish its foothold. The site is the result of “mostly one person’s mania,” says its editor, who describes himself merely as an “ordinary male, newshound ratepayer.”

Bouche may not be willing to disclose his real identity, but he clearly has a finger on the pulse of the local polity—no mean feat in a 1,776-square-kilometre community with nine local governments. Some of the jokes are generically suburban enough for anyone to get (e.g. “Region Celebrates 30,000th ‘Drive Your Car to Work’ Day” or “Area Militias Working Hard to Keep Poor Out of York Region”). Others, meanwhile, require at least some local knowledge to get, such as a mock editorial supporting a Richmond Hill councillor who used his expense account to purchase some nice golf clubs.

Humour is surely in the eye of the beholder, but you don’t have to know who Tony Van Bynen is to at least chuckle at the notion of Marg Delahunty taking shots at suburban mayors after her ambushing of Rob Ford didn’t quite go as planned. You don’t have to know Pefferlaw from Purpleville to get all the gags, is what we’re saying here. (And, come on, Tony is the mayor of Newmarket, folks! Know your suburban leaders!)

As with most satire, there’s a real point underlying most of the humour on Yolk Region, though Bouche acknowledges there are souls more courageous than he fighting the good fight in small-town council meetings and bland OMB hearings, where big decisions are going down. For all the jokes about it, he’s clearly not especially amused by York Region having ammassed a debt so large it needed provincial approval to exceed the legally prescribed limit.

“With local councils back-stopped by a developer-friendly OMB, developers generally get everything they want,” he says. “The region has been growing too fast and could be in real trouble if a major housing crash disrupts its ability to pay for infrastructure. Essentially the region has been divided and conquered and the developers love it.”

Many local residents don’t even know how their two-tier municipality is governed (or how many local officials made the Sunshine List), so if a little humour helps the medicine go down, so much the better.

Asked about the site’s raison d’etre—why does a boring ol’ suburban community even need its own parody news source?—Bouche offers that, “People seem to be hungry for stories that give them a sense of place and belonging, even when it’s a fiction. So, probably the region does not ‘need’ a satirical blog, but apparently [I feel] compelled to write one.”

Remember how we chuckled in Argo when Ben Affleck explained that people from Canada don’t say the second “T” in Toronto? That’s because we’re from Toronto and we need Americans to validate our existence (just look at this past week’s late-night TV show coverage of Rob Ford’s latest scandal). Well, suburbanites feel the same way when Toronto deigns to acknowledge them, so it’s perhaps not surprising that Yolk Region occasionally widens its horizons.

“In the beginning, I was aiming for a local York Region audience, but the connections between the 905 and 416 regions make it hard not to cross the border now and then,” Bouche says. “You could say that the money and political will to grow the 905 came from downtown.”

Hence, the site has attracted wider notice with some of its stories lately. Whether talking about transit taxes or casinos, Yolk Region‘s articles provide a reminder that Toronto isn’t actually the centre of the universe. With prospects for a casino in the city now extinguished, for example, Markham and Vaughan are among the municipalities considering just how awesome it would be to pick that dirty apple off the ground. So when Bouche suggests that running riverboat-style casino subways might be a way to kill several birds with one stone, he’s reminding us that the burbs and the city have plenty of real issues and foibles to share.

York Region, for those who fear looking beyond the confines of downtown, stretches from Steeles Avenue clear up to Lake Simcoe and includes everything from populous urban inner suburbs like Markham and Vaughan, to more rural communities like Georgina and East Gwillimbury. Its population is at more than one million now, and it has one subway en route and another planned. In short, the burbs ain’t what they used to be. Heck, if you ignored Richmond Hill, you’d be ignoring one of the best figure skaters this country has ever produced, the school that trains our Olympic trampoline medal winners, and, oh yeah, the current premier.

Yolk Region advertises itself as “an attack-ad free zone,” and while the humour is often political, it tends to be more politely Canadian than biting and edgy. (That said, Bouche acknowledges that he espouses a commitment to Colbertian truthiness.) “I’m torn between writing about more important issues and off-the-wall bits, but it’s all good,” he says. He hopes to push the humour envelope a bit further (albeit without going negative), the longer he keeps at it.

In the meantime, Bouche seems to have the market cornered on humour related to urban sprawl and infrastructure spending. When there’s something to laugh about in Toronto, maybe someone else can open a southern franchise.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

It’s entirely possible that an early work by the next Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg will screen on Wednesday night at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. With the 2013 Student Film Showcase featuring the best from post-secondary schools around the country and the Jump Cuts Young Filmmakers Showcase kicking off the evening with Toronto-area high-school students’ films, the night will be a coming-out party for a new crop of talent. Judging by the polished creativity of some of the entries, it’s safe to say that young people are more prepared than ever to start telling stories on film from an early age.

“If you are reading this, I am dead.”

—Worthington, a career newsman, wrote his own obituary before he died at age 86 on Monday, and today it’s in the pages of the newspaper he helped found: the Toronto Sun. It’s a little unorthodox for a newspaper to let someone compose his own postmortem—one could say it seriously compromises journalistic objectivity—but this is the Sun we’re talking about. (It was “never as good a newspaper as it could have been,” writes Worthington.) Anyhow, the piece is a pretty entertaining read.

I Want Your Job finds Torontonians who make a living doing exactly what they love to do, in any field, and for any salary, and asks them how they did it.

Colin D’Mello is one of those rare and fortunate souls who made the right post-secondary education decision off the bat.

“When I went to Seneca College for broadcasting, that’s when everything just clicked,” says the 27-year-old weekend anchor at CTV News. “I realized this was exactly what I loved to do.”

After working on a Moncton radio station beginning at age 19, D’Mello got a job at 680 News in Toronto and, after four years, found his way onto CTV. After almost six months there as a reporter, D’Mello got promoted to the newly vacated weekend anchor position. “I didn’t think that I was going to get it,” he recalls, “and it was a very pleasant surprise.”

Our interview with D’Mello about what it takes to hold down a job in broadcast journalism is below.

Torontoist: What attracted you to broadcasting in the first place?

Colin D’Mello: Performance. I’ve always been kind of a performer. It was always about entertaining people. That’s why, when I was graduating high school, I didn’t necessarily know whether or not it was going to be news, specifically, but it was going to be something in broadcasting or performing.

News broadcasting is such a specific type of performance. Was it a natural transition for you?

There is a certain sense of performance in it. It’s very difficult to be able to have the right inflection, the right tone, the right attitude when it comes to certain stories. There is a performance in it. It is a craft. If you watch any other anchor on TV, everyone has their own set of tools and their own style for delivery, and that’s based on a lot of work on their craft. So it was a bit of a natural transition, because you can draw a lot of parallels between performing on a stage and performing in front of a camera. The only difference is that you’re not in front of thousands of people, you’re in front of one thing and then broadcast to thousands—if not millions—of people.

How would you describe your own personal style as a broadcaster?

I love to have fun. I used to say that I really have no shame when it comes to making a fool of myself. I’ll always take risks and I’ll always try to have fun with the story. There was one time when there was research released that a hug can improve your mood, so I was sent out to give random strangers a hug on the street. Those kinds of stories really make you appreciate what you do, because it’s fun. You get to put a smile on people’s faces.

For me, at the end of the day, I’m telling people what’s going on in the world. I’m trying to inform them, I’m trying to educate them, and I’m trying to entertain them.

What are the biggest challenges of the job?

When you’re almost 30 minutes to air and something big breaks, that’s a challenge. All of a sudden, you have to rejig your entire newscast and you may have to learn a lot about something you may not have known a lot about. For instance, last year when the Burlington train derailment happened, we were on the air at 5:00 and that happened around 4:00, so it was a mad scramble.

For me, it’s been a lot of learning how to come out of my shell and be comfortable in situations I wouldn’t normally be comfortable in. I end up doing a lot of sports stories and I know little to nothing about sports. You find yourself becoming an expert on a topic you would normally not be an expert in and converse with people while sounding like you know what you’re talking about.

What are your favourite aspects of the job?

You get to talk to so many people. You get to have so many experiences that you would have never had the opportunity to have otherwise. You’re also welcomed into people’s homes during tragic times, when somebody they know and love has died or been killed, and you get to talk to them and tell their story.

Is there anything about the job that would be surprising to people?

I think people would be surprised to learn how much of what we shoot goes on the cutting room floor. Sometimes for a story that’s a minute and 45 seconds, we would have shot anywhere from a half an hour’s worth of footage to an hour or two hours, and you try to encapsulate the best of it.

Just talking to you, I have to say: you talk like a broadcaster. So, what came first: the chicken or the egg?

When I was about eight, I made a radio program with my brother. I think this was always in my blood. I was never into news as a kid, per se, but I think maybe that was there all along and I didn’t realize it.

A screenshot of Fab‘s website, as it appeared earlier today.

Fab, a free, biweekly magazine aimed at Toronto’s gay men, will be releasing its last issue on April 25, after almost 19 years of continuous publication. Representatives of its parent company, Pink Triangle Press, say the move came about out of financial necessity, but that it was also a result of a strategic decision to consolidate increasingly scarce resources.

The shuttering of Fab is part of a larger reorganization at Pink Triangle that resulted in the loss of ten jobs, including one contract position, from the company’s Toronto office—which had 60 employees. (The company expects to add five new staff members in the near future to offset some of this.) Pink Triangle is also trying to sell off its stake in HARDtv, a pay-per-view gay porn channel, but doing so will require CRTC approval.

“None of our products have been immune from the changing media landscape and the [industry-wide] downturn in advertising,” said Brandon Matheson, who is publisher and editor-in-chief of Fab, as well as Pink Triangle’s flagship gay and lesbian biweekly, Xtra.

According to Matheson, the main precipitating factor in Fab‘s demise is Daily Xtra, a new website Pink Triangle plans to launch at some point during the middle of 2013. The site is expected to be a significant revamp of Xtra‘s aging web presence. It will be Pink Triangle’s new flagship product. Some of Fab‘s resources—including its editor, Phil Villeneuve, of YouTube fame—will be redirected to Daily Xtra. Pink Triangle will also be launching a new, twice-yearly lifestyle magazine, to be called Xtra Living.

According to Matheson, Fab was always a challenging fit for Pink Triangle, which purchased the magazine in 2008. “Back when we bought Fab,” he said, “we bought our competitor.” In other words, the magazine covered a lot of the same thematic territory as Xtra, putting it in contention for the same shrinking pool of advertisers.

The closure of the magazine is already causing dismay among some who see its disappearance as a net loss for journalism on gay topics in Toronto.

Villeneuve, the editor of Fab, learned the news two weeks ago (it was only announced today). He had to abandon plans for future issues stretching all the way to Pride Week.

“What we’ll be doing for the final issue on April 25 is sort of a celebratory look back,” he said.

“We want to just really celebrate it while we can, and not make it a sad whisper of a goodbye.”

CORRECTION: March 15, 2013, 3:00 PM This post originally said, incorrectly, that Xtra is a weekly publication. In fact, it’s biweekly.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

You know something’s gone wrong when you’re forced to check the calendar multiple times to ensure that it is in fact 2012. Though the police aren’t calling assault victims sluts anymore (they have since turned to offering fashion advice to pedestrians getting hit by cars), we were still left with a year where newsfeeds found themselves carrying story after story of harassment incidents: some online, and some much closer to home.

One case that had jaws dropping around the world involved Anita Sarkeesian, a former York University student who found herself on the receiving end of harassment from male gamers, including rape and death threats, after she called attention to the stereotypes that female characters were forced into in video games. A particularly gruesome attack took the form of an online game where players were presented the opportunity to bash in Sarkeesian’s face until it eventually became a bloody mess.

This is where local activist Stephanie Guthrie stepped in.

Guthrie determined that the game’s creator was one Ben “Bendilin” Spurr, a 25-year-old from Sault Ste Marie, who attempted to defend the game on the grounds that it wasn’t about hitting women but hitting “a selfish person.” Guthrie’s challenges—important especially because they showed how prominently misogyny persists in the gaming world—gained rapid and widespread support. Unfortunately, and reinforcing the concern that gaming culture still has a long way to go in this regard, Guthrie was quickly hit with the same kinds of threats and harassment she was attempting to expose. Guthrie’s attackers certainly deny it, but this harassment transcends the computer screen, and takes a real toll on its victims.

Guthrie’s activism, too, transcends the computer screen: after a string of assaults earlier this year in the Christie Pits area, she helped to organize Take Back the Block events in several neighbourhoods, to focus on constructive, community-oriented ways of responding to such incidents.

Though many have trolled in gleeful anonymity throughout the internet’s short lifespan, Guthrie has shown that harassers must be held (and will be held) accountable for their actions online as well as off. Though it’s disappointing to see that even today, the online assault against Sarkeesian continues in full force (TEDxWomen had to disable the comments and ratings of her recent talk), it’s only with more people like Guthrie coming forward to call that kind of behaviour out that we’ll be able to make progress.

The Toronto Marlies Standing up for athletes of all orientations.

Brian Burke Making it his mission to combat homophobia.

Cheri DiNovo Championing trans rights.

Jude MacDonald and Paul Magder Holding the mayor to account

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

It goes without saying that the newspaper business has been in a bit of a bind lately. How do you make money—or just break even—producing something that everyone can essentially get for free? The New York Times answered this question by gambling on their popularity and prestige, betting that even if they couldn’t get all of their readers to pay up, their audience was big enough that if only a fraction subscribed, the paywall would be a worthwhile experiment.

Though this idea has since proven to be successful, the thought of implementing such a barrier at a Canadian newspaper didn’t seem all that credible not too long ago. It had, after all, already been tried and failed. And the country’s self-styled paper of record, the Globe and Mail, does not have anywhere near the number of readers that subscribe to the NYT.

But if we consider the music industry as an example of a sector that has essentially been working its way back out of its own coffin, thanks to its absurdly slow embrace of file sharing, then the brutal consequences of waiting too long to act are clear.

The Globe and Mail’s new paywall, while not exactly revolutionary, accomplishes a few things. It counts as an important experiment in whether the Canadian market is willing to pay for news again. Hopefully, it’ll put a bit of money in the Globe‘s rapidly draining coffers. Hopefully, it’ll allow the Globe to do what it has promised and start improving the digital content, both in quality and by supporting online exclusives. And it is also an official acknowledgement that newspapers cannot treat digital publication as an afterthought, or even companion to, the tent pole print edition—suggesting that we pay for news delivered online is a way of suggesting that it is worth paying for.

It is this last thing that is perhaps most important: paywalls remind the news-hungry public that producing news isn’t actually free, even though it has been available for free for a while now. One way or another, we are going to need to start paying for news again, and even if paywalls aren’t the mechanism on which the market finally settles, they once again help move our collective conversation in that direction.

The Globe’s wall and its implementation haven’t been perfect. It can be easily bypassed (though that’s likely a deliberate move); has been extraordinarily glitchy; and at $19.99, the subscription rate seems overly ambitious. But it is important to try, and we are glad the Globe is making the attempt.

Toronto Ombudsman Fiona Crean Grace under fire.

Daniel Dale   Staying professional, even when the mayor couldn’t.

Alice Moran   Speaking up when she didn’t need to.

Captain John   Keeping the waterfront interesting, and keeping his dream alive.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

We invite them into our lives every day. They entertain us, they know where we come from, they tell us the truth even if it’s hard to hear, and we always feel as if they have our best interests in mind.

So when the journalists at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were hit with a devastating funding cut, it felt like an attack on some close friends.

The biggest blow, perhaps, was foreign current affairs program Dispatches, with host Rick MacInnes-Rae. It got the axe this April when Kristine Stewart, executive vice-president of English services, announced a list of changes to CBC Radio, CBC Television, and Radio-Canada as a result of the 2012 federal budget.

That budget shrank support for our public broadcaster by 10 per cent, or $115 million over three years. Other casualties from the cuts were Connect with Mark Kelley, radio dramas, news bureaus in Africa and South America, 175 hours of original TV programs, and 256 jobs (650 over three years). CBC Sports turned into a winter seasonal program and, for the first time since 1974, ads will start running on CBC Radio 2 and Espace musique.

These blows hit the mother corps especially hard since they came just over a year into the CBC’s ambitious five-year plan, emphasizing local programming, specialty channels, and more online services. At that time, Canada already spent far less than other developed nations on our public broadcaster. Even the conservatively inclined National Post protested, writing that the CBC is crucial in supporting “cultural nationalism, the creation and sustenance of a coast-to-coast identity, support for homegrown artists and intellectuals” and “good old-fashioned intellectual elitism.” With another cutback from the CRTC in October to the tune of $28.4 million, those noble goals will undoubtedly suffer.

While some see this as a chance for the CBC to reimagine its identity, Stewart herself told the Globe and Mail that a tighter budget means eliminating more experimental programs and continuing with whatever is safest (read: boring).

“It’s people that produce content, not machines,” said the president of the Canadian Media Guild CBC branch, Marc-Philippe Laurin. Job cuts, more ad space, and less risky programming means fewer people, fewer ideas, and fewer voices broadcasting to fewer eyes and ears across the country.

“Early on I asked our contributors to write like drunken poets. To experiment. Leave in the stuff conventional news leaves out. The personal stuff. The questions. Let the listener hear you thinking out loud,” MacInnes-Rae said in his final send-off. On Dispatches, it was the people that made it excellent storytelling. And it’s our friends on the air we’ll miss in 2013.

Margaret Wente Plagiarism, and laziness of epic proportions.

NHL Lockout Taking hockey away from us.

NFB Funding Cuts Forcing the Mediatheque closure.

John Farrell   Checking out even before he left the team.

Factory Theatre Board of Directors Losing their community’s trust.

Sedwick Hill   For the untimely death of the Toronto Underground Cinema.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente has long been criticized for the views she expresses in her work—for perpetuating gender essentialism, for instance, or for rather bizarrely asserting that contemporary 20-something men “are in an arrested state of adolescence” because women will have sex with them.

It wasn’t garden-variety gender politics that pushed Wente into a particularly unflattering spotlight this year, however, but accusations of plagiarism. First detailed by Carol Wainio, an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa who also maintains the media-watchdog blog Media Culpa, those accusations concern columns dating back to 2009. Wainio described multiple incidents in which passages seemed to be lifted—some rephrased and some taken directly—from published sources including the Ottawa Citizen, Foreign Affairs, and the New York Times, with no citation or attribution to the original authors.

After Wainio published some of her findings on September 18, several days passed before Globe public editor Sylvia Stead responded, and not very reassuringly: she referred to Wainio as an “anonymous blogger” and noted that “there appears to be some truth to the concerns but not on every count.” Her remarks primarily addressed the more minor accusations.

That reaction was met with almost universal criticism: from John Miller, former head of Ryerson’s school of journalism; from Colby Cosh of Maclean’s; and even further afield, from the Guardian. Things devolved further: at one point, Stead accused Miller of poor journalistic judgment because he did not wait for her response before publishing his piece, and why should anyone expect her to check email for something like this over the weekend? It was September 24 before Globe and Mail editor-in-chief John Stackhouse finally weighed in, indicating that there would be unspecified disciplinary action against Wente, and that the paper would reorganize its chain of authority so that Stead would no longer report to him but to the publisher directly. (Along with many others, we found that response unsatisfactory.)

What cements Wente as a villain in this situation isn’t her initial transgressions but rather her own response. In a piece titled “Margaret Wente Defends Herself,” she portrayed herself as an embattled journalist, targeted by “people who don’t like what I write.” In this non-apology, she wrote that “I’m sorry for my journalistic lapses, and I think that, when I deserve the heat, I should take it and accept the consequences. But I’m also sorry we live in an age where attacks on people’s character and reputation seem to have become the norm.” Wainio, in turn, wrote that she was saddened that “Ms. Wente uses the large readership offered her to direct the attack not at colleagues of her own size and weight, but at the smaller people–the readers. Because that’s all I am. A reader—who reluctantly set up a blog to record issues newspapers had neglected to set right.”

Perhaps more troubling than the original accusations are the fact that they seem to be ongoing: Media Culpa‘s most recent entry is dated November 20 and once again details attribution issues with one of Wente’s more recent columns. It seems that long-term consequences, or even any tightening of editorial standards where Wente are concerned, are not forthcoming from the Globe and Mail, nor is Wente particularly interested in improving her own standards of writing. For the triumph of ego over journalism and hubris over ethics, Margaret Wente has earned a spot on our villains’ list.

Factory Theatre Board of Directors Losing their community’s trust.

NHL Lockout   Taking hockey away from us.

NFB Funding Cuts   Forcing the Mediatheque closure.

John Farrell Checking out even before he left the team.

CBC Funding Cuts Weakening one of our national institutions.

Sedwick Hill For the untimely death of the Toronto Underground Cinema.

CORRECTION: 2:44 PM As pointed out by a commenter, we failed to include links to some source material originally. We regret the omission, and have added them.

The Globe is reporting that Sun Media is instituting a metered paywall on December 4—one that will hide “all content created by Sun Media columnists, investigative reports by experienced journalists, complete access to all photo and video libraries, packaged/related content bundles, [and] Sunshine Girl swimsuit and calendar footage” from the freeloading public. The Toronto Sun will be affected, as will Sun papers in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Edmonton. This comes after massive layoffs by Sun Media’s parent company, Quebecor.

Times are tough, and the Sun is in good company here. The Star and the Post are both launching paywalls in the coming year, and the Globe has had its paywall up and running for about a month.

At an anticipated $5.99 per month, Sun+, as the new premium digital subscription will be known, will be a bargain compared to the Globe, which is charging $19.99. And the Globe doesn’t even publish pictures of scantily clad women or issue statements distancing itself from the opinions of its own columnists! Arguably, the Sun is more bang for your internet buck.

In any case, now’s when we find out how many people actually value the Sun, versus how many read it only when they find a crumpled copy on the floor of a Tim Hortons. It will be interesting to see Toronto’s love for its one right-leaning tabloid fully quantified in dollars.

When the phrase “plan that looks to future” sits atop a press release, it’s often code for cutbacks or reallocation of resources. So it is with a missive released today by TVO, which buries the axe amid plans to direct reduced provincial funding into digital children’s and current affairs programming. Not until paragraph six does the bombshell hit: Saturday Night at the Movies (SNAM), currently the longest running movie program on television, will soon load its final reel.

According to TVO CEO Lisa de Wilde, “When Saturday Night at the Movies began almost 40 years ago, it broke new ground but now entire TV networks and web services are dedicated to movies.” While this may be true, those other services lack the extensive archive of interviews TVO has built up since SNAM debuted in March 1974. Those other services offer studio-produced puff pieces and PR junket quality featurettes on movies, but they don’t reach into the mechanics of filmmaking as SNAM’s conversations do. Since the late 1990s, the series has been included in York University’s film curriculum.

Beyond fulfilling TVO’s mandate as an educational broadcaster SNAM, especially during Elwy Yost’s quarter-century run as host, turned a generation of viewers into film connoisseurs. As Torontoist’s Christopher Bird noted in his obituary for Yost last year, “He was the friendliest man on television who wasn’t Mister Rogers, because he had the best job ever: he got paid to talk about movies, and movies deserved better than cynicism and snark to someone like Elwy Yost.” His manner and the show’s excellent programming choices helped the series become the network’s highest-rated series.

To a child growing up in a pre-cable household during the 1980s, SNAM was a gateway to classic movies that weren’t regularly shown on television. Under Yost’s warm guidance, it was a place to discover films that they only knew through stills in picture books, to understand who Groucho Marx was beyond the inspiration for gag glasses, spot Alfred Hitchcock’s cameos, and crack the mystery of “Rosebud.”

Besides SNAM, TVO also announced that it is ending Allan Gregg in Conversation after 18 years. While Big Ideas is being cancelled as an ongoing series, the network indicates the lectures will reappear as an occasional segment of The Agenda with Steve Paikin. The total cuts announced today will save TVO $2 million and axe up to 40 jobs. But amid the carefully vetted talk about fiscal realities and leveraging efficiencies, a little magic has been lost.

According to the current broadcast schedule, the last SNAM double feature will be May 11’s “The Untraditional Family” bill of La Cage Aux Folles and All About My Mother.