CBC Plugged Back In

Late last night or early this morning, depending on your orientation, word came that there was a tentative deal between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the union representing 5500 locked out employees. This ends a 50 day lockout where Canadians in many parts of the country were deprived of the national radio, television, and online services they have come to depend on.

The lockout exposed a number of truly fascinating fault lines that are likely to be studied for some time to come.

For Americans who don't understand the nature of the publicly-funded CBC, the glib answer would be to imagine a PBS with teeth. Only not really - CBC has plenty of commercial aspects to it, but part and parcel of its mandate is to reflect Canada to Canadians.

(I'll try to keep this paragraph short so the interesting applicable-to-all stuff comes later.) That's not an easy thing to do. Though the CBC gets about a billion dollars a year from Canadian taxpayers, for that money it has to run two national television services in English and French, as well as two radio networks, also in English and French. It makes comedy, variety, current affairs and news shows, drama, and movies for tv out of that stipend. This is difficult to do in Canada because it's a nation of only 30 million people spread out in the 3rd (I think) largest national land mass on Earth. During the lockout, as all that programming disappeared, initially there were a lot of articles about how nobody noticed. Typically, that came from large media centres where there are many private broadcast choices. But for a large portion of the country, CBC is it. You're not going to get a lot of private broadcasting competition in Newfoundland or Nunavut. There just isn't a lot of money in it.

Okay, now here's the interestng -- really interesting -- lessons of the CBC lockout that should have implications for people with national broadcasters like the BBC, and we-who-create:

-From the moment the lockout started, there was an explosion of blogging that got the stories of the locked-out workers out. Eventually, that morphed into radio shows being done on campus stations, caravans going across the country reporting the unreported news in various Canadian outports, and even an online news site filled with robust reporting that the overwhelmed locked-in managers, running a skeleton service, simply couldn't match. It's the talent, stupid. That's the message that came through loud and clear. The PR war was decidedly won by the workers in this one. The managers seemed like they did not have a plan; their justifications for why they needed to be able to hire and fire contract workers at will seemed, as the weeks went on, just to be indicative of how poor their strategic planning was generally. Ugly whisperings that have been around for years: talking about how CBC was ridiculously over-managed -- has now leaked a bit into the public consciousness. And it looks like CBC Management will now be called before Canadian parliament to justify "what the hell were you thinking?" So one group responded nimbly to new technology and the narrowcasting landscape, one group flailed. Make note: creative people have to be open to change. The good news is that you're probably more open to change than the people you're likely to be dealing with.

There's more labor fun to come, I'm sure. I can't believe that the next big SAG or WGA fight isn't going to go to wall on the whole DVD royalty issue: it seems like everyone's electing radicals all of a sudden.

I'm just glad that the news will be back. Americans, you are pitifully ill-served by your news media. The major private network here, CTV, does a good job with news. But no one beats the CBC for informed and thorough news coverage, designed to shed light and not just heat.

And of course, Hockey's back. Canadians are a docile people -- but do not deny them hockey or sh*t starts to get weird fast.