Bit of sad news, a quick tale of media marriages and divorces and marriages again and a look at the new battle being waged between broadcasters and cable/satellite companies in this dispatch. Craig Media, CHUM Limited and finally CTVglobemedia are discussed here.
First the sad news, last Thursday employees at CKX-TV in Brandon were informed that the buyout that was scheduled to take place for their station wasn't going to happen. Bluepoint Investment Corporation - headed by a media veteran pulled out of their planned purchase of CKX-TV for the price of 1 Canadian Dollar. Employees were then told that in the interest of "getting on with their lives", the station would go dark after the Friday 6pm newscast.
Brandon isn't a major market of any kind but the station had been on the air for over 50 years and helped to form a mini-empire for the Craig family of Manitoba. For it's entire life, CKX Brandon was a CBC affiliate. They ran the entire CBC schedule from sign-on to sign-off but inserted their own commercials and aired 2 local programs every day. It's signal served much of Western Manitoba through re-broadcasters.
The Craig Family, owners of CKX-TV built another station in nearby Portage la Prairie, MB which targeted the bigger and provincial capital of Winnipeg. The next decade, they launched local stations in Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta under the A-Channel brand. A-Channel was expanded back to Portage la Prairie/Winnipeg, MB. Since sign-on of the Alberta stations, the Craig's arranged a deal with Toronto's CHUM Limited for programming and essentially served as the Citytv affiliates for Alberta and Manitoba. A-Channel had a similar setup for their News, the anchors read the news standing up in the newsroom, innovative camera angles and movies in primetime.
CKX however remained much the same during this time. Master control was in Portage la Prairie along with A-Channel Winnipeg. The Craig family did receive licenses for digital specialty channels and scored a major coup when they were able to secure the Canadian rights to use the MTV name. MTV Canada, MTV2 Canada and TV Land Canada launched in 2001.
However, things really began to look up for the Craig's when they were granted a license to serve Toronto, ON. In 2003, Toronto 1 hit the airwaves to much fanfare but was essentially derided as a Citytv clone. Out west, the Craig's turned their stations in Alberta and Manitoba into more conventional news sources by adding a news desk and their ratings slowly began to come up. The whole standing up in the newsroom thing is really only a Toronto phenomenon.
Here's where things go down hill. Toronto 1 broke the empire, nobody watched, it got bad reviews in the newspaper and lost a million dollars a month for the Craig family. One year later the family put the company up for sale in 2004. Also that year, all employees at A-Channel Edmonton including creative, news and operations went on strike. Some crossed the picket line and the Craig's moved the master control of A-Channel Edmonton to A-Channel Calgary - which made sense as each station broadcast exactly the same programming.
Once the strike was settled, A-Channel Edmonton was back in 4th place in their media market. Later that year, CHUM Limited stepped in and bought the Craig's broadcasting assets - the family also own broadband interests and still continue to own and manage them under the name Craig Wireless, Inc. CHUM spun off Toronto 1 to the owners of the Toronto Sun, Quebecor. In turn Toronto 1 cancelled all news programming and morning programming and was rebranded as SUN TV. SUN TV continues to lose money and produces modest local programming. CHUM also cherry-picked the lineup of Toronto 1 giving them The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Monday Night Football.
The CHUM empire retained the A-Channel name and recycled it to Ontario to it's "NewNet" stations and created a mini-national network of Citytv stations. Citytv grew from 2 stations (Toronto and later Vancouver) to Calgary, Edmonton and Portage/Winnipeg. CKX was still a CBC affiliate, they've never really changed too much. CHUM brought back the walking around the newsroom format and ratings tanked. It should be noted that CHUM's empire was pretty impressive, they owned MuchMusic, MuchMoreMusic and 50% ownership in their french counterparts, Bravo! Canada, Space, CablePulse 24 and a string of radio stations nation-wide. They also owned the CHUM-City Building located at 299 Queen Street West, it served as their headquarters and a rather innovative broadcast studio. It was designed so that any part of the building could become a TV studio. All floors were wired with audio/visual lines, even the parking lot and the founder's office. It's studios were on the ground level and anyone passing by could easily be seen on television. MuchMusic turn's the parking lot and surround street into a street party for their annual MuchMusic Video Awards.
While the TV operations held a very distinct philosophy, see Moses Znaimer, the radio operations were traditional. To be honest, there wouldn't have been a CHUM empire if it wasn't for their original radio operation, 1050 CHUM - Toronto and Canada's first rock-and-roll radio station. CHUM are the call letters of the station and were originally pronounced individually, before using the word 'chum' as it's on-air and corporate name.
CHUM ran into it's own cash crunch back in 2006. All 6pm, 11pm and Weekend newscasts were cancelled in Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Vancouver. All four stations would continue to produce Breakfast Television, a morning show that does bring in somewhat decent ratings - except Vancouver. In Vancouver and Winnipeg, those stations would only produce BT and in order to meet it's license requirements, Calgary and Edmonton would continue to produce their Noon newscast and a nightly lifestyle magazine called "Your City". To date, this remains the same under Citytv's new ownership while Vancouver added two new shows called "Lunch Television" and "The CityNews List" - LT is a noon-hour version of BT while The List features comedians talking about local news. Winnipeg hasn't changed or added anything.
Toronto had no changes whatsoever even though their format had lost ratings since they changed the name from "CityPulse" to "CityNews". All four stations would soon air a new national newscast produced from Citytv Toronto, CityNews International would feature international news, national news, health and sports - making up for the lack of national coverage that the western-based Citytv stations would've been airing.
The A-Channel stations also had programs cut and across the board, CHUM decided to install a new production system. Instead of having a full control room/gallery staff, a computer runs the video switcher, audio board and graphics while one to two people build the lineup for the computer to follow. This has become quite common around North America with WNBC New York moving to this system. CKX Brandon also skirted by with no layoffs in Brandon.
However, the Portage la Prairie operation was shut down. Master control for Citytv Winnipeg was moved to Citytv Calgary and CKX had their master control moved BACK to their building in Brandon, quite the reversal as much of Canada's TV stations are operated either in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto or Montreal. So the former sister stations in Manitoba began to separate.
The exact same day that CHUM cancelled news out west, they also announced they would be purchased by rival Bell Globemedia, now CTVglobemedia. It was only "coincidental" that the layoffs were announced the same day. Each of the Citytv stations including Toronto were based in cities that had a CTV station directly competing with them. In order to clear the competition bureau, CTVgm planned to sell the new A-Channel stations, CKX-TV, Access Alberta - which is the provincial educational broadcaster and some select specialty stations to Rogers Communications. They had pledged to operate two newsrooms in Toronto and to keep all overlap between CTV and Citytv to 0%. That wasn't enough to convince the CRTC, our regulator.
In July of 2006, they approved the purchase of CHUM Limited to CTVgm, however it was on the condition that Citytv be sold off. CTVgm was free to keep of any of the assets they had planned to sell. Rogers Communications stepped in and bought Citytv 3 days later. CKX would now be owned by CTVgm along with the other A-Channel stations. They continued to retain the CBC affiliation even though back in 2002, CTV sold their former CBC affiliates in Saskatchewan to the CBC itself.
CTVgm put Citytv in trust until that sale was approved in November 2006. CTVgm kept most of the CHUM assets including CablePulse24, 299 Queen Street West, then known as the CHUM-City Building and A-Channel which was rebranded as 'A'. CP24 was launched as an offshoot of CityPulse/CityNews in 1998. It was and continues to be the only cable news channel in Canada devoted to a single region - Southern Ontario, mainly Toronto. All Citytv news programming, Breakfast Television and special reports were aired on the two channels simultaneously since launch. In addition, sister-station CKVR Barrie (located a stones throw away from Toronto) which became A-Channel Barrie and now 'A' Barrie also carried BT with their own local news inserts.
CTV kept the operations between the two the same for the first few months but it wasn't until 2008 that CTV began to compete with Citytv using their own studios and reporters. Citytv announced that they would launch the first Toronto newscast at 5pm, CityNews at 5.
A week before that, CP24 launched "Live at Five", a 15-minute newscast from the exact same studio as Citytv. The anchors stood only meters apart and each other's logo could be seen on the other show due to the various numbers of flat-screen monitors littering the studio. This setup continued until November when CP24 was relaunched with a new look, revised colour scheme and studio.
The simulcasts of News at Noon, Six and Eleven continued until December when Rogers announced they were being given a license to launch their own news channel, one that targeted Toronto exclusively. CTVgm brass pulled the simulcast minutes before it was due to occur on CP24 and told them to air CFTO Toronto, aka CTV Toronto's News at Six which is in fact Toronto's Number 1 newscast.
Due to personnel issues, BT from Citytv continued to air in the morning, CP24 aired their own noon and late-night newscasts and CTV Toronto's News at Six aired in the evening. It was to say an awkward arrangement, especially for those working in the building.
Guess there's a limit as to how much can be posted at one time. Part 2 coming later...
Last edited by SirCalgary on 6 October 2009 2:38am - 2 times in total
