The Tea Makers

If Inside the CBC (among others) can cover this all-hands meeting held December 3, we can too.

Marcia Young of The World This Hour introduces Jennifer McGuire, Todd Spencer, exec director of news content, Jonathan Witten, Jane Inito, Cynthia Kinch, Neil Morrison. We’ll also hearing from Richard Stursberg, John Cruickshank – “he’s here and he’s just back from American Thanksgiving.”

Setting a course for CBC News in the future. Based on a lot of research with you. For flagships like The National, World Report, CBC.CA, local services. Also be changes to the way we gather news on all platforms. (Gives teleconference numbers.)

McGUIRE: I have to start with an apology. I’m a hacking, coughing mess at the moment. I just wanted to start by talking about what today is about and what it’s not about. Today really is about us revealing and sharing with you what we think is the strategic direction forward for CBC News. It’s not about revealing the end stage, what programs will look like. You own that work. Our work in looking for CBC News in the future. That’s what today is about – to share our thinking, to fully engage in this process as it moves forward.

STURSBERG: I just would like to say one little thing to begin with. We’re going to try to show you the total architecture, if you will, the blueprints for what the news is gonna look like. I think it’s very important to keep this conversation to ourselves, because this would have tremendous competitive advantage if they found out where we’re going.

I know it’s been a very, very busy, even crazy, time, given the astonishing amount of news that’s going on over the last while (Olympics, Mellissa Fung, elections). But I also want to thank all of you for your considerable efforts in this area. As you know, we owned the federal-election night and we owned it absolutely flat-out. The National exceeded the target we set this year. The local shows are doing better this year than last year. We’ve just set new records in radio. World Report is number one in the country and this is the best book ever for CBC Radio. Online, CBC.CA continues to develop among the most popular news sites in the world – in the country.

I think you should all be very proud of what you’ve been doing. We certainly are. But I want to emphasize one very important thing: This is a good-news day. None of what we are doing here with respect to news renewal is a reaction to (the economic crisis). CBC News is and will remain strong, and in fact I would describe it as absolutely mission-critical to both CBC News and the CBC brand. John Cruickshank has done an absolutely fasntastic job of building on our plans for future success. (His) good work will continue on without delay (even after he leaves).

Our commitment to the new CBC News will be the top priority for CBC English Service in the next three years. We will do what we must to ensure that CBC News renewal is a success.

McGUIRE: We thought it was important today that John Cruickshank have a chance to speak to the change project. John? (Applause.)

CRUICKSHANK: I think that makes me publisher emeritus for a little while anyway. (13 months ago: No news organization where all the parts are functioning together.) We’re going to have a structure that makes some sense. Began a process to decide what public broadcasting should be in this country across all platforms to defend and diversify the voice CBC has.

We also understood that our audience is changing and the way they consume news is changing very, very dramatically. (Most effective way to do that.) Started with some research. This was the most effective research I’ve ever seen. This gave us insight that we’ve been able to build actions on (to) directly target the audiences we want to get to. And of course many of you have been a part of the process and part of the beginning of the tactics that will take us to the next stage. This is a plan that I most wholeheartedly endorse. It’s a plan that I began to develop in concert with you that will get us from a series of great programs to being a great news service. More feet on the street and will allow us more effectively to talk to Canadians about what engages them most in a continuous way. Target our resources where they need to be targeted in the future – to CBCNews.ca and to Newsworld. It’s a plan that will work and be effective as we go forward.

As you can imagine, all the senior news people are anxious to get it implemented, but we’ll be watching from the sidelines – but with enormous enthusiasm for what we’re going to do. I will tell you it was a long time ago that Mansbridge started to needle me on this. (Still a great reporter in our country and our organization.) (Thanks everybody especially “for all your kindnesses to me.”)

McGUIRE: Just to remind you again about sort of the agenda this afternoon, we’ll be presenting our plans forward. This is about building on success. What we’re trying to do today is create a plan to deal with the changed news environment, different ways people are consuming [her phone rings] news, take a step outside of ourselves and look to the future in 10 years and see if we’re where we should be.

So going back to the research. What we see is that news overall has a category (unclear): People who consume news are telling us that you’re all sort of in the middle. We think there is real differentiation between what CBC provides and others do, but people don’t see that differentiation.

People tell us what they want has changed. And it doesn’t fit into a 9-to-5 model or a Monday-to-Friday model. News is a 24/7 reality in the minds of people.

People more and more aggregating. They don’t get their news from one show anymore, from one platform anymore. These are all themes in the research that we felt we had to deal with. In the future, it’s entering the digital phase.

If you look at your own habits, you know that it’s true. It’s changed. We used to set our dials. We’re now much more an audience of news grazers. [Some problem with slides.] You can see right now that people are migrating across platforms. This is Canadian news consumers. Red are the Canadian news consumers we don’t reach. We reach only half of them.

Opportunity to convert audience across the green and across platforms but also the imperative of chasing the news consumers that we don’t have. Argue from a public-broadcasting argument – most of our news audience is an older audience, we skew to a different part of Canada. From a business or revenue perspective. Only half of news consumers use us. That’s of course a significant finding for us.

How do audiences see us? Oh, you lost the slide. OK. The truth of the matter is we delineated, by attribute, things that people take the news for. We measured CBC, CNN, Global, CTV, and we found there is some variation among the networks. CTV scores a little bit higher on friendly, we scored higher on depth, but all in all consumers feel pretty much the same and the mark is a B– or a C. Not bad, but nobody (is on top), and we expected much higher scores in terms of our relationship with Canadians.

[Yet more trouble with slides.] We also see when we measure drivers of how people connect with us emotionally, you see CBC is the red line, CTV is the blue diamonds and Global is grey. You see middling scores, 6½, 7, in terms of us making people feel well informed. These are fairly soft scores. When we map drivers against what Canadians say they want, (it’s similar). They want the real story, for us not to take sides, for us to present all sides, inform about Canada, as you’d expect. What you see is what the audience wants, how they rate us, and the competition.

The biggest gaps are around real stories, presents all sides, not take sides. We’ve seen this in other research – that there’s cynicism for what we do and an appetite to cut through and create sort of meaning and understanding. We know from research that we are well positioned to achieve this. Mandate matters. We can achieve delivering audiences against those.

In terms of engagement, we have to do a better job in a different kind of competition, that’s what they’re telling us. We’re seen as old-fashioned. Everybody is pretty much in the same place (charismatic, innovative), so it isn’t a CBC problem, it’s a category problem.

CBC overall, and I just want to show the next slide again – this is how we see ourselves vs. the competition, and you’ll remember the consumer line was about 6½ to 7, and we’ll go to the next one, Fred, and this is how we see our competition. I don’t see this as a bad thing. I want us to be passionate about what we do. It think the challenge for us is to really understand the competition and really understand the audience expectation.

The burning bridge for us in all of this is when you measure brand, relationship people have with us, and ask “How likely are you to use CBC News in the future?, ” you can see the numbers, and this is consistent by platform, we’re sitting at 21%. Three years ago, the numbers were (unclear) than that. So while our numbers are a big success story in terms of loyalty, consistently we see softening we have to pay attention to.

Position CBC News for the future in three ways:

1. Position for how people want news, a structural element.
2. Engagement and how people are interacting with our news. This will be further put forward in the development process of this exercise.
3. [There wasn’t a third.]

We have to rethink some of the assumptions in our organization. Currently we have newsgathering designed for programs. Built around servicing The National by and large, so Newsworld would be last in line for priorities and online not there (at all). In the future world, we see a stream that feeds the consumer’s appetite: Newsworld, CBCNews.CA, local news, the hourlies, constantly updated and refreshed, still within the values but constantly hot 24/7.

Then you have the programs, which are built around “value-add.” This is a shift in the way we do things. We’ll explore this together – not all the details are in line – but this is absolutely where we’re going.

SPENCER: (Spoke to over 200 people who worked for CBC News.) What do we need to do and how do we deliver? We don’t control when people get their news. We need to be organized around that reality. That means paying attention to a 24/7 news cycle and being able to react.

• Position ourselves to deliver coverage 24/7 in all of our centres.
• Breaking-news and update model in most of our centres.
• Invest in cameras, trucks, to deliver pictures, sound, and text.
• Integrate assignment across all platforms, taking a one-news approach to how we assign. The hub-based assignment process that you’ll learn more about. Cooperation between local and national assignment desks.
• Online will be the first place we break news. They tend to be last in the line. Shifting to the now for online and Newsworld specifically.

(Catherine Gregory leading work on multiplatform assignment desk.) Have to do a lot of work before you can evens ay the word “integration.” Two different languages? computer systems? Can give you two logins, but I don’t even know how to use the radio one if I work in TV. Two pieces to do right away:

• Single assignment desk, collocated at 4th floor Toronto. Complete by September 2009. Two radio studios and six radio booths March 2009. Staff start moving in August 2009.
• Local Toronto show CBC News at Six moves to 3rd floor in August 2009 to be closer to radio colleagues.

Moving workstations: We have multiple cultures here. We want to take the best of those cultures and put them together. Moving is a (traumatic) process and we want to be sensitive to that. John Bainbridge is leading that project.

One iNews system that will be used by everyone. Get that done before you do anything else, you all told us. Upgrades February, training and transition March. [Missed who’s leading that.]

McGUIRE: Programs. The National is a success story. People feel stronger about The National than they do about CBC News in general. Iconic show, iconic host. Taking that and positioning it for the new world. People don’t get their news first at 10:00 anymore. John Whitten has been and will continue to be the lead on The National project. Because of the strength of its brand, we’re stripping it across seven days a week starting September 2009. This means that Saturday Report and Sunday Report will be replaced.

MAN: We’re creating an on-demand early national – a ten-minute version available by 6:00 PM each night. Flexible in length. Updated easily. Push to cellphones, PDAs, podcasts, anywhere we can find a home for it. Punjabi, Chinese perhaps. Would Peter be doing those versions? (Laughter.)

Could allow people to create their own kind of programming (later maybe). Creating a more consistent on-air theme, building the full hour around Peter and personalities the audience would know. Broaden its appeal. Begins in earnest in January. Look, writing, format. How to hold an audience better for the hour – a real issue for us.

Also build around trying to move the program from an intro/item format to a nightly live news event. (Like election night) when Peter is around moving about and creating excitement on the air. Taking attributes of that program and baking them into the process. [Holograms?]

People aren’t as engaged as we’d like them to be. Will create engagement. More consistent on-air team of personalities. Transparency – you see a little of this in The National now, telling people how we got the information and what we do and don’t know.

Audience growth strategies. Keep the audience we now have. We don’t want to lose the audience we have. What we’re really look at specifically is to target areas like Toronto, Vancouver, by sharing local reporters. Specific, targetted attempt to grow audience.

Local news. A new National will have a local-news anchor that starts near the end of the hour and rolls over the top of the hour, though we haven’t finished that development process.

McGUIRE: Decision to go with a seven-day National has nothing to do with the quality of the (weekend shows). What do we have to do? 24/7 is what. That’s what led us to the decision that we came to. This is not a value decision. It’s purely a strategic one.

World Report: The most-listened-to show on radio. Best share ever. 1.7 million listening to talk radio whom we aren’t reaching. We reach a healthy share of a very narrow demographic, mostly 50 to 65+. World Report – strong brand, but we’re not seeing the kind of relationships we really want in terms of how people feel about us.

(Tasks:) Grow 35–49(-year-olds). Digital world. A world where people aren’t hearing news on radio first.

BRITISH-ACCENTED WOMAN: [Missed first two minutes of remarks.] (Will lead in some way.) A very thinly resourced program at the moment. Our radio pie is actually shrinking, and digital is growing. And there’s an enormous potential for us in mobile. CBC Radio News switching to CBC Audio News – think of it as a way you can use it and push it out to other platforms and cellphones and audio widgets, it changes the nature of how you think of that package of news. Ten minutes of program was probably a good length, a very usable length, for digital media.

There’s also a need (to fit) with morning shows. They feel sometimes that World Report doesn’t quite fit their style. They feel the own that space much more in their regions. Ten-minute show allows us to have our information and regional headlines right slam up against World Report and put us on an equal footing with highly commercial radio markets to allow us to do ten on the :10, a huge factor in the morning. Allows us to challenge the commercial spaces now given a ten-minute newscast.

Ensure there’s always a driving and a sensibility to World Report. Total of four editions in each region, 5 AM, add one on weekends (6, 7, 8, 9 AM).

Making that emotional connection with audiences, especially 35–49, capturing the real story. Ensuring that personal relevance is embedded in stories we choose to do. Taking account of the makeup of a contemporary Canada. Affects the way we align our worldview. Think of Mumbai – that would have played well in the central region here and also in British Columbia and also in Quebec where it had particular resonance. Our plan is to update those programs more often and play more specifically to each region.

Editorial resources. Mumbai – should we actually have a presence in India? And when you look at the contemporary makeup of Canada, that would look like something we’d need consider quite seriously.

Much more contemporary sound, greater range of story treatments. Chris Hall doing his fabulous early-morning hits. Economic reporters live in the morning. Wonderful CBC characters, rich storytelling, but a greater range of it. Greater emotional range, and also the serious and funny on each ten-minute newscast. World Report: A heritage property that we have going forward. World Report: A hot property.

McGUIRE: Personal relevance comes up again and again. CBC News matters to Canadians. When we ask them personally if it matters to them personally, that’s where we start getting disconnect. It’s a theme that keeps coming up again in the research.

Newsworld. Again, an audience success story. We’re the number-one news network, 6 million viewers a week – â…” are 50+, half over 55, half of those over 65, mostly in Ontario. Audience satisfaction and loyalty. Even those who use Newsworld the most (say other stations are their favourites). In 2010, the carriage (requirement) comes up for Newsworld, and what is (required today) becomes a choice then.

It’s really important we invest in Newsworld and give the talented team a chance to turn it into a news network that’s hot 24/7. We’re one of the oldest specialty channels in the country with awareness levels that don’t match TSN or some of the newer arrivals.

Position as a hot network 24/7. Appetite for transparency and the real story, repositioning it in news – making it at the front of the line so it can be constantly evolving and breaking news as it stands. We’re also rebranding it. Again: CBC Newsworld, no awareness.

WOMAN: Been at Newsworld a year and a half. What we plan to do: New branding. Everything about Newsworld in terms of scheduling changes takes place as of September 2009. Values of being 24/7, hot, and live. Daytime about live events and breaking news. Morning news will set the agenda, like World Report. Stories unfold as they happen. Newsworld will not wait for the definitive word on anything before we report the story. We’ll tell you what we know when we know it and tell you how we know it.

Prime time is more personality-driven, context, understanding, opinion, debate, interaction with audiences. Net investment in the prime-time strategy. Development there starts in January.

Newsworld and online being the first priority as news breaks. Give the network an authentic, Canadian feel. Also applies to our international bureaus.

Fundamental principle to cover local news stories when they break – propane explosion in Toronto, shutdown of the subway in Montreal. Survival information. Inherently interesting to people in those communities and inherently interesting to people across the country.

• Bottom of screen in [inverse? flipped?] L shape: Local weather, local news and “survival information.” Obviously dependent on capital funding and some technical things that I don’t completely understand.
• Changing our presentation style. Less formal. “Far more accessible.” Transparency, open up the process, pose questions. Like Suhana Meharchand’s show during the election. She could move around and engage people on the assignment desk.
• Physical space we’re talking about developing is much more open. Host freed from behind the desk.
• Much more modern style in look, tone, language. “The story is developing. We’re on it. Don’t move away!” 75% of people who watch the channel are grazers. Grab those people and keep them there.
• Strategic relationships with CBC.CA for breaking news and live events.
• McGUIRE: We know that the biggest growth is in the CP24-style specialty channel. (Hopes to get the funding for the L-shaped screen.)
  • CBCNews.CA: Digital space as complete CBC News brand experience. Peaks at certain times of the day, different from competitors’. Map it against staffing and when stuff gets refreshed, you see why. The expectation online is “constantly updating and fresh.”
  • More in a local digital presence for CBC News. Hierarchy of viewers’ needs: Local, national/international, documentary/current affairs. We know from research we’re underdelivering locally.

Local: One of our strengths and one of our challenges. The message today is an investment message.

MORRISON: 24/7. Means our coverage capacity will be increased to 24/7 across the country. Covering off whatever blind spots we have right now.

• Full integration of local news resources. Already exists in varying degrees. Try to bring everybody up to the same level. Lines up around the hub. Local management of all resources, but against some defined accountabilities and expectations.
• Local online: The first-up for content. Content goes first for online rather than being held for broadcast. Want to put online a breaking-news ticker – a landing pad for everything that comes across the assignment desk. Implies a redesigned local experience.
• Extend through the drive period. 6:30 local newscast and a 7:00 blend of national and local. [He used a radio term and explained it “for non-radio people.”]
• Local news runs across the top of the hour to hold on to the audience. Position late local TV as being the first up in every market. Builds on Vancouver’s 11:00. Live reports. Runs around 10 minutes. Heavily formatted.
• Local TV news updates beginning at 4 PM all the way to newscast. Live, and with real updated content.

McGUIRE: Writing a development bible right now for all projects. Full-scale development happens in January.

Q&A

• Q. from NATALIE CLANCY, CBC Vancouver: Jonathan, how will this 10 minutes work on The National? Sounds really exciting. Last 10 minutes of the program? Right now we do 5 minutes right at 11:00, but starting earlier sounds brilliant. Local news beginning for 10 minutes before 11.

  A. This will all be modelled in development. Start before 11 when there’s a natural turn in the audience and carry it over the top of the clock.

• Q. Which markets are you thinking? All markets?

  [Not answered.]

• Q. from WOMAN: I just wanted to ensure that our coverage of aboriginal people changes as well. Native people, while our numbers may be small, our history makes us significant, and we occupy land where most of Canada’s wealth comes from. Land claims here in Ontario are holding up a lot of development here. The stories we tell are relevant to many Canadians. Don’t reach for the regular grab bag of drugs, dependency, failure and look for new things such as success stories in education despite the fact there’s been no new money for education in ten years and a doubling in population. [Continues for some time.] (Applause.)

  A. I totally agree with you.

• Q. from SUSAN OAKES, CBC News Online: Who’s going to read this on Global tomorrow?

  A. Yeah, it’s a secret from them. And that’s a tricky thing with a news organization. It’s not, obviously, going to be a secret forever. When (everything is ready) we’re going to invite them in and show it to them. There’s a huge amount of work yet to be done. Everybody out there in Global, in CTV, in CITY would love to know what we’re talking about now, because that would give them huge advantages in terms of trying to counter what we’re doing. These are competitively sensitive issues, and I think if we want to succeed we are more likely to succeed if we are quiet about them.

  But we’ve been trying to be much, much more open in terms of what’s going on in the organization. We gave people a day-long briefing, put them up on iO, put up second-quarter results. If you can talk openly this way we can all engage in a much richer and much fuller kind of conversation collectively.

  WOMAN: We’re going into a development process. Things might change. We’d like to tell the CBC story, but would like it to be a concrete story.

• Q. from DEREK STOFFEL: We’re working for 18 million different deadlines already. Talk to us about workload.

  A. Assignment desk will handle that. I have no problem with eight CBC resources being at an event (if we can justify that). (Mentions one news event where it was decided many platforms could be done by one person. But might need to assign different people in other cases.) The integration expectation is not you do something every day for every platform. Internally you can’t be the one who wanders around the building making sure different places get your content. The next phase of the hub is supposed to do that – take your soundbite and put it through the system.

• [Ignored another question, which sounded like a plant, about how this is going to work.]

PETER MANSBRIDGE: You didn’t have to clap. I was asked if I would participate and I wasn’t told what to say and I didn’t decide what to say (until just now). I could ask Richard for round two of our discussions from earlier this year.

I guess what I want to say after listening to this and after this great process of the last few months, I don’t think any department of the corporation is being asked to adapt to change more than we have, especially over the last 15 years. Budgetary, technological. We have to handle them at our own level. Change can be difficult and can hurt sometimes. Change with research background is a good thing. Doesn’t mean research will tell you exactly what to do, but it gives you the tools to discuss, as this group is already doing, based on the kind of data that’s come up.

Some of that material strikes us as far from the way others perceive us. We find that odd and we question it. We know none of our competitors do that. So we are different. But we can’t be blind to the fact that there are things that are happening in our world, broadcast, online, where our viewers, readers, are expecting change. In some cases they’re ahead of us.

(Our numbers are good.) Online, they’re almost crashing [the site] because there’s so many people trying to get on. Great organizations don’t stand still. Here we’ve got data. Work toward some of these changes. I think it’s exciting. We’ve faced that kind of stuff before, and some of us have been through a lot. When we were told with a couple of weeks’ notice we were going to 9:00, changing the format, changing the name, it was based on no research, but we had to deal with it. Terrible. We all know we can lose an audience. It can happen overnight and take years to get it back. We have to be careful. But it’s an exciting time that lies ahead and I’m looking forward to it. That’s all I have to say.

• Q. from JOHN CORCELLI, CBC Archives: Renewing Patrick Brown and Don Murray?

  A. This is the last place to talk about personalities, but we hope we can continue our relationship with Don and Patrick.

• Q. from MAN: With a 24/7 news operation, you run into quiet times and where there’s a struggle to fill the time. How do you reconcile the 24/7 operation with good, high-quality content?

  McGUIRE: We will have newscasts 24/7 on Newsworld but not wall to wall.

• Q. from WOMAN about engaging with younger people, not just 35–49s.

  McGUIRE: That’s the mean age for talk-radio listeners. When we talk about broadening the audiences, it’s doing so beyond 50+ and 65+. That’s a loyal audience for us but we’re a public broadcaster and we’re paid for by all Canadians. I do believe in programming trends. Be specific enough about who you’re speaking to. Don’t compromise the journalism, just position it in places that are relevant to people.

  MAN: Traditional TV and radio, for that audience it’s just not there.

  MAN 2: Biggest consumers of mobile and Internet-based platforms are younger.