Journal: News & Comment

How the CBC can learn from its lockout

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Tod Maffin said he would take a break after the CBC and its union reached a tentative agreement to end its seven-week lockout last week, after a remarkable web-based PR campaign that the union knocked out of the park. But he couldn't really: here's his Future of the CBC blog.

His first question is: "How does the CBC embrace the spirit of open-source communication without risking tarnishing its reputation as a trusted source of reliable, accurate information?"

I'm not sure how to answer. My first question is related, but different: how can we listeners continue to get at the disparate voices we were able to hear from locked-out CBC workers now that the network is coming back online? Will it return to the regional info-blocks it had before, where I never heard the fabulous local broadcasters from CBC North or Newfoundland or Ottawa? If so, that would be a shame.

I think the CBC needs to find a way to become more granular, so that people like me can choose more easily if we want to listen to or watch our own local shows and the usual national ones, or some mix of national, local, and other regional programming. And then of course we need to be able to get involved too—I doubt my music would have been played on the CBC without the lockout, for instance, but now I'm interested in figuring out how to get it there on the regular airwaves. (I've already received some good advice about that from a CBCer—I'll post more later.)

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