Top CBC executive leaves broadcaster

[GAP]

I think this whole thing could summed up by one of the comments

8/8/2010 9:58:00 PM
Would somebody explain to me why we need a government run TV network requiring a billion $ subsidy in the 21st century?

Top CBC executive leaves broadcaster
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/television/top-cbc-executive-leaves-broadcaster/article1664551/
Guy Dixon

Globe and Mail Update Published on Friday, Aug. 06, 2010 2:20PM EDT Last updated on Friday, Aug. 06, 2010 8:30PM EDT

Richard Stursberg has left his position as head of CBC’s English-language services, in the wake of a new five-year strategic plan under development for both the CBC and its French-language Radio-Canada counterpart.

His boss, Hubert Lacroix, the CBC’s president and chief executive officer, with whom he’d often clashed, issued a statement saying that Mr. Stursberg “shook the foundation of the organization … attacked conventional wisdom and uprooted whole parts of the internal culture.”

Although Friday’s announcement came as a shock to CBC staff, there were long-standing tensions between Mr. Stursberg’s aggressive focus on ratings and Mr. Lacroix’s emphasis on consensus building and his statements on the CBC as a public service, insiders said.

Mr. Stursberg’s departure is widely believed to have been acrimonious. The announcement noted that it was effective immediately, and the CBC’s Toronto Broadcast Centre was abuzz with rumours among staff that Mr. Stursberg had been escorted from the building.

A senior executive at the public broadcaster who worked closely with both men described the relationship between Mr. Stursberg and Mr. Lacroix as being, at best, “like a marriage, they tried and it didn’t work.”

The five-year strategic review brought that tension to a head.

~~~
The changes on CBC-TV are widely viewed as Mr. Stursberg’s main legacy.

“I see this as a sign that perhaps the [CBC board of directors] and Hubert Lacroix analyzed Stursberg’s approach, and they gave him time to do it,” said Lise Lareau, national president of the Canadian Media Guild, a union that represents CBC staff. “They’ve watched a few seasons of what his plan was leading to. And they decided – I’m hoping – that enough is enough and that perhaps it’s harder to distinguish the CBC from its commercial counterparts with the way Stursberg’s been programming the network.”

 

[Old Sweat]

If I can be excused for musing out loud, it is passing strange that a network would fire the executive who managed to increase its ratings dramatically. I guess in the CBC world the normal economic rules don't apply. The following story is posted under the Fair Comments provision of the Copyright Act:

CBC axes exec for ratings success

By DAVID AKIN, Parliamentary Bureau Chief
   

OTTAWA – By the measure that matters to most television executives, Richard Stursberg was a big hit at CBC: A lot more people are watching now than when he started.

And yet, Stursberg was canned by the CBC on Friday after nearly six years as executive vice-president of English-language services, apparently because he was too good at getting more people to watch the programming that Canadian taxpayers subsidize to the tune of $1 billion a year.

He was “the most disruptive and hated V.P. of CBC I can ever remember,” former TV producer Howard Bernstein wrote on his blog.

And yet, when Stursberg arrived at CBC in October 2004, an average of 215,000 Canadians were watching the main network at any given minute during the day. For the 12-month period ending July 10, CBC was drawing an average minute audience, as it’s called in the trade, of 328,000, a jump of 52%.

As for CBC television’s overall market share, it grew 34% over the Stursberg’s tenure.

At CBC, that kind of ratings success doesn’t get you a bonus, it gets you a pink slip. 
 

During Stursberg’s tenure, he fought with the union and locked them out; he made Peter Mansbridge stand up to deliver the news; and had ratings winners with Dragon’s Den and Battle of the Blades. News programs got new looks and new time slots but there was little money, if any, for new reporters to find new scoops.

Mansbridge's newscast still draws only half of what Lloyd Robertson does over at CTV National News but still, compared to when he started, Stursberg leaves Mansbridge with 14% more viewers.

Now that he’s gone, the focus turns to Hubert Lacroix, CBC’s CEO since 2008 and the man who let Stursberg go. Until now, Lacroix has yet to make his mark on the public broadcaster.

“There’s now a sense he’s willing to stand up for the public side of broadcasting,” a news executive said, speaking on condition he not be identified.

In CBC-speak “the public side of broadcasting” is code for the kind of non-commercial, public interest role that CBC’s critics say is elitist and out-of-touch.

Stursberg’s departure, the news executive said, will likely be seen as an opportunity to “roll things back” to the days when CBC cared less about ratings.

 

[Spanky]

It's time to make the CBC go it alone, and if they make it, great, good on them, if not, too bad so sad.  But they need to do it without having to rely on taxpayers to subsidize them.

 

[Neill McKay]

It's time to make the CBC go it alone, and if they make it, great, good on them, if not, too bad so sad.  But they need to do it without having to rely on taxpayers to subsidize them.

If you want profit to be the sole objective of every broadcaster in the country then that would be a sound strategy.  As for me, I'm glad there is at least one broadcaster whose clients are the listeners and viewers.  That's certainly not the case with commercial broadcasters.  Commercial broadcasters' listeners and viewers are the product.  The clients are the advertisers.

There is value to programming that has some other purpose than to attract the maximum audience share and thereby the largest product to be sold to advertisers.

 

[vonGarvin]

There is value to programming that has some other purpose than to attract the maximum audience share and thereby the largest product to be sold to advertisers.

I agree that the lowest common denominator be the sole purpose for all broadcasters; however, those are called specialty channels.  There is "OUTTV" which caters to homosexuals, bisexuals and transgendered, there is "SPACE" which caters to fans of science fiction, there is...and so on.  Each such channel is value-added to the overall worth of broadcasting in Canada.  Having said that, it's not worth one billion dollars (one thousand million dollars!) of taxpayer money to be a voice of Canada.  This especially since what the CBC broadcasts is arguably left-leaning.  (I'd be saying the same thing if it were right-leaning, or any leaning for that matter).
I'm not saying that the CBC in particular, and Radio Canada in general, are not worth having.  I'm just a bit wary of spending so much money when the CBC could be turned into a profit-making network of print, electronic and broadcast media.

 

[Good2Golf]

If the CBC more closely mirrored the conduct of the BBC, including widely varied programming and arguably one of the most even news reporting agencies in the world, I would feel better about the billion dollars funding the corporation today.

Regards
G2G