There is so much devastation resulting from BCE’s cuts announced this week: 1,300 positions eliminated, many in the Bell Media division, to begin with. The closure of foreign bureaus and the loss of so much talent. The complete shutdown of six radio stations, which once made important contributions to their communities. And the sale of another three, including Hamilton’s CKOC, which I grew up listening to from Toronto – and later worked for.
Which brings me to another significant loss to the journalism ecosystem.
When it announced Bell’s bloodbath, management said it would bring in a “single newsroom approach across brands,” calling it a “consolidation” of news gathering and delivery.
This business of consolidating newsrooms (those that were left) has me thinking about what starting a career in broadcast journalism used to look like in this country – what so many of my peers and I learned in those newsrooms that are being disappeared.
We learned how to cover city council, courts, police incidents. And more mundane community happenings.
We worked so hard and were paid so very little. But we learned: How to do interviews. How to write news stories – what to put at the top, what to include, what to leave out. What made a good clip or quote. And how to do it fast, too: we delivered two or more newscasts an hour. Maybe sports, too. I learned a lot about sports in those jobs.
Of course, these newsrooms were not meant to be training grounds. But for many of us, they were. And some big media stars came out of them. If you’ve heard Dan Shulman call baseball games on Sportsnet or ESPN, know that he learned his chops in the tiny radio newsroom of CKBB in Barrie, Ont. (part of our daily routine when we both worked there was recording local obituaries).
This week, I reached out to some of the people I worked with in those places, people who continued on to great careers in journalism and beyond. We reminisced about lessons learned, mistakes made, and how those experiences shaped us. And what the loss of those newsrooms means to those communities – and to fledgling journalists.
Doug Farraway, my news director in Hamilton, recalled a day when our then-bustling newsroom covered no fewer than 13 local stories. “For us to go to those 13 events, we connected with people. You not only connected, but you made contacts. That person might have called you back and said: ‘Do you know that there’s a fire?’ All that stuff is being totally lost,” he said.
Mr. Farraway told me that at the height of that news operation, there were at least 12 full-time staff and about four part-timers. “When I left, there were three-and-a-half bodies left.”
In the small radio newsrooms of Ontario, I made a lot of mistakes. In Barrie, I mispronounced the name for the people of Croatia – Croats – for I don’t know how long. In Newmarket, I thought I had taped an entire interview with the local MP and failed to record any of it. I once, horrifyingly, got the giggles in the middle of delivering a newscast.
I had the luxury of making these mistakes in small markets (and before the internet). I learned from them and grew, so that when I hit the big time – Toronto! – I had some experience and a tiny bit of confidence. But I kept learning. I am still learning.
Mr. Farraway also had some great mistake stories (we all do). Like how, in 1975, on his second day on the job, he pronounced the word “communiqué” – this was in relation to the Vietnam War – “comm-yue-neek.”
Another former colleague told me that when the Berlin Wall fell, he made that the top story in his newscast and received a talking-to from a senior manager. Always lead local, he was told.
There was a lot of laughter as we recalled these stories, but they didn’t seem funny at the time. We were so earnest, hard-working, ambitious. We were sponges, learning from the more senior people we were fortunate to work with.
And the listeners endured our sometimes-convoluted writing and pronunciation errors so they could learn what was going on in their communities. We delivered that, if a little bumpily, at times.
What’s happened at Bell Media has become a familiar story. This is hardly the beginning of the disappearance of local broadcast newsrooms. Nor will it be the end.
This week, the Hamilton Spectator reported that Mohawk College is suspending its first-year journalism program, citing declining enrolment and bleak job prospects.
For listeners, readers and viewers, this all adds up to fewer local stories, voices and angles. Many stories will go unreported completely. That’s good news for governments and other organizations that will be able to get away with more, because nobody’s left to ask questions.