Lights, camera...robots?
Canwest's new cuts bring sci-fi to local news
BY Derek Rosin
Illustration by Matthew Daley
Your local news may soon be coming to you with a sci-fi twist. Media giant Canwest has announced plans to lay off 200 employees in regional newsrooms, in favour of a high-tech system that uses robotic cameras controlled from four broadcast centres. Local newscasts will be controlled through Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Edmonton, which means Saskatoon’s newscast, for example, will be produced from Ontario.
According to an internal email circulated to staff, the new set-up will feature “virtual reality” sets, with anchors reading the news in front of green-screen technology.
The move comes as debt-ridden Canwest tries to cut costs in the wake of its purchase of entertainment giant Alliance Atlantis, in conjunction with New York investment bank Goldman Sachs. By that agreement, the more profitable Canwest becomes by 2011, the greater the share of Alliance Atlantis it will receive.
Ian Morrison, spokesperson for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, says the Alliance merger is structured to “lower the quantity and quality of Canadian broadcasting,” since the fastest way to increase profitability is to gut newsrooms.
In November 2007, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP), which also represents workers in broadcasting, launched a complaint with the CRTC. CEP claims that by centralizing production in the broadcast centres and reducing news-gathering, Canwest is violating terms set by the CRTC, and the union is seeking public hearings to investigate.
Kathy Dore, Canwest’s president of television, asserts in the internal message that the company is committed to “high-quality local news in all of our local markets,” but CEP vice-president of media Peter Murdoch is unconvinced. “They’re gutting the people who gather and shape the news,” he says. “The idea that quality and quantity of programming won’t be affected is nonsense.”
