Tuesday, September 25, 2007

More media ranting

So the CBC finally put up the Northwest Passage story, at 11:58 eastern. (Thanks, Shani.) That's exactly 2 minutes before the National aired on Newsworld in Vancouver.

This is exactly the kind of behaviour you expect to see from an institution that simply doesn't take the Internet seriously. At best, the CBC is seeing the Internet as nothing more than an adjunct to it's legacy broadcast functions. Maybe the website is only update every day at midnight -- though that's even worse, frankly, than what I think is probably the real reason for these kinds of delays: a fear that putting a page up on the web would cannibalize TV viewers.

Well, that's a real enough concern in this case, because the web-hosted page has absolutely nothing that the broadcast didn't -- I'd be far better off reading the web page than watching the broadcast version.

But you'd think that the CBC would pay some attention to what's actually going on in the media world -- the NY Times has just opened up a huge chunk of it's formerly-protected content to the Internet, because they make more money from "incidental" traffic (Googlers, blog links) than they did from subcriptions. The Guardian in the UK has an extraordinary online policy, and then you've got the sleepy little CBC which seems to not be getting it.

I don't want to dump too much on the CBC, because there are some high points -- the CBC's podcasts are fairly popular. But when you've got a 24-hours news channel (Newsworld) there's no excuse for the web to be your dumping ground.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think part of your problem is an ongoing problem for the CBC: it's large and I get lost in its website. Did you even know there was a whole site dedicated to this arctic topic? It's on The National's home page site. I bookmarked The National so I can see what's on. Same likewise with Dispatches and The Hour and Metro Morning.