RadioActive wrote:

I know it's easy to be a critic of a TV newscast from the outside, but honestly, I have to wonder what's going on at Toronto's CFTO news. 

It reminds me of their recent use of Jessica Smith, who is constantly being sent out to cover openings of various arts events across the city, which I consider a waste of airtime. But even if you think it's a great idea, the coverage is often baffling.

She interviews an artist or a sculptor or a creator of some new mural, as they pretentiously chat about what "inspired them." The problem? They never show the damn artwork until the last few seconds. In other words, the very point of being there barely gets shown until the segment is over.

A few weeks ago, they did the unveiling of a new mural in part of the city that escapes me. They spent at least two minutes talking about its colours and how long it took to put up. But they failed to show it to viewers until the bitter end. Why?

Wouldn't it be better for the audience to see it first without talking and talking about something you haven't shown them? It just doesn't make any sense. 

Love CTV News or hate it, it's certainly been a bizarre week at Channel Nine Court. I'd love to know why these kinds of things keep happening over there. These problem don't seem to plague other stations. 

 
This is where the News Director should be doing their job. During my years at Citytv/MuchMusic, we had very specific shots that according to Moses Znaimer, (executive producer),had to be included in a report/segment. For starters, we had to show the viewer “where we are”, i.e. an establishing shot of some sort, then it was “show, don’t tell”, in other words, let the viewer see what your talking about. I find tv news coverage in general has slipped in the past few years, maybe due to cutbacks, but if you still have a job in a tv newsroom, please put some effort into it, some of us are still watching!

Didn't catch the CTV local news in Calgary, but both Globals local package and CBC Calgary were superior to what their networks do in Toronto.  Now I was only there for six days and I only watched a few of the casts but first impressions do stay with you.  The radio in Calgary and area was on par and in some cases better than Toronto IMO.

My beef is the repetative nature of foreground programming these days.
I remember when stations prided themselves with coming up with something different from their rivals.
The obvious big stories had to be covered of course, but the individual stations had their own fresh ides too.
Now, you have all the talk shows on the same subjects.
There is also a frustrating sameness.
The topics of health care, school boards, crime just rotate day after day after day.
What this says to me is there are just such small staffs in both radio and TV that you no longer have show producers who really do some digging to come up with some good stuff that just gets buried because it is not "easy" to do some research.
Also there's the "easy" feature of having so-called pundit panels all discussing the same topics.
I don't need to hear what the head of some media consulting firm has to say, or some pollster.
It's become even more absurd when completely unqualified people are brought onto panels, like bringing on the resident weather forecaster or traffic reporter.
I do want to hear what regular people have to say, which is what talk programs are supposed to be all about.
Then I don't want some talk show host talking over them and hanging up.
(I'm looking at you, Agar.)
Growing up in Vancouver we had what I call "real" talk radio.
People like Jack Webster, Pat Burns and Barry Clark.
They just opened up the phone lines and took on anybody on any topic.
And they had real experience to back up their views too, as opposed to being hot house plants who started off as producers, then learned to have "opinions" to get their own shows.





 

ED1 wrote:

Binson Echorec wrote:

Binson Echorec wrote:

So Bell sent two representatives to Seattle? Melissa Duggan is there for CP24. One reporter should be enough to cover for all outlets.

Last night I caught a post game report from Rahim Ladhani on CP24, making Bell's decision to send two people to Seattle even more baffling to me.

paterson1 wrote:

Didn't catch the CTV local news in Calgary, but both Globals local package and CBC Calgary were superior to what their networks do in Toronto.  Now I was only there for six days and I only watched a few of the casts but first impressions do stay with you.  The radio in Calgary and area was on par and in some cases better than Toronto IMO.

Beware of tourist-ear (to steal a term from RadioAaron). I find I'm much more easily impressed by radio and TV when traveling, mainly because everything sounds so fresh. I wonder if Calgarians would think positively about Toronto media versus their own.

I find I’m generally impressed with Toronto radio, especially the news radio stations. In comparison to what we have in Calgary, 680’s readers are really smooth and keep the whole all-news rhythm going. TV on the other hand I’m not that impressed with (except for CP24). Every TV newscast has some kind of flaw that I can’t really get past.

And regarding CTV Calgary, they consistently put out good newscasts. They even have TWO certified meteorologists, and can muster up full-ins if either of them are away (take notes CFTO).

I know CTV London and CTV Windsor both have certified meteorologists and they share Julie Atchison and Gary Archibald for both stations. For CTV Kitchener they don’t have a meteorologist they instead have a “Weather Specalist” and yes CTV Kitchener had a lot of different Weather presenters over the past years. For London radio AM980 is the only AM station in the city and it is more of a talk station now since they ditched the non-stop morning news and afternoon news sometime ago after COVID and 1290 CJBK shut down back in 2023. For CBC London they have a local morning show and they have a regional afternoon show for Southwestern Ontario. Now for K/W radio they have 570AM that does have a non-stop morning news and afternoon news. Then they air shows like the Mike Farwell show and they simulcast it on Rogers TV. CBC Kitchener only has a local morning show and the afternoon show is from CBC Toronto. In comparison for London and K/W I do find Kitchener’s AM570 wins and CBC London’s wins and AM980 and CBC K/W’s loses.

I was just writing the exact same post. Lindsay Morrison launched into a forecast directly in front of a group of intense drummers and you could not hear a word she said. The pounding percussion completely drowned her out and viewers were treated to nothing but noise - albeit noise with a steady beat. 

Worse, when it became clear she was inaudible, they stayed with the live hit, when sensibly they should have immediately gone back to one of the anchors, who were properly mic-ed. So for at least a minute, all you heard were drumbeats. And the weather? Well, your guess is as good as mine. 

I simply cannot figure out how what the producers are thinking over there on a regular basis. It seems whenever there's a decision to be made, they too often make the wrong one. 

Usually these things are signs of low morale, people going through the motions, or even malicious compliance.

RadioAaron wrote:

Usually these things are signs of low morale, people going through the motions, or even malicious compliance.

There is one other possibility. I call it "the cascade effect." It happens when one thing goes wrong (like the bad weather hit), leaving the folks in the studio scrambling to fix it. While they're distracted there, something else goes wrong with the next one or two things, and by the time they get back on track, the entire show has gone down the drain. 

It's like a snowball rolling down a mountain and winding up as a huge ice boulder. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Not saying that's what went on here, but I've been in control rooms where that's happened. It's a nightmare. 

OK, this one may be a niggling complaint, but CFTO's 11:30 newscast after the win started with about 10 secs. of the final out and then Rahim Ladhani outside the dome surrounded by screaming fans going nuts. And that was fine. But it went on and on and on with drunken louts yelling into his mic. 

What was missing? The highlights of the game and the Springer dinger that won it all. You might think they would have shown that first and then gone to the mayhem in the streets. But no. It took them a full six minutes of people screaming to finally show the home run.

You'd think they might not want to wait that long to show the most important moment of the season and one of the biggest in team history. 

Instead, we got 360 seconds of unintelligible screeching. Not how I would have done it off the top.

RadioActive wrote:

Springer dinger

I wish to hear this phrase exactly zero more times.