It's a sleepy Sunday afternoon, with a lot of distractions (The Grey Cup, The Santa Claus Parade, the NFL, World Cup Soccer etc.) and a huge number of rerolls and paid programming. Add to that, most of the radio regulars are off for the weekend. So it's to 640's great credit that they went live with the breaking news about the CUPE strike settlement, which came minutes after the deadline that would have kept kids out of school on Monday.

They had executive producer Jason Chapman live on air doing an actual honest-to-goodness show, with some help from Alex Pierson and Greg Brady, telling their audience the news they needed to know. CityNews 680 also had the story and both covered Stephen Lecce's live presser. 640 took the CUPE press conference as well, which 680 did not. 

And what of Ontario's once "Authoritative News Voice?" CFRB continued with Marc Saltzman's pre-recorded computer show, and apparently never told their audience about the breakthrough. Another black mark on 1010 and another checkmark for the Corus station. 

It used to be the other way around. But Bell's cuts to CFRB continue to be heard - or rather not heard - on air. You can't do breaking news when you have nobody in the newsroom to break it. And the CTV people were too close to their own air time to break in.

So good for 640. That was a real service to listeners. Now that the education workers are coming back, perhaps Bell should take a lesson. 

[Update: For some inexplicable reason, Global News led off with a promo for the annual Santa Claus parade(!) before getting to the CUPE settlement. Absolutely baffling. City TV led with the non-strike agreement.]