The Southern Ontario/WNY Radio-TV Forum » CTV Toronto: Weather Or Not

RadioActive · August 7, 2023 7:45 pm

Anyone who has read my previous rants about TV weather knows it's one of the most important parts of a newscast for me. So I was very disappointed the past few days by what CTV Toronto passed off as its "forecast."

I realize it's a holiday weekend and people are off, but they didn't have any weather anchor on their Friday noon show, none at all on Saturday and Sunday's 6 & 11 PM editions, and they were MIA again on both of Monday's shows.

Instead, the weather forecast was delivered by anchor Rahim Ladhani, who clearly was seeing the maps for the first time. At one point, he had to deliver verbal cues to the control room while it was going on, asking them "to advance to the next one." He clearly sounded like he had no idea what he was talking about and was just reading the boards off the cuff as they came up.

And then on Monday, he was back at it again, telling the audience it was 18 degrees in "Wharton." Except it was actually Wiarton, not exactly an obscure place given that Ontario's Groundhog Day has taken place there for decades.

I'm not blaming Ladhani, who was doing his best. But he has enough to do fronting an entire newscast, besides ad libbing weather. It's embarrassing enough not to have a weather person during a Long Weekend when it matters most. But it's even worse when you're in the biggest broadcast market in Canada and one of the largest in North America. Why they couldn't temporarily borrow someone from CP24 is beyond me.

I don't know of any other station that does this, even if they have to assign a regular reporter to the duty. But at least they know what's coming and get to prepare for the segment. What a disservice to CTV's audience.

Perhaps Bell doesn't know which way the wind is blowing. Maybe they would if they had a weather person present.

paterson1 · August 7, 2023 8:25 pm

CTV Kitchener had a weather forecaster all weekend long including for the 6 o'clock package tonight. Tyler Kelaher was outside live for the preview and inside for the forecast. He was on Sunday for both 6 and 11:30 casts.

Sijia Lu anchored tonight and I believe both casts yesterday. The first story tonight had a live report regarding a suspicious fire in town. This evenings newscast was only half an hour for the holiday and not the usual two hours from 5-7pm. CTV London had no news today.

mic'em · August 7, 2023 8:53 pm

CTV Barrie had the week in review. I switched to CFTO.

haydenmatthews14 · August 7, 2023 9:38 pm

paterson1 wrote:
CTV Kitchener had a weather forecaster all weekend long including for the 6 o'clock package tonight. Tyler Kelaher was outside live for the preview and inside for the forecast. He was on Sunday for both 6 and 11:30 casts.

Sijia Lu anchored tonight and I believe both casts yesterday. The first story tonight had a live report regarding a suspicious fire in town. This evenings newscast was only half an hour for the holiday and not the usual two hours from 5-7pm. CTV London had no news today.

Same with Windsor they had no news today as well. I noticed that CTV Barrie had news but why not London or Windsor? I guess both London and Windsor have the same news director. My only complaint about CTV London’s newscast on the weekends is that they have the anchor do the weather but if my memory serves correctly I think until 2017 or 2018 they had the anchor do the weather which still happens to this day even CTV Barrie’s weekend anchor does the weather too on the weekend newscasts.

haydenmatthews14 · August 7, 2023 9:40 pm

mic'em wrote:
CTV Barrie had the week in review. I switched to CFTO.

Really? What a boring type of newscast to air. Even CTV London couldn’t air that type of newscast on a holiday Monday.

RadioActive · August 7, 2023 9:56 pm

haydenmatthews14 wrote:
I guess both London and Windsor have the same news director.

The ND of CTV London is Tom McConnell, who spent over two decades doing an afternoon talk show at CKTB in St. Catharines. I still miss his program. Shame he lost CJBK.

From his Linked-In page:

haydenmatthews14 · August 8, 2023 10:52 am

RadioActive wrote:
haydenmatthews14 wrote:
I guess both London and Windsor have the same news director.
The ND of CTV London is Tom McConnell, who spent over two decades doing an afternoon talk show at CKTB in St. Catharines. I still miss his program. Shame he lost CJBK.

From his Linked-In page:

Surprised that it still shows that he is Program Director at the now defunct CJBK on his profile. I think the former news director Daniel Cress who was the news director at CTV Windsor moved to CTV Kitchener along with Sijia Liu. I believe the regional news director is Kristin Weaver who I believe is based out of CTV London. Her name appears during the credits at the end of a CTV London CTV Windsor and CTV Kitchener newscast.

RadioActive · August 8, 2023 11:07 am

I've found over the years that people who are busy and employed often forget to update their Linked-In pages. I'm assuming that's what happened in this case.

haydenmatthews14 · August 13, 2023 12:48 pm

Okay so on Saturday’s CFTO’s news at 6 they had no one in the weather department again. So they had fill in anchor Pauline Chan do the weather which she kind of stuttered a bit but otherwise did a fine job. Meanwhile at CKCO in K-W Colton Weins was anchoring the 6PM news while Sijia Liu was doing the weather forecasts. And on CFPL TV in London they had a regional news at 6 done out of London with Amandelina Letterio and on the 11PM news they had Sanjay Maru do the regional news out of Windsor.

RadioActive · August 13, 2023 1:21 pm

I saw Ms. Chan and she clearly wasn't comfortable. When she would come to the end of a board, she would be phumphering around for anything to say until they switched to the next graphic. I found it awkward and obvious that she hadn't seen it before, didn't know what she was talking about and it was confusing to the viewer. This is not something to try and ad lib.

That's why they have someone fulltime whose job it is to prepare for this segment and nothing more. When it goes off the rails you can tell. At the very least, whoever is operating the change needs to lead the anchors, because otherwise they seem to run out of things to say and then it just gets awkward.

Said it before and worth saying again - it's an absolute embarrassment that what they purport to be the #1 newscast in the #1 market in the country does not have a weather person on the weekend. Especially when there were storm, hail and even tornado warnings for some parts of the province on Saturday. Awful. Bell should be ashamed of itself.

ED1 · August 13, 2023 11:34 pm

haydenmatthews14 wrote:
Okay so on Saturday’s CFTO’s news at 6 they had no one in the weather department again. So they had fill in anchor Pauline Chan do the weather which she kind of stuttered a bit but otherwise did a fine job. Meanwhile at CKCO in K-W Colton Weins was anchoring the 6PM news while Sijia Liu was doing the weather forecasts. And on CFPL TV in London they had a regional news at 6 done out of London with Amandelina Letterio and on the 11PM news they had Sanjay Maru do the regional news out of Windsor.

Why doesn't CTV get the Kitchener or London weather presenters to at least pre-tape a forecast for CTV Toronto? As mentioned above, it makes zero sense for smaller markets to have weather anchors on weekends but the flagship station in the network doesn't.

paterson1 · August 14, 2023 9:31 am

ED1 wrote:
haydenmatthews14 wrote:
Okay so on Saturday’s CFTO’s news at 6 they had no one in the weather department again. So they had fill in anchor Pauline Chan do the weather which she kind of stuttered a bit but otherwise did a fine job. Meanwhile at CKCO in K-W Colton Weins was anchoring the 6PM news while Sijia Liu was doing the weather forecasts. And on CFPL TV in London they had a regional news at 6 done out of London with Amandelina Letterio and on the 11PM news they had Sanjay Maru do the regional news out of Windsor.
Why doesn't CTV get the Kitchener or London weather presenters to at least pre-tape a forecast for CTV Toronto? As mentioned above, it makes zero sense for smaller markets to have weather anchors on weekends but the flagship station in the network doesn't.

That's a good point. CTV affiliates do the weather for CTV News Channel all the time. Shouldn't be a big deal if the forecaster for Kitchener or Ottawa did the weather for Toronto on weekends.

Stinand · August 14, 2023 12:23 pm

I have a weather app 24 hours a day, all weather all the time...

haydenmatthews14 · November 2, 2023 2:54 am

And it looks like CTV London got worse. Julie Atchison was off tonight so they had Amandelina Letterio as a fill in. To me she does not bad but during the 11PM newscast she went a little too quick she forgot to show the satellite radar instead she just jumped ahead to the 7 Day Forecast part of the weather segment. So yeah a little too quick on the weather segement there.

dieter · November 3, 2023 11:03 pm

CTV Toronto also makes it tough to follow the weather forecast when Jessica Smith does it -- mostly on weekends. She talks far too fast.

haydenmatthews14 · November 5, 2023 1:30 pm

Last night's CTV Kitchener's news at 6. They could not show the weather graphics or the weather radar for some reason possibly due to the move to the new location. Instead they just had their tower camera spin around in a loop.