In 1975, an irreverent U.S. broadcaster named Lorenzo Milam decided to write a book that would serve as a how-to guide on how to start up a non-commercial radio station on a shoestring budget. He decided to call the book Sex and Broadcasting because, as his aunt advised him, the mere suggestion of sex would automatically double the book’s sales and quadruple its readership.
Milam’s aunt couldn’t have been all that wrong. Sex and Broadcasting became something of a classic among its niche audience, and Milam’s book of advice is still considered a valuable reference nearly 40 years later.
The makers of Tom Ford Neroli Portofino body oil are likely hoping that their racy advertising campaign will also double sales and quadruple product use. The ad shown below, which appeared in the London Evening Standard on April 19, a free newspaper distributed at London Underground stations, depicts a young nude couple, with parts of their anatomy not printable in a respectable newspaper cleverly concealed, dousing each other with the product.
London Evening Standard, April 19, 2013
The ad is the least racy of three used in the full campaign; the other two not-safe-for-work adverts being easily found on Google Images.
A newspaper can get away with such advertising in Britain, which tends to be a bit more socially conservative than its European neighbours, but still has a rich history of suggestive advertising and pushing-the-edgecomedy.
Would such ads play well here in North America?
Perhaps they would be tolerated in the continent’s more outward-looking global crossroads cities, but it’s reasonable to presuppose that ads of this type would get a rougher ride in North America’s vast, less worldly, and often very insular provincial regions where reaction was most outraged at Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” that exposed part of one of her breasts on network television. (Violence is fine on North American network television. But sex or nudity? Outside of a few cable television niches, not so much.)
All this suggests that the Tom Ford ad, which was deemed suitable for publication in the London Evening Standard, might still not be considered suitable for publication in the Winnipeg Free Press, the Winnipeg Sun or Metro.
But, I’ll leave this up to the audience. If you opened the Free Press, Sun or Metro one day and saw the ad above, how do you suppose you and those around you would react?
My brief holiday in London happened by pure chance to coincide with the funeral of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The opportunity to be an eyewitness to history and to watch the funeral procession go by en route to St. Paul’s Cathedral was too good to pass up.
However one feels about Mrs. Thatcher, who is still both loved and hated by many Britons, nobody does pomp and circumstance like the British.
“Hello, hello, this is station CKZC, Winnipeg,” were likely the first words ever spoken over a Winnipeg radio station, by Lynn V. Salton, a former Royal Navy wireless officer who founded radio station CKZC at his Grosvenor Ave. home in February, 1922.
CKZC was a modest operation that only operated on Sunday and Tuesday evenings at a wavelength of 420 meters (roughly 710 on the AM dial) and a power of just 100 watts. The station would sign on with Salton playing the “El Capitan March”, followed by more records from Salton’s collection during the course of the evening.
It is presumed that CKZC disappeared from the airwaves around the time that the Winnipeg Free Press launched the short-lived CJCG at about 730 on the AM dial a few weeks later, with Salton as the station’s first announcer.
Though it was a mere fraction of the power used by modern AM stations — most Winnipeg and southern Manitoba AM stations broadcast at at least 10,000 watts — Salton’s 100-watt station was picked up as much as 845 miles away (1,360 kilometres) according to the Manitoba Historical Society, thanks to the tendency of lower-frequency AM band signals to be reflected off the atmosphere at night.
It also helped that the radio bands were much less congested 91 years ago, when the first primitive AM radio stations were going on the air.
Tune across the AM band at night now, and you’ll hear a cacophony of sound as stations from up to 3,500 kilometres (2,175 miles) away clash with each other.
Unlike signal range, where AM still has a certain advantage over FM in rural areas, sound quality has never been one of AM radio’s advantages. AM stations still have to pack their signal through a relatively narrow “pipe” about 20 kHz wide, one-tenth the bandwidth typically available to an FM station and one-seventy-fifth the bandwidth used by a satellite radio channel.
It’s not just the bandwidth and background interference from other stations that puts AM at a disadvantage. So does its relatively low frequency, which makes it more vulnerable to crackling, crunching and buzzing noises caused by lightning, machinery, appliances, household electronics and power lines.
As portable FM radios and cassette tape players, with their superior sound quality, took the marketplace by storm in the late ’70s and early ’80s, AM radio stations began losing listeners rapidly. Many dropped music in favour of talk formats, and as profits continued to evaporate, replaced local programming with inexpensive syndicated shows.
AM’s descent into irrelevance continued nevertheless. In the United States, AM reached the turning point in 1978, the last year that it accounted for more listener-hours than FM. Today, AM stations account for less than one-fifth of all U.S. listener-hours, and the typical U.S. AM radio listener is 57 years old, according to a 2009 U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) study.
Among younger listeners, who vastly prefer listening to music whenever they listen to the radio at all, AM is a rarely visited wasteland of feverish haters, conspiracy theorists and religious fundamentalism. The same FCC study found that 12-24 year olds spend just four percent of their listening-hours on the AM band, rising only slightly to a nine percent share among listeners aged 25-34 years.
This led the U.S. broadcasting regulator to conclude that, “the story of AM radio over the last 50 years has been a transition from being the dominant form of audio entertainment for all age groups to being almost non-existent to the youngest demographic groups.”
Consequently, many broadcasters are beginning to give up on AM radio. The former 58 CKY and CKRC 630 have long since decamped to the FM band as 102.3 Clear FM and 99.9 Bob FM respectively. Two more stations — CKSB 1050 and the weaker CKMW 1570 from Morden/Winkler — are poised to join the exodus, with plans to shut down their AM transmitters and to move to 88.1 and 88.9 FM respectively.
This, plus CJNU’s plans to move from 107.9 to 93.7 FM, and plans to open a new country music station in Steinbach on 107.7 FM, mean that the Winnipeg FM dial is running out of bandwidth.
A new station on any other frequency would have to prove that it wouldn’t cause interference not just to any other Winnipeg or southern Manitoba station, but would extend the same courtesy to FM stations as far away as Brandon, Kenora and Grand Forks — a consideration that limits the FM dial to 20-25 local stations in even the largest cities.
Where will that leave CJOB 680, CKJS 810 and TSN Radio 1290, the three remaining Winnipeg stations without an FM slot?
One possibility would be to take over an existing station’s slot. This is a viable option for CJOB, which has a sister station in 99.1 Fresh FM that has been doing only so-so in the ratings. CKJS and TSN Radio, however, could only do this by displacing a more successful sister station.
Another suggested option would allow for massive power increases to fight off electrical and weather-related interference. Yet another would be for AM stations to simultaneously broadcast in both analog and digital, with the receiver switching back and forth between the two modes depending on which one produces a better signal; but results so far in places where digital AM radio has been attempted are far from encouraging.
Such an expansion, if it even happens, is probably years away. Though most full-powered U.S. TV stations abandoned channels 5 and 6 in the 2009 digital switchover due to poor reception — digital TV reception on channels 2-13 often ends up looking something like this – a few stations still continue on. Some analog low-power and repeater stations that were exempt from the U.S. 2009 and Canadian 2011 switchover deadlines will continue operating until about 2015, and some might attempt to stay on channels 5 and 6 as digital stations thereafter.
Either the remaining channel 5 and 6 stations would need to move to other channels, or some kind of frequency-sharing agreement would have to be reached.
That latter option has a precedent: while FM radio was expanding rapidly in many parts of the world in the ’70s, Australia was struggling with the fact that it had already assigned the 88-to-108 MHz band used in most of the world for FM radio to Australian TV channels 3, 4 and 5.
After considering the possibility of using higher UHF frequencies, a move that would have made Australian portable FM radios useless in other parts of the world and vice-versa, an agreement was reached to move most TV stations overlapping with the proposed 88-to-108 FM band to new channels, aside from a few repeaters in isolated areas with no FM service. A second agreement will eliminate the remaining TV/FM overlap when Australia’s last remaining rural analog TV transmitters shut down at the end of 2013, reserving the 88-to-108 band exclusively for FM radio.
Given the long distances between the few full-powered channel 5 and 6 digital TV stations that will exist in either Canada or the U.S. after 2015, such a dual-use agreement could be reached. Accommodating FM stations in the space currently reserved for these TV channels should not be a problem in Winnipeg: both channels have been allocated for digital TV use in Winnipeg, but both are unoccupied and almost certainly will remain that way.
A second advantage of expanding the FM band downward is that radios that can tune in those frequencies are already being manufactured for the Japanese market, where FM radio stations have traditionally operated between 76 and 90 MHz, and might soon start showing up in the 90 to 108 MHz band after being vacated by Japanese TV stations during that country’s 2011 digital TV switchover.
Even if the North American FM band is extended down to 76 MHz in the years ahead, allowing all remaining southern Manitoba AM stations to move to FM if they choose, some local stations will continue simulcasting on both bands for 10-15 years after a 76-to-108 FM radio becomes standard in Canadian vehicles, as that is where many Canadians do their radio listening, and no ratings-sensitive broadcaster will give up that market segment.
At least not yet. But radio listening habits, like many other habits, are developed early and are progressively more difficult to change with age. This does not bode well for AM stations competing for the ears of a younger generation that spends more than 90 percent of its radio listening time on the FM band, and many hours more listening to high-quality audio tailored to their own tastes online and on their iPods. Like the listening public, AM radio stations will need to migrate to new technology to survive.
Do you live in rural Manitoba or northwestern Ontario and still pick up CBC from one of their many towers dotting the region? Then get ready, because that signal will almost certainly be going off the air on July 31.
Canadian government policy once decreed that any community with 500 residents or more should, if possible, live within range of a CBC transmitter. This led to a proliferation of CBC towers across the province in the ’60s and ’70s, extending service to remote communities that had to wait until as late as 1975 to get their first glimpse of television.
Construction slowed in the late ’70s as the rapid growth of a new technology, satellite television, gave remote mining towns and First Nations access to the same array of programming found in the big cities.
By the late ’90s, home satellite dishes were both cheap and compact, leaving the CBC’s aging network of rural transmitters increasingly viewer-less.
Though the shutdown officially needs regulatory approval, the CBC “has already given notice to affected tower landlords and has terminated all of the Corporation’s leases on the sites where our analogue television transmitters are located,” according to an April 4 letter to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
“We have also formally notified all [cable companies] of the termination of our analogue over-the-air television transmission at all sites effective July 31, 2012.”
This will save the CBC the enormous cost of converting its many transmitters across the province to handle digital signals. The Winnipeg stations that had to make this change by Aug. 2011 had to spend millions of dollars on engineering studies, new equipment and channel changes in preparation.
“This transmission infrastructure is worth millions and has already been paid for by Canadian taxpayers,” the group says on its web site.
“Rather than being scrapped, it could be maintained by communities themselves. The transmitters and towers can be used not just to continue free TV service, but also to set up local wireless Internet or mobile service, or a community TV or radio service.”
CACTUS supporters have launched a letter-writing campaign to federal broadcasting regulators, urging them to block the CBC from shutting down its rural transmitters without offering them to local communities first.
The trouble is: the CBC’s aging transmitters and towers are of limited value.
“Analogue technology and the related equipment and parts for repair are no longer readily available in the world,” the CBC noted in its April 4 application to the CRTC. “. . . [T]he expected life of these analogue transmitters is therefore very uncertain, and limited at best.”
Community groups taking over the CBC’s old rural transmitters would essentially have to go through all the steps required to launch a completely new TV station: applying for a broadcasting licence, building studios, buying a new transmitter, hiring staff, figuring out how to get the signal from the studio to the transmitter site, and so on.
And then there would be further complications.
First, there’s the matter of the towers. Many CBC towers are aging and require regular maintenance to ensure that failed strobe lights don’t make the tower a safety hazard to pilots, and to ensure that a tower can withstand the rigours of Manitoba weather.
In 1983, CKX-TV in Brandon was suddenly knocked off the air when its faulty 1,363-foot tower south of the city snapped and fell to the ground during a snowstorm. Across the border in 2004, Prairie Public Television’s Grand Forks transmitter was wrecked when a chunk of ice fell off the tower, and smashed through the roof of the transmitter shed at the tower’s base.
Then there’s the problem of the channel the CBC’s stations operate on.
Of the 48 transmitters that relay CBC Winnipeg programming to communities all over Manitoba, northwestern Ontario and three northern Saskatchewan villages, 46 of them are on the channel 2-13 VHF band.
Those are not good channels to be on in the digital era.
VHF channels 2-13 were fine in the old analog era. Though they were prone to interference from “skip” and everyday household appliances — hence the early abolition of the particularly vulnerable Channel 1 — they provided a reasonable signal at acceptable cost to station owners.
These channels were considered far preferable to UHF channels 14-83. UHF stations offered a cleaner signal, but needed more power to match the range of VHF stations, and reached fewer viewers due to the fact that many early antennas and TVs were not designed to receive UHF channels.
It’s all different in the digital era. Unlike old-style analog signals, digital signals don’t break out in squiggly lines, “ghosting” or dots when they are suffering from interference. The TV simply gives up trying to sort out the weird information it is receiving, and crashes.
VHF is so problematic for digital TV station owners that Rabbit Ears, a blog for digital TV enthusiasts, has started keeping track of stations’ desperate efforts to move to UHF, or at least get a massive power increase approved, under the heading VHF Nightmares.
This has been consistent with some Winnipeg viewers’ experiences: little or no difficulty picking up CBC, SRC, Global or Joy TV, all of which operate on UHF — but significant difficulty picking up CTV or Citytv, both of which stayed on their old VHF channels after the 2011 digital switchover.
To sort it all out, a community group that has been handed the CBC’s old equipment would have to find a UHF channel to move to, and not just install a new transmitter at the tower base, but a new transmitting antenna up at the top, too.
That would get very expensive, very quickly.
Those interested in keeping free CBC service in their community or starting a new community TV station have better options available to them than CACTUS’s plan.
They could follow the same path as local volunteer-run stations such as UMFM 101.5, CKUW 95.9 and CJNU 107.9, which operate from low-power transmitters installed on top of existing high-rises. (UMFM broadcasts from the corner of Portage and Main; CKUW and CJNU broadcast from neighbouring Osborne Village high-rises.)
Currently, nothing stops any community organization that has the funds to do so from applying for a TV station licence, even if it’s just a shoestring-budget operation consisting of a low-powered transmitter and antenna installed on top of a high-rise or a cell tower.
From a 70-metre (230-foot) high-rise or cell tower, a community group putting out a relative low-powered 500 watt signal on UHF channels 14-51 could expect to provide decent indoor reception over about an 11-kilometre (seven-mile) radius.
That would be enough to cover most of a medium-sized city, or a small town and its surrounding area.
Double the power to 1,000 watts (still a fraction of what commercial broadcasters use) and move up to a 110-metre (360-foot) tower or building, and coverage expands further to about 16 kilometres (10 miles).
And there are channels galore available for would-be community TV station operator to choose from. In Winnipeg, there are unclaimed channels on 25, 28, 42, 43, 46, 48 and 49. In Brandon, 16, 18, 27, 34 and 49 are up for grabs. The same is true for channels 30 and 50 in fast-growing Morden-Winkler.
Using the subchannels, a community group could offer CBC, CTV and Global service to a community abandoned by the corporate broadcasters, and offer a community channel based on Shaw’s Cable 9 in Winnipeg — or even on the hilariouslybad Videon/Cablevision community access channels of the ’80s.
Community-based TV is within the grasp of any dedicated group of citizens. And it need not rely on the CBC’s goodwill.
Have you been having trouble getting clear reception of QX 104 or Ignite 107 on your alarm clock radio or in the office?
Apparently the owners of those two stations have heard your complaints, and are taking steps to improve reception in Winnipeg.
QX 104 has been battling the fuzzies since it signed on in 1981 as CFQX 92.9, a small-town community station from Selkirk with little more than a fringe signal in parts of Winnipeg. A new, higher-powered transmitter and a move to 104.1 in the late ’80s allowed the station to reach a larger audience and possibly save the station from going dark.
Their equipment still wasn’t able to push a fuzz-free signal in office buildings and high-density neighbourhoods, so the station is seeking broadcast regulator permission to move from its current transmitter site just west of Selkirk to a new site near Oakbank, about 15 kilometres closer to central Winnipeg.
If approved, this should guarantee a reliable signal on even the cheapest of the city’s radios, as well as providing the Steinbach area with better coverage.
A transmitter closer to Winnipeg will leave some listeners in Gimli, Winnipeg Beach and other Interlake communities with a weaker signal.
The plan approved by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will see Ignite 107.1 close down its 920-watt transmitter on top of Chateau 100 on Donald St. and switch on a new 100,000-watt system on Highway 2 between Oak Bluff and Starbuck.
This move will allow Ignite to offer a better signal on indoor radios in suburban areas, and expand its car radio coverage to Morden, Winkler, Portage, Stonewall and Steinbach. Indoor fuzziness might continue to be an issue in the downtown area and the eastern half of Winnipeg.
The station previously had a troubled history, once shutting down for a year due to financial difficulties, returning to air, and then continuing to bleed red ink until it was sold to Golden West Broadcasting in 2008 for less than the cost of a Vancouver handyman-special bungalow.
Ignite’s move into the big leagues will reduce the city’s stock of low-powered microstations by one, leaving only 45-watt CJNU 107.9, 250-watt Kick FM 92.9 and 450-watt CKUW 95.9 continuing to operate at less than 1,000 watts.
Forget the Government of Canada ads about “clearing the snow” from Canadians’ over-the-air TV reception after this week’s digital TV switchover in Canada’s big cities. Some Manitoba communities will have nothing but snow thanks to some little-publicized changes the TV stations are making.
Manitoba’s TV stations aren’t just changing to digital. Many of them are reducing power and some are moving from tall rural towers to city rooftops, reducing their signal’s range.
CBC and Radio-Canada used to broadcast from a 324-metre (1,063-foot) tower near Starbuck, Man at 100,000 and 59,000 watts respectively. They’ll be moving by October to the roof of the Richardson Building, and reducing power on their new UHF frequencies to 42,000 watts and 7,600 watts respectively.
CTV will be staying put on their Ste. Agathe tower, south of Winnipeg, but reducing power from 325,000 watts to 24,000 watts on Channel 7.
Global has moved to the top of the former CanWest building in downtown Winnipeg, and is now on UHF Channel 40 with a power of 25,000 watts. They formerly operated from the CBC’s Starbuck tower at 325,000 watts.
Citytv will be continuing to broadcast from its Elie tower, west of Winnipeg, but will reduce power from 325,000 watts to 8,300 watts on Channel 13.
Joy TV will continue to broadcast on Channel 35 from their tower just off St. Mary’s south of the Perimeter, but will be reducing power from 22,000 watts to 6,000 watts.
These power reductions are based in part on some controversial calculations made by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which oversaw the 2009 digital transition south of the border.
Even though digital TV should require less power than traditional analog TV to produce a watchable picture, many critics argue that the Commission grossly underestimated the power needed for a station’s signal to overcome the challenges of the urban environment, where signal-absorbing trees and buildings and interference from machines and appliances take their toll on a signal.
Since there have been a lot of hits on this blog over the past few weeks from people with questions about digital TV in Manitoba, here is a pre-emptive response to the questions some of you will have as to why you can no longer receive your favourite stations — and some suggestions on what you can do about it.
If you live or have a cottage in Gimli/Winnipeg Beach…
Radio-Canada Manitoba will remain weak in Winnipeg Beach, even with a rooftop antenna, and will become virtually impossible to receive in Gimli. You’ll probably get better results pointing your antenna east toward their Channel 11 analog transmitter near Fort Alexander.
CBC might still have a so-so signal in Winnipeg Beach if you have a rooftop antenna. This signal will become very difficult to receive in Gimli. (Hint: If you point your antenna ESE, you might pick up a weak analog signal from CBC’s Channel 4 Lac du Bonnet analog transmitter. If you point it north, you might pick up another CBC signal on Channel 10 from Fisher Branch.)
CTV reception will be very poor, even with a rooftop antenna. (Hint: Viewers north of Inwood might be able to get a weak CTV analog signal on Channel 8 from the station’s Fisher Branch transmitter.)
Global, Citytv and Joy TV will be very weak in Winnipeg Beach, even with a rooftop antenna, and will be virtually impossible to receive in Gimli.
If you live in Morden/Winkler…
CBC and SRC will become virtually impossible to receive, even with a rooftop antenna. Currently, Morden is on the outer edge of the station’s rabbit-ears range, and Winkler is in the station’s rooftop-antenna zone.
CTV and Citytv’s signals will lose strength, and might be difficult to receive with an indoor antenna in the middle of town. Both stations currently offer moderately strong “Grade-A” analog signals or better.
Global should be virtually impossible to receive, now that it has reportedly shut down its old analog transmitter.
Joy TV will be difficult to receive.
If you live in Portage la Prairie…
Radio-Canada Manitoba will become extremely difficult to receive, even with a rooftop antenna. Currently, Portage la Prairie is on the outer edge of the station’s rabbit-ears range.
CBC Manitoba will only be putting a very weak “deep fringe” signal into Portage. Currently, Portage is on the outer edge of the CBC’s rabbit-ears reception range.
CTV reception will only be satisfactory with a rooftop antenna.
Now that its analog signal is reportedly off the air, Global will be very difficult (if not impossible) to receive in Portage. Portage is just outside the western fringe of Global’s digital TV coverage area.
Joy TV will be extremely difficult to receive, as Portage will be on the extreme outer edge of its digital reach.
If you live in Selkirk…
CTV and Citytv’s signals will lose some strength, and might be difficult to receive with an indoor antenna in the middle of town. Both stations’ current analog transmitters cover Selkirk with a moderate “Grade-A” signal.
Joy TV might also lose some strength, with its analog “city-grade” signal being replaced with a digital signal that might not be strong enough to overcome the ground clutter in the middle of town.
If you live in Steinbach…
Radio-Canada Manitoba, CBC and Global will all drop from good to marginal indoor reception in Steinbach. Signal quality will depend on how many buildings, trees and other obstructions there are between you and the transmitter.
Citytv will be even worse, as Steinbach sits right at the point where any realistic hope of receiving Citytv with an indoor antenna ends.
If you live in Winnipeg…
Citytv might be difficult to receive in the eastern half of the city if you’re using an indoor antenna. Signal quality will depend on how much ground clutter — such as buildings and trees — there is between you and the Citytv transmitter.
Incidentally, the stations aren’t necessarily to blame for coverage reductions. The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, the federal agency which regulates the airwaves in Canada, invited public comments on both Global’s and the CBC’s plans to reduce rural coverage — and no one objected.
A bit of lighter fare in this week’s View from Seven, as we take a trip back to the ’70s, thanks to the phenomenal video archive maintained and frequently updated by Vancouver YouTuber robatsea2009, and additional clips fromGWhizIneedAnameandronj218.
Modern-day Zellers, Wal-Mart and Target stores look like boutiques compared to the rather ugly “new” K-Mart store featured in this 1978 ad from a Cleveland TV station. But at least the musical theme is rather upbeat.
It’s 1979, and this new thing called “VHS” has come on the market, allowing you to record movies anywhere and play them back on your TV set. Trouble is, you’ll need to lug a huge camera and recorder around with you all day.
Jeez, do they still have Saturday morning cartoons? (CBS, 1975)
A young Connie Chung makes a brief appearance during a local station break in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve 1976.
Slow news day in Cleveland? This 1978 newscast (with five anchors, including one who’s wearing a tomato-red jacket) opens with a “bad news” story: yes, the price of hamburger is going up! Check out some ’70s technology at about the 03:00 mark.
A fascinating behind-the-scenes clip showing NBC’s Jessica Savitch letting loose a rant while preparing for an evening news update, possibly in early December, 1979. It’s not clear how this clip came to be in the public domain, but probably came from an unencrypted satellite feed that network staff either accidentally left open, or deliberately left open for the entertainment of master control operators at affiliate stations and the relatively few Americans who owned satellite dishes at the time.
Savitch died in a 1983 motor vehicle accident, only a few weeks after delivering a news update in which some people suspect she might have been slightly inebriated or stoned.
An even more serious meltdown by ABC News Chicago correspondent Max Robinson, recorded from the satellite feed, after discovering that network brass had decided to have a (white) anchorman in Washington do the lead-in to his story on the May 25, 1979 crash of American Airlines Flight 191 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.
Scan up and down the radio dial and it might seem that there are more choices than ever on Winnipeg’s airwaves. Indeed there are: No fewer than five new radio stations have gone on the air in Winnipeg since 2000.
Despite the increased variety over the past decade, the local radio market continues to be dominated by just a handful of veteran stations. Though a total of 28 stations put a reasonably solid signal into Winnipeg, the top five — CJOB, Hot 103, CBC Radio One, QX-104 and Power 97 — accounted for nearly 60 percent of all listener-hours in Fall 2010, while the top 10 stations accounted for slightly more than 85 percent of listener-hours.
Now here’s a primer on the also-rans in the Winnipeg radio market — the stations you might not have known existed.
810 CKJS Winnipeg
Format: Ethnic (primarily Filipino); some religious programming
Morning Show: “Good Morning Philippines”
Afternoon Drive Show: “Afternoon Pasada”
Survival Strategy: Target niche audiences, not the general public. Rely on community to generate low-cost programming.
On air since: 1975
Ownership: Newcap Radio
Transmitter: 10,000 watts, located off Waverley south of the Perimeter
Survival Strategy: Target the Red River College campus
On air since: 2004
Ownership: Crecomm Radio
Transmitter: 250 watts, located at the RRC Notre Dame campus
Signal quality in Winnipeg: Good within a kilometre or two of campus, probably acceptable in most of northwest Winnipeg if your radio has an antenna. Strictly a rimshot signal (i.e., passable on a car radio but too weak for reliable indoor reception) for those living east of the Red River or south of the Assiniboine or in the middle of downtown.
Survival Strategy: Volunteer support, and use a temporary “special events” broadcasting licence to get a foot in the door
On air since: Intermittently since 2006, pending the awarding of a permanent broadcasting licence
Ownership: Nostalgia Broadcasting Cooperative
Transmitter: 45 watts, located on top of an Osborne Village high-rise
Signal quality in Winnipeg: Should be good in the centre of the city, might require an antenna in some older post-war suburbs. Strictly a rimshot signal if you live out beyond Assiniboine Park, Lagimodiere Blvd., Bishop Grandin or the Chief Pegius Bridge. (Which is probably not bad if your transmitter is less powerful than most lightbulbs!)
Are you a former employee or an old fan of CJAY, CKY, KCND or CKND? Have any interesting stories about what happened behind the scenes or on-air? Then The View from Seven wants to hear from you! Read on, and then share with us your stories and your memories in the comments section below! Comments never close, and the readers keep on coming week after week.
Dr. Andrew Stewart and his fellow members of the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG) certainly couldn’t have been accused of going on a junket, arriving as they did in Winnipeg in the middle of January, 1960.
As the members of the BBG — which regulated Canada’s airwaves from 1958 to 1968 — and a crowd of observers gathered in a seventh floor meeting room at the Fort Garry Hotel, the city outside was enveloped in a dull, grey light freezing drizzle that started in the morning and continued into the mid-afternoon.
It was a good day to be indoors watching the meeting that was the talk of the town: the BBG’s public hearings which would determine who would be granted the valuable Channel 7 television licence that would finally break the CBC’s monopoly on Winnipeg television.
The people gathered at the Fort Garry Hotel that day represented a Who’s Who of Winnipeg society.
The first application was heard from R. S. Misener and Associates, backed by the Moffat family which owned Winnipeg’s CKY radio station, Investors Syndicate president T. O. Peterson and the owners of CKSB Radio in St. Boniface and CFAM Radio in Altona.
The proposed station could be “a potent and positive force in our society… exploring new frontiers of the mind… and bringing about all that is good in our cultural community,” Misener vowed to the Board, before going on to present a programming schedule that included game shows, five-pin bowling, cooking and sewing shows and a Saturday late night movie called “The Owl Prowl”.
The second application was presented by Red River Television, backed by Great-West Life chairman Joseph Harris, the Sifton and Richardson families, and Winnipeg Free Press publisher R. S. Malone. A morning “Breakfast Club” program based on NBC’s “Today” show would be the anchor program in the station’s schedule, along with local music and homemaker programs and a wide range of popular U.S. programs in prime-time.
The final application was presented by Perimeter Television, fronted by CJOB founder Jack Blick and supported by lawyer Graeme Haig and other investors. Perimeter was vague on how it would program its station – which presumably would have operated as CJOB-TV — aside from a promise that its newsreaders would deliver the news in “perfect English”.
Ultimately, the Misener application was given the green light.
Later, the BBG — staffed at the time by appointees of the Diefenbaker Conservative government — would face accusations that licences were given out based on political considerations.
The Misener group were reasonably discreet in terms of their political preferences, but could partisan considerations have cost Red River Television its chance at winning a TV licence, given the principals’ Liberal Party connections?
William Hull noted in his 1994 book on the history of the Board of Broadcast Governors that the accusations of partisan favouritism mainly swirled around the granting of a Toronto Channel 9 licence to a group led by John Bassett, a well-known Conservative; and in permitting CKVR-TV in Barrie, Ont., whose owner happened to be a former Liberal candidate, to expand its signal to cover the lucrative Toronto market later in the ’60s.
If there were any complaints about politics being a factor in determining the outcome of the Winnipeg hearings, they were discreet ones.
Hull concluded that some members of the Board who were in charge of choosing a licence winner were “actively involved in partisan political activities, and some clearly looked for some personal gain from this,” but also observed that if the Board’s decisions were political, board members were careful to leave no evidence behind.
Having presumably won the licence in January 1960 on the basis of merit — in the absence of any evidence to the contrary — the Misener group would have to work quickly to get their station on the air.
The reason: There was competition coming from south of the border.
In 1956, a group of investors associated with a Grand Forks radio station won permission from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to construct a new Channel 12 TV station in the tiny border town of Pembina, N.D.
Their goal, however, wasn’t to serve Pembina and the sparsely populated surrounding area. It was to serve Winnipeg audiences, 100 kilometres to the north, and hopefully make some money satisfying Canadians’ insatiable appetite for American TV programming.
The station was slow to get to air, though. It wasn’t until early 1959 — nearly three years after they were awarded the licence — that the serious work of building studios and erecting a tower got under way.
Now with a second Winnipeg station under construction at Polo Park, it became urgent for the Pembina operation to finally get up and running.
Thus began a mad race between the owners of Channel 7 and Channel 12 — which would become better known as CJAY-TV and KCND-TV later in the year — to beat the other station to air.
“The idea of KCND was to come into the (Winnipeg) market as the second station, but in the interim the licence was granted to CJAY, so they were building at the same time,” former KCND-CKND employee Dorothy Lien told the Winnipeg Free Press in 1989.
“It was a great race between the stations to see who would get their tower up [first],” she recalled. “I remember driving down to Pembina in September of 1960 to watch our antenna being mounted, and then driving back to Ste. Agathe to see that they were at the stage of getting theirs up, too.”
The race was as close as one got to a photo finish in the broadcasting industry.
On Sunday, Nov. 6, 1960, Winnipeggers noticed a test signal coming in from Pembina on Channel 12. On Monday, Nov. 7, the half-finished station went on air at 6 p.m. with a limited program selection, owing to the fact that the station was literally not yet connected to the ABC and NBC networks from which it would obtain most of its programming.
Given that the only other option in Winnipeg was to watch the CBC station, viewers weren’t exactly choosy.
Five days later, at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 12, 1960, CJAY-TV Channel 7 signed on from a brand-new studio next to Polo Park Shopping Centre.
Though CJAY had lost the race to air, it still had a decided advantage over its cross-border rival.
“We had very low power and very poor microwave [linking the station to the networks],” Lien told the Winnipeg Free Press in 1989. “We really didn’t make an impact for about six years. People didn’t have the antennas to bring in Channel 12.”
KCND had been modeled after KVOS-TV, a small outlet in Bellingham, Wash., just across the border from Vancouver, which discovered that there was big money to be made in buying programs at low Bellingham rates and selling advertising at high Vancouver-Victoria rates.
The practice was controversial, given that KVOS was at times selling advertising on programs for which a B.C. broadcaster had supposedly purchased “exclusive” rights; but it also made KVOS one of North America’s most profitable TV stations for a time.
But there was a critical difference between KVOS and KCND.
KVOS’s transmitter was only 70 kilometres from central Vancouver and just 45 kilometres from Victoria, close enough to put a strong and clear “Grade-A” signal into those communities, as it still does today.
KCND’s transmitter was 100 kilometres from central Winnipeg. Its “Grade-A” signal only went as far north as Niverville, beyond which ground clutter and weather tended to interfere with reception.
Given that there were no cable systems in Winnipeg at the time, it was an oversight on the part of the station’s owners that threatened to bankrupt the station.
“Our signal was never as strong in Winnipeg as our engineers thought it would be,” lamented Boyd Christenson, an early KCND announcer and program host who was interviewed by the Winnipeg Free Press in the mid ’80s. (* – see footnote)
“We weren’t getting the dollars we needed out of Winnipeg to sustain the station,” Christenson said, describing the station’s financially troubled early years.
The station’s fortunes dramatically improved after the arrival of cable TV in Winnipeg in the late ’60s.
KCND’s survival in the early years was no doubt driven by the fascination that many Manitobans had for the glamour of Kennedy-era America and a yearning for something different on their screens, which led to a cult following in Winnipeg.
“KCND was strictly bargain basement,” former Winnipeg resident Greg Klymkiw wrote in a June 2010 article for the Electric Sheep web site. “Though to kids, tired of fiddlers from Newfoundland and joyful Canucks winning useless pen and pencil sets on stupid Canadian TV, KCND was… AMERICA!”
“I kind of fell in love with KCND-TV Channel 12,” a commentator named Rob wrote to The View from Seven in November 2010. “For some reason the channel 12 logo was very cool!”
“My dad’s bedroom TV had only local stations, but he got channel 12 by installing an interior Channel 12 Antenna… sometime in ’71 or ’72 but we weren’t allowed to use his TV. My younger brother used to sneak in there and watch reruns of ‘Lost in Space’ at 6 PM while my dad was working evenings,” Rob wrote.
“Sometimes my dad called us to his bedroom to watch ‘Chiller Thriller’ at 10:30 PM Saturday night,” he added, referring to the station’s popular Saturday night horror movies.
On the Canadian side of the border, CJAY-TV was not only putting a cleaner signal into Winnipeg, but also benefitting from its ability to purchase programming from all three U.S. networks between its commitments to the CTV Network, which it joined as a founding member in 1961.
CJAY also had a wide range of local programs, many of them live. This made early local TV unpredictable and, at times, hilarious.
“One time we were doing a game show,” longtime CJAY-CKY employee Fred Harland told the Winnipeg Free Press in 1989. “And this truck driver walked right through the middle of the shot.”
“Of course, this was a live show. Everybody laughed, but nobody said anything, then two minutes later he came back the other way. I guess he was finished making his delivery.”
“So the host — I think it was Stew MacPherson — stopped him and said, ‘Sir, do you mind if we talk to you for a second?’”
“This guy didn’t know what was going on. So Stew walked over to him and said, ‘Do you know you’re on television right now — for the second time?’”
“And the guy looked right at the cameras and said, ‘My ol’ lady’s gonna — (expletive) when she sees this.’”
Pranks were also common. CJAY sportscaster Jack Wells was the victim of one prank where the telephone that was placed on the news set for decorative purposes started ringing while he was on the air.
“I just picked it up and said, ‘OK honey, I’ll be home for dinner in about 20 minutes,’” Wells told the Free Press in 1989.
“Videotape has made boy geniuses out of a lot of people,” former announcer and program host Al Johnson said in a 1980 special marking CJAY-CKY’s 20th anniversary. “But live television — that was the trick.”
“To be able to withstand two or three or five years of that was a killer. You’d end up in the booby hatch today. A lot of our good friends did. Hit the bottle…”
“Let’s not tell those stories, Al,” host Ray Torgrud interrupted.
Another favourite victim of pranksters at CJAY was “Uncle Bob” Swarts, who hosted a popular children’s show called Archie and his Friends from 1965 to 1986.
In the same May 1989 interview — just two weeks before Swarts’s death on June 9, 1989 — Harland recalled an on-air prank where one of the puppets, a dog named Petite, was the victim of a gunpowder-filled birthday cake that exploded as the puppet leaned over to blow out the candles.
“There was shrapnel flying everywhere. The dog was scorched and Uncle Bob’s eyebrows were singed… and after he cleared the smoke out of his lungs, Bob didn’t know what to say. So we went straight to commercial.”
In spite of the early bloopers and financial struggles, both stations survived.
The Moffat family, which owned CKY Radio for decades and were early investors in CJAY, bought out the station’s other owners in 1973. For consistency, the Moffats rebranded CJAY-TV as CKY-TV on June 1, 1973. The station remained in its original Polo Park studio until relocating to downtown Winnipeg in 2006.
Canwest Broadcasting, headed by Paul Morton, Izzy Asper and Seymour Epstein, took over KCND in late March 1975 and proceeded to consolidate the station’s Pembina, N.D. and Winnipeg studios (then located at Portage and Winchester in St. James, but deemed unsuitable for Canwest’s needs) under a single roof on St. Mary’s Road in St. Vital. The rebranded all-Canadian operation took to the air as CKND on Aug. 31, 1975.
As both stations celebrate their 50th anniversaries this week, take some time now to journey down memory lane. Then share your memories of local television in the comments section. (I’m particularly interested in hearing from former employees of CJAY, CKY, KCND or CKND as to what was best and worst about working at those stations.)
(* – Technically, it would have been possible for KCND or later KNRR to put a higher quality Grade-A signal into the southern half of Winnipeg, but they both erected their tower on the wrong side of the North Dakota-Minnesota border. According to the Radio Coverage Prediction utility on the Communications Research Centre Canada web site, a Channel 12 station running 220kW from a 600-metre tower on the higher terrain 30 kilometres east of Pembina would have put a Grade-A signal into Winnipeg. They could not have done this from the lowlands west of Pembina, where both stations located their 427-metre towers.)
CJAY-TV goes on the air, Nov. 1960 (Click to enlarge. Thanks to rob1961 for the file.)
An early CJAY-TV local game show called “Lucky Seven”, hosted by Al Johnson, believed to be from either 1960 or 1961 (Source: Archiewood)
Portage and Main might be renowned as the windiest street corner in Canada. It could soon be the street corner most heavily bathed in electromagnetic radiation as well.
A few months ago, this blog reported that Global Winnipeg’s decision to move its transmitter 30 kilometres, from a CBC-owned tower just off Highway 2 near the village of Starbuck to the roof of the Canwest tower at Portage and Main, would mean that any rural Manitobans living more than 60 kilometres from Winnipeg and not yet on cable or satellite would have to switch by September 2011 if they want to keep watching the station.
Now it turns out that the CBC itself is also abandoning the Highway 2 site, and moving both its local English and French-language television transmitters to the top of the Richardson Building.
As with Global, this means that large parts of southern Manitoba will no longer have access to CBC Television without a cable or satellite subscription after the mandatory switchover to Digital TV at the beginning of the 2011-2012 television season.
According to the CBC’s application to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), their English signal after that date will only extend south to Morris, north to the southern edge of Lake Winnipeg, west to about half-way between Elie and Portage, and east to La Broquerie and Richer. The French signal will cover a slightly smaller area.
If you live in Portage, Morden, Winkler or Emerson and don’t have cable or satellite, you won’t have a CBC signal to watch after Aug. 31, 2011. Even if you live in Beausejour or St. Malo, you’ll need to replace your rabbit-ears with a rooftop UHF antenna if you want to continue receiving a reliable CBC signal without having to pay for cable or satellite.
Yes, that’s right — a UHF antenna.
Channels 2 to 6 – at the low end of the VHF band — are hostile places for a digital signal. That bit of interference caused by your parents’ electric carving knife or by an atmospheric disturbance causing TV stations in Tennessee to suddenly become receivable in Manitoba can make a complete mess of a digital signal.
Channels 7 to 13 — the upper end of the VHF band — are a little more interference-resistant. But UHF channels 14 to 51 are the most interference-resistant of all.
So UHF has gone from being television’s skid row — inhabited, according to longtime industry stereotype, by low-budget stations that made just enough money so that the station manager could hire an exterminator once in a while to get rid of the rats and roaches — to being the coolest neighbourhood on the dial, in less than a generation.
There’s just one hitch: most outdoor aerials in Manitoba were designed for VHF, not UHF, which could cause reception problems.
If approved by federal regulators, CBC’s English TV signal will be moving from channel 6 to channel 27, while the French-language service will be moving from channel 3 to channel 51 by next year’s Labour Day weekend. The deadline to make any objections known to the CRTC is October 26.
In other local television station news, the CRTC has dismissed a complaint about Jack Van Impe Presents, a paid-time religious program aired on Global Winnipeg. This stemmed from a 2009 complaint originally filed with the station and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council by an unnamed viewer, who claimed that the program is “inappropriate for daytime hours when children could be watching, as they will be traumatized”.
In particular, the complainant was irked by the impication that “only Christians will be saved when doomsday comes in 2012″ and that “anyone who is not Christian will suffer a horrible death”.
In their weekly program, Michigan-based televangelists Jack and Rexella Van Impe present their case that Barack Obama and the European Union are harbingers that the world is imminently about to experience “the rapture”. When this happens, according to the Van Impes, selected Christians will suddenly disappear into Heaven, leaving everyone else behind to deal with the resulting chaos.
As the following excerpt from a May 31, 2009 broadcast shows, these doomsday scenarios are frequently interrupted by sales pitches for DVDs:
Jack: Well, as you know, Kissinger said we are preparing Obama to create the new world order and Brown is pushing Blair, really his enemy in the past in the U.K., to become the first permanent president of the European Union because he says “I want Blair to be a partner with Obama in the creation and architecture of the new world order.” Every sign that you hear, every sign from Revelations chapters 6 to 18 occurs during the reign of the leader of the new world order. It’s the final sign. I can’t emphasize it enough.
Rexella: All right. Friends, we need to be focussing on the fact that the Lord could come very, very soon. That is good news. We’re going to get on with more global headlines in just a moment. But let me just say that, whoa, you want to get your call in right away. We’re really trying to get them out as fast as we can [holds up DVD]. New World Order Rising, our wonderful offer of the week.
Most of us can recall at least one occasion where we’ve come across something on television that was so boring or repulsive that we asked ourselves, “My God, who watches this stuff?”
The easiest way of figuring that out is to watch the commercials. If they show a bunch of young guys getting together for a good time, it’s safe to assume that the audience is heavily skewed toward males aged 18-29. If the ads are for prestigious Wall Street investment firms and high-end hotel chains, however, the audience is more likely skewed toward middle-aged and older professionals.
Spend half an hour watching CBC News Network and — despite the youthfulness of newer personalities such as Nil Koksal and Kalin Mitchell — you’ll quickly get the sense that the viewership of all-news channels skews toward the 55-plus demographic. Young adults, after all, are not key customers of no-medical-exam-required life insurance, Grey Power car insurance, contraptions that make it easier to get in and out of the bathtub or of the various other advertisers that help keep the CBC News Network on the air.
Their children are more likely to be watching lighter fare when they turn on the television. The typical “Family Guy” viewer is 30 years old, making it one of U.S. network television’s youngest shows. “The Office” (median age: 35 years) and “Scrubs” (38 years) also tend to attract a younger audience.
Surely this news must give pause to backers of the proposed Sun News Channel, which some have billed as “Fox News North” in recognition of Sun Media’s small-c conservative leanings. Not only would a new all-news channel fragment a Canadian market that is only a fraction the size of the neighbouring U.S. market — and less partisan to boot — they would also be dependent on many of the same accounts that CBC News Network and CTV News Channel depend on. Then again, perhaps their plan is to force one of the two incumbents out of the game. Only they would know for sure.
It also makes you wonder if the greying of the all-news audience portends a less well-informed Canada of the future. The old way of watching the news — a 10 p.m. date with Knowlton Nash or an 11 p.m. session with Lloyd Robertson — might be old-fashioned and no longer practical in an era when you can click on the stories that interest you and ignore the rest, but at least you learned bits and pieces about politics and the economy while you were waiting to hear about the latest celebrity scandal.
Now… who cares about China or what effect interest rates will have on your household finances when your mortgage comes up for renewal? Lohan’s in trouble again!
On the bright side, we’ll simply do what human beings have always done when confronted with a changing world: adapt to it. And instead of hearing about what effect events overseas might have on Canadians’ lives from CBC’s Peter Mansbridge and CTV’s Lisa LaFlamme, we’ll get Family Guy‘s Peter and Lois Griffin to raise the subject.
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On a completely different subject, several of us Winnipeg bloggers are making plans to converge later this month for beers and to finally meet one another in person. Visit the Winnipeg Bloggers group on Facebook or contact me via e-mail (mcdougak[at]mts.net) to find out more.
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Listen to some of Winnipeg’s best bloggers as they discuss what’s happening around town. Tune in to UMFM 101.5 FM 5:30 p.m. Wednesdays, or download the podcast anytime.
“Hello, hello, this is station CKZC, Winnipeg,” were likely the first words ever spoken over a Winnipeg radio station, by Lynn V. Salton, a former Royal Navy wireless officer who founded radio station CKZC at his Grosvenor Ave. home in February, 1922.
Portage and Main might be renowned as the windiest street corner in Canada. It could soon be the street corner most heavily bathed in electromagnetic radiation as well.
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