Tod Maffin has the basic details here for CBC and for Radio-Canada.

Notable:

• * 80 job cuts in the newsroom. The actual number of layoffs will be lower after voluntary retirements.
• * Radio One’s The Current, the flagship morning show, will be cut 10%.
• * Radio One regional noon shows cut from 2 hours to one.
• * On Radios One and 2, Outfront, The Point, Inside Track cut, among others. (Some US public radio stations air episodes of Outfront.)
• * Regional “Living” programs canceled on TV
• * Investigative programs Marketplace and Fifth Estate see budget cuts
• * The Border, Being Erica, Little Mosque on the Prairie will have fewer episodes (The Border is getting some airings in the US. Is Mosque? Not sure.)
• * Regional radio cuts aren’t evenly spread. Production centers where the cost per listener is highest get deepest cuts: Sudbury, ON for instance.
• * There was talk of finding synergies between Radios 2 and 3: some sharing of programs? Perhaps the return of the old Saturday run of Radio 3 on Radio 2? The weekend edition of The Signal is cut.
• On the Premiere Chaine, the French regional noon shows will go away, replaced by a national show.
• * Windsor ON’s morning show on the Premiere Chaine will be canceled, replaced by the Toronto morning show.

There is some good news today: Maffin reports Ottawa will continue its expected funding of CBC this year, including the annual supplement of $60 million for programming. The cuts would be worse without this.

Will there be a stink about CBC not getting any bailout money, now that commercial networks Global and CTV have gone crying to the government for money? We’ll see. CBC got hammered for supposedly making the ask, but that was before Global and CTV started begging.

And, after you sell $125 million in assets to make up this year’s deficit, what do you do about next year’s deficit, if there is one? Uh oh.

How to get there: 400 jobs at CBC, more than 330 at Radio-Canada (the French side) and 70 admin positions. Most of the cuts look to come at the network level, with the regions bearing less of the burden (70 job cuts). CBC/Radio-Canada will also sell more real estate and other assets. CBC will announce a voluntary retirement program and leave open positions unfilled, which will reduce the actual number of layoffs; they’ll be announced in May.

Canadians who know, correct me if I’m wrong, but this looks different from the massive cuts of the late 1980′s, which went deep into the regions. After that bloodletting and additional cuts in the 90′s, CBC had slowly rebuilt some of the regional newsgathering/production capability, using supplemental funding from Parliament and other money from cost savings and real estate sales.

It looks as though much of this capacity will stay in place, pending deeper cuts: the supper hour TV newscasts will continue, for instance, and no stations will close. Also relatively unaffected: the CBC Radio One schedule and the regional noon radio talkshows; and the local morning shows, many of which are at or near the top of the ratings.

Again, correct my errors here, but this looks like an effort to cut in such a way that the rebuilding process will be easier once the economy improves. You don’t have to reopen stations you’ve closed down, for instance. It also looks like the way to proceed if one wants to maintain (in some way) the recent increases in local/regional service.

So… what about Radio 3? And, if Radio One emerges somewhat unscathed, does that mean Radio 2 gets a low and tight haircut? Also, the French cuts might be proportional, but Radio-Canada produces more of its own content. Will cuts here be more damaging to the leading position of Radio-Canada in Francophone Canada? Oh, and whither Newsworld? Radio 2′s auxiliary online streams?

All of this will get more clear tomorrow.

Election results are blacked out until local polls close, a law that worked in the days of terrestrial radio and TV, but is now basically unworkable. Newspaper and other media web sites shut down their election coverage until polls close in the far west, and satellite subscribers get blacked out channels, but that will hardly stop bloggers and twitterers, who will be among the principle sources of news for those who want to follow the election as it unfolds.

• * CBC News: Canada Votes
• * The Globe and Mail
• * MediaScout
• * Chantal Hébert (one of the best political columnists in the country)

Uh, so how will these streams be different from the 40+ streams offered by CBC through Galaxie, available on cable and satellite systems? I suspect they will be quite similar, except for the range of genres offered on each CBC-branded Internet stream. And I bet we won’t hear the guy with the deep, buttery smooth voice saying, “Galaxie, Canada’s Continuous Music Network.” Tod Maffin says these will be music-only streams, with no announcers.

These streams probably won’t please the many listeners who are livid about the changes at Radio 2 – a couple dozen have left thoughtful comments on my blog, and thousands more have contacted the CBC, apparently. But they offer an additional range of options for Internet listeners, especially if you’re looking to meet your personal Canadian content quota.

For my part, I was sorry to see Eric Friesen and Shelley Solmes depart the Radio 2 schedule; they were the two hosts I listened to most frequently. Tom Allen is still hosting mornings, though, and mezzo-soprano Julie Nesrallah is the new voice of the classical midday block.

Starting Tuesday, I’m going to be listening for a few things – how Radio 2 introduces different musical styles and genres in and among the dayparts, how Nesrallah is as a host, whether the CBC’s often relentless host-coaching saps her of all personality, and whether Radio 2 can create a definitive “sound” for a service that embraces so many styles. CBC’s French network, Espace Musique, has been reasonably successful at this, and its mix is even more eclectic.

We’ll know more on Tuesday… and beyond, as they say.

I started reading Teamakers during the 2005 lockout because 1) it was written by a CBC manager who was working inside while everyone else was out on the street, and 2) it was pretty damn funny.

Public media in Canada is a different beast altogether from the US variation, but there are enough similarities that I felt this blog also had something to say to those of us south of the border. What “Ouimet” saw was sometimes a smart organization, often a hydra-headed bureaucracy of managers managing paper… and not often enough an organization focused on serving the Canadian people.

It’s one thing to have those opinions and offer them to your friends; it’s another entirely to say them publicly, even anonymously, when you’re in management.

This isn’t about denigrating the CBC, although that’s probably what many thought. If you love something, you want to make it better… whether you’re a manager who wants to overcome stifling bureaucracy, a new media person who wants to convince radio people to embrace new opportunities, or a fundraising consultant who wants stations to jettison bad practices and prosper.

We’re all in it, together.

This follows news last month that Jurgen Gothe is giving up his weekday slot on Radio 2 for a new weekend program. (part of the final phase of the re-design of Radio 2)

Last month, CBC announced that Eric Friesen would be leaving “Studio Sparks” by the end of the summer, and the corporation by the end of the year. Eric, of course, came south of the parallel to American Public Radio (the PRI precursor) and Minnesota Public Radio for a few years.

That’s three major host changes in a month. (Is Jay Kernis up there?)

Radio 2 is making another significant cutback in classical music. Even in the most recent phase of the redesign, morning drive is mainly classical, and afternoon’s venerable DiscDrive is…. well, it’s somewhat classical, or classical/jazz/folk/world, or “whatever Jurgen Gothe wants to play.” Both drivetime shows will now have much less classical music. Middays have been solidly classical and it looks as though it will remain so, even though the daytime schedule will shift – Eric Friesen is leaving in August.

CBC is, however, planning a major online initiative, launching three 24-hour internet radio services – classical, jazz, and singer-songwriter. This is the biggest move CBC (the English-speaking variant) has made in internet radio since launching Radio 3, a service that’s now also available in North America on Sirius. On a number of levels, this is a significant expansion of all three genres, even though they’re getting less air time on FM radio.

And now, pardon this half-assed analysis of an American: the changes at Radio 2 follow, by several years, a similar shift at CBC’s French cultural network, which transformed to Espace musique. Espace musique encompasses a very wide variety of music – classical, jazz, world music, emerging artists, chansons, even hip-hop, punk, ska, and electronica on weekends. Espace musique has also launched eight online music channels focusing on the principle genres of the service – Bande à part. (There’s a flavor of Bande à part on Sirius, too.)

CBC’s French services have traditionally been successful with listeners – CBC has tremendous strength in the production of French audio and video content. But at least part of the CBC’s success in French-speaking Canada is because of its widely understood role in preserving Francophone cultural distinctiveness and cohesiveness. CBC English radio has long been committed to preserving Canadian culture, but the changes on Radio 2 now represent an extremely broad view of the Canadian musical culture the corporation wants to embrace and extend – certainly more broad than most public radio programmers in the US would be willing to consider for a single service.

What I think will be interesting to watch is the long-term impact of this extensive change on listeners to Radio 2… if the audience grows, or not… and how its demographic shifts.

Take a long look.

The Spark wiki is in the early stages, but host Nora Young tells the Globe and Mail she hopes listeners will use it

to offer thoughts about show topics, to contribute questions for guests who might be coming up on the program, and generally to interact with her and the rest of the show staff.

The newspaper reports Spark is planning to do its entire show on February 6 using ideas generated by listeners.

Spark is using the Socialtext platform for its wiki. I don’t know a lot about Socialtext, except that I’ve heard good things about its ease of use. Wiki ease of use has always been a speedbump for me – a number of wiki platforms require the use of markup language. It’s certainly something you can learn, as evidenced by the thousands of Wikipedia contributors, but for internal station projects and such, I’ve set up wikis on Zoho and Jot for staff use because the WYSIWYG interface is less daunting. Socialtext is also in this category of products.

What’s a wiki good for? Internally, it’s an excellent place to maintain operations manuals, checklists, policies, etc. It’s an excellent collaborative space to discuss and co-create content. At Iowa Public Radio, our classical music team uses a wiki to share and discuss music programming; I use it as the official location for documents like our local/network break schedule, etc. If anyone on staff spots an error or needs to add new information, she can do it herself.

Externally, wikis can be a fun way to aggregate information. Probably the best-known example is Minnesota Public Radio’s Minnewiki, which is a truly encyclopedic exploration of music in Minnesota.

Wikis are a space where your audience becomes a true partner with you in creating something that’s useful to all. I think it’s one of those level playing fields where we can engage and really interact with our audience.

Not to oversimplify, but if you have information to share, and you know your listeners or viewers have even more information that they’d like to share… a wiki is a way to easily bring everyone together.

• What is a wiki?
• Wikipedia: Wiki
• Some free or low cost wiki platforms: Mediawiki, Socialtext, Jot, Zoho, Wetpaint, Wikispaces