If you get bored over the holidays, you could spend some time thinking about how to improve CBC News. The guys in charge of the CBC News renewal process are asking for your submissions, “We want you to bring your ideas to the table, share them with your colleagues, and ultimately have an opportunity to experiment.”

So if you have ideas for new treatments and formats, how to changes the audience’s perception of CBC News, and how to build a new audience; send them along to newsrenewal@cbc.ca.

There are a bunch of more details on the specifics here (you’ll need a CBC user id to log in). Right now they are concentrating on The National, World Report, Newsworld, local service and CBCNews.ca.

By: Paul Mcgrath
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The folks at the intranet portal said today “that CBC’s Sounds of the Season has raised $230,000 (and counting) for Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank, and in B.C., CBC Radio One Food Bank Day raised almost $340,000.”

Congratulations to everyone involved. Raising over half a million dollars for charity is an amazing achievement. I’m sure it will be much appreciated, especially this year.

By: Paul Mcgrath
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Kevin O’Leary, one of the original “dragons” on Dragons’ Den is about to become a shark.

The Toronto Star reports O’Leary has been hired by Mark Burnett, who produced Survivor and The Apprentice, to appear on a ABC version of the show dubbed the Shark Tank.

Burnett is shooting the pilot next month in Los Angeles. O’Leary is the toughest of the Dragons, “When it comes to business, I’m known as a straight shooter,” he told the Star. “I don’t worry about people’s feelings when it comes to money. I worry about their money.”

By: Paul Mcgrath
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On Thursday the CMG released more details of the new collective agreement. “In short it has been agreed this deal is merely the starting point… Improving the ongoing relationship between the parties is the key element in this deal,” the Guild email said.

One of the major points of the deal is a 1.5 per cent salary increase effective January 1, 2009 - which means if you make $50,000 a year at you’ll be looking at a $750 dollar raise on January 1st, 2009. The 1.5 per cent rate is set by the federal Treasury Board and affects all public service unions.

“The proposed salary increases are a reflection of the current financial crisis and the limits in funding for wage increases for the public service set by Treasury Board. Other public service Unions are seeing rollbacks, we fortunately are not,” Marc-Philippe Laurin, the CMG branch president, who helped negotiate the deal said this week. “If the [Treasury Board] rate goes up in year three, four and five, we get the difference,” he added.

The deal is contingent a late January ratification vote by CMG members.

Other highlights of the deal include:

• An increase of the co-parenting provisions to 80% from 75%;
• Three weeks severance for every year of service compared to two weeks in the last collective agreement;
• Allows employees to buy additional vacation time;
• Increased access and choice for training;
• A review of compensation for IT and maintenance staff, and a review of sales targets and commissions for sales staff;
• An acknowledgement that the bureaucratic and painful PMSD process doesn’t really work.

Overall the deal reflects CBC President Hubert Lacroix’s direction. One of the major elements of the deal - improving the relationship between employees and management - is one of Lacroix’s major objectives. “This is the first time in my CBC career that bargaining has involved real dialogue from beginning to end,” Laurin said.

In some ways it’s amazing that the we’ve gone from being locked-out to a reaching new collective agreement based on trust and improved relationships in the span of four years. “Many things changed in this round of bargaining, but mainly the perception each had of the other as the enemy,” Laurin said.

The deal is also considered a living document - it’s more of guide than the final word. And it’s not set in stone. Some of the provisions can be changed, with mutual agreement, during the course of the agreement.

The full details of the deal are available here.

So what do you think of the deal? Is it good, bad, does it depend too much good relationships, or this a better way forward than picket signs and walking shoes?

By: Paul Mcgrath
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Despite having little additional information on the tentative agreement, a vote has been set. The ratification vote will occur at the end of January. The vote happen after membership meetings in most CBC locations between January 12th and 25th.

Expect highlights of the deal to be sent out on Thursday. The full text will be available in January. The Guild says “The full memorandum of agreement is currently being collated and translated.”

By: Paul Mcgrath
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Marc-Philippe Laurin, the CMG branch president, who helped negotiate the new tentative agreement offers his thoughts on the deal. He said the deal is a watershed agreement that changed the “perception each had of the other as the enemy.” Laurin added it also avoided an ugly fight that would have made the 2005 lock-out “look like a picnic.”

Below is the full text of the email Laurin sent me after the deal was announced.

The overall deal is very good for both sides on many accounts… We have reached agreement with CBC management on many issues thought settled during the last bargaining round. They were not, and they threatened an even uglier fight in 2009, one that may have made 2005 look like a picnic.

The proposed salary increases are a reflection of the current financial crisis and the limits in funding for wage increases for the public service set by Treasury Board. Other public service Unions are seeing rollbacks, we fortunately are not. If the [Treasury Board] rate goes up in year three, four and five, we get the difference.

What is most important is the new and different approach both sides took to reach this agreement.  We reached a better understanding of each other’s needs. One would think that as  obvious, but not so for the past decade.

Is it a watershed agreement?  I really believe so.  For too many years, CBC management and the Guild have been at odds on pretty much everything. Sharing of information was, for all purposes, non existent let alone having any honest and forthright discussions.  Many things changed in this round of bargaining, but mainly the perception each had of the other as the enemy.  We are, for lack of a better word, partners in public broadcasting.  They run the shop and we do the programming, maintenance and office work. So we had better know what the other is thinking and needs to ensure both our prosperity.  You cannot do that if you don’t even speak to each other except through lawyers and arbitrators.

So that was the challenge I put to Hubert Lacroix in January of last year. Let’s put the lawyers out of business and deal with our problems ourselves in house.  We know what is best for us.  It is tough at times to face some realities, but a deal you get yourself is better than one that an arbitrator imposes on you. Hubert impressed many delagates with his straight talk when he was invited to this year’s Guild convention. Many started to believe things could change.

So the key to this round was that many were the same players as in the last round, and we changed the way they do business.  It was not about what each side wanted but more about what each needed, and understanding the reasoning behind the need. That is reflected throughout the agreement.

So here we are today, at the beginning of a new relationship based on honest dialogue and principles. This I hope will carry us through the future, but one can only hope. It will be up to the new folks who participated in this round to make it happen, because the real work may not be getting the realtionship on track and the deal done, but nurturing it through the next few years to ensure that this new way for us of doing business sticks and we stay on track.

Regards,
Marc-Philippe

By: Paul Mcgrath
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On December 16, 1953—54 years ago today—Vancouver’s first locally-based television station, CBC-owned and operated CBUT channel 2, was launched when CBC chairman Davidson Dunton pushed a button at the station, a converted garage at the southwest corner of West Georgia and Bute Streets. CBUT began with network programming initially tape-delayed from Toronto.

Thanks to Tod Maffin for the heads up.

By: Paul Mcgrath
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According to the Google Zeitgeist published last week, ‘cbc’  is the number one term for news sources in Canada.

The results mean people typed in the term ‘cbc’ into the Google search engine more often than any other news provider - beating out CTV, BBC, CNN, Global and several others.

This would seem to indicate that the CBC is a strong front-of-mind brand for news searches, which bodes well for CBC News in general and cbc.ca in particular.

By: Paul Mcgrath
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Flickr user BruceK took this picture of the book sale that was held in the CBC Toronto atrium last week.

Do you have any pictures of the CBC that you’d like to share? Leave a comment with you email below and I’ll be in touch. Don’t worry I won’t publish your email addresses.

By: Paul Mcgrath
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The CBC and the Canadian Media Guild have reached a tentative agreement on a new five-year deal after seven weeks of negotiations. The deal was signed this afternoon. It is subject to a ratification vote by guild members.

If ratified, the deal would come into effect on January 1st, 2009 and last until 2014.

The details are a bit thin at this point, but here are the highlights:

• Wage increases of 1.5 per cent each year;
• Improvements in maternity/paternity benefits;
• Improved benefits for bereavement leave and layoffs.
  

There are obviously way more details on the deal, and I’ll post them as I get them.

What do you think so far?

By: Paul Mcgrath
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Police forces across Canada have withdrawn older models of tasers following Frederic Zalac’s reporting for The National.

According to the Globe, Forces in Winnipeg, Newfoundland, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Fredericton, York Region, British Columbia and the RCMP have recalled pre-2006 models of tasers for tests.

The weapons were withdrawn after Zalac’s reporting showed four of 41 units tested discharged more current than the manufacturer’s specifications. The testing was commissioned by the CBC and Radio Canada, and was the largest independent electrical test on the weapon.

To watch the full length report from The National click here.

By: Paul Mcgrath
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Cedric Sam, an IT analyst with radio-canada.ca, has developed a custom electoral map using Google’s satellite imagery.

As you can see from the picture above, Sam used customized electoral maps and overlaid them on top of Google Earth’s satellite imagery. The technique was used once on-air for the federal election, and then several times for the recent Quebec provincial election.

To make it work Sam collected geographical and elections data from provincial and government sources and then feed it into a database. Then he incorporated the live elections results, and crunched it together to represent the ridings. “At each moment during the evening, by a click on the script, I could generate a fresh map with current data colored with the party in advance or elected in any given riding,” he said.

“The coolest map that we generated that night was that of parties finishing third in each riding. In a single shot, [we were] able to show how Quebec effectively returned to a two-party system with a map almost entirely colored in pale blue, the color representing Mario Dumont’s ADQ.”

Given that the next election is probably around the corner, this seems like a great application for the Canada Votes pages. To watch a Youtube video of the on-air presentation, click here.

By: Paul Mcgrath
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The CBC Office of the Ombudsman, an independent body, has cleared Krista Erickson of allegations of bias.

According to the Winnipeg Sun,

There is absolutely no evidence of any partisan interest on her part — she is an aggressive reporter who will pursue a story no matter whose interests are at stake,” ombudsman Vince Carlin wrote in a recent report.

Erickson was reassigned out of Ottawa in January after a CBC investigation determined that she passed questions to Liberals during the Mulroney-Schreiber hearings. Erickson has since been reinstated to the Ottawa parliamentary bureau.

By: Paul Mcgrath
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Yesterday the CBC’s One Million Acts of Green campaign reached a major milestone, half a million Acts of Green.

The campaign is one of several innovative CBC campaigns being developed by the CBC in unison with corporate sponsors as advertisers become increasingly interested in non-traditional campaigns. The One Million Acts of Green campaign was developed as part of a partnership with Cisco.

Several other include the Campbell’s Chunky - Football Meets Food campaign, which won Paul Abrams, who works in marketing and sales, a Marketing Magazine Gold Medal Award for media innovation; as well as the Hockey Night Mashup and the Kraft Hockeyville competition.

Now in the interests of full disclosure I should mention that I work on the One Million Acts of Green campaign. The objective is to ask Canadians to commit one million environmental acts between now and July 2009. The campaign is well ahead schedule, having reached the half million mark in less than two months. It is one of the largest campaigns the CBC has ever done outside of hockey properties.

“What makes the non-traditional revenue so important is that the possibilities are endless and we are only held back by our imaginations and our ability to prove to advertisers that it will provide them an opportunity to be seen, in a place, or space, that their competitors are not,” Abrams said.

What do you think of these sorts of non-traditional campaigns?

By: Paul Mcgrath
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In part two of two of my “Federal Election” series we are going to talk about two items. The first, which is the brain child of David Raso, is the postal code/riding look up. For that, I’m going to hand the keyboard over to him:

My Ridings
Hi, I’m David Raso a Senior Architect of Front-end Development at CBC.ca and Blake asked me if I could explain how one of our Election modules work. We wanted to build a module which would show you information and results for the riding you live in, so the My Riding module was created. This module allows you to enter your postal code and then displays information about your riding - it’s on every page of the Canada Votes site.

No Database Needed!
Sounds simple enough right? The simplest solution would have been to hook up the form to some sort or dynamic backed code written in Java or PHP which would search though the postal code database we got from Statistics Canada and display your riding info. Well because we get so much traffic on election night we have to build everything to be extremely stable and scalable. So using a dynamic application was out of the question - so then how do you provide a postal code look up database without a database? We could use some cloud computing (like Amazon or Google) or big complicated Akamai cached edge applications - but we like to keep things simple.

Everyone in meetings would say: “It can’t be done”, then you sit and stare at the white board. Few minutes later we came up with one of those “It’s so crazy it just might work” ideas.

When you enter your postal code into the form and hit search - we don’t connect to a database and find that postal code - we change your postal code into a url and using AJAX (a JavaScript programing technique) we fetch a flat HTML file which contains the ID of your riding. We then use that ID and AJAX, again, to fetch a flat HTML of your riding info. This is all done by your browser so all our web servers have to do is return those tiny HTML files your and computer does all the heavy lifting.

How It Works
So if you enter M9A2X1 we change that into “http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/myriding/postalcodes/m/m9a/2×1.html” we then download that file using AJAX. The files contents are stored as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) which the My Riding JavaScript can easily understand and obtain the ID for your riding. Once we have your riding ID we then use AJAX again and download the file for your riding “http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/myriding/ridings/130.html” then all we have to do it display that HTML file in the My Riding module. Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezie.

That’s all good and it works but you might be asking your self: “Does that mean you have a HTML file for each and every postal code in Canada?” - yup you’re correct. Over eight hundred thousand - 827,018 files to be exact. We took the database from Statistics Canada and created a script that would turn each postal code into a flat HTML file that contains the name and ID for the ridings in that postal code - some postal codes have multiple ridings, try out K0A1W0. We then uploaded the 3GB folder to our webservers - and because they don’t change we can cache all those files using Akamai.

On election night when the hundreds of thousands of users try to find their riding there is no database to go down, or application server to be bogged down. Just one small cached HTML file to download!

Comments and the Black Out
This is the first Election where commenting was allowed on CBC.ca. One of the issues we faced were users posting election related results in their comments.

This was an easy solution. We asked the 3rd party company that is responsible for moderating our comments (called ICUC) to not approve any comments for publication until the blackout period ended.

By: Blake Crosby
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