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"KNOW the box; but BE beyond it. The box is Over-Rated." – CEFM

Once again it is summer. Last week something happened at work that got me remembering the amazing days of summers past spent at Camp Glenburn. Glenburn has to be one of the best places in New Brunswick to promote active living. It is on the south shore of the Bellisle Bay on a big hill that about every 2 hours you would go up and down. When you were up you were up, when you were down you were down and when you were only half way up…

I had spent 4 summers there, the first was the year before the boathouse, the second was the year they built the boathouse, and the third was the year after the boathouse was built, and the final was when I was 16 in 1998. One of my most favorite activities was canoeing, Especially when one year we went to the island in the bay east of the camp, and the other year when we went to a beach across the bay and to the west. And then there was the treks way up the hill to Mt. Baldy however it was in hindsight just a huge rockface and not really a mountain. continue reading…

Moosehead Launches Moosehead Light Lime

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While in my last post I may have took the position that Saving Local is not important. That is not true. I am against CTV and Global who have for the last few years, mainly CTV, treated New Brunswick as a second class maritime province in terms of share of news coverage and local programming.

Now on to the main topic of this post, CBC Radio 1 in Saint John. In reality Saint John has about 4 main contacts for news CHSJ, CBC, CHNI, and Telegraph-Journal. However, only the Telegraph-Journal and CBC provide the depth of information and understanding of our community as a whole. Despite radio being close to a hundred year old technology. The style of the CBC just draws you in and is never shallow on good storytelling.

Technically speaking the CBC does have a trend on over staffing on productions on the TV end but with the radio it takes less people to technically produce the shows so that leaves cutting the staff as ripping out pages from the unpublished book, still there but more shallow. I definitely plan on attending the rally in King’s Square this weekend.

We Want Our CBC

Today I seem ads on CTVGlobeMedia stations that are urging the government to require cable/satellite distributors to pay for distributing the signal. I think this is just plain wrong. Here in Saint John there are 4 broadcast stations CBAT (CBC Fredericton but licensed and has its main transmitter in Saint John), CKLT (Has no programming differences from CJCH (CTV Atlantic) in Halifax, NS), CIHF-TV-2 (a semi satellite of CIHF-TV known as Global Maritimes from Halifax.), and CBAFT-1 which is a re-transmitter of CBAFT the Radio-Canada Moncton feed.
When it comes to local programming CTV is the absolute worst, as I have noted before at most has 2 stories from the Saint John area and 4-5 total from the entire Province of New Brunswick on a good day. Global TV despite their severe cut backs have managed to keep their news stories basically equal per province.
The basics is that all 4 of these broadcasters offer their signals for free over-the-air (a.k.a. poverty-vision). The cable company simply re-transmits the feed via an antenna to cables to the subscribers. Why should we pay to have something that we get for free anyway? In fact this even benefits the TV stations by making it more convenient to watch the stations resulting in more viewers rather than switching over to better content from away. Thus removing ad dollars.

In less dense markets like the Maritimes TV must come up with a different model in order to survive. Depending on a single news program is clearly not the way to go, but neither is alienating the viewers by making some pay, while others do not. Do we consider a TV tax like the United Kingdom? I don’t thinks so either but fees must not be duel standard. The CRTC recently made a decision that requires distributors to no longer require a bundle of channels. In this schema you can choose to not purchase stations, adding fees will just doom local programming to certain failures.

If you want to see more about this CTV is promoting the site http://www.ctv.ca/savelocal/.

I just arrived at Wordcamp Toronto. So far the trip here to Toronto has been very eventful. Starting with Air Canada cancelling my flight from Saint John to Halifax and I will post more later.