Canadian Radio in 1960

Twittersphere 1 Elections Canada 0

Radio stations were forced to pull their feeds on Monday night. All this was done to keep election results in certain areas from reaching those who had yet to cast their ballots. The Canadian law concerning election results dates back to the late 1930s. The premise is an obvious one: it is believed by some that people may be influenced by the results in other areas of the country. No doubt that may be the case, but why is that any different from posting opinion poll results up until a day before the election? Surely those have far more influence.

In any case, the original law has been on the books for a very long time. It came into being when radio was the only means to obtain updated election results, other than making a long-distance phone call. Well, since then TV had become the king of all media. They too have had to adopt the same policy. Make no mistake about it, today’s traditional media nearly unanimously hates the law. They would much prefer to broadcast results to everybody as they become available.

Still, the law was effective in keeping people in the dark since it was implemented. Broadcasting was the only means of informing large masses and unless you had contacts in the areas in question, you simply had to wait until the polls closed in your part of the country. That all began to change with the advent of the modern Internet.

As far back as 2000, people were beginning to challenge the law. This was years before the explosion of social media. A Vancouver resident was actually fined that year for posting election results on his blog. Paul Bryan was fined $1000. He appealed the law all the way to the Supreme Court and lost. The Court voted 5-4 to uphold the law.

Enter the 2011 vote. Twitter may not have been a huge factor in swaying public opinion during the campaign, but it would become a huge story in reporting its results. Elections Canada had warned people not to tweet early election results, or face the consequences. Those could include fines of up to $25,000. Well, it didn’t take long for the law to be openly challenged. Within minutes of the closing of polls in Newfoundland, results were being posted for all to see. Shortly after, the hash tag #tweettheresults overflowed with not only results, but with plenty of Elections Canada bashing, comedy and sarcasm.

By 9 o’clock Monday evening, #tweettheresults had become the top trending topic on Twitter in Canada, and amazingly, the third highest trender in the world. Now this should in no way indicate that the entire world was fixated on the results of the Canadian election. On the contrary, most probably had no idea we were having one. It did show the incredible penetration of social media in Canada right now. And yes, there were several people down south and in other parts of the world who found the blackout rule fascinating and decided to join in. Some even asked people in Canada to forward them results so that they could in turn tweet them.

Elections Canada is now grappling with how to respond to what happened Monday night. It was clear going in that with the rise of the Internet and new media that such a law is not enforceable. They do say that in order to go after someone for posting results, they would first need to have received a complaint. It remains to be seen if the law will be changed in time for the next election, now scheduled to be no less than 4 years away.

Le Baseball - Ouverture - 1969

Radio Centre-Ville Benefit Performance - April 15th

Village Scene Productions
In association with the Rialto Theatre

Presents

EQUUS

“Passion can be destroyed; it cannot be created.”- Martin Dysart

Written by Peter Shaffer

Directed by Paul Van Dyck

Choreographed by Jacqueline Van de Geer

Wednesday, April 13 to Sunday, April 24, 2011

At the Rialto Theatre, 5723 avenue du Parc.

Tuesdays to Thursdays at 7:30 pm,

Fridays, Saturdays and Sunday April 24 at 8:00pm.

Matinées: Sundays at 2pm.

Tickets: $30 regular, $24 students/seniors.

20% discount off regular rate offered to valid card carrying members of: UDA, ACTRA, CAEA, QDF, QWF, ELAN, at the door only.

Preview, Wednesday, April 13, 7:30 pm, two-for-one (tickets at the door only)

Opening Night is Thursday, April 14 at 7:30pm (By invitation.)

Advance ticket purchase: (Service charges may apply.)

On line at La Vitrine www.lavitrine.com, P.D.A. 145 Ste-Catherine W.,

Priape- 1311 Ste-Catherine St. east.

ÉM - Café Mile End 5718 avenue du Parc.

Information: Tel: 514 965-9VSP (877) www.villagescene.com


Benefit performances:

Friday April 15- Benefit: Community radio station, Radio Centre-Ville CINQ 102.3FM (regular ticket prices).

Sat., April 16- Benefit: RefugeRR, rescue & retirement ranch for horses. Tickets: Regular 30$ ot 24$ Or $50* including : play at 8 pm; meet & greet talk back session with cast; and performance by Soul Fusion at 11 pm. *A 25$ tax receipt willl be issued on request. Available at the door or by reserving directly with Refuge RR.

Easter Sunday buffets: -Brunch buffet service 11:00-13:00 $20; -Dinner buffet service 17:00-19:00 $25. Contact the Rialto for reservations at: 514 268-7069 or ecarosielli@gmail.com

Digital Sound Editing

I spent a couple of months at CKUT during the summer of 1997. I had hoped to gain some on air experience, but aside from recording a commercial, I got stuck in the music library. While I was there, the library was in a very cramped room. I haven’t been to the place since that summer, so they may have changed things around since then. Anyway, there was a way of labelling the CDs, records and tapes and this old Macintosh computer for entering each item into the records. Obviously, like all radio stations now, the station has since gone digital. I think/hope they have also since installed air conditioning. Back then, the place was unbelievably hot in the summer.

I’ve heard stories of how radio people used to have to splice tape back in the day. At CKUT, I was supposed to take a little training on the basics of radio. I only attended one meeting, but that is where I learned the splicing technique, complete with the use of a pretty sharp blade. I was fortunate enough to get through the lesson with all my fingers intact. I can’t say that I still remember how it was done. We would use a similar kind of technique when splicing film once upon a time. Obviously, it was a painstaking way of editing. One mistake could not only ruin your content, but cause physical harm.

There are some pretty cool looking tape reel machines at Radio Centre-Ville. I wonder when they were last put to use. Fortunately, we’ve gone past the tape days. Now we do our editing on computers using some pretty nifty pieces of software. Adobe Audition is the standard at most radio stations, although there are other audio software packages out there. I was first introduced to Audition at the Montreal Radio and Television School. Like everything else, practice is the only way to learn it. You can manipulate your audio almost completely to a point. Still, if it is really bad, there is only so much that can be done to make it “listenable”. In terms of digital “splicing”, your edits can literally sound flawless if done correctly. Of the utmost importance, you can also monitor your waves as you record.

Audition is a huge and expensive program. Many find it out of reach for home use. You can however download it for a free 30 day trial. Fortunately, there are quite a few smaller free programs you can download. They will by no means give you to same degree of control or quality the bigger programs have, but they can still do a pretty nice job. One such piece of software is called Audacity. It isn’t flashy, but it gets the job done. You will need to download an add-on in order to save in MP3 format.

Whether you use something basic or powerful, it beats using a blade… Progress is a great thing.

Getting on iTunes

I’ve recently posted a couple of radio programs on iTunes, including Yesterday’s News. I procrastinated about it for a while because I thought it would be overly complicated. Over the past few weeks, I started looking into how to get an RSS feed up. After a bit of investigating, I decided to go with a podcast host that handled all the tech stuff for me. HTML is one thing, but I didn’t have the patience to take RSS lessons. The only thing I really had to take care of was creating images to go along with the feeds.

It took a few hours to set things up, but once all is up and running, the maintenance is no big deal. After sending iTunes the feed, I thought it might take a while to get it online. Surprisingly, it only took a couple of days for one and four for the other. You notice the difference in “hits” almost right away.

The topic of how traditional radio can compete with sites like iTunes has come up several times on this blog. And as you can clearly see by logging on to iTunes, there seems to be no limit to the amount of podcasts that originated as traditional radio programs. There are also plenty of podcasts that are in no way connected to conventional radio.

Whatever the future holds, the more choice you have, the better. The worst thing you can do is to not keep up with the times. Btw, here is the link to Yesterday's News.

RCI Turns 66

We've just passed the 66th anniversary of the launch of Canada's shortwave service. Radio Canada International first started broadcasting on February 25th, 1945. Originally, it was known as the CBC International Service or “Voice of Canada“. The service was launched as the Second World War was drawing to a close. In the beginning, it was meant to keep Canadian military personnel in touch with Canada.

After the war ended, the mandate would become focused on spreading news, information and entertainment from and about Canada throughout the world. This was done in many languages. Like most western broadcasters, RCI would pump their content into the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. What would become RCI also broadcast events from Expo '67 to the rest of the world. Of course, shortwave listening was more widespread in western countries in those days than it is now.

The service is based in Montreal, which makes it about the only branch of the CBC aside from Radio Canada that is based here. It has faced a number of budget cuts over the years, as radio enthusiasts are probably well aware. It's not unique to Canada though, as we have recently seen with the announcement coming from the BBC. Budget cuts over the years have resulted in cutting back many foreign language broadcasts.

RCI currently broadcasts in 7 languages: Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Arabic and Portuguese. RCI’s only transmitter is located in Sackville New Brunswick. The service can also be heard on satellite and of course online.

What does the future hold in store for RCI and other shortwave services? Hard to say, but these broadcasts are favourite targets for budget cuts, as mentioned above. That will probably remain the case for the foreseeable future. New media is seen as a better way to deliver content to far away places. However, realistic access to digital technology is still not within reach of a high percentage of the world's population.