This game epitomizes what it meant to be a fan of the Montreal Expos

Painful for us at the end, but what an amazing game it was!

Yes, this used to be a blog

I have not had enough time since last summer to continue posting here on a regular basis. Instead, it has been easier to redirect my thoughts directly toward my radio program.

I’ve now spent over four years at Radio Centre-Ville. English programming can be heard on CINQ from 10:30 PM on Fridays through to 4 PM Saturdays. The English team is comprised of a small, but dedicated group of station members and volunteers. The only reason people devote so much time and effort to the station is because they love what they do and still believe in the relevance of radio.

I’ve found that one of, if not the biggest problem facing the English team is lack of exposure. Seven languages are heard on CINQ, and all of them, except for English and French do not really have to “compete” with commercial radio for listeners. For instance, it is easier to build an audience for a specific linguistic community than it is with say, English programming which is more general and less associated with a specific ethnic group.



In other words, we need to get the word out that we exist in a market with many big-budget English-language outlets. Considering we broadcast only once a week, that only adds to the challenge. In recent months, we have been increasing our efforts to get the word out about our programs. A new Facebook fan page has been launched, as has a Twitter feed. Several of our programs also have a web presence like Tracey's Cuisine, Jazz Boulevard, Scottish Voice, Arts Notebook and of course, Yesterday‘s News. All of our latest shows are available via podcast at radiocentreville.com and some of our shows have online archives and are available on iTunes.

One other way we have been using to get the word out about our shows is an occasional overnight replay of some of our programs. We’ve done it twice already and hope that it may have introduced some new listeners to some of what they may have been missing. The next installment of “Best of” Radio Centre-Ville’s English-language programming will air on Saturday, June 1st from 2:30 AM through to 7:30 AM. If you happen to be up during the early morning hours, please give it a listen on 102.3 FM in Montreal, or online with the station's live audio feed.

Retro Montreal ad from 1987: AM 60 Storm Watch

The Evolution of Cable

Once upon a time, some people lived with a handful of over-the-air analog channels. There were even such things as black-and-white receivers. Hard to imagine the way thing have evolved since then!

Back in the 1980s, just having cable was a big deal. Even though you’ve got far more choice today, it seemed you were getting far more bang for your buck back then. Specialty channels were scarce, but all you really wanted was to pick up the border channels anyway. That, and the way the image appeared to be crystal clear with cable. Today, we scoff at anything that isn’t HD, but at that time, it was standard analog cable that was the step up from the old rabbit ears.

There is one thing that is similar now to the early days of cable TV, and that is the necessity for a set-top box. Back in the 1970s and a part of the 1980s, you needed a set-top cable converter. Some rented it from their cable provider, others bought their own. The rented ones tended to be corded models, like the one shown below. It only had the capacity for about 30 channels and you couldn’t control the volume with it, or even turn the set on for that matter. The store-bought models, made by manufacturers like Jerrold and Philips did provide those features, were wireless and looked impressive sitting on top of the TV.

As the 80s drew to a close, most new TV sets had built-in converters, and thus all you needed to do was plug the cable directly into the unit. If you subscribed to pay-TV, it was still necessary to route it though a decoder box provided by the cable company. Keep in mind, unless you had one of those gigantic C-Band dishes or an antenna, you quickly realized that cable companies were monopolies.

The 90s arrived with new decoder technology. In Quebec, Videotron introduced the “Videoway” box with much fanfare. This set-top box introduced us to interactivity several years before the Internet. I’ve mentioned Videoway here before, but it is worth bringing up again, if only to point out how it was a technological sign of things to come. Interactive TV was a new feature of the system, including the ability to chose camera angles during live events and outcomes on pre-recorded TV programs. It never really became as widely used as it could have been, however. There were also interactive program guides, games, news and weather services and so on. But Videoway was still an analog decoder and although it hung around for some up until a few years ago, the technology had become dated by the end of the 90s.

Around the year 2000, digital TV began to appear in earnest. The picture appeared far superior to analog and it became far more customizable. As was the case with early cable, it once again became necessary to hook up an exterior box to benefit from this new technology. At around the same time, Satellite television began to appear in Canada after Grey market dishes began to take business away from the cable companies.

It is ironic that Bell fought against competition in phone services and cable companies against competition for television distribution. Today, they all offer the same services, meaning they all ended up better off and a lot richer by opening up the field. One thing that has significantly changed is the way content distributors are now also content producers.

The final change in cable offerings has been HD programming.
Again, with the necessity of buying or renting a set-top box. The HD set-top box is in all actuality a computer system, complete with a large solid-state drive for its PVR. It will be interesting to see whether in the near future a standard will be developed to allow TV receivers to be designed with set-top box capabilities. If that happens, like in the 80s, all that will be needed from the cable company is the cable.

There is no respect for Montreal's radio history

It hasn’t been a fun time for fans of Montreal radio in recent years. If one thing has become apparent, it is that history means nothing when it comes to the preservation of Montreal’s “heritage” stations. It began two decades ago when the CFCF call sign disappeared in favour of CIQC. Yes, I know, they were forced to change their letters, but still! At the very least the station continued to exist on 600 under its new name for nearly a decade. The 600 frequency would go silent, but theoretically, the station lived on down the dial at 940. A few years ago, the plug was pulled on the old CFCF's decades and decades of history - good and bad. My car radio’s still programmed to stop on 940 during scans, even though I never listened to it much in its “declining” years. All I hear now is static. Too bad, because supposedly it is a great frequency to have. But the radio “carnage’ didn’t stop there!

CKAC was also hugely significant when it came to Montreal’s radio history. It spent its final years as an all-sports station. I was under the impression they were doing reasonably well with the Habs and all. Their ownership however, hit the jackpot when the Quebec government decided for reasons only they understand, that public money should be handed over to help fund an all-traffic radio station. If it were such a great idea, then it is likely that a private broadcaster would have taken that initiative on their own. Of course, it’s a lot easier when the government is paying your way. So it was bye bye CKAC. Let us not forget that back when CKAC was a hugely popular talk station in the early 90s, their main competitor, the original CJMS was put out of its misery in another odd business merger. At the time, CJMS was actually doing pretty well too.

Now the same folks who turned CKAC in to an all-traffic waste of a frequency wanted to do the same thing in English on the old 940 spot - with the province’s money that is. The CRTC said no.

Which brings us to one of the last classic Anglo radio remnants that is left: CKGM, aka Team/TSN 990. They went through format change after format change right through to 2001 when they went to the all-sports format. It seemed unlikely they could succeed, but amazingly they have held on for more than a decade. Their luck, however, is about to run out. We’ve seen a lot of manoeuvring over the years, but this most recent one by 990’s owner Bell takes things to a new level. This time, they don’t just want to change a format or a place on the dial, they want to change the language of the station itself. 990 was set to shortly move to a new stronger frequency on 690 AM. The reasoning given to the CRTC was that somehow that will allow it to reach a wider English-speaking audience on the western tip of the island and beyond. With them now being the Habs’ rights holders, it might have been a convincing argument. The CRTC bought it. So under the pretext of increasing the reach of the Anglo market, Bell now says they want to use that new frequency as a French-language all-sports station, to complement RDS.

This most recent move seems to have taken the radio world, and more particularly 990 employees totally off-guard. Since the news broke, there has been an emotional campaign launched by the station’s listeners to save it. They are not a huge group by any means, but they have been persistent in their petitions to the CRTC, obligatory Facebook campaign and in their planned rallies.

Will the effort make a difference? You would hope so, but probably not. Canadian media is now owned not by a handful, but by a few fingers worth of massive corporations. All they care about is the bottom line. And if you are able to easily swallow up your competition, you are under far less pressure to respond to the demands of listeners of viewers. Why?  Because you pretty much own everything. If people abandon Station A for Station B and you own them both, so what?

So to summarize, what is clear from the above is that history be damned when it comes to deciding on the fate of long-time institutions. And oh yes, English-speaking radio listeners in Montreal are being screwed.

Remembering Neil McKenty

Neil McKenty was probably the most popular English-language talk show host in Montreal radio history. Whatever you might have thought about his opinions or the way he dealt with callers, the fact is that his legacy is still evident over a quarter of a century after he left the radio business. It was definitely personality-driven radio, as was the case with many of his Montreal contemporaries of the time. There were no e-mails to read and no text messages - it was talk radio in its purest form and it was highly entertaining.

My recollections of the content of McKenty’s “Exchange” are limited, but my memories of his voice are rock solid. When I was young, like in so many other households, the radio dial was set in stone. I was introduced to the medium of radio by hearing the voices of George Balcan, Ted Blackman, Gord Sinclair and Neil McKenty. I can't recall what they were talking about during the early 80s, but I remember their voices as if it were just yesterday. As I got older, I learned that there were other frequencies on the dial and I discovered some great stuff on differing stations local and far away.

Someone who is old enough to remember McKenty’s program told me that at first his tolerance for a caller’s dissenting opinion was pretty limited. It seems that stance mellowed a bit later on however, especially with his online presence. That person also recounted a story of a particular program in the early 1980s where the seal hunt was the topic of the day. Mr. McKenty was aparently very much against it. In the hunt's defence, one caller pointed out that for some native peoples, seal meat was also used for food. McKenty responded that he’d have to try some of that “flipper” meat… Then there was the time a young girl called up and used what McKenty seemed to think were very “big” adult words. He asked her where she had learned them. “From listening to you” was her response.

Neil McKenty hosted a TV talk show for a brief period in the late 1980s, but then seemed to leave broadcasting for good. From then on, he expressed his opinion in print. Less than a year ago, I discovered his relatively new blog entitled - what else - “Exchange”. It was clear that despite being in his late 80s, McKenty had overwhelmingly accepted and embraced the new digital age.

Neil McKenty was another Montreal radio figure who had a lasting influence on others. His passing is another reminder of a time in local radio that has come and gone and can never be repeated.

More Radio Musings: Texts, talk shows and RCI

Call me old-fashioned, but every time I tune into a radio talk show and hear what seems to be half the program devoted to reading text messages and e-mails, it irks me. The radio talk show was traditionally the only truly interactive medium before the Internet. The tradition is spoiled when someone spends half their time reading comments instead of engaging callers. The conversation between host/guests/callers is what always made radio call-in shows entertaining. The radio talk show as we know it is unfortunately gone forever, replaced with a phone/text/email hybrid monster.

It’s even worse on television, which was never designed to be interactive in the first place. They have too fallen into the Twitter/Facebook trap that has already dumbed down many a newscast with segments devoted to reading tweets and comments. All this is being done to make TV seem like a natural extension of the online world. It isn’t and never will be. You cannot have a two-way conversation between one side and hundreds of thousands or even millions of others. It is difficult enough to have a meaningful, coherent discussion with large groups of people when it is entirely done online.

As for the RCI saga, most of their employees recently found out they will soon lose their jobs. On June 26th, just a few days before Canada Day, Radio Canada International - a broadcaster that reaches far more people than the CBC brass will admit to or even care to know about - will be silenced. The historic Sackville transmitter will be shut down and a “new” RCI will launch as a web-based service.

This decision is wrong on so many levels, particularly because even the budget they had before the 80% cuts was very meager even by CBC standards. CBC brass and supporters like to make a big deal about how important the Corporation is for the country as a national institution. Therefore, it is strange that they would decide to cut the one department that actually fulfills the role of displaying Canada and its news and culture to people who would never otherwise know anything about it. But here lies the problem, the CBC itself. It is a public institution that behaves as if it were a private one. This is not new. They don’t believe in transparency, even when the Feds dare to touch their budget.

It seems funny how within mere days of the announcement of the government’s budget cuts, the CBC already had a list of its cuts prepared. Strange that they seemed to be able to prepare such a detailed list in a matter of a few days… More likely, CBC brass had their chopping block prepared and were waiting for the right pretext to assign blame elsewhere…

The only thing that can save RCI now is direct government intervention, ideally removing it from CBC clutches. It probably won‘t happen though, since there is no political will to save something most Canadians don’t know anything about. Foreign pressure has done little to save international services elsewhere because there is seemingly no money to be made in shortwave. It may seem that way, but the promotional value of having a service like RCI is far greater than governments seem to realize. Furthermore, the vast majority of people who will lose access next month do not have the Internet available to them. For them, Canada will just simply no longer be heard, period.