Cambodian Bloggers Champion New, Open Ways
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 at 12:05PM The Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia has had a very difficult history over the past few decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was seen as a glamorous and vibrant place. Dynamic, ambitious and newly independent from French colonial rule, Cambodia embarked on an extensive programme of building that is now called “New Khmer Architecture.” It is the most visible legacy of this modernizing time.
The book Cultures of Independence: An Introduction to Cambodian Arts and Culture in the 1950s and 1960s says architects of the period showed “a willingness to expand and incorporate new elements, looking both outside and inside the newly independent nation …. Whether consciously or not, most of their work took up questions of how to create forms that would be recognised as both Cambodian and modern.”
But with the war in nearby Vietnam worsening in the 1970s, the destabilising effect of the conflict gave rise to the Khmer Rouge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge), a radical and genocidal movement under the dictator Pol Pot which killed an estimated 2 million Cambodians. It came to an end when newly independent Vietnam invaded the country to overturn the Khmer Rouge regime and end the genocide that had raged between 1975 and 1979.
By the early 1990s, the United Nations was helping Cambodia make the transition to democracy and redevelop its economy after the trauma of the Khmer Rouge years.
Today’s Cambodia is a country with a fast-growing economy – at 5.5 percent in 2010 according to Prime Minister Hun Sen – but still trying to come to grips with the pain and damage of the Khmer Rouge period.
On the internet, pioneering bloggers are trying to bridge the gap between reluctance to speak out about those years and the need for the country to modernize and open up. In the past, keeping quiet in public was the best survival strategy and outspoken voices could end up dead.
The internet is still in its infancy in Cambodia, with only 78,000 users in 2010 (Internet World Stats) – up from 6,000 in 2000, but still tiny in a population of 14,805,358 (World Bank). Cambodia still has high levels of illiteracy of 26 percent (ILO) and poverty, leaving access to the internet and computers a minority pursuit.
The first connections to the internet in Cambodia were set up in 1994 and internet cafes have been flourishing since the mid 2000s.
One role model can be found at the Blue Lady Blog (http://blueladyblog.com/). Its author, Kounila Keo, blogs about her daily frustrations, passions, and life as a young woman who has been working as a newspaper journalist. Her blog tackles anything Cambodian, from education and politics to lifestyle, press freedom, culture and problems facing the country. She is a passionate explainer of Cambodia’s blogging culture.
She started the Blue Lady Blog in 2007 and in a talk at Phnom Penh’s TEDx in February (http://tedxphnompenh.com/) described how she found blogging has transformed her life in three ways:
1) Freedom of speech: She could now fully express herself and venture opinions she could not do even as a journalist.
2) Self-education and self esteem: she has had to learn things on her own and in turn this has boosted her confidence.
3) Knowledge and new perspectives: blogging connects her with people around the world she would not normally have contact with. And blogging is becoming the new voice of a new generation of youth, allowing them to redefine the country’s development challenges in their own terms.
Keo found blogging altered the challenges facing youth, posing the question “What can young Cambodians do for Cambodia?” She believes Cambodian youth should do something rather than wait for opportunities to come to them. Young people have told her her blog has spurred them into action.
“Cloggers” – Cambodian bloggers – are a group of young internet users championing the use of information technologies in everyday life.
In 2007, the first Clogger Summit (http://cloggersummit.wikispaces.com/) brought together bloggers, webmasters, media representatives and NGOs for the first time to exchange ideas and share and debate. Since then, there has been a proliferation of blogs in the Cambodian language.
Developing a vibrant – and open – information technology sector has many advantages. Pioneering work by the United Nations in Mongolia as it made its transition to free markets and democracy led to the country becoming one of world’s freest for internet use.
A vibrant and free information technology sector enables businesses to quickly modernize, connect with customers and markets around the world, spread information and ideas quickly, react to crises and build market efficiencies.
Honduras, Mali, and Mongolia (http://www.yuxiyou.net/open/) were highlighted as being some of the freest places in the world for the internet in a recent report by Reporters Without Borders (http://en.rsf.org/).
By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions
Published: March 2011
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
Follow @SouthSouth1
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Indian Newspapers Thrive with Economy
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 at 11:53AM
The onslaught of digital media in the developed countries of the world regularly brings pronouncements of the death of the traditional newspaper. But this assumption of digital triumph misses out on the reality in countries across the global South.
As incomes rise and literacy levels go up, so does the desire to consume news and information. And while many are jumping straight to online and mobile phone sources, just as many are enjoying more traditional print media offerings like magazines and newspapers.
India boasts both a fast-growing economy and the largest number of paid-for newspapers in the world. The print media industry in India has seen phenomenal growth since 2005, with the number newspaper titles increasing by 40 percent to 2,700 (World Association of Newspapers). The two factors driving this growth in newspapers are rising literacy and a booming economy
The World Association of Newspapers found China leads the world for newspaper subscribers, with 93.5 million readers a day. India is second. It is estimated the Indian newspaper industry will generate US $3.8 billion in revenues in 2010, a 13 percent growth rate over the last five years.
Estimates place growth in the newspaper industry in the next four years at 9 percent a year, to US $5.9 billion (KPMG).
Part of the reason India is defying the decline in newspaper numbers and readership seen in developed countries is poor internet penetration across the country. Because of this, only 7 percent of the population uses the web for information. And the country’s high number of illiterates (just 65 percent of the population can read) means even if many could afford a newspaper, they couldn’t use it.
According to Amar Ambani, head of research at India Infoline Group, “Unlike the West where the internet publishing and advertising has significantly hit the print media, the Internet threat to print media is still in its nascent stage in India, given the low penetration of computers and adequate bandwidth across the country.”
Newspapers are also growing in a highly competitive market exploding with new television channels on cable and satellite and other media distractions like mobile phone applications.
The newspapers (http://www.world-newspapers.com/india.html) are a strong reflection of how much the economy has changed in the past decade. They contain advertisements for property, mobile phones, cars and dating services.
Cost is also a critical element in their success: at only four rupees each (US $0.09 cents), many Indians buy several newspapers at a time for their home. The publications are able to charge so little because of the health of the advertising revenue coming in. Newspaper advertising in India increased by 30 percent between January and Match 2010 alone, the quickest jump in ads for the Asia-Pacific region (Nielsen India).
There is a hierarchy in the newspaper industry: English-language newspapers attract wealthier readers and can charge the most for advertising. But rising literacy rates combined with increasing personal wealth is fuelling growth in regional papers written in local languages. India has 22 official languages and English as an associate language. The country as a whole has about 33 different languages and over 2,000 local dialects. Hindi newspaper circulation rose from 8 million in the early 1990s to over 25 million in 2009.
The Times of India (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com) is now the world’s largest circulation English-language newspaper, with 4 million readers. It uses this success to charge 10 times what regional papers can for advertising. At present, the regional newspapers’ bread-and-butter is mostly government-paid advertising.
But if trends continue as they are, then the tables will turn on big beasts like the Times of India. Regional papers will grow as people look for an opportunity to read in their own local language.
Flush with cash and confidence, Indian newspapers are also innovating new ways to advertise untried in other countries. Talking ads attached to the actual newspaper’s back pages caused a great stir when they were trialled in India recently (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/sep/28/newspapers-advertising). The talking ads for a car company delivered a sales pitch but also alarmed and annoyed many people because the talking ad wouldn’t stop talking.
Ambani puts the success of the Indian newspaper industry down to five factors: the economic boom in semi-urban and rural India; growing local content; more opportunity to grow the number of readers; rising advertising spending; and rising literacy as a result of rising secondary school enrolment. He believes students aged between 10 and 15 are getting the newspaper habit and they represent huge future growth in newspaper readers.
By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions
Published: February 2011
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
Follow @SouthSouth1
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Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsfebruary2011issue
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Southern Innovator Issue 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQNt4YmhZagC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 4: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9T_n2tA7l4EC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
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Indian Newspapers Thrive with Economy
Tuesday, June 23, 2015 at 9:45AM
The onslaught of digital media in the developed countries of the world regularly brings pronouncements of the death of the traditional newspaper. But this assumption of digital triumph misses out on the reality in countries across the global South.
As incomes rise and literacy levels go up, so does the desire to consume news and information. And while many are jumping straight to online and mobile phone sources, just as many are enjoying more traditional print media offerings like magazines and newspapers.
India boasts both a fast-growing economy and the largest number of paid-for newspapers in the world. The print media industry in India has seen phenomenal growth since 2005, with the number newspaper titles increasing by 40 percent to 2,700 (World Association of Newspapers). The two factors driving this growth in newspapers are rising literacy and a booming economy
The World Association of Newspapers found China leads the world for newspaper subscribers, with 93.5 million readers a day. India is second. It is estimated the Indian newspaper industry will generate US $3.8 billion in revenues in 2010, a 13 percent growth rate over the last five years.
Estimates place growth in the newspaper industry in the next four years at 9 percent a year, to US $5.9 billion (KPMG).
Part of the reason India is defying the decline in newspaper numbers and readership seen in developed countries is poor internet penetration across the country. Because of this, only 7 percent of the population uses the web for information. And the country’s high number of illiterates (just 65 percent of the population can read) means even if many could afford a newspaper, they couldn’t use it.
According to Amar Ambani, head of research at India Infoline Group, “Unlike the West where the internet publishing and advertising has significantly hit the print media, the Internet threat to print media is still in its nascent stage in India, given the low penetration of computers and adequate bandwidth across the country.”
Newspapers are also growing in a highly competitive market exploding with new television channels on cable and satellite and other media distractions like mobile phone applications.
The newspapers (http://www.world-newspapers.com/india.html) are a strong reflection of how much the economy has changed in the past decade. They contain advertisements for property, mobile phones, cars and dating services.
Cost is also a critical element in their success: at only four rupees each (US $0.09 cents), many Indians buy several newspapers at a time for their home. The publications are able to charge so little because of the health of the advertising revenue coming in. Newspaper advertising in India increased by 30 percent between January and Match 2010 alone, the quickest jump in ads for the Asia-Pacific region (Nielsen India).
There is a hierarchy in the newspaper industry: English-language newspapers attract wealthier readers and can charge the most for advertising. But rising literacy rates combined with increasing personal wealth is fuelling growth in regional papers written in local languages. India has 22 official languages and English as an associate language. The country as a whole has about 33 different languages and over 2,000 local dialects. Hindi newspaper circulation rose from 8 million in the early 1990s to over 25 million in 2009.
The Times of India (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com) is now the world’s largest circulation English-language newspaper, with 4 million readers. It uses this success to charge 10 times what regional papers can for advertising. At present, the regional newspapers’ bread-and-butter is mostly government-paid advertising.
But if trends continue as they are, then the tables will turn on big beasts like the Times of India. Regional papers will grow as people look for an opportunity to read in their own local language.
Flush with cash and confidence, Indian newspapers are also innovating new ways to advertise untried in other countries. Talking ads attached to the actual newspaper’s back pages caused a great stir when they were trialled in India recently (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/sep/28/newspapers-advertising). The talking ads for a car company delivered a sales pitch but also alarmed and annoyed many people because the talking ad wouldn’t stop talking.
Ambani puts the success of the Indian newspaper industry down to five factors: the economic boom in semi-urban and rural India; growing local content; more opportunity to grow the number of readers; rising advertising spending; and rising literacy as a result of rising secondary school enrolment. He believes students aged between 10 and 15 are getting the newspaper habit and they represent huge future growth in newspaper readers.
By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions
Published: October 2010
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
Follow @SouthSouth1
Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iymYBgAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+october+2010&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsoctober2010issue
Southern Innovator Issue 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q1O54YSE2BgC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 2: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ty0N969dcssC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQNt4YmhZagC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 4: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9T_n2tA7l4EC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
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African Media Changing to Reach Growing Middle Class
Tuesday, June 23, 2015 at 9:37AM
Africa’s growing middle classes are being targeted by a new generation of media entrepreneurs. This growing group of Africans is ambitious and intelligent, and they want media that matches their aspirational ways. Clever media people are stepping up to feed this trend.
The continent as a whole forms the 10th largest economy in the world. Of Africa’s more than 1 billion people, 900 million can be classified as part of the consumer economy. Out of this group, there a third – approximately 300 million people – make modest sums by Western standards, about US $200 a month, but have spare cash to buy things like mobile phones, DVDs and new clothes, or pay for better schools. They are the population that is overlooked when attention is focused only on the very poor living on less than US $2 a day.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Nigerian journalist Dele Olojede is one of several African media pioneers re-shaping the continent’s media and taking it to the next level. Another is Godfrey Mwampembwa, whose popular puppet television show satirizes contemporary politics and current events and brings a welcome local flavour to a programming schedule packed with foreign imports.
A book by University of Texas professor Vijay Mahajan, Africa Rising, details the phenomenon of Africa’s middle class consumer society. He calls this group of middle class consumers ‘Africa 2′, with the desperately poor called Africa 3s, and the extremely rich Africa 1s.
This new group has expanded far beyond just the ruling elites and government workers. Many of its members work in the private sector, as secretaries, computer entrepreneurs, merchants and others who have benefited from consistent growth rates in many African countries.
And because these people consume products and services – and advertising products and services are the lifeblood of private media – the opportunities are plentiful.
“I’m convinced that Africa is going to be built by Africa 2s,” Mahajan told the Washington Post newspaper. “These are the people sending their kids to school . . . who are the most optimistic, the most forward-thinking.”
Olojede, owner and publisher of Next newspaper (http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/index.csp) in Nigeria’s biggest city, Lagos, has been able to grab readers by breaking original stories and offering a quality, well-designed publication. Launched in 2008, it has its sights set on going continent-wide by 2011.
“There is a need for a newspaper for the African metropolitan middle classes, along the lines of the International Herald Tribune,” he told Monocle magazine.
Olojede cut his teeth as a foreign editor for the US newspaper Newsday and has used this experience to make Next such a success.
Next has become the number one news website in Nigeria’s highly competitive media scene.
Wisely, Olojede put design at the centre of making his newspaper and website stand out from the competition. He commissioned the experienced newspaper design team of Garcia Media (http://garciamedia.com/blog/articles/in_west_africa_a_new_newspaper_is_born_—online_first) – who have designed for The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald and Die Zeit – to develop the template and prototypes.
Kenyan economist James Shikwati (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Shikwati) believes Africa’s middle-income consumers are also a driving force for political change.
“It’s empowering,” he told the Washington Post. “If you give people a sense of freedom in the economic sector, then you deny it in the political sector, you have a problem.”
Kenya-based newspaper cartoonist Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa) has profited from this phenomenon. Fed up with TV channels sticking to a menu of foreign imports and dull news programmes, he looked to famous puppet TV shows Spitting Image (from Britain) and Les Guignols (from France) for inspiration. The result is the XYZ Show (http://xyzshow.com/blog), which features grotesque puppet caricatures of well-known public and political figures. The show’s blog makes for an excellent entry point into African TV programme-making and its ups and downs. The show is broadcast on Citizen TV in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.
“I moved to Nairobi in 1992 when I was 23,” Mwampembwa explained to Monocle. “The Daily Nation, the biggest newspaper in Kenya, had lost its editorial cartoonist so they ran a competition to look for his replacement. I sent in my drawings and came second.”
“I took a year off in 2000-2001 to study film and animation in Vancouver. When I got back to Nairobi I started thinking about the sort of TV programme I would like to make. Kenya needed a show that would make fun of our politicians and expose hypocrisy and I thought a puppet show like Les Guignols or Spitting Image would be a great way to do it.”
“We managed to raise funds for a pilot in 2007 and Citizen TV (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Citizen-TV-Kenya/261061365404), a private station, eventually agreed to broadcast a series.”
Each episode costs US $16,740 and the puppets are US $3,600 to make. The programme-makers could only get money from foreign donors: the French, Dutch, and Finnish embassies and the Ford Foundation.
Despite initial complaints from politicians, the show is preparing for its second season – and, Mwampembwa said, “there will be a lot of big stories for us to cover.”
Making a popular TV show is not an easy thing to do. Mwampembwa maintains a furious work pace to straddle his many roles:
“I have to draw a cartoon every day but editorial cartooning is not a nine-to-five job, it’s 24/7. Whenever I get ideas I have to sketch them.
“It was a steep learning curve in the first season. The show is important for Kenyan TV and everything is done here in Nairobi. We won’t change any of the politics though. We are very hard-hitting and we will stay that way.
“Over the years I’ve got nasty letters, emails and phone calls but that’s OK, it’s part of it.”
As these media innovators show, there is nothing but opportunity for entrepreneurs feeding the hungry news and information appetite of the continent’s ambitious middle class.
And Mwampembwa says becoming better informed doesn’t have to be dull: “We are informing the public but I’d like to think we are entertaining them too.”
By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions
Published: September 2010
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
Follow @SouthSouth1
Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9HaUFL3wYWIC&dq=development+challenges+september+2010&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsseptember2010issue
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Southern Innovator Issue 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQNt4YmhZagC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 4: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9T_n2tA7l4EC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
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Undercurrents: A cancellation at CBC TV raises a host of issues for the future
Saturday, June 13, 2015 at 1:16PM
By David South
Scan Magazine (Canada), April/May 1997
The screensaver on an Undercurrents researcher’s computer terminal bears a maxim that might strike a chord in a lot of CBC units these days: “Only the paranoid survive.”
The quirky media and technology show will fade to black at the end of March. Its cancellation raises a host of issues for a CBC deeply troubled by budget cuts, an ageing audience, a dearth of alternative programme concepts and an inability to plan for a future.
In the show’s pilot, Wendy Mesley – Undercurrents’ host and progenitor – set the tone for this accessible look at the relationship among technology, media and society: “Like it or not we are living in a wired world where OJ Simpson, Big Brother, even your bank machine, all converge … we’ll explore all the issues, the undercurrents of the information age.”
To those who loved it, Undercurrents was a program that satisfied a vital public need, and an ambitious concept for a public broadcaster that some say had grown a little musty. The show promised avant-garde production and investigative journalism that critically explored today’s new media and technology culture. Youngish researchers and producers were hired from outside the CBC. They brought with them experience and new ideas from specialty channels, TV Ontario and CTV. Some came straight out of journalism school.
Critical reaction to the first programs was mixed. John Doyle, a critic with the Globe and Mail’s Broadcast Week, lauded Undercurrents when it launched, calling it “a superb example of solid CBC-TV journalism and original reporting.” Others were less flattering. The Toronto Star’s Greg Quill accused the show of “flirting with infotainment.” At the Vancouver Sun, Alex Strachan wasn’t impressed by a report on a weekend conclave of computer geeks in the California desert for a kind of Hackerstock. “It sounds interesting,” he wrote, “but it isn’t.”
What hurt more was schedulers playing musicial chairs with the show’s slot. Switching Undercurrents from Tuesday at 7 pm to Friday at 7 pm midway through its life left viewers confused and sent ratings plummeting just as network programmers were casting about for places to apply a whopping 30 percent budget cut. As a result, some feel the show never had a fighting chance.
In the end, it was the show’s precarious financial arrangement that killed it. Undercurrents was never funded from the general current affairs budget. Instead, it drew on a special reserve of cash created by the network. When it came time to mete out the cuts in December, the special funding bubble burst. Rather than cut further into the budgets of flagship current affairs programs, executives chose to drop Undercurrents.
Executive producer Frances Mary (FM) Morrison acknowledges that gratitude for her program’s special funding obscured a recognition of its fragility. “That was really our Achilles heel,” she says. “We were just this little orphan that didn’t have its own money. We weren’t adopted into the larger family.”
With the network funding gone, Undercurrents’ budget (rumoured to be over a million dollars per season) was nowhere to be found. Discussions about chasing a corporate sponsor went nowhere because the show needed more money than any sponsor could have provided. “It was never an issue of $100,000 or $200,000,” says Morrison. “It was the issue of our entire budget. [CBC] would still have had to come up with the rest of it.”
CBC TV’s news, current affairs and Newsworld director Bob Culbert and former current affairs head Norm Bolen both say they wanted the show to stay on the air but couldn’t find a way to fund it withou seriously hurting programs like The Fifth Estate, Marketplace and Venture.
Bolen, now VP of programming at the History and Entertainment Network, says it came down to choosing between The Health Show and Undercurrents. The Health Show won because it had a “bigger audience, a broader demographic and was bringing in revenue from sales of programming to the specialty channels.”
Mesley has another theory. “The majority of people who worked on this programme are not traditional CBCers… They can’t bump, they don’t get huge severance packages. Of course, if you want a future, those are the wrong reasons for letting people go.”
With its intensive focus on issues like the abuse of computer-morphed images, surreptitious “data-mining” of consumer purchase records, or media “freebies,” there’s no question that Undercurrents has met a need in this media-saturated world. But controversy over the cancellation centres on the age-old question of CBC and the youth audience.
Morrison and Mesley both say they intended the show to appeal to a younger-than-usual CBC audience. But CBC executives weren’t convinced it was an audience the network could, or should, go after. According to Culbert, a youth mandate was something the production team brought to Undercurrents. “It started as a media ethics show targeted at a classic CBC audience. Nobody sat around one day and said ‘let’s invent the show that will go after younger viewers.'”
Bolen expresses a profound lack of faith in the under-30 audience. “People under 30 don’t watch information programming, okay? Let’s get that straight. I sure wouldn’t spend the rest of my life trying to get an audience that doesn’t watch a certain genre of programming. This is a business where you pay attention to reality. People under 30 watch trashy American sitcoms, which I’m not in the business of doing, and which the CBC isn’t in the business of doing.”
“I think that’s bullshit,” says Reid Willis, producer and director of CityTV’s Media Television. “People under 30 are interested in what’s going on in the media. The 20 to 30 group is more media savvy than the generation that preceded them.” But Willis thinks the lack of information programming pitched at a young audience is down to a lack of interest from advertisers.
Mesley and Morrison remain convinced Undercurrents did appeal to a younger audience, but felt it was sabotaged by the schedule shuffling. In the show’s first slot, Tuesdays at 7 pm, its average audience was 499,000. The biggest night came on Sunday, October 22, 1995 when a repeat aired at 9:30 pm got an audience of 865,000. But Undercurrents’ debut in the 96/97 season in its new 7 pm slot on Fridays was demoralizing for the crew. Morrison reports the audience for the season opener at 438,000 and 434,000 for a strong programme the following week.
She says the numbers built as audiences found the programme’s new location, peaking at 678,000 on December 6. According to CBC audience research figures, average minute audience for the 96/97 season to February 2 stood at 518,000 viewers.
“Friday at seven was not a good place for Undercurrents,” claims Morrison. “It’s an older audience. In fact the audience for Air Farce [which followed Undercurrents at 7:30] is quite old, surprisingly old. I was actually astonished to find out how old that audience was.”
CBC audience research bears Morrison out, reporting that the 18-34 demographic for both Air Farce and Undercurrents has been identical this season – a mere 14 percent of the total audience.
Fridays at seven is also a heavily competitive slot packed with overhyped American tabloid TV shows like Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition, Hard Copy and A Current Affair. Morrison says focus groups told her that audiences in that time period surf around looking for stories they like and then switch around with no loyalty to a particular programme.
“People build a menu. We took a leaf out of the tabloid book in terms of our presentation in order to survive in the seven o’clock environment.”
Undercurrents’ jerky camera work and flashy graphics didn’t endear itself to everyone, a fact the show’s producers recognized early on. “I can point to stories where we sabotaged ourselves with stylistic extremes,” admits Morrison.
But Mesley bristles at accusations the show was all style and no content, or a clone of Media Television. “We are the antithesis of Media Television. Obviously everyone has adopted their style from rock videos. But they get nearly all their video as handouts. We are not saying, ‘This is hip.’ We are not saying, ‘This is the latest consumer thing you can add to your collection.’ We are saying ‘Think about this.'”
Undercurrents’producers express pride in the show’s innovations. They cite its lead role in web page design at the corporation., its efforts at promoting a more playful visual presentation, and its success in promoting an acceptance of media stories elsewhere in news and current affairs. But what seemed to enliven everyone interviewed for this story was a love of the public broadcasting ethos, where stories are told because they are important, not because advertisers say they are important. Many of the young researchers and producers at Undercurrents had done time at the privates, and appreciated the freedom and extensive resources offered by the CBC. But they felt they had come to a CBC whose values were in peril.
“It will be like C-SPAN here,” quipped an Undercurrents freelancer who has done time at the specialty channels.
Others who thrived in the upbeat atmosphere at Undercurrents say they’re not too keen to look for work elsewhere in the CBC. One such is 25-year-old researcher Bret Dawson. “It’s not a happy place,” he says.
It’s not clear what, if any, programming will replace Undercurrents. If the current trend prevails, it looks like any new programming will have to survive on a smaller budget, generate outside income and prove it can draw in viewers in short order. Under those conditions, people at Undercurrents and elsewhere wonder how long CBC’s commitment to innovative new programming can hold out.
Scan magazine was published in the 1990s for Canadian media professionals.
CBC TV's Undercurrents host Wendy Mesley.
Undercurrents in Scan magazine 1997.
In 2021 Wendy Mesley commented on the story in a Tweet.
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