Q&A: Why the CBC is expanding its coverage of southern Alberta
Journalists to be hired for Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer and the Bow Valley
Red Deer, Medicine Hat and the Bow Valley are a few Alberta communities that the CBC is looking to reach with new bureaus as part of plans to expand its local news coverage.
Earlier this month, CBC announced it was hiring up to 30 permanent journalists in 22 communities across the country. The move was highlighted by a planned influx of new reporters in Western Canada, including in seven locations around Alberta.
The CBC plans to include a new journalist based in Red Deer, covering the city as well as other central Alberta communities like Sylvan Lake and Lacombe. It also plans to hire a new Medicine Hat reporter who will also cover Brooks, Taber, Bow Island, surrounding First Nations communities and the region's agricultural industries.
On the western side of the province, the CBC is bringing a journalist to the Bow Valley to cover the Banff townsite and Banff National Park, Canmore, Lake Louise and Kananaskis, as well as a reporter in Hinton and Jasper covering those communities, Jasper National Park and northern Rockies, and nearby communities like Grande Cache and Edson.
Another reporter will be tapped to cover both eastern Alberta and western Saskatchewan in Lloydminster and the Battlefords. CBC will also expand existing bureaus in Lethbridge and Fort McMurray with another reporter added in each city.
Tracy Johnson, the director of journalism and programming at CBC Calgary, spoke with CBC Radio's the Calgary Eyeopener on Wednesday about the planned additions to the broadcaster's coverage of southern Alberta.
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The following has been edited for length and clarity
Calgary Eyeopener: Why is the CBC adding more journalists in southern Alberta?
Tracy Johnson: It's largely because we want to continue to focus on local news. We have 48 local stations across the country, but there are still a lot of towns and cities where we don't have CBC journalists based. So we're adding up to 30 across the country, and [seven] of them will be in Alberta. There's a bit of an emphasis in Western Canada, where we'd like to build up a little more presence.
There are a lot of towns and cities around 50,000 people that don't have CBC journalists embedded in them.
So we took a look across the country, tried to see where the population was growing, what cities had tons of stories happening and where we might be able to place journalists with a little bit of money that we got from the Google settlement with the Government of Canada over being excused from the Online News Act. We got a chunk of money.
CBC had a look at how to spend it, and we decided to spend it by hiring local journalists in cities and towns where we don't have people already.
Eyeopener: This comes at a time where the future of the CBC, we expect, will be a hotly debated federal election issue. The Conservative leader says he intends to defund the CBC. That's an interesting context in which to be expanding, especially with the threat of defunding and what would ultimately end up being layoffs. How do you put those together?
TJ: Everyone is aware that the future of the CBC is a wide open question. But we know that we want to continue to cover Alberta and southern Alberta. We want to continue to tell the stories that are happening. So the only thing that we can do is try to continue to prove our worth to Canadians.
There are people listening right now who are in Medicine Hat or in the Bow Valley or in Lethbridge, and we want to be able to send more journalists down there to continue to cover their stories. Of course, we're at risk, but this is one of the ways that I think that we try to prove our worth to Canadians as the public broadcaster — to be able to place journalists in these towns and cities to cover the stories that are important, to get those stories out over the CBC's broad network.
We're coast to coast to coast. We have 48 stations and bureaus across the country. We can tell Canadian stories. We can tell stories from Medicine Hat and Lethbridge, Banff and Canmore to people outside of Alberta. That is how we think we're going to prove our worth, because it's really important to us as the public broadcaster, and you and me sitting in this room, to continue to be able to do our jobs for Canadians.
Eyeopener: You've got to find somebody to work there, somebody from the community or somebody who's really keen and wants to go there. When will these communities see CBC journalists working in town, pumping out stories?
TJ: We're going to start the recruiting process and trying to find space in the coming weeks. So it'll probably take a couple to three months before we get things going in any real way, but we are going to try to move quite quickly.