I walked away from my radio staples
Everyone who knows me knows that CBC radio’s Ottawa Morning and All In A Day have been my daily staples for several years. In fact, All In A Day served as inspiration for my own Electric Sky Podcast.
At the Montreal Podcast meetup this week, I publicly announced that 2006 was the year in which I abandoned my beloved radio shows. Both have undergone some radical changes in the last year, the most obvious are new hosts with styles that, even after many months, I have not been able to warm up to. This of course means that I have nearly wrapped up my love affair with terrestrial radio.
I remain a subscriber to several CBC Podcasts including The Digital Extra, Quirks and Quarks, Editor’s Choice, Ideas and Ontario This Week - a show that is hosted by the talented Michael Bhardwaj and features highlights of Ottawa Morning, Ontario Today and All In A Day.
Now, if CBC could Podcast Vinyl Cafe and O’Reilly and the Age of Persuasion…
December 30th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
more and more people will be doing this in 2007.
December 30th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
As I said at the meet-up, If the CBC is losing die-hard listeners like YOU, they’ve got BIG troubles.
December 30th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
It was your reaction, Bob, that led me to blog about it. The look on your face suggested that perhaps the apocalypse is upon us.
Mark
January 1st, 2007 at 10:17 pm
The CBC, for me, is useful for news. Hell for local news we do not even have a station based in Sault Ste. Marie, we get Sudbury news.
There is useful stuff and very informative stuff (the Age of Persuasion is amazing) but I used to listen to the CBC while cooking supper, now I listen the Buz Out Loud from CNet when cooking dinner, it comes out at just the right time of day….
January 2nd, 2007 at 11:00 am
Let the Age of Podcasting begin….
January 3rd, 2007 at 11:36 am
Hi Mark,
Living in Kingston, we get the All In A Day feed from CBC, and I share your thoughts about the current host and show format. It’s hard to forget the great moments back in the days of Ken Rockburn and even Brent Bambury as hosts. Don’t know if you remember the period when Ken was syndicating a radio show called Medium Rare which aired on CHEZ. Around the same time, I was producing and syndicating a weekly talk/magazine show out of Toronto called The Weekender (with Ted Woloshyn) which ran nationally and on another FM station in Ottawa. Then the CRTC, in their wisdom, decided to eliminate certain “foreground” programming requirements for FM stations. Practically overnight, most of the stations dumped their long-form spoken word and specialty music shows and replaced them with….well, you know the rest.
January 3rd, 2007 at 3:53 pm
It really seems that CBC programming is being polarized. There’s still smart, interesting stuff like the O’Reilly show, Quirks and Quarks, Dispatches, and of course Ideas, and then there are shows which are being deliberately dumbed-down; the morning and afternoon drive shows and by my reckoning, one of the worst national programmes on CBC radio: DNTO. Since Nora Young and Co.’s departure it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard. I mean how many times can you start an interview with, “So, hey, like, I’m talking to …”.
January 7th, 2007 at 12:15 am
[...] I walked away from my radio staples [...]
January 7th, 2007 at 1:43 am
The CBC has a problem of either being pretentious as hell very often or it is trying to be hip.
As I said previously, there is good stuff on the CBC, the news, the Age of Persuasion, Quirks and Quarks, but most of it does not umm resonate with me. That said perhaps I am not the target market or whatever.
January 18th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
[...] Recently, Mark Blevis was lamenting the decline of our local CBC Radio One offerings here in Ottawa which prompted me to comment thusly (sorry for quoting myself): [...]
April 8th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Looks like they have a Vinyl Cafe podcast now, and it’s pretty awesome.
As for the Age of Persuasion Podcast, you can find it here:
http://themainframe.ca/2008/03/05/age-of-persuasion-podcast/
There’s a link there to subscribe in iTunes. It looks like it’s just an unofficial podcast that someone put together using the mp3s on the CBC site. But it works just fine.