D.T. Douglas Trowell
J.C. Jack Crane
B.N. Barry Nesbitt
D.I. Donald Insley

INTRODUCTION:

The Communications Media. This is part 1 of a four part series produced by the
Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto to explore as much as time will allow
radio, T.V., newspapers. Later in the series Dr. Marshall McLuhan, Canada's much quoted communications expert, will discuss the first three programs. This week radio and our participants are: Douglas Trowell, Vice President and General Manager CKEY Toronto; Jack Crane, Program Director of English Language Network of the CBC; Barry Nesbitt, Assistant Manager CKFH Toronto; the host for the program will be Donald Insley, Station Manager CKFM Toronto. Topics to be discussed: formula radio, responsibility of the medium to the public, news, ethics of radio programming, programming for minority groups and network broadcasting. And here to begin the discussion is the host Donald Insley.

D.I. Ladies and gentlemen I'm Donald Insley and I am supposed to moderate this discussion about the radio business. I imagine there will be some excitement involved but perhaps I may participate of that too, time will tell. On my left around our table is Mr. Douglas Trowell. Good evening Doug.

D.T. Don

D.I. And directly across from me is Barry Nesbitt.

B.N. Donald.

D.I. And to my right Mr. Jack Crane.

J.C. Don.

D.I. I suppose this is a really not the proper thing to do, discussing radio and starting off with a quotation from a newspaper, however, in the Toronto Star of February 6th in a column by Miss Joan Irwin I note that she said, “It’s mildly discouraging to have to note how little broadcasting has changed in the last eight months.” She's been away for that time. “A few new voices perhaps and minute adjustment of emphasis but apart from that were pretty much just as we were. I have a conviction that the job of the mass media is not only to inform the public, not only to cater to known preferences but also to expand horizons, battle complacency and just generally keep ahead of the game. The current well worn rut, therefore, alarms me.” Well that's Joan Irwin's opinion, I'd like to know what yours is. For instance Doug Trowell, what basic philosophy underlies the operation of your radio station, which is CKEY Toronto?

D.T. Oh, that's a tough question, first of all may I comment on Joan Irwin, I find her mildly discouraging myself quite frankly. However, getting back to your question, the basic philosophy of our operation is to try to make a good business out of it, and in order to this obviously we have to serve the greatest number of people possible. It is a business operation and I don't think there's any point in suggesting otherwise but it also is subject to all the normal criteria established by regulatory groups and regulatory body, in this case the BBG. And also by the tastes of people so I think what were trying to do is reach the greatest number of people with the broadest possible kind of service and by the same token give them the very best, most professionally handled kind of product we can in the programming area. I think you can develop on this you know in specifics hour by hour but uh I think basically that sums it up.

D.I. Barry Nesbitt, do you have a different point of view?

B.N. No, I think that since Doug and myself are both in private broadcasting I think probably our objectives are much the same, perhaps in a slightly different way. We must all of course provide the basics that we have suggested we would do when we undertook our broadcasting license to entertain and educate and inform and since we are private broadcasters and in a business, of course make money.

D.I. Barry, may I comment on one facet of your reply and that was that we had an obligation which we apparently promised to government authority to entertain, inform, etc. A good many of the radio stations in this country never made any promises of any kind when they received their broadcasting license. Would you agree?

B.N. I would agree on that, I think of course time is the element there. I think in the initial days this was not required and as good or bad broadcasting practices occurred then the regulatory bodies said hold on let's make some changes, which they have done, and our station I think is the newest in the Toronto area and I think when we obtained our license we certainly made some commitments and we certainly strived to live up to them and more so.

D.I. Jack Crane is the Program Director of the CBC English Network and very likely has a different viewpoint from the other gentlemen gathered around our table this evening. Jack, what's your thought about the basic philosophy underlying the operation of radio stations?

J.C. Well, I think this is where we go off in different directions at the beginning of the discussion because I quite accept what you people have said is your philosophies for private broadcasting as being essentially those of a business man. We just start with a different set of ground rules if you will, that, to us broadcasting in radio and television is a service rather than a business. I don't say that in any self-righteous way it's the way it's the way it started to be. It gives the everything we do we start off from a different point of view than you do on these things. Now of course when you talk about what philosophy should underlie or does underlie our radio service. In our case ours is a highly formalized thing to the degree we do operate under an Act of Parliament and the substance of it is that we shall provide a radio service that is national in character so that our interests must be totally from coast to coast. And also, that we cannot appeal to any one section of the population that our service must also, while it’s national in scope, be if you will all things to all men at some time or other and believe me that's not an easy thing to do.

B.N. Well I think that private stations have to observe some of the same things that the CBC does. I don't think there's any particular exception to that basic view that you have to try to get as many people as possible covered by your service. Now in your case you can specialize by programs to the extent that no private station could possibly do simply because they wouldn't have any audience and the financing of the private station depends on the audience and to a large degree I think dictates what kind of programming is involved. The price of a station, the cost of the capitalization in the first place.

J.C. Oh, I agree with you and the other thing that I've left out of my little statement, which is very important too, is that in addition to philosophy we've got the very practical concerns of producing programs that use Canadian talent in various ways, and on many occasions it would be far cheaper and in fact perhaps of little difference to the audience itself to put on a recording rather than a young Canadian artist standing up in the studio singing. But eh that's also what we want to do. We want to encourage talent.

B.N. When you say talent do you mean strictly entertainment talent or do you get beyond entertainment in let’s say journalism for example? Would you regard a good reporter and a good editor as talent or would you not?

J.C. I think I would yeah.

B.N. So in the same sense then if a radio station, a private radio station operates a highly developed and skillful news operation involving professional journalists and training them and developing a kind of journalism in radio, this is a major contribution to the development of Canadian talent is it not?

J.C. Well I agree with you in those; you’re limiting it more than I would choose to limit it.

B.N. Oh, I don't choose to limit it, I just want to use it as an example.

J.C. I'll take it as an example.

B.N. You would accept that, and I'm not arguing with anybody on this point by the way I'm just interested in another viewpoint.

J.C. There also must be a certain commercial aspect in your approach too. Well, from the outset we've been a commercial operation or rather a hybred form of animal which we always say is the typical Canadian compromise, both public and private, our advertising revenue goes to make it up. We've been more commercial I suppose since the Fowler Report of ‘58. In television that has increased I think. In radio of course this has been accompanied by the general downward trends in radio listening in the last ten years with a reduction in the available advertising. Now I don't know, you people went through a slump and I think most of you are out of it now aren't you in terms of radio advertising?

B.N. That's a fairly optimistic point of view, I think there are problem areas.

D.T. It's very competitive of course because in the time that has elapsed since the change of advertising from radio to television and the concept of how you use radio vis-a vie television, which is really simply an extension of the old form of radio advertising. In the same time period a great many more stations have been licensed and a much more highly specialized kind of programming and audience development and a much more highly developed and skillful presentation of advertising, wouldn't you say Don?

D.I. I would. Also, the point occurs to me that Toronto is not exactly typical. It used to be that most radio stations depended upon their network affiliation to carry them through the day. Well in this market for instance Doug's station CKEY back in 1944 came into a metropolitan market with no network affiliation whatsoever and it fought its battle as an independent and has been doing so ever since. And its stations for instance like CFRV Toronto who once relied upon a basic CBS affiliation for most of their programming which had to adjust to changing conditions in which of course its done so quite successfully.

D.T. The other thing too surely is that radio advertising changed almost completely from sponsorship to spot advertising.

D.I. Jack Crane, and this is not to be insulting in any way, but in today's conditions with the competition from television, is there still justification for the idea of a radio network?

J.C. I think there is, I think that we've tried to respond to what's been happening and don't say we've done it very satisfactorily yet, but we run a network of about what is it about twenty of our own stations and affiliates numbering another…

D.I. Thirty or so?

J.C. There are fifty-seven I think affiliates. Now, there's a formula now in which a good deal more of the air time by each of these local stations is occupied by their own programming. The network produces fifty or sixty percent of what they receive. Now, I don't think that that formula has to remain fixed. I think you can maybe have more local programming maybe have less, but I do think that there is a need for the job that the CBC was set up to do some twenty-five years ago, of bringing the country together somehow with sharing ideas from coast to coast. A couple of things that immediately come to mind are the sort of radio cartoons done in the morning by Max Fergusson, which to a degree are something that would be in a national newspaper if we had one. If the Globe and Mail were right in Halifax and in Vancouver every morning that sort of thing would be common currency across the country. To a degree we do, I don't think we do enough of it, we do some of it. I think also that the bringing in of material from abroad we have, one of the thing's I'm most proud of in the CBC is our, overseas news service. The James M. Metafies and the Stanley Birks and the Tom Goules and so on, these people are reporting from abroad with the Canadian viewpoint, which I think is required and no one station could do that sort of thing. Now when you speak networking we you can hung up on the purely technical consideration of does this have to be done by a piece of wire stretched between here and Winnipeg or can you not just dead-head things through by phone lines and have them released them and so on. However, it’s done I think to me the important thing is that certain basic ingredients are heard across the country.

D.I. At the interest of your reaction to the question as to whether CBC programming is the same from coast to coast in this country. Do you put up the same face in every community you serve?

J.C. Well that is something we deliberately set out to do with the network but then with the local part of our service we deliberately set out to try and express the character of that region. And we do it in obvious ways, we carry farm broadcast say in Saskatchewan, we carry fisheries broadcasts in Halifax. We also, and I don't say this is what our Charter directs us to do but we also, respond differently to different communities as determining how they are served by other media if um…

D.T. How, how do you go about determining this? This is something that has always interested me…

J.C. No, that if I finish my example I think it will be quite plain. Just this that if you go into a town like Whitehorse, which we serve, and we serve the whole of the Yukon with low power transmitters--well you're getting into a place there where there is no television so that you must, now I may re-trench there, I'm not sure whether they've got some closed circuit in there but take Yellowknife, which hasn't. People still require from you a form of radio which we were doing down here in 1938. We've somehow got to give a service to that community which doesn't assume that they've had all their days entertainment out of television. Whereas, you get into a big market like um Montreal or Toronto and you, there are other things that you feel people require from you in the local service.

B.N. Like French language for example at CJVC.

J.C. Here in Toronto, yes.

D.I. I was interested in your comment about Max Fergusson. In your mind has he provided the political satire which is the equalivent of what we hear on the morning show from CJVC in French?

J.C. Max is a very gentle satirist I don't in fact think he considers himself really a satirist. He's a good-humored man and he is kind, a very kind man. I think that we don't have on the network anything akin to sort of the establishment or the British TW3 type of thing, which what you’re referring to is in the form of Shane (unintelligible). You get some pretty biting stuff coming out of that.

D.I. I would imagine that of some of our members of Parliament really knew what CJVC was feeding to the populace there'd be some uproar.

B.N. This program originates from Montreal?

J.C. It's Montreal, yes and it’s, it’s a very successful morning show. It’s a live show done, or at least it’s done in a studio with a piano and they serve coffee and they have a great deal of fun.

D.I. I would imagine from my imperfect knowledge of French that it probably is as good a program of its kind as has ever been produced either in the United States or Canada.

J.C. Well they've got some brilliant people on it.

D.I. Doug, a moment or so ago Doug Trowel,l you were asking how Jack determined what should be fed on this station. How did you arrive at the peculiar and I don't mean that at in any… which distinguishes your station from any other? Did you attempt scientific research into the needs, the desires of your audience?

D.T. I don't know how scientific it was but it was certainly research. First of all I think that again recognizing the fact that it is a business and therefore has to subsist on the basis of advertising revenue totally without any recourse to any other monies of any kind. We have to be able to make it a paying kind of an enterprise. Now in our particular case it was a highly capitalized operation. Therefore, we had to make a definite plan to get a large circulation because with the limitations in commercial of say fifteen hundred minutes a week, which is the BBG limitation, obviously if you have to generate a certain level of revenue you have to have a certain basic rate from which to work from. So we went after a part of the metropolitan Toronto audience basically and in describing what it looks like or its profile it would be probably a replica of the market itself in short various quintiles or various bases of breaking the audience down. If you get into an area where you’re describing sex-age groups or socio-economic groups and so on. You have a pattern that is the pattern of the general market, which we are licensed to serve and we set out to attract that same kind of pattern to the station. Now, I think again you just simply try to find the things that people indicate by their behaviour that they enjoy listening to and at the same time you attempt to let them know that you have it and you attempt to satisfy that basic desire on their part to do something they can sit and listen to. You’re respective of where they are and you mentioned a moment ago that radio audiences declined, well, perhaps it’s declined in certain respects but in other ways it’s grown enormously through the vast distribution now of individual receivers. Radio has become a very intimate kind of a medium, it's a person to person medium. People don't sit down anymore around a radio except maybe in Whitehorse or the Klavic or someplace and you’re looking after them well anyways. And we don't reach that far but we I don't know if that answers the question or not Don we’re just trying to get a big basic audience. We’re after that major group in the eighteen to forty-eight age group for several reasons. One is that they represent the largest portion of the audience and also they are the greatest radio users.

D.I. Barry Nesbitt in your view would it be correct to assess what we've said so far, or at least two of you as opposed to Jack Crane, that would it be fair to say that what we have concluded is that radio is a profit making enterprise, which must give the listener what he wants in order to survive?

B.N. I don't think there's any doubt about that.

D.I. And would it also, do you think that every radio station, every private radio station, must aim for the largest possible audience they can get?

B.N. It would time I have to bring that word in once again. Our station is the junior member of the Toronto stations and when you come in with a new station you must think in terms of what your competition is doing. And if they have one particular area and are handling it extremely well then you must adjust your particular programming to suit what you want to do. And our station operates for specific groups and this is been our particular approach to it.

D.I. Is it possible, do you think, for a new radio station to come into a market and emulate a successful operation?

B.N. I would suggest that would be a rather difficult feat. I think that there's a loyalty to a degree of listenership. I think our oldest station here in Toronto CFRV most certainly proves that point and I think it would be difficult to do.

D.I. Well who do you think your station is serving Barry?

B.N. Well that's a, we are serving small groups Don.

D.I. Ethnic groups?

B.N. We serve ethnic groups we have of course a great deal of sports coverage which serves a large number of people so eh our audience can go from a very small area to a very large area in one broadcasting day.

D.T. Your total circulation is really the important thing to you...

B.N. That's correct yes.

D.T. As opposed to a half-hour measure.

B.N. But of course radio…

D.T. I'm sorry.

B.N. I'm sorry. Radio of course is changed as it was suggested earlier. People don't sit down and listen to a quarter-hour program or a half-hour drama. They are listening to a radio per-say a certain period of time whether it might be forty-five minutes in the morning. They're not hearing, or as Doug suggested, sitting around and actually listening for that length of time anymore.

D.I. The owner of your station, Foster Hewitt, is a very well known Canadian. A sports personality and undoubtedly it has occurred to you to feature sports because of that connection. Does it ever occur to you to become in effect a true sports station and do scarcely little more than that?

B.N. When the station first opened Don this is in essence what it did. I think there was a sports feature every night, whether it was NHL hockey or OHA junior A hockey or a Pee-Wee game or wrestling or a boxing match what ever it was we tried to do that. We found that it wasn't commercially sound and it also afforded us a rather large staff at the time that eh was pretty unwieldy.

D.T. Seems to me if I may make a point here that the problem of a station trying to create an identity for itself having say in a community a sports station, an all news station and all good music stations on, is the difficulty in this day in age of assuming that anyone is going to us a great deal. I think that's why most stations tend to get into that center ground where you can be like a water tap that's on all day long and have a compatible sound whether they tuned you in at eight in the morning or ten at night.

D.I. A basic consistency.

D.T. Yeah I would like to think people did a great deal of dial twisting, when they wanted a hockey game they’d turn to the hockey station.

D.I. I think they do when they want a hockey game. You can see that in the audience.

D.T. That may a bad example but.

D.I. I think, I think it does.

D.T. I think there’s something to do with the very nature of the machine itself, the radio. I know in television with the channel selector being click, click, click you change channels very easily. On radio there's some difficulty in dialing away especially with the smaller transistor where you don't even have the spot on the dial marked a great deal. I know that the kids eye-witnessed if they find something that they don't know its frequency is 560 or 1020 or anything else. They know that little strip of ribbon is off two-thirds of the way off down the dial and they sort of leave it there they don't twist back and forth for other things. Do you agree?

B.N. We probably spend a lot of money and a lot of time promoting a frequency and half the time it isn't even visible on the dial.

D.T. Don't you feel that this is true that people do, they're really not sure where they're listening, in a great many cases or what frequency they're listening to and they're hearing what they like so they stay there.

B.N. By and large they can identify the stations that they're listening to though by call letters or by something, by some kind of trademark.

D.I. Is it fair gentlemen to say that radio stations by and large have identifiable personalities in contrast to television stations, which as far as I can gather have no personalities of their own whatsoever?

B.N. Oh, sure.

D.T. I agree completely particularly in a large market like Toronto where you have six or seven of these channels.

D.I. I'm interested in someone's opinion on another matter. Is there a market in Canada large enough, in your view, to sustain an all-talk radio station?

B.N. Yeah, I think Toronto could probably sustain it depending… Again this gets back to the basic thing you start with. If you don't have a high cost operation to begin with, if it has not cost a great deal of money then you can afford to specialize in smaller and smaller areas. In the same way that you can specialize in satellite F.M. stations for example where CFRB and CKFM, CKFM on its own might not really be able to afford to do what it does but because it is part of a larger corporation, which can to a degree subsidize some of the costs or at least make it possible for them to carry out the kind of programming they’re doing it doesn't cost as much to start a station usually as it does to buy one. The only difference being that when you buy one you presumably buy a going concern. Now this isn't always the case but if you start with a transmitter there's a frequency coming open here 1540, it’s a daytime frequency. I think you could probably make a go of a talk station if you had really the time to do it and the money was not of paramount importance. In other words if you could make sure you could make enough money in the advertising you could sell to cover the cost. Sure there's room for a talk station, in my opinion anyway.

D.I. Dennis Brathwaite I think would appreciate your view on that.

B.N. I don't know what, I don't know what Dennis uses for judgment calls.

D.I. (unintelligible) I guess refers to Dennis's plea for more talk because Dennis has an interesting theory that people driving in automobiles just can't stand the sound of music.

B.N. Dennis is wrong, I kid you not.

D.I. That great question mark.

J.C. But we run into this a great deal in program judgments that you tend to make a doctrinaire judgment between radio—between music and spoken word and you know there are formulas that say forty percent music to sixty percent spoken word, which I just don't accept. I think that a program is a program is a program and if it’s an interesting one you don't stop and think whether that was somebody was talking to you.

D.T. Excuse me my Henry Aldridge voice…

D.I. Douglas Trowell.

D.T. What we, by and large our music and news operation with a heavy accent on local news but we do get into talk programming from time to time largely Norm Perry's program called "Perry Scope" and this program consists of fascinating interviews which Perry does. Don's very familiar with Norm having originally hired him back in the days when Don was at CKEY but we also extend beyond that. If the show is of a certain character that lends itself to say exploitation by open line… In other words we had a show, what was it, a week ago on motorcycle gangs and clubs and rioters and so on, which was obviously the kind of a program to stimulate a good deal of controversy and it was designed so to do in the course of the interview and right afterwards we just opened the line for about an hour and we had a fascinating hour of talks. This really supports your point of view, Jack, but I don't know that we could do this on a consistent basis and make the same kind of ground. Probably you do it on a hit and miss basis when you have something that is hot you can go with it um irrespectful of what it is—hot in terms of people's interest. And this could be anything ranging from our carrying the CBC fed live coverage of the Churchill funeral for example, which was a hot listener item and fortunately it was made available to all.