By the end of March 1997, 123 CBC _employees in BC will lose their jobs. That’s one out of every three _ employees. 20-year veterans will be hitting the mean streets at the same time as graduating journalism students. Both will want work in the broadcast industry. The question is: if you owned a TV or radio station and were looking for someone to do _ field work or to anchor a weekend _radio program, who would you hire? A young, ambitious graduate

| with precious little experience, or a

| 20-year veteran who can do the job .

OTT aI Ns OT aD

_as though it were second nature? by Paul Andrew

Saucier said he must respond to a

$414 million reduction in federal

: | ast October during a speech _ grants. And so, by the end of March,

i to the South Calgary Rotary a total of 123 people in this region will be losing their present posts.

Club, Guylaine Saucier,

i 5

| chair of the board of the CBC, That's one out of every three CBC spoke of a six-part strategy to re- employees in BC. And prospects for _ invent the network. The first graduating students are tough. principle would be to maintainand _ “It’s going to be tough for

strengthen its Canadian identity by looking for new talent and by giving it the opportunity to be seen and heard.

students, there’s no doubt about it,” said Susan Englebert, director of CBC Radio for British Columbia. “There are fewer jobs here to offer

“We will be Canadian. If we were _ people. There will be reporters out shut down tomorrow, what would __ there looking for jobs in the pri- i Canadians miss? The Canadian vates, but things are cyclical and ' content,” Saucier said. times change, and I certainly hope :

But what followed was anything

_ but a demonstration of Saucier’s _ commitment to Canadians. Two _ months after his speech, the "systematic lay-off of almost 1,000 _ CBC employees across Canada left a lot of the public broadcaster’s employees speechless and stunned. Their jobs are now redundant, and _ don’t fit CBC’s grand scheme of going Canadian.

Because of downtown Vancou- __ ver’s production centre, British

Columbia is one of the CBC’s traditional strongholds. But tradi- __ tion offers little protection from the _ axe-wielding chief executive.

that young people will come back to the CBC.” Englebert, a 22-year employee who missed the cuts, has been involved in radio for most of her time at the CBC, and was recently put in charge of the entire BC radio operation. She says one of the best ways to enhance your chances of working at the CBC is to be good at everything, rather than one job in particular.

“T think that as we come down to budget cutting and jobs drying up, I think you have to be good at a lot of things,” Englebert says. “Your chances are a lot better at getting work.” :

The rules dictating the future of broadcast journalism haven't changed overnight, but like almost all production environments, fewer people are needed to do the same amount of work. The CBC layoffs make it that much harder to break into the field. Broadcast journalism schools like the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) have had to revamp their programs to prepare students to do anything and everything. Bill Amos, pro- gram head of broadcast journalism at BCIT, says that because of the constant changes in the industry instructors there have been trying to figure out exactly what they should be training students to do.

“We're trying to come to grips with the new media, and because we found that a lot of our people are ending up in media relations, we're looking at possibly adding courses in that area. And we may be having discus- sions with Langara and/or Kwantlen College about maybe adding a print course for our students.”

Rob Dykstra, chair of the journal- ism department at Langara Col- lege, says if there is to be any cooperation between BCIT and Langara, it won’t take place simply because of recent layoffs at the

oes AES

February 3, 1997 listening to old Rush albums since 1976 Volume 21 -

CBC cuts into students

CBC layoffs will reduce openings for newcomers

CBC. “We began talks three or four years ago with BCIT about sending Langara students to BCIT for advanced broadcast training because we already provide two introductory broadcast courses here, but they’re fairly basic stuff. We don’t have the equipment BCIT has. Now those talks have been renewed so we can get together and build on each other’s strengths.”

*

The agreement would be to send a graduate of the two-year pro- gram at Langara to BCIT for another year and subsequently receive a Bachelors of Applied Arts. The agreement would work in

The trial continues page 5

Bingo - 3 Martini - 7 Sumo - 8

Issue 12

reverse for students at BCIT wanting to further their knowledge in print journalism. “We haven't done any serious talking on this issue. We'll be starting that this semester,” Dykstra said. “But you can’t react radically with a whole program and a large institution just because one organization has a few layoffs.”

That might be true in BC, but with Canada-wide cutbacks at CBC totalling almost 1000 people, journalism schools are having to

because it is obviously a concern,” Amos admitted. “{Graduates] are not working full-time in structured jobs on radio or television stations.” Amos said some students who come out of the mea broadcast program at BCIT are now working mainly in print, writing articles for The Vancouver Province, rather than broadcasting news for the CBC. Quality programming is also a major concern in the wake of the CBC downsizing, and is producing a new area of conflict between union officials and CBC executives. “Some people feel the quality will drop, but we know what our value

CBC continued on page 4

adjust to industry trends. “Yeah, we're trying to broaden our program to address this,

ty Graphic