News

LOCAL SCENES FROM A NATIONAL DEBATE / As the talk, and the spin, rages on from both sides of the argument, an important question lingers. Do Canadians care about local television? As tales from two cities show, the answer depends on the locale

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This mansion cost six dollars.

For less than the price of a movie ticket, the new owners got a stately 150-year-old house, complete with creaking floors, warmly-lit foyer, hand-carved doors - and the TV station housed inside.

In the deal five months ago, the most valuable thing to change hands wasn't the real estate; it was CHCH Hamilton, the town's only over-the-air television station.

"We're very grateful for CanWest not knowing what they were selling," says Cal Millar, whose company Channel Zero bought CHCH from CanWest Global Communications Corp. in June. "It was a real hidden gem."

For Hamilton, losing the station would have been "devastating," says Donna Skelly, an anchor who led a campaign to save CHCH. "Many of us have lived here forever; some of us were born here. We just didn't want to see it go black."

With her immaculately hair-sprayed coif and talkative nature, Ms. Skelly is every inch a TV personality - and she worked that cachet to drum up support. City councillors got on board; the staff talked about buying the station; the community held a rally. There were speeches. People made signs. They brought their dogs.

And then a bidder stepped in: nine-year-old Channel Zero, which owns a few specialty channels, including Movieola and Silver Screen Classics, but the CHCH deal marked its first foray into over-the-air stations.

For CanWest, the sale - whose bill came to $12 with CJNT in Montreal included - was part of an effort jettison money-losing operations. The real price tag of the deal was Channel Zero's agreement to assume an undisclosed amount of debt and ongoing financial losses at the two stations.

But the purchase also gives the company an opportunity to move up in the broadcasting leagues with a daring programming strategy.

Mr. Millar believes the model he has put in place has the potential to change the TV industry: all-news during the day, old movies at night.

"We're up over 70 hours a week of local news. Maybe people don't understand what 70 hours means. It's a lot," says Mike Katrycz, CHCH's news director. The output amounts to 10 times the local programming that the station's CRTC licence requires. "There's not another local station or conventional broadcaster that does anywhere near that."

What's more, Mr. Katrycz and the staff were given just six weeks to prepare to go live 14 hours a day - a feat one manager likened to asking a sprinter to run a marathon.

"It was bedlam," Mr. Millar admits. But he says the change is working, and the station has the ratings numbers to prove it. "All of a sudden during the day, when the channel was doing a lot of goose eggs previously, we now have viewers."

The numbers are small compared to what American prime-time shows rake in. But for daytime hours, 10,000-20,000 viewers is good, Mr. Millar says.

Mr. Katrycz argues the response is a sign there's money to be made with news. "There seems to be this pervasive wisdom that says local news is not the thing to be doing and it costs too much money. Hopefully we can prove that we are the exception, if not the rule."

After only two months on the air, the new format hasn't proven anything yet. Mr. Millar expects to lose about $3-million by the end of the first year, but says the station is on track to break even on a month-to-month basis by next spring.

That is an ambitious forecast. Indeed, Canada's larger broadcasters have argued the traditional, advertising-dependent model of conventional broadcasting is no longer viable.

Mr. Millar insists the model still works close to the ground. About half the spots sold at CHCH are for local businesses, which either can't afford to advertise on bigger Toronto stations or find that the stations don't reach their customers sufficiently.

As for CHCH, "It deals with the region we're in," says Dan Cowan, a sales representative at Haldimand Motors Ltd. in Cayuga, about 30 kilometres south of Hamilton. The used car dealership runs a half-dozen ads on the station, mostly during the day. "Their viewing audience is the one we sell to."

The station's reach actually goes well past the Golden Horseshoe. Seven transmitters - including a 1,000-foot tower perched on the Niagara Escarpment in Hamilton's east end - beam the signal to four million homes across the province. It's also picked up by cable and satellite services from St. John's to Vancouver - a potential audience of up to 20 million, though most of those viewers would tune in for the movies, not Hamilton news.

But local news is really the core of CHCH's strategy.

"This is really a model of what is going to work, not just in Hamilton," Donna Skelly says. "It's much more cost-effective to produce local programming than it is to purchase American programming. ... We are what keeps people watching television."

"For the individuals that live here that can't afford cable - and there's a lot of them - you can watch and get the news," says Patty Fraser, a local resident who likes watching CHCH's personalities, including tanned and square-jawed "weathercaster" Matt Hayes, a "constant Hamilton man."

Hamilton audiences aren't served by bigger stations up the road in Toronto, city councillor Terry Whitehead says.

"Most media tend to focus on the larger centres," Mr. Whitehead says. "That really does disenfranchise [other] communities."

"Ultimately, we survive or fail on whether this is a business," says Mr. Katrycz, "as does every other journalistic endeavour, with the exception, perhaps, of the CBC. If we can prove there's revenue to be made, yes, this all may grow bigger. That's what I look forward to."