MEDIA NEWS
Rogers cuts 110 jobs, ends all OMNI newscasts
Courtesy of Northwest Broadcasters “recent news”page:
Locally, for Breakfast Television at City Vancouver, at least 30 people were laid off from administration along with senior camera employees. The only on-air personality is traffic reporter Michel McDermott. At sister TV station OMNI, another 20 or more have been let go, mostly reporters and editors.
Omni newscasts had production costs of about $9 million last year and brought in $3.9 million of advertising revenue, said Colette Watson, vice-president of television and operations at Rogers.
(Brian Kerrigan/The Globe and Mail)
By Simon Houpt
Published Thursday, May. 07 2015,
.
Rogers Media Inc. slashed 110 positions from its conventional TV operations on Thursday, transforming the daily newscasts on its multicultural OMNI stations into current affairs shows that will spend more air time on each story but won’t do original reporting.
Rogers will also eliminate its short-lived Breakfast Television program in Edmonton, in favour of a two-hour early evening program known as Dinner Television. That show, which will be hosted by the NHL veteran Jason Strudwick, will feature light chat but no original news-gathering.
Operations in Rogers’ Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver stations were affected.
The multilingual OMNI stations currently air newscasts in Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi, and Italian. They have faced increasing pressure from newscasts originating abroad.
Read More HERE
I miss the good old days of Scarborough Community Television 10 where two guys just sat on cam and played “Trivial Monopoly” and cracked jokes while taking phone calls from stoned callers. It was FREE! It cost NOTHING to produce! One of the guys is now a TV News Anchor on CTV Toronto!
Once again with Rogers it’s all about$
It appears to not matter how the cuts effect the loyal employees.
So I guess it’s no surprise.