In their red suits and white beards, they were waving placards and touting the city of bridges’ new radio station, Santa FM, promising all Christmas music all the time. “From Bing to Sting,” they pledged.

Ah, but two days later the station’s website professed that they had listened to the people, that a steady diet of holiday tunes was not what was wanted. And so was born Wired 96.3, the city’s newly-licenced CFWD-FM, with a contemporary hits format. You know, Kanye West, Timbaland, Linkin Park, and with on-air personalities named Trouble, Blender and DJ Bone.

“To be quite honest, we probably would have gone crazy listening to Rudolph one more time,” the managers said with apparent relief.

Well, of course it was a publicity stunt, and a rather clever one even if it did come along a week after April Fool’s Day.

The campaign, concocted by station General Manager Carley Caverly and Program Director Chris Myers, reflected the verve and sense of fun approach to broadcasting by the owners, Regina-based Harvard Broadcasting, Inc.

Harvard`s Station Group Manager Michael Olstrom says the credit for the concept goes to his team, not him.

“I said, ‘well, I’m not quite sure about it but, hey, go for it’,” recalls Olstrom who explains that they had originally planned to use the stunt to launch the station the previous Christmas but had to apply to the CRTC for a new frequency first to avoid potential interference with another station’s signal.

“And they said ‘we think we should dust this off and bring it out and we think it’ll be unique’. It turned out to be a pretty interesting launch.”

An Emerging Player

Although it has roots going back more than a century, Harvard is an emerging broadcast player in the west, unafraid of going up against more-established competitors like Rawlco and Elmer Hildebrand. Besides Wired in Saskatoon, Harvard now has three stations in Regina, one each in Calgary and Ft. McMurray, newly-acquired AM and FM services in Yorkton (approval pending) and high hopes for Edmonton, Red Deer and even somewhere, some day, in Manitoba. (There had been an unsuccessful application for a Kelowna licence and once, years ago, a rare attempted eastern foray into Ottawa.)

Veteran broadcaster Bruce Cowie, Harvard’s vice president, says they’ve made a firm commitment to focus their growth plans from the Ontario-Manitoba border to the Pacific.

“Particularly that Calgary-Edmonton corridor. If we had a number one priority that’s it. Because Alberta is the growth area in the foreseeable future. We’re consolidated enough in Saskatchewan now with the addition of the Yorkton stations and the new licence in Saskatoon. We’re interested in some of the interior markets in British Columbia... and we need a presence in Manitoba. That would be probably third or fourth in our focus.”

Cowie sees a unique mindset in the New West, one that doesn’t permit the homogenous formats that have been prevalent in radio elsewhere.

“We enjoy the opportunity to be able to provide distinctive formats in every market we work in. They’re different, their economic bases are different. We don’t run a cookie-cutter operation with a format in every city. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does not work in this part of the world. So we have youth contemporary stations, we have country stations, we have AC formats, we’ve got them all. But all of them came from very extensive research that we do in every market that we hope to succeed in.”

Cowie says there’s also something special about being an hour away from everything “by walking, car or flight.”

Of course, there is also the basic fact that a radio signal, especially an AM one, can still stretch for long distances across the prairies.

Take CKRM at 620 on the dial in Regina, which Cowie says remains number one with the 12-plus crowd in its market, unheard-of for an AM station. (Actually a close look at the numbers shows that’s mornings only and translates into an older, rural listenership.) And, after all these years, it is still the radio voice of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, which doesn’t hurt. By the way, Cowie had also been president of the football club for a number of years in the ‘70s.

That AM signal still extends into Northern Saskatchewan and well into Manitoba and Alberta.

“It’s pretty amazing when you’ve got a radio station that can cover that much territory,” says Olstrom.

It is also Harvard’s claim to be live to air as much as possible, with little voice tracking, limited usually to overnight and weekend shifts.

“That does have an impact on our earnings and cash flow,” Cowie concedes. “But it keeps us true to our purpose and plan. That these are local, fully interactive radio stations.”

Olstrom agrees they try to keep voice tracking to a minimum.

“Other than Regina, we’re stand-alones, we’re competing against larger companies who have the resources, and yes we could voice track out of market, but our philosophy is we believe that we need to be live and local as much as possible.”

While conceding he’s never worked in the East, Olstrom, 48, agrees that there is a different philosophy and outlook in the West, a region they know well. The New Westminster, B.C. native says it’s also best for a small but growing company not to spread itself too thin.

“You got something in Halifax and the next station is in Regina. You know, that just doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint for us at this stage. When you’re in the West you can quickly get into markets and deal with situations and understand what’s going on.”

Good Times For Radio

So what does small but growing mean?

Cowie sees three tiers to radio broadcasting in Canada.

There are the little guys including one-ofs, a middle tier and then the big guys like Astral. He sees Harvard near the top of the bottom rung and says it could quadruple in size and still be mid-sized and regionally-based, which is right where they’d like to be.

“That, we believe, is the level at which our plan is guaranteed to work,” says Cowie. “Because those licences provide enough infrastructure and cash flow to do the things we do. We do higher Canadian content than most other stations. We do a lot more in terms of new music, which I think is the future of radio.”

But even modest growth is seen as risky business these days by those who have been writing the epitaph for terrestrial radio as a communications technology that the digital age has passed by.

Cowie, however, insists over-the-air radio is not only healthy but has a bright future, but only if properly integrated with other platforms, in particular the Internet.

“Radio today is enjoying good times again. I mean, it’s strong,” he says, while emphasizing that it is necessary to use radio as a part of an entertainment and information-based program service along with the newer platforms.

“We have just started a new part of our business in the last year. It’s called Harvard Interactive and that’s its mission, to make sure that we participate in both the revenues and in the programming, particularly for our younger-audience licences.

“Because here’s what’s real -- if we continue to lose young people ... as we have in the last ten years, we put in question our entire listening audience for the future. It’s a serious time.”

Olstrom concedes they were slow off the mark in taking advantage of the Internet, partly because they weren’t sure where music copyright rules were going and what it would mean for operating costs.

“We have to get better at, for example, our websites and utilize those to our benefit and monetize those to offset some of the loss in revenue or the revenue that is going to the Internet.”

It’s also important to develop a talent farm team system. Cowie says, “Kids coming out of small markets have got a really tough row (to hoe)... but here’s a chance for them to move within the organization.

“They may not want to go to a major market but they will have an opportunity at least to be seen and heard.”

Local The Key

Olstrom says local is definitely the key to radio’s success, if not its survival.

“Radio, it’s free. You gotta put up with the commercials once in awhile but it’s a free service, a quality service, and we relate to the community and we act and react to things that are going on in the community,” he says.

“I believe radio has a strong future if we don’t make a mess of it in Canada like happened in the U.S (where) the bean counters got more involved than they should have and Wall Street started trying to take profits out of something that was already sucked out.”

Cowie maintains Harvard is committed to community service, whether it’s helping supply an ambulance for the children’s hospital in Saskatoon to the recent training agreement signed with the Aboriginal People’s Television Network. Cowie says the gesture recognizes the importance of Harvard’s western regional base and of the significant First Nations population there.

Under the seven-year partnership with APTN, aboriginals interested in entering broadcasting will be trained and mentored as interns at Harvard stations in Calgary, Ft. McMurray and Saskatoon. APTN will help select the interns and will also have access to the news stories they generate.

The broadcaster is also investing more than a half-million dollars to fund the initiative.

“This may sound almost cosmetic but it’s not. What’s good for the market is good for us. And that just makes all kinds of sense,” Cowie says.

“APTN would supply the candidates, we provide the physical plant, you know, office space, technical facilities, computers, all of that. And this person will grow as any young reporter will in the time they’re there.”

He says the CRTC has also accepted the plan.

“It’s another major important step, we think, to diversity.”

The Hills and Cowie

Now they say there are no hills in Saskatchewan.

But the Hill Companies – Harvard’s parent owners -- are run by Regina’s premier business family, a driving force in Saskatchewan business circles going back to 1903. In fact, a 10-storey Hill office building, built in 1914, was for years the tallest such structure in the province. On the same site today stands the twin-tower Hill Centre.

As a broadcast entity, the Harvard radio group was officially born in 1977 when the Hills bought CKCK-TV Regina. The station was sold to Baton Broadcasting in 1986 and eventually became part of the CTV network, a process in which Cowie later played a major part.

In 1981 Harvard moved into radio with the purchase of CKRM and what is now CHMX-FM in Regina. In 2002, the company added Regina’s CFWF-FM (The Wolf 104.9) to its stable.

CKRM’s history, of course, is much older. Born in the 1920s as Moose Jaw’s CJRM, it was owned by James Richardson and Sons and provided prairie listeners with daily grain and marketing reports. The station was eventually moved to Regina and in 1943 the call letters were changed to CKRM.

After launching new stations in Calgary (CFEX 92.9) and Ft. McMurray (CFVR Mix 103), Harvard earlier this year bought independently-owned radio stations, Yorkton’s GX94 and Fox FM. CRTC approval is expected.

A Prince Albert native (he was once a neighbour of John Diefenbaker), Cowie saw his own career become intertwined long ago with the Hills. He considers chairman and director Fred Hill as his mentor.

But how did he get pointed in the direction of broadcasting? Cowie says he owes it all to Mr. Canada.

John Fisher was a New Brunswick-born newspaperman and broadcaster who began his own career in radio at CHNS Halifax, eventually becoming a roving reporter for the CBC in the 1940s. His stories about Canada were heard on the air and, later, during personal appearances across the country when Fisher won his nickname, Mr. Canada.

One summer, at a fair in Prince Albert, young Cowie heard Fisher speak from the grandstand stage about his beloved Canada.

“And I could see it. I had never been out of Prince Albert (but) I could see the snow on the mountains, I could see the Pacific Ocean. What struck me, and I didn’t realize it until years afterwards, was the power of the English language. He was such a wonderful orator and that stuck with me. I knew early, when I was 10 or 12 years old, that’s what I was going to do. So I would walk down the street reading the news aloud.”

Like so many broadcast executives, Cowie recalls with both fondness and fright that his first experiences in the business were hardly eloquent.

As a teenager in the 1950s he got his feet wet at hometown station CKBI where his part-time job involved rolling up mike cords and driving the staff announcer home (even though he didn’t yet have a driver’s licence). Later he knocked on the doors of CKOM Saskatoon where he made a demo tape and a few days later got a call back from the production manager inviting him to fill an opening in the newsroom. His duties included getting up at 5 a.m., listening carefully to CHAB Moose Jaw and copying down all the good stories that happened in southern Saskatchewan.

“So we could make our Saskatoon station sound a lot bigger than it really was,” he explains with a chuckle.

After only two weeks on the job, he was told one morning that the news director had phoned in sick and that he had to go on the air, something he’d never done before.

“Listen kid,” Cowie was told. “This is a new station, nobody’s listening anyway, all of the people that want news listen to CFQC down the street so just go on the air, it doesn’t matter.”

But that very morning in 1956, there was a critical shake-up in the Soviet politburo that saw Nikita Khrushchov take command and wipe away the Stalinist era. The news stories were replete with complicated Russian names and, Cowie says, in those days the Broadcast News wire was not yet providing a pronunciation guide.

“To this day I still have those names in my head,” says Cowie, who recalls the Russian upheaval was followed quickly that year by the Suez Canal crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which brought with them more complex foreign names the young Cowie did his best not to mutilate.

He was right, though, nobody was listening.

There followed a couple of years as a country music show deejay (while reading news on weekends) and travelling and singing with a few bands.

But soon he was lured by television.

In 1958, Cowie moved to CKCK-TV Regina as part of a vague five-year career plan. He ended up staying in TV for 30 years, including that fateful day in November, 1963, when someone handed him a bulletin that U.S. President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

“I threw it back at him and said ‘I’m not reading that’,” he recalls, noting that there had been a lot of joking around in the station newsroom in those days. “I thought someone was messing around.

“He handed it back and said it’s real and the director said ‘Bruce, you gotta read that’.”

Cowie became CKCK’s general manager in 1968 at the age of 30 and continued to run the station for the Hill family until that sale to Baton Broadcasting.

He then accepted an offer from Electrohome Ltd. of Kitchener to move to Edmonton and run CFRN-TV. He soon became president and chief operating officer of Electrohome’s broadcast assets, which also included CKCO-TV Kitchener.

When those assets were also folded into Baton, he was there to help Ivan Fecan with the complicated process of putting the new CTV together and even became the network’s executive vice president and COO.

Later Cowie moved back to the West, where he assumed the vice presidency of Harvard.

Along the way, he has served as president of the Saskatchewan and Western Association of Broadcasters (of which he is also a Life Member), chair of the CAB board of directors, and in 2001 was inducted into the CAB Hall of Fame. He also served as a Regina alderman.

Asked if the Harvard name is connected at all to Harvard University, Cowie says absolutely, noting the name originated as Fred Hill’s tribute to his alma mater.

After the Second World War, Hill flew bombers for the USAF, then went back to Boston to attend Harvard where he graduated with his MBA. He returned to Saskatchewan to join his ageing father, Walter, in the family business that included insurance and real estate and which soon diversified into broadcasting and oil and gas.

Fred took over the business from his father in 1953 and his own son Paul is now president and CEO of Harvard Developments, Inc. and of The Hill Companies which began with his grandfather back in 1903.

Cowie turned 70 earlier this year, and in July celebrates his 50th wedding with his wife and three children and eight grandchildren.

And he still likes to pack up the car and motor regularly to Palm Springs, California for family vacations.

John McKay is a Mississauga-based writer on media issues. He may be reached by e-mail at mckay1169@rogers.com

Needless to say, I was speechless. Could this be true? Have we been doing it all wrong?

Local radio was created to entertain and inform. But according to this forum, the only thing that interests the public these days is music. Therefore, we should all just forget about the upcoming Relay For Life and spin a little more Nickelback. That should help boost the ratings, huh?

Let’s be real here. Stations that choose to move away from localization will lose out in the end. Radio is, and always will be, about the local community. People want to know what’s happening in their town. Why do you think that in most major markets the local news/talk stations are holding down the #1 spot? News/talk stations specialize in giving their listeners information about their hometown. It serves as a platform for them to interact and discuss the issues they face on a day-to-day basis. It talks about the things that they care about. It’s local.

There are a lot of elements that contribute to the success of a radio station. Does music play a large role in this? You bet it does. But people can now get their music anywhere, so we need to look at the real reasons people tend to choose to listen to radio in the first place. When a crisis occurs, where do people go? If the road is closed due to an accident, who has that information? When the local food bank is in dire straits or gas prices are on the rise, who do we turn to? It certainly isn’t an iPod.

So how do we win? We win by doing what radio does best, establishing a lasting and emotional connection with our listener. By being local. Now, I’m sure some of you are thinking: “The last thing I want to hear about is some jock blabbing on and on about the community bake sale”. Local does not necessarily mean talking about bake sales and charity car washes. Local means relating to the person that lives in your community. Finding creative ways to talk about the things that your demo cares about.

Think about what it’s like when you attend a party at a friend’s place. Do you just sit there and listen to music? Nope. You talk about the things that are happening in your community, at your work, with your family, and so on. You talk about the things that the other people at the party can relate to. You create an emotional connection.

When I travel to other cities and listen to their local radio stations, it is amazing how many make no effort to localize anything. So why would anyone that lives in this community care to listen? Stations like this force people to listen to satellite radio.

It is my belief that every radio station should reflect the community it serves. This could be done with station imaging, jock talk, news coverage, even the music you choose to play. Perhaps the best thing to do is to think of radio as a person rather than, well, radio. Be the person that people turn to in time of need, the person that always knows what’s going on and the cool places to hang out. Be the person that shares in a listener’s frustrations or celebrations, the person that we can rely on to put a smile on our face. Be real. Be plugged in. Be local.

Creating a local product takes effort. It is a never-ending job that needs to be reviewed each and every day. It takes creativity, dedication and a real passion for your community and your listener. At times, it will be exhausting and frustrating but in the end the rewards will outweigh any potential negatives.

The state of radio is not near as bleak as some people make it out to be. However, if there continues to be a group of broadcasters that push the belief that “local radio” is the end of us… then God help us all.

Rudy Parachoniak is Morning Show Host/PD/Operations Supervisor at CKQR-FM Castlegar, B.C. He may be contacted by e-mail at rudy@mountainfm.net

Now, I don’t expect that you’ve heard of Martyn. Not many people have. He was a popular singer-songwriter in Britain in the early 70s. Think Cat Stevens meets early Elton John meets Eric Clapton. A commercial flop over here, Martyn’s music hasn’t been available in North American record stores for some 30 years.

I don’t bring up Martyn to try to impress you with my esoteric music tastes. I’m sure your iPod holds a few personal discoveries I’ve never heard of.

The point is, by giving us easy access to an almost limitless supply of artists, songs and different types of music, the Internet allows us to personalize our music experience in ways we never thought possible. We aren’t just talking about iTunes or the iPod here. It extends well beyond that, to peer-to-peer downloading services, to indie artists selling their music on MySpace, and the personalized Internet radio services offered by Yahoo! LAUNCHcast and Pandora. For both music retail and music delivery, the action is increasingly moving away from the big hits of a few superstar artists. It’s the music manifestation of what Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, refers to as “The Long Tail.”

And the implications for radio are huge. The steady decline in terrestrial radio listening in under 35 demos over the past ten years is only the tip of this very large iceberg.

The curious thing is that, while all this is happening, mass appeal formats are gaining tuning share while niche formats are slipping.

How is that possible? Wouldn’t the most successful formats be those that focus on serving the increasing number of music fans who are exploring the far reaches of the Long Tail?

Certainly, terrestrial radio companies should be developing new technologies, platforms and business models to reach these listeners. But the reality is that terrestrial radio signals and even satellite radio channels are best suited to play the hits rather than chase the Long Tail.

The locked-in “push” model represented by terrestrial, HD Radio and even satellite radio services is simply no match for the personalization I can get from other platforms. These new technologies free me to hear whatever I want, whenever I want it, wherever I want to hear it. No matter how niche-oriented the format, a one-way radio service is at best a halfway measure for those times when I want to live out on the Long Tail.

However, where terrestrial radio does excel is connecting me with what other people like—not just what my Facebook pals like, but what’s popular in a general way.

Recent format share trends back this up. Arbitron shows that mass appeal formats (Mainstream CHR, broad-based AC, Adult Hits, News/Talk) have been gaining a larger share of the shrinking radio tuning pie, while niche formats such as Alternative, Rhythmic CHR and Smooth Jazz have all shown share declines over the past few years. Even on satellite radio, the most listened to channels are the ones that mirror terrestrial radio’s biggest formats. In fact, one of the most popular satellite radio channels—XM Radio’s 20 on 20—repeats the current hits more often than any terrestrial station would ever dare.

I don’t expect any pre-programmed radio channel to play John Martyn for me. And, if they did, I’m not sure I want to hear what obscure track they would play next. Thanks all the same, but for my Long Tail moments, I’ll stick with my iPod—or maybe a highly-personalized Internet radio service. But when I want to plug into what other people like, or to mine those shared memories of hit songs from the past, I’ll be turning to the mass appeal formats on my FM radio.

Jeff Vidler is a Partner in Solutions Research Group www.srgnet.com, a Toronto-based research consulting firm with a primary focus on entertainment, media, technology and leisure. E-mail: jvidler@srgnet.com

The first-generation digital boxes were notoriously finicky to set up in the first place. Anything you could do to narrow the variations in the quality of material that the digital processor saw would reduce the amount of fiddling around with what were then little-understood controls once the audio was in the digital domain. In a way, it’s surprising, but this is still true, even with the newer generations of digital whiz-bangs -- uniformity of product on the input yields better sound with fewer artefacts on the output.

This must be partly due to the variations in the quality of the source material that we provide. We should always keep in mind that our processor gurus are optimizing their algorithms and designing primarily for a form of audio that is becoming a rarer and rarer bird, indeed -- “unprocessed” or “raw” audio.

Even if we take pains to use a storage system that is uncompressed, and perhaps even an STL system that doesn’t use bit-reduction techniques, we still need to be concerned about our audio sources -- as commercials are swapped back and forth between radio stations and studios, MP3 files are being created and re-expanded, sometimes with more care than others. The music distribution services seem to be taking some care but, here again, consumer-oriented AAC and MP3 files of “difficult-to-get” music seem to have a way of seeping into systems, past even the most vigilant and discerning audio policemen. And increasingly, and even more disturbingly, music is being mastered by the record companies with built-in crunching, compressing, and even clipping.

Well, these are variations that we might just have to accept. As the world continues to change, maybe we’ll eventually drift into an alternate universe where we will once again have control over these things, but in that respect it will not resemble the one we’re in right now. So we’re going to have to make the best of the situation in which we find ourselves, and fix what we can.

Whether the audio that’s going to be processed ends up in a non-bit-reduced form such as an FM composite signal, or gets crunched down mercilessly to a low-bit-rate creature such as an Internet stream, what can we do to get the most out of our nth-generation digital bit-flinger?

Consistent input levels and equalization are desirable, but not if they come along with “analog” artefacts such as pumping and breathing noises… and, we’re told by all the designers of bit-reducing algorithms, absolutely with no added clipping. We need something gentle and slow -- a gated, automated gain-rider like the Audimaxs and Texars of yesteryear. Preferably with several audio bands, not so much for equalizing, and definitely not for pre-emphasis, but only to help keep the “tonal balance” more similar between different audio sources.

The guys that developed the CBS Dynamic Presence Equalizer, a fairly terrible box from oh-so-many years ago, might have been on to something after all. Or maybe just the beginning of something.

Come to think about it, something like this (in the digital domain) might be just what’s needed to rein in the audio level problems being experienced by HDTV stations, for completely different reasons (only they’ll need it for 5.1 audio!).

We live at the dawn of this digital age, and it’s comforting to think that in a few years our level control and quality control problems will all have been solved. In retrospect, some of our approaches to today’s problems will no doubt seem quaint. At the same time, it seems ironic that the key to ironing out some of these troubles may lie in the audio processing techniques of the past.

Dan Roach works at S.W. Davis Broadcast Technical Services Ltd., a contract engineering firm based in Vancouver. He may be reached by e-mail at dan@broadcasttechnical.com

Then I considered this: if I were to work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks per year and for 40 or so years I would be spending about 75,000 hours (excluding holidays) working and shaping sheet metal. For many this would be a dream, but for me this instantly cast a pall on my future. How could anyone “work” for 75,000 hours?

Nevertheless, I was eager to be employed and my lunch box and I went to work and got acquainted with gloom. I soon came to realize, though, that “work” did not necessarily mean “toil”. I changed my attitude about “work”, revaluated my decision, and then headed straight towards a broadcast engineering career.

Now “work” has become synonymous with “hobby”, and that has had a profound impact on the person I’ve become.

Have you ever taken a bit of time to reflect on those engineers you work with? You probably think they’re all left-brainers, kowtowing only to the portion responsible for the logical, analytical, objective way of thinking. They speak an undecipherable language and get excited over blinking lights.

You probably also have preconceptions that, because most broadcast engineers are male, the right side of the brain (which is responsible for the intuitive, holistic, subjective way of thinking) is fairly stagnant. They might exhibit emotions equivalent to those emitted by the machines they nurture -- but don’t be misled. The next time they confuse you with jargon or smile for no apparent reason appearing caught in their own little world, consider the following.

Since the 1950s, engineers have created and organized a gathering of peers from Manitoba to the East Coast for the sole intent of sharing broadcast-related technology knowledge. Broadcast engineers gather in a non-competitive fashion to cultivate professional development and build relationships that span the continent and create a considerable support network. Mix in manufacturers, suppliers, integrators, and consultants and this network widens. Many of the friendships fostered will grow far beyond business.

When members arrive for the yearly conference they are greeted with a handshake well before registering. Genuine smiles and an air of enthusiasm permeate the venue. The energy following this gathering has consistently cultivated improvements from year to year, and some members that attend other conferences rate this one as one of the best. The CCBE is a great place to be!

Now For The Left Brain Stuff

The Central Canada Broadcast Engineers Conference will be held Thursday, September 18 through Sunday, September 21, 2008 at the Horseshoe Resort just north of Barrie, Ontario.

Thursday workshops: 10:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Papers Sessions:

Friday: 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Saturday: 9:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

Sunday: 9:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

Keynote Address will be by Jim Adamson, senior vice president of LARCAN, who began his broadcast career with Canadian General Electric in 1966, serving in a variety of capacities both technical and marketing-based. After more than two decades with that organization, he joined LARCAN in 1987. Now, as a respected industry leader with over 40 years of experience, Jim brings together a wealth of broadcast knowledge and expertise.

Jim Adamson’s experience will provide a unique perspective during this pivotal time in Canadian broadcasting as we move toward the digital age. His insights from digital broadcast projects he’s worked on worldwide will lend a deeper understanding from all levels of broadcasting about the changes and emerging opportunities the Canadian broadcast industry is looking toward.

Recognized with the CCBE 2006 Ambassador of the Year award, Jim has a renowned reputation for his commitment, service, and excellence as a diplomat to the industry.

I don’t want to waste many of my 75,000 hours and to that end I have to admit that I am grateful some of them have been spent with all who have been involved with the CCBE.

Denis Barriault is Membership Chair of the Central Canada Broadcast Engineers. He is also the Chief Engineer at Dougall Media in Thunder Bay. Barriault may be reached at dbarriault@dougallmedia.com