Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

For Fall Break, I went to visit my friend who is studying abroad in Montreal and awkwardly tagged along with her class when they went to visit the CBC, the main broadcasting company in Canada, acting as the national radio and television broadcaster. It was formed in 1936 and is the longest running media corporation in Canada and hosts the most radio and news shows, airing in both English and French.

To start off the tour, we had to put on a fake newscast in a very realistic studio setting. They had students working in the control room and being both news anchors and reporters, the recording lasted about 20 minutes and had 5 segments. Unfortunately, I somehow got roped into being a reporter (because you can't just hang back when a frenchman calls you out) and ended up reading on camera as an automotive expert, and Shanghai reporter, Wong Lee. Complete with fake backgrounds, scripts and external video, it was a completely student run "broadcast" (Sorry for the bad quality of the pictures, they were taken from a phone).

After stumbling our way through that, we took a quick tour of the building, starting off with the main newsroom. They have approximately 200 people constantly monitoring news around the world and maintaining the CBC social media. In the same room they were filming a splitscreen for that evening between an anchor and a reporter on the other side of the room. We then went to go check out on of their main radio studios where they usually air live music and group interviews. While one of the guides played some dramatic background music on the piano, the other explained how the uneven stature of the walls prevented echos and created a very clean and quick sound. The very last stop on the tour was to their main television studio, which is the third largest studio in North America (about 6 times as large as Studio A here, minus the green curtain). They tend to film live studio shows here with an audience, but even then, they only take up about three fourths of the studio. They also mentioned that even with platforms or rugs down, the never show the floor in their studios, and thats how you tell if shows, especially soap operas, are filmed in a studio.

It was very similar to the BBC, which I toured when I studied in London, except the BBC put much more emphasis on their fiction shows, whereas the CBC is mainly news and radio. Also unlike the BBC, CBC employs commercial advertising in addition to it's federal funding, with the exception of radio. The building itself is a very prominent figure in the landscape, with a very futuristic feel to it on the inside.