Toronto news media changes

A couple of things for those in Ontario who follow the news media a bit, relating to competition coverage or otherwise.

CityTv has has major layoffs and lost their noon and all weekend news, so if you want coverage of the Waterloo and GTR regionals you're going to have to campaign and make a good case for them to send a camera and reporter out on the Friday.

CTV/A-channel and CP24 are still alive and in the GTR CP24 might be the one to provide some live coverage all three days.

Canwest Global has been bought by Shaw cable and we are hopeful it will provide some stability.
http://www.thestar.com/business/arti...canwest-global

The other major issue facing the news media in the states and in Canada is radio systems encryption, let's say all the money issues affecting the broadcasters simply didn't exist, many police, fire, ems services are encrypting their radios and this is a major end-of-world problem for the media.

There are various flavours of digital, P25 clear (uniden BC996xt/396xt will pick this up no problem just like analong, then comes along formats that scanners cannot pick up, P25-encrypted, MotoTRBO, Iden, MA-COM pro-voice clear and pro-voice encrypted and there are others like opensky.

Decoding encrypted is highly illegal in the USA and Canada so not an option, all the other flavours are just digital and you can decode them and monitor but no scanning radio is available and probably won't be.

Some media have set up news tip lines but the average member of the public doesn't call their TV or radio station, they just expect to see it on the news as if we know everything and we do, well we used to, now as we lose our radios we will have no clue what's going on.

It's not only the real bad stuff by the way that we won't know about, many interesting, funny, and good stories and visuals as well as all the severe weather stuff come from a couple of keywords I heard on the scanner, I would venture to say that 75% of what you see on you're local newscasts started with some use of a scanner in some way, the way things are going there won't be much news much longer and I would say by 2012 it's over.

www.radioreference.com is a good site to have a look at.