Radio and TV news
Both AM730 Vancouver and 880 Edmonton appear to have shut down. Both websites redirect. 730 redirects to 980 and and the Edmonton station redirects to 630 CHED now. AM730 is broadcasting CKNW and CHED can be heard at 880 until the transmitters are shut down. I suspect this is the start of bigger things.
This is a breaking story and I’ll post more when I get it.
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Very unfortunate. The all news format of Global 880 in Edmonton was better than that of the Rogers stations. Did anyone ever listen to AM 730 in Vancouver?
Sad to find out about AM 730 is now off the air. A great traffic team who did their best to provide an essential service for motorists in Metro Vancouver. I will miss this station.
The CRTC or whatever the organization that regulates broadcasting in Canada is called this week, should go back to the strict ownership laws that limit the large Toronto companies to only one station per market. Small, privately owned radio stations could do just fine targeting niche markets, like people who like 60’s and 70’s rock and roll. Ethnic radio stations do just fine which is proven by 2 Chinese and 4 Punjabi radio stations competing with each other in the Vancouver market on the AM band alone. There’s 3 more Punjabi stations on FM and one Chinese. How can they make a profit and not put each other out of business? I believe it’s because they have a different mentality from the Toronto corporate monsters, the small mum and pop stations have a local focus and get their advertising revenue from small businesses, the Toronto corporate monsters only get their advertising from other corporate monsters and as soon as that goes down, they lay off staff and shut down radio stations. We need to restore free enterprise in broadcasting, having two or three big corporations running all radio in Canada means you have no choice, it’s like three or four different shades of grey. At least in Vancouver, we are close enough to the US border to get US radio, which is suffering with the same problems to some extent, but because their market is 10X bigger, there still are small independent radio stations that play good music on AM and the corporate radio stations offer more choice than the 3 or 4 shades of gray that the Canadian market offers. When CISL went to sports, I stopped listening to Canadian radio. I was very happy when 1410 and 1040 went off the air as it allowed me to pick up US radio stations that I never knew existed and I will be happy when 730 finally is turned off. I would hope that CBC 690 will go off the air soon so I can listen to XETRA in Tijuana again.
880 in Edmonton has been phoning it in for years. Fifteen minute prerecorded news bytes looped over and over again for hours. Bare minimum. They fell to the bottom in Edmonton and stayed there, so no surprise the mother ship is pulling the plug. I’m with the rest of you in that I’m not happy about it, just not surprised.