Media Beat: December 03, 2017
A column about media and the regulatory environment within and beyond Canada's borders.
By David Farrell
Anticipated CRTC decisions this week
Bell Canada – Application to review and vary Telecom Order 2017-95
File number: 8662-B2-201705724
Canadian Administrator of VRS (CAV), Inc. – Application requesting video relay service funding for 2018
File number: 8695-C209-201706400
Final 2017 revenue-percent charge and related matters
File number: 8695-C12-201702481
Bell Canada – Application to review and vary a portion of Telecom Decision 2017-56 regarding final terms and conditions for wholesale mobile wireless services
File number: 8662-B38-201703109
CBC’s digital shift is helping to kill local news outlets
Government subsidies and the network's dominance among Canadian online news consumers is tilting the playing field against its rivals and helping to attract digital advertising dollars – Barrie McKenna, Globe and Mail subscription
CHIC 790, where the girls were…
The strange story of the first all female radio station in Canada
The first time I was ever aware of a radio station called “CHIC 790” was when my father took me as a child to a Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball game at the old Maple Leaf Stadium on the Toronto waterfront. There was a billboard in the backfield with a picture of a chickadee holding a baseball bat advertising game coverage on the suburban Brampton, Ontario radio station.
(I wasn’t interested in the baseball games. It was more fun exploring the cavernous empty stadium because almost no one attended the baseball games and that was why shortly afterwards the team folded. The end of baseball in Toronto that was sad for my dad until major league ball came back with the Blue Jays)
The next time CHIC got my attention was an ad campaign for a new version of the radio station, this time with all female announcers in the late 60’s. (Men were still heard on the news)
“The CHIC Chicks” (Yes, as incomprehensible as this appellation would be today it was considered “novel” then)
The new jingles sang out loud that you could now tune to “CHIC 790, Where the Girls Are!” This even got me to tune in to 790 and listen awhile. Long enough to figure out that women could be announcers and do it well. They even addressed “Metro-West Weather” which fit my part of the city in Weston, but there wasn’t enough novelty to make me a regular listener.
The incredibly talented Ingrid Schumacher is noted for being the first female announcer on Toronto’s CHUM-FM. Groundbreaking in the previously closed realm of all male announcers! A milestone in itself!
CHIC and the “CHIC Chicks” debuted years earlier in the 1960s. (Maybe its the chauvinism of the era that let them be forgotten?) – Mark Elliot, Medium
