Raise the Hammer

To be charitable, it's been five months since the full team (two producers, two reporters, videographer) was put in place.

Having listened to the broadcast and the web replay (metrics, yo) I was struck by the distinction between the blank cheque enthusiasm CBC HQ has reportedly evinced for this digital foray, RG's blue sky digital-is-synonymous-with-evolution spiel and the pervasive worship of traffic.


~3 min

Gillespie: “I see the metrics every morning and I know what worked and what didn’t work. Worked and didn’t work in the sense of audience went to and what the audience did not go to… one of the fascinating things about working on this platform is that my gut instinct as a traditional journalist – I am trained in traditional journalism – is sometimes wrong. Things that traditional journalists think will resonate with the audience don’t…. I think that there’s a real gulf between big traditional media and the audience…. People don’t see themselves in the media often enough… So I’m very sensitive to that….”

~10 min

Gillespie: “I don’t think the message is, people aren’t interested in it, I think the message is, you didn’t get it right. So that’s fine. I don’t throw out the whole concept, I go back to the drawing board…”

~17 min

Gillespie: “They, the big they [CBC], are just trying to figure out metrics now, because there’s no such thing as us. We don’t exist. Every other market, there is cross-promotional work. They have a radio station or a television station. In many cases, they have both. We have nothing except what we do down on James Street. The challenge we face… is how do we get our message out?”

~19m

Smith: Do you decide your stories on what other mediums are doing or not doing?

Gillespie: No.

Smith: No. It’s just, this is your formula and this is how you’re going to approach it.

Gillespie: Well, formula’s the wrong word. It’s more like what’s in my gut.

Smith: So you’re going by gut when you’re finding what stories…

Gillespie: But I see where my gut is right and wrong. When I came here I knew that the community was undervalued by journalists. That journalists make the mistake of having a very niche view of what journalism is. That community was somehow soft news or unimportant news. But the truth is that what traditional news – and I’m a news journalist – what they generally think of as important is not the same level of importance as the same level of importance of people I work with on the street, of people I have coffee with, it’s not the centre of their world. And unless journalists can understand that they need to have a broader perspective on what is important to people, how would you ever expect an audience if you can’t… you know, it’s like I said earlier: I don’t see myself reflected in it. People don’t see themselves reflected in it…. So, the view from the people who say, you should be at City Hall all the time, We could be at City Hall for the 200 people who read about every small thing that happens at City Hall, but that’s not where the audience in Hamilton is at…"