This looking for radio/editorial work in Canada is proving to be a harder task than ever one expected..
Seems the trend in North America is swinging, or has swung away from informing people through the medium of radio.. newsroom staffs cut to the bone.. one station in Cambridge has only one newsreader.. obviously a rip-and-read operation, and this is a travesty.
It used to be, and not so long ago in fact, that a newscast was a 'show' in itself, a kitchen-table summary of the local, national and international goings on. This five minutes an hour, or five every half-hour newscast was an artform, to conceive, write, edit and present a product that left the listeners informed, and perhaps more precisely, educated as to what was happening around them, concerning their various forms of government, their crime rate, their economy, their 'poco mundo'.
One dispairs that this era seemingly has passed, that now it's all snappy talk and patter, or predigested pap written for the toothless mind and presented by those who's main concern is to present a modicum of information in the least time possible.
Radio news has always played an important part of informing the public, before they hear it on their six or ten o'clock television presentation. Because of it's frequency and immediacy, it has filled a void, allowing the listener to digest the facts as verbally presented, before seeing it in pictures..
It's disturbing to think, that either the public, or those who run radio stations, now feel the man on the street disinterested in the development of the news around them. It bespeaks a society which wants only entertainment, music and chatter, from a medium with a long history.
Consider, there are places still, where television is unavailable to the larger part of the population. There, they get what information they have, in toto, from radio broadcasts either from their local stations, or from institutions as BBC, or CBC, overseas services.
It may well be that North American society is saturated with news coverage, and has become disinterested in a format which offers continuous updates. But one might hazard a guess, that those who make the decisions at each and every radio station, have decided that they can either not find the talent, or cannot afford those with the ability to make 'the news' saleable.
One news reader for an entire station.
That, again, is a travesty, and a dis-service to their listening audience.