The former CBC boss shook up my work world, got fired and wrote a book. Time to catch up.

This article originally appeared on The Tyee.

Those hazel eyes haunted my dreams as a young CBC journalist.

Richard Stursberg’s new book includes one particularly perceptive passage: “They would look at me as though confronted by the Great Satan himself. The stench of sulphur and charred flesh seemed to follow me everywhere. Employees looked aside when I came into view.”

He’s describing the climate in Toronto after the 2005 lockout at the CBC, but that searing hatred never completely dissipated during his tenure as executive vice-president in charge of English services. He was the engine pushing toward a more populist, commercial CBC. He also oversaw the elimination of 800 jobs in 2009. Sitting across from him on the patio at JJ Bean, I ask if the ill will we wished him ever affected his day to day mindset.

“Yeah, it slowed me down dramatically,” replies Stursberg. “The level of resistance within the news department, despite the fact it was failing, was unbelievable. I was very conscious of the fact that people were worried and resistant. But at some point it was pretty clear that if we didn’t do something, the whole thing was just gonna kind of vanish.”

Fort News

It was thus that under Stursberg’s tenure, local newscasts were stretched from 60 minutes to 90 — with the same staff. New, high-tempo graphics and music were brought in. And we had to be live, all the time. I remember as a videojournalist, editing my own news piece, having to abandon everything and run to the roof at 5:00 and 5:30 to deliver gasping, breathless “lives,” before running back up for a third time at 6:00 to intro my barely-finished story. Some days in Montreal there were only four reporters to fill an hour and a half of airtime.

“When you look now at CBC News,” I ask Stursberg, “do you see your vision realized?”

“Yeah, up to a point. But I had always thought there were two steps involved. One of which is, it had to be this sort of promise of breaking news, 24-hour-a-day breaking news. And going faster than the privates…”

I interrupt him. “I don’t ask this out of disrespect, but have you ever broken a news story?”

“Of course not, I’m not a journalist. Why would I break news stories? I’ve never worked as a journalist in my entire life. But that’s neither here nor there. I can still count. I can count how many news stories get broken.”

Continue reading at TheTyee.ca

At a workshop today. Photo by Evan Crowe.

I love making content for people on their computers and phones. And I spend a lot of time alone in the dark with a laptop, reading and writing and maintaining loose, electronic ties with a large community of people, many of whom I’ve never met.

I like giving props or debating people in 140-character bursts and I like reading comment sections online (a sickness, I admit) and overall I place a lot of value and hope in decentralized groups of citizens logging on and talking it out. But sometimes I don’t make enough time for the other stuff.

Here’s my theory: I think laughing together in a group does things that no other human activity (or technology) can quite duplicate. And every so often, we need to go to that well to replenish the online portion of our lives.

Laughing in a group creates consensus. It triggers sensations of belonging, of fellow-feeling, of community. And we humans need that, biologically, to function. A heartbeat ago in evolutionary terms, we spent our time (though most ancient languages have no such word) following animals around with our friends and family. We hadn’t yet invented agriculture, but my bet is we were already experts at laughing. How else did we survive?

I was reminded of this at the Reimagine CBC event in Vancouver this week. If you weren’t there, picture 1200 people packing out both levels of the Vogue theatre to celebrate the potential of our public broadcaster. It was surreal, partly because if you based your opinion purely on online comment sections, you would never believe that so many people gave a damn about the CBC.

For me, the highlight of the night was a monologue by Ivan Coyote, a storyteller who I’ve seen many times getting coffee around the corner from my house, but had never experienced live.

All she did was describe the place of CBC radio in the soundscape of her childhood in Whitehorse, Yukon in the late 70s. But she did it in a way that was poignant and galvanizing and above all, funny. It’s hard not to nod when you’re laughing along with 1200 other people. And Coyote primed the pump for a night of speakers and song that left me feeling inspired and reassured and not alone.

We had a similar, smaller-scale experience at the DOXA festival last night, screening our completed documentary “Renaissance Man” for a couple hundred friends, family members, supporters, collaborators, and film fans. Having created the film on a computer for other people on computers, it was unexpectedly marvellous to see our work on a huge screen with big speakers.

And at points in the film, points I’d long forgotten were funny to begin with, we heard something in the dark that gave me goosebumps — a big group of people laughing.

That’s a power I’m interested in exploring further. Live events, collective experience, group laughter. I think these things are going to become increasingly important in warding off despair and fatigue and isolation over the next few years.