John Cruickshank, new publisher of CBC News, sees his job as being focused on strategy -- but people at the John/Front bunker can expect to see him in the newsrooms there.
In clarifying what his new job, set to start in late October, will entail, Cruickshank said yesterday, "It's the distinction between the tactical, hands-on role of editor-in-chief and the more strategic role of publisher. Not to say that I won't be involved in the news operation, because nothing could keep me from doing that.
"But it [the strategic role] is really important now because of the extraordinary dynamism of the audience, frankly, and the changing tastes for how we get news, when we get news and what form it comes to people, that there be somebody thinking about those things," he said. "I have this sense that it's my mission to help lead the CBC's news operation into the future."
The CBC's mission is also different than that of private news organizations, he said. "The CBC has a mission to be deeper, to be broader, to be more intensely reflective of Canadian reality, to have frankly higher standards when it comes objectivity and trustworthiness. Of course, you come under higher scrutiny as a result of that kind of mission and those kinds of requirements."
But like other news organizations, CBC News has been pushing toward sending its news out across numerous platforms, from TV and radio to websites and other digital means.
That has been part of Cruickshank's legacy at the Sun-Times. He has beefed up the paper's website, not only by pulling content from the 100 suburban papers owned by the Sun-Times Media Group in the Chicago area, but also by creating neighbourhood websites that incorporate draws such as social networking and viewer-generated news content. That kind of news website targeting both the regional/national level and local level is what CBC News is trying to create, particularly with its Web incubator projects in Vancouver.