Call it the CNN complex. For much of its 10-year existence, CBC Newsworld has lived in the shadow of its big-name American counterpart. Whenever a big news story breaks, Canadians will naturally flip channels until they get some live, on-the-scene coverage – and Newsworld, with one-tenth the budget of CNN, hasn’t always been able to deliver the goods.

In fact, when Newsworld first launched in the summer of 1989, it had more in common with radio than television. Much of its live news coverage consisted of telephone interviews accompanied by static slides or pictures – not exactly compelling TV, recalls Janice Ward, director of Project 10, which is responsible for all promotional activities in conjunction with the channel’s tenth anniversary.

Much has changed since then.

Last year, in fact, CNN actually carried Newsworld’s coverage of the Swissair crash off the coast of Nova Scotia. Ward says CNN affiliates from all over North America were calling with queries and commending the channel on its reportage. ‘That’s when we knew we’d really made it.’

Canadians are learning to depend on Newsworld for event coverage, says Geoff Thrasher, the specialty’s director of marketing and sales. When something big happens, people are tuning in to the channel – and staying with it.

For example, as Thrasher notes, Newsworld’s audience grew 800% during the Swissair coverage, and nearly 600% when the channel covered the first anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. This summer’s royal wedding, meanwhile, resulted in a 1,000% growth in audience numbers.

As one may gather from the above, Newsworld is heavily committed to generating audience research – much of it highly specific – which sales reps for the channel have at their disposal when speaking to media buyers. Recently, for example, Newsworld spent $10,000 on a research project designed to determine how the channel stacks up against magazines.

‘They come in with plenty of research and back-up,’ says Niall Mulholland, broadcast manager for Cossette Media in Toronto. That’s important, he argues, because the channel needs to be able to prove that its audience is as desirable as it generally claims.

According to Newsworld, highly educated information-seekers make up the bulk of the viewership. They tend to be managers, owners and professionals – and more likely than not, they’re investors as well.

Not surprisingly, given the makeup of the audience, Newsworld airtime carries a premium price tag. And the channel refuses to give in to the temptation to cut rates – a stance that frustrates many buyers, but earns a degree of respect from them as well.

‘They stick to their guns,’ Mulholland says. ‘They know what they’re worth.’

One media operation that has supported Newsworld from day one is Toronto-based Harrison, Young, Pesonen & Newell. According to Doug Newell, the agency’s senior vice-president, media buying operations, HYPN spent $2.5 million on Newsworld in its first year alone.

‘We saw how successful CNN had been, and we saw the specialty market unfolding,’ Newell says.

One of the major advantages that Newsworld enjoyed from the outset, he adds, was a strong brand – thanks, in large part, to its CBC roots.

The brand equity definitely makes the channel a solid buy, agrees Florence Ng, vice-president, broadcast with Optimedia Canada in Toronto.

That’s only part of the attraction, however. Newsworld, she says, delivers the same quality of programming as news properties on the main CBC service. But because it’s a specialty service, the channel offers advertisers more opportunities in the area of sponsorship and promotions.

While Newsworld had the good fortune to come out of the gate with the equity of the CBC behind it, the channel was also breaking new territory in this country – and that, says Thrasher, was no small challenge.

‘There was obviously some resistance [in the early days],’ he says. ‘Who the hell is going to watch news all day?’

Promoting its on-air personalities – such as Don Newman, Alison Smith and Anne Petrie, all of whom were with Newsworld from the very beginning – is one of the ways that the channel has attempted to stand out.

‘It’s very rare in the specialty world to have strong personalities,’ Thrasher says.

With increased competition for the all-news audience – most notably, from CTV Newsnet (formerly CTV News 1) – Newsworld has been compelled to beef up its news coverage in the past couple of years.

Among other things, the channel has built a new and much-improved news centre in Toronto. Where it used to broadcast from three different cities across Canada, it now has a single, instantly recognizable set, which should mean greater consistency in the eyes of viewers.

Newsworld has also invested in adding more satellite trucks, to increase its capability to deliver live coverage.

Further improvements are in the offing, Thrasher says. ‘If your brand is news, then [you’ve got to] be better at it.’

Sidebar: Interactive exhibit celebrates Newsworld’s anniversary

CBC Newsworld is taking its show on the road.

To mark its tenth anniversary, and to hammer home its brand identity as a news leader, the specialty channel has developed a travelling exhibit called Newsworld Interactive, which is designed to give Canadians an opportunity to participate in the ‘exciting’ world of broadcast news.

‘We must interact with the people who watch us,’ says Janice Ward, director of Project 10, which is handling all of the promotional activities associated with Newsworld’s tenth anniversary.

A scaled-down version of the exhibit appeared earlier this summer at the Calgary Stampede, but the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto represented the first official leg of the tour. The exhibit is scheduled to travel to six other Canadian cities over the course of the fall. (Efforts are underway to sign up a corporate sponsor.)

The exhibit includes a video wall displaying raw historical footage, a speaker’s corner booth, a live anchor desk, and ‘history flashback’ terminals. These terminals feature vignettes about milestone news stories – ranging from the Oka incident to the fall of the Berlin Wall – as remembered by the CBC Newsworld journalists who brought them to air. The vignettes, drawn from the commemorative documentary Decade on Fire, have also been airing on Newsworld to help promote the tenth anniversary. WC

Also in this special report:

– Info-based channels pose buying challenge: Non-traditional formats require media planners to think outside the box p.25

– Not much to distinguish online news portals p.28

– News radio will survive – and thrive p.29

– ROBTV to corner the financial markets p.30

– TSTV offers sales pitch for Toronto Star: Torstar-owned infomercial channel helps sell subscriptions to print sister p.30