An acrimonious industrial dispute is rocking the broadcasting world in Canada.
After talks over workers' contracts failed, Canada's public broadcaster locked out more than 5,000 workers - more than 60% of all staff - on August 15, leading to the decimation of CBC's usual TV and radio programming. The remaining managers recycled programmes in an attempt to keep stations on the air.
In a piece in the magazine Macleans, Mark Starowicz from the CBC documentary unit writes:
At the moment, there are no negotiations and no one is talking, except colleagues trying to resist the gloom. I just got an email from one of the mid-level managers inside: 'Thinking of you. Miss you all. We've watered the plants.'
But the dispute hasn't silenced the Canadian hacks: far from it. An astonishing amount of from-the-picket line blogging is going on, and there's an accomplished and comprehensive website for the locked-out workers, which is publishing written contributions from angry CBC staffers. There are also dozens of images on Flickr.
The management isn't taking things sitting down, either: it has a website of its own. Blogger Robin Rowland predicts that what he calls the CBC blog war "will go down as one major step in the changing media landscape".
As Stephen Baker of Business Week's Blogspotting blog writes, "a strike or a lockout is a different animal in a world where the workers can blog. It's got to be a struggle for unions to control the message, and to speak with one voice". Baker also points out that the proliferation of direct comment makes the job of covering the industrial action far easier for journalists.
I haven't found any equivalent blogs written by angry former or present Gate Gourmet employees, but do let me know below if you have.
On a different note, the CBC crisis - and the resulting media blackout - are also having some unexpected side effects. So many listeners enjoyed watching live sports minus the commentary that Chris Zelkovich of the Toronto Star suspects the impact of the chatter-free coverage could revolutionise sports broadcasting.
