Morning TV news market opens up in Regina

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Category: Media Matters

Created on Monday, 31 October 2011 09:28

by Jonathan Hamelin

The first episode of CTV Regina’s new morning show came out swinging, literally. Regina mayor Pat Fiacco appeared on the show with boxing gloves and knocked co-anchor Jonathan Glasgow to the floor.

Saskatchewan Roughriders receiver Rob Bagg also stopped by to share his favourite candy apple recipe. Show producer Meghan Duffy said viewers can expect more of the same from the program. CTV’s morning shows are scheduled to run Monday to Friday, 6-9 a.m., in Regina and Saskatoon, the first of at least two local TV stations to step into the morning news market.

“The six p.m. news is completely different than the morning show. On the morning show, there are a lot more aspects that need to be a little bit lighter because you can’t hear hard news for three hours as a viewer,” Duffy said.

The shows are the only morning TV editions in Saskatchewan. “People in Saskatchewan deserve to wakeup to local programming,” Duffy  said. “Canada AM is a fabulous show if you’re looking for national headlines and unfortunately the people that are in Weyburn, or Swift Current or Moose Jaw don’t know what the temperature is in their area because Canada AM is Regina and Saskatoon and that’s it.

The first show went extremely well. I’ve been getting flooded with all sorts of positive emails from head office in Toronto, from friends in Manitoba, colleagues in Vancouver. It was such an amazing show.”

Duffy has been involved in the planning of the show since it started in August. She helped compile an on-air team she feels “all bring something completely different.”

Co-anchor Shallima Maharaj has worked with Reuters, the Business News Network and CTV Prince Albert. Glasgow has been a broadcaster in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and B.C. Rounding out the team are weatherman Carey Smith and traffic, sports and web anchor Lindsay Dunn.

But CTV won’t be the only station in the game  for long. Global Regina is set to launch a morning show on Nov. 28.  Global Regina Morning News will include similar content, adding live traffic cameras in the city.

University of Regina School of Journalism head Mitch Diamantopoulos hopes these morning shows will take a responsible journalistic approach.

“If the morning show is what it takes to draw people who would otherwise not tune into the news, and if the celebrities get them to tune into the show and then you drag them through something that is maybe relevant to their lives, or they learn something new about the world and their place in it, then that’s good,” he said.