Yahoo News CBC to Cut 600 Jobs Amid Advertising Headwinds
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has announced it expects to cut around 600 jobs as it deals with lower advertising revenue and competition from U.S. digital giants.
Canada’s pubcaster said it faces a $125 million budgetary shortfall likely to be offset with programming cuts and layoffs. “These pressures are a result of the same structural factors affecting all media companies in Canada, including rising production costs, declining television advertising revenue and fierce competition from the digital giants,” Catherine Tait, president and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada, said in a statement.
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On the programming side, the pubcaster expects to cut its English- and French-language content spend over the next year, which will include around $40 million less for series commissioned or acquired from indie producers. The latest layoffs forecast at the CBC represent around 10 percent of the workforce at the CBC and Radio-Canada, the country’s English- and French-language pubcasters.
“CBC/Radio-Canada is not immune to the upheaval facing the Canadian media industry. We’ve successfully managed serious structural declines in our business for many years, but we no longer have the flexibility to do so without reductions,” Tait added.
The CBC may see some increased funding after Canada struck a $100 million deal with Google to annually pay local publishers for news snippets shared or repurposed on its local platform, with Meta remaining a U.S. digital tech holdout in choosing not to pay local media outlets for news snippets repurposed on its local Facebook and Instagram platforms.
In another bellwether for a struggling Canadian entertainment industry, the Toronto Film Festival has announced 12 full-time jobs were cut as part of a “strategic review” of the organization. That follows the SAG-AFTRA strike greatly reducing the number of Hollywood actors at premieres and parties for its 2023 edition, and the lingering impact of theater shutdowns during the COVID-19 crisis.
“Like many in the arts and entertainment sector, we are continuing to recover from the pandemic as well as the setback of this year’s SAG-AFTRA strike,” Judy Lung, vp public relations and communications at TIFF said in a statement.
The job cuts at the Toronto festival also come ahead of Canadian phone giant Bell and lead TIFF sponsor since 1995 deciding to end its $5 million a-year sponsorship of the marquee film festival and its year-round programming from the end of 2023.
The 28-year partnership with Bell included two years of pandemic disruption with slimmed-down digital editions in 2020 and 2021 and dealing with the impact of the Hollywood actors strike on helping sign up new mobile phone subscribers and new customers for its Crave streaming platform competing against Netflix and other U.S. digital giants.
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