CTV Vancouver gave thanks in New York Monday evening Oct. 10 as it received the Edward R Murrow Award for Overall Excellence – Large Market Television, which was previously announced and reported in the June 30th Broadcast Dialogue Weekly Briefing. The hardware makes it official. It’s the first time in the 45-year history of the “Murrows” that the American branch of the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) has awarded the honour to a Canadian station.
OMNI Television is bringing back Hockey Night in Canada: Punjabi Edition for the NHL regular season. Starting Oct. 15, 48 games will be broadcast on OMNI 2, OMNI BC, and OMNI Alberta. Every Saturday night, back-to-back games will air from the OMNI studios in Vancouver. Host and play-by-play announcer Harnarayan Singh will be joined by fellow analysts Randip Janda, Bhupinder Hundal, and Harpreet Pandher.
Paul Barnsley, of Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) has won the Journalists for Human Rights Lifetime Achievement Human Rights Reporting Award. He received the award at a gala held Oct. 6 in Toronto. Barnsley has had a long career covering human rights issues starting his career at the Tekawennake, a weekly community newspaper, and from 1997 to 2007 worked as a correspondent for Windspeaker. In 2007 he joined APTN and is now head of their investigative team.
Talk shows produced by independent production companies now qualify for a federal tax credit as the result of a Trudeau Government cabinet decision dated Sept. 30. Several categories of programming have traditionally been excluded from the tax credit, including talk shows, reality shows, news programming, awards shows, game shows and pornography. The tax credit for talk shows is backdated to Feb 16 of this year and will not apply to in-house network productions. Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly can’t say how much the credit will cost taxpayers, which has drawn the ire of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.
CBC-co-produced 80’s children’s show Fraggle Rock is getting an HD makeover and remaster by The Jim Henson Co. for HBO and its streaming and on-demand platforms later this year. Filmed primarily in Toronto between 1983-87, Fraggle Rock was seen in 10 languages in more than 90 countries and featured more than 100 original songs across its 96 episodes.
