Government appoints lawyer, former Transcontinental director to head CBC

The complicated relationship of the public and private sector in media became even more tangled on Monday with the announcement that Hubert Lacroix is to be president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Montreal lawyer -- a senior advisor to the law firm Stikeman Elliott -- was once a senior adviser to Telemedia Ventures Inc. after spending several years as the executive chairman of Telemedia Corp. After Telemedia (which at the time owned Canadian Living, Homemaker's and Style at Home) was merged with printing and media giant Transcontinental Inc., Lacroix sat on Transcon's board.

A one-time basketball colour commentator and coach at McGill University, Lacroix, 52, assumes the position on Jan. 1, the day after Robert Rabinovitch, who has served as president and CEO for the past eight years, officially finishes his second term.

“I am a huge fan of the CBC,” Lacroix, who was approached for the job by a head-hunting firm, said in an interview with Canadian Press. “I grew up with it, I worked for it, so it’s pretty exciting to actually now join this team, which is an incredible one, and try to help CBC/Radio-Canada move forward.

The appointment of Lacroix did not go down well with Friends of Canadian Broadcasting president Ian Morrison, who says the cabinet appointment meant Prime Minister Stephen Harper ignored a Commons Heritage committee directive of a few years ago that said the president should be hired and fired by the CBC board of directors, not the prime minister.

“The problem is if you’re named to that position by a certain party, do you feel an obligation to that party?” said Morrison. ``We’d like the president of the CBC to have a responsibility to the board of directors and be accountable to the board, not to the prime minister.”

Morrison also suggested that Lacroix’s CV was lacking in significant broadcasting experience.

“Could you imagine the head of CTV being someone who had almost no television production or scheduling or marketing experience?” he said. “I just wish there were more people near the top at the CBC who knew television as well as the senior executives of CTV know television.”

Of course, Lacroix said he was well-prepared for the task.

He said the public broadcaster faces two significant challenges: to stay relevant to a changing population and to raise funds that will keep that audience watching and listening.“My job and the mandate that I have taken is clearly to try to make this company evolve in terrific changing times and to create the sense of urgency that I know everybody else around, in every other company competing with CBC/Radio Canada, has.”

CanWest now owns The New Republic

CanWest Global Communications now owns The New Republic. Without much fanfare, the company bought control by acquiring 50% of the magazine from a pair of investment bankers to add to the 25% they already bought last January. Editor-in-chief Martin Peretz retains 25% . According to a story in the New York Times, CanWest plans major renovations, including reducing the magazine's frequency to every two weeks and increasing the number of pages per issue and the amount of illustration in what has always been a fairly text-heavy and austere publication.

Mr. Peretz said that the takeover by CanWest would help guarantee the magazine’s financial future, [the Times story said].

“It just seemed to me, given my own intellectual and moral synergies with Leonard J. Asper, a very good partnership,” he said, referring to the chief executive of CanWest. Mr. Asper was not available for comment yesterday.

The 97 year old, slightly right-inclined magazine of comment and politics seems an oddball fit for CanWest. For one thing, its circulation has been in freefall since 2000, when it was over 100,000 and now stands at about 60,000.

[S]ome critics have attributed the weakening sales to a murky and sometimes conservative editorial voice, as progressive causes have intensified, particularly in the blogosphere and particularly over the war in Iraq. The New Republic initially supported the war but has since apologized for that support. It also backed Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who lost the Democratic primary in 2006 but retained his seat as an independent during the election.

While the circulation of other liberal magazines, including The Nation and The Progressive, increased after President Bush’s re-election in 2004, that of The New Republic did not.

There is a familiar face at the helm. Greg MacNeil, a consultant to CanWest and the former President of St. Joseph Media (Toronto Life, Fashion, Wedding Bells, Canadian Family), has been the interim publisher of The New Republic since November. He said that CanWest would provide some media-business savvy that the magazine has lacked in recent years:

“It’s a garden that needs watering.”

Not that most Canadians need to be told, but CanWest owns most of the newspapers in Canada and is this country's second-largest broadcaster. (Just yesterday it announced it was increasing its stake in the acquisition of Alliance Atlantis Communications to $200 million. Perhaps this overshadowed the TNR takeover news, which appears nowhere on the CanWest website.)

[UPDATE] Some comment in the bitchy blog Gawker about the decision by The New Republic not to extend subscriptions to compensate for halving frequency; the magazine argues that each issue will be fatter. Hence, fewer, fatter issues for the same price.