In my latest Guardian column, What Canada’s national public broadcaster could learn from the BBC, I look at the punishing cuts to the CBC, and how a shelved (but visionary) BBC plan to field a “creative archive” of shareable and remixable content could help the network lead the country into a networked, participatory future.
The CBC, at least, has only limited delusions about the importance of commercialising its archives, especially when that comes at the expense of access to the archives for Canadians. Canada is a young nation, and the CBC has been there with Canadians for about half of the country’s short life. The contents of the CBC’s archives are even more central to the identity of Canadians that the BBC’s is to Britons.
If the CBC is to be cut and remade as a digital-first public service entity, then a Canadian Creative Archive could be one way for it to salvage some joy from its misery. There’s nothing more “digital first” than ensuring that the most common online activities – copying, sharing, and remixing – are built into the nation’s digital heritage.
What’s more, the CBC’s situation is by no means unique. In an era of austerity, massive wealth inequality, industrial-scale tax-evasion and totalising market orthodoxy, there’s hardly a public broadcaster anywhere in the world that isn’t facing brutal cuts that go to the bone and beyond.
All of these broadcasters have something in common: they produced their massive archives at public expense, for the public’s benefit, and have made only limited progress in giving the public online access to those treasures.
What Canada’s national public broadcaster could learn from the BBC