Media in Greater Sudbury

This is a list of media outlets in the city of Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.

As the largest city in Northeastern Ontario, Greater Sudbury is the region's primary media centre. Due to the relatively small size of the region's individual media markets, most of the region is served at least partially by Sudbury-based media — CICI-TV produces almost all local programming on the CTV Northern Ontario system, and the CBC Radio stations CBCS-FM and CBON-FM broadcast to the entire region through extensive rebroadcaster networks. As well, most of the commercial radio stations in Northeastern Ontario's smaller cities simulcast programming produced in Sudbury for at least a portion of their programming schedules, particularly in weekend and evening slots.

As of 2009, all radio stations in Sudbury currently operate on the FM dial. Sudbury's last AM radio station, 790 CIGM, turned off its transmitter on September 30, 2009, ending more than 70 years of AM radio broadcasting in the city.

History

Sudbury was home to several notable broadcasting firsts in Canada.

CICI-TV, which launched in 1953 with the call sign CKSO, was the first television station in Canada not directly owned and operated by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It was also one of the first television stations in Canada to broadcast in colour, as well as the first television station in Canada to hire a woman, Judy Jacobson, as a weather presenter.^[1]

CHNO went to air in 1947 as the first bilingual radio station in Canada outside of Quebec. Its owner, F. Baxter Ricard, subsequently became the first commercial broadcaster in Canada licensed to operate two AM radio stations in the same city when he opened CFBR in 1957.^[2]

Radio

Defunct stations

• CKBB (2001–2005)
• CKSO (2002–2006; not to be confused with earlier stations which are still in operation under different call signs)

Early radio in Sudbury

CKSO radio signed on as Sudbury's first radio station in 1935, but prior to CKSO's sign-on in the 1930s there was a radio station named CFCR under the name of licensee "Laurentide Air Service, Ltd.", operating on the frequency of 410 metres as of 1924. As of date, there's unknown historical information on this radio station, when it began broadcasting or ceased broadcasting, however, according to the Canadian Communications Foundation page, it's believed the station began broadcasting in 1923 up until around 1925.^[4][5][6]

Out-of-market radio

The out-of-market CKNR from Elliot Lake, CJJM from Espanola and CFRM and CHAW from Northeastern Manitoulin and the Islands can be heard in parts of the city, particularly in the western half of Walden.

In 2008, CFRM applied to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to add a rebroadcaster in Sudbury, citing that this "would allow Sudbury residents who own property on Manitoulin Island to stay connected by providing them with important information relating to local weather, marine and road reports and events specific to Manitoulin." That application was denied by the CRTC on April 29, 2008.^[7]

CBCS, CBON and CJTK have repeaters in Espanola and on Manitoulin Island. Most of the city's commercial radio stations, however, are able to serve this region directly from their Sudbury transmitters.

Television

The city is served by only one conventional broadcast station which originates programming locally. The remainder are rebroadcasters of stations from other markets.

Greater Sudbury did not fall into the category of major broadcasting markets, which was the benchmark for the CRTC to force broadcasters to convert to digital on August 31, 2011.

Defunct television stations

On August 1, 2012 the CBC, TVOntario and TFO networks shut down their analogue OTA rebroadcasters. Below is the list of transmitters affected by the shutdown. In all cases, the local cable company continues to carry the originating signal on the same channel.

Cable

The cable television provider in the city is EastLink (formerly Northern Cable). The city's community channel is branded as EastLink TV. EastLink also produces a separate channel for real estate and advertising listings, branded as Home & Market Television, on cable channel 13.

American network affiliates available on cable in Sudbury come from Detroit (WDIV/NBC, WXYZ/ABC, WWJ/CBS, WJBK/FOX) and Buffalo (WNED/PBS).

Due to the region's large francophone population, Sudbury is one of the few cities in Ontario whose cable provider carries an affiliate of the Quebec television network V, which has only voluntary carriage rights outside of Quebec, as part of its basic cable package. In most of Ontario, that network is distributed only as part of a subscription digital cable package.

Print

Sudbury's daily newspaper is the Sudbury Star, owned by Quebecor's Sun Media division. The newspaper with the highest circulation is Northern Life, a community paper which publishes twice a week.

Several local neighbourhoods within the city are also served by weekly community papers such as The Valley Vision and South Side Story. There are also student newspapers at the city's postsecondary institutions: Lambda and L'Orignal déchaîné at Laurentian University, The Shield at Cambrian College and L'Étudiant at Collège Boréal.

Sudbury Coffee News is a restaurant publication delivered to restaurants, coffee shops, hotels and other establishments in the Sudbury area.^[8]

In the early 1960s, the city saw a "newspaper war" between two startup weekly newspapers, the Sudbury Sun and the Sudbury Scene. The Sun, a publication of Northland Publishers, was out of business by 1962, and filed a competition lawsuit against the Scene, a division of Thomson Corporation which owned the Sudbury Star at the time, alleging that the Scene had deliberately undercut the Sun's advertising rates to protect Thomson's monopoly on English-language periodical publication in the city.^[9] The federal trade practices commission ruled in Thomson's favour.^[9]

A francophone community paper, Le Voyageur, is published weekly. One of the longest-running Franco-Ontarian newspapers, L'Ami du peuple, was published in Sudbury weekly from 1942 to 1968. Le Voyageur commenced publishing shortly after L'Ami du peuple ceased.

Sudbury is also, along with Thunder Bay, one of the major centres of Finnish-Canadian settlement. An important historical Finnish newspaper, Vapaus, was published from 1917 to 1974. Arvo Vaara, an early editor of the newspaper, was convicted in 1929 on charges of sedition and libel after purportedly publishing unpatriotic remarks against King George V.^[10]

The magazines Northern Ontario Business, Sudbury Living and Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal are published by Laurentian Media Group, the publishers of Northern Life.

Internet

In early 2005, an internet newspaper was launched as Sudbury News Now, delivering local information, such as news, weather and sports. It also included breaking news updates, but was discontinued less than a year later.

Northern Life and EastLink were partners in Sudbury24.ca, an online video community which combined news reports from EastLink TV with user-created video content. That service is not currently in operation.

As of 2014, Northern Life has a content and marketing partnership with the Village Media network of internet news sites in other Northern Ontario cities.

References

Media in Canadian cities
Banff Brampton Brandon Caledon Calgary Campbellton Charlottetown Edmonton Fort McMurray Fraser Valley Fredericton Gatineau Grande Prairie Greater Sudbury Guelph Halifax Hamilton Kamloops Kelowna Kingston Kitchener-Waterloo Lethbridge London Medicine Hat Mississauga Moncton Montreal North Bay Ottawa Owen Sound Peterborough Prince Albert Prince George Quebec City Red Deer Regina Rouyn-Noranda Saguenay Saint John St. John's Saskatoon Sault Ste. Marie Sherbrooke Thunder Bay Timmins Toronto Trois-Rivières Val-d'Or Vancouver Victoria Windsor Winnipeg