CIII-DT
CIII-DT is a television station in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, serving as the flagship station of the Global Television Network, a division of Corus Entertainment. The station maintains studios at 81 Barber Greene Road in the Don Mills district of Toronto, and its transmitter is located atop the CN Tower in downtown Toronto.
The station reaches much of the population of Ontario through a network of 12 transmitters across primarily the southern and central portions of the province. Since August 29, 2022, CIII-DT serves as the master control hub for all 15 Global owned-and-operated stations across Canada.
History
, the founder of CHCH-TV in Hamilton, envisioned a national "superstation" of 96 satellite-fed transmitters with CHCH as its flagship. In 1966, he filed the first application with the Board of Broadcast Governors for a network to be branded as NTV—however, the application faced various regulatory hurdles and underwent numerous revisions over the next number of years. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission eventually decided to go ahead with the publicly owned Anik satellite system instead of relying on private communications companies to build Canada's satellite broadcasting infrastructure, placing the NTV application in jeopardy after Power Corporation of Canada, a key investor in the plan, backed out.In 1970, one of Soble's former employees, Al Bruner, teamed up with Peter Hill to revive the application under new ownership. Bruner and Hill's group, Global Communications, scaled back the original NTV proposal to a network of seven UHF transmitters in Southern Ontario, whose combined footprint would have provided at least secondary broadcast coverage from Montreal to Detroit. Global Communications still aspired to eventually build out Soble's original 97-station network, and viewed the seven-transmitter Ontario chain as an interim step. However, since CHCH was no longer involved in the application, Global's iteration of the plan also required the launch of a new station to serve as its flagship.
The station first signed on the air on January 6, 1974, as CKGN-TV. It branded itself as the "Global Television Network," a name which reflected its then-unprecedented coverage of most of Southern Ontario from six transmitters fed from a centralized studio. From its launch in 1974 until 2009, the station's main transmitter was licensed to Paris, a small town near Brantford, but Toronto became the station's primary city of licence following an amendment to the channel 41 licence in 2009. Through its entire history, however, the station's main studio facility has been based in a converted factory in the Don Mills area of North York.
It had hoped to be distinct from CBC and CTV by airing a number of its own Canadian-made programs. Three months later, however, many of these programs had been cancelled due to deep financial problems. It had made a serious blunder by signing on in the middle of the 1973–74 television season, and prospective advertisers did not have the money to spare for commercial spots. It barely registered as a blip in the ratings; in Toronto, for instance, it only drew a 2.5 share, just a fraction of those drawn by CBC and CTV. Its line of credit was yanked, and it was unable to meet daily expenses.
Amid losses of over a million dollars a month, the network was bailed out by two conglomerates in March 1974 – a Toronto-based group headed by Allan Slaight and a Winnipeg-based group headed by Izzy Asper and Paul Morton. By the fall, Global was forced to scrap its ambitious business model just to survive. Instead, it began airing as much non-Canadian content as allowed, becoming essentially a clone of CTV.
Asper's group bought controlling interest in 1977, making them first western owners of a major Canadian broadcaster. In 1989, Asper and Morton tried to buy out each other's shares, and the Court of Queen's Bench of Manitoba ended the contest by ordering a sale of shares by auction, which allowed Asper and his company, Canwest, to take full ownership.
Image:GlobalOntarioLogo.png|140px|thumb|left|First logo as "Global Ontario", used from August 1997 to February 2006.
The station's callsign was changed to CIII-TV in January 1984, in accordance with its 10th anniversary of broadcasting. The Windsor/Cottam transmitter would be an exception to the rebroadcasters that were also assigned the CIII calls that month for a few years as it continued to be identified in CRTC documents as CKGN-TV-1, perhaps because of licensing issues with nearby broadcasters in the Detroit market.
Shaw Media purchased the station from Canwest Global in 2010 and Corus, in turn, acquired CIII from Shaw Media in 2016.
Image:Globalontario.svg|120px|thumb|right|Second logo as "Global Ontario", used from 2006 to 2009.
News operation
CIII-DT presently broadcasts 30 hours, 55 minutes of locally produced newscasts each week. In addition to its main news department in Toronto, the station also operates a news bureau at the National Press Centre in Ottawa. CIII does not employ its own sports reporters; sports news content was formerly provided by sports specialty channel Sportsnet 360.Early on, its flagship news program Global News was developed under the guidance of Bill Cunningham, a veteran of CBC News; in the beginning, the newscast was anchored by Peter Trueman in Toronto and Peter Desbarats in Ottawa. During the news department's early years, its newscasts were one of the most successful and important programs that CKGN/CIII had. Trueman has noted in his memoir that the programme was groundbreaking: "Our newsroom-studio combination... served as a model for the new CHAN-TV facilities in Vancouver, and it is currently the inspiration for Ted Turner's new Cablenews operation in Atlanta". The CBC also looked to it for inspiration when it changed its national news format in the early 1980s. The programme also pioneered the use of "regional correspondents," usually print or radio journalists, who would regularly advise the station about stories in their part of Ontario. This allowed field producers and a Global crew to target key stories of the day. "This is the main reason that much of Global's ex-urban coverage has been so effective", Trueman wrote in 1979.
During the 1980s, Global greatly expanded its news operation, with a 90-minute block of news starting at 5:30 p.m., as well as newscasts at noon and 11 p.m. By the end of the 1980s, the noon newscast was simply titled News at Noon, the 5:30 newscast was called First News, the 6 p.m. newscast was called The Six O'Clock Report, and the 11 p.m. newscast was titled The World Tonight. Trueman left CIII in 1988. Other anchors on the station over the years have included Mike Anscombe, Beverly Thomson, John Dawe, Jane Gilbert, Peter Kent, Loretta Sullivan, Bob McAdorey, Thalia Assuras and Anne-Marie Mediwake.
From 1994 to 2001, CIII also produced First National, which was anchored by Peter Kent and aired at 6:30 p.m. weeknights. In 2001, the program was replaced by Canada Tonight, which in turn was replaced that fall with Global National, anchored by Kevin Newman; it originated from CHAN's facility in Vancouver before moving to a dedicated studio in Ottawa in February 2008. In January 2009, CIII canceled its weekday morning newscast Global News Morning, along with the Noon News Hour, with the former being discontinued due to low ratings and both programs being dropped due to cost-cutting measures at certain Global stations. From February to August 2009, CIII simulcast former Hamilton sister station CHCH-TV's Morning Live newscast each weekday from 7 to 9 a.m. The CHCH simulcast was later dropped after Canwest sold that station to Channel Zero, with CIII airing second-run lifestyle programming in the morning timeslot, as well as rebroadcasts of the previous night's News Hour Final.
On October 11, 2011, CIII-DT launched a three-hour weekday morning newscast titled The Morning Show, running from 6 to 9 a.m., which broadcasts from a storefront studio at Shaw Media's Bloor Street building in Downtown Toronto. The station also moved its early evening newscast, News Hour, a half-hour earlier to 5:30 p.m. to coincide with a shift of Global National to the 6:30 p.m. slot, joining Montreal's CKMI-DT and Halifax's CIHF-DT as the only Global stations to carry the network's national newscast in that timeslot.
On August 27, 2012, CIII restored a midday newscast to its schedule with the launch of a half-hour weekday noon newscast. Unlike the existing lunch hour newscasts carried on Global's sister stations, the newscast airs for 30 minutes instead of one hour. The expansions to CIII's news programming were part of a benefits package that was included as a condition of the sale of the Global Television Network to Shaw Communications.
In June 2016, Global News announced that The Morning Show co-host Liza Fromer would not have her contract renewed after five years with the station. Fromer was the only original host of The Morning Show remaining from when the show launched in 2011. No replacement was hired to fill her position. Another layoff was with Global News at Noon anchor Rosey Edeh. Neither anchor works with the station anymore.
Former local news programs
- The Morning Show – airing from 6–9:30 a.m. ET weekdays. The show is hosted by Carolyn Mackenzie, Jeff McArthur and Liem Vu at a studio at Corus Quay. Carolyn Mackenzie anchored local news, Jeff McArthur anchored national news, and Liem Vu reported on social media news and weather. Jeff McArthur's national news segment is also aired on Global News Morning shows on Global Halifax, Montreal, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Regina. The 9–9:30 portion of the show is also aired nationally after local Global News Morning programs, however the run-time has since been extended to one hour. The national one-hour show kept The Morning Show branding, while it was dropped locally.