'Harvard' An emerging Player In The New West!

Harvard Broadcasting -
An Emerging Player In The New West!

by: JOHN MCKAY

July 2008 Edition

It was April in Saskatoon but the streets were filled with Santa Clauses.

In their red suits and white beards, they were waving placards and touting the city of bridges’ new radio station, Santa FM, promising all Christmas music all the time. “From Bing to Sting,” they pledged.

Ah, but two days later the station’s website professed that they had listened to the people, that a steady diet of holiday tunes was not what was wanted. And so was born Wired 96.3, the city’s newly-licenced CFWD-FM, with a contemporary hits format. You know, Kanye West, Timbaland, Linkin Park, and with on-air personalities named Trouble, Blender and DJ Bone.

“To be quite honest, we probably would have gone crazy listening to Rudolph one more time,” the managers said with apparent relief.

Well, of course it was a publicity stunt, and a rather clever one even if it did come along a week after April Fool’s Day.

The campaign, concocted by station General Manager Carley Caverly and Program Director Chris Myers, reflected the verve and sense of fun approach to broadcasting by the owners, Regina-based Harvard Broadcasting, Inc.

Harvard`s Station Group Manager Michael Olstrom says the credit for the concept goes to his team, not him.

“I said, ‘well, I’m not quite sure about it but, hey, go for it’,” recalls Olstrom who explains that they had originally planned to use the stunt to launch the station the previous Christmas but had to apply to the CRTC for a new frequency first to avoid potential interference with another station’s signal.

“And they said ‘we think we should dust this off and bring it out and we think it’ll be unique’. It turned out to be a pretty interesting launch.”

An Emerging Player

Although it has roots going back more than a century, Harvard is an emerging broadcast player in the west, unafraid of going up against more-established competitors like Rawlco and Elmer Hildebrand. Besides Wired in Saskatoon, Harvard now has three stations in Regina, one each in Calgary and Ft. McMurray, newly-acquired AM and FM services in Yorkton (approval pending) and high hopes for Edmonton, Red Deer and even somewhere, some day, in Manitoba. (There had been an unsuccessful application for a Kelowna licence and once, years ago, a rare attempted eastern foray into Ottawa.)

Veteran broadcaster Bruce Cowie, Harvard’s vice president, says they’ve made a firm commitment to focus their growth plans from the Ontario-Manitoba border to the Pacific.

“Particularly that Calgary-Edmonton corridor. If we had a number one priority that’s it. Because Alberta is the growth area in the foreseeable future. We’re consolidated enough in Saskatchewan now with the addition of the Yorkton stations and the new licence in Saskatoon. We’re interested in some of the interior markets in British Columbia... and we need a presence in Manitoba. That would be probably third or fourth in our focus.”

Cowie sees a unique mindset in the New West, one that doesn’t permit the homogenous formats that have been prevalent in radio elsewhere.

“We enjoy the opportunity to be able to provide distinctive formats in every market we work in. They’re different, their economic bases are different. We don’t run a cookie-cutter operation with a format in every city. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does not work in this part of the world. So we have youth contemporary stations, we have country stations, we have AC formats, we’ve got them all. But all of them came from very extensive research that we do in every market that we hope to succeed in.”

Cowie says there’s also something special about being an hour away from everything “by walking, car or flight.”

Of course, there is also the basic fact that a radio signal, especially an AM one, can still stretch for long distances across the prairies.

Take CKRM at 620 on the dial in Regina, which Cowie says remains number one with the 12-plus crowd in its market, unheard-of for an AM station. (Actually a close look at the numbers shows that’s mornings only and translates into an older, rural listenership.) And, after all these years, it is still the radio voice of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, which doesn’t hurt. By the way, Cowie had also been president of the football club for a number of years in the ‘70s.

That AM signal still extends into Northern Saskatchewan and well into Manitoba and Alberta.

“It’s pretty amazing when you’ve got a radio station that can cover that much territory,” says Olstrom.

It is also Harvard’s claim to be live to air as much as possible, with little voice tracking, limited usually to overnight and weekend shifts.

“That does have an impact on our earnings and cash flow,” Cowie concedes. “But it keeps us true to our purpose and plan. That these are local, fully interactive radio stations.”

Olstrom agrees they try to keep voice tracking to a minimum.

“Other than Regina, we’re stand-alones, we’re competing against larger companies who have the resources, and yes we could voice track out of market, but our philosophy is we believe that we need to be live and local as much as possible.”

While conceding he’s never worked in the East, Olstrom, 48, agrees that there is a different philosophy and outlook in the West, a region they know well. The New Westminster, B.C. native says it’s also best for a small but growing company not to spread itself too thin.

“You got something in Halifax and the next station is in Regina. You know, that just doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint for us at this stage. When you’re in the West you can quickly get into markets and deal with situations and understand what’s going on.”

Good Times For Radio

So what does small but growing mean?

Cowie sees three tiers to radio broadcasting in Canada.

There are the little guys including one-ofs, a middle tier and then the big guys like Astral. He sees Harvard near the top of the bottom rung and says it could quadruple in size and still be mid-sized and regionally-based, which is right where they’d like to be.

“That, we believe, is the level at which our plan is guaranteed to work,” says Cowie. “Because those licences provide enough infrastructure and cash flow to do the things we do. We do higher Canadian content than most other stations. We do a lot more in terms of new music, which I think is the future of radio.”

But even modest growth is seen as risky business these days by those who have been writing the epitaph for terrestrial radio as a communications technology that the digital age has passed by.

Cowie, however, insists over-the-air radio is not only healthy but has a bright future, but only if properly integrated with other platforms, in particular the Internet.

“Radio today is enjoying good times again. I mean, it’s strong,” he says, while emphasizing that it is necessary to use radio as a part of an entertainment and information-based program service along with the newer platforms.

“We have just started a new part of our business in the last year. It’s called Harvard Interactive and that’s its mission, to make sure that we participate in both the revenues and in the programming, particularly for our younger-audience licences.

“Because here’s what’s real -- if we continue to lose young people ... as we have in the last ten years, we put in question our entire listening audience for the future. It’s a serious time.”

Olstrom concedes they were slow off the mark in taking advantage of the Internet, partly because they weren’t sure where music copyright rules were going and what it would mean for operating costs.

“We have to get better at, for example, our websites and utilize those to our benefit and monetize those to offset some of the loss in revenue or the revenue that is going to the Internet.”

It’s also important to develop a talent farm team system. Cowie says, “Kids coming out of small markets have got a really tough row (to hoe)... but here’s a chance for them to move within the organization.

“They may not want to go to a major market but they will have an opportunity at least to be seen and heard.”

Local The Key

Olstrom says local is definitely the key to radio’s success, if not its survival.

“Radio, it’s free. You gotta put up with the commercials once in awhile but it’s a free service, a quality service, and we relate to the community and we act and react to things that are going on in the community,” he says.

“I believe radio has a strong future if we don’t make a mess of it in Canada like happened in the U.S (where) the bean counters got more involved than they should have and Wall Street started trying to take profits out of something that was already sucked out.”

Cowie maintains Harvard is committed to community service, whether it’s helping supply an ambulance for the children’s hospital in Saskatoon to the recent training agreement signed with the Aboriginal People’s Television Network. Cowie says the gesture recognizes the importance of Harvard’s western regional base and of the significant First Nations population there.

Under the seven-year partnership with APTN, aboriginals interested in entering broadcasting will be trained and mentored as interns at Harvard stations in Calgary, Ft. McMurray and Saskatoon. APTN will help select the interns and will also have access to the news stories they generate.

The broadcaster is also investing more than a half-million dollars to fund the initiative.

“This may sound almost cosmetic but it’s not. What’s good for the market is good for us. And that just makes all kinds of sense,” Cowie says.

“APTN would supply the candidates, we provide the physical plant, you know, office space, technical facilities, computers, all of that. And this person will grow as any young reporter will in the time they’re there.”

He says the CRTC has also accepted the plan.

“It’s another major important step, we think, to diversity.”

The Hills and Cowie

Now they say there are no hills in Saskatchewan.

But the Hill Companies – Harvard’s parent owners -- are run by Regina’s premier business family, a driving force in Saskatchewan business circles going back to 1903. In fact, a 10-storey Hill office building, built in 1914, was for years the tallest such structure in the province. On the same site today stands the twin-tower Hill Centre.

As a broadcast entity, the Harvard radio group was officially born in 1977 when the Hills bought CKCK-TV Regina. The station was sold to Baton Broadcasting in 1986 and eventually became part of the CTV network, a process in which Cowie later played a major part.

In 1981 Harvard moved into radio with the purchase of CKRM and what is now CHMX-FM in Regina. In 2002, the company added Regina’s CFWF-FM (The Wolf 104.9) to its stable.

CKRM’s history, of course, is much older. Born in the 1920s as Moose Jaw’s CJRM, it was owned by James Richardson and Sons and provided prairie listeners with daily grain and marketing reports. The station was eventually moved to Regina and in 1943 the call letters were changed to CKRM.

After launching new stations in Calgary (CFEX 92.9) and Ft. McMurray (CFVR Mix 103), Harvard earlier this year bought independently-owned radio stations, Yorkton’s GX94 and Fox FM. CRTC approval is expected.

A Prince Albert native (he was once a neighbour of John Diefenbaker), Cowie saw his own career become intertwined long ago with the Hills. He considers chairman and director Fred Hill as his mentor.

But how did he get pointed in the direction of broadcasting? Cowie says he owes it all to Mr. Canada.

John Fisher was a New Brunswick-born newspaperman and broadcaster who began his own career in radio at CHNS Halifax, eventually becoming a roving reporter for the CBC in the 1940s. His stories about Canada were heard on the air and, later, during personal appearances across the country when Fisher won his nickname, Mr. Canada.

One summer, at a fair in Prince Albert, young Cowie heard Fisher speak from the grandstand stage about his beloved Canada.

“And I could see it. I had never been out of Prince Albert (but) I could see the snow on the mountains, I could see the Pacific Ocean. What struck me, and I didn’t realize it until years afterwards, was the power of the English language. He was such a wonderful orator and that stuck with me. I knew early, when I was 10 or 12 years old, that’s what I was going to do. So I would walk down the street reading the news aloud.”

Like so many broadcast executives, Cowie recalls with both fondness and fright that his first experiences in the business were hardly eloquent.

As a teenager in the 1950s he got his feet wet at hometown station CKBI where his part-time job involved rolling up mike cords and driving the staff announcer home (even though he didn’t yet have a driver’s licence). Later he knocked on the doors of CKOM Saskatoon where he made a demo tape and a few days later got a call back from the production manager inviting him to fill an opening in the newsroom. His duties included getting up at 5 a.m., listening carefully to CHAB Moose Jaw and copying down all the good stories that happened in southern Saskatchewan.

“So we could make our Saskatoon station sound a lot bigger than it really was,” he explains with a chuckle.

After only two weeks on the job, he was told one morning that the news director had phoned in sick and that he had to go on the air, something he’d never done before.

“Listen kid,” Cowie was told. “This is a new station, nobody’s listening anyway, all of the people that want news listen to CFQC down the street so just go on the air, it doesn’t matter.”

But that very morning in 1956, there was a critical shake-up in the Soviet politburo that saw Nikita Khrushchov take command and wipe away the Stalinist era. The news stories were replete with complicated Russian names and, Cowie says, in those days the Broadcast News wire was not yet providing a pronunciation guide.

“To this day I still have those names in my head,” says Cowie, who recalls the Russian upheaval was followed quickly that year by the Suez Canal crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which brought with them more complex foreign names the young Cowie did his best not to mutilate.

He was right, though, nobody was listening.

There followed a couple of years as a country music show deejay (while reading news on weekends) and travelling and singing with a few bands.

But soon he was lured by television.

In 1958, Cowie moved to CKCK-TV Regina as part of a vague five-year career plan. He ended up staying in TV for 30 years, including that fateful day in November, 1963, when someone handed him a bulletin that U.S. President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

“I threw it back at him and said ‘I’m not reading that’,” he recalls, noting that there had been a lot of joking around in the station newsroom in those days. “I thought someone was messing around.

“He handed it back and said it’s real and the director said ‘Bruce, you gotta read that’.”

Cowie became CKCK’s general manager in 1968 at the age of 30 and continued to run the station for the Hill family until that sale to Baton Broadcasting.

He then accepted an offer from Electrohome Ltd. of Kitchener to move to Edmonton and run CFRN-TV. He soon became president and chief operating officer of Electrohome’s broadcast assets, which also included CKCO-TV Kitchener.

When those assets were also folded into Baton, he was there to help Ivan Fecan with the complicated process of putting the new CTV together and even became the network’s executive vice president and COO.

Later Cowie moved back to the West, where he assumed the vice presidency of Harvard.

Along the way, he has served as president of the Saskatchewan and Western Association of Broadcasters (of which he is also a Life Member), chair of the CAB board of directors, and in 2001 was inducted into the CAB Hall of Fame. He also served as a Regina alderman.

Asked if the Harvard name is connected at all to Harvard University, Cowie says absolutely, noting the name originated as Fred Hill’s tribute to his alma mater.

After the Second World War, Hill flew bombers for the USAF, then went back to Boston to attend Harvard where he graduated with his MBA. He returned to Saskatchewan to join his ageing father, Walter, in the family business that included insurance and real estate and which soon diversified into broadcasting and oil and gas.

Fred took over the business from his father in 1953 and his own son Paul is now president and CEO of Harvard Developments, Inc. and of The Hill Companies which began with his grandfather back in 1903.

Cowie turned 70 earlier this year, and in July celebrates his 50th wedding with his wife and three children and eight grandchildren.

And he still likes to pack up the car and motor regularly to Palm Springs, California for family vacations.

John McKay is a Mississauga-based writer on media issues. He may be reached by e-mail at mckay1169@rogers.com

http://www.broadcastdialogue.com/magazine.asp

.