22 groups battle for last FM license in Toronto

From where I sit On The Kowch, my last appearance before the CRTC in October will now look like a cake walk compared to what I'm facing the week of May 7th when I participate in my second application hearing for the last FM license in Toronto.

In October, my biggest worry was speaking French at the Montreal hearing. In May there are more than 20 other groups going after the same prize as my client Tietolman Tetrault Pancholy Media. We want to make 88.1FM  the first FM newstalk radio station in Toronto. Others want 88.1FM to play music, start an all business station or serve Toronto's  multi-cultural communities.

Our research shows that there is room for another talk station in Toronto. Especially one on the FM band to attract younger talk listeners.

What is exciting about setting up this FM newstalk radio station is the impact it will have on the future generation of broadcasters. Five years of teaching radio and talk radio students  at two Toronto area colleges has had a profound influence on what I convinced TTP MEDIA to do with the radio station.

Montreal broadcast legend Paul Tietolman shares my vision about the importance of providing a space at the radio station to help the next generation of talk show hosts, anchors, reporters, producers and board ops. We both come from the days of listening to radio when weekend overnights were training grounds for new talent.

Today taped programming or American syndicated programming fill the airwaves on weekend overnights.

On 88.1FM weekend overnights will be reserved for students in our apprenticeship program to host shows and anchor their newscasts on the top of the hour. We will provide a three hour block of programming Sunday night to be managed by college or university students. They will produce the shows.They will host the shows. They will anchor the news and they will sell commercials with the college or university keeping the money to establish scholarships or buy new equipment.

The 88.1 FM Work and Learn Project will hire four second or third year broadcast journalism students to work from May to the end of August. There will be a total of four paid internships - two working with the station's investigative journalism unit and two producing the talk shows.

TTP MEDIA will hire a team of 16 reporters to cover the GTA and enough news anchors to have live top of hour local newscasts 24/7. We will have reporters at City Hall, Queens Park and Parliament Hill.

88.1FM will embrace the ethnic, multilingual, multicultural communities through our creative effort to hire people from these communities to produce, host talk shows and anchor the news. We will recruit three multicultural freelance broadcast journalists to each produce a five part series on vital subjects of great interest to the ethnic communities in the GTA to air in the spring, fall and winter months.

We will hire eight researchers to produce all the talk shows. We will create an investigative journalism unit to broadcast specials and miniseries. We will have regular Town Hall meetings and build a news bureau and a studio in the 905 region to broadcast special shows where many of our listeners live.

From 5am until evening our talk shows will be hosted by two co-hosts who will confront each other. The face to face co-hosts will be able to comment to the extreme limit because a second co-host will be there to answer and comment and challenge every point with an effective counter point or opposing view.

This won't be talk radio for the faint of heart. It will be heated, it will be controversial while at the same time it will be balanced because each show has two co-hosts.

From where I sit On The Kowch, If you're not satisfied with the kind of talk radio now available in Toronto you need to support our application for 88.1FM. Support the application by 7954689 Canada Inc. for a broadcasting license to operate an English-language commercial specialty FM radio programming undertaking in Toronto at 88.1 FM today by clicking here and then follow the prompts.

Steve was in charge of programming Canada's two largest newstalk radio stations for 14 years

You can email Steve at steve@kowchmedia.com

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