CanWest Global is no longer merely a broadcaster. After last summer’s $3.2-billion (us$2.3-billion) takeover of newspaper mega-chain Hollinger Inc., the company now has more than 100 Internet properties.

‘You can’t think of us as just a television company anymore – we’re a multimedia content and distribution company,’ proclaims Gary Maavara, vp and gm of new media at CanWest Global.

CanWest’s websites include destinations dedicated to such diverse subjects as amateur sport, health and wedding planning.

‘We want to be the provider of the sites that will basically give Canadians every kind of information they could possibly be interested in,’ says Maavara.

The flagship Canadian-based site is www.Globaltv.com, whose index page allows the visitor to link to the sites of 10 Global Television stations across Canada, as well as other stations CanWest owns.

Maavara says the Internet is an invaluable marketing device for the overall brand. ‘We can gauge very quickly what people like and don’t like, and we get a lot of feedback every day,’ he says. ‘That skill base is going to be very helpful to our traditional media as well, because we’re helping tv and newspapers understand better what their audience wants and needs. That’s definitely an objective of the new media strategy. [Another is] to serve advertisers better.’

The massive infrastructure CanWest has in place, especially in terms of electronic news gathering, leaves Maavara confident the company won’t be losing eyeballs to Internet start-ups.

‘I respect what [start-ups] are doing, but we have Web people who are purely dot-coms who want to get video from us because they can’t replicate it themselves. That’s what [the merger of] aol and Time Warner is all about. Video is expensive to produce – it isn’t any cheaper just because it’s on the Web.’

*City-specific news on the Net

The city-specific sites encompass news, weather, traffic, sports and entertainment information. Maavara admits that, at first glance, it’s a lot of data for one pair of eyeballs.

‘We’re trying to [provide] a comprehensive perspective on the local community, and that requires us to have a lot of stuff in it,’ he says.

The main page for each city offers about 50 links. Click on a link, and a whole page will open dedicated to that particular story. Maavara wants to dispel the impression the Web is only useful for repurposed ‘infobytes.’

‘One perception of the Internet is that it’s superficial,’ he says. ‘But every day we produce a website that has more text in it than [many] magazines. And we’re not taking tv script from the newsroom and putting it on the Internet – we have dedicated Web newsrooms.’ That’s nine Web newsrooms across Canada, to be exact.

‘The positioning statement for Globaltv.com is ‘breaking local news,” says Maavara. ‘Our stories are constantly updated, and we put the time stamp on each article every time we do something to it. That way the reader knows how fresh that story is.’

-www.Globaltv.com