Vancouver: After one month on the picket lines, the 125 striking workers at bctv are expected to be back at work July 13, after a tentative agreement went to a ratification vote July 10. But for bctv, the labor disruption has already taken a heavy toll on its vast audience share in the market.

According to surveys taken by the Vancouver office of Nielsen Media Research before and after the strike began June 9, average weekday viewing of the 6-7 p.m. newscast at bctv fell off about 55%.

While bctv still leads the market in overall viewers, average weekday viewing for the June 10-26 period indicates an audience share of only 5.6 for the dinner-hour news compared to an audience share of 12.6 per weekday in the four-month period between February and May.

‘As evidenced by the numbers, there is a change in viewing patterns in the evening news hour,’ says Nielsen’s Vancouver-based marketing executive Michelle Louko. ‘News is very important in Vancouver. When it’s not available on one station, people will look to other sources.’

Audience gains, consequently, have been experienced by Vancouver’s other news stations.

‘It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,’ says George Froehlich, executive producer of news and sports at Global Vancouver, which experienced the biggest jump during the period, increasing 74% from a 2.7 share to a 4.7 share in the Vancouver area.

‘When it comes to news, people are habit-driven,’ he says. ‘We’re hoping that people who have sampled us will stick with us.’

Froehlich says Global was at full battle readiness during the strike and expanded its regular summer staff by six people to increase the depth of the coverage. And like other competing stations in the market, Global Vancouver stepped up its on-air promotions, newspaper and radio advertising and live location shoots during bctv’s first-ever strike.

Over the period, cbc’s award-winning Broadcast One increased its audience share 23% from 1.7 to 2.1 over the period, while vtv’s newscast jumped 14% in audience share, from 0.7 to 1.5.

No one, however, is predicting that the strike disrupted the news market enough to gut bctv’s usual huge margin of dominance in the Vancouver market.

‘The supper-hour news is built on loyalty,’ says Rae Hull, regional director of television for cbc in Vancouver. ‘In this case, bctv certainly has blinked. But bctv has been a dominant force for a long time.’

Union members struck bctv over issues regarding wages and initiatives for workers displaced by new technology and corporate consolidations. (For example, Master Control at bctv and sister station chek-tv are to be merged, affecting the jobs of up to 12 people.)

Union negotiator and veteran reporter Clem Chapple says people negatively affected by job losses will have longer notices, enhanced severance packages, training and other programs to soften the blow.

On the issue of wages, a scale system has been implemented for new reporters offering 5% to 6% improvements in pay as they move up the ladder.

Many reporters at bctv are over scale (with some salaries as high as $100,000 per year), however, so there is also an across-the-board pay raise of 2% per year for five years, with two years being retroactive. The current contract expires in 2001.

During the strike, bctv canceled all of its regular 5.5 hours of daily news programming and replaced its NewsHour with an hour-long version of Canada Tonight. Anchor Tony Parsons was responsible for the whole hour including sports and weather and presented news from other parts of Canada and around the globe.

Alternate acquired programming, some of it Canadian content, filled the blanks left in the schedule created by the canceled news programs.

The lack of local coverage, says bctv and chek president Art Reitmayer, accounts for the loss of audience at bctv during the strike. He acknowledges the risk posed by the strike to bctv’s loyal audience, which normally numbers about 600,000 people per night, but says, with 95 people in the newsroom, bctv will be hard to beat now that its back up and running.

bctv’s workers – including popular anchors Pamela Martin, Jennifer Mathers and Squire Barnes – are represented by Communications, Energy and Paperworks (cep) Local 814, which added about 45 reporters and other editorial workers in May 1997. For them, this contract is a first agreement. Other workers, unionized since 1968, had been without a contract since 1996. Negotiations were delayed by the expansion of bctv’s bargaining unit and other issues, but began in earnest last September.

The unionized workers at chek avoided a strike or lockout July 3 by accepting a similar agreement for a new contract. bctv workers had picketed chek during the strike because the union says bctv was using local coverage generated by chek.

cep has other locals in the Vancouver area which represent workers at the newspaper dailies The Vancouver Sun and Province. Because of pressure from the union locals, the papers refused ads from bctv offering information about the station during the strike.