A longtime staple of weekend television is no more — CHCH TV has announced the end of its Saturday Evening News programs at 6 and 11 p.m.
According to the station, competing with foreign tech platforms and streaming services for viewership — while also contending with domestic regulatory and financial realities — has become unsustainable from a business perspective.
Last weekend was the final broadcast of the show. This Saturday, in lieu of its usual evening news, CHCH will air a pretaped conversation between Greg O’Brien, news director of the station, and on-air personality Rick Zamperin.
“We always keep the viewer, the reader, the listener in mind. But there are economic realities that we have to adapt to,” O’Brien said.
The federal Independent Local News Fund (ILNF) previously supplied CHCH with more than $2 million annually to produce local news, the station outlines in a new op-ed for The Spectator. That share has been reduced by 45 per cent as new stations have been added without expanding the fund, the op-ed continues.
According to a recent report from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), between 2021 and 2025, both English-language and French-language broadcasting markets experienced declining revenues amid a shift toward online services.
Maintaining high viewership on Saturday evenings was another challenge, O’Brien explained.
“It was our lowest-rated day, to be perfectly blunt, and that’s not just us,” he said of the decision to step away from a Saturday news broadcast.
“People are doing other stuff on Saturdays, you know, which is fine,” O’Brien continued. “You don’t have to watch TV at 6 o’clock. So that was part of it.”
O’Brien said the station isn’t losing any full-time jobs related to the change, but noted a number of part-time shifts are cut. “I feel really badly for our part-timers, because there’s so many shifts lost for them,” he shared.
Although a difficult situation, the decision to change course also presents an opportunity of sorts, he explained.
Moving forward, CHCH will use podcast content for its former Saturday Evening News slots. The screen ticker will share local news, sports and weather.
“We’re not going anywhere,” O’Brien noted. “We’re maintaining our programming all the way through the rest of the week, Sunday to Friday.”
“I’ve said this a million times, you know, journalists, we do it because we love what we do, and we think it’s more of a calling than really just a job,” he continued.
