I’m still bummed about the loss of the Hockey Night In Canada theme song, so hearing that another CBC asset was vanishing wasn’t the best Monday afternoon tidbit.
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The good news is that Search Engine has a future beyond Google caches – on TVO. Mike Miner, producer of The Agenda and The Fifth Column blogger said he feels like he picked up a slugger that the CBC tried to clear through waivers.
Avid Search Engineers will recall the portentous radio cancellation of last year. It didn’t look good.
“I could have argued about how great our numbers are or how cheap the show is to produce or how important our subject matter is, but ultimately there was no way for me to do that without essentially making the case that some other show should get axed instead,” explains Jesse Brown who notes the decision was purely a financial one for CBC.
Thankfully Brown met Miner while working on a story about Conservatives stealing TVO footage.
“When I found out that his podcast wasn’t going to be renewed, we quickly moved to bring it over to TVO. It all came together amazingly quickly. Everybody here is a big fan of Search Engine, so it was clear right away we wanted to have it, we just weren’t sure how quickly we could dot every i, cross every t,” says Miner of the deal that came together in an astonishingly quick day and a half.
If you’re wondering, Brown, who’s enjoying a rare good-news moment in CBC cutbacks, owns the right to the Search Engine name and plans to keep the show close to its regular form, perhaps better now that, as he puts it, “I make better radio when I’m not worried about losing my job!”
Search Engine will broadcast biweekly (not semi-weekly) until Fall, when it switches to weekly, so update your Web Rolodexes.
