CHLY Relaunches Midcoast Morning and Hires Full-Time Reporter
By Jesse Scott-Bradley
November 20, 2023
CHLY, Vancouver Island University’s campus community radio station, hired a full-time reporter in July and two months later it relaunched its Midcoast Morning show after a three-year hiatus. These initiatives signal CHLY is reinstating its non-for-profit newsroom after a two-year funding crisis.
Mick Sweetman, 47, joined CHLY to produce daily local news stories, “[putting] emphasis on what’s called civic journalism. So that’s a lot of reporting on…town and city councils, school boards, university administrations, and [other] publicly funded bodies.”
Sweetman emphasizes the need for non-for-profit news: “We’re not trying to increase our profit margins. We’re really driven…by trying to serve the community. I hope that the information that I’m helping provide is useful, and I can go into a little bit more depth than some of the other commercial radio stations.”
Midcoast Morning is CHLY’s flagship news show. Sweetman says, “I’ll be doing daily news reports [and the show will] pick an issue and do a couple of interviews on that specifically…and I think it’s a good complement.”
Lauryn Mackenzie, 23, is currently the host and producer of Midcoast Morning. Mackenzie’s work focuses on “a mixture of current events that are happening in the government, provincially, or municipally, or arts and culture stories.”
When asked why local news coverage is important to audiences, Mackenzie says, “We’re doing it because were really are passionate about news….We have volunteers coming in and out all the time.…I don’t think you’d be able to get the same thing if it wasn’t for all the volunteers.”
Previous CHLY attempts at news programming have failed due to funding issues. Jesse Woodward, 39, the Executive Director and Station Manager at CHLY, says, “Some version of it originally started back in 2019…when I had the opportunity to apply for the Local Journalism Initiative…When I applied for that second round of funding, we didn’t get it.”
In 2023, the station was able to get a different grant from the Radiometres Fund to reinvent its news efforts. “I decided to approach this a little differently. I applied for a different fund in 2022,” Woodward says. “The goal is to build up this non-profit newsroom project to fill what is a developing hole in terms of local news coverage.”
Woodward explains, “In 2016, there was a CRTC study with Canadians surveyed in terms of the desire for news and local news – approximately 86% of respondents agreed that there was a need for local news….We used to have three newspapers in Nanaimo and today we have one, [the Nanaimo News Bulletin].”
A deficit of local news coverage in Nanaimo also meant less objective content and more advertising. “One of the issues that come into play with shrinking newsrooms is that you end up with newsrooms where your advertisers can influence what you’re covering,” says Woodward.
CHLY’s newsroom covers stories up and down the Salish Sea coast from Duncan to Comox. If you’d like to support the station, you can donate and contribute to their goal of fundraising $70,000 before April 30th, 2024. Tune into Midcoast Morning or daily news updates for local coverage on 101.7 FM.
