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Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has layed off 35 members of its communications staff, most of them PR people, in an effort to trim $117 million from the dept’s annual budget, according to the Globe & Mail.
The flaks’ work will be shifted to outside PR agencies and to five “promotions managers” who will be liaisons with the agencies.
In-house TV station publicists are notoriously underpaid, so CBC undoubtedly will have to pay the agencies more than staffers were getting. It’s hard to imagine that any money will really be saved.
I did PR for several major Public Broadcasting System (PBS) shows early in my career and the money for the agency came from corporate underwriters of the programming since under-funded PBS in-house staffers didn’t do a good enough job of promotion.