CBC North searches for journalism leader as managing editor leaves

CBC North has begun recruiting for a new top journalist after managing editor Garrett Hinchey announced he’ll leave the public broadcaster.

Hinchey, born and raised in Yellowknife, is moving to a communications role at Rio Tinto’s Diavik diamond mine.

He became CBC North’s managing editor in June 2021. The CBC is now advertising for a journalism senior manager to replace him.

While the name is different, the description of the role suggests it’s broadly similar, overseeing the CBC’s northern journalism and programming. Applications are sought by the end of February 1.

Hinchey expressed pride that in his two and a half years in charge, CBC North had been able to hire Indigenous northerners like Dez Loreen and Carla Ulrich to reporting positions in Inuvik and Fort Smith respectively.

“I came in sort-of preaching and hopefully being a bit of an example of what we can do when we really empower northerners to get involved in northern journalism,” he said.

“We haven’t been able to exclusively fill every position with northerners. I don’t think that would create the best product anyway … but we have managed to make some pretty significant steps there, that I think have been good ones for our relationship with our audience and also in terms of keeping our coverage relevant.”

Relevance, he said, will be a challenge for whoever’s next in the role. That person will also have to cope with possible cuts, as CBC/Radio-Canada expects to cut about 10 percent of its nationwide workforce in the first half of this year. How that will affect CBC North is not yet clear.

“The landscape is changing,” said Hinchey, pointing to Meta’s decision to ban news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada, a response to federal legislation designed to make tech giants pay for news shared on their platforms.

“That has already fundamentally changed the way we work and the way we communicate with people. We’re trying to make sure we can continue to be as relevant as we were when we lived in this sort-of analog broadcast world that we no longer live in, and that’s tough at a place like CBC,” he said.

“So much of what we do is tied up into radio and television, and those things are really important connectors for people all across the North – they remain like that. So making sure we can still provide that to people while at the same time connecting to audiences who didn’t grow up with that, necessarily, or they don’t use that in their day-to-day lives.”

Hinchey said figuring out how to preserve Indigenous-language radio, in particular, while modernizing it “to continue to connect with people who aren’t tuning into the radio every day” would be one of CBC North’s biggest challenges ahead.

The Diavik mine is expected to cease operations in 2026. It will be the first of the NWT’s three active diamond mines to close, heralding the beginning of a transformation in the territory’s economy. What that economy will look like without diamonds is not yet clear.

Hinchey said he viewed his forthcoming Diavik role as “making sure that we can meaningfully connect with people on this thing that’s going to have a huge impact on everybody’s lives in the North.”

Below, you can read a full transcript of our interview with Hinchey about the role he’s leaving and what’s next for CBC North.

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This interview was recorded on January 12, 2024. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ollie Williams: Lots of people consider the CBC to be part of their lives, but they might not know what a managing editor does. I wondered, even, if you fully knew what the job was when you took it. Now you’ve been doing the job for two and a half years, how would you describe what you actually do?

Garrett Hinchey: That’s a great question. Broadly speaking, I’m responsible for our journalism. That’s the bottom line of what this job is. A lot of what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis could be story-dependent things, making sure that we’re following our JSP, that what we’re doing is ethical, that it’s legal, handling complaints or possible legal challenges.

The big-picture side of that is setting priorities for us editorially through projects or staffing. I feel like I’ve been doing hiring non-stop since I’ve gotten here, we’ve had a lot of turnover and transition, and there’s an opportunity to shape the future of the station with those sorts of moves.

Looping into the broader CBC and being that connective point, I think has been a really big part of this job. The big CBC, the one that’s headquartered in Toronto, they’ve got their tentacles all across the country. They have their own priorities and things that are really important to them. Those often jive with what we’re doing up here in the North, but they don’t always fit perfectly.

I think having somebody at that table who knows this place well, and has a sense of how a particular decision might land – or what the ripple effects of making a change at the network or the corporate level might mean for us on the ground here in Yellowknife, and our audiences across all three territories – that’s been a really big part of the role, being able to participate in those conversations and help pick up those blind spots that can be missed from folks who don’t know this place.

I’m not involved in the day-to-day in terms of writing and producing stories. Honestly, that’s something that I’ve missed since I’ve moved into this role. It’s not something that I had any preconceptions that I was going to be able to continue – it’s a management position, you’re managing 40 people here in Yellowknife, dealing with things like scheduling overtime, hiring, human resources, all those sorts of things. And then you have this broader eye on the journalism that’s going on in all three territories and getting your hands in there as much as possible. It’s big and expansive.

I think the length of that answer gives an indication of the scope of the job. Also, just to help our audience out, you mentioned the JSP there – that’s the CBC’s journalistic standards and practices. Now, when you started in June 2021, you said you wanted to make a difference. And of course, you’re from here, you’re born and raised in Yellowknife. But you’ve also overseen a period of news where – if your newsroom is anything like mine, anyway – there was a lot of reacting to big events like the pandemic, floods, wildfires. Where do you hope you did make a difference?

Yeah, you’re totally right. It hasn’t been by any sense of the word a conventional few years for us, or for anyone who’s living up here. When I came into this job, most of our staff were still working from home from the Covid-19 pandemic, and so we had to manage that, get everybody back into the station and do that in a safe way that worked for everyone and worked for the time we were in. Of course, the wildfires and flooding, everything else – we have been jumping from big story to big story.

The thing that I’m really proud of, that I feel like I was able to move the needle on, was: I came in sort-of preaching and hopefully being a bit of an example of what we can do when we really empower northerners to get involved in northern journalism. And we’ve done a lot of hiring since then. You know, we haven’t been able to exclusively fill every position with northerners. I don’t think that would create the best product anyway, and we can go into that if you want, but we have managed to make some some pretty significant steps there that I think have been good ones for our relationship with our audience, and also in terms of keeping our coverage relevant.

We’ve hired video journalists in Fort Smith and Inuvik, Carla and Dez, both Indigenous northerners who are indigenous to those regions. We did that by changing our priorities on those kinds of hires, right? Really making that a really important factor in making the decisions we made. Maybe not prioritizing folks with a conventional journalism background. We wanted people who were really connected to the community and were good storytellers. We’ve had some success with that in Yellowknife as well. We’ve got some reporters on our staff now who have grown up in the city and in the territory. We were able to hire one of the graduates of the Northern Journalism Training Institute, Julie Beaver, who’s working here now and is doing an excellent job.

I feel like we have started down a path there that I think is a good one. There’s more to be done, for sure, but I think the successes there are showing us that it’s worth the challenge that it brings with it.

Looking back, I think about the wildfire evacuation a lot. After the initial chaos subsided, and we were able to get a lay of the land, we were able to basically rebuild the CBC station in Edmonton in about a week, with people headquartered all over Alberta, and some folks in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon and Ontario and BC. The fact that we were able to pull that together, I’m really proud of that. I think that was a really challenging time, but something that we were able to come through – and come through for northerners.

There are some challenges facing this place going forward.

The big thing is figuring out how we can continue to stay relevant. The landscape is changing. It has changed majorly in the last year: we lost access to Facebook and Instagram, the same way other news organizations did, and that has already fundamentally changed the way we work and the way we communicate with people.

We’re trying to make sure that we can continue to be as relevant as we were when we lived in this sort-of analog broadcast world that we no longer live in. That’s tough at a place like CBC. So much of what we do is tied up into radio and television, and those things are really important connectors for people all across the North – they remain like that. So making sure we can still provide that to people while at the same time connecting to audiences who didn’t grow up with that, necessarily, or they don’t use that in their day-to-day lives.

Indigenous-language radio is going to be a really big challenge for my successor to take on, to figure out how to continue that programming – which is so central to everything we do and our mission – but modernize it, and find ways to continue to connect with people who aren’t tuning into the radio every day at one o’clock. That’s the big, big challenge I see coming across the horizon.

And the CBC, at the same time, has already told its staff that there will be some positions cut. And I’m talking nationwide at this point – I don’t know, necessarily, if any of those will affect CBC North. You’ll know more than I do.

Your successor is going to have to work in that environment as well, at the same time as an environment where the audience is increasingly polarized. You can see that immediately when you look at the job of a journalist in southern Canada or in the United States, where so many topics are perceived through politicized lenses that are very black-and-white in terms of how people see issues, and then how they perceive journalists and journalism as well.

Where do you think your successor needs to start in terms of what you’ve talked about, which is staying relevant, and then these issues of how much resource the CBC actually has to do what it needs to do, and how it navigates this new environment that we’re all in?

There’s a lot tied up into it. In the media, not just at the CBC, people are constantly being asked and expected to do more with less, to find their way onto the same traditional analog platforms that we use, but also connect using new media and all these different things.

I can’t really speak to the layoffs that have been announced or how they might impact CBC North in the future but I think, for me, being connected to the places up here, the different communities across the territory – in a really meaningful way – is something that needs to underline everything that we’re doing. That could mean day-to-day coverage, it could mean the different hires that we make. But it also means how we broadcast to people. And so I just hope that is kept at the front of any decision that’s going to be made going forward.

When you talk about the polarization that we all see and we all hear about, we’re lucky up here. CBC North is an institution, it’s a place that’s been around for a very long time. It’s central to a lot of people’s lives and the way that they connect with the south, the rest of Canada, the rest of the North. We have a lot of goodwill here and we haven’t seen that polarization, maybe, in the territories as much as we have in other places.

But we absolutely need to keep in the front of our mind that, like, that relevance we have and that connection we have is not something we’re just entitled to. It’s something that takes a lot of work. The kind of work you need to do to keep that going, to keep a place like CBC North relevant in Yellowknife as well as in Colville Lake, it’s different now than it was 20 years ago, 30 years ago, five years ago. That’s going to be a big challenge with all the different pressures facing our industry, the pressures facing the CBC. But from everything I’ve heard, the folks who are making decision through CBC recognize how crucial CBC North is to connecting the territories with the rest of Canada, for the service it provides, the sort of unique service that it can provide in a place that doesn’t have a lot of other news options in the private sector.

Someone coming in right now is going to have an opportunity to guide it into the 2020s and beyond. That’s going to always remain the big goal, is staying connected meaningfully with our audience and making sure that we’re not just a part of their lives because we’re on the radio, but we’re actually doing something positive for them, whether that’s survival information or talking about just what it’s like to live in a small place, or helping ensure strength of Indigenous languages.

The role that’s being advertised to replace you is titled “senior manager, journalism” and that’s a slightly different title. I wonder if that means the job stays the same or if it’s slightly different. But I also wonder, given everything you’ve laid out here as issues that the next person is going to have to consider, what the most important advice is for that person to hear?

My understanding is that the responsibilities are staying the same.

The advice really comes down to listening: listening to your staff, making sure you have a good understanding of what motivates people, what their concerns are, making sure people have a voice in what it is that they’re contributing to. That’s how you get people to stay invested.

This is a place where what we do is a public service. That’s the way I’ve always thought about it and looked at it. I think about it like police officers and firefighters – not in that we’re putting our lives on the line like those guys are, of course, but we’re being paid by the taxpayers to do something that ostensibly provides a positive benefit to everybody out there. You need people who are committed to that mission.

So making sure that people have an opportunity to contribute to what it is that we do meaningfully – the staff in the station but also our audiences – and kind-of checking your preconceived notions at the door. Just because I grew up in Yellowknife, does not mean that I’m an expert on the North. Listen to people who are in their communities, who have been broadcasting to their audiences, or who are just living there and connected to people. Take that in and really try and put it through the lens of a journalist or a manager, and turn that into something useful and meaningful for them.

What’s next for you?

I’ve taken a senior communications advisor position with Rio Tinto. I’m going to be working with the Diavik mine and a lot of that work, I think, will be tied to the pending closure.

That’ll be working communications within communities around the territory, making sure that we can meaningfully connect with people on this thing that’s going to have a huge impact on everybody’s lives in the North. Communicating with the staff at the mine and making sure they understand the implications and the impact and the options that are available to them. And then also working with the leadership there, being involved in governmental relations, those sorts of things as well.