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Chris Zelkovich: Sports Media Watch - Feed
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 Keith Pelley now heading Rogers MediaKeith Pelley, who oversaw the CTV-Rogers consortium's coverage of the Vancouver Olympics, has been named president of Rogers Media. The announcement was made Tuesday morning. Pelley will replace Tony Viner, who has retired. Pelley, who rejoined the CTV group after a stint as president of the Toronto Argonauts, will oversee all aspects of Rogers media properties from television (Sportsnet) to radio (including the FAN 590) and magazines. His departure from the Olympic Consortium means that it will be seeking someone to oversee the 2012 London Olympics.
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 Little love for Toronto FC on television -- yetThe CBC had better be right about Major League Soccer. The people's network recently jettisoned the Raptors because it felt ratings weren't quite good enough to justify those weekend time slots. On the other hand, it expressed deep and abiding love for Toronto FC, which would give its left halfback to get the kind of ratings the Raptors drew. Witness Saturday's poor draw, the latest in a series of poor ratings for the MLS club.Since its inception, the Toronto team has been a major hit at the gate and a semi-disaster on television. But this isn't a case of the...
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 CFL leads the way, edging out Sportsnet OneWhile only one of the Canadian Football League's Labour Day weekend ``classics" came close to matching the title, it was a pretty successful weekend for three-down football. The high-water mark came Sunday when TSN set a regular-season ratings record for CFL games when an average of 1.34 million viewers watched Saskatchewan defeat Winnipeg. The rest of the games did pretty well, too, with one topping 1 million and the other two coming close. The Blue Jays did well, too, with Rogers Sportsnet attracting more than 600,000 for each of its two weekend games. Friday's outing, we'll assume, didn't do as...
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 CFL dominates weekend TV ratingsIt's long been said that the Canadian Football League season doesn't really start until Labour Day in both intensity and fan interest. If that's the case, the CFL is in for a heck of a fall. Its two games dominated the weekend ratings once again, with Saturday's Saskatchewan-Edmonton game topping 1 million viewers. The Calgary-B.C. game was next with 771,000 viewers. What's impressive about those numbers is that both games involved the league's worst teams, with both B.C. and Edmonton entering them with 1-6 records. Here are the top weekend sports ratings in English Canada, according to BBM Canada overnight...
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 No shortage of hockey on TV in 2010-11The NHL announced its national television schedules for the 2010-11 season on Wednesday and, as usual, there will be no shortage of hockey on Canadian TV. Hockey Night In Canada has an 87-game lineup, including two pre-season match-ups and 29 all-Canadian tilts. Toronto Maple Leafs fans can rest easily, knowing their team will be on almost every Saturday night -- in Ontariio, at least, and probably nationally. The only two Leaf-free Saturday nights are Oct. 16 and Jan. 8, because those are the only two Saturdays the Leafs don't play. TSN and TSN2 will combine for 124 games: 76 on...
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 Big chair shuffling at TSN and Olympic group officesNew titles were being handed out like candy at the TSN and Olympic broadcast consortium headquarters Tuesday. It's an interesting list, even for those who might not collect broadcast executive trading cards. First, Stewart Johnston replaces Phil King as president of TSN, a pretty big move for a guy who was named head of programming only three years ago. But Johnston learned at the foot of the master programmer -- King -- and no doubt learned something from him as he sat in the big chair at TSN. Mark Milliere gets a bump from head of production to senior vice-president...
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 Blue Jays hit the heights. Too bad about Friday's game.Now here's a rarity on the summer sports scene: A Toronto Blue Jays game managed to draw more viewers than a Canadian Football League contest. Granted, the CFL game was a dog with fleas, but still this doesn't happen very often. But as happy as the folks at Rogers Communications must be at seeing their team draw an average of 713,000 for last Friday's game against the Boston Red Sox, they have to be girding their loins for the viewer onslaught they will face Friday. That's the next Jays game scheduled for Sportsnet One, the new channel that's available only...
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 Sportsnet One's debut shuts out Jays fansIt probably doesn't happen that often, but I understated the case in my Monday column when I knocked Rogers for shutting out tens of thousands of Blue Jays fans by putting Saturday's game on Sportsnet One. The Jays two games on the West Coast scored more than 480,000 viewers apiece on Rogers Sportsnet. Saturday's game, available only on Sportsnet One to Rogers customers, drew substantially less than that. BBM Canada originally reported the audience at 31,000, but admitted today that there were errorrs in its calculations. Suffice to say, though, that it didn't make enough mistakes to drive up that...
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 FAN morning host choice is Krystal clearApparently Andrew Krystal has impressed The FAN 590 so much in his first month on the job, the station has given him a major promotion. Sources say Krystal will become the all-sports station's morning show host after Calgary's Mike Richards turned down the FAN's offer last week. The move may be temporary, though, with Krystal moving back to the 9-to-noon spot once a permanent host is found for the crucial morning slot. But if Krystal can score solid ratings over the next 12 weeks, he may get the job full-time.
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 Tennis Canada changes up with relaunched websiteJust in time for the annual Rogers Cup events in Montreal and Toronto, Tennis Canada is relaunching its website with a whole new approach. And the new way of doing things means less focus on stuff like the Rogers Cup and more on those who play the sport. Not that the racquet-swingers have anything against Canada's biggest tennis tournaments -- in fact, Rafael Nadal will be at the CN Tower on Friday to launch the new site at 4 p.m. -- it's just that the organization believes it has to speak more directly to those who play the sport than...
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 Blue Jays still making waves on TVHey, maybe Rogers Sportsnet is on to something here, what with its decisions to claim all the Toronto Blue Jays telecasts and then launch a new channel to carry many of them. The Jays are out of it as far as any meaningful baseball goes. They can beat Baltimore -- hey, who can't? -- and they should hang around the .500 mark this season. But post-season play isn't even a dream. On top of that, attendance is awful -- Montreal Expos awful at times. But despite all that, the team is still scoring on television. The Jays managed to break...
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 World Cup final moves into upper echelonIt really wasn't much of a game, unless you love yellow cards and flopping around, but Sunday's World Cup final is now among one of the most-watched events in Canadian television. CBC drew an average of 5,131,000 viewers for Sunday's game, putting it among most-watched sports events in the past year. The king, for now and probably all time, was the Olympic men's hockey final (16.6 million.) Four more Olympic events topped the 10 million mark in Vancouver. In an earlier version of this post, I kind of lumped in all the Olympic stuff as one event, which was admittedly...
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 Football -- both kinds -- dominate the sports ratingsThere's no doubt that football is ruling the air waves in Canada this summer. The sport the rest of the world calls football continued to score huge ratings for CBC, which averaged 1.89 million viewers per match in the World Cup quarter-finals. That's about a 400,000 per match boost over the round of 16. As popular as the quadrennial soccer orgy has been on television, it's also a big hit online. Friday's games averaged more than 150,000 live streams. The sport North Americans call football also had a great holiday weekend as Canadian Football League openers averaged 880,000 per game....
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 CFL to get NFL Network exposureThe Canadian Football League will get a little more exposure south of the border this season. The league announced Wednesday that it has signed a deal with the NFL Network to show 14 games this season. The NFL Network will pick up TSN's broadcasts, starting with Thursday's Grey Cup rematch in Saskatchewan. CFL fans in Canada won't get their games on the NFL Network, though, as TSN retains Canadian rights. The NFL Nework, which carries a package of NFL games, also carries the Arena Football League, college and high school football games. While the deal is smaller than previous CFL...
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 Hockey draft takes a run at World CupThe high ratings for the World Cup are no doubt causing buttons to pop among supporters of the beautiful game in Canada. (Ever wonder why nobody refers to it as ``the well-officiated game"?) But if ever proof was needed that this is a hockey country, it came Friday night. TSN's broadcast of the NHL entry draft averaged an incredible 828,000 viewers. That's only about 150,000 viewers below CBC's average for the World Cup, which is even more incredible when you consider that soccer's slow pace looks practically frantic compared with the NHL draft. Four hours of kids in badly fitting...
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 Don Landry and Gord Stellick muse on Black ThursdayIt's never a good day when somebody loses his or her job, which made Black Thursday at the FAN 590 a pretty awful day for a lot of people -- include a lot of regular listeners. It sure was a bad day for Gord Stellick, who says he and morning co-host Don Landry were notified at 8:59 a.m. that they were wanted in the boss's office. Moments later, they were unemployed. ``I never saw it coming," said Stellick. ``I'd heard rumours and we were on pins and needles for a while, but I just never expected this." Landry, on the...
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 Greg Brady leaves 640 and heading to The FAN 590Greg Brady, host of 640 Toronto's Bill Watters Show, has left the station and is heading to the rival FAN 590, sources say. All links to Brady's blogs on the 640 website have been removed. The FAN has called a staff meeting today, at which it's presumed Brady's arrival will be announced. It's not clear what role he will take on, but his arrival likely means some sort of shakeup in the station's lineup.
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 CFL grabs eyeballs, but so do horses, bulls and calvesNow that we're officially into the summer television doldrums, what with the marquee special events off the calendar, the Canadian Football League has assumed its rightful spot at the top of the sports ratings. That's not a surprise, but what is surprising is the company the CFL is keeping. While football games took the top two spots on the weekend, third place was held by something other than the usual suspect: rodeo. Yes, the Calgary Stampede drew an average of 690,000 viewers to CBC on Sunday evening. That's more than baseball, the Toronto Indy and even the British Open. Even...
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 David Amber leaves ESPN to return to Canadian TVIt wasn't a trade, but it almost looks like one. Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment is expected to announce today that David Amber is leaving ESPN to join Raptors NBA TV as its main anchor. Amber will replace Adnan Virk, who left the anchor job earlier this year to join -- you guessed it -- ESPN. MLSE broadcast head Chris Hebb confirmed that Amber will join the channel in October, anchoring pre-game and post-game shows and handling other desk duties with NBA properties. ``This is a good move for David and a good move for us," Hebb said. Amber said...
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 Expect more changes at Hockey Night In CanadaOne shoe dropped at Hockey Night In Canada on Friday. Expect the other to drop before the first pucks fly in the fall. Sherali Najak is out as executive producer, which is interesting in itself because he had only three seasons in that job. But what's really telling is who replaces him: Trevor Pilling. Now, Pilling has a pretty impressive resume: CFL, Olympics, World Cup and more. But very little hockey. He has produced NHL games for CBC, but isn't a member of the HNIC mafia. And that seems to be the point. He has been brought in to give...
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