NERW-on-the-road 6/26

[fybush@world.std.com]

*Welcome to the last update in our "NERW On The Road" series.  It's
been a long trip from Boston to Prince Edward Island and then back
west; here's how we spent the last two days.

*Wednesday morning found us leaving Quebec City with a trip around
town to the various stations' studios.  One thing that was immediately
apparent is how the Radio-Media group has homogenized its station
lineup across Quebec; we found CHIK (98.9) using the same logo and
"Energie" format as Montreal's CKMF, and CITF (107.5) sharing the
"Rock-Detente" format with CITE in Montreal and several others across
the province.  On the AM side, the old CJRP (1060) and CKCV (1280) are
gone; the only remaining commercial one is CHRC (800), which uses the
same news-talk format and network programs as CKAC (730) in Montreal.

Walking around Place d'Youville, we found the small office that houses
CBVE (104.7), Quebec City's lone English-language station.  CBVE
produces its own morning and afternoon drive programs, which are fed
to the rest of the CBC English network in Quebec outside Montreal as
the "Quebec Community Network."

We drove by the avenue Myrand studios of CFCM (Channel 4), which are
also nominally the studios of CKMI, Global's Quebec City affiliate,
which was created by taking the license of Channel 5, once a private
English CBC affiliate, and moving it to 20 (and more importantly,
adding relays to reach the English-speaking viewers in Montreal on 46
and Sherbrooke on 11).  Channel 5 is now CBVE-TV, a straight relay of
CBMT in Montreal.  Its transmitter remains on the self-supporting
tower that also has CFCM.