With a shrewd casting instinct to rival that of Robert Altman, Znaimer and company assembled a large and varied cadre of characters who established a bedrock of trust with viewers and became celebrities in their own right. Citytv's diversity not only led to better quality news reportage, but better business as well, and by the mid-1980s CityPulse was close to slaying stodgy old dragons CFTO (CTV) and CBLT (CBC). It all seems so utterly Martian now, but at the time most major Toronto news outlets were anchored by silver haired, grandfatherly males, most of whom smoked pipes and wore un-ironic elbow patches. Not only that, the people he enlisted actually reflected multicultural Toronto. Znaimer populated his soap opera with real people, not reporters. show deployed "Gonna Fly Now" (Rocky's Theme) to great effect, with assignment editor Glen Cole's introductory holler sounding like that of a wrestling announcer. The after-dark broadcast used the jazzy grooves of Grover Washington Junior's "Masterpiece" to soundtrack stories of our city, later Graham Shaw's mighty "Pentatus" while the 6 P.M. One of Znaimer's commandments at the time was "let the actual sound and visuals tell the story."Ĭlocking in initially at a whopping 90 minutes length, CityPulse soon settled into a fast paced 60 minute edition at 6 P.M., followed by another at 10 P.M., later known as CityPulse Tonight. ![]() No surprise it's formula would go on to transform news reportage around the world, as well as confound and then reshape viewer's expectations. While some saw the slick rebranding a betrayal of Citytv's earlier earnest commitment to hardboiled, old school journalism, CityPulse was in fact the most progressive and prophetic form of news gathering and telling ever broadcast. The City Show was more indebted to CBC's house style, unsurprising as Znaimer cut his teeth at t he Mother Corp in the 1960s. But if you contrive to remain a child when you should be an adolescent and an adolescent when you should be an adult, you're just a failure."įrom its very first anarchic transmission on September 28th, 1972, the crown jewel in Citytv's schedule was The City Show, fronted at first by the pensive chain-smoking Warner Troyer, a nightly 2 ½ hour marathon of in-depth discussion of local events, public affairs and news which at the time was a welcome antidote to Toronto's thirty or sixty minute news programs which aped the U.S. You can be nostalgic about the days when you were young and pimply, when things seemed to matter more and less at the same time. The biology of a television station is no different from the biology of a person. "There is nothing as necessary as biology. "There is no alternative to growing up" Znaimer told NOW magazine in 1982 while discussing Citytv's 10th Anniversary. But change is paramount to the Citytv success story. ![]() He recently celebrated 35 years at the helm looking roughly the same as he did when he started, even as everything around him has changed fundamentally. If CityPulse was the daily soap opera of Toronto, then Martineau is its Victor Newman. According to Gord Martineau, it was former Toronto Mayor and all around Citytv fanatic David Crombie who once said in deference to the CityPulse news team's cramped studio space at 99 Queen Street East, "the city is your newsroom." The program had debuted in May of 1977 with its own striking subtitle - a day in the life of Toronto - and a very strict remit from Citytv's visionary man upstairs Moses Znaimer: "You can decide that news is 24 discrete mini-events delivered with the voice of doom, or you can say, as we do, that it's the daily soap opera of Toronto."
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