Pontiac’s community radio station CHIP FM hosted its annual general meeting on Wednesday evening to update its members on its finances and present highlights from its 2023-2024 year, which ended in August.
The annual report distributed at the meeting describes the year as a transition period during which the station, which lost its longtime director general François Carrier in March, focused on creating new projects that will enable the station to maintain financial health.
Most significant of these projects is the new Chase the Ace lottery game the station launched this fall.
“It’s a pretty complicated thing to launch a lottery, so that was a lot of work, but it’s been going up and up for the past couple of weeks, so it’s pretty exciting,” said Geneviève Gagnon, interim director general for the station.
Gagnon also highlighted a new partnership with École secondaire Sieur de Coulonge, in which one of the station’s radio hosts puts together a playlist of francophone music for students to listen to, from which they pick their favourite song, interview the artist who wrote the song, and then put together a radio segment about the artist.
“It’s pretty cool because it [gives them] a direct contact with francophone music, which is kind of hard to [promote] because English music is so anchored in our day-to-day life,” Gagnon said.
Gagnon said she’s proud of the station’s continued efforts to diversify its programming, led by Marie Gionet, and of the journalism the station is bringing to its audience.
“In terms of journalism, we still have Caleb [Nickerson] who does incredible work, in terms of going in-depth on subjects that are somewhat complicated,” Gagnon said.
“What François was bringing was the French side of this, so we just need to find someone who’s going to be able to also bring that on the French side.”
Deficit grows
The station’s financial report shows a deficit of $124,137, about $100,000 more than it was in 2023, largely due to a reduction in grant money and a reduction of advertising revenue.
Gagnon said the station didn’t bring in as much grant money as it had in previous years because of the transition it underwent when Carrier left.
“Because in the last months you’re not going to start a big project if you know you’re going to be leaving soon, we didn’t apply for as many grants as we have in the past, and as we can,” she explained.
In terms of the station’s $20,000 decline in advertising revenue, Gagnon said local and national advertising have been lower than before, in part because “the government just decided to spend less money into local media publicity.”
“The budget is technically in a deficit, but it doesn’t even put a hole in our general finances, to be honest,” Gagnon said, explaining CHIP has invested $400,000 it accumulated through government advertising in interest-generating bank accounts.
A Carrier-sized hole to fill
Former director general François Carrier had been with the station for a decade when he left in March to take a job as director general of Gatineau-based news organization Le Droit. Gagnon said his departure has left the station with a big hole to fill.
“What François brought in 2013 – and it’s what created partnerships, listeners, viewership – is just the quality of journalism that he would bring, the contacts he created through the years. He really created this trust between the media and the population,” she said, noting his dedication to the station is what led to its significant growth starting in 2013.
“Basically he would overwork and it created this gap where anybody that we hire is obviously not going to have his level of experience and they’re not going to be able to cover all of the stuff that he covered. So to fill out what he would do, we’re going to need more than just one employee.”
Gagnon said the introduction of new technologies and the changing nature of audiences has slowed the station’s growth, bringing new challenges it needs to tackle to continue to reach new audiences.
“We need to be more active on social media. We have to go towards that content and have someone who knows how to work it to get audience attention very, very quickly. That’s what we need to start going into — quick information, more visuals, and be very active on different platforms of social media. But obviously the Facebook ban makes it a bit more difficult.”
She noted Carrier has a year from when he started his new job to decide if he wants to stay in it long term or return to CHIP. If he decides the former, the radio station will hire a new director general to fill his shoes permanently.
