New anchor at Global Montreal News Final; BBM numbers show Morning Show struggling

Elysia Bryan-Baynes has been named the new anchor of Global Montreal News Final show. She takes over from Richard Dagenais, who now hosts the network’s morning show.

Big congrats to @ebbaynes, named anchor for nightly 11pm News Final on @global_montreal. A great journalist committed to her community.

Elysia Bryan-Baynes has been named the new anchor of Global Montreal News Final show. She takes over from Richard Dagenais, who now hosts the network’s morning show.

Big congrats to @ebbaynes, named anchor for nightly 11pm News Final on @global_montreal. A great journalist committed to her community.

— Troy Reeb (@troyreebglobal) May 15, 2013

To quote Global Montreal's new News Final anchor, @ebbaynes, "I'm über excited!" Congrats, Elysia! twitter.com/Dagenator/stat…

— Richard Dagenais (@Dagenator) May 15, 2013

According to her bio, Bryan-Baynes was born and raised in Montreal and has worked for 10 years at Global as a researcher, reporter, producer and National Assembly correspondent. She studied law and communications at Carleton University.

Global News has also made Gloria Henriquez the new associate producer for the Morning News show. The morning show faced some challenges ahead, says media blogger Steve Faguy. "As a guinea pig for a new way of producing live TV, with local control-room staff using servers across the country, it has been plagued with technical problems, some so serious they have forced the show off the air a couple of times." And the latest BBM numbers indicate the show has made little headway with viewers, and its audience remains around 500 viewers, "which is about as much as it had before the show went on the air, when it was showing things like repeats of the previous night's newscasts," Faguy writes.

"If anyone deserves blame for this, it's Global management and Shaw Media, which have put the bare minimum (one could argue even less than that) into the show in terms of resources. It's understaffed, underfunded, undermarketed, and so it should come as no surprise that it's underviewed.

This show is here to fulfill a commitment that Shaw made to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission when it bought Global TV in 2010. It promised to fund local morning shows in six markets, including $5 million for Montreal until 2017. That means no matter how badly the show is received, it will continue to be on air at least until then. So in a sense Global doesn't have to care about ratings, certainly not in the first few weeks."

Faguy adds that City TV will launch its morning show with three times the staff size as Global News in the coming months. "If Global's morning show hasn't developed a strong connection with viewers by then, any morning viewing looking for a local alternative to Canada AM will switch to City instead," he notes.