How CBC Toronto is changing to better serve our city

What do you do each morning when you get up? Or in the hour or so before bed? If you're like millions of Canadians you're looking at your smartphone, perhaps scrolling through Facebook or your email, and we hope checking in with CBC Toronto.

October has been a month of enormous change here at CBC Toronto. The main goal is to deliver more compelling stories on digital platforms. This is part of CBC's 2020 digital strategy. You can read more about it here.

For CBC Toronto,like so many media organizations in this city, digital is changing what our audience needs and when it needs it. Now, more than 70 per cent of our digital traffic comes from mobile phones.

The rate of growth on mobile is higher than it is on radio, TV or any other digital platform. How do we become part of your lives, from the moment you wake up until you head to bed at the end of the day, wherever that day takes you?

The truth is, we were doing a lot on digital already but it wasn't always meeting our audience needs. I wanted to outline for you, our audience, how we're changing and what you can expect.

More enterprise journalism

We've created an enterprise unit a special team whose goal is to break news you can find nowhere else every day. We've already broken some big stories: the lack of support for jurorswith PTSD was one of thefirst.

The team also came up with an interesting neighbourhoodstoryabout an exchange of bylaw complaints byquarrelling residents.

The team at Metro Morning with Matt Galloway is thrilled by these changes because we're now breaking more important stories this city needs to know each morning.

The more visible change,which you'll seeat 6 p.m.,is that our TV supper hour show is getting a fresh start.

Dwight Drummond is the host of a show that has a new format. It's more relaxed, it's based in the community much more and is entirely focused on answering "why" not just "what."

By 6 p.m., most of you already know the news. Why does it matter? That's what we hope to tell you at the end of the day. The show is going to continue to change over the next number of months and we welcome your feedback.

A new vision for the day

The other important change wasn't anything you'd see it's how we're arranging our staff. We now have an assignment desk the heart of any station or newsroomthat assigns for TV, radio and digital. They're making sure the stories we breakon Metro Morning are also compelling onafternoon radio, and our TV shows at 6 p.m. and 11 p.m.

We're also reorganizing ourselves around the time of day each team is serving. So instead of being arranged around shows or around digital or radio, we've now got a morning team that encompasses the city's #1 radio show, Metro Morning, videographers, along with digital and radio news staff.

The afternoon team is made up of the TV show team, digital staff, and our afternoon radio show Here & Now.

The changes are helping us meet the different needs you have based on time of day. In the morning you've likely only got a few minutes before you get up and on the way; in the afternoon you likely need not only survivalinformation, but also stories that explain the "why," not just the "what."

These changes are about serving you better and realigning our staff and priorities to ensure we're connecting with as many Torontonians as we can.

It's an exciting time here at CBC Toronto. We hope you'll appreciate the changes we're making and you can contact me directly at marissa.nelson@cbc.ca or on Twitter @marissanelson.