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Howard Fink is currently engaged in a research project on the BBC World Service Radio News, 1970-86, in the Concordia Centre for Broadcasting Studies (CCBS). The Diniacopoulos/BBC News Collection was donated to the University last year, and is housed in the CCBS.

The project involves, first, the archiving and dubbing to cd of 9,000 hours of WS (Radio) News programs, broadcast on short-wave and taped daily off-air by the late Prof. Denis Diniacopoulos (Communications, Concordia U). We are also gathering background information on the principles, organization, and procedures of production of these programs, during the significant 16-year period of the tapes.

Finally, the above work enables comparative research into these programs, renowned for their objectivity and comprehensiveness, relative to treatment of the same significant news by other comparable national broadcasters.

This project is being funded by a joint donation by the late Mrs Diniacopoulos, mother of Denis, and by Concordia Advancement.

The archiving of the tapes is now complete, and a copy of the microfilmed indexes to the BBC WS News has been purchased, as the CCBS instrument of access to this Collection. The work of dubbing these tapes to cds is moving rapidly ahead without incident, after the usual start-up problems. I have interviewed a number of BBC WS News administrators, most of whom have moved up the ranks from correspondent and editor, and these interviews have been recorded for further use both in this project and for future CCBS research on the programs. The comparative analysis is in the organizational stage. I will be delivering the first academic report on this project in Toronto next March in the Radio Section of the Popular Culture/ American Culture Associations Conference.

John was co-founder of the Centre for Broadcasting Studies and Director from 1983 to 1986 and 1989 to 1992. He taught sociology, specialized to community studies and popular culture at Sir George Williams and then Concordia University from 1966 to 1998.

He is presently a member of the International Editorial Board of the Journal of Radio & Audio Media, a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre and a member of the Advisory Board of the RE-Visionary Interpretation of the Public Enterprise (RIPE), a research enterprise devoted to public broadcasting.

He was also Canadian Editor of the Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Radio edited by Christopher H. Sterling and published by Fitzroy Dearborn, London, 2004.

He is currently working on issues related to the use of radio among members of minority groups and the question of public spaces, media and citizenship while maintaining earlier interests in radio drama production.

Recent Publications

• “Introduction to the Symposium on Canadian Radio Research”, Journal of Radio & Audio Media. Vol.20, No.2, Nov. 2013. Pp. 292-295
• “The Socio-Cultural Context of Broadcasting Markets” (with Yon Hsu, Geoffrey Lealand, Brian O’Neill & Michael Foley and Christian Steininger) in Gregory F. Lowe & Christian S. Nissen (Eds.). Small among Giants: Television Broadcasting in Smaller Countries. Göteborg, Sweden: Nordicom, 2011.
• Mediated Society: A Critical Sociology of Media (with Greg Nielsen & Yon Hsu). Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• “Recognition & Mis-Recognition: Radio as Interlocutor – A Study of Second Generation Immigrant Use of Radio (With Michael Rosenberg). Centre for Broadcasting Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, 2004.
• “This Hour Has 22 Minutes: The Centre-Periphery Problematic and Gender Performance” (With Tammy Saxton & Donavan Rocher) Fréquence/Frequency, Nos. 11-12, 2004 (Pp.182-198)
• “Canadian Radio & Multiculturalism” Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Radio, London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2004. (Pp. 275-277)
• “The Public/Private Tension in Broadcasting: The Canadian Experience with Convergence” (With Mary Vipond) in Gregory Lowe & Taisto Hujanen (eds.), Broadcasting and Convergence: New Articulations of the Public Service Remit. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2003 (Pp. 69-82)
• “From Cultural Relativity to Multiculturalism: The CBC’s The Ways of Mankind Series, 1953. Fréquence/Frequency, Nos. 9-10, 2002 (Pp. 95-108)
• “Production, Preservation and Access: The Struggle to Retain Audio-Visual Archives” Canadian Journal of Communications, Vol. 26; Nos. 2 & 3; 2001 (Pp.285-293)
• "Broadcasting: Centralization, Regionalization and Canadian Identity" Pp. 80-90 in Craig McKie & Benjamin Singer (eds.),Communications in Canadian Society. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishers, Inc., 2001.

Mary Vipond taught in the Department of History from 1970 to 2008, retiring as Professor Emeritus. She has studied Canadian broadcasting history since the early 1980s and is the author of The Mass Media in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer, 4^th ed. 2012) and Listening In: The First Decade of Canadian Broadcasting (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), as well as many articles on radio history in the 1920s and 1930s.

Her most recent publications are:

• “What’s a New Public Broadcaster to Do?: The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission’s Programs in Transnational Context, 1932-1936,” Journal of Radio and Audio Media, 20, 2 (2013), 295-310
• “A Life in History: Nationalism and Communication,” Canadian Historical Review, 98, 3 (2017), 568-90. She is currently completing a SSHRC-funded project on propaganda on the CBC during World War II.