Wednesday, 3 July 2019

Italian Programming on OMNI in Thunder Bay Appears to Have Suddenly Returned

Last week, I posted about how the noon-day Italian newscasts on the OMNI channel on Shaw cable in Thunder Bay had disappeared.   There used to be both a RAI broadcast from Italy as well as the OMNI network's Italian language newscast which covered Toronto, Canadian and international news including Italian items.  This appeared to have been a somewhat arbitrary change given the size of the Italian community in Thunder Bay.  I contacted OMNI via their contact page, I put a link to my blog post on my LinkedIn account and even forwarded a copy of my post to Corriere Canadese, Canada's Italian language newspaper all in the hopes of attracting some attention.  I did hear back from Corriere Canadese and they expressed interest in the story but until today have yet to hear anything back from OMNI.  However, flipping through my channels this morning,  I noticed that all of a sudden, the noon-hour Italian newscast was back followed by a half hour Italian cooking show. 

So it looks like I can go back to my practice of PVRing the OMNI Italian newscast out of Toronto for viewing in the evening in order to keep up my Italian as well as get a different perspective on the world news.  It would be nice to have the other RAI newscast return too but hey, I suppose sometimes we have to take what we can get.  Not sure what got things moving.  Have not heard back from OMNI directly so hard to know.  Perhaps it was contacting the Italian media community via Corriere Canadese that got things moving or the contacts on the LinkedIn network. In any event, thank you to whoever helped to get things moving.  Hopefully, the Italian content is here to stay.