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When CBC launched its first digital-only station in Hamilton on May 10, 2012, the service centred around a newly designed homepage featuring a large, customizable map of the city with linkable “pins” to stories and some widgets featuring traffic updates, “the latest from Twitter” and local blogs.

The big Hamilton stories of that first year in operation included the death and provincial state funeral of former Ontario lieutenant-governor Lincoln Alexander, McMaster University’s run for the Vanier Cup and a firestorm at city hall called “Peggygate.”

At some point, the map disappeared and the page reverted to a more traditional news website layout. But the small team of journalists based out of CBC’s James Street North office never lost their entrepreneurial spirit, chasing stories in service of a growing and vibrant community. 

Today, there are so many more Hamilton stories to tell. Our team, led by executive producer Eva Salinas, is busier than ever. 

Which is why this week is an important one for CBC Hamilton and the people we serve there. (And no, it’s not just because a who’s who of Canada’s music industry will descend on the city this week for JUNOfest and the weekend JUNO Awards ceremonies, for which CBC is the lead broadcast partner.)

Rather, it’s because we also announced an expansion of our local news service in Hamilton, in the form of a live audio morning show, available on HD radio and other digital platforms, and a weekly podcast to be added to the existing digital news offered by the station. CBC News will hire up to six new roles to support the added services, which will launch later this year. 

This investment in Hamilton is the latest initiative under the proximity pillar of CBC’s new five-year strategic plan, putting the national public broadcaster closer to where people live, while also preserving and improving on the diversity of trusted news sources that local communities can rely on.

We expect our new morning program will help showcase and elevate the excellent work done by our journalists already in the city as well as that of our colleagues at local news outlets like The Hamilton Spectator, CHCH News and community publications and periodicals.

In January, we announced our plans to hire an additional 33 local journalists and set up 11 new bureaus in communities where CBC has little or no presence, increasing our footprint from 66 to 77 locations. Many of the new positions are based in Central and Western Canada.

But we have not ignored the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA), a booming region with an estimated population of more than eight million people. Our local service expansion announced in January includes a planned eight-person bureau located in Peel to serve the region. We have also placed two reporters in St. Catharines to serve the Niagara region and two more in Oshawa to serve the Durham region.

Our future Hamilton HD radio weekday morning show will feature community interviews, news reports and survival information, including local traffic and weather updates. It will be available on HD Radio receivers (99.1-2), the CBC News app, the CBC Listen app and cbc.ca/hamilton. 

CBC Radio One listeners in the region will continue to be able to listen to Toronto’s Metro Morning on terrestrial radio and our other digital platforms.

CBC News’s local podcast slate will also grow with the new weekly podcast This Is Hamilton. Offering audiences an additional platform to stay connected to what’s happening in their community, This Is Hamilton will bring the total number of CBC News local podcasts across the country to 16, pending the imminent launch of This Is Kelowna and This Is Quebec.

You can learn more about the expansion of CBC News’s local service and the proximity pillar of our new strategic plan in this video.