Our Rivière-du-Loup stations, CIMT and CKRT, cover a very large territory. We broadcast in Rivière-du-Loup, Charlevoix, and New Brunswick. We have teams on the ground just about everywhere. We hire young reporters. We are a regional training school, since several reporters who are now here in Ottawa worked in Rivière-du-Loup, as well as others elsewhere in the country. We have always hired passionate people.
In fact, the people who live in the regions need just as much quality information, produced with the necessary journalistic rigour. Since we are affiliated with networks like TVA and Radio-Canada, the journalistic standards are the same, whether we serve a small market or a large one. It is no different in the case of Rivière-du-Loup. The difference is that we cover large territories, sometimes with small news teams.
Over the past few years, we have continued to hire staff, despite a difficult economic context for the media. We have always been concerned with maintaining the quality of information, because people need to be informed, locally and regionally. In fact, local information is the basis of democracy. People want to know what is happening in their municipality, their school board, their hospitals. The decisions made impact them on a daily basis.
In the absence of local media such as our own, people would listen to national news. The locus of interest would thus be much further away. This is how we in the regions manage to reach people. In fact, they let us know daily. When we meet people on the ground, they thank us for talking to them about their area, because they want to know what is going on close to them. That is why it is important to provide greater assistance to regional stations like ours, so that we can maintain that information quality.
There have been a lot of technological changes these past years, and we have had to invest in high definition. Our station was one of the first ones in Quebec, after Montreal, to make that change. May I repeat that the people in the regions want to have a product that is of equal quality, as regards both the image and the information. There was also the whole digital change, with the advent of the Internet. People want to be informed quickly, and we have to maintain not only our local programming but also our websites, with the same number of journalists. We constantly add information to our sites, 24 hours a day. This means that we do more, but we do not have any more staff than before.