More on Space Ignoring the Auroras

A small update in the story of Space skipping the Aurora Awards…

As mentioned in an earlier post, the Space channel (Canada’s science fiction and fantasy-oriented cable TV channel – much like SciFi in the US) not only failed to attend the Aurora Awards ceremony at VCon32/Canvention27 in Greater Vancouver this past Sunday, but has also failed to post the award results on its website in the days since. Space claims its SF entertainment news show Hypaspace is supposed to be on top of the interesting stuff in the genre. Clearly they have dropped the ball, as the Auroras are Canada’s top awards for SF and some internationally-respected authors (see the list in the previous posting with the award results) are among the winners.

Last night, after emailing my letter of concern, I received the following autoreply from Space:


Greetings from SPACE!Thank you for your interest in our station and for taking the time to write to us. We regret that due to the large volume of emails and calls we regularly experience, we may not be able to respond to your message personally. Be assured that your comments, queries and suggestions are taken seriously and individually reviewed.IF YOU ARE INQUIRING ABOUT THE REMASTERED STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES EPISODES:SPACE does not currently have the rights to air these particular episodes, but it is something that we are definitely looking into for the future.Please note that we have a daily listings page that should answer many of your programming questions: http://www.spacecast.com/tvschedule.aspx---------------------------------------------------------------------------------If your inquiry was answered above, you will not receive a response to your e-mail.Once again, thanks for your input and for tuning into SPACE.


My initial reaction was skepticism. I doubted there would be any real response to my note.

Today, the following email was sent to me:


Thank you for your e-mail. Your comments will be forwarded to the appropriate parties.

Regards,
SPACE Communications


It would appear that a real human being has actually looked at my complaint. I’m kinda surprised.

Now the question remains whether I’ll get a real answer from someone actually involved in the decision-making process either explaining why Space made this error, or attempting to cover up their blunder, or apologizing for it and detailing whether they’re going to rectify it. And I’m curious as to whether they’ll bother to shoot a story to include in this weekend’s Hypaspace news package (which raises its own question: will they have to purchase footage from a fan who was there, or will they do a quick read-only story, or play pick-up by reading the results and then cutting to a hastily-arranged interview of one of the winners, which would have to have been shot either today or tomorrow).

One thing is certain, at the time of this blog entry, Space has still not posted the Aurora results to the Hypaspace page of its website! How they can fail to get the info up when it takes mere minutes to update a web page is beyond me. So much for covering what’s important in SF.

More updates as they come in.