That Notre Dame Catholic Channel problem

Our friend dustin over at CatholicGuyShow.com posted a very well written piece this morning lamenting the intrusion of Notre Dame sports programming on the regular programming of The Catholic Channel. We couldn't agree more with his comments... Father Leo really got hosed when his new Advent show, Smoking Stirring The Pot, got unceremoniously bumped in favor of a basketball game. To the channel's credit, at least they aired it at 10:00pm ET after the game had ended. (And to Greg and Jennifer Willits' credit, it aired earlier today in place of the last two hours of their own show.)

But this brings up another problem that we've been pondering for some time: where's the promotion for shows like this? Sure, Lino, the Willits and some of the other hosts have been telling us that it was coming... but other than that, how do you find out about stuff like this? Maybe there have been commercials for the show on the channel... but we certainly haven't heard them. What about the Catholic Channel web site? Well, Edward Cardinal Egan's Advent-themed show is highlighted at the top of the page... but what about Father Leo's show? Nothing. Nada.

Well, maybe it's on the Programming Schedule page, you might think. So we looked... and what we found wasn't pretty. Not only was it not there, parts of the schedule grid were badly out of date. Daily Mass weekdays at 8:00am? Hasn't been that way since August... of last year. Weekend programming? With the two new shows airing during Advent, the schedule hasn't been changed one bit to reflect the inclusion of those shows. In fact, we tried to listen to the Sunday replay of The Catholic Guy Show because we were hoping to hear the parts of Wednesday's show that we missed because we were traveling for Thanksgiving. What did we hear at 4:00pm ET? The Busted Halo Show. A great show, but not what we were looking for.

This is just a symptom of a bigger problem: poor promotion of The Catholic Channel's seasonal shows... and to a lesser extent, their shows in general. During Christmas and Easter the Channel usually posts a page showing the schedule of programming for those days (Masses, music programs, etc.), but the schedules that were posted both last Easter and last Christmas had huge gaps where we couldn't figure out what was on the Channel at certain hours. What good is that? Why even bother airing anything if you can't figure out what's on at a certain time?

Also, there are two separate official sites for The Catholic Channel: one on Sirius.com (which www.thecatholicchannel.org redirects to), and one on XMRadio.com. The XM site is generally more descriptive... and its program schedule a bit more accurate... than on the Sirius site, but still doesn't reflect the two new Advent-themed shows and the moving around of other shows to accommodate them. C'mon, guys... how hard can it be to maintain one or both of these things on a regular basis so that it's accurate?

And don't get us started on some of the promos being broadcast on the Channel nowadays... Lino already took time on his show to lambast the current Fully Alive promo that's been broadcast for weeks without change. For goodness' sake, dig some old promos out of the archive and slap them on the Channel if you have to... just for the sake of keeping things fresh. Surely the Popcaks must have discussed some promo-worthy things on their show in recent days.

That's enough ranting for today about this... we'll see if anything changes if/when the Christmas programming schedule gets posted. But we're not counting on it. You'd think after four years of existence that The Catholic Channel would have stuff like this figured out by now.