If Strategy 2020 takes hold, the CBC will probably have to figure out how to package the range of its reporting for Snapchat, as news outlets like the BBC and CNN have done already. But by the time you read this, the audience may have moved on to a newer, flashier platform—Instagram Stories, say—and Fenlon and his team will be scrambling to get their heads around the next fad. “We’re building the car while we’re driving it,” he says, “and it may turn out to be an airplane.”

That’s fine. One expects a public broadcaster to pay attention to currents and tides. But rather than excitement about new technology, there’s a very different feeling in this building: anxiety. The new corporate strategy proposes a future in which everyone is on digital, consuming their news and entertainment on devices. But what if it’s wrong? You only have to look at the Toronto Star’s experiment with creating a tablet edition of its newspaper to see how the rush to digital can end up being a colossal, expensive, and embarrassing disaster. Launched in 2015 and aggressively marketed, Star Touch was shuttered this year because of low readership. It was a 20 million dollar miscalculation that ended up costing roughly seventy people their jobs.

Walking on the second floor between colour-coded elevators, I see a picture in an office window, held in place by closed Venetian blinds. It’s like some kind of talisman of the past—a faded publicity shot of comedy duo Wayne and Shuster. I am not a fan of nostalgia: glory days usually prove never to have existed. But the picture’s presence seems rebellious, because these tuxedoed cornball geniuses—who got their first CBC show in 1946 and were off the air by 1989—don’t fit into an evolving image of a forward-looking, plugged-in, hip CBC.

Since its founding in 1936, the CBC has routinely been accused of stodginess. But as the broadcaster adapts to changing media conditions and grows more elaborate, it harbours ambitions that threaten to outstrip its own ability to define itself. Jeffrey Dvorkin, once a managing editor of CBC Radio News and now head of the journalism program at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, puts it this way: “When media organizations lose sight of their purpose, they embrace technology without really understanding what it is.”

In the CBC’s past, we find examples of excellence in which new or emerging technology barely figured: Morningside, This Hour Has Seven Days, The Great Eastern, and, more recently, WireTap. These shows were about writing, performance, the vagaries and complexities of human communication—not electronics. It’s a legacy the broadcaster ignores at its peril.

Heather Conway, the CBC’s executive vice-president on the English side, has a modest office on the seventh floor of the corporation’s Toronto headquarters. I wait for her in an open carpeted space the size of a basketball court. It’s empty but for two black vinyl couches pushed close together as if marking a spot on the carpet where one might build a fire for warmth. The space is undergoing renovation as the CBC shrinks its footprint in the building and rents out office space it no longer needs. The mood is ghostly: human beings used to work here, before the downsizing and reconfiguring—all the euphemisms for people losing their jobs.

It’s important to note that despite the CBC’s cutback targets—it aims to shed 1,150 full-time positions by 2020—it also plans to hire 300 new employees “in the next years” to improve the company’s digital skills. Whether that will mean more coders, more interactive journalists, or more thought leaders who would help shape the company’s ultramodern ethos remains unclear. What Strategy 2020 does make clear is that the CBC wants its creative people to think, a lot, and often, about smartphones and what to put on them. To drive home the point, TVs hang near most elevators in the building, showing the latest Chartbeat metrics on how Canadians are usingcbc.ca: 57,852 concurrent visitors at 11 o’clock in the morning, growing to 60,832 an hour later. Is this good? It’s just metadata, but the effect is of watching koi in a pond, seeing where they feed, for how long, and in what parts of the information pool.

A story about the Trans Mountain pipeline, for example, has 1,251 views. But the top story on the CBC, with 4,109 views, is about a Kingston landlord upset that his tenants have been keeping livestock in their apartment: a goat, rabbits, chickens, “definitely” quails, according to the landlord. The reasons one story has four times as many clicks as the other are not all that complicated. One story advances your understanding of political and economic forces in Canada. The other you can practically smell, and is more likely to show up on your Facebook timeline.

The question is: Which of those two stories represents the future of the CBC? It’s the classic clickbait dilemma. Do you draw people in using cat videos, then hit them with the hard journalism they need? But the strategy is flawed. You end up with a news service that’s all over the map, trying hard to be liked. When I talk to Fenlon about metrics, he says, “It’s healthy and good to do a gut check with what we think is important and how that’s playing with the audience, but it’s just one of many factors.” Which is to say that, in the newsroom, an editor’s instinct about news value will be informed, but not determined, by numbers. Still, by the elevator, there’s the insistent statistical hum that tells a programmer what people really want—and it’s not pipelines. Who doesn’t want to give people what they want? Especially if you’re looking to round up 18 million of them by 2020.

“People’s viewing habits are shifting away from scheduled content to on-demand content,” Heather Conway tells me. “In radio, they’re shifting from linear listening in the car or home to streaming.” She holds up her smartphone. “I have one of these,” she says. “Most Canadians have one, too, and they check them all day long. And one of their favourite things to check is CBC. So by the time you get to the supper hour, you actually know the news. What you’re interested in is what’s next.”

For programmers at the CBC, the message is simple: Think about digital. All. The. Time. But making radio and TV with that in mind is more challenging. A radio producer I know there tells me that, so far, she’s had little guidance about how to, as she puts it, “up the digital game.” The company should appeal to younger listeners, one manager told her. That same manager said, vis-à-vis the vision thing, that in five years people will be using driverless cars, so the CBC needs to think about creating programming for people who are in cars but don’t have to focus on driving. “I have honestly tried to understand our mission or mandate,” she says, “but the message from management has been vague and confusing.”

All she knows, she says, is that every Friday, she gets an email announcing the top digital stories for their division (often the quirky ones), and that everyone wants to be mentioned in this report and are gutted if they’re not. “Our numbers suck,” she says of the radio show she works on. “So a group of us tried to figure out how to better market our show. We’re not marketing experts, but no one else is doing it for us.” They hashed out ways to make Twitter more effective in boosting their numbers. But, she asks, “Are we even making radio anymore?”

Those concerns sounded familiar. I heard similar things in 1992, when I started as a radio producer. At that time, the corporation’s president was Gérard Veilleux. His idea, which he had cooked up with pen and paper on a Canadian Airlines flight from Edmonton to Ottawa the year before, was eventually dubbed “repositioning.” At the time, the television audience was shrinking, and the fear was that things would only get worse thanks to satellites—nicknamed “death stars”—which could broadcast hundreds of specialty channels for every taste, leaving general-interest networks like the CBC in the dust. New technology called for change, so Veilleux and his senior programmers dreamed up a branding exercise that, they said, would win back viewers by reminding them of how distinctive and vital the CBC was.