Here's an article on George that appeared in last Saturday's Globe
and Mail:

THE HAMPSON INTERVIEW: GEORGE STROUMBOULOPOULOS

This Hour has a nose ring

But don't call him the 'youth fix' for the CBC, he says. Nor
an 'alternative' broadcaster. 'I'm not going on TV with a 9-foot
Mohawk and a pierced scrotum'

By SARAH HAMPSON
Saturday, March 12, 2005 Page R3

'Things don't have to be black and white. Things don't have to be
perfect.
"Life is sloppy. Life is awkward. Life can be drums and guitars and
bass and vocals. Life can be female vocalists and it can be male
vocalists. Life can be all of these things. So can news."
Such is the aesthetic driving CBC News: The Hour, an hour-long show
hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos, launched in January on CBC
Newsworld, at 8 p.m. ET, Monday to Thursday.
The riff of explanation, delivered in one long breath at the end of
an interview, comes from Stroumboulopoulos, 32, the latest youth fix
for the network.
He doesn't like that suggestion, though. "I don't even think about
it. I don't care. The smart thing for them [CBC executives] to know
is that I'm not the youth fix."
Okay, but they're the ones who put out a press release to launch the
show, saying that it promised "to cut through the crap." Someone is
trying really hard to be hip when official language is street
vernacular.
Plus, there's the cautionary tale of Jian Ghomeshi, the former host
of Play and the last great hipster hope for the network, who's now
show-less, and a regular contributor on The Hour. "Well, I don't
think shows are supposed to be forever," Stroumboulopoulos says of
Ghomeshi's meteoric rise and fall. "[But] I think newscasts can
[be]," he quickly adds.
His show is clearly an experiment. Mostly, it's George and his big,
brown teddy-bear eyes and wildly gesticulating arms taking us
through a composition of newsy bits, from politics to sports to
entertainment and a few wild-card interviews thrown in for good
measure. In February, on one of several shows I watched, for
example, there was a video interview with an obscure scientist who
had developed some theory about wormholes that would allow us to go
from our own "soap bubble" of a universe to another. While he was
talking, the camera cut to Stroumboulopoulos holding his head in his
hands and every so often, mugging for the camera with dumbfounded
expressions. "Well, it's a kinda human story," he says now to
explain why he included it. "And the philosophical end of that
story, which I hope people would take from it, is hey, we're all
lonely, we're all happy, we're all sad, we're all hurting, we're all
everything. Wouldn't it be great to disappear [to another universe]?
Hey, there's a guy who says we can!"
That's news? The program is not about what happens so much as what
Stroumboulopoulos finds interesting and how he reacts to it. The
Hour is The World According to George. In that way, he's like our
version of CNN's news guide, Anderson Cooper, only with a nose ring,
two earrings, spiky, messed-up hair, and dressed in his uniform of a
T-shirt, jeans and white sneakers rather than a suit.
(Not that the former MuchMusic VJ thinks of himself as
an "alternative" broadcaster. "I'm not going on TV with a 9-foot
Mohawk and a pierced scrotum," Stroumboulopoulos says in the
straightforward manner that's become his trademark.) These new kind
of current-events shows use compelling personalities like search
engines on the Internet. The world is so small, with blips of every
event in every corner of the planet monitored on news radars, that
consumers of information need someone to tell them what's important,
cool and worthy of their splintered attention.
It helps if we like the guide with whom we're hitching a ride
through the universe, and Stoumboulopoulos is completely lovable.
(His long-time girlfriend, by the way, is Jasmine Tuffaha, a 27-year-
old television producer for the main CBC network.) His eyes are
great pools of feeling, and he reaches out to touch me so often that
I decide to leave my arms folded on the table between us, just to
make it easier for him.
"You never see a non-fiction representation of who you are," he says
to explain his show. "You see reality shows, which are directed by
producers who tell the [cast members] what to do. You see the
[regular] news, which is very sobering, a sort of here's what
happened today. You need all that. . . . But The Hour needed to be
everything that I am, everything that everybody is. It needed to be
serious, it needed to be comic." He sees his show as a "sidebar"
and "an adjunct" to the traditional news programs. "Our show only
works because it's beside The National [at 9 p.m. ET on Newsworld,
10 p.m. on the main network.] As a stand-alone, there's no point in
having a show like ours. You need the machine of the network behind
you." Peter Mansbridge, The National's staid anchorman, whom
Stroumboulopoulos contacted for advice on life inside the Corp once
he'd made the leap to CBC Newsworld, has called him "one of the
bright interpreters of the current generation."
The show is not marketed as a companion piece to The National and,
as Stroumboulopoulos himself says, "Nobody's loyal to a channel."
(Part of his charm is that in the throes of his passion about some
topic or other, he often contradicts himself.) Of its performance,
the broadcaster will only say that The Hour's audience numbers
are "on target." When asked how long he has been given to make the
show a success, Stroumboulopoulos says CBC Newsworld "gave us a
couple of seasons at it."
CBC has been trying to lure Stroumboulopoulos to the network for a
number of years. It first approached him in 2000, his rookie year on
TV, after he came to CITY-TV from radio, Toronto's 102.1 The Edge
via The Fan 590 AM.
Their offer of an " arts-based, entertainment-based show" and
other "anchor-driven things" didn't suit him, he says. "My strength
as a broadcaster is to be very natural. Put me in a construct, I
will look like a caged animal." He was happy at MuchMusic, where he
was host of The Punk Show, The New Music, LOUD and MuchNews. He was
bagging live interviews with U2's Bono at a Liberal leadership
convention and travelling to Zambia to co-host a documentary for
World AIDS Day.
CBC came knocking on his door again in the summer last year. "They
said, 'We have a show.' I said, 'What's the show?' They said, 'What
do you want it to be?' "
Stroumboulopoulos has had a steady rise through the Canadian media.
The elder of two children, he was born in Toronto and grew up in the
suburban Malton and Rexdale neighbourhoods. His father, who is a
Greek from Egypt, left the family when his only son was 7. They have
spoken only once or twice in 25 years, but, as Stroumboulopoulos
says, "I'm not having to write a concept album because I have a
problem with Daddy."
He was raised by his Ukrainian mother, who rented out rooms in her
house and took an early-morning paper route and an afternoon job as
a waitress to make ends meet. In later years, she graduated from
nursing school. At 14, Stroumboulopoulos found jobs after school and
on weekends, working at Mr. Sub, as an usher in a movie house and at
the airport, driving forklift trucks. He helped put himself through
Humber College's two-year radio broadcasting program.
Stroumboulopoulos is uninhibited, like a grown-up child who wants to
stick his fingers into everything that captures his fancy. When he
was younger, his family tried to shorten their surname to
Stroumbouls. He would have none of it. Early on, he hired a manager
in Los Angeles, Michael Sugar of Relativity Management,
because, "You need representation to have a career," he says. There
have been offers from the United States, which, so far, he's turned
down.
He owns a house near Queen and Bathurst -- "It's a son-of-an-
immigrant thing," he says. "You want to own land." He also owns a
BMW motorcycle, his fifth, since he began riding at 18, and an 11-
year-old secondhand BMW car. (As anyone who has been watching the
show knows, he's in the market for a hybrid car.) In his spare time,
he and some friends are making a documentary about Jesus, which they
hope to sell to networks around the world. He keeps his hand in
radio, as host of Budweiser Radio, a Canada-wide syndicated show
about new music, sponsored by the beer company.
"I want to have a catalogue of things to be proud of, so I can say I
did my part," he says. Would he compromise in his views of what he
wants to do? "If I was asked to do something I was uncomfortable
with, I would leave. I am not a lifer anywhere."