programs, including former CBC Radio staple Double Exposure. Vancouver Breakfast, hosted by Aamer Haleem, Linda Freeman, and radio DJ Ted Schredd, featured a set adorned with chairs and props shaped like strawberries, bacon, and eggs; Alex Strachan of The Vancouver Sun called it "an alarm clock that wouldn't stop ringing". The 6 p.m. Vancouver Live was co-anchored by former MuchMusic VJ Monika Deol. Baton was making other moves highly pertinent to CIVT's future outside of Vancouver. In 1997, Baton bought Electrohome's broadcasting assets in August, a month before CIVT went on air, in exchange for a 23-percent voting interest. In October, it executed an asset swap with CHUM by which two Ontario stations were sold in exchange for CHUM's CTV-aligned operation in the Maritimes. These deals gave Baton controlling interest in CTV, which had once been structured on a cooperative basis. To complete its ownership, Baton spent $42 million to purchase the CTV shares held by WIC and Moffat Communications, owner of the CTV affiliate in Winnipeg; in 1998, the company renamed itself CTV Inc. BCTV held a continuing affiliation agreement with the CTV network through August 1999, and its CEO promised no near-term changes to the station. Baton's deals had an impact from the start on VTV. Daryl Duke, an influential Vancouver film director who had previously founded CKVU in 1976 and who had backed the Baton–Electrohome bid because he felt it granted the most local control of any of the five original proposals, resigned in October, claiming the station's advisory board was a legal fiction due to changes in company composition and that he was a "director of hot air". He was joined by another member, Simon Fraser University faculty member Catherine Murray, in resigning. A year on from the launch, analysis of VTV's first year in operation was mixed. Murray criticized VTV as a clone of Citytv where original Canadian shows were consigned to "schedule ghettos" in less-viewed dayparts, and a disillusioned Duke noted that "everything they do locally is noisy pursuit of raucous trivia". Overall station ratings showed little movement from the audience VTV drew at its launch. However, other programs were receiving praise. Despite ratings that trailed even the CBC, a longtime laggard for the Vancouver news audience, Vancouver Live at 6 was named Canada's best newscast by the Radio-Television News Directors Association, and the twelve Gemini Awards nominations for VTV programs exceeded the combined