Happy Canada Day, folks.
Pierre Trudel joins Fanatique.ca
A year after refusing an “insulting” contract renewal at CKAC and a month after his last column at La Presse, Pierre Trudel has joined Fanatique.ca as a star Habs blogger. His first post is a self-introduction. You can also read this old Journal piece to get an idea of who he is.
On his blog, he talks about the Habs and recounts rumours (though at least he describes them as such).
Fanatique.ca is owned by Branchez-Vous, and while not the most spectacular poaching in journalistic history (talk to me when you’ve convinced François Gagnon or Red Fisher to come on board), it is a step toward making BV a serious media outlet in the city.
Now that I’ve posted this, maybe Carl Charest will stop bothering me.
Shaw renegs on promise to save TV stations
Hey, remember a couple of months ago when Shaw said it would buy three endangered CTV-owned stations for $1 each in what seemed like the most insincere offer in the history of mankind?
Yeah, turns out it was a giant bluff. After going over the books for the three stations, Shaw determined that they are, indeed, losing quite a bit of money and it’s not worth the CRTC brownie points and good PR to sink more cash into the stations. CTV issued a brief statement Tuesday afternoon saying Shaw reneged. Media outlets have repeated the statement, but Shaw and CTV aren’t commenting further yet, and the stations can’t comment because they don’t know what’s going on.
This comes (coincidentally?) on the same day Canwest announced it will offload two stations onto Channel Zero.
So CKX-TV in Brandon, Man., CHWI-TV in Wheatley (Windsor), Ont., and CKNX-TV in Wingham, Ont., go back to being endangered and unless another buyer can be lined up they won’t last past the summer.
The optimism they had when the deal was announced now flies right out the window.
Channel Zero offers to buy CJNT Montreal, CHCH Hamilton
The press releases came out Tuesday afternoon and has been rewritten everywhere: CP, Presse Canadienne, Reuters, Financial Post, CBC, Hamilton Spectator, LesAffaires.com, Broadcaster Magazine.
Channel Zero (warning: website has sound you can’t turn off), which owns Silver Screen Classics and Movieola, but also AOV Adult Movie Channel, XXX Action Clips Channel and Maleflixxx Television (latter three are Wikipedia links), has agreed to purchase two of Canwest’s five E! stations, CJNT in Montreal and CHCH in Hamilton.
The sale, which is for an undisclosed price (but presumably better than the $1 a station that Shaw was offering in what apparently turned out to be a bluff) is contingent upon the usual CRTC rubber stamp, but also on Canwest wrestling a new deal out of unionized employees at CHCH that would switch from a defined-benefit pension plan to a defined-contribution pension plan eliminate the employee pension plan. (CJNT staff, a grand total of six, are not unionized.) According to my ears at CHCH, the station’s staff are excited by the offer (except for the pension thing) and of the prospect for producing more local news.
Channel Zero has an FAQ posted on its website which actually does a pretty good job answering the kinds of questions this would prompt from skeptics like me. (They promise not to air adult material on either station, though … would that be such a bad thing for CJNT?)
Programming
The plan for CHCH is to turn it into an all-news station during the day (5:30 am to 8 pm) with movies in the evening. This capitalizes on CHCH’s unusually high local programming requirement of 36.5 hours per week, which Channel Zero has promised to maintain (it says it wants to keep license terms “substantially similar”, which suggests some changes).
For CJNT, the plan is to air foreign-language movies and multicultural music videos. It’s not clear if that means there will be fewer of the foreign-language talk shows that currently air, or if the celebrity gossip and second-rate U.S. imports will be cut off.
And the rest?
Even if the deal goes through, and that’s a big if, the other three stations in the E! network, CHEK Victoria, CHBC Kelowna (B.C.) and CHCA Red Deer (Alta.) are still up in the air. Canwest has made it more clear that they won’t keep the stations running after this summer, and if they can’t find a buyer for them they’ll be shut down.
But will it work?
CHCH News has an analysis of the deal and an interview with Channel Zero’s Cal Millar, which both sound very positive. People say they want local news, and this company seems prepared to inject funding to create a new all-news station. But CHCH host Mark Hebscher insightfully compares this to Toronto One, which failed as a locally-focused station two years later became bottom-feeding Sun TV.
Call me a skeptic, but Channel Zero has zero experience in running conventional television stations and zero experience with local news. Taking on CHCH is a big challenge, and I think the company is being overly optimistic about its proposed business model, even with the cut to pension expenses. Two or three years down the road, we may very well see Channel Zero come back to the CRTC and ask for reductions in local programming requirements and other commitments as it starts bleeding money.
But, like CHCH employees and their union leaders, I hope I’m wrong.
Metro service extended for Stevie
The Montreal Jazz Fest kicks off Tuesday night with a giant free concert featuring Stevie Wonder at the new plaza across from Place des Arts. The concert, which starts at 9:30 p.m. with opening acts, is expected to run pretty late into the night, and the STM has decided to extend service on the green, orange and yellow metro lines by a half hour to accomodate traffic (in addition to adding more trains during the evening).
Final departures on the orange and green lines will be 1:05am instead of 12:35am, and final departures on the yellow line will be at 1:20am instead of 12:50am.
For those who haven’t taken the last metro before, the last trains of the orange and green lines wait for each other at Berri-UQAM and Lionel-Groulx to make sure people transferring don’t get stranded. The trains are scheduled so the last ones depart in all four directions from Berri-UQAM at 1:30am.
For those of you going to the concert, you’ll want to be on the platform at Place des Arts at 1:15am if you’re heading east, 1:25am if you’re heading west. If you’re taking the yellow line, try being there no later than 1am.
The STM also announced Monday a bunch of other stuff they’re doing with summer festivals, although most of it is in the form of cross-promotional discounts or free shuttles.
Montreal Geography Trivia No. 42
Here’s a riddle for you.
There are two streets in Montreal that share the same name (almost, one adds the word “du”), are about 12km from each other and both lie entirely north of Gouin Blvd. (though still on the island).
Their common name evokes forestry, though isn’t the name of any individual type of tree.
What are their names?
UPDATE: Five of you got this one right: Rue Bocage in Ahuntsic and Rue Du Bocage in Pierrefonds. Though extra points for those who noticed that there are two Rues Du Pont, in Ste. Geneviève and Ahuntsic. (The first, notably, doesn’t actually lead to a bridge.)
Don’t buy the Post today (you can’t)
The online-only National Post for Monday, June 29, 2009
Today is the first day of the National Post’s no-print Mondays announced in April and reiterated last week. For nine weeks, until the end of the summer, the paper won’t be printed on Mondays and its content will only appear in virtual form.
But the paper is still being edited and laid out as if printed on broadsheet paper. It has four sections (eight-page A section, four-page business, four-page arts/life and eight-page sports) and other than its size (and the fact that there’s colour on every page), it looks no different than any other edition of the print National Post.
Needless to say, this version of the paper is also very light on advertising, though there are some full-page ads that look as if they’re separate from the sections.
Take each other’s hand as we jump into streaming classic TV
Paul (Paul Reiser) and Jamie (Helen Hunt) finish ... uhh ... making lasagna, in the pilot of Mad About You.
Global TV’s website, which many people still don’t know streams videos of hit TV shows that the network has rights to (like House and 24) has opened up a “classics” section where you can see some selected episodes of some ancient TV series.
The complete list so far (links to Wikipedia articles for reference):
- Dawson’s Creek
- The Facts of Life
- Good Times
- Just Shoot Me!
- Mad About You
- Married… With Children
- Maude
- One Day at a Time
- Silver Spoons
- The Nanny
- Who’s the Boss?
Some of you might note that Mad About You, Just Shoot Me! and Married… With Children are staples of Canwest’s TVtropolis retro TV channel. The Facts of Life, Good Times, Maude and Who’s the Boss? are aired on Canwest’s Déjà View super-retro channel.
So far it’s just a smattering of about a dozen episodes from each of the series, but the collection will grow from there. The number of series will probably also expand as Canwest negotiates streaming rights for the shows out of the money they could be spending on bonuses for young sarcastic copy editors at their metro newspapers…
Finnerty’s gone – who will host Daybreak now?
Mike Finnerty giant ad outside Maison Radio-Canada, slightly torn to reveal ... another giant Mike Finnerty behind him.
In case you missed it, Friday was Mike Finnerty’s last day as host of Daybreak on CBC Radio One. Finnerty announced last month that he was leaving the CBC to move to London and take a job with the Guardian.
The theme of the final show (all links in this paragraph are streaming RealAudio format, which astonishingly it still uses) was what people will miss about Montreal (including lots of suggestions from listeners), since Finnerty is leaving the city. Finnerty also took the time to interview two CBC bosses, the big boss Hubert Lacroix, on the future of the public broadcaster, and local boss Patricia Pleszczynska on who would replace him as Daybreak host. Finally, he invited all the other CBC Montreal radio hosts to talk about what they’d miss about the city.
Despite hinting otherwise, there was no announcement of a new host. Pleszczynska said to “wait until September” while they evaluate the various candidates, many of whom we would expect would test-host the show over the summer.
You can listen to Finnerty’s final podcast here (MP3), which includes some original “live… to download” host banter and repeats the morning interviews. Or you can listen to my selections from Finnerty’s last Daybreak (MP3) from the over-the-air version.
Now it’s time to decide who will replace Mike in the anchor’s chair. I suggested a few names last month, but in the past few months during Finnerty’s vacations to London we’ve had a few guest anchors who might be candidates for the job. Links below are to the podcast versions of their shows in MP3 format, which isn’t a perfect way to evaluate how they do live on-air, but gives you an idea of their interview abilities and ability to socialize with the staff.
- Shawn Apel (currently Daybreak’s municipal affairs correspondent and resident philosopher): April 30, May 1
- Susan Campbell (currently the host of Quebec AM): May 18, May 19, May 20
- Brendan Kelly (currently an entertainment columnist for The Gazette and Daybreak): June 4, June 5
- Stephen Puddicombe: May 21, May 22
- Nancy Wood (currently a national reporter for CBC television from Montreal, and a former host of Radio Noon): May 4, May 5
Shawn Apel is the first temporary host to take over the Mike’s mic on Monday morning.
CJAD, CBC Montreal win RTNDA awards
The RTNDA (which used to stand for something but now doesn’t) has announced the winners of its annual broadcasting awards.
Two of them are from Montreal:
- Charlie Edwards Award (Spot News) – CJAD 800 for Montreal North Riots
- Sam Ross Award (Editorial/Commentary) – CBC News: Montreal for Daycare Fees
I also note that one winner is the A-Channel station in Windsor, which CTV decided to pull the plug on until Shaw came in to rescue it.
Fagstein’s 2009 Montreal construction map
Google Map of Montreal construction zones
As if underscoring how much spare time I have, I’ve tinkered over the past few weeks with some data that the city has put out about planned road construction this summer. A copy of the PDF listing the projects is on The Gazette’s site. They used it to create a searchable database of the projects, which intern Megan Martin introduced in Friday’s paper. My approach (which began before I knew my paper’s online department had a similar idea) was to just dump the data into Google Maps and see what kind of overall map emerged. It involved a lot of cutting and pasting and a lot of tweaking, but I just finished it now.
515 colour plan only adds confusion
As the city does work on Metcalfe St. that forces the 515 bus into a detour at its western terminus, the STM decided that they’d take another crack at solving the confusion problem that hits people (locals and tourists alike) when they want to take this bus: because it’s a circular route, there’s no East, no West, and no terminus. Both directions will bring you where you want to go eventually.
The solution? Colours!
Isn’t it obvious? The blue sign is for the bus that takes the clockwide route, toward Berri and then down to Old Montreal. The yellow sign is for the counter-clockwise route that goes through Old Montreal and then up to Berri. This is consistent with the schedules which have a yellow route and a blue route on them, unless they’re copied in black and white, in which case they only have one direction visible.
So now not only has the STM invented a new colour for the 515 (recycled from a failed experiment), they’ve invented another one too! A light blue that’s just different enough from the standard dark blue to be both confusingly similar and confusingly different.
Of course, this won’t solve the confusion inherent in the route’s design, and will just create more. This is the first time the STM is using colours on stop signs to indicate direction, and it’s a break from the standard. If transit users need anything, it’s a standard framework from which to understand how things run. This idea laughs in the face of that.
The STM should do as I suggested and drop the part of the route between Berri and Peel, which is redundant to not one but two metro lines (and the 150 and 15 buses) and therefore the least-used part of a little-used line. Then they can have proper East/West designations and the confusion will be gone.
Of course, what’s really going to piss people off is that in order to fit these two stops, the city had to remove 10 parking spaces along Peel (not that the bright red bags with no parking signs on them stopped drivers from parking there anyway, as you can see).
Vision’s Boulos goes independent
The fallout from the switcheroo at Vision Montreal is continuing. Less than a week after the party’s vice-president quit because she couldn’t support a sovereignist anti-borough leader, token anglo Karim Boulos has quit the party and decided to sit as an independent, leaving Ville-Marie borough mayor Benoît Labonté in a minority position on the borough council.
The move comes a couple of days after Boulos posted an item on his blog about how destructive party politics can be, based on a column from The Gazette’s Henry Aubin he read. Though he asked for comments, the post only got one, from me, asking if this means he’ll be sitting as an independent. I didn’t actually thin he’d just make the jump right there.
As important in his decision is that Boulos represents the Peter-McGill district (PDF), which includes all of the Ville-Marie borough west of University (in other words, both anglo universities, though not the McGill ghetto). With the splitting of the borough into a third electoral district, his turf becomes even more anglo than it was (it used to extend to St. Denis). And having a sovereignist former PQ minister leading your party isn’t sitting well with those constituents on Pine and Dr. Penfield.
His move also comes just over a week after he defended Vision leader Louise Harel on his blog, saying he’s still a federalist Liberal but they can work together on municipal matters.
Anglophone séparatissss
We’re doomed. (via Le Monde Selon Jay)
Scènes de l’Autre St-Jean
I biked to Parc le Pélican last night to see l’Autre St-Jean (yeah, that l’Autre St-Jean). I got there after the anglo acts, but early enough to take some pictures of the party and hear some songs from Malajube before I left.
Here are the best of my pics:
Bonne fête, Québec
Hey Québec, je comprends que c’est ta fête aujourd’hui.
Je voulais faire un long billet de tous les choses que j’aime de toi, mais là, c’est tellement beau dehors et le party commence bientôt. Et La Presse et The Gazette ont déjà fait des listes.
Alors, laissez-moi simplement dire que même si nous sommes pas toujours en accord, même avec les trous-de-cul jeunes patriotes qui me disent d’aller à Toronto, même avec la loi 101 et la politique du souveraineté qui termine jamais, le Québec c’est ma province, tout comme Montréal est ma ville et le Canada est mon pays.
En trois mots et demi, je t’aime, Québec.
Et pas juste parce que tes femmes sont ben hot.
Hey, si t’es libre ce soir venez chez moi et on prendra une bière. J’achètera une caisse de Molson Cana… euh, Labatt Bleue.
It’s coming
Expect more of this next weekend, and next Wednesday.
Don’t forget the apostrophe
The mythical flag of Anglophonia
You may not be aware of this, but there’s a scandal – no, a SCANDALE! – involving Gazette humour columnist Josh Freed.
I know what you’re thinking: Josh Freed is still alive? He still has a pulse? Someone’s still reading him?
Apparently so. He writes weekly on Saturdays on Page A2, usually about some issue of the week and relating it to how he can’t figure out his microwave. This past Saturday, he wrote about the Fête nationale craziness, and praised how it was francophones who lobbied to get two anglo bands reinstated for a concert tonight.
He also discusses Quebec’s flag:
Maybe we could find a new apolitical flag for Quebec’s national day that speaks to all modern Quebecers who live in our city. How about a fleur-de-lys in one corner, with a snowmobile, a jazz saxophone, and some Cirque de Soleil stilts in the others? Or what about a Bixi bike stuck in a snowbank? Our licence plate is another relic of the political past that could use a facelift. It says “Je me souviens” – or “I remember” – but what do I remember? It’s certainly not my own license plate number, which I keep forgetting as I get older. In fact, given Quebec’s aging boomer society, our license should probably say “J’oublie – I forget.” Or, “Ou sont mes clefs d’auto?” Maybe we could put something practical on the license plate – like a warning for the driver behind you: “LOOK OUT! POTHOLE AHEAD!”
It’s fairly clear here, or should be, that Freed is a satirist and isn’t actually seriously suggesting these things.
But apparently a sentence earlier in his story raised an eyebrow or two:
The dinosaurs of nationalism like the St. Jean organizers who tried to stop two local bands from singing in a foreign dialect called English – a move reminiscent of the old days of the Apostrophe SS.
Somehow, despite only printing about 150,000 copies, one of them was leaked to one of Montreal’s million or so francophones, who passed it on to Gilles Rhéaume. He’s now hopping mad and has filed a complaint with the Quebec Press Council (via Montreal City Weblog).
It was only on Sunday that someone thought to talk to Freed about it, and he took the time to explain to La Presse’s Patrick Lagacé what “Apostrophe SS” means. Yeah, it’s a Nazi reference, which are almost always crude, but it’s also decades old (he even uses it in referring to the past), and it’s a play on words (or, rather, letter). He’s even used it before.
Some francophones might not get it. Or they might take it too seriously. But, of course, Freed wrote this in The Gazette, and he wasn’t writing for a francophone audience.
Considering all that was lost in translation, perhaps one should be provided next time.
A footnote: I edited this piece on Friday night, and wrote the headline “Politics ruin the party”. Had I known it would get disseminated so much (and misunderstood), I might have tried for a more absurd, more memorable headline at least.
UPDATE (June 27): Freed uses his next column to explain himself. In a nutshell, the Apostrophe SS went all Nazi death-camp on apostrophe-S-es, not people.
After the street sale…
St. Laurent near Prince Arthur, midnight June 22.
… comes Garbage Day, apparently.
CFQR dumps Terry DiMonte
Less than two years after he moved to Calgary in the midst of a nasty contract dispute and took up a job that pays him more money than God, and less than a year after competitor Q92 decided to have him do a noon-hour show from Calgary, Terry DiMonte has once again been booted off Montreal radio.
DiMonte announced on Thursday that his show on CFQR would come to an end, by “mutual agreement.” His final show is Tuesday, June 23, from noon to 1pm, just before the Fête nationale holiday.
Unlike his very public spat with Astral Media’s Rob Braide and Bob Harris, which DiMonte described as “hurtful”, his departure from Q92-now-925-the-q is more an acceptance of an unsustainable situation, and he holds no acrimony toward the station or its owners. CFQR is, above all, a music station, and with its relaunch in April it became even more so. DiMonte’s voice time was cut to only about six minutes during the hour (other Q DJs were similarly cut to make room for more music), and he’s paid far too much to sit around and drink coffee for 20 minutes while he waits for his next two minutes on air. As he said on the air on Monday, “it doesn’t fit anymore.”
Even though his ratings were up in the last quarter, the price was still far too high. There are plenty of younger, cheaper, more local DJs that can be brought in to introduce Madonna and Marvin Gaye. According to someone intimately involved with a source with inside knowledge of a phone call between a highly-placed insider and the astrologer for a janitor with access to secret documents, DiMonte was told (graciously) on Thursday that budget cuts meant he had to be dumped. It was a day after he was congratulated for his ratings bump.
Asked about his departure, DiMonte had nothing but kind words for the station (which is owned by his current employer, Corus):
My time at Q was really nice. They were welcoming and supportive and Mario Cecchini and Mark Dickie are class acts. And it was an interesting and different challenge, talking to Montrealers from a studio in Calgary. That was fun. And it helped ease the pain of the bums rush I got from CHOM.
I asked him what he’ll be doing with all the extra time he has. He says he has lots of work to do as “a morning man trying to make a mark in a city of 1.2 million people and 18!! radio stations” and he doesn’t expect to be taking extra-long lunches.
It was a cute little experiment, but in the end DiMonte was overpriced and underworked, doing a job more suited to someone with less than half his experience. It was like hiring a race car driver in a limousine to deliver pizzas. It just didn’t make sense.
So DiMonte is once again off Montreal radio, at least until someone can match what he’s getting in Calgary and offer him serious money to come back. Considering the state of the media economy here, and the rather charred bridge between him and Astral Media (which owns CHOM, CJFM Mix 96 and CJAD), I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I’ve asked for comment from Brian DePoe, program director at CFQR, but he’s on vacation until after June 24. I’ll update this post if he has anything to add.
UPDATE: The last two minutes from his final show, in (slightly imperfect) Mp3.
