Some Canadian media companies reported earnings this week, but everyone's eyes were on my parent company Canwest. And by "everyone" I mean "The Globe and Mail, the CBC and the Toronto Star", and by "eyes" I mean "daggers of hate".
Canwest's earnings report showed some bad numbers, made worse by both the current economic situation (which doesn't look highly upon companies with a lot of debt) and the newspaper crisis. There are suggestions that the company might have problems making its debt payments and may be forced to sell assets, though upper management is forever optimistic (at least in its intracorporate literature). A bright spot apparently is that the National Post showed a profit for the first time, making the free-market economists they have as columnists seem slightly less hypocritical.
Unsurprisingly, the Globe had fun at Canwest's expense, with a couple of pieces lamenting the company's impending doom.
January 15, 2009 – 3:59 am
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Posted in Media
The Association québécoise des télédiffuseurs et radiodiffuseurs, which represents private French-language broadcasters in Quebec (namely, TVA, TQS, Astral, Corus, RDS, Radio-Nord and MétéoMédia), has pulled out of the Quebec Press Council en masse.
Their reasoning: They're already forced to belong to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, so it's a waste of money to belong to two organizations that dictate how they should run their news affairs.
The Council has decided not to fight the matter, but it puts the group in an odd position when it comes to complaints about these broadcasters (and certainly TVA will come up often as it still does news). They could still hold hearings about them, but the broadcasters aren't going to cooperate, nor are they going to listen to the Council's decisions, as toothless as they already are.
UPDATE: The Council responds with an open letter which is, frankly, unconvincing. See also a post about this at Les 7 du Québec.
ProjetJ has an audio interview with Thérèse David, former TQS VP and journalism professor, who defends the press council.
UPDATE (Jan. 23): ProjetJ interviews Corus to get their take on the matter.
January 15, 2009 – 2:56 am
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Posted in Media
It's nice to not have any competition anymore, because that means you can bring the axe down on your staff and reduce the quality of your product, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
January 14, 2009 – 2:08 am
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Posted in TV, Video
CFCF's Rob Lurie, at his most smokalicious
A smorgasbord of government organizations and nonprofits is sponsoring Quebec's anti-smoking week next week, and part of the campaign features videos with TV personalities giving heart-felt thank-yous to loved ones who helped them quit smoking, while sitting on the floor of the same living room. Each video ends with "je t'aime" (or "I love you") in a serious, look-you-in-the-eyes way that seems to walk the line between tear-inducing and creepy (though maybe I'm overly sensitive in this regard).
Included in that list is token anglo CFCF's Rob Lurie (above), TVA's Dominic Arpin (who writes a blog post about the experience shooting this piece), RDS's Pierre Houde and Jacques Demers, and a bunch of other people equally split between the media partners (they even got the two guys left at TQS).
Kidding aside, they're pretty gut-wrenching videos, designed to make people uncomfortable and get them to talk to their parents, kids, siblings, spouses and other loved ones about quitting smoking.
The Chicago Tribune, apparently keenly aware of the current newspaper economic crisis, has decided to print two versions of its paper: a broadsheet version for home delivery and a tabloid version for newsstands. Both will have the same content, just formatted differently.
Does this sound excessively stupid to anyone else? They're going to have to use valuable resources to edit and layout two newspapers (and unless they've outsourced it to India, this is an expensive proposition), with editors doing two sets of layouts with different headlines, photos, captions and story lengths.
The Tribune says it has no plans to force home subscribers to switch to tabloid, but I can't imagine one of the two not being forced to close and replaced with the other down the road to save costs.
January 13, 2009 – 3:06 pm
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Posted in Media
After writing what is essentially an obit of its former printing plant, Le Devoir looks to the future, and lists some improvements that are coming with is new Quebecor-owned presses. Many of them are the opposite of what you'd expect from a newspaper in this economy:
- First edition deadline is now 10:30pm instead of 8:30pm, allowing the paper to have election results, sports results (including most Canadiens games) and concert reviews in the paper the next day.
- A larger paper (though this part is a bit vague) "en haute saison"
- An increase in the point size of text
- More use of full-colour inside the paper
- Weekly Agenda section printed using a heat set process, which means the ink won't rub off on your hands
- Reduction in the top and bottom margins, meaning the paper will be 4cm shorter without losing any content
I'm on a mailing list for job postings related to editing, you know, for when that six-figure executive position comes up with the corporate jet. I just haven't bothered unsubscribing.
Even though I'm not looking for a job, I read the emails out of curiosity.
One I've seen a few times is from a trade magazine publisher. Trade magazines are usually high-budget affairs because they're sent to highly-paid professionals and a lot of money is spent on advertising and otherwise communicating things between people in this industry.
The position is a "junior editor", who is responsible for editing and proofreading, assigning material to freelancers, deciding on editorial coverage, "managing multiple projects simultaneously" and working on the design.
Doesn't sound particularly "junior" to me, but maybe some of those things are exaggerated.
The position requires a B.A. in communications (or equivalent) and professional editing skills. Knowledge of Quark Xpress and bilingualism are listed as "assets"
It's entry-level, but professional.
The starting salary? $13/hour
And yet for some reason I keep seeing this position posted every month or two. It's almost as if the salary is so insultingly low that the people who apply are all horrendously unqualified.
Sadder still, I'm sure you can come up with even worse examples.
Every year, the Canadian Newspaper Association coordinates a "freedom of information audit" by getting its members to anonymously issue standard freedom-of-information requests to local government agencies and report the results.
Journalists employ FOI requests on a regular basis (and usually slap an "EXCLUSIVE" label on whatever juicy stuff the government agency has helpfully compiled for them). The difference here is that the audit's test pretend to be from average citizens, who may be less (or more) likely to get information from the government in line with the law.
The fourth annual audit, which was featured in an article in The Gazette on Saturday and the Journal on Sunday, focuses, naturally, on all the ones that caused problems instead of the ones that were answered quickly and painlessly. Among the main highlights is the CBC's refusal to give information on the salaries of its top employees.
The audit ranks individual cities, provinces and federal institutions. The City of Saskatoon and the Province of Saskatchewan had the highest marks, while the lowest, an F, went to Quebec City. Montreal and Quebec were in the middle.
The Gazette describes Montreal's performance as mediocre, with none of the requests being released in full without fee. Two of them the City said there were no records to offer. One of them was denied in full. The remaining two cases (one for the city and the other Montreal Police) requested fees for the information. The police wanted $662.50 to compile reports of incidents involving Tasers.
