Monthly Archives: March 2009

A few extra million

March 14, 2009 – 3:24 am| Posted in Business, Media

Some good news for my benevolent corporate overlords on Thursday as it announced that it has gotten $34 million as part of a settlement agreement with the Chicago Sun-Times concerning some unfinished business related to the sale of the Hollinger chain (including the Gazette) to Canwest in 2000. Sure, that money could be used to pay off debt, but I'm thinking it should be invested in bonuses to a low-level employee who could really use it. *cough*

Speaking of the Sun-Times, its management has abandoned a plan to outsource copy editing and layout outside the country, after rumours circulated that they would fire 30 workers and have an unnamed firm in Canada or India take up the work. Had they gone with Canada, the work would have probably been taken up by Canwest Editorial Services, a company in Hamilton that does work for Canwest papers as well as many clients worldwide.

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Creamer

March 13, 2009 – 3:12 pm| Posted in Opinion, TV, Video

Comedy Central blackout

For those who haven't seen it yet, the full interview between Jon Stewart and CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer has been posted to the Comedy Network website. The Daily Show invites us to go to their thedailyshow.com website, but because of a stupid deal between Comedy Central and CTV's Comedy Network, any time someone in the U.S. links to a Comedy Central clip, you're shown the message above and are forced to find the video - from scratch - on the Comedy Network website (assuming the clip even exists on it).

I'll spare you analysis of the interview, since apparently there is no shortage of journalists who have nothing better to do than talk about what was on television the night before. Unfortunately, while plenty of pundits are liberally quoting the interview, judging Cramer's body language or talking about how much of a hit it is on YouTube, there isn't much talk about what this means for CNBC. The inevitable comparisons to Stewart's appearance on CNN's Crossfire in 2004 have already been made. Since Crossfire was cancelled months after Stewart's appearance (and CNN has since moved more toward polite analysis from partisan hacks instead of shouting debate), the reasonable question to ask is whether CNBC will also undergo a radical shift as a result of this public depantsing.

Just pulling this out of my ass here, but I'm guessing there will be some changes to CNBC's tone, with more confrontational interviews with corporate CEOs, more skepticism of Wall Street companies and get-rich-quick schemes. (Of course, these will be more the result of the market collapse than Stewart's prodding.) But Mad Money isn't going anywhere. Jim Cramer isn't suddenly going to drop his sound effects and start doing more reasoned analysis. And anyone who thinks that it will be doing a lot more serious investigative business reporting in the long term is kidding themselves. It's hard, and there's no money in it.

And if any cable network understands the profits that can come from getting high ratings as cheaply as possible, it's CNBC.

UPDATE: Bill Brioux has the Canadian ratings numbers for the show on The Comedy Network and CTV.

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Dialing, dialing, dialing: It’s like this thing

March 13, 2009 – 12:00 pm| Posted in Fun, Humour, Video

The lines are now open for the St. Patrick's Day Drunk Dial (1-888-734-1285), where your flawless inebriated logic can be archived and publicized forever. (via dups.ca, which also has the story behind the project)

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Virgin Radio branding hasn’t helped CJFM’s ratings

March 13, 2009 – 2:18 am| Posted in Radio

Virgin 96

Though everyone at what used to be Mix 96 was really excited about owner Astral Media stripping out their (admittedly lame and generic) branding to replace it with one they bought form the British, ratings figures since CJFM's new brand launch in January have shown little change for the station.

BBM figures for Dec. 1 to March 1 (PDF) using their new fancy-shmancy portable people meters show it has 16% of the anglo Montreal market, putting it behind powerhouse CJAD but ahead of its direct competition. Over the past few years, CJFM's share of the anglo market has drifted between 13% and 20%. There was a slight uptick compared to figures from before the relaunch, resulting in about 8,000 more daily listeners, or an increase of about 1%. But that's still well within the usual margin for error in radio ratings.

If Astral expected an audience jump from the change, it didn't get one. But there wasn't a widespread abandonment of the station either. When it comes down to it, people don't care about the branding, so long as the music is the same.

For the French side of the recent radio ratings, Le Devoir has the numbers.

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Those who can’t, research: Concordia MA in journalism studies

March 12, 2009 – 9:55 pm| Posted in Media

Concordia University is launching a two-year graduate program in journalism studies for fall 2009, and is currently accepting applications. Unlike its one-year graduate diploma, the MA program isn't designed for students interested in pursuing a journalism career, but academics and mid-career journalists looking to research about journalism itself, and complete a research project (perhaps to find a business model that will bring back those 30% margins?).

Applications are due by April 30 (April 10 if you want to apply for scholarships)

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H&R Block tries social media marketing

March 12, 2009 – 1:22 am| Posted in Business, Montreal, Public transit, Video

The big wigs at H&R Block have apparently heard that social media marketing is the new thing, so they've apparently hired some kids to shoot videos of themselves going places as part of a campaign called "Refund Road Trip"

The one-minute "webisodes" (20 seconds of which are text intros, teasers or ads for H&R Block) are on their website at RefundRoadTrip.ca and on YouTube, where they've gotten a massive modest pathetic view count ranging from 348 views to three views (plus about 800 for the trailer).

On the website, visitors are encouraged to enter a contest (for a whopping $5,000!) where they put together maps of their proposed road trips, where they do the responsible thing and blow their hard-earned money playing tourist.

To me it seems kind of silly in this recession environment to be encouraging people to spend tax refund money on unnecessary trips instead of retirement savings or paying down debt, but those things just aren't as fun as taking an RV and going across the country.

I mention this (and sadly give H&R free publicity) because the Refund Road Trip makes a stop in Montreal. The videos of the Montreal portion of the trip start at Episode 24 (which is on YouTube but hasn't been posted to the H&R website yet).

After that you can see the fun of hauling luggage up stairs, putting on makeup and walking around taking pictures.

My favourite though is Episode 27, in which "Cassidy" (who knows/cares if that's his real name) walks out of an apartment next to Café Chaos on St. Denis and somehow ends up on an OC Transpo bus holding a copy of Ottawa's 24 Hours daily before the sun comes up. That's some fast walking!

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Michel Vézina moves to Transcontinental

March 12, 2009 – 12:39 am| Posted in Media

Michel Vézina, the former ICI columnist who quit in January when he wouldn't sign a contract that would allow his work to be republished freely in other Quebecor publications (including the Journal de Montréal), has resurfaced at Transcontinental, where he will be writing about the arts for MontrealExpress.ca and the various Transcontinental-owned community weeklies.

I'll note the irony that he will now be writing what is essentially a syndicated column after having objected to syndication.

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Journal Daily Digest: Boycott 24 heures?

March 11, 2009 – 11:58 pm| Posted in Media

Youssef Shoufan, the guy behind this video about Journal de Montréal workers, has suggested through his blog and a Facebook group that Montrealers boycott Quebecor's 24 Heures free newspaper in protest of its alleged bias in favour of Quebecor companies like TVA and Videotron.

It's very unlikely such a move is going to make any difference, for the simple reason that people who care about the state of the news industry don't read the free papers, and the vast majority who don't care about media convergence won't give this a second thought and will go on reading the newspapers boycott or no. You can't threaten to cancel your subscription to 24 Heures.

Meanwhile, at the Journal, there's little going on. Le Devoir had a piece from Paul Cauchon on Monday summarizing the stalemate, and focusing on all the anti-Quebecor articles that have appeared on RueFrontenac.com now that journalists have the freedom to say what they really think about their corporate overlords.

And at the little brother Le Réveil, which was also locked out by Quebecor, advertisers are pulling out of the publication in solidarity with workers (so says the no-agenda-here RueFrontenac). Saguenay's mayor is under pressure to pull the city's $130,000 worth of advertising from the free paper.

Keeping the machin running

I'm starting to like this overly-enunciative fellow. (The original, for those missing context)

Elsewhere

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Rearranging the deck chairs on the media’s Titanic

March 11, 2009 – 6:58 pm| Posted in Business, Media

Some news today from Canadian media as they struggle to keep afloat:

Canwest still ticking

Canwest, which faced a huge debt-related deadline today, got another extension - this time to April 7. It also said it would not make a $30.4 million debt payment scheduled for Friday, taking advantage of a 30-day grace period before lenders start demanding all of their money back. The rest of the release includes a lot of news which sounds kind of good but I don't understand.

Everyone is understandably nervous about Canwest's future, including some independent television producers for Canwest's cable channels who have halted production and are holding their breath.

UPDATE (March 12): DBRS has responded to the delay by lowering Canwest's credit rating from CCC to C. Canwest Limited Partnership, which is the branch The Gazette falls under, is rated slightly higher because it has more manageable debt.

Quebecor pulls out of CP

The bigger news is that Quebecor, the huge media company that owns Sun Media and the Journal de Montréal/Québec, gave notice to Canadian Press that it plans to pull out of the news-sharing cooperative effective in June 2010 (CP requires a year's notice before membership is suspended - Sun Media could always change its mind, though that's probably unlikely). Sun Media is CP's largest member since Canwest pulled out of CP in 2007. Despite that and the "millions" of dollars that won't be paid each year, CP is downplaying the significance of the pullout, saying it is restructuring itself to become a for-profit operation, which will allow it to sell its services with more flexibility.

Since pulling out of CP, Canwest and its newspapers (including the Gazette) have relied on competing wire services including Reuters, Agence France-Presse, New York Times News Service and PA SportsTicker, in addition to beefing up its internal Canwest News Service by adding national and international bureaus. Sun Media has already started beefing up its parliamentary bureau in Ottawa and launched its Agence QMI wire service, which notably has been used to provide content for the locked-out Journal de Montréal.

Apparently the notice happened in December, but the news was leaked to the public through a memo to employees by Quebecor head Pierre-Karl Péladeau.

UPDATE: Steve Proulx notes that CP said as recently as a year ago that it was confident Quebecor wouldn't pull out.

Meanwhile

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Who’s got the video slam dunk?

March 11, 2009 – 12:43 am| Posted in Media, Video

So this kid Justin Darlington likes to dunk basketballs, and apparently he does it so well he's getting media attention just being in Montreal. So much in fact that two Montreal newspapers have created videos about him.

So judge for yourself: which of the following does the better job?

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