This week's trivia quiz is from Jean-François Villeneuve:
Where is this?
UPDATE: Craig Silverman gets the first right answer below. It's Beaubien, just east of Durocher in that area of Outremont between the tracks.
Quebec culture minister Christine St-Pierre announced at the FPJQ conference that she has ordered a study be done on the future of media in Quebec. Dominique Payette, a professor at Université Laval and former journalist for Radio-Canada, has been put in charge of this study.
The scope seems to be pretty large, and could touch on everything from whether newspapers should be subsidized to whether the government should fund a news department at Télé-Québec. (My knee-jerk reaction to both would be "no".)
Although the situation in Quebec media is different from the rest of the world (some would say we're behind the times, which is a plus for newspapers and television networks), I don't know if it's so different that a study like this will bring any new insight into this debate that has already been over-analyzed by self-proclaimed experts all over the world.
More information at Le Devoir, Agence France-Presse (!) and Projet J, which has an interview with St-Pierre.
Murray Sherriffs
Proving once again that when you leave Corus, you join Astral, and when you leave Astral, you join Corus*, Murray Sherriffs, the popular morning man on Mix 96, who was canned from the station when it rebranded as Virgin Radio in January, will return Monday as the morning news anchor on CFQR 92.5 the Q (formerly Q92). (via RadioInMontreal)
Sherriffs's departure caused a lot of negative reaction from listeners, who saw it as the biggest mistake of the rebranding.
Sherriffs will join morning host Aaron Rand, who has been riding solo since fellow hosts Paul "Tasso" Zakaib and Suzanne Desautels were ditched in August. Another move that caused a lot of protest from listeners.
Also joining the team is fellow Astral castoff Sarah Bartok, whose previous job was at Astral's CISL AM 650 in Vancouver. She'll be the traffic reporter. She replaces Shaun McMahon, who moves from traffic to show producer.
The last big reveal of the conference of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec, the election of president and board members, happened today, and it was mostly a victory for Martin Bisaillon and his pro-union group, even though Bisaillon himself pulled out of the race after the OMGSCANDAL.
These people will join vice-president Richard Bousquet (Rue Frontenac) and secretary-treasurer Philippe Schnobb (Radio-Canada) on the board. If we look at it from a straight party perspective, the unionists have two of five seats on the board and the presidency. Hardly a majority, but will this send a bad message to managers and media bosses in Quebec that the FPJQ is moving toward taking sides (even if they say the point is not to do so)?
Elias Makos, who used to work in the Expos' marketing department before the franchise moved in 2004, moderated a panel at the recent sports journalism workshop at Concordia University looking at Montreal's major-league baseball team.
And, fortunately for us, his work teaching Concordia students to handle video has come in handy here, and the entire hour-long discussion is available on YouTube:
It has more to do with the Expos and sports business than journalism, but it's still a fascinating look at what went wrong with this franchise from people who know.
The panel includes:
Jack Todd, of course, also has some thoughts on the matter, which he shared in a column. His talk at the conference is recorded audio-only here, though there's a lot of noise.
Once again, journalists gathered together this weekend to pat each other on the back, handing out awards to honour the best of Quebec journalism over the past year.
And, as usual, La Presse and Radio-Canada were the big winners, and aren't shy about showing it: La Presse, Radio-Canada. But Gesca's Le Soleil and La Voix de l'Est also picked up awards, as did the Journal de St. François and H magazine. (Le Devoir also covered the awards even though it didn't win any.)
The sole anglo winner is Sue Montgomery of The Gazette. And they're very proud.
Since, like previous journalism awards announcements, nobody has thought to link news of the winners to the stories and photos they won for (Radio-Canada comes closest, linking only to its own reports), I've done so here for those I can find:
See the FPJQ release for comments from the juries for each award
See the FPJQ release for comments from the juries for each award
* Décarie's photo was published before the lockout in January.
The 40 photos finalists will be on display at the Maison de la culture Ahuntsic - Cartierville from Jan. 14 to Feb. 20, 2010, as part of a tour of Quebec.
The barrier segregating Montreal West from the Ville Saint Pierre district of Lachine is here to stay. The Quebec Court of Appeal this week upheld a lower court ruling that Montreal West was within its rights to setup a barrier to car traffic between the two towns. Though Montreal (which the Lachine borough is part of now) may appeal, I'd wager their chances of getting heard at the Supreme Court level are slim. If the barrier comes down, it'll be because of a deal among neighbours, not because a hand was forced by the courts.
Montreal West argues this isn't about building a wall between rich and poor (there's no restriction on pedestrian travel), but the only issue is safety. I couldn't find any evidence of a problem when I checked it out two years ago. But it seems to be enough to convince people that it's necessary. And that's why it's the same argument used by other cities who erect barriers between neighbours.
I have, in the past, been critical of amateur bloggers following pro sports teams. Particularly in the wake of the success of my employer's Habs Inside/Out website, I just couldn't fathom how people without access to the team and with daily jobs that might affect their posting schedule could ever really hope to compete for news. Even analysis, it seems, hasn't been very convincing (though people talking out of their ass about what players the Canadiens should sign and what lines they should put them on is a problem in just about every medium).
But while many of these blogs are long gone from my RSS reader, one is proving me wrong. Four Habs Fans is reminding me that if you can't be informative, you can at least be funny:
©FHF, or is it TFS? Or BGL or GMS or something...
It's not perfect - they use acronyms for nicknames that makes it hard to follow if you're new - and it's rather sexist with the scantily-clad women (not that I ... uhh ... pay attention to the hotties or anything). But this Photoshop job alone has me singing its praises now.
Okay, maybe not singing. But I'll offer them a lap dance.
Meanwhile, HIO's Mike Boone - who also relies more on humour than original breaking news or analysis to create a following - is offering to liveblog Habs games from the home (or bar) of just about anyone with an HDTV and WiFi.
On Monday, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission will finally get down to meeting about the future of conventional broadcast television, and through a series of hearings lasting at least a week, will hear arguments from broadcasters, cable and satellite companies, unions, producers, and maybe even a few television watchers, about whether those who freely transmit television signals over the airwaves should be paid a fee by cable and satellite companies currently mandated to distribute that signal. If it does, it will then have to decide who pays for it, how much it will be (or how it's negotiated) and where the money will go.
To prepare for it, TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has a long panel discussion with four experts: the uncomfortably smiley Ian Morrison of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting (who supports fee for carriage), the knowledgeable but detached Grant Robertson of the Globe and Mail, the nerdy Michael Geist (who, like Andrew Coyne, supports deregulation and increased consumer choice), and Norm Bolen, who represents producers (and supports fee for carriage) as president of the Canadian Film and Television Production Association.
In the Globe and Mail, the story is told through the eyes of two former Canwest E! network stations: CHCH Hamilton, which was bought by Channel Zero and is trying to build a business model around being an all-news station during the day (70 hours a week of local news), and CHCA Red Deer, which it seems hasn't been missed much since it was shut down on Aug. 31.
Meanwhile, even though the deadline for public comments has passed, both the Local TV Matters people and the Stop the TV Tax people are still running ads. The former has created a new one, which as usual vastly oversimplifies the issue.
The Gazette on Friday announced the fourth of its four new Friday Voice columnists, who will write about once a month each (rotating every week) on different issues:
In addition to these, local arboreal expert Bronwyn Chester, who had written a weekly feature called Tree Tuesday for the Spacing Montreal blog, now has a weekly column in The Gazette on Sundays called Island of Trees, and is leaving her unpaid Spacing column. She also has a blog devoted to the subject.
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