Monthly Archives: March 2017

| Media

Media News Digest: CRTC hearing, settlement at CHCH, Quebec helps out newspapers

News about news

At the CRTC

TV

Radio

Print

Online

News about people

Good reads

Obituaries

Jobs

Upcoming events

With any luck this should return to its usual schedule starting next Wednesday.

| Media

Media News Digest: Pottergate, more awards, Bernie St-Laurent is back, RIP Denis McGrath

(Late this week because I survived the Great Steve Faguy Man Cold of 2017)

News about news

There was a Class A shitstorm in Quebec media this week about a piece by Andrew Potter (former Ottawa Citizen editor and current McGill professor) tying the clustertruck on Highway 13 during last week’s snowstorm to some greater social malaise in Quebec. It includes statistics suggesting Quebecers are more socially distant than the rest of Canada, but also had some head-scratching generalizations about restaurants offering two bills and bank machines dispensing $50 bills.

Reaction was swift, with columnists (almost all from francophone Quebec-based media) piling on to condemn it: Jérémie Bédard-Wien, Denise Bombardier, Dan Delmar, Bernard Drainville, Sophie Durocher, Sophie Durocher again, Joseph Facal, Patrick Lagacé, Patrick Lagacé in English, Josée Legault, Mylène Moisan, Michèle Ouimet, Nathalie Petrowski and Lise Ravary.

Le Soleil even did a fact-check, as did La Presse’s science blog, and even Maclean’s, all finding that Potter’s statistics about Quebec society were accurate, though his conclusion of a “pathological” problem was exaggerated (they say nothing about the anecdotal stuff like restaurant bills).

Potter finally apologized and distanced himself from his own story (earning at least some praise for that rare move). That wasn’t enough, though. McGill, after publicly throwing him under the bus, “accepted his resignation” from his job as head of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (a Maclean’s story says the resignation was not voluntary, citing anonymous sources who also say “numerous high-profile figures have contacted McGill since Monday to express their personal displeasure with the column”, which prompted figures as high as the prime minister’s office to deny involvement). McGill says academic freedom is not at stake, which convinced precisely no one.

The response prompted another wave of hot takes, this time mainly from anglo media (Paul Adams, Frédéric Bérard, Ann Brocklehurst, Michael Byers, Lucinda Chodan, Colby Cosh, Andrew Coyne, Raymond J. de Souza, Michael Friscolanti, Lysiane Gagnon, Matt Gurney, Allison Hanes, Trevor Hanna, Michael Harris, Joseph Heath, Chantal Hébert, Barbara Kay, Jonathan Kay, Philippe Labrecque, Josée Legault again, Peter Loewen, Emmett Macfarlane, Don Macpherson, Candice Malcolm, Éric Montpetit, Brian Myles, Joseph Quesnel, Aaron Rand, Chris Selley, Michel Seymour, Evan Solomon, Michael Taube, William Watson, Daniel Weinstock, Ira Wells, Margaret Wente, Suzanne Wexler, Peter Wheeland, Barry Wilson, three professors in Maclean’s, a discussion on CBC’s The Current, podcasts at Canadaland and Ricochet, and editorials from the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Maclean’s and Winnipeg Free Press, plus an untold number of letters to the editor and discussions on social media). The hot takes get even hotter, comparing this scandal to everything from a corrupt third-world government to the Rwandan genocide. And that awful episode of Canadaland was rightfully blasted by its own supporters on Facebook.

TV

Lori Graham on the CTV float

Radio

Print

Online

News about people

Good reads

Obituaries

Jobs

Upcoming events

| Media

Media News Digest: RTDNA Canada regional nominees, Canucks change radio station, more layoffs at Postmedia

News about news

At the CRTC

  • Newcap has asked the CRTC to drop its 15% special-interest music requirement for CHLG-FM 104.3 in Vancouver (one of the stations Bell got rid of after it bought Astral). It says the station lost $10 million in seven years.
  • CBC has applied to replace low-power AM transmitters with low-power FM transmitters in Lebel-sur-Quévillon and Senneterre.

TV

Radio

Print

News about people

Good reads

Jobs

Upcoming events

| Radio

Tributes flood in to former CHOM/CKOI announcer Denis Grondin

Denis Grondin, a former announcer at CHOM, CKOI and 98,5fm (or, as some media described him, he’s the father of actor Marc-André Grondin), died suddenly of an apparent heart attack the night of Tuesday to Wednesday. He was 66.

So sudden was his death that it came mere hours after he recorded his weekly show Samedi soir sur la terre for Radio Ville-Marie. The show aired Saturday night as planned, complete with the promise to return next week. You can listen to the final show here: Hour 1, Hour 2.

There weren’t much in the way of formal obituaries in the media, but the French-language news outlets generally offered briefs with tributes that were made on social media:

I’ll do the same below. I’ll also link to this interview in Urbania from last year, where Grondin looks with a critical eye at the state of the industry today.

On Friday, Grondin’s family responded with this:

Continue reading →

| Radio

Montreal radio ratings: Another win for The Beat

Numeris, the company that measures radio and TV ratings, came out with their quarterly report this week, and once again it was Cogeco’s 92.5 The Beat that had the most good news to announce on the anglo side.

Among anglophone listeners, CKBE-FM had a 17.2% audience share, second only to CJAD’s 28.2% among all listeners. Virgin Radio was well back at 13.5%.

The shares were mostly stable among the anglophone audience, but the exception was Virgin, which was down for the second straight quarter and by almost three points compared to the same time last year. (I’ll compare year-over-year because two years ago when The Beat had a surge in the winter book Virgin claimed it was because of Christmas music that aired on The Beat during the holidays.)

CHOM recovered a bit after hitting a new low in the last quarter. It’s still fourth among anglophone stations, but it regained its position as first among men 25-54.

Despite this being a good report, The Beat couldn’t resist getting cute with spin, saying it’s the “number one radio station”, which only works if you (a) exclude the francophone market and (b) exclude people outside the 25-54 demographic. It also called its morning show the “fastest growing” one in the market with new hosts Vinny and Nikki. Which is kind of like saying your kid is “most improved.” The Beat’s morning show has been historically weak while its daytime has been strong.

Bell’s press release stressed its combined market share (which is, of course, because it owns most of the stations). CJAD still has the highest share by far, and 8 of the 10 most listened-to shows among anglophones. TSN 690 is stable at a 4% share, and CBC Radio One climbed more than one and a half points, its total audience up about 25% among anglophones.

Here are the top-line numbers (average minute audience and listening share) among anglophone listeners:

Station Average minute audience Share Daily reach
CJAD 800 16,600 28.2% 191,400
The Beat 92.5 10,100 17.2% 216,100
Virgin Radio 96 7,900 13.5% 196,200
CHOM 97.7 6,400 11.0% 135,000
CBC Radio One 88.5 4,700 8.1% 51,200
TSN Radio 690 2,400 4.0% 65,100
Rythme FM 105,7 1,200 2.1% 50,700
Radio Classique 1,100 1.9% 26,000
CBC Radio Two 93.5 900 1.6% 21,800
98.5fm 800 1.4% 26,600
Rouge FM 107,3 700 1.1% 29,100
Énergie 94,3 700 1.2% 22,400
CKOI 96,9 500 0.9% 33,600
ICI Radio-Canada Première 95,1 400 0.6% 10,400
ICI Musique 100,7 200 0.3% 5,500
AM 980 100 0.2% 2,500
Radio circulation 730 100 0.1% 5,600
91.9 Sports 100 0.1% 4,900
CIBL 101,5 0 0.0% 900

Among Montreal francophone listeners:

Station Average minute audience Share Daily reach
98.5fm 36,500 21.0% 584,000
Rythme FM 105,7 28,400 16.3% 620,200
ICI Radio-Canada Première 95,1 23,400 13.4% 309,900
Rouge FM 107,3 14,600 8.4% 389,900
CKOI 96,9 14,200 8.2% 436,200
Énergie 94,3 10,300 5.9% 348,100
Virgin Radio 96 9,400 5.4% 350,400
The Beat 92.5 8,000 4.6% 336,100
CHOM 97.7 7,400 4.2% 255,800
ICI Musique 100,7 4,300 2.5% 107,100
91.9 Sports 3,700 2.1% 68,100
Radio Classique 3,600 2.1% 91,800
CJAD 800 2,100 1.2% 40,800
AM 980 1,300 0.7% 18,200
CBC Radio One 88.5 1,000 0.6% 23,800
CBC Radio Two 93.5 700 0.4% 32,700
Radio circulation 730 400 0.2% 36,200
CIBL 101,5 200 0.1% 14,600
TSN Radio 690 100 0.1% 5,300

Combined:

Station Average minute audience Daily reach
98.5fm 37,300 610,600
Rythme FM 105,7 29,600 670,900
ICI Radio-Canada Première 95,1 23,800 320,300
CJAD 800 18,700 232,200
The Beat 92.5 18,100 552,200
Virgin Radio 96 17,300 546,600
Rouge FM 107,3 15,300 419,000
CKOI 96,9 14,700 469,800
CHOM 97.7 13,800 390,800
Énergie 94,3 11,000 370,500
CBC Radio One 88.5 5,700 75,000
Radio Classique 4,700 117,800
ICI Musique 100,7 4,500 112,600
91.9 Sports 3,800 73,000
TSN Radio 690 2,500 70,400
CBC Radio Two 93.5 1,600 54,500
AM 980 1,400 20,700
Radio circulation 730 500 41,800
CIBL 101,5 200 15,500

Victory for 98,5fm, Radio-Canada and 91,9 Sports, loss for Rythme and Rouge

On the franco side, unsurprisingly it was another win for 98,5fm, which once again declared itself the most listened-to radio station in all of Canada. Though its average minute audience of 37,300 (in its central market) is beat by Toronto’s CHFI-FM with 42,400.

Bell Media’s press release couldn’t dig up much to say about Rouge FM, so it led with Énergie instead, noting its improvement. Rouge FM dropped 2.5 percentage points in market share from a year ago.

Not that Rythme FM was much better. Though it’s still ahead of Rouge FM in the ratings, its share dropped to 16.3% from a high of 20.5% in the summer.

Great news for Radio-Canada’s Première station, which after hitting a low of 6.6% this summer has hit a high of 13.4%, putting it third in the market. Radio-Canada’s press release notes that morning show Gravel le matin is second in the market, behind 98,5fm’s Paul Arcand.

There were some winners on the low end of the ratings board as well.

RNC Media’s 91.9 Sports, which went through a series of format changes — from jazz to right-wing talk to news talk and finally to sports — in an attempt to find an audience, seems to be happy with the sports talk format. It had a 2.1% share, which is 50% higher than the last ratings book, and an average-minute audience of 3,700 which just slightly edges Radio Classique. The boost was enough to warrant an article in the Journal de Montréal.

Good news as well for CHRF AM 980, which more than doubled its share to 0.7%. Still dead last among music stations, but it’s an improvement.

Community station CIBL, which started reporting for the first time last quarter, is still the lowest-rated station overall, with an average of 200 listeners in French and an English number within the margin of error of zero. The station looks like it’s going to stay here for the time being. Its new manager explained during a recent general assembly that they discovered Numeris offers lower prices for community stations.

Other reporting

  • InfoPresse (25-54 numbers)
  • La Presse (highlights of francophone stations, plus top 10 shows)
| Media

Media News Digest: Another extension on CRTC jobs, Canadian Screen Awards for non-fiction, Kelly Greig hired by CTV

News about news

At the CRTC

  • The four open CRTC commissioner positions, including chairperson, were supposed to have application deadlines on Monday, but they’ve been extended, again, until March 15.
  • The commission has split the difference in resolving a carriage dispute between Bell TV and MusiquePlus/Musimax. MP/MM complained because Bell was taking the channels out of the first-tier “Good” package in Quebec and leaving them only in the highest-tier “Best” package. And for older subscribers still on theme packs, it would be removed from popular packages there too. The commission rejected Bell’s argument that a channel is considered available in a package even if to take that package a user has to switch packaging systems (and ditch their grandfathered rights). But for the three-tier system, is only requires that Musimax (now just Max) be in the middle-tier “Better” package, and Bell can go ahead and limit MusiquePlus to just the “Best” package.
  • CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais wrote a letter in which he bizarrely says there’s no proof that a 40% drop in viewership of the Super Bowl in English Canada is because Canadians watched it on Fox. I get that you can’t know exactly how much of that drop is due to the CRTC’s simultaneous substitution decision, but to say there’s no direct link between the two is ludicrous.

TV

Radio

Print

News about people

Jobs

Upcoming events

| TV

NHL trade deadline coverage: TSN still edges Sportsnet on breaking news

The National Hockey League trade deadline. That magical moment when NHL fans stay glued to their TV screens with the hope that their team’s general manager will pull off the deal of the century that will get their team to the Stanley Cup.

For TSN, it’s an annual event, filled with analysts, insiders constantly on their phones, and gimmicks to fill time. For Sportsnet, which only really started treating this like TSN does after it got the NHL national rights, it’s a chance to compete with the traditional leader at this game. Both networks began their coverage at 8am, going through past the 3pm deadline.

I recorded both networks from 8am to 5pm so I could compare their coverage. It’s one of the few events you can do that, because unlike game broadcasts or events like the NHL draft, there are no exclusive rights here. The two had a lot of similarities — multiple desks of analysts inside a big studio, an insider guru (Bob McKenzie vs. Elliotte Friedman), on-screen graphics listing recent trades and players who could be up for grabs, and reporters in all seven Canadian NHL markets following their teams’ actions and getting comment from their general managers. They also had several differences. TSN tried to be funny, even getting actors Jay Baruchel and Jared Keeso to do sketches for them. Sportsnet had some fun but it was mostly talking heads.

But, really, who cares about that stuff? I wanted to compare them based on the thing that really mattered: Who breaks the news first.

I compared when the two networks announced trades during their broadcasts to see which one came out first. I also compared when they interviewed players who had just been traded. (There were other journalistic scoops, such as confirming that a player wouldn’t be traded, or a team was done trading, but I left those out of this assessment.)

Here’s how it went. All times are Eastern, and are based on my PVR. There’s an inherent imprecision when it comes to digital television, so the times could be off by 30 seconds or so. For the purposes of determining a winner, I’ve considered any announcement within 30 seconds apart on the two networks as a tie. (Only what’s broadcast on TV counts here. I’ve ignored Twitter, app or other non-TV alerts.)

Player trades

Player Teams TSN time Sportsnet time Winner
Thomas Vanek DET to FLA 11:54:30 11:47:54 Sportsnet
Joseph Cramarossa (claimed off waivers) VAN to ANA 12:07:25 12:08:07 TSN
Dwight King LAK to MTL 12:21:16 12:20:38 Sportsnet
Jarome Iginla COL to LAK 13:09:56 13:00:35 Sportsnet
Kyle Quincey NJ to CBJ 14:07:16 14:09:07 TSN
Andreas Martinsen/ Sven Andrighetto COL-MTL 14:07:56 14:07:46 Tie
Mark Streit PHI to TB 14:28:43 14:30:17 TSN
Valtteri Filppula (as part of Streit deal) TB to PHI 14:35:18 14:35:44 Tie
P.A. Parenteau NJ to NSH 14:51:57 14:51:31 Tie
Curtis Lazar OTT to CGY 14:53:16 14:56:10 TSN
Eric Fehr PIT to TOR 15:10:00 15:12:47 TSN
Frank Corrado and Steve Oleksy (as part of Fehr deal) TOR-PIT 15:21:29 15:29:02 TSN
Mark Streit TB to PIT 15:21:40 15:18:52 Sportsnet
Drew Stafford WPG to BOS 15:30:03 15:31:34 TSN
Lauri Korpikoski/ Dillon Heatherington CBJ-DAL 15:32:13 15:31:52 Tie

Most of these were very close to each other, and the difference is often as simple as how fast you can get the panel to stop talking so it can be announced on air. Sportsnet got a clear win on the Vanek trade, and TSN was first by quite a bit to peg that Frank Corrado was being returned as part of the Eric Fehr deal. For Iginla, TSN was first with the rumour of his trade to L.A., but Sportsnet was the first to confirm it (or at least be confident enough to go with it — some of these trades were hard to judge because they were reported with varying degrees of confidence.)

The other announcements were all within a couple of minutes of each other.

But by my judging criteria, TSN wins seven, Sportsnet wins four, and four are ties.

Player interviews

After a trade breaks, there’s a rush to get the players involved on the phone to discuss what happened. Here’s how that broke down.

Player TSN time Sportsnet time Winner
Thomas Vanek 12:08 12:18 TSN
Dwight King 12:24 None TSN
Jarome Iginla 13:20 14:07 TSN
Kyle Quincey 14:21 None TSN
Curtis Lazar 14:56 15:14 TSN

No real contest here. All three players who spoke to Sportsnet did so after talking to TSN. (There were also interviews with players who had been traded before 8am on trade deadline day, but those were not breaking trades so I did not include them here.)

Both networks carried GM press conferences from Canadian teams and did good jobs of analysis. Though TSN still takes the edge here, Sportsnet has made up a lot of ground in terms of what really counts — breaking news.

Maybe by the time their 12-year NHL deal is done, they’ll be the ones blanketing their late-February broadcasts with promo ads about this news-reporting event (which didn’t report a single thing for almost four hours).

| Media

Media News Digest: HBO Canada free previews, Jay and Dan among many with new jobs

At the CRTC

TV

Radio

  • Radioplayer Canada launched today. The app, similar to Bell’s iHeartRadio app, has almost every station that isn’t owned by Bell, including all Corus, Rogers and Cogeco radio stations. In Montreal, that includes Cogeco’s The Beat 92.5, 98.5fm, CKOI, Rythme FM and Radio Circulation, plus RNC Media’s 91,9 Sports. So far, at least, it looks like the player doesn’t have preroll ads, and it’s focused less on randomly switching between stations than iHeart. Already found a few bugs related to the location-based station search (it either doesn’t work, or it shows Saskatoon stations for Montreal, and it doesn’t show CBC stations), and neither the Google Play store nor the App Store list this app first when searching for “radioplayer”, which could lead to a lot of people downloading the wrong app.
  • Quebec City’s BLVD 102,1, which has become the home of André Arthur and Nathalie Normandeau, has added Journal de Montréal columnist Sophie Durocher to its lineup, which means it’s now a talk radio station during the morning, day and afternoon weekdays. Between this station, Énergie (Stéphan Dupont, Stéphane Gendron, Jérôme Landry), FM93 (Doc Mailloux, Éric Duhaime) and the original CHOI Radio X (Dominic Maurais, Richard Martineau, Jeff Fillion) it’s a lot of opinionative talk during the day on the radio in that town.
  • CKZU, a shortwave retransmitter of CBC Radio One in Vancouver, is being shut down by the public broadcaster, which argues it can’t justify buying a new transmitter considering the few people who listen on shortwave.

Print

Online

Movies

News about people

Good reads

Obituaries

Jobs

Upcoming events

| Media

N.D.G. Free Press newspaper shuts down

The Free Press newspaper, which launched as the N.D.G. Free Press in 2009 and later expanded to include neighbouring west-end communities, has published its final issue, its editor told Mike Cohen and the Montreal Gazette.

Its sister paper, the Westmount Independent, will continue to publish, David Price says.

As a free paper, distributed mainly through the mail, the twice-monthly Free Press required advertising revenue to survive, but despite a recent plea to readers, the paper couldn’t find enough advertisers to become profitable.

The Free Press wasn’t the kind of news machine that you’d find at the Montreal Gazette or CBC or La Presse, but it was independent, and it tried to fill the hole left after Transcontinental shut down what was left of the old N.D.G. Monitor. There’s still The Suburban, which has a west-end edition, and of course the daily Gazette, but residents of that part of town will be less connected to what happens in their community.

City councillor Marvin Rotrand tweeted something offering hope something could be done to save the paper, but that seems too little, too late at this point.