Fagstein » Opinion

Bell Let’s Talk Day: “This is why we do it”

Fagstein — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:30:59 +0000

Bell Let's Talk national spokesperson Clara Hughes in an interview with TSN Radio in Toronto (Bell Canada photo)

Today is Bell's Let's Talk Day, a day in which Canada's biggest telecom company raises money to help treat mental illness, and helps bring the issue out into the spotlight at the same time.

Until midnight Pacific time, Bell is donating five cents for every long-distance call and text message sent using its network, as well as every (non-robot) retweet of its Twitter account, to this charitable cause.

I was reminded of this campaign when I watched CFCF's noon newscast today. It was hard to miss it. Half of the first 15-minute block was devoted to it, with a story by a local reporter profiling someone with mental illness, and an interview with the campaign's spokesperson, Olympian (and national sweetheart) Clara Hughes.

It didn't stop there. Later, a health news story about the potential causes of suicide (probably a coincidence because the study just came out), a sit-down interview with an expert on mental illness, and a chat with reporter Tarah Schwartz about a special report on depression airing on Thursday. That's not including the commercials devoted to the subject and all the other programming that's airing on CTV, including a special at 7pm.

A year ago, I asked similar questions about this campaign, and whether the perfectly laudable cause justified the apparent intrusion of Bell Canada into the editorial decisions of CTV's newsrooms. (One could argue that many have simply decided to join this cause without being ordered to, which is possible, but there's a reason we're not seeing as much coverage of this on CBC and Global, and do we really think it would get so much airtime on CTV if this was, say, a Telus campaign?)

There are also questions to be asked about Bell's motives in this. Every large company puts profit ahead of anything else, and it makes sense for a company whose reputation is as poor as Bell's to spend millions of dollars making it seem more human. And it sends the message that if you really want CTV News to pay attention to your cause, no matter how positive it is, you need to get Bell onside.

But rather than rehash all that, I'll share an email that was forwarded to me by someone from Bell Media, who I'm guessing saw my tweets critical of the campaign today or was directed to last year's blog post. It was sent from a viewer of CTV's Marilyn Denis show, which also devoted segments to mental health today, including one on postpartum depression.

He added only: "This is why we do it."

I've redacted the person's name since it's not important.

Subject: Thank you thank you thank you

Hello Marilyn

My name is ***, mother of 4 girls 8,6,4 and 5 months.

I started my last pregnancy with depression and it is becoming a giant battle!

I feel darker and darker and the show today made feel good and thank to CTV, let's talk day. It is good to know that I will talk and search for help.

What a show thank you again.

There are a lot of thing behind my depression, I have in Canada for 17years no status, with 4 children provide a good life. Being a great mother and wife. Keeping on packing weigh. Being there sometimes became a burden etc....but I do it because I love my family.

Well I just wanted to say thank to you and CTV for this day Let's talk.

I never wrote to a show but the one today saved my life.

By the grace of God!

There are worse reasons to abuse one's power.

CTV’s Express feels like anything but

Fagstein — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:23:28 +0000

Monday marked Todd van der Heyden's debut at Express, the afternoon show on CTV News Channel with Amanda Blitz.

Because he's from Montreal, because he's a nice guy and because he's a geek at heart, I wanted to be encouraging and wish him well in his new job.

Unfortunately, after sitting through the first three-hour program, I was left frustrated, both at what CTV seems to be doing with its all-news network and at how that industry is changing in general.

When it launched in 1997, what was then called CTVNews1 was licensed as a continuous 15-minute news wheel, repeating the headlines four times an hour. This was to distinguish it from CBC Newsworld, at a time when all cable channels had genre protection.

But as the CRTC came to realize that cable news was healthy enough to warrant direct competition, restrictions on the CTV network became relaxed, and now the two are effectively head to head in terms of format. This is a good thing.

What's not good is that rather than focus on more news to keep people better informed, CTV seems to be relying more on pointless, time-wasting banter that just wastes viewers' time.

Coming up, more chatting

Express's format seems to be mainly discussions with reporters about news stories, punctuated about half a dozen times in each day by discussions between the anchors about the news. These chats throw out personal anecdotes or reminders of history or sentences that start "it's interesting because..." - the point is probably to have more "analysis", but it comes out as anything but. Like people at a water cooler talking about a big story but neither person being fully informed about it.

It's not to say either anchor is uninformed. They clearly have a solid grasp of the news. But reporters are brought in to talk about stories for a reason. Anchors deal with so many different topics in a day that they can't become an expert in all of them.

On the local supper-hour newscast, anchor banter is a way to fill leftover time and get the newscast to the top of the hour. Endearing personalities to viewers is a side-effect to just having a flexible filler whose length can be adjusted on the fly. Because some anchors have been doing this for years, they make it seem natural, filling five, 10 or 30 seconds and making it seem as if they just happened to run out of conversation at exactly the right time.

But on Express, this banter is an integral part of the show, and I can't imagine why. There wasn't a single one of their chats that left me more informed about a topic.

I didn't do an exact count, but even though Express is three times the length of CTV Montreal's 6pm newscast, there were maybe half the stories discussed in it. I don't recall seeing any packaged reports at all, and some segments were simply repeated in their entirety.

A waste of four minutes

Let me give you a more concrete example. At one point during the show, there was some "breaking news" about a soldier being arrested and accused of leaking secrets. They had reporter Mercedes Stephenson live to talk about this news.

This, in its entirety, is what was known at the time:

A member of the Canadian Armed Forces, Jeffrey Paul Delisle of Bedford, N.S., has been chaged with a breach of trust under the criminal code for passing secret information to a foreign entity. He was arrested on Saturday. The government says Canadian citizens are not at risk, and it is taking steps to mitigate the release of this information. The investigation began in July 6, 2007 and the alleged acts took place between Jan. 10 and Jan. 13 of 2012.

I just timed myself reading that paragraph out loud, and it took less than 30 seconds.

The segment took a total of four minutes and 40 seconds, including an extended discussion between van der Heyden and Blitz, even though they had just learned of the story. The information listed above was repeated multiple times. There was speculation about what "foreign entity" meant. There was comparison between this and WikiLeaks or other cases of intentionally leaked information, even though they didn't know what information was leaked, how it was leaked, or who it was leaked to.

I'm not faulting them for not knowing this information. It's breaking news, they report what they have. And the RCMP wouldn't give further information. But rather than spend 30 seconds or a minute reporting the news and then moving on to another story, they kept discussing how they didn't know anything for almost five minutes.

I don't understand how I'm supposed to be better informed by this. I don't see how this isn't just a gigantic waste of my time.

Rumours as news

Here's another thing that bothered me. At one point an expert was brought on to talk about parenting, and she discussed how teens are finding ridiculous new ways to get drunk. It's a popular topic among journalists who want to attract viewers by scaring parents and inventing "trends" based mostly on rumours.

She brought up one method, which is infusing alcohol into gummy bears and then eating them during class.

The other method she mentioned was how teens are soaking tampons in alcohol and inserting them vaginally to accelerate the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream. She prefaces this by saying "I wanted to make sure this wasn't a hoax", which suggests she did some double-checking. But had she actually done some research, she would have found that a hoax is exactly what this is. Not only has there never been a single actual person who has admitted to doing this, but it just doesn't work. Tampons don't soak up enough alcohol to get someone drunk, they're very difficult to insert once they've been soaked, and they hurt like hell once inserted.

The story goes entirely unchallenged, leaving viewers under the incorrect impression that enough teenagers are attempting this that it has become a "trend".

This isn't just bad journalism. Pretending that people are doing these things successfully will make teenagers believe that there's a successful way of doing them. Instead of realizing after their first attempt that it was a stupid idea, they may try again, convinced that their technique must just need some fine-tuning because everyone else is doing it in a way that works. Pretending that it's a scary trend is probably going to make the problem worse, or it would if teenagers weren't just a bit smarter these days than your average TV pundit.

Anyway, this is a tangent, back to criticizing the show.

Second-hand news

Another segment was about the Shafia trial in Kingston, Ont. Reporter Merella Fernandez was brought in studio to discuss the latest developments with the two anchors.

Since the studio is in Toronto, I'm guessing Fernandez wasn't in the courtroom. And since the proceedings aren't broadcast, she's getting her information second-hand. One assumes it's from another reporter in Kingston, but this is never mentioned.

This bothers me because I'm seeing it more and more in cable news (I won't go so far as to call it a "trend" without quantifiable evidence): reporters are brought in to talk about a story they've only gotten second-hand. I see it a lot on Sun News Network, but I expect more from CTV.

I understand how TV news works. Maybe they didn't have a reporter out there and relied on Canadian Press for information. Maybe they had a reporter who was busy preparing a packaged report for evening newscasts and didn't have a bunch of time for a live hit on News Channel. That's understandable. But if a reporter is getting information second-hand, that should be explained.

Besides all that, a few technical problems and some name slipups, it went well. Hopefully it has nowhere to go but up.

They can start by making sure CTV News Channel has a bit more news.

Express with Amanda Blitz and Todd van der Heyden airs 1-4pm weekdays (Eastern time) on CTV News Channel.

Technology is abandoning AM radio

Fagstein — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:30:20 +0000

The only portable AM radio I could find at a huge electronics store - a $10 radio with analog tuner

I did some Boxing Week shopping Thursday night. Despite the cold, I went wandering for about three hours around various stores, though for the first time in years I didn't have any big-money purchases in mind.

One thing I had been looking for was a portable device capable of receiving AM radio. Ideally it would have had a digital tuner, an antenna of some sort and an internal memory capable of recording the radio. As someone who writes about radio a lot, it helps to be able to record as well as listen.

But going through the aisles of iPods and other MP3 players at Future Shop and Best Buy, I discovered that such a device does not exist. Well, actually, it does, but it's kind of expensive and you can't buy it in one of these stores.

In the end, I bought the radio you see above, a Dynex (read: cheap as hell) FM/AM pocket radio. It has an analog tuner and cheap plastic parts (and obviously no recording capability), but it has an antenna and a headphone jack, and though it's a bit noisy it receives CJAD and CKGM.

It used to be, even as little as a decade ago, that no one in their right mind would try to sell something as a "radio" and not include one of the two bands. But as portable CD players were replaced by smaller MP3 players with lower power demands and no moving parts, FM has become less of a priority and AM has been all but abandoned.

A portable CD player sports a ferrite bar AM antenna (left) about 4cm long and 3mm thick.

There are a few technical reasons for this. For one, because the AM band is at a much lower frequency than FM (centred around 1 MHz vs. around 100 MHz), the antenna has to be much longer. For older portable devices (like my old CD player pictured above), this is accomplished by coiling a long antenna inside the device. Ideally it would be strung out in a straight line for maximum reception, but coiling it is a compromise that works here, though its reception isn't as good and it's highly directional (which is why the angle at which you're holding a portable AM radio affects its reception).

In smaller devices, such an antenna - about the size of a AAA battery - becomes prohibitively large. Smartphones and iPods don't even have room for that AAA battery, much less an antenna for what has become a secondary function. For FM reception, portable devices ingeniously use the headphone cord for an antenna, but that doesn't work for AM.

In addition to the size of the antenna, AM radio is more susceptible to interference, requiring even more electronic real estate being used for filtering and amplifying.

"AM RF IN" marks where the AM antenna connects to the circuit board ("RF" means "radio frequency")

And then there's the simple matter of demand. Music stations long ago moved from AM to FM, as has CBC and Radio-Canada in Montreal. We're left with only three large commercial AM stations (CKAC 730, CJAD 800 and CKGM 990) and a handful of smaller AM stations that would be very difficult to capture with a portable antenna anyway.

That's about to change. The CRTC recently awarded two new frequencies (the previously dormant 690 and 940 kHz), and two new AM stations will be on the air at some point in 2012. Two others, who lost in the bidding for those frequencies, may also reapply for other vacant frequencies. By the end of 2013 we could have four new high-power AM radio stations in Montreal, at a time when most broadcasters have all but abandoned the band.

But can these stations survive if there's nobody left who can listen to them? It's not just iPods and smartphones. Even larger desktop alarm clock radios have started to abandon AM in favour of iPod connections. Unless a device's main function is broadcast radio, you're much less likely to find AM on it. And people like multifunction devices.

The one big thing keeping AM alive is the same thing keeping most radio alive: cars, which are so large there's no need to worry about space for an antenna. Entertainment for drivers obviously can't be visual in nature, so radio has become the perfect source for them. And radio has responded in kind by catering to drivers, focusing on rush-hour programming and having regular reports on traffic.

The industry has also responded by offering online streaming as an option, via apps for iPhones or other smartphones. Rather than capture a noisy signal through the air with a big antenna, smartphones can download a high-quality audio stream through the cell network they already use for phone calls and checking their Facebook.

But switching to the Web opens up these broadcasters to competition from all over the world. For people who don't care as much about local content, there is a seemingly infinite choice of things to listen to.

Five years ago, when asked by Forbes about why its MP3 players didn't have AM radio, a representative of SanDisk explained the technical reasons behind it, but added that "SanDisk is exploring the possibility of adding an AM receiver to some of its MP3 players."

I'm still waiting. Hopefully AM radio will still be around by the time a solution is found.

UPDATE (Jan. 9): La Presse has an arts section cover story today about the future of AM radio, which discusses this issue as well as the larger market for the band. It includes quotes from broadcasting consultant Michel Mathieu painting a dire picture for AM radio, which is kind of ironic because Mathieu was hired to get many smaller community stations their broadcast licenses, including stations like CJLO on the AM dial.

There's also a story about Paul Tietolman and his upcoming French-language talk radio station, with some thoughts from experts about its viability.

CRTC looking at eliminating top-40 radio restrictions

Traffic wars in Kirkland

Fagstein — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 22:00:33 +0000

I always laugh when I hear about people in suburbs complaining about traffic. It seems everyone wants giant highways heading into downtown, but they don't want anyone but them using their streets.

In Kirkland, there's a street called Henri-Daoust St., that acts as a shortcut between Antoine-Faucon St. and Brunswick Blvd., a bit west of St. Charles Blvd. It's a simple two-lane street that serves as a small artery for the area, and is used by the STM's 201 and 261 buses. But it was also used by a lot of people in western Pierrefonds to get around traffic on St. Charles.

Because western Pierrefonds is an area that is continuing to expand with new developments, the problem is only getting worse.

So residents on that street demanded traffic-calming measures, preventing cars from using it as a shortcut, at least during rush hour.

Complicating matters is that one end of the street is in Pierrefonds, a borough of the city of Montreal, while most of it is in Kirkland, an independent city. Pierrefonds had no interest in preventing its residents from using the street, and Kirkland could not legally block people.

Finally Kirkland decided to prohibit cars from turning left from Henri-Daoust onto Brunswick during the morning rush hour (and the reverse during the afternoon rush). Once drivers were aware of this restriction, they would stop using the street.

And, as it turns out, that's exactly what happened. More than 1,000 drivers stopped using the street as a shortcut, according to the city.

But residents still weren't happy, and they went door-to-door trying to convince people to push the city for more action.

The city reacted alright, by telling residents they were removing the signs prohibiting left turns, effective Dec. 15. Residents say it's "revenge". The administration is being called "bullies".

I don't know whether this move is badass, or just being a total dick. It certainly seems a bit of a juvenile way to get one's point across, if that's the goal.

But the pamphlet being passed around by residents (PDF) clearly states that they don't like the no-left-turns sign, that it wasn't their idea but was only reluctantly accepted.

The truth is there is no way to make everyone happy. There are things to be done to calm traffic to make neighbourhoods more livable, but people who live in the suburbs have to come to realize that their way of life isn't sustainable. Other people also want to live in the suburbs, and they will want to use your street.

And not every street can be a cul-de-sac.

Dropping dead isn’t such a bad thing

Fagstein — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:30:45 +0000

Warning: Deep thoughts below.

My great-grandmother died yesterday. She was 104.

It wasn't a surprise. She had been in a coma in the days leading up to her death, and it was just a question of timing. As it turns out, it happened just before my mother was scheduled to come in and do her shift by the hospital bed.

It's sad, but it's being met with a feeling of acceptance, and it got me thinking about death, and about the downside of being near-immortal.

I was watching an episode of The Simpsons, recorded on my PVR, when my mother called to give me the news. The episode was one of those this-is-what-the-future-is-like ones, and made jokes about the various technological ways some characters used to extend their lifespans. Just before that I was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which has also explored the idea of how immortality isn't the best thing in the world.

Up until very recently, Jeanne Clément (née Béïque) was remarkably healthy for a woman her age. Even in a society where life spans are increasing, the average state of health at 100 is dead. But it wasn't just that she was alive. It was only a few years ago that she moved out of her home in Châteauguay and (reluctantly) into a nearby nursing home. Well into her 90s she was living alone and independently, doing her daily chores and occasionally getting help from one of her kids.

This story, written two years ago for the local paper, describes her dancing. At 102. I don't doubt it. By then she had a walker, but she was still quite agile, considering.

Obituary in The Gazette

Her first name was Jeanne, but I can't think of anyone who would have called her that recently. To the people in her home it would have been "Mme. Clément", and to everyone else, she was "Mom", only think of that word spoken with a moderate Québécois accent.

I'd like to say I knew her well, but I didn't. By the time I was old enough that going to grandma's house meant something other than finding toys to keep us occupied while the grown-ups talked about boring things, her ability to sit through long social events was waning.

She had 10 children, though by the time I came around it seemed like dozens. Those kids were married, many had kids of their own, and in some cases grandchildren. Even a simple gathering limited only to her descendants and their spouses became a big affair. The photo above was taken at one of those in 2008. The family is so large at this point that while I recognize just about everyone, I can barely remember where people are placed on the family tree.

I saw her once, with my mother, shortly after she moved into her retirement home. We looked at some old photos, and I remember being impressed with how intact her memory was, describing things that happened in a past three times my lifespan. It was like someone from that era had walked through a time machine. In hindsight, I wish there had been more experiences like that, and maybe fewer where I was playing with toys in the basement and counting the seconds until we left for home.

She might have lived to 110 or 120 had it not been for a stroke less than two weeks ago, that left her in that coma. Given her age and the brain damage caused, it made sense to simply let her life slip away and keep her as comfortable as possible.

I don't have strong feelings either way on the issue of euthanasia or assisted suicide. I think people should be given the power to end their suffering if there's no hope of recovery. But I also think that opening the door to making such life-or-death decisions could lead to abuse, or to people making these decisions for the wrong reasons.

In this case, at least, the wishes of the patient weren't really an issue.

"I'd like to drop dead, you know," she said in an interview conducted a few years ago, back when she was still living at home and in complete control of her faculties. My mother laughed when she heard that statement, entirely deadpan. It wasn't that this old woman wanted to see herself die, merely that she'd rather a quick death than a long, painful or depressing one. It's a sentiment my mother shares.

There were also psychological reasons, as much as physical, for not wanting to do on. As fun as it might seem to live to such an old age, my great-grandmother lived to see all her peers die. Her husband, her friends, even one of her children (the latter slowly, from cancer). It's a depressing thought. When you reach that age, and realize that almost your entire life is behind you, and that you've already accomplished almost all of what you're going to do in your life, there's the temptation to wonder whether there's any reason to go on, no matter how healthy you are.

I don't want to paint the picture of a depressed old woman just waiting to die. She had a long life and raised some great children (with some pretty fantastic senses of humour, at the very least), and I remember her as someone who was caring and well loved. It's unfortunate I didn't know her during the decades of her life lived before I was born.

Her funeral will be some time next week. Hopefully, from her children who are now grandparents (and some even great-grandparents of their own) I'll hear some stories of that part of her life I never knew. And I won't be tempted to pull that electronic toy out of my pocket to pass the time.

As for my own life, I honestly don't know. I'd hate to be in a position of facing a slow and agonizing death, and if there was no hope of recovery I'd probably want my family to pull the plug. But it scares the heck out of me to think of being in that position. I have no desire to die. I could see myself living even if it meant nothing more than filling crosswords or watching TV all day. But that assumes my brain still functions and I am not in constant pain.

Hopefully I won't have to make any tough decisions about my own life for another 80 years. And by then, maybe everyone will be immortal.

If not, I fully expect a statue will be erected in my honour.

Oh Kurtis

Quebecor doesn’t inform when it doesn’t feel like it

Fagstein — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 21:53:54 +0000

Last week I told you about Quebecor's new webpage where the media and telecom giant responds to criticism and perceived misinformation via open letter (instead of, say, responding to journalists' queries).

Though I have issues with Quebecor's way of dealing with news about itself (particularly its apparently systematic refusal to speak to journalists from Gesca and Radio-Canada, and to a lesser extent all other media as well), I thought this was a good step forward, that maybe the company would start interacting more with people and present its side of disputes more often.

Then, a few days later came the news that Quebecor was laying off 400 people across the country. This is a cull on the level of triple-digit job cuts two to three years ago by the CBC, CTV, Canwest and Rogers. And it's about three years since an even larger cut at Sun Media decimated its workforce.

It's hard to think of a way Quebecor could spin this positively, but they could probably talk about how this will affect their business, where the cuts will be concentrated, and what will happen to the workers.

Instead, the official response from Quebecor spokesperson Serge Sasseville was "no comment". The "Quebecor vous informe" website is silent on the issue.

Canadian Press finally got he union to confirm the job cuts, half of which is through voluntary buyouts and another 100 through other forms of attrition, leaving only 100 people laid off. It's still a significant cut, but at least some will be leaving on their own terms.

Had Sasseville decided he did want to comment and answer journalists' questions, we might get an answer to why a company that just started up a 24-hour all-news network that depends heavily on the work produced by Quebecor's existing print journalists is now making significant cuts to them. We might know why a company that seems to have no trouble making money feels the need to make such significant cuts in its workforce. We might know why the previous cut of 600 jobs only three years ago wasn't good enough to bring efficiency to its operations.

But instead, we'll just have to guess what those answers are, and it's entirely possible those guesses will be wrong.

24 Heures cuts photo department

It's unclear if these cuts are part of the 400, but news came out earlier this month that Quebecor's free Montreal daily 24 Heures had fired its three photographers, eliminating its photo department, as well as a number of copy editors.

Quebecor wouldn't confirm the news initially, but news came via social media, resulting in a blog post by former 24 Heures photographer Rogerio Barbosa, who quit his job there because the paper refused to pay his expenses. He then went to the Journal de Montréal, where he was locked out along with 252 others in January 2009. The newspaper he left, meanwhile, hired three people to replace them, apparently at a higher pay.

Barbosa's blog post got picked up by Le Devoir's Stéphane Baillargeon, who put this into context: Three photographers hired to replace one months before a lockout at the Journal de Montréal. During the lockout, many photos originally taken for 24 Heures got republished in the Journal. And then months after the lockout ends, suddenly all three photographers are fired.

It makes for a pretty strong circumstantial case that the three photographers were hired for the sole purpose of replacing locked-out Journal de Montréal photographers.

Nowadays, much of the photography appearing in Quebecor papers is done by Agence QMI, wire services, provided publicity photos or writers taking photos for their own stories.

(Baillargeon's piece resulted in a reply from Quebecor's Serge Sasseville, pointing out that 24 Heures still has eight journalists, two "journalistes-pupitreurs", two editors and a designer. Sasseville said six people lost their jobs - three photographers and three editors (of whom four were permanent employees and two freelance).

Kai Nagata’s renaissance

Fagstein — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:14:02 +0000

Kai Nagata has found an audience online far larger than he did on TV - at least in the short term (Fagstein file photo)

Let's get a few things out of the way first:

No, I don't actually think Kai Nagata is mentally ill. My "are you insane?" question was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Kai is a friend, one I've gotten to know a little bit during his brief stay in Montreal. I've admired what was until recently an impressive career in television journalism, but also his creativity in other areas as well. He's a very smart guy, and a great communicator. That may be part of the reason he seems so eccentric sometimes (like the fact that he made a career in television journalism without owning a television set).

Super viral

When Nagata quit his job at CTV after only nine months and change, I was taken aback. I was just as surprised by the reaction that was sparked by a blog post he wrote explaining why he left. Even though it became public on the evening of Friday, July 8, it went crazy viral over the weekend. Thousands of links on Twitter, including from such heavyweights as Roger Ebert, Margaret Atwood and Jay Rosen. It was reposted by Huffington Post Canada, Rabble.ca, The Tyee and the Toronto Star, and linked to from websites like MetaFilter, Digital Journal, The Mark and Small Dead Animals and some blogs. Nagata said by Monday morning the post had more than 100,000 views, not counting those from other websites that reposted the text. By Tuesday, it was 170,000. By Thursday, 271,000. More than 1,000 comments, many responding to each other.

The mainstream media began to take notice after the Monday-to-Friday crowd came back to work. Nagata was interviewed on CBC Daybreak on Monday morning, later that day on CJAD, and on Wednesday, at length, on The Current. News stories were written by CBC (largely based off the Daybreak interview), the Toronto Star (which drew comments on Toronto.com) and La Presse.

As is their way, many media found ways to relate Nagata's story to others. Josée Legault and another CBC story packaged it with the News of the World shutdown, as if they were related in any way other than temporally. Others including the Ottawa Citizen and J-Source used Nagata's story as part of articles about people quitting their jobs. OpenFile was one of many to relate Nagata's story with that of Claude Adams, who was fired from his job at CBC after making a critical error while rushing on a story. Steve Proulx compared Nagata's opinions on journalism to those of Gil Courtemanche.

A writer in the Regina Leader-Post said restrictions on Nagata's ability to express himself also affect workers in other industries, and should be lifted.

But besides all that, the post generated a lot of discussion among his colleagues within CTV Montreal and other local media. And not all of that reaction was positive.

The backlash

A full page in the National Post devoted to Kai Nagata

Nagata said about 90% of the feedback he received was positive. Many comments from journalists and political activists hailed him as some sort of hero. Some even created a Facebook group based on his blog post even though they never met the man and all they knew about him was that blog post.

That level of praise on such a large scale is inevitably going to lead to some backlash from those who feel the need to splash cold water on the situation.

There was Jessica Hume in the National Post defending the idea that journalism makes money. There was Max Fawcett saying Nagata is a narcissist and desperate for attention. There was Bill Amos saying Nagata's criticisms of television news are nothing new, and that TV journalists have found a way to deal with it. (A lot of criticism was along the same lines, asking why he's only realizing now how superficial and image-focused TV is.) There was Sandra Thomas of the Vancouver Courrier suggesting that Nagata gave up and that he's naive. (There's a follow-up to that, too) There was Grant Lafleche from the St. Catharine's Standard. There was Karen K. Ho. There was Jesse Ferreras, saying Nagata's expectations were inflated. There was Dave Bidini in the National Post laying on the sarcasm against Nagata (and, for no apparent reason, Jean-René Dufort).

Then there were the rapid-fire comments attached to news stories and the blog post, and on Twitter: "simplistic, feeble" "long-winded and stupid"

Global Montreal's Mike Le Couteur started up a blog just so he could respond to Nagata and defend his industry. His colleague Mike Armstrong (Global's national reporter based in Montreal) also blogged about it, giving his perspective and saying that TV news is better than its faults. Gazette intern Joëlle Pouliot wrote an opinion piece saying Nagata's actions made young journalists look bad.

Nuanced reaction

Even the backlash has prompted people to come out and write more balanced opinions on the subject. People like Brett Gundlock, who quit his job as a staff photographer at the National Post around the same time. And Ted Bird, who quit his job at CHOM because of differences over programming. And Jen Gerson, who left for Abu Dhabi in what she considered a similarly naive decision.

Robin Rowland posted that Nagata's resignation is a symptom of a generation gap in media, and the fact that young journalists agree with him while it's the older journalists who defend the status quo is even further evidence that so-called traditional media are failing to connect to a younger audience.

Howard Bernstein, who has lots of experience in the TV news industry, said he agreed with most of Nagata's criticisms, but not his decision to leave his job, because TV needs more people like him.

Nagata's blog post also attracted comments from one of his coworkers at CTV, mixed in with all the back-slapping. Among that person's statements, posted anonymously on Nagata's blog post:

In some ways this is greatly idealistic, in others incredibly naive, and as a journalist let’s face it, you’ve crapped on the boss’s desk.

Kai is a great reporter who was able to offer a lot of great analysis and let’s face it: analysis IS editorial judgement. So the idea that you were in some way limited in what you could say, unless [Executive Producer] Barry Wilson or [News Director] Jed Kahane told you directly ‘don’t go there’ is a little odd to be honest. I know Jed– the VP news– has sent him messages saying journalists need to provide context for political stories.

...

On the whole I think management failed you Kai.

You did a great job over the past year, but you were isolated in Quebec city, away from your west coast family and all your friends in Montreal (including your girlfriend). You were missing your support group and it’s obvious you needed it.

...

I work with Kai, I know what he did, and I know that HE had control over his reports. No grand poohbah pronounced from on high "YOU MAY NOT REPORT ON THIS ISSUE" or said "GIVE US THIS SLANT." Not even nudges and winks. the real world of journalism just does not work that way anywhere except in the mind of a conspiracy theorist who is convinced that I'm "just a mouthpiece not for a free press, but for a blatantly bought-and-paid-for press. Paid liars and deceivers who have sold their own consciences"

...

As for editorial influence, I would say CFCF is probably one of the least stringent shops out there. We could take significant liberties partly because of pretty “easygoing” oversight, and partly because we have one of the strongest union delegations in North America. When it comes to social media all that I’ve ever been asked to do is temper remarks with a disclaimer. I mean Christ, Stephane Giroux is a prime example. He says anything he wants (love u steph!). Point is, there’s a lot more at play, at least at this shop, than the ravenous identity and ideology munching monster that many would like believe is this industry.

...

Whenever Kai pitched an important story, he was told “go cover it” unless something big and breaking was happening that day.

IN which case he was free to pitch it again the next day. It’s called making choices, and there’s only so much you can do when you are one man covering an entire city.

Also worth reading are comments made in a series of Twitter posts by Basem Boshra, who resigned as The Gazette's TV critic in 2003, and similarly got a lot of pats on the back for it (though there was no 3,000-word blog post). He would end up returning to the paper four years later, and is now its arts and entertainment editor. He offered some perspective from someone who has been there:

Please permit this corporate media sellout to share a few opinions on the @kainagata manifesto. (It's okay, I fully expect the hate mail.)

First, Kai obviously has the right and freedom to leave a job if he's feeling disaffected or kept down or stifled for whatever reason. But issuing a 3,000-word screed full of facile observations about mainstream TV news is, at best, self-indulgent, and at worst it's disingenuous and insulting to many of the good and talented people I know who work there, as well as in other mainstream media.

I mean, he did not know that TV news can often be superficial and ratings-obsessed when he got into the business? How is that possible? Or that news reporters, particularly of the political stripe, are expected to maintain a modicum of objectivity about the beats they cover?

There are, quite obviously, countless opportunities for pundits on TV news, network or otherwise, who do nothing but express opinions. Again, how any of this came so belatedly to someone in the industry is astonishing to me. Or, at least, it's an indictment of our j-schools.

I will leave aside his lengthy tangent on the Harper government largely because a) I agree with much of it (oh no, an opinion!) and b) they are again hardly controversial. I'm assuming getting that stuff off his chest was the real reason behind this cri de coeur.

But I would also caution Kai - who I don't know and who I only hear good things about from his friends and colleagues - about one thing. I speak from personal experience when I say you'll get welts from everybody slapping you on the back right now for quitting your job, but I guarantee you that many of these same people are privately questioning the wisdom of your decision and/or sanity right now. That's human nature. We love to live vicariously through people go through these "stick it to The Man" scenarios. Then we move on.

Anyways, that's just my $0.02. I hope you find something out there that gives you the satisfaction you're looking for. Good luck, man.

And then there are those screeds from people who work in television news that don't even mention Nagata's name, but are linked to in Twitter posts that relate them to his story. Like Tim Knight, who deplores that CBC's The National focused on William and Catherine's visit to Canada instead of the end of the war in Afghanistan. Or Claude Adams, who lost his job in TV news after he, under deadline pressure, wrote a script that incorrectly said a dog had died (he claims his post has already cost him another job opportunity).

Does this change anything?

So far there has been no meaningful reaction from the people who supposedly control the media and have caused all the problems Nagata complains about, assuming such people even exist. The Star asked CTV News for comment, but they didn't want to. The Current could get only a one-sentence boilerplate about wishing him well. The Tyee said the post was "Sending Shivers through Canada's Media," but provides zero evidence that this is the case.

I asked CTV Montreal News Director Jed Kahane to comment on Nagata, but he politely declined to do so, not wanting to get into a back-and-forth debate.

In my informal discussions with Nagata's former coworkers and others in local media, many agreed with his criticisms of television news (even senior managers recognize its faults), but I heard no one say they wanted to approach their jobs differently in light of Nagata's manifesto.

After the initial surge of gossip, life returned to normal. Journalists still follow him on Twitter, still lament the problems he brought up (none of which was particularly earth-shattering), but go back to worrying about that day's deadlines and finding story ideas anywhere they can.

The truth is that Nagata isn't the first person to criticize the news industry in general, and the television news industry in particular. His comments about how they prefer style over substance and prevent journalists from expressing their opinions are hardly groundbreaking. The only thing that makes this case different is that he resigned over it and made his feelings public.

Reading the comments attached to his blog post, and comments on Twitter and elsewhere, I got a clearer idea of what's going on. Nagata's post is being interpreted by the vast majority in one of two ways:

Nagata is a crazy leftist who is whining and running home to mommy because TV news won't let him push their bias even farther to the left. The news industry is better off without him, and he should probably just go ahead and run for the NDP.
Nagata is a brilliant thinker and a hero exposing how evil megacorporations are slowly eroding the practice of journalism and how "objective journalism" is a fallacy and should be abandoned. He should become prime minister, start up a Canadian version of the Daily Show, or lead a revolution of the practice of journalism.

Of course, both of these are insane. Nagata is very smart, and very perceptive, having learned quite a bit about how the news industry and Quebec politics work despite having spent only a short time immersed in either. But he forfeited his ability to make a real difference when he tendered his resignation.

Kai Nagata as he appeared in September 2011

The return

After weeks of silence (except for some Twitter posts), Nagata returned with a bang in September. It started with a blog post Sept. 1 talking about his "summer of change" and what he planned to do next: Write a series of articles about media, go on a speaking tour, and shoot a documentary in California. For the latter, Nagata asked for donations from his readers.

Ironically, the post was published as I was at CTV Montreal, touring their new studio. It was Nagata's old boss that tipped me off to the blog post, prompting me to quickly load it up on my smartphone and read it from a chair in the set's "cozy corner".

The Tyee, an alternative media outlet based in B.C., announced less than two weeks later that Nagata was its new "writer in residence", a job that pays Nagata a modest honorarium but makes no specific requirements of him concerning his workplace or deadlines. It is for these reasons mainly that he accepted the position and turned down all other offers.

The Tyee also published three pieces by him about the status of media in Quebec, paying particular attention to the power of the Quebecor media empire. The first part explains, for the benefit of the Rest of Canada, the sheer size of the Quebecor empire in this province, and how it's using its power to push the population in a particular political direction. Part 2 discusses the relationship between Quebecor and the Parti Québécois, and the Quebec City arena project that Quebecor is pushing and that caused chaos in the PQ caucus. Part 3 talks about Quebecor's use of public opinion polls (and suggests bias on the part of Léger Marketing), the reluctance of journalists to scrutinize the empire (he lists me by name as an exception), and Quebecor's English-language Sun News Network. He published French versions of each on his blog: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

While these articles were being published, independent media outlet The Mark hosted a brief debate between Nagata and former CBC producer Tim Knight. Knight agrees with much of Nagata's criticisms of television news, but believes Nagata's decision to quit his job was counterproductive - he thinks the culture can only change if the journalists do so from inside.

Nagata has since written for the Tyee about other issues, including Stephen Harper's image campaign and about a trip to Las Vegas where he swindled his way into free tickets to a show by pretending to be interested in buying a timeshare.

15 minutes are up

Nagata's return to the spotlight didn't go nearly as viral as his quitting manifesto. There were no major news stories about his next project, though there was some talk about him in the media. A few blog posts: One from the Yahoo News media blog, one at thestoryboard.ca, one here, another there, a more critical post from Jesse Ferreras, and a sarcastic one from Small Dead Animals. A story in Vancouver's WestEnder magazine. Another in Concordia's The Link. And a few radio interviews, one with Peter Anthony Holder's Stuph File, one with CBC Montreal's Homerun, and one with CBC Vancouver.

There was also a post from Marc-Olivier Bherer, providing a counterpoint and defending Quebecor.

While his viral blog post got more than 1,000 comments, his latest posts have gotten only a handful.

Fact Opinion check

Nagata makes a lot of accusations and statements about how media (and TV news in particular) works, in his manifesto and more recent writings. Many of them are true, but some might leave people with the wrong impression. Here, I'll present the accusations and offer my thoughts on their veracity:

"Few reporters feel strongly enough about the importance of what they do that they would be willing to do it for free." - MOSTLY FALSE. The explosion of social media and blogs should be evidence enough of this. The statement implies (whether intentionally or not) that journalists do their jobs for the money. Any professional journalist would laugh at that assertion. Even the big-time professional ones with strong union backing say they do this because of a passion for it. Sure, there are some lazy journalists who clock out at 5pm and couldn't care less about the effect of what they do, but those are the minority.
"News executives are more concerned with 'growing eyeballs' than presenting important stories to people." - HALF TRUE. Unless they work for PBS, news executives obviously care about ratings. Even at the CBC, they care quite a bit about how many people are watching. But most also believe in what they're doing, even if they may fall into compromises sometimes. Newscasts will talk about cat videos that are popular on YouTube, but they'll lead with political news and other information of a more serious, more important nature. The station Nagata left, CTV Montreal, has just put out a series of special reports during an important ratings period, because it believes it can attract a larger audience by investing in longer-form journalism than by going for cheap eyeballs.
The TV news industry "casually sexualizes its workforce." - FALSE. Yes, the female anchors and weather girls are very pretty. Yes, hair and makeup is given just as much prominence sometimes as diction and grammar for people on the air. But there's a pretty big gap between making people look professional and making them look sexy. I don't recall the last time I saw sizeable cleavage on local TV news. And for the most part the women I've seen have been wearing suits, not low-cut dresses or miniskirts. Yes, there are some countries where the barriers of good taste are stretched, and it seems as though there's a minimum breast size requirement for weather presenters in Mexico. But I see little evidence that that kind of stuff is happening here.
"Every hiring decision is scrutinized using a skewed, unspoken ratio of talent to attractiveness, where attractiveness often compensates for a glaring lack of other qualifications." - MOSTLY TRUE. It's hard to judge this one without knowing what the "unspoken ratio" is, but I'd have to agree for the most part that television news places a premium on looks. It's not an absolute - unattractive people get jobs in television all the time, and experience matters more than anything else. But it's definitely not a coincidence that good-looking people drift toward on-air jobs in television. One caveat I might place on this is that there's an element of self-selection. Good-looking people tend to be more interested in being television reporters, perhaps because they think they have an advantage, perhaps because people keep suggesting it to them. Or perhaps because that's what Barbie would do.
TV news (and particularly the CBC) ignored important news around the world to gush about William and Catherine's tour of Canada. - HALF TRUE. The media went insanely overboard in reporting about the royal wedding and their subsequent visit to Canada. But did they ignore other stories to make room for it? Nagata mentions news happening around the world and in Washington, but much of that news was the kind that would only get 30 seconds on a newscast anyway. Their low impact on Canadians and Montrealers, combined with viewers' lack of interest in the usual international news, is the main reason they get little coverage. Though in the zero-sum game of TV news one would have to conclude that increased coverage of Will and Kate led to decreased coverage of other stories, I don't see any evidence that anything major was ignored.
The CBC is being overrun by consultants who care about style but little about substance. - HALF TRUE. It's true that the CBC has consultants who care about things like how on-air graphics look and what ties the on-air staff wear. Whether they've "overrun" the CBC I can't say, but I don't see their presence as pushing out more legitimate journalistic oversight of news programming.
Nagata was prevented from expressing his opinions on Canadian policy. TRUE. Though news organizations are still trying to figure out how to deal with social media, they have stuck to the idea that journalists should not be taking sides on divisive political issues. From what I'm told Nagata was asked to follow this and not, say, post negative opinions about the Harper government on his Twitter account.
CTV claims all intellectual property its employees produce, even when they're off the job. TRUE. The standard contract CTV has its employees sign actually says this. But it's more boilerplate small print than anything else. I don't know of a case where CTV has tried to enforce this and demanded rights over intellectual work done while not on the job. And I doubt it would stand up to a court challenge. But this remains in the contract, and should be removed or clarified.
"Despite great advances in communications technology, the public conversation is narrower, shallower, and more fragmented than it was a generation ago." - TRUE. I would argue it's more "because" than "despite". Politicians have gotten better at filtering everything they say through a sound bite machine, PR companies have gotten smarter at manipulating journalists, and news consumers' short attention spans means short bits of news are more likely to get attention than long, boring pieces. The expansion of social media has meant more people getting news from biased sources that reinforce flawed logic or uninformed opinions. On the flip side, there's more information out there, and it's far easier to criticize the media in public, which I think is making the media more accountable.
"Every question I asked, every tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out." - TRUE. Welcome to journalism. Like it or not, journalism is a public service, and journalists are supposed to represent the consumer, not themselves. I think of it not so much as imposing a filter taking out one's opinions, but of bypassing a filter that injects them. People need to be informed and make their own decisions, and that means they need to trust that journalists are giving them all the information. Once a journalist starts telling you what to think, that trust goes out the window, particularly if you don't already agree with him.
"Canada has no Jon Stewart to unravel their ideology and act as a counterweight." - TRUE. Canada needs better media criticism, people with the time and resources to go through hours of Sun News footage and point out their hypocrisies. But it doesn't, yet.
"Our satirists are toothless and boring, with the notable exception of Jean-René Dufort." - MOSTLY FALSE. Canada has satirists with teeth, though it can obvious we can use more. It's just that they don't focus on the media. Maybe Rick Mercer, Mary Walsh et al a bit too ~~police~~ polite (though Rob Ford might disagree), but I find Dufort to be a bit rough sometimes, particularly on things like language issues and the Charest and Harper governments where it seems like he puts his personal politics above the interests of comedy.
"And on the more serious side, we have no Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow." - TRUE. Well, at least on the left. But while I think these two might be a bit more loyal to the truth than their opponents at Fox News, I don't consider left-wing commentary masquerading as journalism any better than right-wing commentary masquerading as journalism. Hyperbole is bad on either side, and treating the news as a political war doesn't suddenly become okay just because the fighters are on your side.

Note that many of these are judgment calls, and very subjective. If you disagree, feel free to offer arguments in the comments.

I'll leave discussion of the correctness of Nagata's political views to other forums.

The documentary

It was obscured in secrecy for months. Nagata said he was working on a documentary project about an inspirational person that required him to travel to California, but the details were kept secret. Who is this person, and what makes him so inspirational?

On Friday, Nagata told his followers about the project, posting a link to the first part of the documentary, which is embedded above, and showing off the gear used to create it.

It's called Renaissance Man, and it's the story of Matthew Wadsworth, who is an accomplished lute player. The documentary focuses on a project Wadsworth is undertaking in which he's training to perfo rm a 100-foot dirtbike jump. Which is a bit involved because Wadsworth is blind.

The documentary, which is exactly 12 and a half minutes long, is well done. High definition, good video quality, well edited. I found it interesting enough to sit through even before realizing it was the work of Nagata and his team.

The video was posted to YouTube on Nov. 13, but with no link to Nagata. His name doesn't appear in the video or on the YouTube page. In fact, the documentary has no credits at all. This was done on purpose, Nagata tells me, to test how the video did through word of mouth strictly on its own merits, and hopefully prove that good journalism and good storytelling can reach a lot of people without needing a big name or big marketing budget behind it. The video was sent to the people who donated money, goods or services to help create the documentary and spread from there.

It gathered about 10,000 views, apparently mostly through social media and without any major website linking to it (yet).

I found it through a link Peter Anthony Holder posted to Facebook, again with no reference to Nagata. It was only when I put two and two together (there's a clip of Wadsworth in Montreal's metro, and this story seemed to fit the profile of what Nagata was working on) did I suspect this was it. Nagata confirmed it to me on Thursday.

Nagata said he met Wadsworth at Quebec City's airport, while they were both waiting for flights early one morning. Wadsworth had a large instrument case with him, and the two began talking to pass the time.

This was while he was still working at CTV, and Nagata pitched the idea of documenting Wadsworth to his bosses. It was turned down because of the high travel costs and how much time Nagata would need to spend away from the National Assembly.

Months later, after Nagata left his job, Wadsworth suggested the newly unemployed storyteller travel to California to tell the story of the jump. Compared to some of the awful pitches for documentaries Nagata was answering, this one seemed like a winner.

The project was funded largely by donations ($5,140, plus borrowed gear and donated services), and Nagata and fellow documentarians Evan Crowe and Candice Vallantin are hoping that more come in so they can finish the project (three parts are planned so far). You can donate here.

Nagata's old job

Back at CTV Montreal, Nagata's former job remains vacant.

CTV posted the Quebec City bureau chief position vacated by Nagata on July 15, two weeks after he left. The original deadline was Aug. 15. Among the qualifications, besides fluent bilingualism, TV and journalism experience and the willingness to work overtime, was "Excellent collaborator, he/she ensures to maintain excellent relations with the News department in Montreal, CTV and other external clients." (In case you were wondering, that language was also in the job posting a year ago that eventually went to Nagata. The only change made this time is to drop the TV experience requirement from 10 to seven years, which makes sense since Nagata was hired and had far less than that at the time.)

More than three months after that deadline, no announcement has been made about the position, apparently because of a difficulty finding qualified candidates. (Plenty of eager journalism school graduates, but you can imagine the station's reluctance to take a chance again with someone inexperienced.) The National Assembly returned to work Sept. 20, and Quebec politics remains as hot as ever, but the station has filled its Quebec City bureau on a rotating basis with staff from Montreal.

The job isn't an easy one to fill. It requires an anglophone who is fluent in French and is intimately familiar with Quebec politics, has the ability to work independently (the bureau consists entirely of the reporter and a cameraman/editor), and willing to live in Quebec City. Many existing reporters at CTV Montreal who could do the job are unwilling to move to Quebec City, and many exterior applicants don't have the qualifications necessary.

There has been speculation that the station might try to steal the Quebec City reporters of its competitors (Global's Caroline Plante, who's currently on maternity leave, or CBC's Tim Duboyce), but that's all it is so far. If you know of someone who might be good for the job (and isn't a recent journalism school graduate), you might want to forward their CV to Jed Kahane.

Updates

Nov. 30: Nagata writes about the documentary for The Tyee, in which he goes into more detail about the story behind it and discusses how he sees the filmmaking industry. He's also interviewed by Concordia's The Link newspaper as part of its special issue on media and democracy. There, he says he wants to startup a collaborative social-networking website that's "like a Facebook for citizen journalists."

Nagata also writes on his blog about his trip to England to film the next part of the documentary.

Dec. 17: Part 2 has been posted.

Dec. 30: Part 1 is just under 50,000 views on YouTube, Part 2 about 5,000 views. Nagata writes about the documentary in progress again for The Tyee.

Outsourcing returns to haunt Toronto Star employees

Fagstein — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 05:38:24 +0000

In January 2010, the Toronto Star and its union agreed on a plan that would allow the paper to cut jobs and save money while avoiding some more dramatic cost-cutting plans like outsourcing copy editing to an external company.

Those of us around the country who work in the copy editing field breathed a slight sigh of relief, knowing that somewhere jobs were being saved and would still be done locally. The issue appeared settled: The Toronto Star would still be produced by the Toronto Star.

Less than two years later, we seem to be back to Square One. The Star is offering another round of buyouts to cut staff even further (they won't say by how much they want to reduce the workforce) and Reuters is reporting a rumour that the Star again wants to outsource layout and editing work.

I hope that's just a rumour. Layout and editing is an important job in print media, and I'd hate to think that the industry is coming to a consensus that this work can be done by some kid in a third-world country with 20 minutes of training.

A time to remember – unless The View is on

Fagstein — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:31:25 +0000

People who follow me on Twitter know that one of my pet peeves is when the broadcast networks don't air major live news events, preferring to relegate them to their all-news networks (if they have them) and/or websites.

Various arguments have been brought forth to justify this. Very few people don't have access to all-news channels anymore. There's less interest in live coverage of boring things. People who want it can get it online.

In the end, the biggest factor is money, with a little help from the CRTC. Simultaneous substitution rules encourage Canadian broadcast networks not only to run American programming, but to run it at the same time as the American stations do. They also, therefore, discourage Canadian networks from running Canadian programming during peak hours. As a bonus, relegating important programming to cable channels makes it more likely that people will subscribe to those channels, meaning increased subscription revenue.

In short, this is why we see regular-season NFL games Sunday afternoons on CTV, but all CFL games - even the Grey Cup - air on TSN instead. It's not a question of ratings, because the Grey Cup gets huge ratings in Canada. It's because the NFL games are on CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox, while the CFL games aren't.

It's win-win for the networks, while the only people who lose are Canadian viewers.

In the past few years, there has been a trend where live national and regional events don't get carried on the broadcast stations. Elections are a prime example. Often election nights (particularly provincial elections where a local station would likely have to go it alone or in a small group) get little if any live coverage. Other major events not involving attractive British royalty getting married are also less likely to be seen on local over-the-air television stations.

During CTV Montreal's noon newscast on Thursday, it was mentioned that there would be live coverage of Remembrance Day ceremonies at ~~11pm~~ 11am Friday ... on CTV News Channel.

Sure enough, looking at the schedule, I don't see a Remembrance Day special on CTV's main network.

As it turns out, there was a noting of the occasion on the network, and it was done in the most half-assed way I can think of. It was a video that looked like it had been created in the 90s (it wasn't in HD, though some footage was in letterboxed 16:9) of the national anthem being played over stock footage of old veterans marching, followed by a trumped playing, and then two minutes of silence while old black and white war photos appeared on screen.

The video lasted a grand total of six minutes, from 10:56 to 11:02. Then it was back to regularly-scheduled programming already in progress.

What was so important that it couldn't be pre-empted more than two minutes for Remembrance Day?

The View.

Yeah, that Barbara Walters female-panel talk show. And it's not like it's a special episode or something. No, when CTV cut to it, it was in the middle of a conversation on interracial dating.

The cut was half-assed at the beginning, too. The video cut into the Marilyn Denis show (an original CTV production) in mid-sentence, while they were discussing some fashion makeover. This bothered me a bit more because there's no simultaneous substitution argument. Rather than simply cancel the show for a day, or make it four minutes shorter, or have four fewer minutes of advertising, they let it run as normal and just cut into it.

It's not like this is breaking news they didn't know was going to happen. Remembrance Day is not a surprise.

It's a stunning lack of respect for the viewers of both programs, but that seems pale in comparison to how it treats veterans.

Every year, we get news stories about malls refusing access to veterans to sell their poppies, followed a day or two later by a follow-up story saying the mall's management had changed its mind or that there was a misunderstanding. This year we had stories about people stealing poppy boxes. Each time the news is met with outrage.

Every year, news anchors and reporters wear the poppy religiously, knowing a failure to do so could result in the wrath of viewers.

And here we have CTV, which couldn't be bothered to carry more than six minutes of Remembrance Day coverage because of two entirely forgettable daytime talk shows. It's not like it would have cost them anything, since they were already producing special coverage for CTV News Channel.

Where's the outrage?

How the networks covered Remembrance Day

CBC: A two-hour special on the main network and CBC News Network
Radio-Canada: A two-hour special on the main network and RDI
CTV: Six minutes on the main network, live coverage on CTV News Channel
Global: A one-hour live special, plus a half-hour documentary on Canada's last WWI veteran
TVA: No live special on main network (outside of regular news coverage). LCN checked in with ceremonies occasionally as it would car crashes or other stories
V: An infomercial
Télé-Québec: Nothing
Sun News: Full live coverage
CPAC: Full live coverage
Assemblée nationale: Business as usual, minus a moment of silence at 11am

(Not being able to watch a dozen channels at once, it's possible I missed brief acknowledgments of Remembrance Day from some of these stations. If you saw one, let me know.)

The radio stations weren't much better. While CBC and Radio-Canada had moments of silence (which is eerie and confusing on radio), commercial music stations treated the matter briefly. CKBE 92.5 marked the passing of 11am with a call to remembrance, and CJFM 95.9 had a moment of silence (which lasted no more than 30 seconds).

Clear Channel Cagematch: Tietolman-Tétrault-Pancholy

Fagstein — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:14:57 +0000

Over the past week, I have been taking a closer look at the applications for Montreal's AM clear-channel frequencies 690 and 940 kHz that were presented at CRTC hearings in October. In today's final installment, I look at the application from Paul Tietolman, Nicolas Tétrault and Rajiv Pancholy for a French news-talk station on 690 and an English news-talk station on 940. Though these are technically two separate applications, they are virtually identical in format and are being treated as one application here.

The would-be station owners at the CRTC hearing (from left): Nicolas Tétrault, Rajiv Pancholy and Paul Tietolman

Do you believe in radio? Do you believe that corporate greed and ineptitude has more to do with the decline of media than the Internet or changing habits? Do you think the thing the media sphere needs right now more than anything else is an owner with the heart of a mom-and-pop operation and the bank account of a Fortune 500 executive?

If so, the three men pictured above are here to be your saviours.

If you don't believe, if you think investing in talent has already been proven not to work, and that rigorous cost-cutting is the only thing that keeps radio profitable these days, then these three men will seem like morons willing to flush tens of millions of dollars right down the toilet.

Despite how closely I've followed radio, I can't honestly say which of these is true. I want to hope for the former, but the latter just seems more realistic.

And the success of these applications will depend, more than anything else, on which side of that fence three CRTC commissioners sit.

The application

Tietolman, Tétrault and Pancholy have applied, under a company officially known as 7954689 Canada inc., for a French news-talk station at 690 and an English one at 940.

The proposal is bold, to say the least. The annual budget for each station would rise over the license term from $6 million to $10 million a year (from $5 million to $7 million for the English station), half of which would go into programming. It would start with $25 million in financing for each station, $4.5 million of which is in cash and the rest from a bank loan. The two stations combined would have a staff of 150-200 people, including 8-10 journalists. It projects it would have a 5% market share the first year, increasing to 15% by the fourth year and holding at that level. Advertising would reach $12 million a year for the English station and $18 million a year for the French station by the seventh year.

Most of these numbers are an order of magnitude, or at least 3-5 times, higher than the other applicants for these frequencies.

And that's why critics - including those who work at the big existing players - say it's not feasible.

The station's programming would be mainly talk, most in the form of what Tietolman calls "face-à-face", where two hosts with wildly divergent opinions debate each other on a daily basis. A hippie, David-Suzuki-worshipping leftist with a libertarian free-market capitalist. A hardened separatist with a guy who wears maple leaf underwear.

Tietolman tells me he thinks the problem with talk radio these days is that it's one-sided. For him, the "face-à-face" format is a winner.

Some blocks of the schedule would be devoted to culture, some to politics and crime, a few hours for style and leisure on the weekends, a block for the "female perspective" (with two female hosts), a block for investigative journalism, and shows devoted to nightlife and shift work overnights. Open-line call-ins take up a significant part of the schedule.

Under the applications, both stations would have local programming 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The players

Paul Tietolman

Paul Tietolman: Most of my communication with this group has been through Tietolman. He was the one I met for lunch to discuss the application before the hearing, and I've had some conversations with him over the phone since then.

Tietolman is the son of Jack Tietolman, the man who started CKVL radio and later its sister FM station CKVL-FM, which would eventually change its callsign to CKOI.

The elder Tietolman sold those stations to a company called Metromedia, owned by Pierre Arcand and Pierre Béland. (Arcand is now Quebec's environment minister.) Metromedia was sold to Corus in 2001, and then to Cogeco in 2011. While CKOI was kept running, CKVL was turned into Info 690 in 1999, where it ran an all-news format until the plug was pulled in January 2010.

So there's some irony in the fact that Paul Tietolman is using 690 to try to rebuild, and that one of his competitors is Cogeco, which owns what used to be his father's assets.

Paul Tietolman (pronounced "title-man") is ... well ... let's just come out and say this: He looks and sounds like a 70s record executive. He's a smooth talker and a gifted salesman. He winks a lot. He's not at all lacking in confidence. He's filled with stories about radio and can tell you tales of things done and things tried. A discussion with him elicits the names of the biggest stars in music (both in Quebec and abroad), and how his family brought innovations to radio, among them their belief that FM radio would take off, at a time when nobody wanted an FM station.

Nicolas Tétrault: Tétrault is listed as a businessman and real estate agent. He is also a former Montreal city councillor, elected as part of Pierre Bourque's Vision Montreal team in 2001, then switching to Gérald Tremblay's Union Montreal in 2004. He was defeated by a Vision Montreal candidate in the 2005 municipal election.

Though he said in 2004 that he was tired of the sovereignty debate, Tétrault ran for both the Parti Québécois and Bloc Québécois, losing both times. In 1994, at the age of 19, Tétrault was the sacrificial lamb for the PQ in the northern West Island riding of Robert-Baldwin. He lost (83% to 10%) to Liberal Pierre Marsan, who still holds that seat. In 2000, he ran federally for he BQ in South Shore Brossard-La-Prairie, coming a distant second to Liberal Jacques Saada.

Nowadays, Tétrault is more interested in business than politics. Last year, he teamed up with Tietolman to present a counter offer to Cogeco's proposed $80-million purchase of Corus's Quebec assets. The counter-offer of $81 million included a promise to bring 690 and 940 back on the air. It was rejected, Corus saying the deal with Cogeco was already done and it was too late for counter offers.

Rajiv Pancholy: Pancholy's background is in telecom. He worked at Nortel, then was president and CEO of Microcell, a wireless company better known for the brand name Fido, which was eventually sold to Rogers. From there Pancholy went to Mitec Telecom. Now he's chairman at something called TenXc Wireless.

Among the experts brought in: Jim Connell (centre) and Steve Kowch (right)

Supporting characters: Tietolman, Tétrault and Pancholy came to the CRTC meeting with plenty of backup. Wanting to show they were serious about their plans, they brought in experts:

Yves Guérard, former president of Radio Mutuel (another company whose assets eventually went to Corus and now Cogeco)
Steve Kowch, former program director at CJAD and Toronto's CFRB talk radio stations
Jim Connell, radio announcer and the last on-air guy at 940 AM
Christian Bourque and other representatives of Léger Marketing, to present a study showing audiences support the idea of new news-talk stations
Marco Perron and other representatives of Raymond Chabot Grand Thornton Consulting, to show the company's financial plan is sound
Stuart Hahn, broadcasting engineer

It was an impressive lineup. Kowch and Connell may both be looking for work, but their presence here gave an air of credibility to the proposal. Having marketers and accountants on hand was a big step in convincing the CRTC that the stations' business plan was viable.

The sell

"We're not shareholders, we're broadcasters," Tietolman told me. And everything I've seen from this group suggests its ultimate goal is to bring back quality talk radio, even if that means less profit for themselves. (That said, they expect the quality will bring more audience and more ads, hence more profit.)

Their presentation to the CRTC was slick. While the other applicants had stapled documents out of a photocopier, Tietolman Tétrault Pancholy Media had a colour document in coloured duotangs (red for English, blue for French) with clear plastic covers. It's a minor thing, but another indication of how serious they are.

A large part of the case for this station is that existing talk radio in Montreal isn't doing enough. Tietolman didn't want to slam CJAD, saying he has respect for what they're doing, but he and his partners complained in their application that stations like 98.5FM and CBC Radio aren't doing enough breaking news, particularly over the weekend.

They used as an example Hurricane Irene, a storm that hit higher on the U.S. East Coast than usual and, as a tropical storm, caused a large amount of damage to New York City and New England. As a post-tropical storm, it affected Quebec and the Atlantic provinces, causing thousands to go without power.

But Irene hit over the weekend, when CBC has little local programming, CJAD has fewer journalists and 98.5 plays music instead of talk. As a result, they said, Montrealers (and Quebecers) had nothing to tune to for news about the storm.

"The lack of competition, the lack of choice and the lack of diversity of radio voices resulted in what could have been a very stressful and nervous time for hundreds of thousands of Montrealers," Jim Connell said at the hearing.

Kowch then made it perfectly clear: "Our management team makes this promise of performance to the CRTC and to Montreal's Anglophone and Allophone communities: 940 Talk will be ready and able 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to be there live for our listeners when unexpected events, disasters and storms threaten the health and security of our listeners."

The group also has other ideas to improve their connection with the community, including airing town hall meetings and applying for a low-power TV broadcast license so they can introduce something called "radio-vision". They also plan to stream live video on their website.

The opposition

Privately, the response from the competition to these applications was: These guys are nuts.

Publicly, the response was ... well, actually it was about the same, though said in more polite terms.

"With respect to Mr. Tietolman and Mr. Tétrault's application, it must be understood that 690 and 940 were previously dedicated to the same formats for many years, with some of the best available talent in the city and it did not work," said Wayne Bews of CKGM.

Cogeco chose not to comment on competing applications at the hearing, but Mark Dickie, who ran 940 News, agrees with the sentiment.

The commissioners also focused most of their questions on the viability of the station. They don't really care what these guys do with their own money, but they don't want to award a license for a station that is just going to fail.

The fact that the last incarnation of 690 and 940 were news and news-talk stations that failed financially is the clearest evidence that this might not work. CINF and CINW, like CIQC and CKVL before them, tried various formats of news and talk, constantly reinventing themselves, but eventually failed. CINW in particular started off as all-news, then tried a personality-based opinionated talk format, and finally gave up and played music.

Management at Metromedia at the time said they tried their best at those stations, investing millions into them, but the high price of journalism and local programming couldn't be sustained with advertising revenue, particularly on the English side where CJAD has a 25% market share.

Tietolman-Tétrault-Pancholy has a response to that, as it does most criticisms of its application. It says the plan is nothing like 940 News/Info 690, which had a 15-minute news loop. Instead, its stations would be controversial talk designed to engage an audience.

Tietolman points to other markets in North America, where talk radio stations are often the ratings leaders. On the French side, he sees a giant gap in the market for a talk station, particularly now that 98.5 has to share its schedule with sports talk and Alouettes and Canadiens games. On the English side, he sees CJAD's market share as huge and needing competition, even if he thinks much of the audience for his stations will come from people who don't normally listen to the radio.

The marketers and accountants made the strongest case for the viability of the stations, showing there is an audience interest for news-talk stations and that the business plan was sound.

But the certification of the financials was based on assumptions about audience, costs and advertising sales. It's a big step from people looking at a spreadsheet with a calculator in hand to seeing if this will actually work.

The alternatives

When asked at the hearing what would happen if the CRTC approved the license for one station but not the other, Tietolman-Tétrault-Pancholy was clear: It wouldn't accept that. Despite the rosy projections for revenue and profit, the partners said their business plan wouldn't work unless they could share costs (such as administrative and technical costs) between the stations. If offered one license but not the other, they would refuse it.

They also made clear that their plan would only work with 690 and 940. No other frequencies would do.

After the hearing, there was concern among the team about whether they had taken that position too far. Was it a bluff, a strategic decision to try to force the CRTC's hand into giving them what they want? And would it backfire, giving them nothing to show for all this effort in the end?

Given a week to think about it, the position softened somewhat. They still require both stations, Tétrault wrote to the commission, and 690 is the only one that would work for the French station, but the English station could move to an alternative frequency if they could find one that is sufficient.

990 and 850 are inadequate to the task because of their poor coverage in the West Island, Tétrault wrote. (It's a position that differs with their contention that CKGM is exaggerating its signal issues in the West Island, though that position is also based on the assumption that CKGM is not properly switching to its night pattern.)

Another alternative frequency, 600 kHz (the old CIQC frequency), might be sufficient, but their transmission site can't be modified to use it without buying adjacent land and building new towers, Tétrault wrote. Only the former CINW/CINF site owned by Cogeco could be used for the task, and they could use it under "commercially reasonable terms."

Here, Tétrault seems to be opening the door to using 600 for the English station, provided the CRTC requires Cogeco to commit to reasonable negotiation like Bell Media has committed to should they be awarded a frequency change.

Tétrault's response also reiterates an argument that the group is making in favour of its 690 application: Language politics.

If we discount Radio Fierté, the French news-talk station is the only one for a French-language station, and the frequency has been used by French-language stations for more than half a century. Awarding the clear channels to two English stations might be seen by some as politically problematic, even moreso than the idea that two of three clear channels in Quebec would go to local Montreal traffic information.

"We are firmly of the opinion that 690 kHz should continue to be used for broadcasting in the French language," Tétrault writes in his letter.

I don't know whether the commissioners will keep this in mind when it makes its decision, but my impression is that the applications will be judged on their merits rather than political impact.

The team of Tietolman-Tétrault-Pancholy at the CRTC hearing (there's a smaller second row of people behind them, making it 15 in total)

The transmitter

If approved for 690 and 940, both stations would be broadcast from a two-tower transmitting site near the interchange of Highway 30 and 730 just east of Kahnawake. That site is currently being used to transmit CJMS at 1040AM, a station that has no relation to the previous CJMS even though it shares the same call letters.

The bottom line

Everyone who loves radio, even the CRTC, would love for these stations to succeed. But the scale of this proposal, combined with the realities of declining audience in radio and AM in particular (nationally, AM radio loses money, according to CRTC figures), put the odds heavily against them.

To make it worse, Tietolman, Tétrault and Pancholy have doubled down, saying they won't accept one license without the other. It's a curious position looking at their business plan, and seems more like a bluff designed to force what they want. If the CRTC calls them on it and, say, offers just 690, I'm not convinced they'll say no.

Whether the CRTC approves one or both of these applications depends more than anything else on whether they believe the business plan could be successful. If they're denied, we'll know they didn't.

The chances

The applications are undeniably strong and bold, but are they realistic? I don't know. But I sense in the CRTC a willingness to let them try, and I think they would prefer to see a good station fail after a few years than risk closing the door to people who want to revitalize radio for the sole reason that their plan was too optimistic.

The double-station gamble makes things more difficult for the CRTC to say yes, but I will still rate this application's chances good.

Start date

Tietolman said the two stations would take about nine months to a year to setup, putting their launch date around fall 2012 or January 2013.

Other coverage

The Suburban's Mike Cohen offers his own take on the Tietolman-Tétrault-Pancholy application on his blog.

Steve Kowch, who was part of these applications, offers another perspective on his blog.

The stations even have websites already (English, French), though it's just a page with information on how to submit interventions supporting the station.

Specialty channel war is screwing customers

Fagstein — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:51:09 +0000

UPDATE (Nov. 23): We have a truce! RDS2 has come to Videotron, while TVA's channels including TVA Sports and Sun News are coming to Bell TV.

This fall, two new all-sports networks are being launched. One, RDS2, is owned by Bell Media. The other, TVA Sports, is owned by Quebecor's Groupe TVA.

Personally, I think this is good news. Competition for viewers will do good things, like bring Montreal Impact games to the TV screen. And the CRTC has determined that sports channels - currently the most profitable format - are healthy enough that they shouldn't be restricted from competition. (Not healthy enough for Radio-Canada and Rogers to jump in the fray, but still healthy).

But you can't get TVA Sports if you're a subscriber to Bell TV. And it's not clear if you'll be able to get RDS2 if you subscribe to Videotron (it has deals with only Bell and Shaw so far). That may change (RDS2 is most likely doomed to failure if it can't get Videotron carriage), but even if it's just a delay, this is yet another example of two companies whose affiliated television distribution services are giving undue preference to their affiliated specialty channels.

Another example in the sports sphere is TSN Habs, a part-time regional offshoot of the TSN channel that has regional English-language broadcast rights to some Canadiens games. It's available on Bell TV, but not on Videotron, despite Videotron's huge subscriber base in Quebec, where I understand the Canadiens are popular - even among anglophones.

Sports isn't the only type of channel where this problem exists. In the past few years, broadcasters have applied for and received dozens of licenses for unregulated specialty channels - the so-called "Category 2" channels that aren't protected from competition and have low requirements for Canadian and original content. In exchange for some liberties in programming, the channels have no guaranteed carriage, so cable and satellite companies can choose whether or not to include them in their lineups, and the broadcasters can choose to charge whatever they would like.

Quebecor has been particularly active in this field, launching a bunch of new channels (including TVA Sports), many of them in high definition. In all cases, those channels are immediately carried on Quebecor-owned Videotron's cable system~~, but few of them are on Bell TV~~.

To give you an idea of what's going on here, I've compiled a table below of specialty channels owned by the big cable and satellite companies (Cogeco is included for reference, but doesn't own any specialty channels). I've limited the list to those channels that are either Category 2 (unregulated, with no guaranteed carriage) or that have high-definition feeds available.

I've marked in bold where a service is offered by the affiliated distributor that is not offered by at least two of its competitors, suggesting undue preference. I've marked in red where the opposite is true, where a service is not offered by the affiliated company but is offered by at least one competitor.

Channel	Owner	Bell TV	Videotron	Shaw Direct	Cogeco	Rogers Cable
Discovery	Bell Media (64%)	SD/HD	SD*	SD	SD	SD*
Space	Bell Media	SD/HD	SD	SD	SD	SD
MuchMusic	Bell Media	SD/HD	SD	SD	SD	SD/HD
MuchMoreRetro	Bell Media	X	SD	X	SD(O)	SD
MuchLOUD	Bell Media	X	SD	X	SD(O)	SD
Much Vibe	Bell Media	SD	SD	X	SD(O)	SD
PunchMuch	Bell Media	SD	SD	X	SD(O)	SD
Comedy Gold	Bell Media	SD	SD	X	SD(O)	SD
Investigation Discovery	Bell Media	SD	SD	X	SD(O)	SD
Discovery World	Bell Media (64%)	HD	HD	HD	HD	HD
ESPN Classic	Bell Media (80%)	SD	SD	SD	SD	SD
NHL Network	Bell Media (17%)	SD	SD	SD	SD	SD
TSN2	Bell Media (80%)	SD/HD	SD/HD	SD/HD	SD/HD	SD/HD
TSN Habs	Bell Media (80%)	SD/HD	X	SD/HD	X	X
LCN	Groupe TVA	SD	SD/HD	SD	SD/HD(Q)	SD
CASA	Groupe TVA	SD	SD	SD	SD(Q)	SD
Prise 2	Groupe TVA	SD	SD	SD	SD(Q)	SD
Mlle	Groupe TVA	Dec. 15	SD/HD	SD	SD/HD(Q)	X
TVA Sports	Groupe TVA	Dec. 15	SD/HD	SD/HD	X	X
Sun News	Groupe TVA	Dec. 15**	SD/HD	SD	SD/HD(O)**	SD**
Yoopa	Groupe TVA	Dec. 15	SD/HD	SD	SD/HD(Q)	X
Showcase	Shaw Media	SD/HD	SD	SD/HD	SD/HD(O)	SD/HD
Showcase Diva	Shaw Media	SD	SD	SD	SD	SD
Action	Shaw Media	SD	SD	SD	SD	SD
BBC Canada	Shaw Media (80%)	SD	SD	SD	SD	SD
DejaView	Shaw Media	SD	SD	SD	SD	SD
DIY Network	Shaw Media (80%)	SD	SD	SD	SD(O)	SD
Dusk	Shaw Media	SD	SD	SD	SD	SD
Fox Sports World Canada	Shaw Media (58%)	X	SD	SD	SD	SD
Global Reality	Shaw Media	X	X	X	X	SD
Food Network	Shaw Media	SD/HD	SD	SD	SD	SD
History Television	Shaw Media	SD/HD	SD	SD/HD	SD/HD(O)	SD/HD
HGTV Canada	Shaw Media	SD/HD	SD	SD/HD	SD	SD
Movietime	Shaw Media	SD	SD	SD	SD/HD(O)	SD/HD
Rogers Sportsnet One	Rogers	SD/HD	X	SD/HD	SD(O)/HD(O)	SD/HD
Sportsnet Sens/Flames/ Oilers/Vancouver Hockey	Rogers	SD/HD	X	X	SD(O)	SD/HD
OLN	Rogers	SD	SD	SD	SD	SD/HD
Setanta Sports	Rogers	SD/HD	SD	SD/HD	SD(O)	SD/HD

(Q)/(O): Denotes channels that Cogeco carries in Quebec or Ontario only.

*Discovery World HD, a separately licensed channel, is available on Videotron.

**The situation with Sun News is complicated by the fact that a conventional TV station was broadcasting its content. Rogers, Cogeco and Bell carried the conventional signal, but Sun News asked Bell to pull the channel or start paying for it.

You can see in the chart 12 instances among the 37 channels where there is evidence of undue preference. This does not necessarily prove such a thing - there could be all sorts of reasons to choose whether or not to carry a channel - but it's annoying nonetheless for customers who want a certain channel and can't get it for no apparent reason other than it's owned by the wrong cable company.

You'll also see ~~four~~ (UPDATE: five) instances where a service isn't offered by the affiliated company. It's worth noting that all of those services predate their ownership by the affiliated cable/satellite company.

The CRTC actually has a rule against this sort of thing. It's called "undue preference", and it is supposed to prevent just this sort of thing. The problem is that it's hard to prove. Negotiations between broadcasters and distributors are secret, and we don't know how much each distributor is paying for each channel.

Still, this may come to a head soon. Sun News has filed a complaint with the CRTC alleging undue preference on the part of Bell when it pulled the station's signal and refused to pay for it.

Hopefully the CRTC will take a close look at this issue and do something about it before the flood of new channels makes the problem - and viewers' frustrations - even worse.

Quebecor begins hypocritical outrage campaign

UPDATE (Sept. 20): QMI Agency has published a joke of a news article by Raphaël Gendron-Martin. It quotes only TVA's Pierre Dion bashing Bell and Cogeco for not carrying TVA Sports, and makes no apparent attempt to contact Cogeco or Bell for comment. The hit piece appears in the Journal de Montréal (on the front page), 24 Heures, TVA Nouvelles and Argent (twice). Dion also appeared on LCN and TVA's Salut Bonjour, where again no apparent attempt was made to contact Cogeco or Bell for comment, no mention was made of RDS2 or TSN's Habs channel not being on Videotron, and Dion went unchallenged on anything he said. (In the case of Salut Bonjour, it's clear host Gino Chouinard is being fed his questions and even refers to Dion as "boss" at the end.)

Despite what I am unfortunately forced to conclude (to use Dion's logic) was an organized misinformation campaign from Quebecor that abused its media power, Cogeco did respond by way of an open letter (PDF) that was also published on Facebook. Cogeco said it was interested in carrying TVA Sports and even made an offer that TVA refused.

No (public) word yet from Bell.

I sent an email to Gendron-Martin asking him about his article. He responded by pointing to full-page piece in Tuesday's paper by Danny Joncas, which quotes representatives of Bell and Cogeco. Gendron-Martin did not respond to questions about why he didn't contact Bell or Cogeco before writing his piece, nor why he didn't mention Videotron not carrying RDS2, nor whether he was ordered by his employer to write this article in this way.

Joncas's reaction piece was not posted online, either by the Journal or by any other QMI website. The original article from Gendron-Martin still appears on those websites unaltered, with no indication that there has since been a response.

Joncas's piece quotes both Bell and Cogeco saying these negotiations should be conducted privately instead of in the media, and that both are negotiating with TVA. It also says TVA rejected Cogeco's offer because it wanted better placement in Cogeco's specialty channel packages.

UPDATE (Sept. 23): The CRTC has released new rules concerning this issue (press release, decision, Globe and Mail story). It offers some specific rules (no mobile/Internet exclusivity deals for TV programs), but also includes a lot of rules barring things that are "unreasonable" or "excessive", which leaves a lot of room for disagreement over what qualifies as unreasonable.

It also pushes off a lot of decisions until later, including whether cable and satellite companies should be required to offer à la carte subscriptions (though they seem to be moving in that direction).

Whether those new rules will change how these big telecom companies deal with each other is to be seen.

CKAC Circulation 730: First impressions

Fagstein — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 06:02:24 +0000

Les Justiciers masqués predicted how all-traffic radio would work. Are they that far off?

I should start this off by pointing out that I don't drive. Never have, and don't have any plans to soon. I take public transit to get where I want to go most of the time. So for the most part an all-traffic radio station is useless to me. And I can't offer my thoughts on whether or not it's useful to a driver. I'd like to hear thoughts from other drivers, though, about whether and how they would make use of an all-traffic station like CKAC 730.

Though it had been rumoured for days, the formal decision came down last Friday that CKAC Sports would become Radio Circulation. It went all-music over the weekend, with only this announcement from VP Richard Lachance (MP3) explaining why sports talk had been replaced by Céline Dion et al.

The station went live at 4:30am on Tuesday morning, the day after Labour Day. It cut off Ginette Reno's Fais moi la tendresse in mid-song as the clock hit 4:30 exactly, as you can hear in this excerpt of the first four minutes of Radio Circulation 730 (MP3).

From there, it took on its all-traffic format. It might be a bit harsh to judge it so quickly, considering the speed at which it was setup (announcers were hired less than a month before launch). Cogeco's application for a CRTC license for an all-traffic station came out in May, and might have gotten one in time if it wasn't for competitors arguing that there should be an open call for applications for the former frequencies of CINF Info 690 and CINW 940 News.

The CRTC set an Oct. 17 hearing date for those applications, but Cogeco decided it couldn't wait that long (mainly because the government money tap would only open when an all-traffic station was on the air). So CKAC Sports, Cogeco's only AM station (and the only francophone AM station, for that matter) was sacrificed to get Radio Circulation on the air.

Cogeco is going on with its 940 application for an English all-traffic station, but will have to fight with Tietolman-Tétrault for that channel. Three applications are still pending for 690, including a frequency change for CKGM (The Team) 990, which wants to move to a clear channel and improve its coverage.

Traffic every five minutes

I've listened to the new station on and off since it launched. It seems to run on a schedule that gives the traffic report every five minutes. In one five-minute block, it's a four-minute traffic report followed by a minute of advertising. In another, it's a two-minute traffic report focusing on the "points chauds" and two minutes of weather, followed by ads.

As a point of comparison, a commercial music or news-talk station will give traffic reports that last about 30 seconds, or 45 if you include all the sponsor info. And all those traffic reports tend to sound the same - rushed, fast-talking, and with its own special vocabulary designed to refer to locations as quickly as possible ("the two 15s" for example, referring to that area where Highway 15 and Highway 40 intersect and become the same road for a short stretch, or "the whiskey trench", that area of Highway 138 in LaSalle formerly known for the overpowering smell of the adjacent ~~brewery~~ distillery).

In contrast, Radio Circulation is slow. There's a lot of umms and ahhs. Sometimes it feels less like back-to-back traffic reports and more like a talk show whose subject is traffic. But it's also comprehensive. It will talk about traffic on Taschereau Blvd. on the South Shore. It'll talk about traffic on city streets. It doesn't have to limit itself to five or six things in its traffic report.

During the evenings, when traffic is just about non-existent, the subject material switches. Instead of traffic jams, the announcers talk about road closures for overnight construction work. (I'm not quite sure what they'll talk about overnight during the winter - snow clearing schedules?) Between 1am and 4:30am, the station runs recorded information about overnight construction and safety messages.

There were promises made about information on public transit service, but I have yet to hear any of those things while tuning in.

Some comparisons

I suppose the best thing to compare this station to would be the Weather Network, which has a simple function and doesn't expect its viewers to tune in for more than a few minutes at a time (obsessive masturbating teenagers notwithstanding). They also operate on a schedule that minimizes the wait between the critical information (local forecast), while allowing some time to do something else, like talk about weather-related issues.

Of course, being television, the Weather Network can have nearly constant on-screen graphics showing the local short-term forecast while the rest of the screen discusses something else. There isn't an easy way to do this in radio.

I also spent a bit of time listening to CHMJ AM730, Vancouver's all-traffic station (coincidentally on the same frequency). The biggest difference between the two is that Vancouver's station is privately-owned and has to actually earn its revenue.

The stations sounded about the same - a similar five-minute schedule for traffic, though Vancouver's announcers were clearly a bit more comfortable, having been at their jobs for more than two days. The similarity shouldn't be surprising - Cogeco mentions it specifically as a model to follow in its CRTC application.

One thing I noticed is that Vancouver's station splits its traffic reports for bridges from the main traffic reports. This makes sense because bridges are less vital to Vancouver's traffic scene than to Montreal's. Vancouver's station also offers reports on wait times for ferries (which doesn't really apply here) and waits at the U.S. border (which might be useful here, but probably less so than in Vancouver).

And then there's the fact that CHMJ provides information on police radar traps. That raised a question for me: Is a radio station that gets $1.5 million a year from the transport ministry in a position to do the same? The agreement between Cogeco and the MTQ obviously doesn't require the station to provide radar warnings to drivers, but it doesn't forbid it either. And while it's true that the police forces don't work for the transport ministry, it might be a bit embarrassing if the provincial government was funding an operation that undermined the provincial police force.

To me, this underlines once again why having a government-funded all-traffic radio station is a bad idea.

Nevertheless, it's here, and if Cogeco is successful with the CRTC, we'll get an English one within a couple of months. Radio Circulation's website is running. Right now it's just a live stream of the station audio and a Google map with Google's traffic info overlay.

And just because I think the government funding is a bad idea doesn't mean I don't think we should have an all-traffic station in Montreal. We have enough free space on the AM band that if someone wanted to start a private station up that provides a useful service, there's no reason we shouldn't let them.

But I'm not sure if drivers will use it, either. So I put the question out to you drivers: Would you switch to an all-traffic radio station, which has a comprehensive traffic report every five minutes, or just listen to your favourite music/talk station and get the major traffic points every 10 minutes?

Is there a market for all-traffic radio in Montreal? And if so, does CKAC do a good job of capturing it?

Government pays for Cogeco to shut down CKAC Sports

Fagstein — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:37:21 +0000

Following two days of rumours (thanks mainly to Pierre Trudel), Cogeco this morning confirmed that it is switching formats for CKAC 730AM, Montreal's only major commercial French-language AM station. It will go from being an all-sports station to an all-traffic station effective Tuesday morning. After the announcement, Cogeco immediately pulled the plug on sports broadcasting, and is running music until then, interrupted every half hour by a three-minute announcement by Cogeco VP Richard Lachance.

Listen to the announcement running on CKAC during the weekend (MP3)

Live sports broadcasts will be carried on Cogeco's news-talk 98.5FM, and some (but not all) personalities will move there as well. Lachance tells LCN that seven employees will be affected, four of whom will find new functions at 98.5. Michel Villeneuve and Ron Fournier, notably, will have shows on 98.5, in the evening (when the station currently rebroadcasts shows from earlier in the day).

In a bitter and ridiculous press release, Cogeco mainly blamed its competitors, who opposed a fast-track process for Cogeco's all-traffic licenses to be approved by the CRTC. It complained that nobody was interested in the vacant 690 and 940 frequencies formerly held by Corus's all-news stations and purchased by Cogeco when it bought Corus Quebec, without addressing the claims by competitors like Bell Media that Cogeco was unwilling to negotiate selling the former stations' transmission towers and other facilities.

But mostly it stresses that it had to establish an all-traffic station by the day after Labour Day, when supposedly the fall traffic season will begin. Waiting until October (or later) would be unacceptable. It's "urgent" that it has to be up by September, Cogeco says. People relying on traffic reports every 10 minutes just isn't enough.

What's not said in the press release is that this is all about money. Cogeco's not in a rush to get this all-traffic station on the air because it cares about Montreal drivers. It's in a rush because it cares about the $1.5 million subsidy from the Quebec government. The agreement between Cogeco and the Ministry of Transport says the stations must be operating by Oct. 31, but the contract actually begins Sept. 1. (It doesn't make clear what happens if Cogeco misses its deadline.) Once that happens, the station begins collecting $125,000 a month from the government to pay its staff.

Thankfully Cogeco doesn't own a popular English-language AM station, so it can't shut that down to turn it into an all-traffic station. Instead, it will wait for the CRTC to decide on 940AM, and is asking them to hurry in making a decision (they are hurrying, and had already tightened deadlines for applications for that frequency).

When this all-traffic station idea was announced in May, I panned it as a waste of $9 million of government money over three years for something that just about every radio station already provided for free ad nauseam. Cogeco's competitors agreed, and demanded an open call for applications for those frequencies, which the CRTC granted.

Now it seems even more obvious how bad an idea it is. Cogeco has compared its $1.5-million subsidy against the ad revenue from CKAC and decided it would rather the government subsidy. The Quebec government is essentially using public money to push Cogeco into shutting down a popular all-sports radio station and replace it with something that is redundant to every other station in the market.

(One might ask if Cogeco didn't want to shut down CKAC, why not apply for an all-sports radio station on 690AM and bring it back? The press release is silent on this.)

It's a sad day for Montreal radio, and an even sadder day for common sense and government spending.

CKAC 730AM will go all-traffic Tuesday, Sept. 6 at 4:30am. The CRTC hears applications for 690 and 940AM (Cogeco has withdrawn its application for 690) on Oct. 17.

A Facebook page has been setup to protest the decision. CKAC Sports's Facebook page has a brief note from the station: "Merci à chacun d'entre vous de nous avoir suivi, lu, et d'être venu commenter ainsi que partager votre passion pour le sport", followed by a lot of angry comments.

You can also watch video of CKAC's empty studio while listening to Céline Dion and other awful music.

Other coverage

TVA interviews Michel Langevin, who will be moving to TVA Sports
Benoît Dutrizac on 98.5FM interviews Lachance about the changes
Hockey Inside/Out's Mike Boone doesn't understand how Montreal can support an anglo all-sports station but not a franco one
Sports commentary satirists at Sportnographe say they're sad about CKAC leaving (though with TVA Sports, RDS and others, they won't be struggling for content)
Radio-Canada
The Gazette
CTV
Agence QMI quotes some Twitter posts

Rolling the dice on Quebec’s infrastructure

Fagstein — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 02:08:51 +0000

Have you seen so many Transport Quebec trucks in one place in your life?

Infrastructure is one of those things - nobody pays it any attention to it until it fails. People have better things to worry about, so they don't think about their water pipes, their electricity lines, their building foundations or their roads or bridges, so long as they're working properly. But when something goes wrong, any of these can suddenly become a top priority.

For this same reason, those who are in charge of infrastructure tend not to prioritize it. If the people don't care, why should the government? Making a working thing still work is not going to win you as many votes as making a brand new thing. And that's a logic that's not reserved for inept governments. Given the choice between paying a professional engineer to do an inspection on that seemingly innocuous crack in a home's foundation and spending that money on a new big-screen TV, which do you think is going to be the more common choice?

Lessons from NASA

(Feel free to skip this section if you know what STS-51-L and the Rogers Commission are)

When I hear about major infrastructure failures, like the de la Concorde overpass collapse in 2006, I think about the Space Shuttle.

The Space Shuttle was an extremely complex system, requiring thousands of highly educated experts to work together to make it a success. But of all those engineers, scientists, programmers, administrators and other staff, it's just those handful of people who actually board the shuttle for a trip into space that really attract the public's attention. And for every mission, it's only those few days spent actually executing it that people notice (if even that).

On a cold day in January 1986, all those experts worked hard to send one of those space shuttles into orbit. Like a scene from a movie, the flight director asks department heads if they're prepared for launch, and if everyone agrees, gives the "go for launch", which can be revoked right up until liftoff. The launch can even be aborted while in progress. There's a procedure for all that, because those really smart people have pondered every contingency.

Launch delays for the shuttle program were so common as to be routine. Mechanical issues and bad weather were the most common reasons (there are uncommon reasons too). But they're also very expensive, not to mention how bad they look for the public, even if they understand that safety is paramount.

The launch of STS-51-L was delayed multiple times, because of bad weather at the launch site, bad weather at emergency landing sites, and mechanical failure. It was six days after its originally scheduled launch that it finally took off from the pad at Kennedy Space Center. And even then it was over the objection of engineers who were worried about the effect the cold might have on a critical component of the external solid rocket booster.

Actually, it wasn't quite like that. There wasn't some veteran gray-haired engineer sitting at mission control explaining exactly what would happen, screaming that no one was listening to him and guaranteeing that the shuttle would explode if it lifted off. The conversation actually took place internally within the contractor responsible for the rocket booster. The engineers in charge signed off on the launch despite the concerns. And it's not too hard to understand the logic. The concern was theoretical. It wasn't guaranteed that the part would fail, and even if it did, there was a backup.

On Jan. 28, with the weather having warmed up and no remaining reasons for delay, STS-51-L took off. Everything looked fine for 73 seconds, even though the part in question - an O-ring seal around the right solid rocket booster - had indeed failed, along with its backup. By the time anyone noticed something was wrong, the failure led to the solid rocket booster partially detaching, the centre fuel tank disintegrated and the orbiter was torn apart.

What millions on the ground and on television saw was an explosion and clouds of vapor heading in directions they're not supposed to go. The Space Shuttle Challenger had been destroyed, and its seven astronauts wouldn't survive. (Their exact cause of death isn't clear, but they survived the explosion and may have even been conscious as they plummeted to their deaths.)

An inquiry was ordered, and it was thorough. Blame was spread around, particularly among those who dismissed safety concerns because they wanted the launch to proceed. But there was also blame placed on a culture where risks were be minimized because of overconfidence in the safety of the system as a whole. So much redundancy was built in, and minor failures in such a complex vehicle were so common, that concerns about even serious problems were easily dismissed.

The shuttle program was grounded and the next one wouldn't take off until 32 months later. NASA made sweeping changes as a result of the report, and the disaster is even taught to engineering students as a lesson in what happens when one becomes overconfident in safety. The hope was that, for the shuttle program specifically and for major engineering projects in general, such a mistake would never be allowed to happen again.

And then it did.

The circumstances and cause were radically different for the Columbia disaster on Feb. 1, 2003. It happened on re-entry, not takeoff, and while there were concerns about damage before it began its doomed descent into the atmosphere, nobody really had a clear idea what kind of damage could be caused by a simple piece of foam flying off the external fuel tank.

Still, the conclusion reached after the second fatal accident in the shuttle program was that NASA had not learned its lesson from Challenger. The culture had not sufficiently changed, and safety concerns were being dismissed wen the likelihood of them causing significant trouble was low.

A hole beneath the elevated Metropolitan Expressway currently being repaired

Risk management

Whenever I hear a politician, a company CEO or anyone else say that safety is their "number one priority" or that they don't take any chances with safety, I cringe. Because really, safety is not paramount. It's a risk, one they try to minimize but only so far as their budget can reasonably take them. If it costs too much money to reduce the risk of injury from almost impossible to impossible, they'll stick with almost impossible, so long as they can do so legally.

And the rest of us are the same. Yes, speed kills, but the vast majority of speeding doesn't result in death. A driver who goes 120 km/h in a 100 zone is increasing the risks to himself and others around him, but the chances are still pretty low that anything bad is going to happen. You buy your car with airbags and crumple zones because you know that the chances are pretty good that someday something might happen, but on a given day the likelihood is too small to even think about.

It's called risk management. Nothing can be made 100% safe, so a balance is reached where there's an acceptable (very low) level of risk that can be achieved economically.

The question, then, becomes where this balance is to be placed. For something where failure is a mere inconvenience (like, say, cable TV), something like 99% or 99.9% is sufficient. People will complain when they get to that 0.1% of the time, but there won't be any commissions convened to investigate it. For infrastructure where failure can mean fatalities (like in a bridge or tunnel), 99.9% is nowhere near adequate. Even a 99.999% success rate would mean failure for one out of every 100,000, or a couple of cars a day on the Turcot Interchange. It has to be 100%, and it has to be everywhere.

Workers do repairs on the St. Pierre Interchange at night to minimize traffic disruption

Quebec, you've lost me

Before Sunday, I had confidence in Quebec's infrastructure. You might think that's ridiculous, with all the news I've been exposed to about collapsing overpasses, crumbling bridges and surprise sinkholes under our roads. But things I had seen gave me more hope than fear. When the government shut down one span of the Mercier Bridge, it acted before there was structural failure and before anyone died. When Transport Quebec imposed lane reductions on the Turcot Interchange, it did so as a proactive measure. While Montreal motorists whined that this was all evidence of the government being irresponsible about infrastructure, I took it the opposite way.

But the collapse of a "paralume" at the entrance to the Viger Tunnel on Sunday changed my feeling on the subject. It was entirely subjective, and maybe not entirely rational (it looks increasingly like this was the result of a mistake in repairs to the tunnel's walls rather than a case of not noticing a badly decayed structure). But as of that moment I couldn't trust Transport Quebec to keep roads safe.

Transport Minister Sam Hamad isn't exactly helping matters. When asked point blank by CTV's Todd van der Heyden whether he's ultimately responsible for what goes on in his department, Hamad avoided answering the question. To Daybreak's Mike Finnerty earlier in the day, he compared what happened to a plumber doing a bad job on your house, saying it was the plumber, not the home owner, who would be responsible. Hamad clearly wants to blame anyone but himself for this.

And yet the man who's responsible for nothing was in charge enough to reassure us that any road that's open to traffic in Quebec is safe - while standing in front of the proof that his statement was clearly not true.

But I'm not calling for Hamad's resignation as transport minister. Yes, he's incredibly bad at media relations, and he can't take responsibility for his own department. But do we seriously think that the next person Jean Charest appoints to this cabinet post is going to do anything substantially different, other than being a better bullshitter?

Odd sight of an empty Ville-Marie Expressway during the morning rush hour

And this isn't just Hamad's fault. Quebec's infrastructure problem predates his tenure as transport minister. It predates the Charest Liberal government. In fact, funding for inspections has gone up significantly since the de la Concorde collapse. There's just far too much infrastructure out there to keep tabs on, even without counting what can happen when someone makes a construction mistake.

Hamad should take responsibility, if not blame, and Quebec needs to seriously look at how it manages its highway infrastructure, through an inquiry if necessary. And inspection reports should be made public. They'll probably show that there are overpasses, bridges and tunnels all over Quebec that are in a critical state. They'll probably lead the media and motorists to panic, in some cases unnecessarily. But they'll also show the full extent of the problem, and what a monumental task it will be to bring it all up to an acceptable level again.

And it's a monumental task that Quebec will undertake half-assed, if at all. Because Quebecers want huge increases in spending on infrastructure maintenance. We just don't want to pay for it.

CTV Montreal viewers overwhelmingly reject paying more for highway repairs

Well, we don't care THAT much

It's an unscientific poll, but I don't think the 1,393 who responded to CTV Montreal's TalkBack question are too far out of the mainstream. Quebecers want roads and bridges to be safe, but they don't want to pay tolls or higher taxes to ensure this. They want the money to come out of nowhere. Maybe from education, or health care. Many probably think there's a few billion in the budgets of the Office québécois de la langue française and Jean Charest's salary as premier to fix it all up, or that once we eliminate corruption in construction contracts everything will balance out.

But really, just like the government, the transport department, and those engineers at NASA, Quebecers are willing to play the odds. If half a dozen people die once every five years or so because of a major infrastructure failure, that's an acceptable loss, or at least not so outrageous that they'd consider paying a few cents more for gas or paying a few bucks to cross a bridge every day.

We'll never admit it, of course. The Ville Marie tunnel collapse didn't kill anyone, but we're still all up in arms about it just because it could have. (The fact that this happened in the middle of summer when there isn't much other news certainly contributes a bit.) Ask any regular Quebecer, and they'll say there should be no risk, no gambling of anyone's safety. They'll say no injury is acceptable.

They'll say infrastructure safety should be the government's top priority, no question.

Well, except taxes. And health care, and education, and the economy. Those other "No. 1 priorities" will take up a larger part of everyone's attention as the months and years go by without a major infrastructure failure. Those millions of extra dollars being shovelled into keeping our roads and bridges even more safe won't be noticed by motorists, except when they see the traffic cones (which they will no doubt whine about). When the next round of across-the-board budget cuts comes around, the transport department and its team of inspectors won't be immune, any more than health care and emergency services workers are.

And then, in a few years, when we see the next bridge collapse, the next tunnel cave in or the next sinkhole develop that either kills someone or looks like it could easily have done so, we'll have this same debate all over again. We'll all shift the blame around, demanding someone else be held accountable.

We certainly won't look in the mirror, and realize that we've reached a subconscious pact with our government that allows them to roll the dice with our safety. Because despite what we say, our No. 1 priority isn't infrastructure safety when we enter the voting booth. It's sovereignty, or the personalities of the party leaders, or health care, or education, or immigration, or whatever big thing has most recently caught our attention.

Like our government, we'll do a lot of talking about how unacceptable this all is. But when it comes time to put our money where our mouth is, we'll suddenly become very silent.

P.S. I wonder who inspects the structures that hold up TV reporters so they can get a better backdrop while reporting on the tunnel collapse.

Vive la Fête nationale – it’s our holiday too

Fagstein — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 01:05:18 +0000

l'Autre Saint-Jean at Parc du Pélican: Lots of bright lights in your face

CTV Montreal had one of their viewer polls on Thursday asking whether they plan to celebrate the Fête nationale. The result: 91% said no.

Those who believe in the stereotype of CFCF viewers, that they're hardcore federalist anglophones who despise Quebec and the French language, won't be surprised by that number. But I was. (And it wasn't exactly a fluke either, their viewer polls, though voluntary and unscientific, still attract more than 1,000 responses on a regular basis, and this was no exception.)

It's kind of depressing. Like me, many anglos complain that they're not made to feel included in Quebec society, but then when given the opportunity to participate in it, they turn it down.

On Thursday night, I headed to Parc du Pélican in Rosemont for l'Autre Saint-Jean. You might remember that as the event that attracted a lot of controversy for inviting two anglophone acts to play there. That's how I learned about it, and when the organizers ~~stuck to their guns and kept them on the ticket~~ caved to public pressure and re-invited them after caving to lesser public pressure by uninviting them in the first place, I decided to show my support and attend the party. There were some boos for the artists, but also lots of cheers, as francophone Quebec does not speak with one voice.

I went back this year, not because they had any anglo bands on the ticket, but because I was free that night and there was this big free rock concert happening, so why not? I got to listen to some Galaxie and Karkwa with thousands of other people in weather that varied from clear to drizzle.

At one point during the night, as I was tweeting beside the stage, I got tapped on the shoulder and looked up to see the night's emcee, MC Gilles introducing himself to me. Since he has 20,000 twitter followers and I only have about 3,000 (and because he's on half a dozen TV and radio stations and I'm on none), he's more famous than me, so it was an honour to meet him. I also encountered some other interesting characters.

But the night was about the music, not networking with the long-haired masses. As Karkwa was on stage, they invited on a special guest, Patrick Watson, to perform with them. Many in the crowd were already aware of the surprise, but he still got a huge cheer when he was brought on stage. They performed a song in French, and another in English, and the crowd ate it up. It didn't matter what language they sang in (and really, at a rock concert, few people can make out the lyrics anyway), that front row of young girls wanted to take these men home with them.

Rue Frontenac's Philippe Renault was there (this event attracted a lot less journalistic attention than it did in 2009), and summarizes the night. The story includes a photo of Watson in a Quebec flag T-shirt, which the fans appreciated.

That's not to say the crowd was anti-separatist or anything. Speakers who advocated Quebec independence (including now-former-PQ MNA Louise Beaudoin, who represents Rosemont) were heavily cheered as well when they gave their vive-le-Québec-libre speeches. It's silly to think that pro-sovereignty speeches will ever be absent from St. Jean festivities (though it would be nice if divisive political speeches in general would be toned down a bit). But this event was about people wanting to have some fun, celebrate their music and their heritage, and welcome all to the party.

And yet, I could easily have been the only anglo among the 9,000 people in that park.

I'm an anglophone Quebecer. I can't change my birthplace, my family history or my mother tongue, nor do I have any desire to. I live here because I love this city, warts and all, and I love Quebec. I celebrate its culture and its people, whether they speak English, French or Klingon. I watch its television, read its newspapers and talk to its people, and the vast majority of those things are in French.

It's days like this that I wish I wasn't seen as some exception to the rule. I wish more anglophones took a serious interest in some of the great stuff that's produced by Quebec artists. I wish as many anglophones could identify Véronique Cloutier, Éric Salvail, Damien Robitaille and Louis-José Houde as can identify Rufus Wainwright, Leonard Cohen, Terry DiMonte and Mutsumi Takahashi. (I also wish the same was true for francophones.)

And I wish more anglophones would take the initiative to make themselves part of Quebec's culture as much as I wish that Quebec's culture would open its arms to us.

I could go on, but I want to go to this party at Parc Maisonneuve. I hope I'll see you there.

Bonne Fête nationale à tous les québécois. Vive le Québec ivre!

Fête nationale at Maisonneuve Park

UPDATE (after the Fête nationale at Parc Maisonneuve): I got to the concert pretty late. Fortunately I recorded it on Radio-Canada so I didn't miss anything. I saw the best parts in person, including a tribute that Rufus and Martha Wainwright did to their mother, Kate McGarrigle, who died in January 2010. They were warmly greeted by the crowd after Guy A. Lepage's introduction that described McGarrigle as building a bridge between Quebec's two solitudes.

They sang in French, songs that the crowd wasn't familiar with (certainly not as much as they were with those of Éric Lapointe and Robert Charlebois), which was probably why many who were far from the stage didn't pay much attention.

There's a bit of controversy here, in that the Wainwrights were apparently not allowed to sing in English. That's still unfortunate, and probably more a symptom of the fact that this concert is run by the highly political and anti-anglophone Société Saint-Jean Baptiste than evidence of a desire to censor minority cultures in Quebec from the government or artists. I think the Wainwrights' choice of songs was good, and they should probably have been sung regardless, but it would have been nice if that choice was theirs.

All that said, it was nice to see them there, to see Kate McGarrigle recognized as an important Quebec artist by Lepage and the concert, and an acknowledgment that anglo Quebecers are Québécois too.

On my way to the metro station afterward, I noticed that a group behind me was chatting in English. So I guess I wasn't the only anglo there.

Maybe Quebec is changing. By baby steps, to be sure, but still changing. And dare I say it, it's changing for the better.

Be careful who you make fun of

Fagstein — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 19:20:00 +0000

QMI Agency reporter Julien McEvoy must have thought he had a pretty good scoop when he spotted an ad in a community paper from one of the new NDP MPs that contained some grammatical errors.

The ad was by Matthew Dubé, the former president of the McGill NDP club who had to quit because he got elected as an MP on May 2 in the riding of Chambly-Borduas (that's the riding Jean-François Mercier ran in as an independent).

Politicians are always putting ads in community newspapers wishing them well during all sorts of holidays. But this one contained some errors. Specifically, two verbs were improperly conjugated, and the ad referred to the riding of Quebec (as in Quebec City), even though his constituency is just east of Montreal.

The Journal de Montréal printed the article on Page 2 on Wednesday (PDF), complete with a reproduction of the ad that circled its errors. At the end, it asks readers to weigh in on whether these kinds of mistakes will affect Jack Layton's credibility.

McEvoy apparently made no effort to contact Dubé or the NDP for comment. They quickly responded after the story was published, saying it was the newspaper that was responsible. The NDP had not approved the final text of the ad, he says.

The party acted quickly, and got l'Oeil Régional to publish an apology on its website. The Journal and Canoë also published a follow-up piece.

But McEvoy didn't back down. Despite the paper's apology, he insists the error was still the NDP's, that it was the party - not the paper - that drafted the erroneous text in the first place. He has also posted images of another NDP MP's similar mistakes, and another ad that uses the logo for the NDP (in English, instead of NPD in French).

Perhaps this is why the original articles online have not been corrected or updated. Neither has this article, which erroneously refers to it as a card sent through the mail.

I shouldn't need to explain why erroneous articles online need to be corrected. The mistake gets passed around a lot more than the correction. And people aren't going to search the website of every article they read to see if a corrected article was published the next day.

Other articles posted online that used the QMI piece (without attribution or links) also sit uncorrected, including this blog post and this piece on CJAD's website.

Whether you believe the paper or the NDP is ultimately at fault here (I'm more inclined to believe the latter, though I also think newspapers should proofread all their ads), there are some unfortunate implications of this story. It's clear that the Journal and Quebecor have an agenda here and are pushing it. They feel the NDP MPs are incompetent and want to expose their troubles with the French language. This story is being fuelled as much by the usual sensationalist bias of the media (and particularly the Journal) as it is by Quebecor's growing right-wing bias that puts the NDP in its sights.

There's the fact that McEvoy appears to have made no attempt to contact a politician before publishing a piece designed to smear him. Whether or not such a smear is justified, basic journalistic ethics require at least an attempt to seek comment before publishing it. Had McEvoy done so, he would have learned of the NDP's response and there would have been little need for a follow-up piece.

And then there's the simple fact that L'Oeil Régional is now owned by Quebecor. Which brings up the question: Why were Quebecor newspaper employees not able to spot basic grammatical errors in an ad before it was published?

I'd ask these questions to McEvoy, but apparently the new rules of journalism say I don't have to.

We open our arms to you, arrogant bastards

Fagstein — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 07:39:32 +0000

A new Impératif français ad shows young people holding up buttons that say "Oui! Je parle français"

I saw an ad tonight on TV from Impératif français, the French-language rights lobby group. What struck me most was that this ad was on CFCF-12. An anglophone station airing an ad for a group that seems, on its surface at least, to be so anti-anglophone. Kinda strange.

It turns out they launched a new ad campaign specifically targetting anglophones. And its press release actually sounds very progressive in its views of anglos in Quebec (emphasis mine):

Par cette nouvelle action, Impératif français cherche à renforcer auprès des Anglo-québécois la fierté de parler français et d'appartenir au principal peuple francophone d'Amérique.

Les études actuelles sur les choix de vie des Anglo-québécois ont démontré combien la maîtrise et l'appréciation du français avaient une incidence directe sur leur sentiment d'appartenance au peuple québécois, sur leur choix de vie et leur désir de mener leur carrière au Québec.

Le Québec compte dans sa population une minorité anglophone particulièrement instruite et extrêmement mobile sur le plan professionnel, au point où il perd, décennie après décennie, de nombreux effectifs au profit d'autres provinces canadiennes ou des États-Unis. Conscient de ce gaspillage de ressources, Impératif français considère qu'il est grand temps d'influer sur ces migrations interprovinciales en renforçant la place du français dans le cœur et l'esprit des Anglo-québécois.

Langue internationale, le français est aussi la langue de la très grande majorité de la population québécoise. Sa maîtrise ouvre les portes des différentes administrations publiques et facilite également l'intégration dans le secteur privé. En outre, la maîtrise du français permet aux Anglo-québécois de mieux connaître leurs concitoyens, de participer à la vie politique et culturelle d'un milieu de vie unique en Amérique du Nord. Cette maîtrise est la voie royale pour enraciner les Anglo-québécois dans leur patrie.

En outre, la connaissance du français permet d'abattre les préjugés, de rapprocher les citoyens et de développer une société intégrée capable de se doter d'objectifs communs. Pour tous, au Québec, le français est la clé de l'avenir. « Mon avenir est ici. Le Québec, c'est mon monde, ma patrie »

There are a lot of good ideas in here. In a province where more than 80% of the population has the same mother tongue, it's vital for everyone who works there to speak that language. Even in Montreal, where half the population is francophone, a quarter anglophone and the rest a bunch of other languages, you can't have a serious career here without being able to carry on a conversation in French.

The statement goes further, pointing out how many people leave Quebec after taking advantage of its cheap education, and how this brain drain is an economic waste. Impératif français wants to help combat this by reinforcing the Quebec in Quebec anglophones, reminding them that no matter what language they speak at home or how much life in Calgary seems flawless to them, their corner store is not a dépanneur, their Canucks are not Les Canadiens, their comedy festival is not Juste pour rire, and their Leah Miller is not Véronique Cloutier.

And then, rather than emphasize how much the group wants to push Quebec's two solitudes apart, it points out how improving French language skills among anglophones can help bridge the gap. Their mission is not to push anglos down the 401, but to bring them into the fold and make them feel like true québécois.

I was about to go find my nearest Impératif français member and give him or her a great big hug, but then I read this interview its president did with Métro last week. It was short, consisting of three questions. The first answer started like this:

Nous déplorons l’arrogance des Anglo-Québécois qui imposent l’anglais partout.

Oh well, maybe next time.

A new Sherriffs in town

Fagstein — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 06:39:52 +0000

Catherine Sherriffs will anchor CFCF's 11:30 newscast (CTV photo)

CTV Montreal announced on Thursday that reporter Catherine Sherriffs has gotten the job as 11:30pm newscast anchor, left vacant since the departure of Debra Arbec to CBC last month.

Sherriffs's appointment is effective July 4, which, coincidentally or not, is the same day Arbec is scheduled to begin as the 5pm anchor at CBC.

"I'm really excited to still be reporting, it will be great to get out into the city," Sherriffs says in the story CTV posted online. "But being an anchor is what I always dreamed about. Literally, always. I've never wanted to do anything else."

Sherriffs, from Morin Heights, is a 2007 graduate of Concordia's journalism program, and got her start on radio. She's the niece of current CFQR newsman Murray Sherriffs.

The choice of Sherriffs is a bit (but not too much) out of left field. Either of weekend anchors Paul Karwatsky or Tarah Schwartz would have been an obvious choice. Or one of the veteran reporters. But not all of them were interested in a job that would see them lose their weeknights.

Sherriffs hasn't been contributing to CTV long (in fact, she wasn't even a permanent member of the staff), but her appointment reminds me of that of Andrew Chang at CBC, who was also a noticeably young (and tiny, and cute) pick but who has turned out to be a very good anchor.

Another pretty face

Of course, the first reaction from TV watchers, and the thing most of us are too polite to point out in public, is that Sherriffs is very pretty. The thought immediately enters one's mind that she was picked for the job primarily for this reason.

Let's be honest here: Looks do matter on TV. In a world where your boss will talk to you about your choice of tie, how you look is a big part of how you're judged. I personally cringe at the thought of how random strangers would judge me if I ever got a regular job that saw my face (and fashion sense) on television.

Look around the dial and you see lots of pretty faces in TV news (not just on Sun News Network). There's an element of self-selection in this - people (especially women) who are very pretty seem more likely to see themselves as television reporters, or have people suggest that to them. There's a natural sociological force that brings pretty faces and on-camera TV jobs together. And there are decision-makers who, when presented with two candidates with equal skills and experience, will convince themselves that the prettier one actually has more skills or more experience.

We can say this is wrong, that people should be chosen for their mental qualifications and not their looks, but at the end of the day it's ratings that matter, and ratings are driven by the viewers.

So, was Sherriffs chosen because she's pretty? I can't get into the head of the decision-makers at CTV, so there's no way to know for sure what they thought consciously or unconsciously. My guess is that it was a minor factor in the decision. Sherriffs's hosting experience comes from radio, where nobody really cares what you look like. And her work as a TV reporter gives no indication that she's a dumb girl wandering the streets with a microphone. Pretty works, but it isn't enough.

The real test will come next month, when she takes over the anchor chair and begins walking the fine line between being a serious news reader and being a warm, relatable human being that people are comfortable spending some time with before they go to bed.

It'll probably be awkward at first, but give it a few months and she and their viewers will get used to each other.

I've never met Catherine Sherriffs, but from what I know about her through her colleagues and her work, I can tell you this: This is what she wants to do, and few people are as motivated as she is to succeed.

CTV Two: The second-rate brand

Fagstein — Tue, 31 May 2011 08:20:37 +0000

BBC Two. ESPN2. CBC Radio 2. TSN2. And now Bell Media has added another broadcaster to the list of brands whose names literally scream out "second-rate stuff goes here": A Channel/ATV will become CTV Two, they announced on Monday.

Of course, A Channel is a second-rate channel, carrying mostly American programming that CTV has the rights to but can't fit into the main network's schedule. And I wasn't exactly crazy about the /A\ branding either, particularly because of how ungoogleable it was.

A poll apparently told Bell that CTV's brand is the most trusted media brand in Canada, and so it has decided to use that brand to maximum effect. It can't turn A Channel stations into CTV stations directly (most are too close to existing CTV stations), so it'll impose its brand and add a number to it because they can't think of anything better to name it.

Another change will be rebranding the newscasts as "CTV News" - so they'll be indistinguishable from CTV newscasts in all the other markets. Whether viewers of the local stations want this is, of course, irrelevant. The decision comes from the top, using the same logic that killed the Pulse News brand in Montreal.

CTV seems to be implying that it will put more effort into the network than it has in the past, giving it higher-profile shows instead of third-rate crap. It promises "one monster acquisition to anchor the schedule" - which I guess means that they're going to give the network a single hit show and otherwise keep the relationship between the two networks unchanged.

Using A as the sloppy-seconds network is the main reason it has never been profitable. And it will probably remain that way. But part of Bell's deal with the CRTC when it purchased CTV's assets was a commitment to keep the unprofitable A Channel stations running for another three years. So we'll see this experiment continue whether or not it's successful.

There may not be a lot of money for newscasts or original programming for the A stations, but apparently there's plenty of money to keep rebranding this network every few years. Hopefully whoever came up with the stupid name and cheap logo didn't get paid too much.

UPDATE (June 2): The announcement of CTV Two programming for this fall contains little of interest. Certainly no "monster acquisition" I can see.

All-traffic radio: A $9-million waste

Fagstein — Tue, 24 May 2011 23:40:22 +0000

Coverage map for CINW 940AM at 50,000 watts, as submitted to CRTC

Last week, news came out that Cogeco and the Quebec government have reached a deal that will see the creation of two new all-traffic AM radio stations in Montreal set to open in the fall. The project will cost taxpayers $9 million over three years.

It's the most ridiculous use of $9 million I've seen in a while.

The history of 690 and 940 AM

Montreal has had two giant holes in its radio spectrum since January 2010. Both frequencies - 690 and 940 kHz - started out as CBC stations. CBM (CBC Montreal) moved to 940 and CBF (Radio-Canada Montreal) moved to 690 in 1941. They were among Canada's oldest AM radio stations and each had clear-channel status, meaning that they could operate at 50,000 watts and did not have to reduce power overnight to avoid interference.

Clear-channel status is highly sought - or at least it was. There are only about a dozen such stations in Canada (CKAC is the only active one in Montreal), and the clear-channel status means they can be heard from very far away with a good enough antenna.

Despite this seemingly huge advantage, CBC decided in the late 90s to move its AM stations in Montreal to FM - 88.5 and 95.1 MHz - where they remain today as CBC Radio One and Première Chaîne). The argument was that FM provided better quality audio and the signal would be easier to capture in the city. The tradeoff - that the signal would no longer be carried by skywave to neighbouring provinces and territories - didn't seem to be such a big deal. It was a controversial move at the time, particularly for CBC Radio listeners who had better reception with AM than FM.

In 1999, the decades-old CBC transmitters were shut down and the frequencies vacated. Métromédia (later Corus Quebec), which owned CIQC 600 AM and CKVL 850 AM, wasted no time in snapping the clear channels up, and moved those two stations to the vacated frequencies. They were reborn as all-news stations CINW (940 News) and CINF (Info 690).

We all know how that turned out. The anglo all-news station didn't work out financially, so they changed it up into a news-talk format in 2005. When that didn't work either, they fired everyone and started played music in 2008. (Info 690, meanwhile, kept going with their news format). Then, in January 2010, Corus pulled the plug on both stations and gave up. They returned their licenses to the CRTC.

Since then, the frequencies have remained vacant. Clear AM channels that it seems anyone could have had just by asking. But no takers.

In 2010, Corus agreed to sell its Quebec assets to Cogeco. This included the transmitters for CINW and CINF, even though they were inoperative and had no broadcast license. The deal was approved in December, giving Cogeco the equipment (and a lease on the transmitter site in Kahnawake until 2021) but no idea how to use it in a way that could make it profitable.

And here's where the Quebec government comes in.

Congrats, Cogeco lobbyists

According to documents they submitted to the CRTC (you can download them yourself from here), Cogeco found out about the Quebec transport ministry wanting to improve the way it communicates information about traffic disruptions to the public. With all the construction work expected to come (the Turcot Interchange, for example), they wanted to minimize the pain to drivers by keeping them as well informed as possible.

Cogeco went to them and proposed a ... let's call it a partnership. Cogeco would provide the transmitter, the programming, the staff. The government would provide access to traffic information and lots and lots of money.

The government thought it was a great idea, and on April 14 they published their intention to award a contract to Cogeco. The deal was finally announced last week by the government and Cogeco (PDF) and the CRTC announced it would hold a hearing on the proposal to give the licenses back to CINW and CINF. News coverage was brief, most just regurgitating the press release:

The station, which according to the deal must be operational by Oct. 31 (though the target date is Sept. 1 pending CRTC approval), would broadcast live from 4:30am to 1am weekdays and 6am to 1am weekends and holidays. This information includes:

Traffic status on highways and bridges
Road conditions
Information on road work sites (it's unclear if this is just those run by the transport ministry or all municipal sites as well)
Highway safety tips
Weather conditions

In other words, the kind of stuff you'd expect from any traffic information radio station. Missing from this list is an item about providing information on public transit service. It's unclear why both sides left this out of their press releases, but it's contained in their CRTC submission and in the contract between the government and Cogeco, and I would imagine the intention is to include such information in their broadcasts.

The deal also includes promotion of the station by Cogeco and 25 minutes a day of airtime for the ministry.

Cogeco says it plans to use CHMJ in Vancouver (owned by Corus) as a template. That's also an all-traffic radio station, but with one major difference: It's not funded by the government.

You could also compare it to The Weather Network and MétéoMédia, which provide all-weather programming, funded mainly by subscriber fees that all cable subscribers must pay for the channels.

Why this is a bad idea

I appreciate that the ministry wants to improve communication about traffic and road work. But they're doing this by getting into the broadcast business. The figure of $3 million a year might not be much, but it represents about three-quarters of the stations' proposed budgets. Cogeco also predicts that figure will rise if the contract is renewed beyond three years (the CRTC asks for seven-year projections for a station's finances) to $3.3 million a year for the next three years.

Put simply, this is a solution to a problem that does not exist. I mean, seriously, is the biggest complaint about commercial radio that there aren't enough traffic reports? Just about every station does traffic reports every 10 minutes during rush hours. CJAD does it all day. All this without any specific funding by the government to do so. Even CBC Radio One does traffic reports, including public transit updates. (The CBC is funded by the federal government, but that funding doesn't come with a requirement to do traffic updates. CBC Radio does traffic reports because it knows that's what rush-hour listeners want to hear.)

This isn't to say an all-traffic radio station wouldn't make sense. CHMJ is trying that format. And it's a good idea for AM radio, because most portable music devices these days can't receive AM radio, but most cars can. But if there's a demand for it, then it can be done without government funding. And if there isn't a demand for it, why bother?

Cogeco's own submission to the CRTC says there are about 1.3 million vehicles travelling in the Montreal area during the afternoon rush hour (less in the morning), which means more than $2 per vehicle per year spent on these stations. They expect their market share will be 1.5% for the anglo station and 1.6% for the francophone station. Based on their estimated total weekly hours of listening, the English station would expect about 1,000 listeners on average (more, obviously, during rush hour) and the French station about 3,000 listeners.

And CRTC submissions are usually pretty optimistic.

Why this is overkill

The other thing that bugs me about this is the choice of channel. Cogeco wants to put both these stations on clear channels, and have both running 50,000 watts day and night. The reach of these stations, as you can see from the map at the top of this post, is not just the greater Montreal area, but as far as Gaspé, Moncton, southern Maine, Kingston, northern Ontario and even Labrador. The vast majority of its listening area couldn't care less what happens on the Champlain Bridge.

Then again, if nobody else wants the frequency, I guess it's better to do that than nothing at all. But surely we can find a better use for such a powerful signal than traffic reports for one city.

There are also some strange proposals, like having a roving reporter patrol the city to report from the scenes of major traffic events. Compare this to the private sector that has helicopters flying overhead to report on traffic and other issues. It's a government employee doing a job that the private sector is already doing better.

What the government should spend its money on

In the grand scheme of things, $9 million isn't a lot of money. But rather than spend it on duplicating a service the private sector already does for free, how about the transport ministry use it more wisely. Spend it on adding more traffic cameras, providing better real-time information to traffic reporters, better ways of getting information to smartphones and other portable devices, improving the Quebec 511 service. Create a database of road work (both provincial and municipal) that can be integrated into Google Maps and used to suggest better routes to drivers.

Or, you know, they could use it to improve the province's highways. At least repave the kilometre or two closest to the Ontario border, which will give the most psychological bang for the buck and end those silly anecdotal cross-border comparisons.

The CRTC will be hearing the two applications for all-traffic radio stations on July 18 in Gatineau. Comments and interventions are being accepted until June 20. The contract is contingent on CRTC approval and would be cancelled if CRTC approval doesn't materialize before Oct. 31.

UPDATE (May 31): A Gazette piece says that there was a call for bids in this deal. That's not entirely accurate. On April 14, the transport ministry published its intent to give a contract to Cogeco (a document that starts off by saying "this is not a call for bids"), and gave competitors 10 days to indicate that they could provide a competing offer for the deal - something that if accepted would have led to a formal call for bids. After the deadline passed, the ministry gave the deal to Cogeco.

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