Tag Archives: 24-Heures

Shockingly, people still reading newspapers

September 23, 2009 – 10:28 pm| Posted in Media

NADbank, the national newspaper readership monitoring service, released a report on Wednesday with some new numbers (PDF) for newspaper publishers to chew on. And, of course, with all the data there, each newspaper cherry-picks facts to make it look like they're doing better than their competitors:

So what do the numbers show?

For the sake of comparison, I'm using the "five-day cumulative" number, which measures how many people read the newspaper (in printed form) at least once over the previous five weekdays. The numbers are compared to the last annual report released in March.

  • Journal de Montréal: 1,027,400, up 3.3% from 994,600 despite the lockout
  • La Presse: 678,200, up 0.9% from 672,300
  • Metro: 630,100, up 2.0% from 617,900
  • The Gazette: 454,200, down 1.1% from 459,200
  • 24 Heures: 516,400, up 13.9% from 453,200

Note that no numbers are given for Le Devoir.

The big news here is with 24 Heures, which has shown a huge jump in readership, surpassing The Gazette for fourth place in the market overall.  This is most likely due to more aggressive distribution as well as the increased number of journalists now employed by the paper since the Journal de Montréal was locked out. It also may have picked up some former ICI readers, since ICI is now a weekly supplement in 24 Heures.

For online readership, the numbers are all press-release-worthy:

  • La Presse (cyberpresse.ca): 359,000, up 10% from 326,200
  • The Gazette (montrealgazette.com): 134,900, up 6.5% from 126,700
  • Metro (journalmetro.com): 36,900, up 12.2% from 32,900
  • 24 Heures (24hmontreal.canoe.ca): 27,100, up 24.3% from 21,800

NADbank is also, for the first time, counting Journal de Montréal online readership (the Journal doesn't have its own website, but Canoe groups some of its articles on a page here). It measures weekly readership at a paltry 130,700, just a bit less than The Gazette.

It's unsurprising that online has grown quite a bit (in most cases it really has nowhere to go but up), and while Metro and 24 Heures have seen huge gains percentagewise, their numbers are still so small that NADbank puts an asterisk next to them to indicate the sample size was too small to be reliable.

Speaking of small sample sizes, the numbers also include Montreal readership for the Globe and Mail (97.600 Monday-Friday, 79,800 weekly online) and National Post (71,400 Monday-Friday, 41,100 weekly online).

So I guess the newspaper crisis is over, huh?

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24 Heures launches new look

September 8, 2009 – 3:22 pm| Posted in Media, Montreal
After: 24 Heures Montréal Sept. 8

After: 24 Heures Montréal Sept. 8

The lesser of the two free dailies in Montreal launched with a new look today. In addition to a new logo, it includes a new colour scheme (orange and white instead of black and yellow) and new fonts (ones that seem to make it look more like Metro).

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So Metro goes to the STM, 24 Heures goes to the AMT

August 25, 2009 – 10:55 pm| Posted in Media, Montreal, Public transit
First edition of La Page AMT, August 26, 2009

First edition of La Page AMT, August 26, 2009

The Agence métropolitaine de transport has announced that, starting Wednesday, it will be communicating with customers via a page in the free daily 24 Heures once a week. The first such page, announcing their new train cars, is available as a PDF. It appears on Page 12 of Wednesday's edition.

If this idea sounds eerily similar to the Info STM page in Metro, it's no coincidence. It all goes back to how these two newspapers got started.

A tale of two free commuter dailies

Metro began publication on March 1, 2001, a partnership between Swedish-based Metro and Montreal-based Transcontinental. A key part of the business plan for this newspaper was a deal it struck with the Société de transport de Montréal (then the Société de transport de la communauté urbaine de Montréal or STCUM). In exchange for exclusive distribution inside the metro system, the newspaper would give 2% of its advertising revenues (guaranteed at $900,000 for the first three years) to the transit agency. It would also give a free page in every issue to the STM so it could more easily offer information to metro users.

Before Metro's first issue went out the door, Quebecor Media launched a campaign against the deal. Cease-and-desist letters went out to both the STM and Metro, followed by a lawsuit. Even a letter from former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, a member of Quebecor's board of directors. Quebecor's argument was that a restriction against other newspapers distributing freely in the metro was a violation of its right to free expression.

The lawsuit was rejected in 2003, and in 2005 the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear an appeal. (A similar lawsuit happened in Philadelphia against Metro, and it too ended up losing in court.) Quebecor was clearly not going to win this battle in court.

24 Heures from four years ago (Aug. 26, 2005)

24 Heures from four years ago (Aug. 26, 2005)

24 Heures, Quebecor's answer to Metro, was launched as Montréal Métropolitain less than two weeks after Metro began distribution. Because of the agreement between Metro and the STM, the paper is distributed outside metro stations. And because of Montreal's ban on newspaper distribution boxes, the company has to hire people to actually hand copies out to commuters. Without a distribution system in the metro, 24 Heures suffered, and constantly lags behind Metro in circulation figures.

At some point since its launch, 24 Heures decided to focus more on places Metro doesn't distribute (which is basically everywhere outside the metro). One of those places is commuter train stations, where you'll find yellow 24 Heures boxes but no Metro.

So it makes sense that the AMT and 24 Heures team up with this page.

What's unclear is whether the AMT is paying 24 Heures for this page, or whether it's being offered as part of an agreement with the AMT. I've asked the AMT about it, and will update this post with what they say.

La Page AMT will be published every Wednesday in 24 Heures starting August 26. 24 Heures is available in virtual format free online.

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Canadian newspaper readership stable

March 25, 2009 – 3:28 pm| Posted in Media

It seems to go against conventional wisdom, but NADBank results released this morning show that readership at major Canadian newspapers remains stable, with three quarters of Canadians reading at least one daily newspaper each week. Online numbers also remain stable, which is disappointing because they represent so little.

Both the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail cherry-picked results to declare victory. The Star has more print readers on a daily, Saturday and weekly basis, but the Globe has more online readers and a higher total readership of both online and print (the Globe also says it won "key" demographics and implies that its readers are smarter). Other newspapers trumpeted their gains, especially the Calgary Herald, whose readership jumped 7% over last year,

In Montreal, the Journal de Montréal is still the undisputed print leader, with 578,800 having read it "yesterday" and 1,129,600 in the last week, 40% more than second-place La Presse (even throwing in Cyberpresse readers, against the Journal's lack of a website, the paper still comes up short). Note that this is all before the lockout.

For those who care about comparing competing papers, there's not much new here. The market percentages are almost identical to last year. A slight uptick in online readers for Cyberpresse, but only from 9% to 11% of the market.

In terms of raw numbers:

  • The Journal de Montréal lost about 3% of its weekday and Sunday readers.
  • La Presse lost about 30,000 weekly print readers but gained about 26,000 weekly online readers.
  • The Gazette (my paper) gained modestly in all categories, but online growth is robust, rising 11% since it relaunched its website last fall. In the Greater Montreal Area, it rose 31%. (Still, most of the website's traffic comes from outside Quebec, an oddity among Canwest's papers)
  • Metro lost almost 5% of its weekly readers, and though it gained almost 20% online, its web readership is still negligible.
  • 24 Heures gained 2.4% in weekly readers (perhaps partially at Metro's expense). Its online numbers are similarly negligible.

In general, 49% of Montrealers 18 and over read a newspaper on the average weekday, 74% read at least one a week, and 76% read a newspaper or go to a newspaper's website in a week (which means a tiny number - 4% nationally - go to newspaper websites but don't subscribe). Freebie newspaper readership is at 24% here, with 717,000 people having read either Metro or 24 Heures in the past five weekdays.

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Journal Daily Digest: Boycott 24 heures?

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping the machin running

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

Elsewhere

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The Great La Presse Habs Scoop of 2009

February 21, 2009 – 3:47 pm| Posted in Canadiens, Media

La Presse scored the jackpot in Friday's paper when it combined the four things that journalists and their bosses have wet dreams about:

  1. A scoop, a story that nobody else has
  2. A story filled with anonymous sources about a crime boss/drug lord/mafia king
  3. A story about a celebrity scandal
  4. A story about the Canadiens

The news dominated coverage yesterday and today, even as everyone was talking about Alex Kovalev's performance problems.

Part of that was because of La Presse, whose hockey analysts were dropping hints on every TV sports show they could find Thursday night to say that a huge scoop would appear in the next day's paper.

The various news sources did all they could to try and match La Presse's story before it came out, but couldn't gather enough before publication to put it all together. So while most just waited until it was out and summarized La Presse's story or re-researched it, Quebecor-owned 24 Heures put out its exclusive story that four Canadiens players had been arrested.

The story, still available in the Google cache, by reporter Maxime Deland, quotes a single anonymous source "very close" to the Canadiens saying four players had been arrested on Thursday night on their return from Pittsburgh.

Of course, no such thing happened, so 24 Heures deleted the story. I found no correction on their website, and the story was not in Friday's edition of the paper.

The story has gotten so big now we have the second (third?) day stories about whether the media is blowing this out of proportion. This piece at Fanatique summarizes the timeline of stories from the various news outlets, while Yves Boisvert, Patrick Lagacé and Mike Boone defend the media's insane interest in the Canadiens as a mere reflection of what the fans want to read.

UPDATE (Feb. 26): Pierre Trudel says La Presse did a good job with its scoop... in an article in La Presse.

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Who needs press releases when you own the newspaper?

February 21, 2009 – 2:48 pm| Posted in Media
24 Heures, Feb. 20, 2009, Page 20

24 Heures, Feb. 20, 2009, Page 20

From Friday's 24 Heures. Neither of these sound like news stories (even entertainment news stories), but when you remember that Quebecor owns 24 Heures and also owns TVA and Videotron, the advertorials make sense.

This, I can only assume, is what Quebecor wants to see in the Journal de Montréal.

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Journal Daily Digest: Do they regret the errors?

January 30, 2009 – 12:12 pm| Posted in Media

The big link for today is (like many of the ones below) from Rue Frontenac, the website put out by locked-out Journal workers. One of the pieces put up Thursday goes through editions of the Journal over the past week and points out some of the errors in the paper. (It didn't take me long to find one myself - the Sunday paper's inside index of columnists had the wrong page number for Benoit Aubin.)

Most of the errors are fairly small (misspelling hockey players' names), some are a bit more severe (getting a hockey player's team wrong), and some are just grammatical nitpicking. What is clear, though, is that they spent a lot of time going through the paper in order to catalog and report on these flaws. I guess they have a lot of free time on their hands now.

One of their criticisms, of the use of the phrase "setting a new record" (as if one could set a record without it being new) made me smile because it's something that I've done a few times in headlines and has been marked in red ink by fellow editors more than once.

The rest

Last week I got a consumer survey in the mail, inviting me to fill it out and win crazy prizes. I actually started filling it out until I noticed it was asking me information that went way beyond what I'm prepared to divulge.

I did notice it had a section on what newspaper you read. But something didn't seem right.

Notice something missing?

Notice something missing?

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Y’a pas d’choix, y manque un bras!

November 26, 2008 – 10:01 pm| Posted in Humour, Media, Video

You know, part of me imagines that everyone reads the Journal de Montréal like this.

Or 24 Heures like this.

There are, amazingly, hundreds more where these came from.

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Big media is stealing your photos

September 15, 2007 – 2:29 am| Posted in Blogosphere, Media

Local blogger Julie Belanger is peeved at 24 Heures. They published a photo of hers, without permission or credit, to illustrate a story.

It's the kind of stuff you expect from amateur operations. Do a Google Image search and copy whatever looks good. Take a stock photo from Getty Images or iStock without paying for it. Or just go on Flickr, ignore the copyright or copyleft notices and use a photo for commercial uses, with or without attribution. TVA isn't above it.

What makes this case interesting is the response she got from the editor: The photo was sent along with a press release, so they're not responsible.

Bullshit.

Whether or not this was done (the organization that sent it denies that any photo was attached and the release on Telbec backs them up), it's the newspaper's responsibility to ensure that photos and text they publish are not protected by copyright. Just like you can't get away with having stolen merchandise just because you bought it from someone dirt cheap in good faith, you can't simply pass the buck on copyright infringement.

If the organization sent the newspaper a photo and made it clear that there was no problem publishing it, then the newspaper should sue the organization and the photographer should sue both.

Sadly, because these photographers don't have copyright lawyers on retainer, big media can simply screw them over.

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