The Montreal Newspaper Guild website has the latest update, which also points out that talks for the 37 employees in the (non-classified) advertising department have broken off.

UPDATE (Oct. 10): No strike is being called for the foreseeable future. Friday's talks had progress, though jurisdiction remains a roadblock. Conciliation talks are set for Oct. 20 and 21, and the guild says that "additional measures" are necessary to show that the union is "serious" about its demands.

Meanwhile, management is apparently preparing for the worst, with Canwest News Service making inquiries of Concordia University journalism students (and Gazette freelancers) who might want to work freelance for them in the event of a strike. Because they'd be working for Canwest and not The Gazette (even though Canwest owns The Gazette), they would not be breaking Quebec's tough anti-scab laws, even if what they write is of local interest and would only appear in The Gazette.

Concordia's journalism department director, Mike Gasher, has sent a letter to students cautioning them against working as freelance scabs, Macleans reports.

UPDATE: CBC has picked up the story (with requisite "CBC has learned" which implies they didn't just read it from Macleans' blog), and J-Source has picked it up from CBC. The CBC story includes a denial from Canwest News Service's editor-in-chief that the inquiry has anything to do with a possible Gazette strike.

Thanks mostly to the CBC, other blogs are also picking up the story.

UPDATE (Oct. 14): La Presse also writes about the story, this time including a new explanation from Canwest: that the freelance copy would be needed in the event of a Gazette strike in order to provide material for Canwest News Service and other newspapers across Canada, to compensate from the loss of Gazette copy (Canwest has no non-Gazette journalists in Montreal). Of course, as a subscriber to Canwest News Service, The Gazette would have access to this copy as well.

Journal in negotiations

As if that weren't enough, workers at the Journal de Montréal are also at the bargaining table for a new contract, mere months after their sister union at the Journal de Québec accepted a new contract that removes their four-day work week and requires journalists to perform multiple multimedia jobs.

Updates are on the Journal du Journal website. So far nothing too serious is coming out, besides low-level pressure tactics like wearing yellow lanyards.

Still, management at La Presse are no doubt creaming their pants multiple times over at the thought of their two main competitors both being crippled by work disruption simultaneously.

Ozzy Osbourne too

Just figured I'd throw this in there: the Writers Guild of America is telling members not to work for Freemantle Media, which produces a new Ozzy Osbourne "reality" show, because they couldn't reach a deal that would involve paying writers less in order to write less (because it's "reality" and therefore "half-scripted").

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My favourite quote:

"...I started to see a sharp, sharp turn in what people considered newsworthy or inclusion-worthy..."

No kidding.

Even though I can't find anything actually new about this story (no doubt it's another banked holiday feature), and I haven't been active on Wikipedia for a while, I'll add a brief comment:

I'm not sure what camp I'm in. I think it's funny that there are things like lists of Stephen Colbert's Words and other pop culture minutiae. But when every article about some aspect of pop culture has a section that denotes what Simpsons or Family Guy episode references it, things are getting out of hand.

A limit has to be set, and sadly we're still debating where to put that line.

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Prince Edward Island's West Point Lighthouse is an icon. But now that icon is in danger of being claimed by the very element it guards against.

Water has eroded the dunes near the lighthouse so badly that there are concerns the building might collapse into the ocean.

So lighthouses guard against ... water? That's odd, I could have sworn that lighthouses were invented to warn ships about land. You'd think they'd already be well aware of the water surrounding them.

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What's interesting about the story is how seriously it takes itself, compared to the amount of journalism behind it.

The lead:

"The goalie depicted in At the Crease, the iconic painting by late Canadian artist Ken Danby, has finally been unmasked."

It seems groundbreaking. Like Woodward and Bernstein, an epic feat of investigative journalism.

"Now, with an assist from none other than hockey great Wayne Gretzky, CanWest News Service has unlocked the secret."

This sentence is misleading: Gretzky didn't assist, he told Boswell who it is:

This week, following Danby's death, CanWest News Service asked Gretzky, now the coach of the Phoenix Coyotes, if he would reveal the model's identity.

"Dennis Kemp is the name of the goalie," came the reply from a Coyotes spokesman.

In other words, now that Danby is dead, Boswell called Gretzky up (err... called his spokesperson up) and asked if he would reveal the name, and he did.

Is this supposed to be what investigative journalism is nowadays? Well, perhaps I'm being too tough. After all, identifying someone is the easy part. But getting his story is another matter entirely.

Oh wait:

"One mystery about the painting still lingers. Despite scores of phone calls to Kemp families across Ontario, CanWest News Service has been unable, so far, to locate Dennis Kemp."

So much for that. The goalie has been unmasked, but nobody can find him.

UPDATE (Oct. 13): The Guelph Mercury tracked him down in Lethbridge. Meanwhile, Danby's son insists there wasn't a single model for the painting.

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