"Il est aussi clair dans notre esprit qu'un groupe de presse rival peut poser un regard critique sur un autre," Enquête host Alain Gravel writes in a blog post published hours before his show's report on the Quebecor media empire (also viewable on tou.tv). "Ça se fait partout dans le monde. Sinon, qui pourrait le faire?"

It's a good question. There are few journalistic enterprises here with the resources to pull it off. Maybe La Presse, but it suffers from the same problem as Radio-Canada of being a perceived enemy of Quebecor. An anglophone media outlet like the Globe and Mail or Toronto Star or Maclean's might, but this story needed to be told in French.

Aside from La Presse and Radio-Canada, the only big media left in this province are all owned by Quebecor. And that's kind of the point. A study by Influence Communication done for Enquête shows that these three media companies produce 83% of the journalism that Quebecers consume. Though Quebecor is the largest of these three groups, the problem of media concentration concerns all three.

Gravel pointed out right off the bat how delicate the report would be, because Quebecor owns TVA, which competes directly with Radio-Canada. It's an important point to keep in mind, and certainly No. 1 on the list of issues Quebecor would bring up in response.

Fortunately for us, Enquête has pretty solid journalistic credentials, and isn't about to say something unless it's been verified.

A good summary

The hour-long report by former TVA journalist Guy Gendron, which has been on every journalist's must-watch list for the past week provides a good summary of the issues. It describes how Quebecor pulled its big two papers out of the Quebec Press Council (and has done the same in Ontario). It talks about its penchant for using its journalistic outlets for self-promotion, using the example of the launch of Videotron's wireless services, which was the top story on TVA's newscast.

Most of it is stuff that journalists in Quebec (and certainly those who have a keen interest in media, like myself) already know about.

An email from Journal de Montréal entertainment editor Michelle Coudé-Lord orders the replacement of a figure in a supposedly independent ranking of cultural figures.

The best part of the report, and the one that brings up something I hadn't already known, concerns a survey done of the most influential cultural figures in Quebec done in 2007. Emails obtained by Enquête show that entertainment editor Michelle Coudé-Lord, apparently under orders from editor-in-chief Dany Doucet, pushed for figures connected to Quebecor to be placed on this list, even though it was supposed to be drawn up by a committee of outside experts to ensure impartiality. Figures like Julie Snyder, René Angélil and Gillett Entertainment Group (now Evenko) boss Jacques Aubé were given more prominence, while 98.5 radio host Paul Arcand, Télé-Québec host and TV producer Marie-France Bazzo, author Michel Tremblay and MNBAQ chief John Porter were considered less so (in the case of the latter, Coudé-Lord apparently wrote "on s'en fout" - or "we don't care").

Confronted with the emails during an interview (the only one in the report in which anyone representing a Quebecor media outlet participates), Coudé-Lord didn't deny they were hers or what was said in them, but said she didn't remember. She also said something about not wanting to implicate her boss.

It's telling because it shows just how far Quebecor will apparently go to manipulate its journalism to suit its own ends, how these orders seem to filter down the chain of command, but above all how petty it all seems to be. This was over what was essentially a popularity contest.

(Besides the emails, Enquête provides evidence in the pages of the newspaper itself. It shows that the list differed between the Journal de Montréal and the Journal de Québec, apparently because of last-minute changes made to the former, giving Snyder her own spot on the list at the expense of Arcand. It's worth pointing out that this happened in the middle of the Journal de Québec lockout, which may help explain partly how this happened. The Journal de Québec version isn't online, but the Journal de Montréal version is still on the Canoe.ca site.)

Journal de Montréal entertainment editor Michelle Coudé-Lord confronted with her emails during Enquête. Some former Journal employees particularly enjoyed seeing this.

But that was about it in terms of big revelations during the show. And though it makes Quebecor look like dicks (or, at least, the management of the Journal de Montréal - no one has really put these supposed incidents of interference any higher than the office of editor Dany Doucet), it doesn't quite reach the level of scandal that you'd expect politicians to get up in arms about.

Politicians will have to answer for some of what was said here (at least I hope they will). It's been alleged that the Liberals and Parti Québécois are too afraid to confront the Quebecor empire, which is why the government agreed that the public health care system should fund in vitro fertilization (a pet cause of Snyder, the conjoint of Quebecor boss Pierre Karl Péladeau), and why both parties supported using taxpayer money to fund a new sports arena in Quebec City that would be managed by Quebecor under a deal that would get special legal protection from the National Assembly.

(Incidentally, one of the scheduled interviews of PQ leader Pauline Marois on Friday is with LCN's Jean-Luc Mongrain. Somehow I don't expect she'll be asked much about it there.)

A history lesson

The rest of the show focuses on explaining the nature of the Quebecor empire, talking about the News of the World scandal and Rupert Murdoch's media empire, about the creation of the Sun News Network in Canada, and other stuff we already know.

That's not to say such things aren't useful (though I don't see how this relates to Murdoch, other than Kory Teneycke wanting to model Sun News after Fox News). Looking back at the creation of Quebecor Media a decade ago reminds us about some of the things Quebecor said at the time. (For those who need a refresher: Quebecor was asked to purchase Videotron, which also owned TVA, by people who wanted to stop a planned purchase by Rogers Media and keep control of the telecom giant in Quebec. The Caisse de dépôt et placement threw in $2.2 billion so Quebecor could make the deal, and now it owns 45% of the $3-billion company.)

A hearing in front of the National Assembly looking into the Quebecor-Videotron deal has some statements from Quebecor VP Luc Lavoie that will make you laugh nowadays (emphasis mine):

Quebecor a toujours diffusé une grande diversité d'opinions dans ses publications et entend continuer à le faire dans le cadre de la création et du développement de sa nouvelle filiale Quebecor Média. Il ne serait pas dans l'intérêt de Quebecor Média qu'il en soit autrement, puisque la crédibilité de nos différents médias est à la base de leur succès.

...

En 1997, Quebecor s'est porté acquéreur de TQS et a pris l'engagement auprès du CRTC de respecter l'indépendance de sa salle des nouvelles. Un code de déontologie et un comité de surveillance ont été proposés et approuvés par le CRTC, et jusqu'à maintenant, l'indépendance de la salle des nouvelles de TQS a scrupuleusement été respectée.

En octobre 2000, le CRTC a renouvelé la licence de TQS, reconnaissant de ce fait que le maintien de l'indépendance de la salle des nouvelles de TQS, dont il avait fait une condition en 1997, avait été respecté.

Dans sa demande au CRTC, Quebecor Média propose d'appliquer le même modèle à TVA et au réseau LCN. Soyons clairs: la haute direction de Quebecor Média ne se mêle pas des choix d'éditoriaux et de ses propriétés. Nous n'en voyons pas l'intérêt. Notre stratégie de convergence n'implique pas une uniformisation des contenus éditoriaux de nos différentes propriétés, au contraire. Nos quotidiens sont entre les mains de professionnels de l'information tant au niveau des cadres qu'au niveau des travailleurs syndiqués. Les choix d'éditoriaux sont faits par ces professionnels et le résultat est que nos quotidiens québécois occupent les premiers rangs dans les deux marchés qu'ils desservent.

...

Quebecor Média continuera de respecter les engagements pris dans les contrats de travail, les engagements pris auprès du CRTC, les lois en vigueur dans le domaine de la concurrence et, surtout, elle poursuivra sa tradition de respect de la liberté d'expression.

Vous savez, on pourrait y voir quelque chose de rassurant parce que la haute direction de Quebecor, qui est une compagnie publique, est imputable à ses actionnaires de ses gestes et elle se conduit comme une entreprise commerciale qui ne se met pas les mains dans la gestion de l'information. La haute direction de Quebecor n'a pas impliquée dans les choix éditoriaux qui sont faits au quotidien, sur une base hebdomadaire ou même sur une base annuelle.

...

Donc, un code interentreprise, comme vous le décrivez, nous apparaît essentiellement excessif, parce que vous savez, vous avez, je crois, Mme la ministre, souligné que nous avons pris un engagement de devenir plus actifs au Conseil de presse. Donc, voilà une forme de contrôle ou, si on veut, d'examen de notre comportement.

And from others at the Quebecor table:

Or, au Journal de Montréal, nous avons les syndicats, les employés sont syndiqués pour la majeure partie et, dans leur convention collective et celle surtout avec le syndicat des journalistes, il y a les clauses corporatives qu'on appelle où il est assez clairement indiqué que ça n'est pas à l'autorité du Journal de Montréal de dicter ni plus ni moins ce que les journalistes vont faire d'une nouvelle ou d'une information quelconque. C'est déjà régi, ça.

[Note: It's funny to see Quebecor point out the protections in the Journal de Montréal's collective agreement, considering it was these protections that were attacked when the Journal's employees were locked out and have since been removed from that collective agreement]

...

Et les journaux Quebecor vont continuer de supporter La Presse canadienne, parce que c'est notre intérêt et c'est également l'intérêt des publications au Québec, parce que, vu que c'est une coopérative, nous fournissons énormément de nouvelles à La Presse canadienne dont les petits joueurs dans les petits marchés peuvent bénéficier des nouvelles que nous fabriquons nous-mêmes. C'est un échange coopératif. Donc, c'est tout à fait clair que nous allons continuer dans cette direction.

[Note: Quebecor has, of course, pulled out of Canadian Press. But, just as important, Canadian Press is no longer a cooperative, having been privatized and now owned by a consortium controlled by Torstar, Gesca and the Globe and Mail]

...

le syndicat et Le Journal de Montréal ... considèrent essentiel d'assurer, de préserver leur indépendance. Ils s'assureront que les informations et commentaires publiés soient exempts de pressions interne ou externe, ne soient pas influencés par ces dernières. Dans la rédaction et le choix des informations, aucun fait ne sera exagéré ou intentionnellement omis dans l'intérêt d'une personne, d'un groupe ou d'une institution. C'est l'article 7.02 de la convention qui garantit l'indépendance de la salle de rédaction.

Et le deuxième point que vous souleviez, l'échange de textes, il n'y a pas d'échange de textes entre les autres composantes du groupe. Les seuls échanges de textes qu'il y a, c'est entre Le Journal de Montréal et Le Journal de Québec. C'est garanti dans la convention collective, et ça nous permet justement de faire circuler les articles de Montréal à Québec et de Québec à Montréal. Ça a donné naissance au Journal de Québec. Ça a donné naissance à un autre journal qui, sans cette possibilité-là, n'aurait pas eu les ressources nécessaires pour le faire.

Similarly, from the CRTC hearing about Quebecor buying Videotron:

Luc Lavoie: "with the pace of the news business today and the 24-hour news channels, it would be essentially silly to ask a journalist to cover for LCN and then write a piece for the Journal de Montréal, and then write another one for a Canoe portal. It just would not work. It would turn out to be a bad product, and it would turn out to be to our disadvantage to do something like this, and we certainly won't do it."

Péladeau: "le fait d'avoir des conventions collectives qui existent depuis de nombreuses années au niveau des clauses professionnelles assure que le travail des journalistes doit être un travail qui va être correctement effectué"

Lavoie: "On ne veut pas se faire marginaliser. Par ailleurs, on n'a aucun espèce d'intérêt à ce que il y ait une standardisation chez nos médias parce que très souvent ils sont en -- pas très souvent, pratiquement toujours, ils sont en concurrence les uns avec les autres. C'est le contenu de nos publications, c'est le contenu de notre réseau de télévision, c'est nos contenus qui fait notre force. C'est ça qui attire notre clientèle. C'est ce qui fait de nous un leader. C'est ce qui fait qu'on est le journal numéro un à Montréal et le journal numéro un à Québec. C'est ce qui fait que le réseau TVA est le numéro un et on a aucune espèce d'intention, je vous prie de me croire, de devenir numéro deux ou trois."

Critics don't like them, I get it

Far too much of the report, I think, is spent talking to people who wring their hands about the dangers of Quebecor. There's Brian Myles, a Le Devoir journalist and head of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec, who was elected to the post during the Journal de Montréal lockout and is seen as more supportive of the workers' side. There's John Gomery, head of the Quebec Press Council, which Quebecor pulled out of. There's David Patry, the former Journal de Montréal reporter who worked under Coudé-Lord (and now, incidentally, works for the NDP). And there's Raynald Leblanc, a former Journal photographer who was president of the workers' union during the lockout.

Add to that some experts in media, and those who think they've been wronged by Quebecor's media machine.

The investigation does also bring up repeated complaints at TVA (which is still a union shop), where a committee of employees said many times that coverage was being skewed to look more favourable to Quebecor's interests. But these too can be dismissed as merely opinions (albeit of Quebecor's own employees), not as hard evidence.

Quebecor responds, kinda

Predicting that there would be a lot of scrutiny following this report, Enquête wisely posted some documents to its website, including a response from Quebecor spokesperson Serge Sasseville (dated Feb. 21, to give an idea of how long Enquête has been working on this file) to various themes brought up in the Enquête reporting.

In it, Sasseville points out that there are other companies that are also moving in the same direction. Companies like Rogers, Bell and Shaw are creating media empires of their own. He even argues that Quebecor's convergence model is a good thing, because it means individual voices can be saved from bankruptcy. (Of course, that argument only works if you assume Quebecor is in fact saving media that would otherwise go under).

Besides, Sasseville says, the Internet makes the whole concentration of media ownership debate moot.

Sasseville also defends the kinds of things that journalists and others deplore. He says it's perfectly normal for management to dictate what gets published in a newspaper. He defends the withdrawal from the Quebec Press Council (though he notes that Quebecor's weeklies are still members through Hebdos Québec) by arguing that its decisions are arbitrary and don't respect previous precedents, and Quebecor's attempts to change the way the council functions has failed.

And he defends the creation of QMI Agency by pointing out that the large newspaper chain Postmedia (which owns my employer, The Gazette) also pulled out of Canadian Press and created its own wire service. He argues that sharing content frees journalists to work on valuable original reporting instead of duplicating the work of others working for the same company.

You can read the full response here. It doesn't address some of the specific allegations made in the Enquête report, so it will be interesting to see if there's a public statement coming on the matter.

In the meantime, some commenters on Gravel's blog asked if they plan to look into the "secret deal" between Radio-Canada and La Presse owner Gesca. I certainly wouldn't discourage them from doing so, but unless they come up with something really scandalous, any report will be dismissed by Quebecor's defenders as biased journalism.

Besides, one would think Quebecor Media would be best placed to investigate such a thing. As soon as they find something, I have no doubt it'll get lots of coverage in their various media.

Worries from TVA

Another thing posted to Enquête's website are the minutes of committee meetings at TVA from 2009 and 2010. The Comité professionnel, as it's called, has representatives of the employees and management, and deals with issues of journalistic integrity, as well as other union issues. The minutes suggest serious concerns from the employees about interference from Quebecor, though many of these are up for debate.

Among their concerns, in 2009:

• Too much emphasis is placed on exclusives or special reports, even to the point of playing them ahead of more important news of the day (TVA management said they don't want to have the same news as their competitors)
• LCN reporters were forbidden from speaking about an ad from the Directeur général des élections that seemed to parody LCN host Jean-Luc Mongrain (TVA management said they didn't want to pour oil on the fire and were pursuing the matter legally)
• TVA reporters were forbidden from speaking about Guy Laliberté's show from space, which aired on Radio-Canada. (TVA management said it was Laliberté that didn't cooperate with its journalists because of the deal with Radio-Canada, and it was "normal" not to talk about such an event in that case.)
• Argent reporters were told that negotiations at the locked-out Journal de Montréal were not a story, while negotiations at La Presse (Gesca) were. (TVA management said the Gesca news was given prominence because it was an exclusive)
• Management dictated to the letter how LCN dealt with revelations of former Ville-Marie borough mayor Benoit Labonté were covered the day after they were made on Radio-Canada. (TVA management said they were worried about a lawsuit)
• The Agence QMI brand was taking over existing ones, even TVA, even though "Agence QMI" doesn't mean anything to the average person. (TVA management said Quebecor was building up the QMI brand, though credit should be properly attributed to TVA for stories coming out of the network.)
• Argent employees felt in general the business information network was being used as a conduit for pro-Quebecor news (and news against its competitors). (TVA management denied the claim.)
• Employees felt TVA gave undue attention in its news to products for sale, particularly those connected to Quebecor (like a DVD of the TVA show Dieu Merci)

And in 2010:

Will it change anything?

That's the big question. Will this result in any changes? I doubt Quebecor is going to change anything here. There's nothing in this report they didn't already know (though maybe someone will look into the Journal de Montréal situation described above). They believe they're in the right here, and none of the academics or disgruntled former journalists interviewed by Enquête are going to change their minds.

Quebecor is probably going to respond to this either by ignoring it or by attacking hard. Either way, there won't be changes.

Politicians might take some heat, and some might even decide that going to war with Quebecor is a necessary evil, assuming the public supports them in the battle and is willing to look past the Quebecor backlash.

The public certainly isn't going to change. Those who hated Quebecor before will continue to do so. Those who apologize for Quebecor because they hate Radio-Canada will continue to do so. And those who subscribe to Videotron for their telecom services won't care about how Quebecor's journalism works, so long as they get their à la carte HD channels.

In the words of Coudé-Lord: On s'en fout.

Enquête reaction:

• Richard Therrien, Le Soleil: "le reportage de Guy Gendron ne ressemblait pas à un règlement de comptes"
• Hugo Dumas, La Presse: "Une question, maintenant: de quelle façon Quebecor va-t-il contre-attaquer? L'empire n'a pas l'habitude de se laisser administrer des taloches publiquement."
• Clique du Plateau: "Si c’était pas un règlement de compte, on se demande bien ce que c’était"
• Renart Léveillé: "Cette émission était très attendue et elle ne semble pas avoir déçu beaucoup de monde : les commentaires que j’ai pu lire étaient tous très positifs "
• Cassandra Brisebois, ComMédia: Le slogan de Quebecor devrait être : « Tu es avec nous ou contre nous. Tu es notre ami ou notre ennemi ».
• Grégoire F.W.: "Nous ne sommes plus informés, nous sommes manipulés ; nous sommes à la merci de puissants groupes qui contrôlent l’information"
• ProjetJ (written before the show aired)
• Rue Frontenac (under its new management): "Loin de moi de faire ici l’apologie de Pierre-Karl Péladeau. Mais je me suis interrogé sur les reproches constants que l’on dirige à l’endroit de la notion de convergence. La convergence en elle-même n’est pas mauvaise en soi."
• Martin Lavallée (in a letter to Le Devoir): "Cette émission ne possédait pas vraiment d'intérêt public, contrairement à la prétention de la SRC et d'Alain Gravel. Par contre, il serait sans doute d'intérêt public d'enquêter sur l'empire Power Corporation et sur son influence sur la politique du Québec"

The journalist Guy Gendron was also interviewed Friday morning on Radio-Canada radio, where naturally he was treated with kid gloves and wasn't challenged on anything.

Mario Dumont, who as a host on V is somewhat neutral ground, gave him a bit harder time, saying that Radio-Canada was biased against him when he was leader of the ADQ. Gendron responded to most of his questions by saying he's not a spokesperson for Radio-Canada and can't answer for anything outside his report.

CIBL 101.5 interviewed Guy Amyot of the Conseil de presse, who said we have to look at questions surrounding concentration of media ownership.

Quebecor's own media has been completely mostly silent on the matter (which suggests to me that they have nothing obvious to challenge about the reporting), aside from an article from Guy Fournier in the Journal de Montréal pre-attacking the show before the report aired. Fournier followed up in the next week's column, correcting an error he made (Gendron worked for TVA before it was bought by Quebecor, so Gendron never actually worked for Quebecor), and possibly sarcastically correcting another error that was more exaggerated hyperbole about how Radio-Canada never apologizes. He also suggests that Enquête spent too long discussing the phone hacking scandal in Britain, something that other TV critics also panned in their criticisms of the report.

Doucet responds

UPDATE (Nov. 8): Sunday's Journal de Montréal contains a letter from Doucet. It's not online, but I hope he doesn't mind if I reproduce it here in its entirety:

Enquête : danger ignoré

Nous n'aimons pas donner des leçons de journalisme aux autres, contrairement à nos confrères de la société d'État Radio-Canada, mais l'un des pires dangers dans ce métier, c'est d'échafauder une hypothèse et de trouver des témoignages pour l'appuyer, tout en fermant les yeux sur ceux qui pourraient la démolir.

L'émission Enquête, diffusée sur les ondes de Radio-Canada jeudi dernier, consacrée à Quebecor, a utilisé les pires subterfuges pour étayer sa théorie sur la trop forte influence de Quebecor, incluant de piéger notre collègue Michelle Coudé-Lord avec de vieux courriels. L'idée était simple : provoquer la surprise, l'hésitation et ainsi obtenir des images qui viennent appuyer le propos. Mais qui peut se souvenir à brûle-pour-point d'un courriel vieux de quatre ans ?

C'est ce même journaliste de la SRC, Guy Gendron, qui avait déjà déclaré, le 15 février 2007, qu'il existe "une stratégie de l'empire Quebecor visant à jeter le discrédit sur Radio-Canada". Nous avions prévenu la direction de la société d'État que son journaliste avait déjà une opinion personnelle bien arrêtée, qu'il y avait donc un danger de partialité.

Nos avertissements ont été ignorés et c'est donc sans surprise que nous avons assisté, jeudi soir, à un reportage tellement orienté, si loin de la réalité, qu'il est inutile d'en rajouter.

Dany Doucet,

Vice-président Information, Sun Media Québec

You'll note that Doucet doesn't challenge a single fact in the Enquête report, preferring an ad hominem attack.

Why not investigate Power Corp.?

His letter was beneath another one from Léo-Paul Lauzon attacking Power Corp., saying Enquête should do an investigation on how they prevent their media outlets (La Presse and other Gesca papers) from reporting on Alberta oilsands, which Power Corp. has an interest in, and how the majority of opinions printed in the papers are in favour of privatization of public companies.

I can't speak for opinions, people are allowed to have them, and it's true that columnists will tend to have political views in line with their employers (how many liberal and social-democratic columnists does Sun Media employ compared to their conservative ones?). As for their reporting on oilsands, I'll point you to the La Presse dossier on the subject and let you judge for yourself whether it's biased in favour of the industry.

The only thing I would say is that, while I don't have tons of friends at La Presse, I haven't heard a story, even on the grapevine, of a journalist feeling they had to adjust or spin their reporting to reflect the wishes or financial interests of Power Corp.

A reference to oilsands is also kind of ironic in that it was the same journalist, Guy Gendron, who did a report for Zone Libre Enquêtes in 2007 about the Alberta oilsands. That report was slammed by the Journal de Montréal's Dany Bouchard for being a vengeful hit piece against the Harper government, resulting in Gendron filing a complaint against Bouchard at the Quebec Press Council. Despite Bouchard's protests (this was back when the Journal was a cooperating member), the complaint was upheld in its entirety.

Monday's paper had another letter, from Benoît Élie, condemning the Enquête report because it was only negative against Quebecor and didn't mention any positive things they had done, like giving financial aid to Le Devoir to keep it afloat.

Sophie Durocher responds, too

Another response to the Enquête piece in the Quebecor empire came from Sophie Durocher, the columnist for the Journal de Montréal, Journal de Québec, Clin d'Oeil and 7 Jours, and host of her own show on Videotron community channel Vox. (All of these are Quebecor-owned media.) She writes in Monday's JdeM and JdeQ that it's Power Corp. that has the worrisome media ownership issues, and suggests that Radio-Canada is intentionally avoiding talking about it, using as proof an author who wrote a book about Power Corp. but wasn't invited to talk about it on any Radio-Canada shows.

Durocher also repeats the Richard Martineau talking point that Gesca owns 7 of 10 daily newspapers in Quebec. I've already discredited that before, but to resummarize: There are 14 daily newspapers in Quebec, if you include Ottawa's Le Droit but exclude the Ottawa Citizen. Durocher and Martineau exclude the two anglophone dailies and (inexplicably) the two free newspapers in Montreal. And the Enquête report addresses relative size when it points out the Influence Communication study, showing Quebecor with a much higher influence than either Gesca or Radio-Canada.

And Durocher suggests the FPJQ has been bought by saying Gesca and Radio-Canada are sponsors of their upcoming conference. That's true, but it's perfectly normal for a journalism conference to be sponsored by organizations that do journalism. And Reader's Digest, Astral, Rogers and Transcontinental Media are also sponsors, on the same level as Radio-Canada. Quebecor chose not to co-sponsor the event, and now one of its journalists is using that as a talking point.

Éric Duhaime weighs in

On Thursday, a week after the Enquête report, Sun Media's resident Quebec expert Éric Duhaime devoted his national newspaper column to attacking it. Like his fellow columnists, Duhaime doesn't challenge a single fact in the report, but says it's a reason the CBC should be defunded by the government.

Duhaime's column also contains factual errors:

1. Like Durocher, Duhaime says Gesca owns seven of 10 daily newspapers in Quebec. This is not true.
2. Duhaime repeats the "secret deal" talking point, saying it was revealed through an access-to-information request. The "secret deal" between CBC and Gesca is actually a 2001 agreement that focuses mainly on marketing and specifically says that editorial content will remain separate. The deal expired long ago and has never been renewed. And to call it secret is ridiculous because it was announced in a press release when it was signed.
3. Duhaime says the "provincial celebrity" list (it was actually a list of the most influential people in the cultural realm) was first published in the Journal de Québec. It was actually published simultaneously in the Journal de Québec and Journal de Montréal.
4. Duhaime says the order was to replace "a radio host" (Paul Arcand) by Céline Dion. Actually, the email Coudé-Lord sent said to replace Arcand by Jacques Aubé of Gillett Entertainment Group. The differences between the Journal de Montréal version and Journal de Québec version is that the JdM deletes Arcand (No. 7), inserts Julie Snyder separately at No. 6, bumping the rest of the list down (Yannick Nézet-Séguin takes over No. 7, from No. 6 in the JdQ), and Jacques Aubé becomes No. 8 in the JdM. The rest of the list shifts by one, knocking off the last name, Marie Chouinard, from the Journal de Montréal list.

Investigate everyone

That said, a lot of people not under the employ of Quebecor are also asking why Enquête doesn't do a report on Gesca, Bell, Rogers or other large media companies. I say: Go ahead and investigate. I'm sure there are plenty of skeletons in the closets of these companies that should come out. And don't leave it to Enquête. There are other investigative journalists out there (some even work for Quebecor), and nobody is stopping them from pursuing their own investigations. Frankly, I'd be shocked if there wasn't a journalist for Quebecor somewhere already investigating Power Corp., and we know from their hundreds of access-to-information requests that they're investigating Radio-Canada.

But suggesting that Enquête shouldn't talk about Quebecor unless it investigates other media is like suggesting a journalist shouldn't release details of wrongdoing in the Charest government without first finding evidence of wrongdoing in all the opposition parties.

I spoke to Gendron, and asked him if Enquête plans an investigation into Gesca or Power Corp. He said Enquête doesn't comment on or confirm its investigations before they air, but there's nothing stopping them from doing such an investigation.

Report was ready in spring

Incidentally, I asked Gendron why there was so much time between the interview with former Journal de Montréal journalist David Patry and the response from Quebecor, in February, and the airing of the report.

Gendron said the report had been ready to air in spring, but was held because of a defamation suit by Quebecor boss Pierre Karl Péladeau against Radio-Canada boss Sylvain Lafrance. By the time that had resolved itself, it was too late for that season of Enquête. The report was held until fall, and updated with information about the News of the World scandal, the launch of Sun News Network and the pullout of Sun Media from the Ontario Press Council.

The updates lengthened the report, Gendron said, so it filled the full hour when it was eventually aired.

Related Posts

• Is Quebecor evil?
• Série Montréal-Québec: Flawless, says Journal
• Journal Lockout Digest: FTQ traitors
• Journal Daily Digest: Jack to the rescue
• Journal Daily Digest: Quebecor fights back

Tech reporter Jean-François Codère has only his iPhone to comfort him

It's hard to describe the emotions coming from Rue Frontenac's journalists when I met them a few hours after the vote that approved a new contract between the Journal de Montréal and its workers' union.

Sad. Angry. Indignant. Depressed. Resigned. They certainly weren't celebrating, but they decided as a group to drink their troubles away at a local bar as they contemplated their futures. They were cooling off after a 10-hour meeting that ended badly for them (and they let the cameras know it just afterward).

This group was a minority of the 253 workers locked out of their jobs on Jan. 24, 2009. They are the Rue Frontenac faithful, the young, motivated journalists who have worked hardest to feed a website and weekly print publication that was setup primarily as a pressure tactic and a demonstration that the success of the Journal de Montréal had more to do with the workers than the company or its name.

People like Gabrielle Duchaine, Jean-François Codère, Jessica Nadeau, Dominic Fugère, David Patry, Pascale Lévesque, David Santerre, Vincent Larouche, and others. I can't say for certain what was in their minds (or their secret ballots), but for the most part, these are people who voted against the contract, who were ready to say on the spot that they're never going back to the Journal ("no fucking way" was how Nadeau put it when I asked, though others didn't want to commit officially while emotions were still high), who are so low on the seniority list that they probably couldn't come back even if they wanted to, and who are ready and eager to make a run at turning Rue Frontenac into a viable business.

Starting Monday, as the journalists who are returning to their jobs come back to work (though it won't be in the same building, and at last report it seemed they wouldn't even be able to fill all 42 editorial positions because only 23 have agreed to return), Rue Frontenac changes from being a union pressure tactic into an experiment with an untested business model.

While the prime focus of the anger of this group after their ratification vote was and remains Pierre Karl Péladeau, the chief executive of Quebecor who they believe has turned lockouts and union busting into a business model, a flood of criticism emerged that night against a former ally: the CSN, who they believe let their union be destroyed.

Was CSN incompetent?

The list of criticisms against CSN management and its leader Claudette Carbonneau were many: They were woefully unprepared for the type of conflict they were engaging in. They were slow to push a public campaign to boycott the Journal de Montréal (one which was obviously unsuccessful - the paper actually saw a readership increase despite the drop in original content). Their lawyers were incompetent, unable to battle on the same level of those of Quebecor. They didn't even support the idea of Rue Frontenac when it launched. Carbonneau, who was too timid to be a union leader, bungled the PR for the union's side of the conflict, and should have known despite her denials about an agreement shortly before the lockout that Péladeau argues could have stopped it before it started.

It's not so much the motives of the CSN that are in question. Carbonneau says the central union gave $7 million to the local to support it and its members, and made it clear at the second anniversary of the lockout that it would continue supporting the union for as long as it takes.

But it's clear the Syndicat des travailleurs de l'information du Journal de Montréal believed it knew better how to run its business, and it was the local that did most of the organizing and planning. The CSN provided money and organizational support, but the campaign - particularly Rue Frontenac - was mostly the local union's doing.

The anticlimax

The last straw - or perhaps just the most recent example - of CSN's perceived incompetence came during that heated Saturday union meeting at the Palais des Congrès. After the vote was counted, as the executive waited for all the members to come back into the room for the announcement, a flak for the CSN assembled a scrum of outside media to tell them the result. Those journalists instantly forwarded that information to their desks or tweeted it themselves, resulting in all sorts of breaking news alerts going out. Many of the union members sitting patiently waiting to hear the results ended up getting it not from their executive but on their smartphones from Radio-Canada or other media.

There was no harm done - the result had been counted. But it made for an incredibly anticlimactic announcement, according to some of the people who were in the room. That, they said, aside from being yet another example of the CSN screwing something up, hurt them psychologically.

"They stole that moment away from us," explained Jessica Nadeau. That moment where the announcement is made, and people cheer, yell, cry, pat each other on the back, or otherwise react together. Instead, the ground had been softened by rumours (much like a government will leak bad news to the media before it's announced so the impact is lessened), and there was no such release.

CSN head Claudette Carbonneau, seen here at December's protest, spent a lot of time explaining herself to the media in the past week. Union president Raynald Leblanc is on the far left.

Say it ain't so, Carbo

After this very public airing of grievances (even Beaudet had a cartoon on the subject), and articles from people like Patrick Lagacé taking her to task (he defends his views in a blog post), Carbonneau and the CSN went on the defensive. She talked to Radio-Canada. She explained herself to Presse Canadienne. She appeared on Tout le monde en parle to explain herself to Guy A. Lepage (and got a rather nasty pancarte from Dany Turcotte saying the CSN was "so-so-so-solidement planté"). The FNC's president wrote an op-ed in Le Devoir defending the union.

It got to the point where the STIJM's president, Raynald Leblanc, had to issue a press release defending the CSN.

Former CSN head Gérald Larose didn't bite when invited to by Rue Frontenac, instead saying such a long conflict is bound to cause tensions. In Le Devoir, columnist Gil Courtemanche also wrote that it's difficult to assign blame to any one party for all of this. Though he and others make it clear that the unions came out on the losing side.

Less than two weeks after the vote, and for reasons she said had nothing to do with the Journal de Montréal, Carbonneau announced she would not seek re-election to the top post at CSN.

Fractured union

Now that the formalities are out of the way, the STIJM is no longer what it once was, if only because its membership will be only a fraction of those 253 from 2009.

The contract effectively split those members into the following groups:

• The 62 full-time workers and one part-time worker who will be returning to the Journal de Montréal (assuming all positions offered are taken)
• Those who will take the buyout/severance money and retire - a number that theoretically could encompass more than 100
• Those who will work with Rue Frontenac as it tries to become a viable worker's cooperative - one that coordinator Richard Bousquet admitted in January could realistically only include a handful
• Those who have already found other jobs (like Fabrice de Pierrebourg), will quickly find other employment or will rely on other jobs for income, taking semi-retirement or working for less
• Those who are not part of the above groups, who are too young or too poor to retire even with this extra cash, and whose skills aren't transferrable to available jobs elsewhere

It is, of course, that last group that is the big worry. And we won't know for a little while how many people are in it.

Will this end up in court?

The division between members of the STIJM heightened shortly after a followup meeting to vote on a back-to-work protocol. An email signed by photographer Claude Rivest (one of many people in the editorial department whose contributions to Rue Frontenac trailed off in the months after it launched and eventually stopped entirely) sought to round up opponents to the protocol to launch a court case arguing improper procedure in the vote. (Rivest didn't answer a request for comment on the matter.)

The main issue was the way the union decided to disburse the $20 million severance funds. It was by seniority, with a minimum and maximum. Rivest argued that setting a maximum unfairly hurt those who worked at the paper before 1985 by making those years not count.

Rivest's email launched a heated back-and-forth over email among STIJM members, most of whom were strongly opposed to Rivest's move, calling it "cheap" "disgusting" and "absurd". The discussion died down quickly, and not much has been heard since.

Lessons

Everyone and their grandmother tried to analyze the Journal de Montréal conflict to find some sense in it:

• Michel Kelly-Gagnon, president of l'Institut économique de Montréal, predictably takes the side of the employer, throwing up some strawman arguments and concluding that the working conditions before the lockout weren't as awful as nobody said they were.
• The Tyee, just as predictably, takes the union's side, focusing on how much profit Quebecor's print assets were raking in
• Le Devoir's media reporter Stéphane Baillargeon summarizes it as proof that a newspaper can function with no (or, more accurately, few) journalists.
• Editorial cartoonists including The Gazette's Aislin and Le Droit's Bado have thrown their two cents in, making jokes about Quebecor's Nordiques obsession.
• Projet J talks to Denis Bolduc of the Journal de Québec's labour union. The Journal de Québec had a long lockout itself that seemed to be a big deal, but whose issues weren't nearly as big as those the Journal de Montréal would later face. Bolduc points out that the union has filed grievances charging that the Journal de Québec is already violating aspects of the agreement it proposed that ended the lockout.
• Rue Frontenac's Yvon Laprade asks some experts how this conflict will affect future labour negotiations in Quebec. He finds there isn't much demand for others to follow the model of the Journal de Montréal.
• Simon Jodoin at Voir says unions and governments have to see how the environment has changed and adapt to it.
• Martin Patriquin at Maclean's wonders who will be the next victim of the Quebecor lockout.

Most agree that this is a union defeat, that the Journal proved one could operate a newspaper legally and successfully during a lockout, and that the readers who could have made a difference by refusing to read the Journal chose to continue reading, rendering the union virtually powerless.

Frankly, I think both the union and the paper have been crippled. Sadly, both look like they're what Pierre Karl Péladeau wanted. (He disagrees, of course, during an interview with Paul Arcand)

Now what?

As some employees return to work, the rest try to forget about the Journal de Montréal, either trying to figure out how they can begin their retirement, finding another job or trying to work out a viable business model for Rue Frontenac.

Union president Raynald Leblanc is not among those returning to the Journal, and still deciding on his future. So what's left of the crippled union needs a new leader.

As far as the public is concerned, the campaign is over. That hoopla about changes to Quebec's anti-scab law is all but gone now, even though nothing about the agreement prevents another company in a similar situation locking out its workers in the future. The Journal de Montréal was a heavily mediatized conflict (some would argue it was overexposed in the media), and the end of the conflict has made this issue less important in everyone's minds, no matter what efforts the CSN may put behind promoting it.

Nothing changed outside of the Journal itself, to the point where people may forget about this conflict entirely in a few years.

Rue Frontenac may be the exception to this. It's still trying to figure out what it can be and how it can make money. (I, for one, would suggest less focus on things everyone else is covering, like Canadiens games and Tout le monde en parle episodes.) Even the most optimistic would admit its chances aren't that good. But everyone hopes it can survive and prove that good-quality original journalism is a viable business model.

If Rue Frontenac survives in the long term, it may be the only real lasting evidence that there ever was a lockout here, and a reminder of what the Journal de Montréal used to be.

Because whether you're on the side of the union or the employer, you have to admit that the Journal de Montréal won't ever be the quality it was when those 253 employees were working there.

Hell, it's even given up Frontenac St. itself.

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After a 10-hour session inside a closed meeting at the Palais des Congrès, members of the Syndicat des travailleurs de l'information du Journal de Montréal voted 64.1% to approve a proposal by the mediator that will finally end the lockout that began on Jan. 24, 2009.

A back-to-work protocol still needs to be worked out. And approval is contingent on this being negotiated successfully. But it's unlikely anything will stop this deal from getting final approval.

The deal, which lasts five years, will see the Journal hire back 62 workers (plus one temporary worker), which includes:

• 24 journalists (12 in news, seven in sports and five in arts)
• five deskers
• four photographers
• four graphic artists
• an editorial cartoonist (assuming Marc Beaudet wants to return)
• a statistician (plus a part-time or temporary one)
• two quality control people
• one "adjointe"
• 10 people in classified (nine salespeople and one customer service agent)
• 10 people in the business office, including two accountants

The rest will share a $20 million severance package, whose method of splitting is up to them (something expected to cause a lot of tension as they decide how to calculate how much each worker gets). For those of them lucky enough to get the choice, they'll have two weeks to decide whether they want to rejoin their former newspaper.

Almost all of the Rue Frontenac personalities I talked to later Saturday night had already made up their minds: "No fucking way" are they going back to work for Quebecor, in the words of journalist Jessica Nadeau. Though some left open a slim possibility that they might accept a return, not wanting to close the door completely out of anger without thinking about it first, most of the core of Rue Frontenac made it abundantly clear that they are going to stay outside the grip of the Quebecor empire and try to make an independent publication of Rue Frontenac and RueFrontenac.com.

The contract is over 100 pages long and I'm just getting my first look at it. I'll post more details in the days ahead, but suffice it to say this is a huge victory for Quebecor and a giant defeat for the union.

But at least some people will get some money out of it.

As you wait for more of my thoughts, you'll find coverage of this story ... well, just about anywhere:

• The Gazette
• Le Devoir (which mentions how pissed off union members were that they found out the result of the vote via the media)
• Radio-Canada
• Cyberpresse (Presse Canadienne)
• Globe and Mail
• CTV
• Canadian Press
• Le Soleil
• Agence QMI
• QMI Agency
• and, of course, (eventually) Rue Frontenac.

Reaction and analysis is coming in from:

• The FPJQ, which sees this as reinforcing its worries about media concentration in Quebec
• Le Devoir's Stéphane Baillargeon, who wonders if the managers who have been doing the work of journalists for the past two years won't see themselves out of their jobs soon
• Le Soleil, which looks at how this affects the Journal de Québec
• The right, which sees this as a victory against the unions
• Mauvais Oeil, which humorously looks at how readers of the Journal and the rest of the world see the conflict

And reaction from the journalists themselves:

• Martin Leclerc, on how the Journal - even before the lockout - is no longer what it once was
• Yves Chartrand takes out frustrations on the CSN
• Pascale Lévesque offers her CV
• André Rousseau doesn't mince words, calling it a total capitulation

Related Posts

• New contract proposal to Journal de Montréal workers
• Some reading on Quebec’s anti-scab law
• The future of Rue Frontenac
• Journal de Montréal lockout by the numbers
• Journal de Montréal: 89.3% vote against offer

Note that this does not necessarily mean there's an agreement in principle. The release mentions nothing about whether the union executive recommends the proposal, whether the employer will accept the proposal, or any details about the proposal itself. (UPDATE: Apparently the CSN is saying the union is, in fact, recommending the proposal, which is pretty huge -- oh wait, the union is now denying it has recommended the deal.)

The vote will take place Saturday at 10am at the Palais des congrès, and followed by a press conference.

You'll recall that the last vote on a proposal, in October, resulted in 89.3% of workers rejecting the offer.

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• It’s over: Journal workers approve contract by 64%
• Some reading on Quebec’s anti-scab law
• The future of Rue Frontenac
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• Journal de Montréal: 89.3% vote against offer

An example to illustrate this is a company called Côté Tonic in Quebec City, which has been doing copy editing and page layout work for the Journal de Montréal during its lockout. Stories in Rue Frontenac and La Presse show that the small company did production work during the Journal de Québec lockout and had to fire people after that was resolved, but learned about an impending lockout at the Journal de Montréal before it was launched and even before the end of the labour contract for Journal de Montréal workers.

This information comes out now for a somewhat ironic reason: an employee who was laid off when she took maternity leave complained she was fired illegally. Her complaint was rejected because it was determined that the layoff happened after the Journal asked the company to reduce its workforce. But because labour relations board decisions are public, the dirty laundry comes out into the open.

The union representing locked-out workers claims there are all sorts of fly-by-night operations doing their work in secret, from customer service to page layout to accounting. But they've had difficulty gaining evidence about how they work, and under the current law there's nothing they can do about it anyway.

Also worth reading:

• La Presse's Martin Croteau looks at both sides of the argument about whether the anti-scab law needs to be updated
• Paul Journet has a recap of Tuesday's hearings, including Pierre Karl Péladeau's testimony
• Rue Frontenac's Yves Chartrand and La Presse's Journet on the Journal de Québec union's testimony, including their worry that Quebecor could be planning a second lockout there
• Rue Frontenac's Mathieu Boivin on union boss Raynald Leblanc's testimony
• Rue Frontenac's Charles Poulin on the demonstration the union made by producing this week's paper by remote.
• The FPJQ's presentation to the commission, which focuses on its desire for a separate inquiry into the concentration of media in Quebec (Radio-Canada has a summary)
• Chartrand on the second day of testimony, and statements that the commission will recommend changes to the law
• Steve Proulx on the need to update the law to make all strikebreakers illegal regardless of location
• Union president Raynald Leblanc interviewed by TV5 in France (where the concept of "lockout" doesn't exist because it's illegal)

There's also the Twitter feed of Rue Frontenac's David Patry, or the hashtag #commissionJdeM. The hearings can also be viewed online, in case you have a few hours to waste.

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• It’s over: Journal workers approve contract by 64%
• New contract proposal to Journal de Montréal workers
• The future of Rue Frontenac
• Journal de Montréal lockout by the numbers
• Journal de Montréal: 89.3% vote against offer

The comments attached to this amuse me. Perhaps it's time I create some automated Google Translate version of this blog.

Or I could send my blog posts to QMI Agency's translation department.

(For the record, this is what the Google Translate version of the post referenced above looks like)

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Rue Frontenac's newsroom

Rue Frontenac started as an idea, in that it was copied from an idea realized elsewhere. When the Journal de Québec was locked out for a year and a half, its workers launched a competing free daily and later a website called MédiaMatinQuébec.

The publication was a pressure tactic (a judge even ruled as such when Quebecor sought an injunction preventing them from publishing). It would keep people updated on the status of negotiations from the union's perspective. But more importantly, it would remind readers that the real power of the newspaper came from its journalists, who would continue to do their jobs despite being in a labour conflict.

In essence, the journalists protested their lockout by continuing to work.

Whether MédiaMatinQuébec succeeded in its mission of forcing the employer's hand by turning public opinion against it is a matter of debate. But it raised the profile of the locked-out workers, and journalists facing a labour conflict since then have made this idea part of their plans.

On Jan. 24, 2009, about six months after the end of the Journal de Québec lockout and less than an hour after an agreement not to launch a labour conflict had expired, 253 members of the Syndicat des travailleurs de l'information du Journal de Montréal were officially locked out of their jobs.

The lockout wasn't a surprise - the writing had been on the wall for months. So a plan was already in place when the lockout became official (for both the employer and the union). Journalists would work out of the STIJM's offices, which are next door to the Journal de Montréal's office building at 4545 Frontenac St., at the end of Mont Royal Ave.

But rather than a free daily, they decided to go with a website. Unlike Quebec City, Montreal already had two free daily newspapers (one of which is owned by Quebecor), and its larger area makes it less practical to distribute a newspaper on a daily basis. Four days after the lockout began, RueFrontenac.com was launched.

(The title is somewhat ironic - though next door to the Journal's offices on Frontenac, the STIJM is actually on Iberville St., just north of where Frontenac merges into it.)

Its team of journalists, working out of drafty offices without most of the usual office comforts, continued to work their beats, trying to come up with exclusives that would raise the website's profile. It's now considered a primary source of news and a major news organization in Montreal.

Rue Frontenac's first issue in October

In October 2010, after a successful test the year before with a special Canadiens issue, Rue Frontenac launched as a weekly tabloid newspaper to accompany the website. Rather than try to stay up to date with breaking news (much of it would be days old), the paper focused on features and exclusive reports. It was more of a magazine on newsprint than a newspaper.

Richard Bousquet, who has been coordinating Rue Frontenac in both its formats, says he worked seven days a week from August to December on this project, until he finally took a vacation over the holidays.

When it launched, Rue Frontenac had 1,400 distribution points, most shared with the free weekly Voir. Now, Bousquet says, it's more like 1,600. And distribution points in Quebec City have been added to those in the Mauricie, Eastern Townships and Outaouais regions. The publication is also taking names of people who would be interested in paid delivery.

The print run is 75,000 copies, and Bousquet wants a return rate of under 5%. Right now it's about twice that, but dropping as they adjust the number of copies for each stand.

The plan is that, with the exception of labour costs paid out by the union's strike fund, the paper should be self-sufficient financially, meaning that advertising revenue (and maybe subscription revenue) should pay for printing and distribution costs.

Advertising comes slowly

"Ça roule," union president Raynald Leblanc said during a press conference two weeks ago when asked about advertising in the paper edition. The reality is a bit more complex.

The first issue of Rue Frontenac had quite a bit of advertising, but it was mostly from unions showing solidarity, not businesses trying to make money.

A notable exception was Micro Boutique, the Apple dealer, which had a half-page ad in the first edition. Bousquet says they wanted in right away to take advantage of the media coverage surrounding the paper's launch. They knew a lot of people would be interested in that first issue.

For other corporate advertisers, the biggest problem was essentially a bureaucratic one: big advertising campaigns are planned and budgeted months in advance. This means there isn't much money for last-minute ads. Many advertisers are also worried about the long-term future of this newspaper if the labour conflict is eventually solved.

And then, of course, there are those who are worried about offending Quebecor, though that's not so much an issue as you might think, Bousquet says. "C'est pas un journal de combat," he clarifies. It's not afraid to say bad things about the media empire, but that's not its primary purpose, either. Obviously, they're not getting ads from Archambault or Videotron, but most other advertisers aren't afraid of what Quebecor might think.

(On Rue Frontenac's website, whose advertising is served by BV! Media, now owned by Rogers, ads for Videotron have appeared in the past, not because Videotron specifically wanted to be on RueFrontenac.com, but because the ads were displayed throughout the advertising network.)

As we enter into that 3-6-month window, more ads are showing up in the paper. We're entering RRSP season, which means a lot of ads from Desjardins, Bousquet offered as an example.

A profitable paper?

"On fait tout pour que Rue Frontenac continue à vivre," Bousquet says. Knowing that there's no way the Journal de Montréal will hire back all 253 workers or even a majority of that, the union eventually wants to offer the Rue Frontenac name to a publication that would be run by some of the workers who will be left behind.

It certainly won't be all the workers not hired back at the Journal who will be able to continue with Rue Frontenac. Forced to pay salaries on top of other expenses, its budget wouldn't be able to support 200 workers, or even 100, Bousquet admits.

Still, he feels strongly optimistic about Rue Frontenac's future as a small publication filling a niche as a weekly newspaper focused on in-depth, exclusive stories, and a website with mostly original breaking news.

Asked whether he thinks having an actually profitable newspaper is feasible, he responds: "Oui, il y a possibilité. On croit que économiquement c'est possible."

There are no big plans for the short term (at least, none Bousquet was willing to share), but they do plan to study their audience and their options. They're still collecting names as they figure out whether they should implement a home delivery service, and they're studying the possibility of increasing from one to two editions a week of the newspaper.

After the lockout

When a contract offer was voted down by a huge majority in the fall, and the union complained about an anti-competition clause as one of its main reasons for rejecting the deal, Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau said the company would withdraw its demand that Rue Frontenac be shut down and that laid-off workers be barred from working for La Presse. (When the Journal de Québec conflict was settled, one of its demands was that MédiaMatinQuébec be shut down, which is why it is no longer online.)

There are still other issues on the table, the biggest one being the number of employees who would be allowed to return to work. Negotiations that have recently resumed are covered under a blackout that prevents both sides from commenting publicly, but I imagine that number is still a major issue.

La question qui tue

So if Rue Frontenac does continue beyond the lockout, perhaps with a handful of employees, what are its chances of success?

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Two years. 24 months. 730 days. 17,520 hours. 1.05 million minutes. 63 million seconds.

These are the figures in the Journal de Montréal lockout that are not in dispute. On Jan. 24, just after midnight, it celebrated - perhaps that's a bad choice of word - its second anniversary.

But the number that's drilled into everyone's head is 253. That's the number of employees that were officially locked out that day. The number is repeated over and over by the union, which refers to 253 families on the street, 253 people without jobs, 253 people working at Rue Frontenac. Some people only partially familiar with the conflict (the ones who use "lockout" and "strike" interchangeably") even refer to "253 journalists", unaware that the lockout also affects dozens of office staff.

Raynald Leblanc, the president of the Syndicat des travailleurs de l'information du Journal de Montréal, admits that 253 is a "symbolic" number. The list of lockoutés has 253 names on it, but many of those people - about 10% - are no longer contributing to the cause and no longer receive cheques from the strike fund. About 10, including columnist Bertrand Raymond, have decided to retire. Most of the others are still leaving open the option of coming back to work for the Journal, but are not receiving cheques either because they have found another job or because, Leblanc says, they are rich enough that they don't need the money. Only two have officially resigned.

The law, Leblanc says, is clear that even those who have taken jobs elsewhere to pay the bills can come back once the conflict is over. Of course, it will be their choice, and some who have since moved on will probably choose to stay in their new jobs, if there's even a job at the Journal to go back to.

Note: Numbers above might be off slightly, take them as estimates

Among the 230 people still "active" in the conflict, the level of that activity varies. There are some, like journalists Gabrielle Duchaine and Jean-François Codère, who are filing stories on a regular basis for Rue Frontenac, the website and newspaper setup as a pressure tactic and public relations campaign. There are some who contribute more occasionally to Rue Frontenac. And there are many, like the 31 people who work in classified ad sales, whose skills aren't really that transferrable. Many of those can be found on the picket lines outside the Journal de Montréal offices, or in newly created jobs like running the Rue Frontenac cafeteria. And there are some who have disappeared off the map completely for whatever reason.

For Pierre Karl Péladeau, the Quebecor CEO whose company owns the Journal, the 253 figure is fiction. He breaks the numbers down another way. For him, the number of permanent employees "active" in the conflict is only 179, discounting 45 contract employees and 29 people who have retired or otherwise quit their jobs. In the latest offer to the union, 52 of those people would continue to have jobs (among them only 17 journalists), and 127 jobs would be eliminated, but 31 of those employees are eligible for retirement.

Leblanc, at 57 years old, is one of those who could leave and start taking their pensions. But he asks rhetorically: "are we obliged to take retirement just because we're eligible?" The answer, of course, is no. Some people need more money and aren't financially stable enough to retire. And to Leblanc, forced retirement isn't much different from forced unemployment.

And so, as Year 3 of the Journal de Montréal lockout begins, and negotiations haven't given us any news recently, we wonder how long this conflict will last.

When it started in 2009, the union bragged that it had a two-year strike fund, enough to pay its employees about 70% of their salary (tax free) until 2011. Asked about that two weeks ago, Leblanc was categorical: "It won't run out."

I asked him where that guarantee comes from. He said it was from other unions. The CSN has made an example of this conflict and will keep putting money into it until it's over. They are determined not to lose this battle over money alone.

With both CSN and Quebecor having seemingly endless pits of reserve cash, the idea that one side could wait it out until the other had been brought to its knees financially has been exposed as a pipe dream.

A parliamentary committee will be holding hearings into this conflict next month. Which is good, because left to their own devices, it seems both sides are content to let this drag on forever.

Two years on: Media coverage

The various local media have noted the two-year anniversary with stories, among them:

• La Presse's Michèle Ouimet talks to some of the workers, including a long-time classified sales representative, about how their lives were like two years ago and what they're like now
• Le Devoir's Stéphane Baillargeon looks at this conflict in the context of "dématérialization" (a piece that was used in the Courrier International - with explanations edited in for its audience in France) at the state of the petition to boycott the Journal. Le Devoir also has a review of the Show du cadenas on Monday night.
• The Gazette's Jason Magder looks at the lockout from a business perspective, talking to analysts and experts about how it has affected Quebecor's bottom line
• Cécile Gladel points out the timing of Péladeau's announcement of tens of millions of dollars for a Quebec City arena, while arguing the Journal doesn't have money to pay its journalists.
• At Rue Masson, Gladel polls local businesses and politicians to see which ones are boycotting the Journal
• René Vézina at Les Affaires points blame in both directions - at CSN and Péladeau
• Gérald Fillion says there needs to be a larger debate about labour conflicts and labour laws in this province
• FPJQ president Brian Myles blames Quebecor's control over too much of Quebec's media and says the government needs to clamp down on media concentration in a press release
• Rabble.ca has its own far-left take on the conflict and Quebecor's evility (reposted at J-Source)
• Radio-Canada's René Hormier-Roy talks to journalist Gabrielle Duchaine briefly about the lockout and her attachment to the Journal

and simple to-the-point stories from CBC, CTV, TVA, Presse Canadienne, Agence France-Presse, Projet J and, of course, Rue Frontenac itself.

UPDATE (Feb. 1): A great story in Concordia's The Link about the human cost of the lockout, talking to people including caricaturist Marc Beaudet.

Related Posts

• It’s over: Journal workers approve contract by 64%
• New contract proposal to Journal de Montréal workers
• Some reading on Quebec’s anti-scab law
• The future of Rue Frontenac
• Journal de Montréal: 89.3% vote against offer

Three TV cameras and a handful of reporters at a press conference on Monday about the second anniversary of the Journal de Montréal lockout

Having nothing better to do on a Monday morning, I headed to a press conference announcing the second anniversary of the lockout at the Journal de Montréal. Miscalculating public transit travel time, I arrived a few minutes late, and passed a man carrying a TV camera down the stairs. I missed little of the press conference, but it was clear none of the journalists there were particularly impressed by what they were witnessing.

That impression was confirmed in the news coverage that came out of it, or the lack thereof. Articles for Métro, The Gazette, Radio-Canada, and, of course, Rue Frontenac. No mention, despite the three TV cameras present, on any of the local newscasts that evening, not even as a 10-second brief with anchor voice-over.

I have a feeling some of them might have expected the artists invited to this Jan. 24 concert to be present, giving at least a minimum amount of interesting video. Unfortunately, though this lockout affects dozens of people who know media very well, the union failed to create an event that would be interesting enough to capture the media's attention.

I noticed that fellow media-watchers like Nathalie Collard, Steve Proulx and Stéphane Baillargeon weren't at the press conference either. That's perfectly understandable. They've all written quite a bit about the lockout, and wouldn't have learned anything new here they couldn't pick up from the press release that was published during the press conference: there's a concert with Les Zapartistes, Bernard Adamus, Karkwa and Damien Robitaille, and nothing earth-shattering on the negotiation front. To have them transcribe a predictable statement from these people and then try to get a reaction from Quebecor would have been a waste of their talents. (Fortunately, I have no problem wasting my time on stuff like this.)

Notice the banner covering the window, reducing the amount of light coming in

On my way to the press conference, I bumped into a colleague in the journalism business, and we briefly discussed the lockout and how other journalists deal with it. We disagreed on whether people feel free to criticize the locked-out workers and are too afraid to be seen as cooperating with Quebecor (see Deschamps, Yvon). I have, on occasion, been critical of the union's positions and of Rue Frontenac (as I'm being here) without feeling as though I would be attacked for it or be punished for it somehow. (Then again, I haven't given any exclusive interviews to the Journal, either.)

But this all makes me wonder: Are we just getting tired of this conflict? The "253" workers who have been "on the street" for two years certainly are. Even if they're still getting paid a significant salary, even if they're playing in a media sandbox where they can do just about whatever they like without having to answer to any big corporate boss, even if they know most of them will probably never again set foot in the building at 4545 Frontenac St. The uncertainty of the future, living in limbo, it must get tiring after a while.

The rest of us, meanwhile, even those who follow the local media and think that the Journal de Montréal conflict is the biggest story of the past two years, we've run out of things to say. Negotiations are barely proceeding (Jean-François Lisée notwithstanding) and in some cases even going backwards. Even the name of this show they're organizing, Le Show du cadenas 2, reflects that Year 2 of this lockout is just the same as Year 1, and Year 3 probably won't be any different.

The print version of Rue Frontenac has spiced things up a bit, but even then the tiredness sets in. Richard Bousquet, who coordinates that project, took a two-week vacation over the holidays after working seven days a week on it since August.

Everyone is tired of this. But both sides will keep struggling to push ahead, and there's no end in sight.

The Show du Cadenas 2 is at 8 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 24, at Metropolis. Tickets are $20 at Admission or the STIJM/Rue Frontenac offices just north of the Journal de Montréal.

UPDATE (Jan. 31): Video highlights of the show from Rue Frontenac.

Related Posts

• The future of Rue Frontenac
• Rue Frontenac hits the streets
• Rue Frontenac puts it on paper
• Fab Fabrice does the unfathomable
• Evolution of a Habs scoop

OK... so, you probably know why I asked you here. That whole Bye-Bye thing. You know, you boycotting Quebecor and all. I don't know if it was your intention to create such a firestorm, but you should have expected it.

Two full pages in the Journal de Montréal on Tuesday devoted to your decision to settle the scores, as they say. Two articles from the Journal's Michelle Coudé-Lord condemning your decision and Radio-Canada for supporting you. That, of course, in turn has generated all sorts of press over at Gesca (a piece by Richard Therrien, a column by Hugo Dumas, a blog post by Patrick Lagacé) which has turned your Bye-Bye sequel into a media controversy 10 days before anyone actually sees it.

I know, I know, you're mad. You're both on Quebecor's enemies list and you're probably never going to come off. They used that giant media empire thing against you after the 2008 Bye-Bye and you felt like crap for months trying to deal with the fallout.

Here's the thing: The backlash wasn't some Quebecor empire fabrication. A lot of people took offence to some of the jokes in that television special. Even the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council had issues with it. Sure, Quebecor went crazy with it, mostly because it was funded with taxpayer money through Radio-Canada. But if you were going to boycott everyone who said mean things about the show, you'd be boycotting a lot of media.

Wait, hold on, can I finish? Please. Let me finish.

OK, so Quebecor doesn't like you. It's not like this is news. It's been the case for so long even I don't know why it started. I'd think you'd be used to it by now.

But this isn't the way to handle it. You're just playing their game, coming down to their level. It's childish, and I expect better from you. As Lagacé points out, you've just created a controversy when your goal, ostensibly, is to avoid exactly that.

It would be one thing if you were taking a stand because of the Journal de Montréal lockout, or because Quebecor had done something particularly evil, or to protest Quebecor pulling out of the Quebec Press Council. But your main reason for refusing to accommodate Quebecor news outlets at your press conference is the coverage that was given to the last Bye-Bye ... two years ago, before the Journal was even locked out.

Yeah, I know you haven't talked to them since, and this boycott isn't new, but nobody noticed before because the Journal doesn't talk about you unless you do something bad.

And surely you understand the bad precedent that's set when people refuse to speak to journalists whose coverage they don't like.

Plus, now you're bringing the people you're working with into the fray. Joël Legendre's relationship with the Journal is starting to look bipolar. He likes them, he hates them, he loves them, he won't speak to them... A bit silly, don't you think?

And come on, you're not new at this media thing. You've been in show business for years now. Véro, you're on Montreal's most listened to radio station every day, and you host one of Quebec's hottest new television shows. Louis ... I understand you also have a career. I think I saw your face on a DVD of something at Future Shop.

Louis, don't leave, I was just kidding. I know you work hard too. Come back.

OK, I realize Quebecor is this giant media behemoth, but you've shown that you don't need their cooperation to succeed. Heck, you should consider it a compliment that they focus so much attention toward you.

Like it or not, you signed up for this. Nobody forced you into becoming stars. You can't have your faces put up on billboards all over the place and then complain when a photographer takes a picture of you at the airport. You have the right to privacy, and you have the right to keep your children outside the spotlight, but you can't just disappear when the news about you is unflattering and not expect people to go looking for you.

I'm gonna talk to Michelle Coudé-Lord, try to talk some sense into her. But ... you're letting them play the victim here (letting the peanut gallery take their side). And if your goal is peace in this media war, this isn't the way you're going to get it.

Please bury the hatchet. Swallow your pride, or you're going to have a bad taste in your mouth for a long time.

Oh, and Véro, please, stop undressing me with your eyes. I mean, Louis is sitting right there. And he's ... wait, is he also undressing me with his eyes?

Dear Michelle Coudé-Lord,

Here, have a seat. I promise there aren't any Cloutier cooties on it.

How are you doing? Boy, you must be ready for a vacation. Almost two years now you've been without a reporting staff, having to fill the Arts & Spectacles section with wire pieces, stuff from other Quebecor publications and whatever original content you and your fellow managers can come up with. I'm not exactly shedding tears for your paper, but I understand if this period has caused some stress among its middle managers.

Anyway, so those articles you had in the paper. Two of them. Was it really necessary to devote a full page (plus a full section cover page) to the fact that the Bye-Bye crew wouldn't talk to you? And is it really surprising after what you did to them two years ago? You say that coverage after the 2008 Bye-Bye was fair and balanced, but you can't possibly say with a straight face that it wasn't excessive.

And really, "vengeance"? You make them sound like a dictator who destroyed an entire village because some woman in a bar wouldn't accept his propositions. They had a hissy fit, and now you're having a hissy fit over their hissy fit, forcing everyone else to have a hissy fit over your hissy fit over their hissy fit.

I explained to Véro and Louis that what they did wasn't a good idea. They were letting themselves be guided by emotion rather than wisdom.

But surely you understand that it's hypocritical for you to play the victim on behalf of Quebecor here. Your paper is no longer a member of the Quebec Press Council, arguing against regulation (even though it's not government-run and has no power to impose penalties) and in favour of the free market. You have to accept that freedom also means the freedom not to talk to you, even if this is the government-funded Radio-Canada.

You appeal to the size of your audience as if somehow without talking to you they could never hope to reach those people. As if that alone meant that anyone on the government payroll (or even who receives money from the government) must give you an interview. I see how you think answering your questions about a show during a press conference is like a government agency answering an access-to-information request about its expenses, but it's not. You want to interview a celebrity, and you're whining because you're being turned down.

And, come on Michelle. Certainly you realize the irony of complaining about how people aren't giving you interviews, and then refusing to speak to reporters from La Presse and Le Soleil about this very same issue.

I also found it funny that the page next to the one complaining about Véro and Louis is a full page puff piece devoted to how Quebecor creation Marie-Élaine Thibert has an album that went gold.

Looking at these pages, can you really blame people for getting the impression that Quebecor rewards its celebrities and attacks those who don't play by its rules?

Aren't you tired of being seen as a pawn of the Quebecor media narrative machine, whether or not you think it's true?

Think about it. Get some sleep. Maybe when you're rested you can see this with a clear head and realize all the damage this media war has done, and maybe you'll be the bigger person and decide to do something about it.

Please.

Related Posts

• The ho-hum Bye-Bye
• Bye-Bye 2010: Redemption
• Série Montréal-Québec: Flawless, says Journal
• Enquête sur Quebecor: Good, but I expected more (UPDATED)
• Journal de Montréal: The day the union died

N.B.: Une version française de ce billet a été publié dans Trente, le journal du Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec.

I've always liked to think of myself as open-minded. It's a good quality for a journalist, and one that I don't think enough of them have.

For most of this blog's existence, there has been a major labour conflict at a Quebecor-owned newspaper - the Journal de Québec in 2007 and 2008, and the Journal de Montréal in 2009 and 2010. In between there have been all sorts of depressing news for journalists in general as the media industry seems to be in a state of slow collapse.

Like many of my journalist colleagues, my first reaction to Quebecor's lockout of its two largest newspapers was to take the side of the workers. Whether or not I agreed with what they wrote when they were employed by Quebecor, they are mere pawns in the media game being played by the great Quebecor Empire. They are the Luke Skywalkers to Pierre Karl Péladeau's Darth Vader.

But in my admittedly limited experience as a journalist, I've learned that situations aren't nearly as black and white as they may seem to be. Society's villains aren't all Hitler-like caricatures of pure cartoonish evil, motivated solely by greed and hatred of puppies. And its heroes aren't all pure good.

So while some may throw it out as a given, I sit here and ask myself a question that requires a lot of thought before I can answer:

Is Quebecor evil?

Two years

Since just after midnight on Jan. 24, 2009, 253 journalists, editors, salespeople, office workers and other members of the Syndicat des travailleurs de l'information du Journal de Montréal have been locked out of their offices at 4545 Frontenac St. Since then, they've lived this second job, honing their journalistic skills (and enjoying some freedoms they didn't have before) while waiting for this labour conflict to be resolved. They're in a state of suspended animation, The Gazette's Mike Boone describes. Though to many of the journalists, they might describe it more as a state of temporary freedom.

The first problem is that while the number 253 has been repeated enough to become a catchphrase for the union, and that is technically the number of employees who have been locked out, it comes with a lot of asterisks. It includes, according to the employer, 45 non-permanent employees and 29 people who have either retired (like Bertrand Raymond) or quit for other jobs (like Fabrice de Pierrebourg). A minor point, perhaps, and one that doesn't change the union's arguments, but to suggest that de Pierrebourg is among 253 people "walking the streets" is dishonest.

Since the lockout, the Journal de Montréal has used its own pages to explain its side of the conflict, saying the journalists are overpaid, underworked and unwilling to accept new technologies and the new business model that has to be followed to survive in this new media environment. The union counters that the Journal was profitable even with its large staff, and that the massive layoffs and unfettered rights to replace unionized journalists with non-unionized agency reporters was unacceptable.

A protester at the Journal de Montréal workers' march makes a point about Pierre Karl Péladeau's salary

When the union recently rejected a formal offer to end the conflict, the Journal again published its side, pointing out how much the workers would get paid and how generous the severance pay would be for those laid off. The union, however, objected to the even more massive layoffs (they would have kept only about 50 of the 253, including only 17 journalists), and provisions against continuing Rue Frontenac or working for La Presse (the Journal has since said they would be willing to let these drop if it got them closer to an agreement).

Considering how much hiring is going on at QMI Agency (more on that below), I can't fathom another explanation for this massive cut other than a desire to continue to operate the paper as it has run during the lockout: A few journalists doing hyped-up feature reports, and the rest being filled by internal and external wire copy.

The massive layoff plan is one that might backfire in the Mont Laurier area, where former Quebecor journalists have started an independent paper. A similar thing happened in the Saguenay region, where a lockout at Quebecor's Le Réveil ended similarly with massive layoffs. Lucky for Quebecor that the Montreal francophone market is so saturated it's hard to see a publication like Rue Frontenac becoming profitable on its own.

Orders from on high

At the annual conference of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec, there was a panel discussion specifically about Quebecor, the "elephant in the room," and whether its policy of convergence represents a threat to freedom of the press. The panel might have been a useful - if heated - discussion if only someone from Quebecor had been present. But as you can imagine, attending a discussion with locked-out workers and others that was more than likely going to turn into non-stop Quebecor-bashing wasn't high on Péladeau's list of things to do. And, because Quebecor didn't defend itself, Quebecor-bashing is exactly what happened.

Journal lock-outé David Patry recounted a few stories about what life was like while he still worked in the Journal's newsroom as an entertainment reporter. He said articles were dictated to him (he used an example about a conflict between Radio-Canada's Sylvain Lafrance and Péladeau, a case that is in the news today because it's before the courts). He says these articles had wording he didn't approve of, and he was forced to sign the articles even though he didn't write them or agree with their contents.

Patry also produced an email from his boss, forwarded from the editor-in-chief, which asked him to retaliate against a La Presse reporter for unfavourable coverage. He pretended to work on it to placate his angry superiors, and the issue eventually went away.

Even in his short time there, he says, he has plenty of similar stories, as do his colleagues. It was so bad, he said, that those colleagues advised him to pick his battles, otherwise he would be spending most of his days locking horns with management.

The story made some headlines (Le Devoir, La Presse, and of course Rue Frontenac), even getting the attention of the Globe and Mail's Norman Spector.

After the conference, Michelle Coudé-Lord, the arts section manager at the heart of Patry's accusations, spoke with Benoit Dutrizac on 98.5FM. She didn't deny sending the email he quotes from (she explained that it's normal in newsrooms for an editor to send an email that might not be considered "elegant"), but did say that Quebecor handing down orders from on high doesn't happen, and that she has never gotten phone calls from Péladeau telling her what he wants to see in the next day's paper.

She dismissed the union's complaints about the paper's coverage as "union propaganda" and said this was all about settling personal gripes between union members and the newspaper's managers.

I've never worked at the Journal de Montréal. I don't know any of its managers. I don't know whether these kinds of orders are given and where they come from. I suspect the non-managers who worked there don't even know for sure. (Patry's email could be traced back only to EIC Dany Doucet.)

But the end product - the content of the Journal de Montréal - speaks for itself. Not only is it populist (it always has been the populist newspaper, for better or for worse), but it's right-wing populist, and has gotten more so over the past few years (particularly since left-wing columnists refused to contribute to a locked-out publication). There's focus on gas prices, government waste, and CBC executive business expenses. I don't think it's a coincidence that Péladeau's opinions so clearly match those of the Journal.

I suspect the situation is much more subtle than what is being implied. While Péladeau does have a reputation as a micromanager (again, I don't know if this is actually true), I can't imagine he has the time on his hands to tell each of his media properties what they should report on on a daily basis.

So Quebecor has middle managers, just like any other large company. They're the ones who make the day-to-day decisions. But I've yet to see one get fired for publishing coverage too friendly to Quebecor and its assets. And they know that. This conditions them to hesitate before doing anything that might look poorly on the Quebecor empire, and encourages them to embellish when writing things that put Quebecor in a good light. It lessens the credibility of the newspaper in the eyes of its readers (at least, those who notice what's going on), but those managers don't have to worry about their jobs.

The head of the Journal de Montréal protest passes a TVA/LCN news van here to cover it.

The non-blackout

One thing that's been interesting to look at is the coverage Quebecor's media properties have given to the lockout itself. It's within Quebecor's business interests to downplay it, even hide it from its consumers. But doing so would go against journalistic principles.

On one hand, the words "Rue Frontenac" don't appear on the Journal de Montréal's website - except in articles about the conflict itself - and rarely appear in news stories from other Quebecor outlets, despite putting a lot of stories into the open that are later reported on by those newsrooms. Compared to other media, who regularly credit Rue Frontenac's journalistic scoops (as much as "professional" journalists are prepared to credit competitors for their scoops), Quebecor is clearly less willing to credit a union website for its stories - a problem that may have contributed to one case of plagiarism and a journalist being fired.

In one extreme case of self-censorship, a Rue Frontenac sticker on the laptop of blogger Cécile Gladel was blurred in a video profile of her for the Canoe website. I doubt there were high-level orders to do this, but it gives an indication of what the front lines think should be standard procedure at Quebecor - and their bosses aren't tripping over themselves to set these journalists straight.

On the other hand, coverage of the lockout has been pretty straight from Quebecor's properties. At the recent protest in favour of Journal de Montréal employees and calling for a change in the laws regarding strikebreakers, a TVA/LCN van and reporter were present and an Agence QMI story highlighted the size of the crowd and gave their demands a voice (while also giving space for a response by the Journal itself).

The naysayers

There are those who decide to use their star power to try to bring about change by boycotting Quebecor. But they are outnumbered by those who are far too dependent on the media Quebecor controls to commit career suicide by refusing to cooperate with them. Bernard Landry, for example, decided (though reluctantly) to give up his Journal column after the lockout began. But star columnists like Richard Martineau, Joseph Facal and Stéphane Gendron are still contributing. Flipping through the pages of the paper, the words "collaboration spéciale" appear next to a lot of smiling faces.

When Quebecor-owned Archambault announced its list of finalists for its Grand Prix littéraire, author Gil Courtemanche announced he didn't want to be a finalist and would refuse such an award, because of what Quebecor is doing to the locked-out Journal de Montréal workers. He also invited his fellow finalists to join him in his protest, putting them in an uncomfortable position.

One of them, Jean-Simon Desrochers, said that should he win, he would donate the $10,000 prize money to the STIJM union representing locked-out Journal workers. But as Steve Proulx points out, could that union accept money that comes out of the hands of Quebecor?

A coordinated campaign has been launched to boycott the Journal de Montréal

The boycott

The CSN and STIJM recently launched a campaign to boycott the Journal de Montréal, and the protest last weekend had that boycott as its primary message.

The purpose of a boycott is obvious: the Journal takes its strength from its readership and the advertising money that brings in. Convince everyone to stop reading it, and people stop placing ads, seriously hurting the Journal's bottom line.

But that's much easier said than done. The fact that the unions are launching this now, almost two years into the lockout, isn't because they didn't want people to boycott the Journal before, it's because their attempts to convince Journal readers to take their side have so far failed. In fact, despite having few journalists and lots of wire copy, the Journal's readership has actually gone up since the lockout.

The CSN and STIJM say this is because Quebecor is dumping the paper, handing it out for free to boost its reader numbers at the expense of subscription revenue (and hey, if they don't have to pay 253 workers, they probably don't need most of that money anyway).

It's true that lots of Journal de Montréal copies are being given away freely. But that happened before the lockout, and La Presse and The Gazette also regularly give out free copies.

The reality is that people who continue to read the Journal de Montréal don't care about the locked-out journalists and other workers. Some of them may have been convinced by management's argument that those workers are overpaid, spoiled brats who are unwilling to adapt to the new media reality. Others are disconnected with the issue, and see this conflict as being between the Journal and its union and having nothing to do with them.

The STIJM and boycott supporters can't fathom why people would continue to read a newspaper that has so little original content (essentially limited to reports from managers and columns by freelancers), but we're talking about a market that has two free daily newspapers, one of which (Metro) is the most read paper on the island.

There are people who support the boycott, but many of them didn't read the Journal in the first place, preferring more intellectual or pro-union fare like La Presse or Le Devoir.

Considering how long this lockout has been going, I find it hard to believe this boycott campaign will make enough inroads into the Journal's readership numbers to have any impact. And even if it did, Quebecor has more than enough money to keep the paper running through an extended lockout.

A union-sponsored survey suggests that Quebecers see Quebecor's journalists as the ones most likely to make their reporting follow the wishes of their corporate bosses. But clearly they're not so worried about this that they'll stop reading the paper.

CSN's Claudette Carbonneau hasn't shied away from taking negotiations to the media

Negotiation by blog post

The high-profile nature of this labour conflict has meant a lot of negotiation in public, even while talks with a mediator go on behind the scenes. And by "negotiation in public", I mean competing press releases, letters in Le Devoir, and now emails to L'Actualité blogger Jean-François Lisée.

Lisée's involvement started with a blog post dated Nov. 29 in which he openly suggested to Péladeau that he take the high road, dropping his defamation suit against Radio-Canada's Sylvain Lafrance, dropping any restriction against laid-off Journal workers going to the competition, and even financially supporting Rue Frontenac as a separate journalistic enterprise by advertising with them.

Péladeau himself responded a few days later, skirting Lisée's suggestions but saying they had withdrawn their anti-competition demans. Péladeau also released a draft agreement signed a few weeks before the lockout began that suggests the two sides had come to an agreement in principle before CSN pulled the plug.

CSN's Claudette Carbonneau responded, and in effect brought the discussion back to the claims from both sides that they both have offers on the table and are waiting for the other side to respond.

Péladeau responded again, in which he broke down that mystical 253 number (as I explained above), suggested that the CSN is pulling the strings and intentionally prolonging this conflict in order to serve its political purposes, and continued to list union demands that he considered entirely unrealistic.

The discussion has ended there for now. The mediator has asked both sides to cut it out and take their arguments to the bargaining table. Lisée, unencumbered by the mediator's demands, has put out five public questions for both Péladeau and Carbonneau, hoping to get answers to some tough questions they might not want to answer.

UPDATE: Péladeau has responded to Lisée, suggesting he doesn't want to talk directly about the conflict but also saying he would be willing to help distribute Rue Frontenac at competitive rates. He also takes irrelevant jabs at both Radio-Canada and La Presse, and points out that his father was the one who shut down the Montreal Daily News (a short-lived competitor to The Gazette), as a counterexample to those who saw Péladeau Sr. as the ultimate friend to the worker.

As for the independence of his newsrooms, I'll quote from Péladeau directly:

Quant à l’indépendance des journalistes, c’est un concept dont il faut bien comprendre l’application au sein d’une salle de rédaction. Un journaliste ne se loue pas un bureau dans une salle de rédaction comme un coiffeur loue une chaise dans un salon réputé où il reçoit librement sa propre clientèle, selon son humeur. Une salle de rédaction n’est pas un collectif de joueurs autonomes qui laissent libre cours à leurs envies du moment; elle possède une structure, un esprit de corps, et le journaliste y œuvre au sein d’une équipe.

L’éditeur, le rédacteur en chef ou le directeur de l’information font chaque jour des choix éditoriaux et livrent des affectations en conséquence. Il ne s’agit pas là de contrôle de l’information, comme cela s’est entendu lors d’une séance de défoulement collectif au dernier congrès de la FPJQ. Il ne s’agit là que de simples préceptes organisationnels auxquels n’échappe aucune entreprise.

Ces accusations de contrôle sont pourtant reprises à l’envi à l’endroit des médias de Quebecor et ce, depuis plusieurs années maintenant, comme si La Presse ou Le Devoir laissaient leurs propres journalistes entièrement libres de choisir les nouvelles à publier.

He also suggests that Quebecor has no need for an ombudsman or the Quebec Press Council, I guess because he thinks the readers can judge for themselves.

Not putting his journalists to any independent verification of their work is a big strike against Péladeau when it comes to his commitment to proper journalism.

14 lock-outs in 14 years

After a lock-out was called at Le Réveil in the Saguenay (a conflict that has since been resolved with 20 of 25 workers getting laid off), the union issued a press release saying that Quebecor had called 14 lock-outs in 14 years, including one at the Journal de Québec and one at Videotron.

Serge Sasseville, a VP at Quebecor, wrote recently in a piece in Le Devoir that despite the CSN talking point, they have signed 100 contracts in the past five years without work disruption. (The article also says that less than half of Quebecor's 15,000-strong workforce has a collective agreement.) Rue Frontenac's Jean-François Codère counters in a comment below that Quebecor's "lock-out rate" is still much, much higher than the Quebec average.

Still, while Videotron and their two largest newspapers underwent very painful conflicts, the broadcast properties are still on the job, including most notably TVA which agreed to a new contract this summer. There's clearly a difference here - either the newspaper unions have working conditions that are unsustainable, or the employer values TVA more than it does the two Journals.

Other Quebecor unions are still negotiating new contracts, or in some cases, their first.

La guerre des médias

I have no idea who started it, but for some reason there's an unofficial war going on between Quebecor on one side and La Presse and Radio-Canada on the other. Part of it is simply competition: Radio-Canada is TVA's most direct competitor, and La Presse is the biggest threat to the Journal de Montréal. But there's something more about this war that makes it troubling. Stories abound of personalities from one side being forbidden from talking to the other. Supposedly some TVA and LCN personalities have exclusivity contracts with Quebecor, which won't allow them to be interviewed on Radio-Canada.

It's become far too easy to figure out which personalities belong to which camp: Éric Salvail, Julie Snyder and Richard Martineau on one side, Véronique Cloutier and Guy A. Lepage on the other. It's not absolute (Salvail and Cloutier have appeared on each other's programs, and Martineau has a show on Télé-Québec), but convergence has created the kind of camps you don't see elsewhere.

Along with this war has come Quebecor's accusations of a "secret deal" between Radio-Canada and Gesca, which owns La Presse. These accusations are echoed by some militant sovereignist groups, who dislike Radio-Canada because it's funded by the federal government, and dislike Gesca because its owners and editorialists are strong federalists.

This suggestion doesn't come from nowhere. Tune in to current affairs shows on Radio-Canada television and radio, and you see a lot of people from La Presse invited as regular guests or columnists. Names like Marc Cassivi, Nathalie Petrowski, Vincent Marissal and Marie-Christine Blais appear regularly on Radio-Canada's programs. In May, Quebecor's Sophie Durocher made a strong argument that this cooperation was bringing both sides too far together. Even Radio-Canada's union has brought forward concerns that the network's shows too often bring in La Presse journalists and columnists instead of in-house experts.

And then there's Exhibit A, an actual deal between Radio-Canada and Gesca to share resources, signed in 2001. They say the agreement (which kept editorial control entirely separate and doesn't call for nearly the kind of convergence being claimed) ended in 2003 and there is no deal linking the two editorially. But the agreement itself hasn't been publicized, and brings up perfectly legitimate questions about whether the two organizations are working too closely together, and whether they believe their audiences are one and the same.

It's easy to cherrypick examples and leave out all the counterexamples. Yes, there are a lot of La Presse people on Radio-Canada, but there are also people from Le Devoir, L'Actualité and other publications. Durocher herself was a guest on multiple occasions on Christiane Charette's show in the months before her column that criticized it.

It's also been pointed out that people in the Quebecor empire, particularly those who are TVA and LCN personalities, choose not to accept invitations on Radio-Canada's shows.

According to people I've talked to, if this deal exists, it is so secret even the people who work at these two organizations don't know about it. And I don't see how they're supposed to implement it if they don't know what it says.

I think it's pushing things a bit too much to suggest there's a conscious effort at either Radio-Canada or Gesca to conspire together and give each other special treatment. But I would be surprised if there weren't subconscious factors in play here. For one, you know how they say that the enemy of your enemy is my friend? I imagine Quebecor's war is creating a lot of resentment among these two groups, creating a natural - though unofficial - alliance. If that's the case, much of this supposed alliance could be Quebecor's own making.

The other thing to consider is that La Presse and Radio-Canada share a similar type of audience. While the Journal de Montréal and TVA are populist media who put a high value on what attracts a lot of eyeballs, La Presse and Radio-Canada are more full of themselves concerned about having a proper balance between attracting their audience and educating them. They sit somewhere between the populist Quebecor properties and the intellectual but not very popular outlets like Le Devoir.

Of course, these aren't the only news media here. Corus's (soon to be Cogeco's) 98.5FM, particularly the shows with Paul Arcand and Benoit Dutrizac, are also serious but popular journalistic outlets, and they also invite journalists from other media on their shows. But they seem to be in this zone between the two camps in the media war, with guests more from places like Le Devoir, V, Télé-Québec, Voir and elsewhere. It's anecdotal and inconclusive, but this struck me as I was going through the lists of their recent interviews.

A copy of a receipt for a café au lait, yogurt and muffin from CBC boss Hubert Lacroix

What does Hubert Lacroix eat?

The war between Quebecor and its perceived enemies doesn't just extend to what guests are invited onto talk shows. Quebecor's news agency is also on a campaign against CBC/Radio-Canada, having its journalists file thousands of access-to-information requests against the public broadcaster seeking everything they can legally get their hands on (the law doesn't allow them to get information related to journalistic endeavours, but does allow them access to things like expenses of board members, which they've tried to turn into scandals).

The CBC was so overwhelmed it took forever to respond to them (something QMI also tried to turn into a scandal). Eventually the CBC responded with an open letter explaining its side - and attacking Quebecor while assuring the public it fully intends to be transparent. It also put "over 70,000 pages of documents" resulting from access to information requests on its website. (This is actually a pretty good idea - can Agence QMI claim an "exclusive" or a "scandal" something that CBC has released on its website?)

Quebecor defends the practice of rifling through CBC executive expenses, saying it's their duty to keep civil servants honest, whether they work for the CBC or any other government-funded agency. Sasseville also suggested that journalists at Gesca weren't doing enough to criticize the public broadcaster, perhaps because so many Gesca journalists get income on the side from Radio-Canada.

The CBC continues pressing Quebecor, accusing it of exploiting its vast media empire to settle a personal mission of Péladeau's. It's a charge Quebecor's Brian Lilley denies, but it's clear from his blog post that this is more than just journalistic curiosity into CBC's use of taxpayer money: it's gotten to the level of conventional wisdom there that the CBC is a "money drain", to use the title of their series.

QMI's campaign against the CBC is justified by a perceived tendency of their journalistic competitors (including, of course, the CBC itself) to refrain from criticizing the public broadcaster. And the more people say that Quebecor is going too far, the more justified they feel in going after this supposed sacred cow.

To demonstrate, Lilley points out that "the state broadcaster has generated far more complaints to the federal information commissioner than other government departments or agencies", without pointing out that according to his news agency's own report, "many" of those complaints come from Sun Media itself.

Scabs and anti-scabs

According to the union, a large part of how the Journal de Montréal is still published is the use of "scabs"

Simply put, scabs are strikebreakers, which are illegal in Quebec, a province that has very pro-union labour laws. A company in a strike or lockout can't hire workers to enter the workplace and do the work of those workers in conflict. Only managers can perform those tasks.

Still, the union claims the Journal is violating the law, secretly having scab labour doing the jobs of locked-out journalists. They claim "dizaines" - a claim that is far from proven. So far, only a single case two cases (thanks J.F.) have been proven, according to labour board decisions so far. Sylvain Prevate from 24 Heures was in violation of the labour code when he was in the Journal building putting together pages during the ADISQ gala in 2009. That proof came from a Rue Frontenac journalist who had to trick him into admitting he was there. There was also - as Codère points out below - freelancer Guy Bourgeois, who was asked to conduct interviews. In that case, the proof was in the Journal itself.

There are no regular inspections to prove that the Journal is complying with the law, and it's essentially up to the locked-out workers themselves (who are prohibited from being on the property owned by the Journal) to prove that their employer is breaking the labour code.

This scab business actually goes back to the Journal de Québec lockout, which began in 2007. A labour board decision, reached after the conflict had been resolved, ruled that the Journal made use of scab labour through a pretty sketchy setup involving subcontractors. But that decision was overturned in court, which ruled that they weren't scabs because of the technicality that they never entered the workplace - the Journal de Québec offices.

Quebecor learned from the Journal de Québec lockout, and setup a news agency called Agence QMI ("QMI Agency" in English, the QMI standing for Quebecor Media Inc.). The basic idea is simple: Allow companies in Quebecor's vast media empire to share content with each other. It's similar to what Canwest did with its Canwest News Service (now Postmedia News) and some major U.S. newspapers - McClatchy-Tribune, New York Times, L.A. Times/Washington Post all have their own wire services.

But QMI Agency also has the advantage of being able to provide the Journal de Montréal with local and regional content in the event of a lockout or strike. There's 24 Heures and LCN for local news, the Journal de Québec for stuff from the provincial government, Sun Media for the rest of the country, 7 jours for entertainment news, Argent for business news, etc. Add on international wire services, and the managers can take care of the rest.

Like Canwest/Postmedia, Quebecor's decision to setup QMI Agency was mainly to replace Canadian Press so they could save money and compete with the national cooperative (now privately owned) news service. But it clearly formed part of the plan for the Journal to deal with its lockout.

Having lost the Journal de Québec case in court, and failing to have QMI journalists declared strikebreakers, the unions are now turning to the government to change the law so that workers don't have to physically enter the workplace to be considered scabs.

It's a pretty simple case - the law already bans scabs, but was written at a time when work couldn't really be done outside a workplace. Changing the law would simply update it for the realities of 21st century technology.

The Liberal Party's youth wing supports such a change, and the Parti Québécois has tabled a bill to make it. But it's still far from clear if t will pass. That depends on Jean Charest and his Liberals.

La Presse's Vincent Marissal suggests some reasons why it hasn't come to be yet.

In the meantime, Quebecor can't be faulted for following the law, even if many people may disagree with it, and even if it may seem unfair.

The hearings

One thing the government has agreed to do is hold parliamentary hearings into the Journal de Montréal lockout, where Péladeau has been invited - but not obligated - to testify.

As you can imagine with parliamentary hearings, expect this to become political somehow. If the Liberals don't immediately make it clear that they support changing the law on strike-breaking, the PQ will pounce on that and label the Liberals enemies of the worker. And even if they do, there's the ADQ who will take Quebecor's side, and Amir Khadir who's clearly on the union's side and wants to see Quebecor broken up.

It's hard to predict in advance what will come of the hearings (besides the bickering). Maybe nothing substantial, maybe something serious like a campaign to force Quebecor to divest some of its media holdings. Or maybe a change of the anti-scab law that will put Quebecor in a difficult position. One thing is for sure: Quebecor is going to fight hard against any attempt to take on its bottom line, and I wouldn't expect them to hesitate to use that giant media empire to further their cause.

UPDATE (Dec. 15): The hearings have been confirmed, with at least one prominent Liberal suggesting the anti-scab law is out of date and should be changed.

The Caisse

Quebecor's supposed evility (evilness? evilment?) has gotten to the point where some are calling on the Caisse de dépôt et placement to step in. You see, in 2000, when Rogers was set to buy Videotron, the Caisse provided enough financing so that Péladeau's Quebecor could purchase the cable company instead to keep its profits in Quebec. The deal gave Péladeau control over Videotron's telecom services and TVA's broadcasting assets. In return, the new Quebecor Media Inc. is owned 45% by the Caisse.

While it's not controlling power (Quebecor itself owns the majority of Quebecor Media), it's a bargaining chip. The only problem is that the Caisse doesn't concern itself too much with political issues, and the government doesn't want to force its hand, which would put Quebecers' money at the whims of the political desires of the party in charge.

If the Caisse is letting the lockout continue, it's not because it wants to be evil, it's because its primary concern is making money for Quebecers, not satisfying a few locked-out journalists and their union backers.

Should we boycott Videotron to express displeasure at Quebecor?

My dilemmas

In February, during a brief period when I was unemployed (it lasted from 1:30 a.m. on Feb. 1 to mid-afternoon on March 1), I had discussions with someone from QMI Agency about a job in the rapidly-expanding news agency. There was a grand total of one sit-down discussion and no formal offer, but I debated internally for quite a while about whether I could work there. It was one thing working for Quebecor (plenty of respectable journalists do), but to take a job at a news agency that is being blamed for allowing the Journal lockout to drag on so long, while those locked-out workers are walking the picket lines, I just wasn't sure.

I asked for advice from some friends and respected colleagues. When I started off a theoretical question to one about working for the devil, she immediately shot back "is it Quebecor?" Another fellow journalist said I shouldn't hesitate to jump on the offer.

In the end, The Gazette needed some extra staff and I was offered another contract there, one I happily accepted.

Almost a year later, I'm facing another dilemma, this one about Videotron.

Videotron is Quebecor's big moneymaker. Its revenue is twice that of the next largest division (the newspapers) at $2 billion a year, and its profits represent 75% of Quebecor's income, according to its latest annual report's financial statements. Take Videotron out of the equation, and you bring Quebecor to its knees.

My parents have been Videotron cable subscribers since it took over CF Cable TV. When I moved out on my own, I signed up for Illico cable and Internet, and I've been with them since.

A few weeks ago I started getting mail from Bell, announcing that its Fibe TV service was soon going to be available in my area. I was tempted by some of its selling points - a free PVR for three years, lots of HD channels (even though I don't have an HD television set), and at first glance it seemed I might save money compared to what I currently pay Videotron.

Then I remembered that Bell has the worst customer service of Canada's telecom companies. And that their offer of à la carte television service is only in Quebec (because that's where Videotron operates), and that said à la carte service has a bunch of holes in it. CNN isn't available à la carte, for some reason.

The thing is, I actually like Videotron. Service interruptions have been few and far between, it offers true à la carte television service selection, and I've never been gone over my Internet download cap. Sure, I'd like to pay less than $100 a month for TV and Internet, and I'd like to have more options for free video on demand than TVA and more TVA. And I think we should have more than one option for digital cable in Canada's second-largest city. But Bell is making it clear that it's only giving customers choice because they're being forced to by Videotron's competitive pressure, and I've yet to see any evidence that its newfound commitment to customer service has made any difference in its quality.

A matter of comparison

It's hard to judge whether a company is evil without looking at its competition. Postmedia Network, the company I work for, has also abandoned Canadian Press for its own news service, and it's also centralizing and outsourcing much of its operations, reducing what it considers redundancy in staff. Global Television has gutted local stations to centralize operations, even to the point of having fake local sets computer-generated through green screens. CTV has forced its local stations to rename their newscasts to "CTV News" and incorporate the national brand. CBC/Radio-Canada has implemented convergence plans that have seen TV and radio newsrooms come together. Rogers is trying to buy the Toronto Maple Leafs in order to profit from its TV distribution and blackmail fans into subscribing to its cable service and specialty channels. V, formerly TQS, doesn't even have a news department. Transcontinental runs community weekly newspapers whose newsrooms are so bare they're absolute jokes. Corus cancelled local programming at a bunch of regional radio stations to be replaced by a show out of Montreal. And now those stations are being bought by Cogeco, which wants an exception to the CRTC's media concentration rules so it can own a much larger piece of Montreal's radio pie.

The list goes on.

There are media companies and news organizations that try not to be evil, either because they're run by benevolent dictators, because they're non-profits, or because they're too small to turn into giant soulless corporate machines. Those organizations tend to stay marginal or die out completely.

Large corporations aren't good or evil. They're machines without a conscience, with enough layers to separate the people who make decisions from the people those decisions affect. Their goal is to make money for shareholders, who are themselves a few layers removed from the details of how their money is made. Appealing to their conscience is pointless. If it's more profitable, all things considered, to throw grandma under the bus, they won't hesitate to do it.

Quebecor's primary mission is no different from that of any other large company: It wants to make money.

So to answer the question...

Is Quebecor evil?

I don't know. To answer yes or no to that question is to ignore how grey the whole issue is.

But if you've read all of the above, my opinion no longer matters. You have enough information to decide for yourself.

UPDATE (Dec. 31): Le Devoir's Stéphane Baillargeon on the stupid war between Radio-Canada/Gesca and Quebecor.

Related Posts

• Enquête sur Quebecor: Good, but I expected more (UPDATED)
• Série Montréal-Québec: Flawless, says Journal
• Journal Lockout Digest: FTQ traitors
• Journal Daily Digest: Jack to the rescue
• Journal Daily Digest: Quebecor fights back

The first edition of the Rue Frontenac weekly (a collector's edition!)

Rue Frontenac, the website run by locked-out workers of the Journal de Montréal, launched a paper version of its public-relations campaign on Thursday morning.

The first edition of what will become a weekly newspaper is 48 pages, all of them colour.

It has a cover piece by Gabrielle Duchaine on how some pregnancy crisis centres hide their militant anti-abortion stance in order to manipulate expectant mothers. (Online, the piece is presented as a Flash graphic.) There are also interviews with Guy A. Lepage (one of Rue Frontenac's biggest supporters among the artistic community - the paper rewards him by devoting an entire page to showing just his head bigger-than-life-size) and Louis Morissette, a piece about how Quebecor has pulled ads from Le Devoir (supposedly as punishment for Le Devoir's criticisms of the Journal), and the usual arts and sports news you'd find in a newspaper, plus some puzzles.

Notably, though, there is no wire content (and, of course, no advertorials). All of the articles are written by Rue Frontenac's journalists. This means the paper won't present anything close to a complete perspective on the news, but the point is to show that they can still produce serious, quality journalism worth its weight in gold.

Only time will tell whether it's worth the price. It's not cheap to print 75,000 copies of a newspaper.

This is the second time Rue Frontenac has actually printed on newsprint. A one-off special issue last year at the start of the Canadiens' season appears to have been well received, at least enough for them to try again.

The paper has advertising, the vast majority of which is from other unions. There are also ads from sympathetic left-wing politicians including Québec solidaire's Amir Khadir, the Projet Montréal Plateau team, and NDP MP Thomas Mulcair.

A man hands out copies of the Journal de Montréal for free outside the Mont-Royal metro station

It was 8:30am on Thursday as I came out of the Mont-Royal metro station, the heart of the Plateau. Just inside the doors was a man in an orange vest handing out copies of Metro. Just outside, another man in another vest handing out copies of 24 Heures. Next to him, a lady in a La Presse hat handing out free copies of La Presse. And nearby, what I had originally confused for a homeless man handing out free copies of the Journal de Montréal.

For the most part, commuters breeze by not touching any newsprint. Some will pick a paper they like, or just take the ones that normally aren't free. Some collect the different papers.

What's clear is that even here, in the plateau known for its "clique" and which elected Québec solidaire's only MNA so far, any effect of the Journal de Montréal conflict on its newspaper's popularity is invisible. People young and old, poor and rich were taking copies of the newspaper at the same rate as those who took La Presse or the free papers. The fact that it is heavily reliant on wire copy and overhyped articles from its remaining managers seems to be of little consequence to those rushing to work in the morning.

That, above all, is what Rue Frontenac has to fight: indifference to their cause from regular folk. The paper might put enough wandering eyes on the quality of their journalism to make an impact. Or it might just annoy Pierre Karl Péladeau even though it's not doing him much harm. Or it might do nothing, coexisting with its writers' previous employer for months or years as a settlement of the conflict becomes no closer to arriving.

A stack of Rue Frontenac papers at a metro on Mont Royal Ave.

Not seeing any Rue Frontenacs at the metro station, I made my way eastward in the direction of the giant Journal de Montréal logo. I eventually picked up a copy at a recently opened Metro grocery store near the Journal's offices. I was a bit surprised by this. Even though there were spaces for all sorts of publications, the fact that a major company would appear to take sides in the conflict is noteworthy. (Though the fact that the paper is distributed through Diffumag allows it to reach a lot of distribution points quickly.)

(Micro Boutique, a reseller of Apple products, also took a stance with a half-page ad in Rue Frontenac.)

A Google map shows the hundreds of distribution points for Rue Frontenac, spread out all over the city and surrounding region as far as Valleyfield, St. Jean sur Richelieu and Assomption. There are also distribution points in the Mauricie, Sherbrooke and Outaouais regions, and subscriptions are available for an unpublicized price.

A van appeals to Cardinal Turcotte to stop a lockout

Just across the parking lot from the Journal's offices (and ironically just after the point where Frontenac St. turns into Iberville St.), a handful of union members at the offices of Rue Frontenac chat jovially before they pile into a van with a giant photo of Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte on top. Even though this conflict has been going on for 21 months, morale hasn't been as low as it had been expected to be. The rejection of a contract offer the union had considered insultingly bad brightened spirits and resolve even though it meant the conflict would last longer.

Maybe it's naive. Or maybe it'll work.

A typo in the website's address got by the proofreaders on Page 3.

More coverage

• Radio-Canada
• La Presse
• InfoPresse
• Trente
• The Gazette
• CTV Montreal

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• The future of Rue Frontenac
• Journal de Montréal Lockout Anniversary 2: The Boring Sequel
• Rue Frontenac puts it on paper
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The offer was the result of negotiations held under a blackout, and while neither side would confirm that one was on the table (they wouldn't even confirm that a meeting was being held to vote on it), some details had leaked out through the media, which notes that it is unchanged from the offer the employer tabled last month:

• The deal would have seen only 50 of 253 jobs kept, among them only 17 journalists (out of 65), five editors and four photographers. The employer would choose who could keep their jobs
• It would have required the shutting down of RueFrontenac.com, at least temporarily (UPDATE: No, it was permanent) and a promise not to launch any competing newspapers
• Those losing their jobs would be prohibited from working for La Presse or Cyberpresse for a period of time
• In exchange, the employer would offer unspecified severance pay to those losing their jobs

The vote is unsurprising, if only because 80% of those voting would have lost their jobs (and been prevented from seeking equivalent jobs elsewhere), and even though some of those might have been close to retirement and decided that some money was better than none, a strong feeling of solidarity in the union was more than enough to overcome those who were tired of the conflict and wanted a quick end at any cost.

Even though the lockout is in its 21st month, the Rue Frontenac operation is still in high gear, and is in fact gearing up. The union plans to launch a weekly paper version of Rue Frontenac this month. Meanwhile, there are hints of a parliamentary commission to negotiate an end to the conflict.

The union was quick to issue a release announcing the offer's rejection (the blackout having been lifted). It includes this quote from union head Raynald Leblanc: "C'est une insulte envers nous, mais aussi envers tous les lecteurs du Journal de Montréal. Comment peut-on prétendre faire un journal de qualité avec aussi peu de personnel?"

Selon lui, le plan de Quebecor est simple. Moins d'information, plus de profits. En fait, la nouvelle salle de rédaction du Journal de Montréal n'aurait plus de journalistes à l'économie, ni aucun chroniqueur salarié. Tout proviendrait de l'extérieur, via l'Agence QMI, qui bafoue sans vergogne le principe d'étanchéité des salles de nouvelles.

Pire, l'entreprise a indiqué vouloir garder ses 25 cadres à la rédaction, ceux-ci se retrouveraient donc à superviser 32 employés. « Il est clair que l'arrogance de Quebecor est liée à l'interprétation restrictive faite par les tribunaux des dispositions anti-briseurs de grève. S'il y avait un tel ratio de cadres dans le système de santé, Le Journal de Montréal, Le Journal de Québec, TVA et LCN en feraient leurs manchettes et dénonceraient cette situation absurde », affirme Raynald Leblanc.

Quebecor also issued a release saying it was "profoundly disappointed" in the offer's rejection. It gave its side of events in the next day's Journal, downplaying the number of job cuts by playing around with numbers of part-time staff, those on disability or those near retirement.

Rue Frontenac, which stayed away from the story until after the meeting (becoming the only news outlet not to report on the story at first) simply pointed to other news outlets' reports on the subject (for "objectivity's" sake) and then published this rather non-objective piece on the subject.

LCN, to their credit, covered the vote fairly.

UPDATE: More commentary from:

• Plateau mayor Luc Ferrandez on what the Journal has become (a piece that itself was covered in news stories by La Presse, Radio-Canada, Le Devoir and Rue Frontenac, and even an editorial cartoon by Beaudet)
• René Vézina on why the media isn't talking much about the conflict
• Pierre Duhamel on the Journal's exaggerated scandals
• Yves Boisvert on how unreasonable Quebecor's demands were
• Patrick Lagacé (on Mario Dumont's show) on Quebecor's non-competition demand
• Patrick Lagacé, Anne Lagacé Dowson, Martin Petit and Franco Nuovo on Christiane Charette, about public support for the locked-out workers
• Nathalie Collard in her usual detached analysis
• Le Club des Ex on the non-competition part of the offer
• Rue Frontenac's cartoonist Beaudet takes on the non-competition clause and a joke at Banquier's expense
• Le Soleil's cartoonist André-Philippe Côté also takes a swipe at Quebecor
• Michel David on the government's refusal to update Quebec's scab law
• La Presse's Michel Girard on how the Caisse de dépôt is as much to blame for what's going on with Quebecor Media
• Le Soleil's Gilbert Lavoie on the need to update Quebec's anti-scab law

Trente also interviews Leblanc on his feelings about the offer.

Related Posts

• It’s over: Journal workers approve contract by 64%
• New contract proposal to Journal de Montréal workers
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Rue Frontenac's first attempt at a paper edition last September

You might remember last September, just before the start of the Canadiens' season, the locked-out journalists and other workers of the Journal de Montréal published a special print edition. It was just a one-time thing, but it got read and now they want to try for something more permanent.

Last week, Rue Frontenac announced that a print edition would be made on a weekly basis (Thursdays) and distributed throughout the Montreal area (from St. Jerome to St. Jean sur Richelieu) starting in late October.

Like most newspapers these days, this one promises to have more features and analysis, keeping the day-to-day breaking news for the website.

The announcement was enough to prompt stories in other media:

• The Gazette
• Le Devoir
• Projet J
• Metro
• La Presse
• CBC
• Radio-Canada
• Branchez-Vous
• Editor and Publisher

From those stories we get some more details:

• The paper will be called Rue Frontenac
• Distribution will be a minimum of 50,000
• The paper will be big - at least 48 pages to start
• The union expects that non-labour costs will be paid by advertising and other revenue
• Distribution will be through newsstands and in person by locked out workers (the other newspaper primarily distributed by handing it to people is 24 Heures, which is sure to make for some interesting mornings in front of metro stations)
• BV!Media, which owns Branchez-Vous and provides online advertising for Rue Frontenac, will help supply advertising for the print product

The Gazette's story also provides some stats on RueFrontenac.com: 300,000 unique visitors and 2.2 million page views monthly.

A paper edition was successful in Quebec City during the Journal de Québec lockout, mainly because there are no free daily newspapers in that city. In Montreal, there are two free dailies, three francophone subscription dailies, the weekly Voir, plus all the anglo publications, community newspapers and weekly news magazines.

It remains to be seen how many people will opt for the union paper over the many other options out there.

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Fabrice de Pierrebourg

La Presse scored a major coup last week, hiring investigative reporter Fabrice de Pierrebourg, who has been breaking stories for Rue Frontenac since he and 252 others were locked out from the Journal de Montréal in January 2009, a lockout that just marked its 18-month anniversary.

De Pierrebourg was the posterboy for the lockoutés' argument that the true value of the Journal de Montréal came from hard-working investigative journalists, which their newspaper has replaced with wire stories, freelance opinionators and overhyped reporting from managers.

Henry Aubin named him one of the "watchdogs of democracy" in December for his scoops about city hall and the municipal election campaign. He was just as useful before he got locked out, perhaps best known for breaching security at Trudeau airport to prove a point.

De Pierrebourg was also one of nine employees fired by the Journal for storming the office while locked out - as part of a peaceful but illegal demonstration - in July 2009. While Patrick Lagacé says it's unrelated (because negotiations began weeks ago), de Pierrebourg tells Rue Frontenac that was the final straw.

The news of de Pierrebourg's hiring was met with mixed reviews. It's a huge move for La Presse (though not unprecedented - the guy who made the announcement was himself hired from the Journal de Montréal back in 2006).

And speaking of La Presse, I guess those financial problems that nearly forced them to shut down less than a year ago, until the union made serious concessions, are a thing of the past. Not only did they take on a new high-profile hire, but they've made 17 temporary workers permanent. (One of those workers I spoke to had no idea why, though that person wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.)

Aside from being good news for La Presse, de Pierrebourg's hiring is also good for him. He has a proper job again. The anxiety and stress is gone.

It's bad news for the Journal de Montréal (at least at first glance), which has lost a solid investigative reporter.

But it's also bad for Rue Frontenac. And if the comments attached to its story are any indication, his now ex-colleagues are supportive of his escape but still saddened at losing a high-profile member of their cause.

The beginning of the end?

Though I hate to use the term "trend", I have to wonder about who else might follow in de Pierrebourg's footsteps. Bertrand Raymond, the most high-profile columnist on the picket lines, announced in January that he would "retire" - and never again return to the Journal.

Raymond has, of course, hardly retired. He writes now for RDS, putting out a column about twice a week on average. Like de Pierrebourg, Raymond has simply found an employer that he can live with.

Both Raymond and de Pierrebourg gave similar reasons for leaving: they couldn't fathom the idea of going back to work for the Journal de Montréal, for Quebecor and the managers who put them out on the street.

It's a sentiment echoed by Jean-François Codère, when I interviewed Rue Frontenac's technology guy in January. I asked him how they would be able to work out their differences with their managers once the conflict ends, and he said he didn't know. Codère has turned down other job offers to stay at Rue Frontenac, but can he and the rest keep this up forever?

The Journal de Montréal isn't showing any signs of cracking. It's still publishing seven days a week (soon it will be the only Montreal newspaper to do so), and so much of the work of producing it is outsourced that they've made it seem almost transparent to its readers. (The number of people who have moral objections to reading a newspaper produced during a lockout are far outweighed by people who don't give a rat's ass about it.)

De Pierrebourg said he felt bad leaving his colleagues at Rue Frontenac. He should. Not because what he did was wrong, but because whether he wanted to or not his departure hurts the cause of those still locked out.

As this labour conflict drags out into the long term, more departures like this are inevitable. Some who are close to retirement age will just decide to give up. Some who aren't might take better jobs elsewhere. And as the union's strike fund starts running out, the rest might not have a choice.

And as the cream of the crop gets poached, what's left will be those who can't get jobs elsewhere. Those who work in classified sales or other non-editorial jobs, who have spent decades in a highly specialized function that doesn't translate well into the job market.

By then, the argument that the Journal is a lesser paper without these people begins to fall apart.

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I thought the exercise was a bit silly. I didn't think real newspapers would function in such a way. As it turns out from five years working at a real, multi-edition newspaper, the exercise was surprisingly accurate.

Working as the late sports editor on Monday night, I went through this process with a relatively minor story.

Guy Boucher is the head coach of the Hamilton Bulldogs, which is the farm team of the Canadiens. The Bulldogs play in the American Hockey League, and its players are routinely called up to Montreal to fill in for injured players.

There was a report that Boucher had gotten an offer to jump to the big leagues (even though he'd spent only a year with the Bulldogs, his first professional hockey team), becoming the head coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets. On Monday came word that Boucher had turned down that offer.

Since the Bulldogs are related to the Canadiens, and Boucher is considered one of the candidates to replace Canadiens head coach Jacques Martin if he's ever fired or quits (we don't suspect either is imminent), this story was going to become the lead brief in Tuesday's paper.

As the night went on, we received news from the Columbus Dispatch that the Blue Jackets had gone with their second choice, Manitoba Moose coach Scott Arniel. The brief had to be rewritten (it started off with "The Columbus Blue Jackets are still looking for a new head coach..."), but that was easily accomplished before first edition.

The scoop

At 10:59 p.m. Monday night, about a half hour after first edition, Rue Frontenac's Martin Leclerc published a scoop that Boucher had accepted an offer to become head coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning. It referred to three unnamed sources as confirming the news.

This news spread quickly, even at this late hour. A post on Habs Inside/Out was updated to reflect the new news, crediting Rue Frontenac. Habs-crazy broadcasters RDS and CKAC were reporting it, also offering credit where it was due.

Ironically, I learned about the story through a Canwest News Service report, also quoting Rue Frontenac. A Gazette editor later called to make sure I was aware of it.

Again, the brief had to be torn up and rewritten, starting with the latest news, but including the rest. (At this point there are three stories merged into one - Boucher turning down Columbus, Columbus hiring Arniel, and Boucher going to Tampa Bay.) An online story was also put together, crediting and linking to the Rue Frontenac report.

Few things are as embarrassing to a journalist - and a journalism organization - than having to admit you've been scooped. Because the report doesn't list its sources - and because it's late at night when usual sources are unavailable - there's no way to independently verify the report. There's no choice, really, you have to credit the news organization that broke the story. Otherwise, you're putting your organization's own reputation on the line if the story turns out to be false. It doesn't matter how respected the other organization is, if they're your only source you have to say so.

The multiplication of unnamed sources

Here's where it gets a bit tricky. Rue Frontenac is the website published by locked-out workers of the Journal de Montréal, a Quebecor publication. To say there's animosity between these two publications is putting it mildly. There appears to be a policy at Quebecor's news outlets that the term "Rue Frontenac" is never mentioned, even when they put out a scoop like this.

But Quebecor, the Journal and its Agence QMI couldn't ignore the story and let everyone else report it. So while RDS, CKAC and The Gazette prominently referenced Rue Frontenac, an Agence QMI story referred to "certaines sources". A different Agence QMI story credits the Tampa Bay Tribune for the scoop.

Except when you look at the Tampa Bay Tribune story, it credits "Montreal sports television outlet RDS". And RDS, you'll recall, credits Rue Frontenac.

Later in the night, TSN managed to get what seemed like a confirmation on the story. But by then, many news stories were already referring to "multiple sources" (say, "RDS and CKAC are reporting..."), even though all those sources led back to the same source.

That's a journalistically dangerous problem when it comes to these kinds of reports. Improper sourcing leads to the impression that news outlets have gotten independent verification of a story, which leads to more news outlets reporting on it with increasingly vague sourcing. Eventually everyone is reporting it because everyone else is reporting it, and it becomes common knowledge. Readers, viewers and listeners are left with the impression that everyone has verified the report, when in fact it's just one guy who's said something on the Internet.

In this case, it seems the story was true, so all the news outlets win their gamble. Nobody has to make any apologies for getting it wrong (and Quebecor doesn't have to say it relied on a report from its own locked-out journalist while refusing to credit him).

The next time this happens, they might not get so lucky.

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It's OK, though, because two years out of journalism school, and a month into a job as a web editor for Canoe, his journalism career is over.

In case you didn't hear, Malhomme published an article on the website of Canal Argent, TVA's business network, about this guy Martin Tremblay who is fighting the government over tax money he thinks he doesn't owe them. Nothing particularly special about the story. It's topped with a quote from Tremblay (from an "exclusive" interview on Argent), and has a bunch of background below.

The article has since been pulled, but Google Cache still has it, and it was republished through the Agence QMI service, and appeared in the Journal de Montréal.

It didn't take long before the folks at Rue Frontenac, the website of the locked-out journalists and other workers at the Journal de Montréal, saw this piece and noticed that it bore a striking resemblance to one written by Martin Bisaillon that same day.

In fact, the resemblance was more than striking. Though the stories are not identical, some sentences and even entire paragraphs are. But Canoe's story makes no reference to Rue Frontenac.

Rue Frontenac cried foul, and by the next day TVA apologized for the plagiarism and said it had fired Malhomme. (As a contract worker, Malhomme did not have job security from the union.)

For the record, I've copied both versions below, with the identical phrases in bold:

That's a lot of bold. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt in these kinds of cases, assume there might be a reasonable, innocent explanation, but I found it hard to come up with one here.

I asked Malhomme what happened, but he refused to comment on the matter, or, despite multiple invitations to do so, explain his actions for the record. (Journalists have all sorts of innocent-sounding explanations about why they plagiarize, usually citing some unintentional mistake in editing.) Neither TVA nor its union responded to requests for comment on the case.

A problem of education?

Like me, Malhomme is a graduate of Concordia University's journalism diploma program, a one-year intensive program designed for people who had undergraduate degrees in some other field to get the basics of journalism.

At Concordia, the most common explanation for academic cheating is ignorance of the rules. Some claim cultural differences led to a misunderstanding, or say they just didn't know how to cite things properly.

Had Malhomme simply not known how to cite a source for a story? Had Concordia's journalism program failed to educate him properly about the dangers of plagiarism?

I put the question to Mike Gasher, the chair of the department. Though he said he found it "very hard to believe" that Malhomme, whom he qualified as an "excellent student", would have been involved in a case of blatant plagiarism, he says that in general the department takes plagiarism "very seriously."

I don't know what goes on in each and every one of the 79 course sections we offer each year, but instructors are encouraged to watch for plagiarism (and any other form of cheating), and we distribute to all students a department handbook, which includes a code of ethics (also posted in all our classrooms).  The point we try to underscore is that a journalist's single most important attribute is his/her reputation -- carefully built, easily destroyed.

I have a vague memory of my time in the program five years ago (before the classrooms they now teach in were even built), and though I don't recall any specific lecture about plagiarism among the media ethics and introduction to reporting classes, it was pretty clear to me that plagiarism (or fabulism - making stuff up) would not be tolerated.

"We have maybe one or two students per year -- out of more than 240 -- accused of cheating," Gasher says, including the undergraduate students in the statistics. He's not sure how many of those were guilty, or how many weren't caught in the first place. I'm not sure if a value of one per cent is high or low, and I'm not sure if the reason the number isn't higher is because people know the consequences or because there isn't enough investigation.

Gasher himself says he's "never had a single case" of plagiarism since he started teaching in 1997, probably because he requires students submit a contact list of every source in their stories. Something as simple as that is pretty good for keeping out fake sources (well, most of the time), though I'm not sure it would have made any difference in this case.

Since Malhomme won't comment, I don't know for sure if it was ignorance that led to this. But based on the above, I'm willing to guess it's not.

So why did this happen?

Too much work?

The second reason given for academic cheating - this one by people who admit they knew what they were doing was wrong - is that they were overworked, didn't have time and panicked.

Though I can't say this for a fact, I have a theory as to what might have happened here, because it's something that happens all the time.

Imagine a young journalist working for a website, expected to write not just one or two stories a day but 12 or 15 (online journalists tend to be expected to have more output than print ones). This journalist gets an email from the boss with a link to a story at RueFrontenac.com. The boss wants their website to match the story. So the young journalist is asked to write the story, using Rue Frontenac's as background. But in the process of rewriting the story, too much of the original gets inserted, and eventually the writer is exposed.

Introduction to matching

Matching is something that happens all the time, and it existed long before the Internet. When one newspaper (or other news outlet) comes out with an exclusive, or just happens to break a story first, another decides to match it with one of their own, to make sure their own readers, listeners or viewers get the information too.

This is done in one of two ways:

If the information in the story can be independently verified, the story is basically re-reported. The journalist calls the same sources, gets the same details (perhaps more) and produces their own story. Usually in these cases, the original source isn't mentioned. The ethics of this are debatable, but since the work has been done from scratch, it's believed to be unnecessary to credit whomever broke the story.

This happens in radio and TV all the time. Assignment editors read the morning paper, see some interesting story, and assign a reporter to cover it, usually talking to the same sources. Occasionally, the reverse happens, with the broadcast outlet breaking the news and the newspapers re-reporting it.

When newspapers do this nowadays, especially for big stories, they try to both match and advance the story, coming out with more details than the original had. If they can get a scoop of their own about some detail of the story, it mitigates failing to get the original scoop.

This is an example of why competition is good for journalism.

If the information in the original story can't be independently verified, the story is rewritten but credited. When you see a story in the paper that said "LCN reported last night" or "a source told CNN" or "according to a report in a French-language Montreal newspaper", it's because the story had anonymous or hard-to-reach sources. The matched story credits the original both for reasons of ethics and to save the ass of the re-reporting news outlet in case the original report happens to be false. (Stories that start "TMZ reported", for example.)

But this case wasn't either of these. The reporting wasn't redone, it was copied. And Rue Frontenac wasn't credited as a source for the story. Perhaps because the journalist naively believed that the background information about the case compiled by Rue Frontenac was public information and need not have been credited.

Of course, there's another explanation, one that explains why Rue Frontenac is so interested in this.

The union factor

The lockout of 253 workers of the Journal de Montréal will have tomorrow lasted 16 months. Though the union representing those workers had a large war chest, it won't last forever, and the Journal has still been publishing, making clear that it can keep going as long as necessary without those workers.

Quebecor, which owns the Journal as well as TVA and other news and information outlets, has been on a convergence trend recently, fuelled in part by the new Agence QMI news agency, which allows Quebecor's properties to exchange content. (That's why a story written for Argent's website ends up in the Journal de Montréal. In fact, it's how a lot of content ends up in the Journal now, making the union question the timing of the agency's creation.)

One facet of this convergence is a reputation for putting the interests of the company ahead of the interests of good journalism, combined with a reputation for holding grudges and making things personal.

It may be undeserved or only partially deserved, but it seems every week a new piece of evidence pops up here or here that makes you raise an eyebrow. Most could be dismissed innocently by themselves (like a decision not to feature Véronique Cloutier on the cover of the Journal de Montréal after the Gala Artis), but taken together even the most ardent skeptics have to wonder.

If this is truly the case, you can imagine how Quebecor would feel about one of its news outlets crediting a story to Rue Frontenac. It's just not done. Their stories might be re-reported if they cause big waves, but a Quebecor outlet would never acknowledge a website that is essentially a pressure tactic against Quebecor. (A Canadian Press story was once pulled from Canoe allegedly for the sole reason that it referenced Rue Frontenac.)

The proper thing for Malhomme to have done was credit Rue Frontenac, perhaps even with a link. But he couldn't do that.

(One thing I could add at this point is that if Malhomme had simply rewritten the Rue Frontenac story - reporting the same information using different words and sentence structures - there probably wouldn't be a scandal here. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine if the value of the story was in what was reported or the way it was written.)

Why not just link?

Even ignoring the union conflict, it would have shocked me if Argent simply linked to another news outlet for story background. It's just not done. Traditional news outlets don't link to much these days, particularly not competitors.

Ask any self-proclaimed new media expert, and they'll repeat the mantra "cover what you do best, link to the rest". It just makes so much sense. Why clog your website with the same Canadian Press stories you can find anywhere else online when you can showcase original stories and content people can't get anywhere else? Why waste a journalist re-reporting a story when someone else has done all the work and you can just link to it?

In newspapers, TV and radio, you need journalists to waste their time re-reporting a story to get it into the new medium. You need to waste valuable newsprint and ink on a copy-pasted wire story from somewhere on the other side of the world because most of your readers don't subscribe to the New York Times or Le Monde.

Online, though, this isn't necessary. Except it happens all the time. When Engadget has some new scoop about an Apple product, everyone has to write their own story about it instead of just linking to the Engadget post. When some breaking news about a celebrity hits the wires, editors are scrambling over themselves to get a story about it online and suck up some of that sweet SEO juice like dogs fighting each other for scraps of food accidentally dropped on the floor. The Huffington Post has practically made a business model out of re-reporting things, re-summarizing stories and reposting videos from the late-night comics or all-news networks, profiting off the work of others.

When I see a story or webpage or blog post I like, most often I'll just bookmark it, adding it to the sidebar. (It's that thing on the right if you're looking at this on the webpage, under the headers "From my feeds" and "Recent bookmarks".) It takes two clicks (sometimes one) and it's done. So easy. If I have some pithy comment, I might tweet it. If I have something important - or just lengthy - to say, I'll write a blog post like this one. But even then, I'll link to the source material and save myself the time spent repeating it.

Maybe there's a bigger problem here

I'm not excusing what Malhomme did. And I don't have too much sympathy for him. But there are systemic problems in the way journalism is done, some that may have contributed to what happened here, pressured a young man in a way that a critical mistake cost him a career.

If journalists and their bosses learned to put honesty and fair play above competitiveness, situations like this probably wouldn't happen.

Not that I expect the system to change any time soon.

UPDATE (June 20): Malhomme breaks his silence in an open letter and interview with Rue Frontenac.

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Recognizing, I guess, that despite not having most of its journalists the Journal de Montréal is still putting out a paper every day and people are still reading it, the union representing the 253 locked-out employees has released a new ad comparing the evil newspaper to some sort of drug, and Rue Frontenac to the nicotine patch.

It's cute, but it just reminds me that people are still reading the Journal. And I don't think most of them are trying to stop.

Meanwhile, the union has also put up a 13-question FAQ for those who want to learn more about their position and what's at stake in this conflict.

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Journal de Montréal Feb. 24, 2010

I'm sure Joannie Rochette and her family would love to save the newspapers that carried the story of her courageous and impressive bronze medal in figure skating.

Fortunately the Journal de Montréal learned to spell her name properly today. They screwed it up on Wednesday's front page after her short program.

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From TVA, Feb. 19

LCN's website posted a story yesterday about Haitian prison escapee sneaking back into Quebec with evacuees. The Rue Frontenac kids protest that they broke the same story 10 days ago and the LCN story doesn't mention them, saying only that "au cours des derniers jours, des journalistes montréalais se sont aussi intéressés à cette affaire." (TVA and the Journal de Montréal are both owned by Quebecor, which has a reputation for not allowing its media assets to report anything that might put another in a bad light.)

In the video, though, which aired on TVA's 6pm newscast Friday evening, you can see about the 1:40 mark a whopping two-second shot of Rue Frontenac's website, focusing on the face of locked-out journalist Daniel Renaud. If you freeze-frame, you can even see the website's address as part of his email underneath. (No mention of Renaud's name or Rue Frontenac is made in the piece.)

So now locked-out Journal de Montréal journalists can say that the address "ruefrontenac.com" has appeared on TVA.

For two seconds.

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