Fagstein » The Gazette

Six years later, security

Fagstein — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:32:49 +0000

WARNING: This post is about me. If you don't care about me, stop reading. Here, you can watch this YouTube video of a cute cat thing and browse from there.

It was so long ago that it's hard to remember what it was like back then.

It was seven years ago this month that, while attending a national student journalism conference in Edmonton (thankfully that year there were no debilitating illnesses), I got a call on my cellphone from the city editor at the Gazette offering me a paid internship that summer.

My reaction was subdued. The man who offered me the job even remarked on that point. It's not that I wasn't happy - I was over the moon - but for some reason the only thing that I could think of was how much this conversation was going to cost me in roaming charges.

Though it occurs to me now that I'm not the kind of person who pulls out the theatrics when someone gives him really good news.

After a short, unpaid internship at the West Island Chronicle that I actually enjoyed even though it wasn't exactly hard-hitting journalism, and another at CBC Montreal that resulted in a few paid shifts at CBC Radio over the previous holidays (which in turn convinced me that being a guest booker wasn't quite my cup of tea at the time), I was really excited at the idea of working at a major newspaper in my home town.

The summer of 2005

I remember parts of that Gazette internship (I was the copy editor, and there were four reporters, a photographer and a designer). I remember meeting Michelle, the person who did the copy editor internship the year before me and who said I could come to her if I had any questions. Michelle is now the paper's city editor.

I remember breezing through my training on my first day, since I was already familiar with QuarkXPress (at the time they were using version 3.32, while I had been using version 4 for my entire time at Concordia's Link newspaper). So even though the first day was to be just for training, they put me to work on the next day's paper for a few hours.

I remember Ray, the foreign editor at the time, handing me a page with a Washington Post story on it, and me discovering that a name was spelled two different ways in that story. I remember that when I pointed this out to him, he told me to call the Post and ask them about it, and he gave me the number to call.

I remember thinking that was insane. You mean I just call up the Washington Post? But I did, and after I explained what happened, they realized there was an error and a correction moved on the wire a few minutes later. I remember thinking how awesome that was that I found a mistake in a Washington Post story on my first day.

I also remember all the mistakes I made during my internship. Thankfully I wasn't put in charge of anything for months, and there were plenty of people to check my work. Whenever I made a mistake, a more senior editor would calmly explain what I'd done wrong and have me try again.

I remember when the internship came to an end, when the schedule went up for mid-September and my name wasn't on it. I didn't have any plans for what I'd do next. My education was done and I had no desire to go back. I had no jobs on the horizon, and I'd never done any paid freelance work.

I remember a strange twist of fate when a position opened up for a part-time copy clerk, an entry-level job that involves a lot of running around at night fetching proofs and doing small tasks. As it turns out, I went directly from one to the other without missing a week. I remember the newsroom manager telling me she had to get back my termination papers from HR. I was in that position for two months, which was enough time for me to literally write the book on it (I put together a fancy-looking guide on how to perform each of the tasks), before another copy editor position opened up and I was back on the desks with the two monitors.

The year of firsts

I remember the first times I did various copy editing jobs, particularly slotting (i.e. laying out) sections. The first time I slotted Nation. The first time I slotted World (which involved going through the wires and choosing what stories to put in the paper). The first time I slotted the city section. The first time I edited the front page. The first time I was given the responsibility of floor editor, which made me the last line of defence for all pages before they were typeset. (It was when I was in that position that, one night when a major error was caught on the front page after deadline, I got to literally call up the plant and tell them to "stop the presses").

I remember about a year later, September 2006, when again a schedule went up without my name on it. As it happened, there was no twist of fate this time. After my last shift (in which I was the last one in the building at 1:30am), I left and didn't come back. Everyone said something would happen to bring me back. But it didn't.

The year of nothing

For the next year and a half, I was unemployed. I had gotten into freelancing, which combined with unemployment benefits kept me afloat. But while I wasn't ~~loosing~~ losing money from my savings, I wasn't adding to them either.

I knew I had to do something, but I wasn't sure what it was. I don't remember offhand if I applied for other jobs, or what they were. I remember that I enjoyed what I did at the Gazette more than any other job I'd done, and I didn't want to do something less enjoyable than that.

It was during this time of no salaried work that I setup a blog and started sharing random thoughts with the Internet, not sure where that would lead.

The return, and again

I remember when, completely out of the blue in January 2008, I got an email from my former boss asking if I'd be interested in a nine-week contract to fill a parental leave. That nine-week contract lasted two full years. And then again, in January 2010, when my bosses ran out of ways to extend my contract, the schedule went up and my name wasn't on it. Once again, I was unemployed.

I spent the month of February 2010 in my apartment watching the Olympics and contemplating my next move. I'd even had discussions with a different media company, though that ended up going nowhere.

As they had in 2006, my colleagues said I would be back. I was skeptical. But they were right.

Again out of the blue in the middle of February, I was told by a bunch of people simultaneously that a handful of temporary copy editing positions had just been posted. The paper was switching from QuarkXPress (software that was 14 years old) to Adobe InDesign, and needed relief staff to put out the paper while everyone was trained on the new system.

The interview was short, I was asked if I could start again on Monday, and the day after the closing ceremonies of the Olympics I was back at my old job. I've been there ever since, working between two and five days a week depending on how many shifts they needed to fill.

The contract life

It's the nature of contract work, especially in a field like journalism where so many people want jobs but there are so few good ones available. Despite the on-again-off-again employment, I considered myself lucky. The two people who were copy editor interns the years before me are still there, but all who came after aren't. Jennifer, Kate, Lucas, Cari, Sebastien, Ambreen, Angela, Dylan, Mel, Jill and Kamila. Those who filled in on short-term contracts like Phil, Jasmin, Amy and others I've probably forgotten about. Plus all the reporter and designer interns who came and went within months, and the photographer interns whose best hope after their stay was to be added to the end of a long list of regular freelancers. Many of them have found other jobs, some even better than The Gazette. But others would probably jump at the chance to come back, if only there were positions available.

On the flip side are those who went from contract to contract for years without having permanent jobs. There was even a name for this: "permatemp". In one extreme example, a copy editor was working for nine years before he was finally given a full-time permanent position as a copy editor.

I haven't done any research to confirm this, but I believe I'm the person who's been there the longest without any permanent status whatsoever.

The permatemp situation has for the most part been eliminated. Partly because there are much fewer people taking maternity leaves (most temporary replacements derive from that). Partly because of an agreement with the union when the last contract was signed to post new positions for people whose jobs were temporary in name only. And partly because there have just been so few non-interns hired in the past five years for even temporary jobs.

On the copy desk, I was the last on the seniority totem pole (I'm now second-last, thanks to a temporary job filling a short-term parental leave), despite being first hired six and a half years ago.

Welcome to the family

I think I've buried the lead enough. Last week, I was offered (and accepted) a permanent position as a weekend online copy editor. As of Feb. 1, I'll be working at least two shifts a week on a contract that never ends.

I'd like to say it's forever, but with the industry the way it is, one can't be certain of anything. What I do know is that my job is a lot more secure than it was before, and my worries about unemployment are much less pronounced. They're more abstract, more long-term, more if-this-company-goes-bankrupt or if-they-lock-us-out. And I'm in the same boat as my colleagues.

The difference is mostly psychological. The pay is the same, the work is the same, and the benefits are similar. But as corny as it is to say, I'm part of the Gazette family now. I'm no longer a temporary fill-in. I'm an employee. As much as The Gazette is permanently tied to me, I am permanently tied to it. I can think of my work there in the long term, not just three weeks ahead.

I don't know what that all means, and what will change. But I know there will be a slightly different mentality toward things like big projects. I've already been asked to help with one, and am eager to do so.

The position technically replaces Tyler Todd, who left the paper months ago for personal reasons and decided not to come back. I know this disappointed many of his coworkers because even though he didn't seem to enjoy it terribly, he was a very good editor. There's some irony in that Todd was first hired in the fall of 2005 to replace me as a part-time copy clerk. In hindsight, my path to permanence might have been faster if I'd stayed a clerk back then.

The next generation

As I remember my past, I remember the editors who helped me learn to excel at the job I enjoy so much. I remember the managers who praised me to their managers, and who did what they could to make sure I had chances to succeed. I remember the people who came after me and whose chances weren't as good as what I had.

And I think of the people yet to come, whose job prospects are even worse than mine were. Those for whom six years on and off part-time contracts would be a dream come true.

I think of the journalism school I came from, where last I checked the program I was in has since doubled in size, putting out twice as many journalists even though only a handful of the people I graduated with have salaried jobs as journalists.

Nathalie Collard wrote in La Presse last week about recent departures at Radio-Canada. Unlike The Gazette, where people are on contracts of three months, at the CBC they have casual workers who will know they're working only when they see their name on the schedule. Or in extreme cases, those who sit at home hoping to get a phone call asking them to work that day.

It's a system that on the one hand lowers the barrier to entry for new employees, but on the other hand offers them no security whatsoever when they get inside. Some people have been contract, temporary or casual workers there for years, de facto permanent but technically not.

I wish I could offer reassurance to people just coming into this business, or who are still looking for jobs. I can offer advice - be flexible, don't undersell yourself freelancing, don't work for someone else for free, find a niche, go where there's demand instead of where everyone else is, think outside the traditional media box - but I know there are cases where it doesn't matter how good you are or how much you love your job or how much your coworkers consider you invaluable. I know because I lost the job I love three times for reasons that were out of my control.

Now I don't have to worry about that happening for a fourth time. Unless there's a lockout, or a strike, or a situation where they have to lay off permanent ~~employes~~ employees (something that, despite the company's financial troubles, hasn't happened in the editorial department since I started there), I'll keep working indefinitely.

I hope the next generation doesn't have as much trouble getting a real job as I did. I hope it doesn't take decades before the journalism industry has found a proper business model. I hope freelancing for a few scraps won't be a last-resort career option for people who are so dedicated to this profession they are willing to live poor to make it happen. And I hope those whose passion isn't really journalism realize that quickly and move on.

For young journalists to be, I can only say I hope you succeed. Hard work does pay off, but not always in the ways you expect. And it takes a while. In my case, six and a half years.

In the meantime, follow good advice, like these nuggets from Gazette Arts editor Basem Boshra, a must-read particularly for those who want to freelance for big papers.

And, as Michelle said to me my first day, if you have any questions, I'd be happy to help.

Want to watch me talk in front of a brick wall for half an hour?

Fagstein — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:54:54 +0000

Last month, I gave a talk to some student journalists from Ontario and Quebec who gathered in St. Henri as part of a regional conference of Canadian University Press.

I occasionally get asked to talk to students, and like most professional journalists I'm happy to do so, because it gives me a chance to help others and because it totally inflates my ego to see so many people look up to me.

As it happens someone was there with a camera and recorded the whole thing.

About half of the talk (which is in English but has questions answered in English and French) has been posted to YouTube in three parts (keep in mind I was low on sleep and didn't have enough time to prepare a script or even a list of talking points, so you'll hear a lot of "uhh"s and awkward pauses - the question period is better):

I was asked to talk about "online freelancing", but as I explain right off the bat there isn't really much of a difference between online and regular freelancing, except (usually) for the pay.

I turned on YouTube's transcription service on that first video, and the first words out of my mouth get recognized as this:

"Service to the following online freelancing outsourcing harvest session ... really ridiculous"

Sounds about right.

I reference a few things in the talk that I should link to here:

Last call for interns

It's not part of the videos uploaded to YouTube, but I also talked a bit about my internship application to The Gazette.

The deadline for applications for next summer's interns is coming up Dec. 16. Applications (cover letter, CV and up to five clippings) for jobs as reporters and copy editors (print and online) can be sent to city editor Michelle Richardson (The Gazette, 1010 Ste. Catherine St. W., Suite 200, Montreal Quebec H3B 5L1). The jobs are full-time for 10-12 weeks somewhere between early June and mid-September, paid at 80% of the starting salary of the position, which works out to a decent pay for a student. It's open to people who are university students in the current academic year.

Applicants need a driver's license and need to be bilingual (i.e. able to speak, listen and read in French).

The full posting (PDF) is posted on Concordia's journalism department website along with postings for other internships.

This internship is how I got started, and look at me now!

Oh, wait...

My Grey Cup screwup

Fagstein — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:32:40 +0000

I have, in the past, made light of errors made in various media. In some cases they're minor and entirely understandable. In some cases there is a fundamental problem with something that has been reported.

And in some cases, it's technically minor but incredibly embarrassing. I always sympathize with unintentional errors, even when I expose them for all to see.

If this had been any other Montreal media, I'd be posting it here with, I admit, a little bit of childish glee. But it was my paper.

And worse than that, it was me.

Erroneous Grey Cup scoreline in Monday's Gazette

I got an email this morning from Sarah Leavitt at OpenFile asking if I was working last night "when the Grey Cup mess up on the front page happened." Since I had no idea what she was talking about, I turned on my laptop and looked at the electronic version of the paper (I'm too lazy to walk downstairs for the print version). I read the pointer text I had written, looked at the photo of the players and of the Grey Cup, looked at the page number it pointed to. I looked at the score to make sure it went in right. Yeah, it was 34-23 for the Lions...

Oh crap.

In case it hasn't occurred to you, the error, which appears downpage on A1 on Monday, is that the name "Hamilton Tiger-Cats" should be "Winnipeg Blue Bombers". It's not like I wasn't aware the Blue Bombers were the ones playing. But for whatever reason it didn't hit me as I was filling in the rest of the text that Hamilton wasn't the right team.

And it didn't strike the other editors who read the front page, who are not big sports fans and had specifically asked me to write this text because they were worried about getting something fundamental wrong.

Naturally, this error did not go unnoticed. Influence Communication saw it and told its 12,000 followers. Mike Finnerty noticed it (and was nice about it, comparing it to one of his own errors). OpenFile has a story on it, by Leavitt, which quotes me trying to explain myself.

But really, there is no excuse. Just a very embarrassing correction in Tuesday's paper, some teasing by fellow editors on the sports desk, and some reader email questioning our competence, all of which is clearly deserved.

Correction printed in The Gazette on Page A2 on Nov. 29

UPDATE (Nov. 29): I got some good-natured ribbing from my colleagues at work, and the newsroom manager said she got about a dozen phone calls from readers, many of them dripping with sarcasm. (I didn't see any emails about it, though. Perhaps because the mistake wasn't repeated online.)

News of the mistake made it to the Hamilton Spectator, which posted a story about it on Monday afternoon and included an image of the error in Tuesday's paper.

The Gazette correction appeared in Tuesday's edition on Page A2. ~~I'm hoping my mom doesn't add it to the scrapbook~~ Too late, apparently. There are also two letters to the editor on the subject.

UPDATE (Dec. 4): Craig Silverman wrote this up for his column in the Toronto Star.

More journalists of tomorrow

Fagstein — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 07:44:16 +0000

A year ago, I introduced my readers to some Concordia University journalism students who visited The Gazette to receive awards (and a little bit of scholarship money) named in memory of some of the paper's dearly departed.

A few weeks ago, the next crop of journalism students came by to receive awards, and I repeated the process, not wanting these new kids to feel left out. (Apparently some of them found that blog post when they researched the awards.)

These awards are an early indicator of strong candidates among the field of upcoming graduates. Two of the five winners from last year ended up as interns this year - Mel Lefebvre on the copy desk and Katherine Lalancette as a reporter. I can't imagine that's a coincidence.

But, of course, it's not absolute. After all, I didn't win any of these awards when I was a journalism student, and look how awesome I am now!

Yeah.

Anyway, here are this year's honourees:

Simon Liem

Winner of the Mike King bursary. A 28-year-old from Vegreville, Alta. Third-year undergrad.

Liem is one of those rare journalists who not only understands finance, but is actually interested in it.

"I did that kind of stuff," he says. "Numbers are fun."

Liem had worked full-time before going into journalism, but said he wasn't enjoying it very much. After seven years of odd jobs, he decided to enroll in the program. And compared to what he used to do, "this has kind of been a vacation for me."

I pointed out to Liem that good business journalists are in demand, particularly because most journalists either don't want to do stories about financial matters or don't understand the issues enough (usually both).

He says he sees himself as "some kind of writer," maybe for magazines. He's also interested in foreign policy. So I'm guessing the whole eurozone crisis thing is pretty fascinating for him.

Liem has written for The Link and Maisonneuve magazine.

Fatima Arkin

Winner of the Susan Carson award. A 24-year-old from Mississauga, Ont. Graduate diploma student.

First off, Arkin wants me to point out that she wasn't feeling well when I took this photo. I think she looks fine, but she insists.

Arkin has freelanced for the Westmount Examiner and worked at The Concordian. She's interested in human rights issues.

I wish now that I'd gotten to learn more about her, but our conversation was cut short, and by the time we reconnected later, I had mistakenly assumed that I learned enough about her. If I did, those quotes are in another notepad. Sigh.

UPDATE (Nov. 23): Arkin responds to her award with an opinion piece in Monday's Gazette, in which she talks about Carson's story (and totally name-drops me).

Maya Pankalla

Winner of a Philip Fisher bursary. A 25-year-old from Calgary. Graduate diploma student.

Pankalla has a passion for both writing and photography. She took creative writing and photography, writing and acting as graphics editor at The Concordian.

This may be one reason she wins this year's Most Adorable Photo for Fagstein award, previously bestowed upon Mel Lefebvre.

"I've always wanted to write since I was little," Pankalla says. She enrolled in journalism because she found it was a necessity when applying for internships.

She sees herself doing feature writing, preferably profiles of interesting people (interesting not being synonymous with famous). "I want to be able to invest myself in stories," she says.

Not only does she want to tell interesting stories, but to do so in interesting ways. "I believe there is a place for beautiful language in journalism," she says of her interest in creative nonfiction.

Pankalla speaks four languages (beyond the obvious, there's also Polish and Spanish) and has travelled to 30 countries.

A freelance piece written for The Gazette was just recently published.

You can follow Pankalla on Twitter at @mayapankalla

Allison (Allie) Mason

Winner of a Philip Fisher bursary. A 25-year-old from New Glasgow, N.S. Graduate diploma student.

I interviewed Mason and Pankalla as they sat next to each other, laughing at each other. It's clear the two have developed a strong friendship, as people in the closely-knit graduate diploma program tend to do. (Two of my former classmates met in the program and are now married.)

Mason's specialty is music, having written for various music publications and worked as music editor for The Concordian.

Unlike her fellow students, Mason is interested more in the broadcasting than the print side, particularly radio. "I surprisingly really like radio," she says, though "writing is my passion."

Mason has already interned at the Westmount Examiner and as I'm writing this just finished an internship at CBC Radio.

Also unlike her fellow students, Mason already has her own website. And I could go on about her biography, but she's helpfully posted it already there.

You can follow Mason on Twitter at @maseLIVE

Philippa Duchastel de Montrouge

Winner of the Lewis Harris award. A 22-year-old from La Patrie, Que. Fourth-year specialization in journalism.

Aside from having the longest name among the winners, Duchastel de Montrouge also has the most impressive CV so far. Maybe I'm just in awe of the fact that she interned at Le Devoir, which I imagine require pretty impeccable French skills. She's the first Concordia student to ever intern there. She also went to Paris as an exchange student for six months.

I spoke to her a week or two after the awards were handed out, not having a chance to corner her that night while I chased everyone else down. We met at The Gazette and she told me about her life so far.

Duchastel de Montrouge moved when she was five to the tiny town of La Patrie, in a home with two older siblings where the nearest neighbours were 1.6 kilometres away. "It's kind of like I lived in the woods," she said. And while most people in that situation might have a satellite TV to pass the time, she didn't. Her parents didn't want her to watch TV, preferring that she read. They were "old hippies," she said, with all due respect of course. The result is that she appreciates reading a lot.

"I love to write feature stories," she told me. "I also like fast-paced breaking news stories, human interest stories. It's more meeting interesting people."

As an example, she brings up a man she met who worked as a security agent for pornographic webcams, a heavy metal singer who looked pretty scary. But he was "one of the nicest guys I've ever met," she said. "Journalism open you up to people you wouldn't necessarily meet on a daily basis."

For the future, she dreams of prestigious organizations like the New York Times. "For me the ultimate is BBC," she said. But for now, she'll go wherever she can get work, whether it's in print or broadcast.

She plans to apply for the annual Gazette summer internship. And while I don't want to prejudice her chances (I don't have any say in the decision), she definitely presents a pretty compelling case.

Gazette locks out two bargaining units

Fagstein — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 06:05:54 +0000

Two bargaining units of The Gazette's production department were locked out on Sunday after rejecting the employer's final contract offer.

One unit is tiny, representing a grand total of two platemakers (a position the Gazette wants to abolish because of advances in technology). The other is larger, representing 20 full-time employees and many more part-time and temporary employees in the mailroom.

Because of my obvious conflict of interest with this case (and, frankly, my lack of familiarity with the issues), I won't comment on it. But I'll post this for the record and link to coverage elsewhere, which discusses the main issues (hours of work is a major one):

Or, of course, you can get it from the horse's mouths. The Gazette's story is here. The union's press release is here.

For the sake of clarity, I'll point out that most departments at The Gazette are unaffected by this lockout. Editorial, advertising and other employees who work downtown are part of an entirely separate union, the Montreal Newspaper Guild. The people who actually deliver newspapers to your doors (well, the few of you who still get home delivery of a newspaper these days) are also not affected. The plan is for the paper to continue being produced, and so far that is exactly what has happened, with managers filling in for locked-out employees.

In meta news, Montreal City Weblog's Kate McDonnell has said she will no longer link to Gazette stories online until the lockout is settled (she did the same thing for the Journal de Montréal during its lockout).

And I couldn't help but notice that someone at Le Devoir seems to have confused The Gazette with an Old Montreal restaurant called gaZette that opened up where the paper's offices used to be almost a decade ago:

This is not The Gazette

UPDATE: Le Devoir's error also made it into the print edition, with a huge photo.

Gazette begins charging for website access

Fagstein — Wed, 25 May 2011 10:54:10 +0000

Pop-up box that comes up when you hit the Gazette's metered paywall

Publisher Alan Allnutt announced in Wednesday's paper that The Gazette is moving back to a paid model for its website.

Based on a similar move by the New York Times earlier this year, montrealgazette.com will have a metered paywall, which allows a certain number of free articles a month and then charges for access beyond that. The model is designed to get heavy users to pay for content while not discouraging occasional readers who might reach an article through a Google search or a blog link.

The system, which is managed by Press+ and expected to be running by the end of the day, will allow 20 free articles a month, then charge $6.95 a month (or $69.95 a year) for access. This compares to $26.19/month for six-day print delivery or $9.95/month for the Digital Edition.

Print subscribers will, once they register, have unlimited access to online content.

The meter will only apply to "premium" content from The Gazette and Postmedia News, including photo galleries and videos. "Major" breaking news stories, blogs and content on affiliated websites like Hockey Inside/Out and West Island Gazette Plus won't be subject to the meter. ~~It's unclear whether other wire copy (Reuters, AFP, etc.) will apply~~. Wire stories, including those from Postmedia News, Reuters and Agence France-Presse, will count toward the meter, even though many of those are freely available elsewhere.

Users of the iPad app will not be metered. Nor will mobile users.

"A great deal has been written about the economics of publishing newspapers in 2011," Allnutt writes. "The 'old' model - selling newsprint products very cheaply to readers and selling the audience to advertisers for the majority of income - is increasingly challenged. Simply transferring advertisers from print to online may not work for all. In order to continue our investment in the quality and depth of our award-winning journalism and offer you the features and functions you want from our website, we believe we have to find new sources of revenue."

Once upon a time, The Gazette used to charge for online access, under a model similar to what Le Devoir uses today: Some articles free, but most completely locked down behind a paywall, with only the first paragraph available to non-subscribers. Like the Times, The Gazette abandoned this model with the hope that increased advertising revenue would be more profitable than the subscriber revenue that comes out of the paywall.

The big question, of course, is whether or not this will work. The Times got 100,000 subscribers in its first month (most of those at 99 cents for four weeks), but its model isn't universally loved, and it has been criticized as being too loose and having too many loopholes. More importantly, there are still plenty of free sources of local, national and international news online, so paid sites need a significant amount of original content that can't be found elsewhere. People aren't going to pay for stories about highway crashes, politics and press releases they can get from six different sources.

There's also the added difficulty that, as part of the Postmedia Network, The Gazette shares content with websites of other newspapers, and those newspapers share content with it. Charging for a Gazette article will be pointless if it can be found unmetered on ottawacitizen.com. The Victoria Times-Colonist is also moving to a metered system (one that charges print subscribers as well), but other Postmedia websites are not. Postmedia is waiting to see how The Gazette and the Times-Colonist fare.

Of course, as much as I'm a fan of an open Internet and getting things for free, being a Gazette employee I stand to benefit indirectly if this results in a lot of new revenue. So subscribe away!

A page of frequently asked questions has been posted, and subscriptions are being taken.

UPDATE: Some early reaction from Twitter. As you can imagine a lot of it is negative (or at least sarcastic):

trelayne: #Montreal Gazette going to "meter" your access to 10 views/month, then U pay! cooky-clueless readers R screwed
justinCgio: Without debate @mtlgazette moves to a "metered" model. $6.95 per month after free 20 articles. #media #nevergoingtopay
ArcadiaMachine: I guess I'll be reading Cyberpresse a lot more from now on.
MsWendyKH: Check it: @MtlGazette adopts French literacy program!
jacobserebrin: The Gazette is setting up a paywall. Why? Gaz has little pull, isn't the NY Times. Other Postmedia sites still giving away same content.
codejill: I could imagine paying that for a coalition of papers, but not for the gazette all by itself...
NathalieCollard: Ouf! Bonne chance!
conradbuck: So they'll start writing premium content?
justinCgio: In a job interview with @mtlgazette I brought up how the #RSS feeds were broken and how the web wasn't live enough. Now you want me to pay?
ALundyGlobal: Interested to see results in a few months
Sita311: #lame I'd put up with advertisement if would remain free.
Andrew_MTL: great, that's a simple delete from my bookmarks. PLENTY of credible news resources for free. You going to charge for tweets too?
ikenney: Goodbye Montreal Gazette. I won't be reading you anymore!!
montrealmarc: People respect the truth. You should just admit that you need the money, not that u r following NY Times business model.
tomhawthorn: What will readers do to get around paywall? Whatever it takes. Or they will go elsewhere. They will not pay.
noahtron: the #paywall put up by @mtlgazette will certainly help increase readership... just cuz it works for @nytimes doesn't mean it works for you!
AVassiliou: We have to pay for @mtlgazette on-line now?? #hugefail Fortunately, plenty of free news sites remain. Times must be tough for @mtlgazette
finnertymike: Re Montreal Gazette paywall: current online offer not wow, plus @Cyberpresse outstanding and free. Subscriber interest likely tiny methinks
finnertymike: Re MTL Gazette paywall 2: Need an online strategy beyond "Ok, pay now": must-read voices? multimedia/graphics? liveblogs? pizazz?
delmarhasissues: Hilarious that The Gazette cites The NY Times when justifying charging for online content. I'll pay for The Times. YOU'RE NOT THE TIMES!
jfmezei: Unless all Postmedia papers lock down, people will just go to other postmedia sites to get the exact same news.
montrealmarc: All the big newspapers need to meet like the heads of the 5 families in "The Godfather" & make a group agreement to all go metered
furry_princess: There's a reason I stopped subscribing to the Gazoo back in 2002. #tabloidfluff
JulienMcEvoy: Voir une annonce «The Gazette cherche un(e) directeur(trice) du marketing» le jour où ils annoncent leur paywall, c'est comme ironique.
Milnoc: The Gazette already lost me as a reader years ago @finnertymike. What makes them think a paywall will encourage me to come back? Sheesh!
aranr: The Gazette's paywall scheme is so misguided. I'd pay to read their HockeyInsideOut mini-site but not the paper itself. #montreal
cdiraddo: So now that @mtlgazette has started to meter their site, it means I will no longer link to them in fear that they may ask my visitors to pay
jesspatterson: how else are they to pay their costs? gotta come from somewhere.
spafax_arjun: If the Montreal Gazette wants people to pay for the content online it needs to step up its game by 2000%

The comments on the story on The Gazette's website are even worse (and less grammatically correct), as are those on the Times-Colonist story. There's also some reaction on The Gazette's Facebook page.

Other coverage from:

The Globe and Mail
The CBC (Comments there are similarly not very nice)
Presse canadienne
Canadian Press
Global Montreal
Financial Post
Métro
J-Source

UPDATE (May 26): Postmedia boss Paul Godfrey was on Toronto's Metro Morning to explain the paywall deal. Summarized by J-Source.

Gazette editorial workers approve three-year deal

Fagstein — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 17:34:57 +0000

Employees in The Gazette's editorial department (including myself) voted 63-20 (76%) on Sunday afternoon in favour of a three-year labour contract with 1.5% yearly salary increases (plus a signing bonus equivalent to 1.5% of wages during the previous year).

Turnout was 76% of the 109 editorial employees.

The workers have been without a contract since the summer of 2008, so wages have been frozen since then. The increases (besides the signing bonus) apply to the three years following ratification, up to 2014.

Among the features of the new contract:

Reporters can be asked to shoot video without additional compensation.
Permanent part-timers will have pro-rated paid vacation, as well as a guaranteed two consecutive days off a week.
Photographers get an increased car allowance, adjusted based on gas prices. Permanent photographers are also protected against layoff during the contract as a result of reporters shooting video.
Shift differentials (paid to employees for each shift worked before 7 am or after 7pm) increase from $8 to $12

The contract also included controversial language that redefines how seniority is calculated. Previously, many workers in editorial were given leave or alternate work arrangements (working fewer days a week) on the understanding that their seniority would not be affected. A letter of understanding with the new contract means time worked after May 2007 will be calculated based on actual days worked.

The Gazette has also agreed to post three new permanent full-time positions in the editorial department: two reporters and an online copy editor. This measure is designed to cut down on the numbers of "permatemps" who have worked non-stop but don't yet enjoy the benefits of permanent status. Some have been working for up to nine years. (UPDATE April 22: City reporter Max Harrold, business/tech reporter Jason Madger and sports/online copy editor Kevin Mio have been made full-time permanent as of May 8.)

The editorial department voted in January 2009 against a contract that called for larger union concessions.

Three other smaller departments also voted on contract offers (with similar provisions for salary and benefits):

The IT department voted unanimously (4-0) in favour
The Reader Sales and Service department voted 7-4 (64%) in favour
The Business department voted unanimously (0-4) against their contract. They return to the bargaining table.

UPDATE: A brief in The Gazette and a press release from the CWA union.

The journalists of tomorrow

Fagstein — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 05:37:12 +0000

Students of Concordia University's journalism graduate diploma program

Almost a month ago, The Gazette went through a yearly tradition of inviting journalism students into its office and handing out some awards (read: small bursaries) to those who have stood out among their peers.

This evening went on like others have before it, with the students being invited into the office and being served wine and cheese before some people they don't know introduce other people they don't know and hand out bursaries named after people they don't know.

But there was a big difference this year: a new bursary, named after someone else they didn't know.

Mike King bursary

The new award was the Mike King bursary, setup in honour of the Gazette business reporter who died suddenly in June. This is a story in itself - normally an endowment sufficient to distribute annual awards takes much longer than four months to build up, but an outpour of donations from friends and colleagues (including myself) meant the first $500 bursary went out right away.

Michael Moore, winner of the inaugural Mike King bursary

Yes, his name is Michael Moore. And yes, he's heard the jokes. His teachers see his name and make some funny comment about how they love his movies.

One of the disadvantages to a name like this is that Moore is entirely ungoogleable. I missed him during the awards night (hence why some eagle-eyed readers will notice that he's photographed in the daylight outside Concordia's Hall Building a few days later), and attempts to find him online were entirely fruitless. Thankfully we were still able to get in touch.

Moore is in his third year as a journalism undergrad, with some English courses on the side. His goal when he graduates in the spring? "I would like to get a job."

Permitted to daydream a bit, he says he'd like to become a sports writer, penning long columns (Dave Stubbs, look out). He sees people like Peter King of Sports Illustrated as role models.

But he knows he's not going to start out as a high-profile columnist, and he's ready to start small.

"I'm willing to go to (small towns), like Mike did, if that's what it takes" he said, noting the career path of the man whose name is attached to his bursary. Mike King worked in Windsor, Ont., Kelowna, B.C. and other small towns in western Canada before getting his dream job at The Gazette.

Lewis Harris award

Lew Harris was a reporter and later a copy editor at the Montreal Star and Gazette until he died of pancreatic cancer in 1999. He had, according to his Gazette obituary, a "quick, dry sense of humour and a hidden flair for whimsy."

Married to reporter Marian Scott and the brother of copy editor Leon Harris, Lew covered politics and crime in his reporting days, and started up some controversy in the 1984 Canadian election campaign when he noticed Liberal leader John Turner had a bum-patting habit.

The bursary started shortly after Harris died. Its first winner was a Concordia journalism student by the name of Caroline Plante. Plante is now the National Assembly reporter for Global Montreal.

Katherine Lalancette, winner of the Lewis Harris award

Journalism student, fluently bilingual, magazine writer, former Alouettes cheerleader. Guess which of these raised eyebrows when it was brought up during the awards ceremony.

Sure enough, fourth year undergrad Katherine Lalancette once danced with the pom poms for Montreal's Canadian Football League team. There's even video evidence online.

But Lalancette was a bit surprised when she heard this tidbit mentioned while her award was presented. The introductions are done mostly based on each student's application, and Lalancette purposefully didn't mention her cheerleading on hers.

Not that she wasn't proud of her past - cheerleading at that level is a lot of work and takes a lot of practice - but she feared that this information might contribute to prejudice against her.

Lalancette has already gotten some real-world media experience under her belt as a contributor to Loulou magazine. Born in Sherbrooke but raised in Montreal, she's fluently bilingual and writes in both languages - a huge asset in the Montreal media environment.

As for her future, she's still unsure. "That's a big question now that I'm graduating," she says. She might want to apply to Columbia University to continue her studies, or be a feature writer about social issues (a common theme among the award winners tonight), or continuing to write about fashion and beauty.

But she's not planning to go back to cheerleading anytime soon.

Katherine Lalancette is on Twitter at @kik_tweets

Susan Carson award

Susan Carson was a feature writer and columnist at The Gazette from 1979 until 1988, when she died of complications following brain surgery.

"Carson was a champion of the poor, the abused, the disabled," The Gazette wrote when the fund was established. "She took their problems to heart and wrote about them; her stories appeared in The Gazette as well as in other Canadian publications.

"Readers responded with jobs for those who needed work, shelter and clothing for people who had lost their homes and opportunity for those who had lost hope. They identified with her loving and gently humorous columns about her family and how she managed to juggle her job with her role as mother and wife. And they were strengthened by the determination of brave, sick children she wrote about, the dignity of mothers on welfare trying to raise families or the resolve of people who refused to allow disabilities to get in the way of productive lives."

Carson, who was married to John Kalbfleisch (now the Second Draft columnist) wrote a column about life as a working mother.

Mel Lefebvre, winner of the Susan Carson bursary

Mel Lefebvre is definitely an idealist. The Montrealer's bachelor's degree is in environmental science, and she just started up a Concordia chapter of Journalists for Human Rights (it's on Facebook). Her dream job isn't as a general assignment reporter, but as a communications director for the David Suzuki Foundation. Failing that, she'd be happy with a feature writer job at National Geographic.

"Cheesy, but ... yeah," she admits, acknowledging that neither dream is particularly likely.

Still, her goal is to change the world for the better, and "hopefully journalism is the right tool," she says.

Mel Lefebvre is on Twitter at @mlynnelefebvre

Philip Fisher bursaries

The most ancient of the Gazette journalism bursaries are named after Philip Fisher, who was president of the Southam newspaper chain from 1945 to 1961. Southam owned The Gazette until the newspaper chain was sold to Hollinger and then Canwest.

Among previous winners are Catherine Solyom and Ann Carroll, both of whom went on to become reporters at The Gazette.

The bursaries are given out annually to two Concordia graduate diploma students.

Carmen Fabio, winner of a Philip Fisher bursary

Carmen Fabio's previous career was designing graphical interfaces for nuclear power plant simulators.

And she quit that to go into journalism.

The born-and-bred Montrealer wanted a change, she says, and to do something that she enjoyed rather than something that made her rich.

"Do I want money, or do I want to enjoy getting up in the morning?" she asked rhetorically. Deciding that she preferred to change the world, she enrolled in Concordia's journalism graduate diploma program, where she's the ... umm ... dean of the class. And by that I mean she's surrounded by relative children.

The former design art student says she would like to go into radio documentary. But, like her colleagues, she'll take what she can get.

Carmen Fabio is on Twitter at @Carma999

Meagan Wohlberg, winner of a Philip Fisher bursary

"I actually care about things," Meagan Wohlberg says about her desire to change the world.

Wohlberg grew up in northern Saskatchewan and studied philosophy and English in her undergraduate years at the University of Saskatchewan.

"I want my career to mold to my politics," she says. She wants to give a voice to the voiceless, to help people who are disadvantaged tell their own stories, and she rejects the idea that all stories must be balanced. "I think there are ways of giving a balanced view" without giving equal time to sides that are illegitimate.

She says she'd see herself working for an alternate, online publication, combining social work with journalism.

"I don't think there's a person who doesn't have a voice," she says.

Meagan Wohlberg is on Twitter at @meaganimous

The losers

Three adorable Fagstein fans gather around my chins for a photo

Though the two undergraduate winners were informed of their bursaries in advance, the entire graduate diploma class was brought in and their wins were surprises.

When I started interviewing the winners, a few of the non-winners got a bit testy with me, wondering why I wasn't interviewing them. I felt bad. I mean, I didn't want to exclude anyone, but I didn't have time to interview dozens of journalism students about their futures.

I especially felt bad when I found out they were fans of this blog. So, hi there. At least you get your photo on my blog.

(Don't feel too bad, though. When these awards were handed out in 2004, I was one of the students present, and I didn't win anything either. So some day you might grow up to become a sarcastic blogger too!)

There were guys in this class too.

Words matter for The

Fagstein — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 09:31:51 +0000

The Gazette's front page for Oct. 20, 2010

If you picked up the Gazette today and have a keen eye for detail, you may have noticed that the word "Gazette" in the nameplate has been deleted (~~except for the Digital Edition, where it appears normally~~ the Digital Edition has since been unfixed).

A similar move was done online for a few hours this morning:

The Gazette website without the "Gazette" part

Rest assured, it was done on purpose.

The front-page gimmick, explained on Page A3 by publisher/EIC Alan Allnutt, is a new phase of the newspaper's Words Matter campaign:

Starting this week, you'll notice ads on radio, online, around town and in the paper with a new style but the same Words Matter attitude you've become familiar with over the past few years.

A big part of this new campaign is using The from our iconic masthead to highlight the stories that really matter to you. You can get news from many sources but when you look for stories that are local, that resonate to you, you turn to The Gazette for The news that really matters.

Gazette cover Aug. 18, 2006

Words Matter began on August 18, 2006, when The Gazette tried a similar stunt by removing all the words from its front page (PDF), with the exception of the dateline and bar code numbers. It certainly caused a splash (certainly in the industry), though some apparently got the impression that the page was some sort of memorial to teen tennis player Stéphanie Dubois, whose picture dominated.

The Words Matter campaign is the brainchild of bleublancrouge, The Gazette's marketing agency, which recently hired Gazette marketing VP Bernard Asselin as its new president.

UPDATE: You can track a bit of the social media reaction to the move here:

Bleublancrouge has uploaded a radio and TV ad for the Stuff We Carry series so you'll get an idea of what the new campaign will look and sound like.

MarketingQC has a blog post up about the move, which unlike reaction from the online peanut gallery is pretty positive.

I hope Jennifer said yes

Fagstein — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 03:52:24 +0000

Page G4 of Saturday's Gazette

I also hope there aren't any other Adams and Jennifers out there who are in the process of having an awkward and confusing conversation.

UPDATE (Oct. 15): She did say yes.

Gazette launches lifestyle magazine, expands Driving section

Fagstein — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:40:50 +0000

The first issue of Urban Expressions magazine

Two projects I've been involved with over the past month were revealed to Gazette subscribers this week.

Today's paper (at least the home-delivery version) couldn't be rolled up very well because of a thick, 92-page magazine called Urban Expressions. It's a lifestyle magazine filled with stories about fashion, home decor, food and other girly magazine stuff (no sex or relationship tips though).

And, of course, there's lots of ads.

I was the copy editor for this issue, and lived it for about a week in August (which is why I didn't post anything to this blog for 11 days), coming up with clever headlines and captions, and reading and re-reading every story to ensure everything was right (so if you find any typos, you can blame me).

Copy editing a magazine is definitely different from a newspaper. You have days, rather than hours. The stories are long, the pages all designed by a professional designer (in this case, The Gazette's Susan Ferguson, who had an even more hellish time with this than I did, designing a whole magazine from scratch), and everything goes back and forth between different people who each have their own ideas.

The welcome message from editor Mark Tremblay is online. The magazine has its own website, but right now that's just a media kit and a mockup magazine for advertisers to peruse.

Rachelle Lefevre cover story in Urban Expressions by Eva Friede

The cover story (like most magazines, this one has a giant picture of a pretty white girl on the cover) is about actress Rachelle Lefevre, who is known for her role in Twilight movies but is also in the upcoming Barney's Version, a film based on the Mordecai Richler novel that just screened in Toronto. She talks to Gazette style editor Eva Friede about her love of the city and poses for pictures in what I understand are the latest fashions.

There's also:

Local content returns to Driving

The other skybox-worthy change happened the day before, as the paper expanded its Monday Driving section to include some local content. The three-days-a-week Driving section hasn't seen any regular original content since Jordan Charness's automotive legal advice column was dropped in 2008.

Among the weekly features, which will be added to the back of the Monday Driving section, are:

Head-to-head comparisons, either two people reviewing the same vehicle or one person reviewing two similar ones. This week, Kevin Mio and Miranda Lightstone look at the 2011 Ford Mustang.
Gearbox, a mechanic's advice column. This week it looks at the possible causes of a particular engine noise.
A profile piece on car modifications. This week it starts off with Danny Geraghty, who founded MontrealRacing.com.

There will also be more automotive news, either local or national.

I'm involved in the editing process of this, though only for the local content and I'm not the one laying it out and writing the headlines (now I know what our assignment editors feel like).

As you can imagine, both of these moves are designed to increase advertising revenue. Let's hope it works.

No more Sundays

Fagstein — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 19:26:01 +0000

A note atop Page A1 on Sunday thanks readers

So that's it, the last Sunday edition of the Gazette is on the newsstands now, just over two weeks after the stunning announcement that it would be stopped because of financial reasons.

The coverage

Other media gave brief mentions of the last Sunday section:

Rue Frontenac, which mentions The Gazette welcoming francophone readers when La Presse cancelled its Sunday paper
Presse Canadienne
Branchez-Vous
Info Astral
Agence QMI

The Gazette itself certainly didn't hide from this notable moment in the paper's history. In addition to the giant note above and yet another reminder of how the paper and its contents will change, today's paper has a retrospective from Walter Buchignani, who was one of many hired to launch the Sunday paper in 1988. He became "Action Man" - doing a different activity every week and writing about it. More recently, Buchignani has worked behind the scenes, supervising the paper's production over the weekend as the night editor, in addition to his regular Formula One column. (His piece includes a humorous bit about having to call the Living Legend of Sports Journalism, Red Fisher, late at night to do an obit for Gump Worsley). Buchignani was in charge last night, too, as we toasted the final issue.

The Sunday tab

The last Gazette Sunday Sports tabloid

I, meanwhile, had the honour of putting together the last ever Sunday Sports tabloid section. It was a small section, and pretty short on news (no Habs game, no Alouettes game, no big tennis or golf tournaments). The biggest story was the Canadiens signing their first-round 2009 draft pick Louis Leblanc (and his announcement that he would play for the Montreal Juniors next season instead of staying at Harvard), and Pat Hickey pointing out how odd it is that they would release this news late on a Friday night.

There's also a Stu Cowan column saying Andrei Markov should learn some French, which I'm sure will spark some debate.

The first Gazette Sunday sports tabloid, Feb. 26, 2006

The Sunday tab is young enough that I remember its origins (though I needed a bit of database help to remember the date). It began on Feb. 26, 2006, the day after the Gazette launched the new "Saturday Extra" section in a reorganization of the weekend papers.

The editor in chief at the time, Andrew Phillips, introduced it thusly:

Sunday Sports is now an easy-to-handle tabloid. We think that format is ideally suited to displaying our best sports writing and photographs on the biggest sports news day of the week. Today, for example, the section opens with a dramatic poster-size photo from Turin of gold-medal skater Clara Hughes.

The poster - which celebrated Hughes's gold medal in the women's 5000-metre speed-skating event at Turin (it would be Canada's last of seven golds at those games, the men's hockey team having been humiliated in the quarterfinal by Russia) - actually formed both the front and back pages of the 36-page section, an experiment that wouldn't be repeated. But I saw that particular cover many times over the following months - one Gazette staffer taped it up to the wall like an eight-year-old would do to a poster of their hero. Hughes had that effect on people.

The Gazette didn't have much experience putting out tabloid sections at the time. The Books tabloid launched only the previous day, while the West Island section was put together as one file in QuarkXPress, something that wasn't feasible on a three-person sports desk.

There were quite a few growing pains. At first, the section was split up into pairs (the plates were broadsheet-sized, so each tabloid page was paired with a mate as it was typeset), so a 20-page tabloid section (not including the 12 classified pages tucked into it) would have 10 Quark documents. And each document would have the full 32 pages in it (and not in sequential order either), only two of which would be used. After a couple of weeks they got each document down to the two live pages, and eventually managed to split those up so each editorial tabloid page would have its own Quark document (with the exception of the centre spread, which would be in one file).

The Sunday tab was a lot of work for two reasons: first, it was a lot of editorial space. The norm was 20 pages. Take away three for the scoreboard stats (which are done by Canwest Editorial Services in Hamilton), one for the full-page ad on the back and another for the full-page photo on the front, and that leaves 15 pages, or the equivalent of 7.5 broadsheet pages, a pretty large section.

Second, it was laid out in a different way than the section was the rest of the week. Unlike broadsheet pages which would have at least three or four stories, the tabloid pages would have one or two, and each page would have a photo, which meant a photo for almost every story. For the most part, each page would be devoted to one sport (multiple pages in the case of hockey, of course). To me, it always seemed more organized than the broadsheet section, not to mention easier to read.

I'll miss the fun of laying that out. But I won't miss the stress of putting it all together on deadline.

What's changing

Taken from the note to readers, here's what's going to be changing next weekend, by section:

Thursday's Arts & Life section - which focuses on music - adds Juan Rodriguez's francophone music column
Friday's Movies section adds Doug Camilli's celebrity gossip column, so he'll be in every day except Monday
Saturday Extra adds the Insight columnists:
- Joe Schwarcz's The Right Chemistry
- Bronwyn Chester's Island of Trees
- Mark Abley's (biweekly) Watchwords
Saturday's Sports section adds the regular Sunday Sports features:
- Sports Editor Stu Cowan's weekly column
- Letters to the Sports Editor
- Cam Hutchinson's Bits & Pieces
Saturday's Culture section adds Bill Brownstein's column, so he'll appear Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday
Saturday's Weekend Life section adds Jennifer Campbell's Social Notes, which returns from vacation in September

Finally, a new section is being added to the Saturday paper, called "Diversions", which will take all the puzzles and comics pages from the two weekend papers and add a few extras.

It will include:

The black-and-white Saturday comics page
Three colour Sunday comics pages (previously, two of these pages would be in the Saturday paper and a third in the Sunday paper)
The Saturday and Sunday puzzles pages, which includes horoscopes, Wonderword, the Sunday New York Times crossword and cryptic crossword and those little Sunday puzzles
The L.A. Times Sunday crossword, which is being added for the benefit of those who objected to removing the Tribune Crossword a while back
A new page called "Looking Back", which features John Kalbfleisch's Second Draft column, as well as "feature photos from Gazette archives" and some other yet-to-be-announced historical stuff

The last Sunday paper left mixed emotions among some editors. It's sad, but many of them will get their Saturday nights back now.

Not me, though, at least not at first. I'm back at work next Saturday night - on the online desk.

Au revoir aux lecteurs du dimanche

Fagstein — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 05:50:45 +0000

It was a year ago this month that, in a drastic cost-cutting effort, La Presse stopped printing a Sunday edition. The Gazette tried to take advantage, putting banners on Page 1 for two successive Sundays welcoming francophone readers whose only other option was to read the (locked-out) Journal de Montréal.

Similar cost-cutting moves have been made at other Canadian newspapers. The National Post, already a six-day paper, stopped printing Mondays last summer. The Victoria Times-Colonist, one of the few with a strong Sunday paper, also stopped printing Mondays. The Winnipeg Free Press stopped its Sunday paper and replaced it with a newsstand-only tabloid.

Next month, it's The Gazette's turn to make a drastic cut of an entire day of publication.

In case you haven't heard the news, The Gazette announced on Wednesday that they would stop printing a Sunday edition in August. The last Sunday paper will appear Aug. 1, and starting Aug. 7, Sunday features will appear in the Saturday paper.

Re-reporting of the announcement has spread to other media: Globe and Mail, Rue Frontenac, CTV, Canadian Press, Radio-Canada (with anti-Gazette comments from the peanut gallery below), Agence QMI (who are a bit slow to update their story), CJAD (with their usual three-sentence story), CBC (which originally misspelled the publisher's name - but to its credit has since corrected it) and Cyberpresse, which illustrated its story by stealing a photo of the old Gazette building that I took in 2002 and posted on this blog last year (and to its not-credit has offered no explanation, correction or apology for this).

Romenesko also linked to the announcement, and J-Source has republished it.

As the stories say, the Sunday paper was born in 1988 thanks to competitive pressure from the Montreal Daily News, a short-lived attempt by Quebecor to crack the anglo Montreal market. The Daily News had a Sunday edition, forcing The Gazette to create one. The Daily News folded less than two years after it launched, but the Sunday Gazette continued for 22 years.

A surprise, but not

The announcement was made mere minutes before I entered the office. Everyone was buzzing, gossiping about what this would mean - particularly for their jobs. Though a meeting is scheduled for Thursday to answer questions, the company has already said that this move isn't coming with any layoffs.

That comes as some relief to permanent employees. What it means for contract workers like me is another story, not to mention the subcontractors who handle distribution and others whose living is directly or indirectly linked to the newspaper.

I'd like to say I saw this coming, that the writing was on the wall when La Presse stopped its Sunday edition, but while it's not the most shocking move in the world, I didn't expect it. The Gazette is profitable, I'm told, and hardly on the path to insolvency. In fact, it had just been purchased the day before.

But the paper was already incredibly thin, and even then there was a noticeable dearth of advertising. Last Sunday's paper had only three full-page ads, and another two in the sports tabloid section. Add a half-page ad on A3, and a handful of smaller ads spread across four pages of a 24-page A section, and that's it for paid ads.

Editorial content on Sundays has diminished slowly over the past few years. Insight, which was its own eight-page section when I started five years ago, giving a huge canvas to large feature stories from news wires, has since become two pages incorporated into the A section, one of which has to make room for two weekly columnists and a bi-weekly columnist.

Because news tends not to happen over the weekend (at least, very few stories about governments, businesses, or anything else that operates during business hours), much of the news that goes into Sunday and Monday papers is prewritten features which can be moved to another day. Breaking news can still go online.

The real victim here will be the sports section, the only one that stands alone on Sundays. Some features like editor Stu Cowan's column can easily be moved to another day, but coverage of Saturday night Canadiens games will now have to wait more than a day for those who prefer to get their news on paper instead of online.

But even though it sucks, even though I never really minded working Saturdays (it's the worst day for TV) and even though it's really bad for my future employment prospects, I can't really denounce the decision. It just doesn't make sense for a newspaper to publish an edition that advertisers won't support.

Here's to hoping that this moves ensures a strong financial future for The Gazette - or at least slows down the march to oblivion.

Linda Gyulai’s big moment

Fagstein — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 05:17:41 +0000

"I don't like politics."

It's an odd thing for The Gazette's city hall reporter to say, but Linda Gyulai explains: her motivations are journalistic, not political. She's not out there to sabotage the mayor (even though many on both sides of the aisle at city hall may think so). She's not out there to stir up controversy. She's out there to explain to people what goes on in their municipal government, both the things they want the world to know about and the things they'd rather keep secret.

If it means she ruffles a few feathers along the way, that's part of the job. She doesn't take it personally.

And if it wins her some awards, that's just a bonus.

A week to remember

On May 27, Gyulai put on a fancy black dress, and travelled to Rideau Hall in Ottawa as an invited guest of the governor-general. The Gazette, along with other high-profile news organizations, had been nominated for the prestigious Michener Award for public-service journalism. Unlike most journalism awards, the Michener is awarded to the publication or news outlet instead of the individual journalist. But The Gazette was nominated for Gyulai's investigations into Montreal's water meter contract, and Gyulai gave a speech as one of the nominees.

After the nominees had given their speeches, each case seeming particularly worthy of the award, foundation president Russell Mills tore open an envelope and read out the name of the winner.

No one was more surprised than Gyulai when he read out "The Gazette."

"I sat there for a long time in shock," she told me during a recent chat at our office. She said the CPAC video of the presentation didn't show her patting her chest with her hand, unable to accept that her reporting had won such a prestigious award.

Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Alan Allnutt gave the acceptance speech, and Gyulai was invited on stage to snap some photos with the governor-general.

The next day, back in Montreal, Gyulai entered the Gazette newsroom to an enthusiastic standing ovation from her coworkers.

"It was an overwhelming response," she said. People were emailing her and calling her. Old high school classmates were looking her up on Facebook. "I've never felt so supported and encouraged."

The next night, at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Journalists, conveniently being held in Montreal this year, Gyulai put on another fancy black dress and sat in the audience, only to be stunned again when she learned she'd won her second award in three days for her reporting on the water meter contract. Though the CAJ awards had many winners that night, her name was first on that list, and her award was arguably the most prestigious of them.

The previous two years, Gyulai had been nominated for National Newspaper Awards (considered the most prestigious of awards for newspaper journalists in Canada) - in 2008 for a feature on Montreal's water system (somewhat ironically in retrospect), and in 2009 for a short feature about traffic cones. The latter resulted in some teasing from coworkers who thought it funny that the most recognized story of her career might have been one explaining the history of an orange cone. She didn't win either time, leaving her CV as "nationally award-nominated journalist" until the Michener prize last month.

A shrine to Linda Gyulai's Michener Award win at The Gazette's office

Gyulai was quick to point out in her post-win quotes to her own newspaper, and to me, that this award should be shared with her colleagues who supported her work, and other journalists who keep hacking at the brick walls that separate them from the truth.

"I'm not working in a room by myself," she said, alluding to the managers that gave her time to work on these stories, and I can only imagine acknowledging the supreme efforts of the copy editors who polished her copy into the gold that readers see in the newspaper. (Really, this is as much my award as it is hers, no?)

The story

"I got a tip that there was something wonky," she started off. She won't say where this tip came from, but she made it a point to thank that anonymous person publicly when accepting the Michener Award. The tip was that a contract approved by Montreal city council in November 2007 was a bad deal for the city. It came in the spring of 2009, shortly after La Presse had revealed a rather cordial relationship between executive committee chair Frank Zampino and a businessman named Tony Accurso that involved trips on Accurso's yacht.

The "wonky" contract was a $355.8-million deal - the largest in the city's history - with a consortium known as Génieau to install meters to measure the flow of water into commercial, industrial and institutional buildings in the city. (Accurso was part of this consortium, and Zampino would later join it after he retired from city politics in 2008.) Once the meters were installed, which was to happen by 2013, the city could charge organizations for the amount of water they consumed, and so encouraging them to use less.

"The first thing I did was go to city hall and look for the contract," she told me. A city hall veteran, she knew that it would be attached to the motion that approved the contract in November 2007 (PDF). (She wasn't present at that meeting herself, as she was working on two feature stories at the time.) But when she got to city hall, she was in for a surprise: the contract wasn't there, and city hall wasn't going to give it to her.

Strange for a project they had been touting so much just before it was approved. (Then again, this was back when they called themselves the "Tremblay-Zampino administration".)

In fact, not only was the contract not made public even after it was approved by city council, she would learn, but the full contract wasn't even given to the councillors who approved it.

"I'd never seen that," Gyulai said. She had to file an access to information request to get a copy of something that was approved by city council.

She has learned the hard way through brick walls like this that this is the way the Tremblay administration operates. Just as we were chatting about her reporting, she had filed a story about outgoing police chief Yvan Delorme testifying at a city council committee about irregularities in the department's dealings with private security firm BCIA. She asked the department for a copy of Delorme's CV, but they refused to give it to her, she said, sighing. It became a sentence in the story: "The police department refused to provide The Gazette a copy of Delorme's curriculum vitae yesterday. It offered no explanation." And another access to information request will be required for something as simple as finding out where the police chief has worked before.

"I just read the contract"

After filing the access to information request and badgering the city for an interview with their water officials, Gyulai eventually got a copy of the Génieau water meter contract, and began to read it. Then she compared the contract to the call for qualification and call for proposals (with its 14 addenda) that Génieau bid on - not an easy task because those documents comprising the two-step tendering process went on for hundreds of pages total.

"I didn't know what I was looking for," she said. Still, she spent months sifting through these documents during the journalistically quiet months of summer 2009. She thanks her bosses at The Gazette for giving her the time to devote to long-term investigative work, even in the midst of a media crisis and while the newsroom is short-staffed during summer vacations.

Not being an expert on engineering, water maintenance or other things detailed in the documents she was reading, Gyulai interviewed experts to find out what was considered normal and abnormal in these kinds of contracts. When she would stumble on something that she thought the public should know (many of them that the adminstration didn't want the public to know), she started pumping out details, many of them exclusives:

Connections between former St. Leonard borough mayor Frank Zampino and construction company Dessau, one of the members of the Génieau consortium
The city won't own the telecommunications system used to report meter data, which could cause a serious problem when the contract ends
The contract's total is more than double what a consultant's study said it would cost in 2003
The $355.8 million doesn't include $68 million for a new command centre, which the city will have to pay for
The savings reached by installing water meters were exaggerated by the city (who said the meters would pay for themselves), based on a consultant's report in 2002

The biggest one came in August, when Gyulai reported that the contract went through major changes - apparently secretly - two months before it was approved by city council, and all those changes benefited the contractor, not the city. Among them, that the contractor's obligation for maintenance of the water meters would be reduced from 25 years to 15 (apparently significant because 15 years is when the meters were expected to start breaking down), and all the financial risk would be shifted from the contractor to the city.

"The meat was in all these seemingly minor tweaks to wording," she explained. "The documents also included questions the city fielded from the bidders, and the answers. They also referred to meetings between the bidders and the city rep. It became apparent that one document was missing - the minutes to a meeting that took place a few days before the most radical changes were made to the tenders (which was just a few weeks before the bidding deadline). The city told me they had no records for that meeting."

Gone in 60 seconds

During the course of her investigation, she watched the video of that November 2007 council meeting (Windows Media Video) in which the water meter contract was approved. City council helpfully records council meetings and uploads them to their website, even though very few people actually watch.

She was surprised at how simply such a huge contract got through the council. There was no discussion, no debate. The motion was carried unanimously - omnibus with four other unrelated motions. All the Vision Montreal councillors present voted for it. Richard Bergeron voted for it. Even though they didn't see the contract, an oversight they would later regret.

"I timed it," Gyulai said. It took only 53 seconds for the largest contract in Montreal's history to be approved by city council.

I have it at 60-61 seconds, all included:

City council approved $435,224,571.34 in spending in only 60 seconds, of which 10 seconds were spent making the motions omnibus and 42 seconds reading the motions. Only the remaining eight seconds were spent asking for debate, asking for votes and declaring all the motions approved.

Gyulai's reporting brought to light irregularities with a contract that the auditor-general would later find so much fault with that not only would he recommend that the city cancel it, but he handed over documents to the police and suggested there be a criminal investigation.

Gyulai wasn't the only reporter pulling out scoops about municipal politics. Montreal was in the middle of a municipal election campaign, and reporters from Rue Frontenac, Enquête, La Presse, Le Devoir and elsewhere were bringing up all sorts of stuff about Benoit Labonté, the mayor and his party, and Frank Zampino and Tony Accurso. Nor was this Gyulai's only investigation that made a difference. Her probe into the privatization of the Société d'habitation et de développement de Montréal was also followed by an auditor-general's report that pointed out irregularities and turned over documents to the police.

Contacts come from respect

Beat journalists develop contacts over time. It just seems to happen. People recognize your face and think of you when they want to put out information.

"When you cover any beat, you end up talking to many people," Gyulai said. "If you sound like you've done your research, they respect that."

She knows her contacts have their reasons for passing on tips. Some are obviously political. Some are personal. Some are just people who have a conscience and want the truth to come out.

Either way, she'll check everything she gets. If it's true (and interesting), she'll write about it. If she can't verify it, she won't.

"As long as the public gets the information, I don't care where it comes from," she said.

Though she was careful not to give away too much information that could lead to exposing her sources, she did say that "over the years, I've developed a lot of contacts, and they come from unexpected places." It's not (always) people on city council trying to sabotage someone else for personal political gain. It's not, despite what you might see on The West Wing, the spokespeople who take journalists aside after a press briefing and leak juicy details prefaced with "this is all off the record."

And it's not Gérald Tremblay. (Maybe.)

No apologies

I asked Gyulai if any of the congratulations she got for her awards came from the mayor or other officials at city hall. After all the attacks levelled at her articles, all the dismissals of the points she tried to bring up, all the times the mayor and others assured the population that the evil media was trying to drum up scandal where none existed, the mayor eventually agreed that the water meter contract was improper, cancelled the contract and called in the police.

If she was right all along, and her work helped stop the city from wasting millions of dollars of taxpayer money, shouldn't she have gotten an apology, or at least a thank you, from the people in charge?

Apparently, no. Some politicians did call to thank and congratulate her (most, as you'd expect, from the opposition). But she never heard from Tremblay. And she's okay with that.

"I don't take it personally," she said. "It's a job."

Gyulai said she has noticed a change in culture between Tremblay and his predecessor, Pierre Bourque. "Bourque didn't try to shoot the messenger," she said of attacks on her journalism and those of her colleagues at other media. "The tactic (with Tremblay) seems to be to try to discredit the messenger. I don't think it works."

So why try? Gyulai thinks this is an issue of a fundamental misunderstanding about her motivations. They see her as a political element. She doesn't.

They think she's out to get the mayor (and hence indirectly support the opposition). She isn't. Opposition members think she's their friend because they have the same goals. She isn't, because they don't.

"They're inherently confrontational," she said. But Gyulai doesn't judge her work based on how much political trouble it causes the mayor, or how much it changes the balance of power at city hall. She gets satisfaction from getting the story, bringing clarity to an issue. It could be something scandalous, or it could be just about explaining the history of a traffic cone.

Still, Gyulai sees herself as a force of good in her little world.

"I like covering city hall because it's one of the few places where you can ride that horse of righteousness," she said.

Congratu ... Point of order!

Proposed council declaration drafted by Vision Montreal

Last week, as city council was meeting, Gyulai got word via one of those old-fashioned letters that Vision Montreal was going to present a motion to the council congratulating her and The Gazette for their Michener award win.

But it never made it to council. Rumour had it that Marvin Rotrand, the majority party's leader in the council, didn't want it presented.

Rotrand told me later that's not how it went down. He said he was only told about it the night before the council meeting, after he would have had a chance to discuss it with his caucus, and then they simply chose not to present the motion to council.

"It's a constant game between Anie Samson and myself," Rotrand said, referencing his counterpart with Vision Montreal.

Vision Montreal didn't respond to a request for comment about this.

We'll see if it's brought up again at the next meeting. Rotrand wouldn't commit to voting for such a motion, saying he would need to see the exact wording and that he worried a bit about the precedent it might set (would council have to congratulate every Montreal journalist who wins an award?), but didn't dismiss it either. And he had only kind words for Gyulai, whom he pointed out he has known for 20 years.

Mirror to Hour to Gazette

Gyulai said she went into journalism to cover social issues, freelancing for Mirror in the early 1990s after graduating from McGill University (political science, 1990), where she worked at the McGill Daily from 1988-90 as a reporter and news editor, then at Concordia, where she got a graduate diploma in journalism in 1993.

Her editor at Mirror said they needed someone to cover city hall, and if she did so she'd have guaranteed space every week. She took the offer, and started covering city hall during the 1994 election campaign. She remembers going to her first council meeting, and seeing Rotrand deliver a petition about two HLMs that had no janitorial services.

"I thought, well, you can cover social issues from city hall," she said.

In her decade and a half following municipal politics, she has written stories about public transit, labour issues, architectural heritage, immigration. She's gotten close to real social issues in a way that a provincial or federal political reporter could only explore in an abstract way. She wrote about things others wouldn't, perhaps because they thought the stories were boring, or perhaps because they came from a guy everyone thought was a nut.

In 1997, as media giant Quebecor purchased Mirror, the paper had to cut its staff by one, and Gyulai had been hired only the year before full-time, so she was the one to get the boot. She decided to follow Peter Scowen, who, shortly after hiring Gyulai to her full-time job at Mirror, jumped to this new competing paper called Hour.

"When my job ended two weeks later, I went straight from writing my last article for the Mirror to writing my first freelance piece for Hour," Gyulai said. "The Mirror editor called me on the Thursday that my first Hour piece appeared and said, 'How could you do this? Why didn't you tell me? We could have negotiated something.'"

Eventually, Gyulai got a call from Brian Kappler, then the Gazette's city editor (now its editorial page editor), offering her a reporting job on the night desk. The "cop reporter," as it's called, is an entry-level job usually filled by the least senior reporter. The job usually consists of calling up the cops periodically between 6pm and midnight and asking if anything big has happened. Most of the time it's pretty boring, until something big happens and then it can become terrifying.

Gyulai turned him down. She wanted to keep her city hall beat, and taking this job, even at a higher pay, wouldn't have allowed her to do that.

Eventually, as the 1998 municipal election was approaching, the Gazette was in the market for a city hall reporter, and Gyulai accepted The Gazette's offer to join its reporting team in that position. (Ah, how one longs for the days when newspapers sought out talented journalists instead of finding ways to buy them out.) She joined the paper, and her first byline as a staff reporter - a story on A3 about revisions to the list of electors - appeared on August 25, 1998. (She had freelanced for the paper before, particularly in 1993 and 1994.) She has since written more than 2,000 more bylined articles for The Gazette in 12 years, an average of more than three a week.

Though going to the Gazette was a no-brainer for Gyulai, she says working for the alternative weeklies provided her with a lot of good training she wouldn't have had at a major daily. Because they come out once a week instead of once a day, she couldn't just report on what people said at press conferences. She would have to find interesting stories to cover, ones the mainstream media wouldn't think about.

Linda Gyulai, as she looks between awards acceptances

The future

As for the future, Gyulai has no plans to leave her beat. "I don't see an end to it," she said. With politics, there's always something new.

She hopes to be able to spend less time doing the daily grind and being a stenographer for city council meetings, and spending more time working on longer-term stories.

But she doesn't know. She can't predict the future, and she has no idea what stories await her.

After all, she said: "You never know where a story is going to come from."

Gazette starts up Alouettes website

Fagstein — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 01:04:12 +0000

After seeing the success of its Habs Inside/Out website, The Gazette (my employer) has gone the next logical step and setup a similar one for the Alouettes, Montreal's Canadian Football League team.

It's called Als Inside/Out, and the name and logo make it clear that these are sister sites, even though the older one will probably get all the attention. It officially soft-launched on Saturday (to coincide with the team's home preseason game in the revamped Molson Stadium). A brief welcome from Alouettes reporter Herb Zurkowsky greets the fans, who are invited to take a peek (and subscribe via Facebook, Twitter or RSS), but the Gazette will put off really advertising its new baby until it's gone through some more testing, and don't be surprised if stuff stops working while its creators play with it.

There are some noteworthy differences between the two websites. First is on the back end: Habs Inside/Out is based on Drupal, while Als Inside/Out is running on WordPress (the same engine that's behind this blog).

The second is on the editorial side and reflects the difference in scale between the two teams: The Canadiens have a beat reporter (Pat Hickey), columnists (Red Fisher, Dave Stubbs, Jack Todd), and bloggers (Mike Boone, Kevin Mio, Hickey and Stubbs). The Alouettes so far have just Zurkowsky, whose coverage of the Alouettes is second to none (even getting him recognized by the Canadian Football Hall of Fame), though he'll no doubt be getting help from his colleagues.

Then again, a look at Zurkowsky's blog The Snap (one of The Gazette's most popular) and his seemingly endless string of feature stories between games during the season makes it clear he could provide plenty of content to keep the site running. (The Als Inside/Out site effectively replaces The Snap.) The fact that the Als play only 13 18 games a season (plus two preseason games and up to three playoff games) compared to the Canadiens' 82 regular season games (and a handful of preseason games and up to 28 playoff games) will also mean a bit less traffic for the younger sister, though Zurkowsky's ability to pull good stories out of nowhere in that dead space between games should not be discounted.

Emry, Richardson are invited bloggers

In addition to Zurkowsky and other Gazette staff, Alouettes players Shea Emry and Jamel Richardson are also expected to pitch in and blog before and after games. (The Impact's Nevio Pizzolitto has been doing something similar for the soccer blog - expect a similar level of not-so-professional writing.)

They're also planning a "cheerleader of the week" feature (I'm assuming those will include photos), and like Habs Inside/Out there will be photo galleries and breaking news.

We’re very proud of you. You’re fired.

Fagstein — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 06:43:57 +0000

Elizabeth Thompson: "Free agent"

Did you hear the shocking news today?

No, not Halak getting traded to St. Louis. We expected something like that.

What I didn't expect was for Elizabeth Thompson, who was The Gazette's Ottawa bureau chief* worked for The Gazette for 23 years - including eight as its Ottawa bureau chief - and then took a buyout in January 2009 (because the paper was closing its Ottawa bureau) in order to jump to Sun Media as one of its parliamentary reporters, to suddenly announce on Thursday that she has been dismissed from that job, a victim of an apparent housecleaning by new management there that has also booted Peter Zimonjic and Christina Spencer.

The move was enough to garner the attention of La Presse (and this blogger), particularly since Sun Media just announced it was launching a new all-news television network, which one would think requires hiring journalists instead of firing them.

As Vincent Brousseau-Pouliot noted in his article, this comes mere weeks after Sun Media was gushing over Thompson's nomination for a Canadian Association of Journalists award, for her discovery that the government auctioned off high-priced silverware and china for insanely low prices, only to later discover that some of the objects didn't even belong to them, forcing the government to buy some items back for up to 25 times the price they sold them for.

Sun Media's piece on Thompson's nomination included this ironic quote:

“Elizabeth is one of the most inquisitive people you will ever meet,” said National News Editor Mike Therien. “It surprises nobody who knows her that she is being hailed for news scoops. We are very proud of her sleuthing.”

Not proud enough, I guess, to keep employing her.

(Needless to say, this is one of the reasons a unionized job is better than a non-unionized one - you can't be fired for literally no good reason.)

Thompson says she plans to stay in Ottawa and remain part of the press gallery there. But she's running out of mainstream news organizations to work for, and there isn't much independent media covering the federal government with the kind of cash to pay a professional journalist.

Thompson's blog posts for Sun Media (and, for that matter, The Gazette) are still online ... for now. And her Twitter account is still active (moreso with everyone retweeting about this news).

*CORRECTION: For some stupid reason this post originally had Thompson working in the Ottawa bureau for 23 years. I blame invisible gremlin editors for messing with my copy.

Long live the Kinger

Fagstein — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 07:59:03 +0000

I didn't know Mike King played for the Leafs...

The story

Mike King, a business reporter for The Gazette, died early Sunday after suffering a brain aneurysm on Friday night. He was 51.

The meta story

Mike King

The first email came in at 10:56am Saturday morning: "please call me," read the subject line from business editor Bryan Demchinsky. The body explained briefly what happened: Mike King had a brain aneurysm and wasn't expected to survive.

'News spread quickly, even on the weekend. By the time I got into the office, people were calling, emailing and otherwise communicating with each other, trying to get details.

Unfortunately, they were hard to come by. We didn't even know what hospital he was in. People in the know were there and didn't have cellphones. Everyone else was in the dark.

By late afternoon we got some more details: King wasn't going to make it. He was on a respirator, his last rites had been given. All that was left was to arrange for organ donations before pulling the plug.

The obit

It's a fact that journalists care more about their own than about others. We know it's not fair, but it's just the way it is. If a reporter dies, there's going to be an obituary written. The only question is how long.

But there were two problems on Saturday night. First, it wasn't clear if King would technically be dead by ... you know, deadline. Second, the only reporter left in the office was a young night reporter who didn't know King very well, and those who did know him well were hard to contact.

The obit was held for a day. It would probably be official by morning, and so the story would go into Monday's paper. The reporter had a reprieve from one of the most uncomfortable jobs a journalist can do. Unfortunately for her, she was back on the job the next day, so she was still the one who would have to write it.

The official word came almost exactly 24 hours after the first: Mike King died on Sunday morning.

The shock

I shouldn't have to explain what it's like to hear that someone who had no symptoms of disease has suddenly died. I'm sure most of you have experienced that at least once. As journalists, we see it on a daily basis. We cover violent deaths, people who die in car accidents, in fires, natural disasters, homicides or just random acts of catastrophe.

And yet, it was shocking. There was no indication - zero - that King had a ticking time bomb in his head waiting to go off, even just a few hours before when he was at work. By the time symptoms showed, he was rushed to hospital, but the affected area was too deep in his brain, and the doctors couldn't help him.

Deadline (it's unfortunate there's no other word for that right now) was still an issue for everyone on Saturday night, so the job went on. Pages were being edited with stories about the World Cup in sports, the Canadian Grand Prix in its own special section, and the news of the day in the small Sunday A section. Stories about King would come up, and though everyone knew him as a nice guy who liked to tell dirty jokes, none of those present knew him well enough.

Some discussions would be about sudden death in general, about the fatality rate of aneurysms, and the other stuff people become curious about in cases like this.

I didn't know King very well myself. The best memory I have of him dates back almost five years now, to when I was an intern at the paper, and some fellow interns had gone out with him after a party and learned about the tawdry office gossip that everyone older than us already knew about. It was a fun night with a fun guy.

For some reason, I didn't fully believe he had died until I read the obituary, which was put together on deadline Sunday by night reporter Monique Muise. She was an intern only last year, and didn't have memories of the man beyond the times he would come up to her desk and say hi.

Writing the obituary, talking to the people close to him (including his wife), and being nervous about getting something wrong made this the hardest story she's had to do in her brief career, she told me afterward.

I don't doubt it. Stories like this are why I prefer copy editing to reporting.

The desk

Mike King's desk

The cubicle belonging to King looks just like any other. Papers strewn about in a mess, and lots of stuff tacked onto the little half walls: There's pictures from his hockey teams with colleagues printouts of Aislin cartoons that reference stories he's written, bobbleheads (including one of the Expos' Andre Dawson), mini liquor bottles and "gray hair pills" on the ledge separating his desk from his colleagues. Headlines with the word "king" in them are pinned to the wall. A mostly empty glass of water sits beside the computer monitor.

Among the papers on the desk is a printout of a booking confirmation for a seat on a train to Windsor, Ont., on June 29.

Everything about it looks like the desk a reporter has left for the weekend and intends to come back to on Monday. But that won't happen.

I don't know what the procedure is. I'd like to think this is rare enough that one hasn't been thought up. But someone will eventually have to clear this desk out. I'm glad it's not me, and that I probably won't be there when it happens.

The obit, again

There was some debate over how much attention to give to King's obituary. News came up to the desk from classified on Sunday that there would be a full page left over in the obituary section, which would be perfect. King's obit could go there, maybe even with room for other obits from wires, as are usually used to fill that extra space next to the paid obits.

Unfortunately, to make room for the Grand Prix section on the presses, the classified section had to be printed in advance, which means that page would need to be typeset by 5pm. That simply wasn't going to happen, so the obituary page would have to be filled with a promo ad and King's obit would go in the A section.

King's obit appears on Page A8, taking up as much room as possible

King wasn't a star columnist (the closest thing we had to a columnist logo pic was taken back in 2001). He wasn't going to get an obit in La Presse, Le Devoir or other local media. But this was his paper, he was part of the family, and this wasn't going to be buried here. He'd get a long obit, and it would get pointed to from the front page.

Mike King's mug appears on the front page

Maybe Muise's obit was too informal, too personal. There are worse times to throw objectivity out the window.

His final story

Skip ahead a few pages from his obituary and you'll find a story by King. He'd written the Your Business feature, about an organization providing microcredit for allophone women. It was a good, interesting story. But, of course, he had no idea when he was writing it that it would be his last. A note was added to it saying so.

Online, two personal stories King wrote were taken from The Gazette's archives and posted. One about the lost art of physical letter-writing - and a package he received that security mistook for a bomb, and the other about arranging for his mother to meet Canadiens great Jean Béliveau. The picture of that encounter is tacked to the wall of his cubicle.

Mike King, circa the dawn of time (or the 80s)

Even though to me he's barely recognizable in this archive photo, it's just too awesome-looking not to post.

We'll miss ya, Kinger.

UPDATE (June 15): CBC Homerun aired an interview with King's good friend Paul Delean, and Pat Hickey reminisces in today's Gazette about the reporter he first met as a journalism student 32 years ago.

UPDATE (June 16): The memorial service for Mike King will be held at Saturday, June 19, 11 am at St. Jean Brebeuf Church, 7777 George St. in LaSalle. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to a favourite charity.

UPDATE (June 21): A bursary has been setup in King's name at Concordia University.

UPDATE (Jan. 3, 2011): Muise, who wrote King's obit for The Gazette, writes an end-of-year first-person story about what it was like.

Gazette World Cup ads to kick your balls with

Fagstein — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 09:03:36 +0000

Cute little 30-second ads for World Cup coverage in my employer's newspaper from Guillaume Blanchet.

http://vimeo.com/12427369

Welcome to the new Gazette

Fagstein — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:38:34 +0000

Notice a difference?

Before	After
Tuesday	Thursday
Wednesday	Friday

If not, the designers have done their jobs right.

The Gazette is in the middle of major technological transition behind the scenes, from Macs using QuarkXPress (version 3.32, circa 1996) and other specialized programs to PCs using Adobe InDesign under a system called Saxotech. Tech business reporter Jason Magder has been describing a bit of the process, particularly from a reporter's point of view.

The changeover has been happening in stages, as staff in various sections get training on the new system (while other staff, including additional hired help such as myself continue to put out the paper every day). The features sections went first, then business. This week was the go-live for the A section. The pages on the left (Tuesday and Wednesday) were created in QuarkXPress. Those on the right (Thursday and Friday) were done in InDesign.

Because the transition is being done in phases and not all at once, the designers had to create templates and stylesheets in InDesign that matched the old Quark pages. Some minor changes were made to clear up inconsistencies or make things easier for editors, but as you can see most of it basically looks the same.

To be clear, readers should not notice any major changes to the design, and no changes at all to content. (Although a bug in a process that is supposed to make it easier to copy articles from print to web causes random words to appear in the middle of sentences, which has peeved a few web readers.)

The next - and last - section to be moved over is sports, which has the latest deadlines. That's next week.

I wish I could say more about how the system works, but I'm in the very last group getting training (in a group that incidentally includes the editor-in-chief, so I guess I should be on my best behaviour). This puts me in the odd position of knowing less than almost all my colleagues when it comes to a computer system. You can't imagine how frustrating that can be for a guy with a computer science degree. But I'll muddle through these last couple of weeks.

Did The Gazette call Ian Halperin a hero?

Fagstein — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:59:10 +0000

So Ian Halperin trying to make headlines again. You know, the "Ian Undercover" guy who puts "IUC WORLD EXCLUSIVE" in front of his blog posts, dresses like a douche and is always threatening to sue people for outrageous amounts?

This time, he's threatening to sue Guy Laliberté for $500,000, because the Cirque du Soleil founder said Halperin was full of shit in his biography.

But what got me about this story isn't that a man desperate for attention is throwing out another disingenuous idle threat and got some journalist to fall for it, but his mention - in his own defence - that The Gazette called him a "local hero."

I found this odd, of course, because I thought Halperin hated The Gazette even though he briefly worked there more than 20 years ago. The paper certainly hasn't been showering praise on him lately, so where does he get this idea that he's been called a hero?

Well, I looked it up, and sure enough, he's right. In a "local hero" column published on Dec. 12, 1993, Bill Brownstein described him thus:

The Montreal singer/saxophonist ekes out a living as a busker, usually at the Place des Arts and Beaudry Metro stations from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. daily. In the evenings, Halperin and his Afro-Latin rhythm band, State of Emergency, play for pocket money at city bistros and jazz joints.

There's brief mention of his journalistic work a decade previous, while at Concordia University's The Link. But the article calls him a hero because he was organizing a benefit concert for homeless people.

I feel like I need one of those fact-checking meters here, but let's rate this one "mostly true". He's technically correct, but misleading in that the article is 17 years old and has nothing to do with the current controversy.

Fagstein » The Gazette

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