Sherbrooke Record to become a weekly in print

A letter, titled 'Strengthening the future of local news', on Sherbrooke Record letterhead.

Notice from the Sherbrooke Record published April 22 saying it would move to a once-a-week schedule.

Quebec’s other English-language daily newspaper will soon no longer be that. This week, the Sherbrooke Record sent a letter to subscribers saying it would only produce print editions on Fridays starting in May.

Currently, the Record publishes in print five days a week (Monday to Friday).

The letter from publisher Sharon McCully explicitly states that “this is not a reduction in news” and breaking news would still be produced online. Instead, it is a way to cut production costs that are increasingly hard to justify for many daily newspapers. Others like La Presse and La Tribune, Sherbrooke’s French-language daily, have already eliminated print editions entirely and gone fully online.

The decision can’t come as much of a surprise. The paper has a community weekly feel to it anyway, and recent non-Friday editions have been only 12 pages long. Being a daily print publication comes with some prestige, but we’re long past the point when that prestige is worth the cost. (And La Presse and others have shown that you can still have that prestige even if you don’t have the paper.)

Brome County News, which was distributed with the Tuesday edition of the Record, will still be produced and distributed on Tuesdays, the note reads, and will also be included in the Friday Record along with the Record’s weekend edition.

UPDATE: In an interview with CBC’s Quebec AM, publisher Sharon McCully points to various reasons for the change, including the fact that the Record could no longer share distribution resources with the Montreal Gazette and had to rely on Canada Post instead, increasing those costs.

Torres Media to acquire CHSV-FM 106.7 in Hudson/St-Lazare

A bit over a decade after it went on the air as the first English-language radio station serving the Vaudreuil-Soulanges area, CHSV-FM (Lite 106.7) is being sold to Torres Media, the owner of Ottawa’s Rebel 101.7.

The purchase price wasn’t announced, but we’ll learn that when the CRTC publishes the application. The commission has to approve the change in ownership before it can take effect. Until then, the station remains property of Evanov Radio, which launched it as Jewel 106.7 in 2015.

Evanov and Torres are trending in opposite directions in terms of radio ownership.

In the 2000s and 2010s, Evanov was expanding aggressively, launching new stations that include CHSV but also CHRF 980 AM in Montreal (Radio Fierté at first), and stations in Halifax, Winnipeg and Meaford, Hawkesbury, Ottawa and Clarence-Rockland, Ont., and acquiring others including Montreal’s CFMB 1280 AM. At its height it owned about 20.

But in 2023, three years after founder Bill Evanov died, the group began shutting down or selling off its stations. CHRF was shut down, as was Pride FM in Toronto, while stations in Halifax and eastern Ontario were sold to other owners, including the Jewel (later rebranded as Lite) station in Ottawa to Torres Media.

CFMB is Evanov’s only remaining station in Quebec, and if someone wants to buy it, now might be a good time to give them a call.

Torres, meanwhile, is in expansion mode. After launching The Rebel (originally Dawg FM) in Ottawa in 2010, in 2015 it launched CIUX-FM in Uxbridge, Ontario, and acquired CKOD-FM (Max 103), a French music station in Valleyfield. In 2020 it launched a country station in Georgina, Ontario. And last year it acquired The Jewel/Lite in Ottawa.

I asked Torres Media President Ed Torres about their plans for CHSV.

“We will conduct some research first. We’ve done some preliminary work, but not yet enough to conclude as to what direction to take the station format-wise,” he told me. “When we do, we will be locally focused on Hudson and environs.”

Roxanne Guérin, general manager of CKOD, will manage both stations, he said.

CHSV launched with some fanfare back in 2015, hiring Ted Bird for its morning show. (He was dropped in 2024.) It also gave shows to Paul Zakaib (Tasso Patsikakis) and Frank Cavallaro that didn’t last long. Nowadays it doesn’t move the needle much, with its announcers being mostly imports from other Evanov stations. At least that means Torres will have a blank slate to work with.

The Beat drops Nat Lauzon

Nat Lauzon in The Beat’s studio in … I don’t know, a while back whenever I took this photo.

It’s an unfortunate reality in the radio business that while your arrival is announced with great fanfare, your departure is often met with a silent scrubbing of any evidence of your existence.

Such was the fate of Nat Lauzon, who announced on Thursday that her time at the radio station had come to an end. “We’ve parted ways,” she wrote in a Facebook post. (She clarifies in a video that the decision to leave wasn’t hers.)

Continue reading

Agriculture minister introduces new tax credit for rage farmers

Citing the need to support new forms of agriculture, the Quebec government will announce Wednesday the introduction of a new tax credit aimed to help rage farmers maintain and grow their businesses.

The tax credit, which will be worth up to 30% of eligible labour expenses, was welcomed by the National Online Rage Farmers Union of Canada (NORFUC), which had lobbied hard for it the past few months.

“Artificial intelligence has been a double-edged sword for us,” said NORFUC national president Avril Wrasse. “It’s made generating images and stories easier and faster, but the increased competition from unregulated overseas rage farmers has significantly eaten into our profit margins. Facebook and Instagram are being flooded with nonsensical posts stealing attention from high-quality Canadian rage bait.”

The tax credit goes into effect starting in the 2026-27 tax year, and illegal immigrants who commit crimes will get double credit if they’re transgender.

CRTC orders Bell, Rogers, Quebecor and Telus to settle disputes using Rock Paper Scissors

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Wednesday announced it would streamline more than a dozen proceedings involving disputes between Canada’s largest telecom companies by ordering them to settle their disputes with a series of Rock Paper Scissors games.

“Our existing processes, which include final offer arbitration, tariff sheets, forbearance, disaggregated wholesale access and a bunch of other terms only you policy nerds really understand, has become too cumbersome due to the large number of complaints and proceedings started by these big four companies,” the CRTC wrote in its decision implementing the order.

Bilateral disagreements over things like TV channel carriage, access to utility poles, third-party internet access and telephone interconnection will be settled by a best-of-three Rock Paper Scissors tournament between the two organizations’ regulatory affairs directors, the CRTC said. (The commission received 148 interventions commenting on the number of games that would have to be played, with Bell arguing for one and others arguing for more.)

Disagreements involving three parties would be solved using the three-player variant of Rock Paper Scissors.

“The Commission has determined this would free up its resources to focus on more OLMC consultations and other pressing matters,” it said.

Bell has reportedly already hired an RPS consultant to train its vice-president of regulatory affairs on best techniques.

National Research Council renames itself Carney National Research Council in hope of restoring federal funding

Canada’s National Research Council has voted to rename itself the Carney National Research Council, hoping it might help the organization restore some funding the federal government cut in its latest budget.

“We’ve studied this extensively — half our staff is just experts in grant writing and government funding — and some compelling research out of the United States shows the best way to protect federal funding is to name yourself after the head of government,” said CNRC chair John Dory Krasavik.

The CNRC is waiting to hear back from the federal government, but is already making future plans to ensure its relevance well into the future. “We’ve prepared a new wave of Pierre Poilievre National Research Grants that are waiting to be deployed if needed,” Krasavik said.

Radio station listeners desperately plead with local announcers to start more podcasts casually chatting about life

A local radio host says she has given serious thought to starting a podcast after listeners flooded her inbox with increasingly desperate pleas for more ways to hear her chat about her personal life and feelings about relationships.

“I was hesitant at first,” says weekend announcer Ebrel Cobia. “But there’s a market need out there, and if no one else is willing to fill it, who better than me?”

Though nothing is confirmed yet, Cobia said she was thinking her podcast would focus on relationships — her dating and family life, and “just the kind of hilarious things that we think of when we chat with our pals in real life, but now you can listen in and join the fun.”

Listeners were absolutely ecstatic when they heard about the potential podcast, with one saying she gets bored for about 36 minutes every Thursday afternoon and she thinks this would be the perfect way to fill that.

“Now I just need to find something similar for my husband, who would love it if someone started a podcast where he gave his thoughts about the Montreal Canadiens,” she said.

Debt-riddled Corus cancels plan to compete in Squid Game after court approves restructuring

Corus Entertainment says court approval for a debt-for-equity restructuring plan means it will not proceed with a planned entry into Squid Game, an underground South Korean winner-take-all competition.

The troubled Canadian broadcaster lost a significant source of funding when Shaw, owned by the same family, was sold to Rogers, and got another blow when Rogers also acquired the Canadian rights to Warner Bros. Discovery brands HGTV and Food Network in Canada. It has more than a billion dollars in debt and said it could go bankrupt if a solution wasn’t found.

Plan A was the restructuring, which will see existing shareholders’ equity in the company reduced by 99% in exchange for cancelling $500 million of that debt.

Plan B was to compete in Squid Game, which has a grand prize of 45.6 billion won (about $42 million). “That wouldn’t have been enough to fix everything, but it would have given us more of a runway,” said Corus financial consultant Ray Qasawi. “I had some concerns about the rules of the game, as we weren’t able to speak to previous contestants, but we were getting pretty desperate.”

Corus had reportedly considered competing anyway, but changed its mind after learning Rogers had acquired the broadcasting rights to that as well.

Koodo’s new Gen Z phone plan blocks all incoming calls

Saying it wants to better tailor its offerings to Gen Z clients, Telus’s discount Koodo brand begins offering a new phone plan starting today that blocks all incoming telephone calls.

With an ad campaign promising an end to “callxiety”, the Just Text Me Plan is being offered at $35/month, comes with 20 GB of data and accepts only outgoing calls. Anyone attempting to phone the plan holder hears a recorded message that says “Please just text me. Thank you.”

Koodo says it hasn’t received any calls about the new plan, but 10,000 people have subscribed to it.

TSN 690 trades Mitch Gallo to Sportsnet 960 for Matt Rose and a second-round draft pick

Facing salary cap pressure, Montreal’s TSN 690 announced late Tuesday it is trading afternoon host Mitch Gallo to Calgary’s Sportsnet 960 in exchange for morning host Matt Rose and a second-round pick in the 2027 sports radio host entry draft.

Gallo, who punched me in the face when I asked for his height and weight, has been at TSN 690 for just under 20 years now, and has become a key part of the schedule.

“It sucks to see him go like this,” said Sean Campbell, Gallo’s linemate. “He’s been a really strong presence in the dressing room. I know he’ll do great in Calgary.”

Gallo said the news came as a shock, but there were three takeaways from the trade brought to you by Snap Bar Sportif in Rigaud, the best place off the island to speculate about the future of on-air personalities.

TSN general manager Shad Prill said the trade is a win for both sides and he thinks Rose has a lot of potential with a change of scenery.

“I’m not sure about the draft pick yet,” he said. “Does Bob McKenzie have any other kids?”