The Gazette’s gaming blogger Tyler Todd has been humbled in a BusinessWeek article about the worst predictions of 2007:
“The media’s great love affair with the Nintendo Wii is beginning to sour…. There are whispers that the device is tiring and gimmicky.”
To his credit, Todd takes it like a man, and points out an even worse prediction he made about the Playstation 3.
A strike vote today at the Toronto Star’s union had 80% of members voting 96% in favour of a strike starting as early as Saturday. That’s when a mutual agreement between the two parties to not strike or lock out expires.
The vote represents a mandate to strike, which means that union leaders can call a strike at a moment’s notice now. Negotiations are continuing and are expected to continue until Friday, however a media blackout has been imposed on recent talks at the request of the mediator.
That means information about management demands may or may not be outdated, and only those involved in negotiations have any idea how close they are to a deal. (Much to the annoyance of union members who are in the dark, as well as reporters who have to write about the situation.)
Previously: Toronto Star edging toward strike
Updates on the situation can be found on the union’s website at wearethestar.ca.
The STM and government-run car-sharing service Communauto have come to an agreement that allows people buying a year’s worth of transit passes to get a significant discount on membership fees for car-sharing.
It makes sense. The point of Communauto is that the car is used only when necessary, and public transit is used at other times.
But since both are largely government-funded services, the money is inevitably coming out of our pockets. Communauto is heavily subsidized, which is what allows it to have such low prices. With less revenue from users, they’ll have to rely on the government even more.
After his successful fatwa campaign to get Montreal Alouettes General Manager Jim Popp fired from his job as head coach, Gazette football writer Herb Zurkowsky finds out Popp is now refusing to talk to him.
(Sorry guys, I couldn’t resist.)
My third silly graphic tonight. Can you tell I’m procrastinating from real work?
The Globe and Mail (or at least columnist William Houston) seems to have joined the expanding chorus of people who think that Hockey Night in Canada should drop the Toronto Maple Leafs as its default team, since it’s second-last in the Eastern conference and playoff prospects look weak.
It’s sort of a chicken-and-egg situation with the CBC and Toronto. They show the Leafs nationwide because the Leafs have the stronger fan base. But the Leafs’ fan base is largely a result of national telecasts.
I’m not in a position to say what team fans in Winnipeg, Halifax or other non-NHL towns should be watching, but I think the CBC should at least concentrate first on making sure NHL cities can watch their home teams — particularly Ottawa and Montreal. Sometimes the CBC splits its network up so that happens, but it should be for every Saturday where two Canadian teams are playing.
It’s not like cost is such a huge issue — HNIC is a huge money-maker for the CBC. And even then, I don’t care too much about the quality of the broadcast. Hell, they could simulcast RDS unedited and I’m sure cable-less Montreal fans would be perfectly fine with that.
Houston’s right: Ottawa is the dominant Canadian team at the moment, and it’s going to go much further toward a Stanley Cup this year than Toronto could ever hope to go. At some point CBC is going to have to make the switch.
UPDATE: Wow, it actually worked this time. That was fast.
Raymond Viger doesn’t read La Presse because the newspaper is too big and he can’t deal with stories split over more than one page.
I can understand that. I’m not crazy about giant papers, especially when I’m in transit. But why not just read the articles online?
(Bumped with new answery goodness)
There is a single traffic light in the City of Montreal where it is permitted to turn right on red (after making a complete stop, of course, following the code routière). But 75% of the time, this issue is moot.
Where is this traffic light, and why isn’t it an issue most of the time?
UPDATE (Jan. 16): The answer is at the corner of Jacques-Bizard Blvd. and Cherrier St.
This intersection, just on the other side of the Jacques-Bizard bridge, is the only traffic light that’s inside the city (part of the Ile-Bizard/Ste-Geneviève borough) that’s not on the island (other islands like St. Helen’s Island don’t have enough traffic to justify a light, and Nuns’ Island has some philosophical objection to the idea of one). And since the right-turn-on-red exception is for the island of Montreal (and there are no signs specifically prohibiting right turns on red here), right turns are allowed.
But the issue is mostly moot, because for three of those directions there are short-cuts that avoid the light. Only traffic headed west on Cherrier turning north onto Jacques-Bizard would find this information useful.
Of course, if you lived on Île Bizard, you’d know this already. You’re reminded of it each time you cross the only bridge off the island:
The Journal de Montréal has a … let’s call it a talent, for creating news with its investigations. Usually it involves a reporter going undercover, tricking a group of people into doing something they shouldn’t and then proudly writing an exposé about the whole topic.
And it gets everyone talking. People chat about it on the bus (as I heard this week), other newspapers comment on it and run follow-ups, and politicians react with promises to deal with the situation somehow.
The latest one involves a young reporter going out and pretending to be a unilingual anglophone while applying for jobs. Despite telling them she speaks no usable French, about 15% of them agree to hire her. Rather than focus on the 85% who thought that not knowing enough French was reason enough not to hire someone with experience during the busy Christmas rush, they proclaim that anglophones have it easy here, even in such predominantly French areas as the Plateau. (Really? The Plateau?)
There’s also a video with the journalist in question which basically has her explain what she did and what the legal implications are (apparently, none). Though she proclaims to be able to speak English without a noticeable accent, she didn’t give an example during the video, which would have been nice.
Like most of these pieces, there is a certain amount of legitimate public interest and a certain amount of needless sensationalism involved here. You really don’t need to know that much in either language to work at a coffee shop, especially in Montreal where most people are bilingual. The Gazette points out that the 85% who denied her employment because of her language is more interesting, while denouncing the whole idea as the kind of journalism “we do not need.”
At the same time, I think a lot of the criticism comes from people who compete with or just don’t like the Journal. Had La Presse done the same experiment and treated it with less sensationalism, their reactions would probably have been different. The ability of people to be served in their own language is a legitimate public concern, even if it seems nobody actually ran into problems here.
Either way, now the issue is out of the hands of the media and in the hands of the hot-button reactionary provincial politicians who would bathe in giant buckets of horse manure if they thought it would win them votes in swing ridings.
Let’s hope they don’t go overboard on a minor issue like this.
UPDATE (Jan. 17): Affiliation Quebec says they’re filing a complaint with the Quebec Press Council:
That the Journal de Montreal, in it’s (sic) front page expose on January 14, 2008, intended to inflame the already tender sensibilities of Quebec’s political and social balance, by acting as an “agent provocateur”, in its worst sense.
As a leading daily newspaper, Journal de Montreal has acted in an irresponsible and reckless manner by featuring an article of questionable news value, placed in a position where the editors knew a maelstrom would ensue.
Further, the story’s headline is quite unrelated to the subject of the material, and fails, in any way, to prove that customers are unable to be served in French.
Gosh, to think the Journal would be so bold as to print an article that provokes public debate on a controversial topic. Those bastards.
I could spend hours trying to read all the news articles and blog posts about Apple’s big announcement today of the new MacBook Air.
People are blindly rewriting Apple’s talking points praising it as “ultra-thin,” which I guess is true though it’s less than 25% thinner than Apple laptops from 3 years ago. They’re also talking about how the removal of just about every physical port from the device “isn’t a big deal” because everything’s wireless now.
I don’t know about that.
It’s a bold idea: there are only four connections remaining on the new laptop: headphone, USB, Micro-DVI (external monitor) and a power connector. Both the power connector and monitor connector are redesigns. The power connector is a new, thinner MagSafe connector, while Micro-DVI is Yet Another Redesigned Video Connector, replacing the Mini-DVI connector on the MacBook, which replaced the Mini-VGA connector on the iBook, which replaced the regular VGA connector on earlier notebooks.
What’s missing? A lot:
But the most stunning omission is the optical drive. Those of you old enough might remember the iMac, when Apple decided to release the first computer without a floppy disk drive. (It was available as an optional external USB device.) That too was considered bold, but they were replacing it with an optical drive, Firewire, USB and networking. People got used to it because the cheap-but-really-low-capacity disks were already on the way out.
This isn’t the case with CDs and DVDs. We’re still arguing on a format for high-definition DVDs, and nothing is seriously on the horizon to replace optical disks as a data medium for music and movies.
The other thing that bothers me is that Apple proclaims that wireless is replacing all the communications methods. I can respect that. It’s just so much more convenient to use wireless Bluetooth and Wi-Fi communications now. But the optional external ethernet port and optical drive don’t have wireless: They communicate by USB. And with just that one USB port, it means you can’t connect to a wired link and read a CD/DVD at the same time. Or connect to the Internet and a digital camera at the same time to upload your pictures to Flickr. Or connect to your digital camera and burn a CD at the same time.
It’s a recipe for annoyance, just to get a quarter inch off the thickness of the machine (and sell it at twice the price).
But MacBook Air will have its niche. Some people don’t have peripherals (or they have a wireless base station they all connect to). Some people have no desire to watch DVDs while they’re sitting on the train to Toronto. Some people don’t need a second battery for their laptops. And some people just buy Apple products because they exist, whether or not they provide the features they look for.
It’s a niche market that sadly excludes me. I prefer to have a laptop whose “features” I don’t have to find creative ways to work around.
Everyone’s falling over themselves talking about the CRTC’s new rules for media ownership, saying it’s about time the regulatory commission did something.
The new rules basically come down to three limits:
Enough exceptions have been made already that nobody is affected right now. These include:
You can see the CRTC’s press release and a public notice outlining the well-thought-out rationale for the decisions they made and those they decided against.
A second, related decision which isn’t getting so much attention is a loosening of restrictions on news gathering. Previously, Quebecor was forced to separate news gathering divisions in its print and television properties. Reporters for TVA and the Journal de Montréal couldn’t so much as talk to each other.
The problem with that restriction is two-fold. First of all, other media like CanWest and CTVglobemedia had lesser restrictions which only required them to manage the news outlets separately. Second, the Internet has forced the CRTC to realize that the medium is irrelevant. Newspaper reporters are shooting video, and TV reporters are writing text. The lines between media are blurring.
So the CRTC has decided to harmonize its rules to the looser CTV/Canwest system, which restricts news management but not news gathering directly. Management of one outlet cannot be involved with managing the other. The reporters themselves, however, are unaffected.
This will come as welcome news to Quebecor, who can now take frame grabs from TVA to fill Journal de Québec pages have more flexibility in its media management.
LCN’s Mathieu Belhumeur has exclusive video that cellphone service providers allow their customers to purchase images of scantily-clad women.
The video report is, of course, filled with examples of such images, just in case you’ve forgotten what a scantily-clad woman looks like.
The real scandal here is that people are expected to pay $2 to download a thumbnail-sized image of anything.
Canwest (note the lowercase W, which is apparently the new style) has changed its logo again, unifying its various brands under the one big banner.
They do this at the same time they announce healthy earnings in the latest quarter:
Canwest’s publishing business, which includes The Gazette and metropolitan newspapers across the country as well as the National Post, performed well, with revenue up five per cent to $362 million and earnings up 16 per cent to $102 million.
This is before the buyouts.
For those of you who might have wondered if the Canadiens’ winning record and flurry of 5-goal games might cause financial hardship for the Cage aux Sports’s five goals = eight free wings promotion, never fear: they’re swimming in profits, according to their first quarter report (though that only covers until the end of November).
La Presse has a rumour (and CBC/CP rewrites that rumour) that Rogers is going to be buying the Montreal and Quebec City TQS stations, while Radio Nord (which already owns TQS stations in Outaouais and Abitibi) would buy stations in outlying regions.
Rogers won’t comment and Radio Nord denies they’re buying the stations.
I suppose it makes sense. Rogers owns what’s left of Citytv, a network without a station in Canada’s second-largest city. (I can just imagine the kind of outcry we’d have if they tried to convert TQS into an anglophone City station.) And if they are buying TQS out, chances are it would be for a significant discount.
TQS’s creditor protection lasts until Thursday.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, at Le Devoir, Paul Cochon looks at the blame game, and wonders why Quebecor (which owns TVA) isn’t being blamed in the same way Radio-Canada and the CRTC are.
UPDATE (Jan. 16): TQS gets its extension, and now has until Feb. 29 to decide what to do with itself. Meanwhile, Steve Proulx doesn’t think La Presse’s “scoop” is any more than idle speculation, and he thinks the CRTC is more to blame for TQS’s troubles than Radio-Canada.
In one of those moments that marketing geeks wet their pants over, RDS apparently agreed in December to cut out the visual feed for 10 seconds of its Sports 30 recap of a Canadiens game, replacing it with an ad for the Quebec Foundation for the Blind which was mostly a black screen. The audio feed was left as is.
I can find no news coverage of this feat, nor anything from RDS, so I’ll just have to take the word of the marketing agency that this actually happened.
I suppose with all the product placement, pop-up ads and other junk that increasingly attacks our television viewing experience, something like this is inevitable. Let’s just hope this idea isn’t expanded to commercial advertising.
(via iPub)