This week’s bluffer’s guide is about U.S. presidential primaries, the first of which was held this week. It’s about as much information as I could cram into 750 words about the overly complicated process on both sides.
Monthly Archives: January 2008
Expensive junk
From Cracked.com, a list of 10 “laughably misleading” ads, which I would say is more like “top 10 commercials for laughably unnecessary or overpriced products”
A little place to get your revenge for My Lil’ Reminder and its ilk.
Your guide to media coverage of the 1998 ice storm anniversary
The floodgates opened this morning on ice storm anniversary stories. Every major local media outlet has something, and many have a lot.
Part of that is because there isn’t much news on the 5th of January. Part is because they’ve had 10 years (with constant electricity) to prepare. And part is because it had such a profound impact on everyone’s lives for two weeks to a month.
This is perhaps the first big project among local media relying on reader-generated content. It’s easy to see why: Everyone remembers the ice storm. The supply of stories is practically infinite.
The problem is that everyone’s story sounds about the same. We were without power. The roads were hard to drive. We had to leave our home and move in with a family member who had power. We communicated with our neighbours for the first time ever. We helped people in need. We were happy to see electricians from the U.S. who came to help. There was a lot of snow and ice.
That’s the problem with user-generated content. It can produce some stunning gems, but most of it is boring filler not worth our time to read.
The archives are fun to look at (particularly the audio/video from the CBC and the PDF pages from The Gazette), to see how different the media and the world was just 10 years ago (67 cents/litre for gas was considered gouging).
Here’s what I’ve found so far (some links via mtlweblog), recommended reading highlighted in bold:
Continue reading
Rock et tous les oreilles
I guess RBO’s Bye-Bye show was a success, considering the sheer number of articles written about the subject, on everything from its ratings (2.4 million people watched it) and the price of its ads to its use of makeup to Hérouxville’s reaction to being made fun of.
Even the Oscars don’t get this kind of coverage.
Maybe they should schedule them during the holidays.
UPDATE (Jan. 17): My God, they’re still talking about it. Three million viewers, plus another million and a half the next day on the repeat. CBC would kill for those numbers.
Relive the 90s with kitsch Québécois commercials
There’s something about late-80s early-90s television you can’t help but admire. And by “admire” I mean “wonder how we as a society could have produced such crap.” When it comes to Quebec commercials from the time though, you have something extra special that deserves to be preserved.
Fortunately, some people have taken it upon themselves to do just that. There’s even a blog, Publicités poches du Québec, that has tasked itself with that mission, uploading recordings of these ads to YouTube.
Here are some of my favourites:
- Céline Dion hawking a Dodge Shadow and Diet Coke.
- A Jean-Pierre Ferland song and some underage-looking kids making suggestive gestures with popcorn for a butter commercial
- TV Hebdo is some sort of magic remote control or something
- Distribution aux Consommateurs works hard for their money, with the big hair, purple suits and giant eyeglasses that make the 80s so regrettable.
- Radio-Canada are there pour vous divertir, avant tout.
- La clef de sol offers a Pentium 133 with a Statue of Liberty on its screen for no apparent reason, and you don’t have to pay until 1997.
- Brault & Martineau is so cool it hurts.
- Wal-Mart doesn’t want you to buy too much soap.
- Froot Loops c’est bon c’est bon.
- Cita-Cita-Citadelle.
2007: A bad year for Quebec journalism
This blog is less than a year old, so I don’t have much raw data to evaluate long-term trends. But the past few months seem to have hit all of Quebec’s mainstream media simultaneously, with most of them announcing cuts in the number of journalists they have on staff.
Individually, none (except maybe troubles at TQS) is a major turning point for an organization, but taken together a trend appears to be emerging.
February:
- CBC brings back a one-hour evening TV newscast to Montreal after budget cuts forced it to hand victory to CFCF. Though it’s good news, the new one-hour newscast doesn’t come close to regaining the ground the station lost when it cut the 6pm newscast down to 30 minutes.
April:
- Editorial employees at the Journal de Québec are locked out by management who want to impose a new contract. Press workers immediately strike in solidarity, and both work together to produce an alternative free daily newspaper that is still publishing. The Journal is still going, put together by management, but the content is coming from the Journal de Montréal (reluctantly) and wire services (including one apparently setup solely to exploit this situation).
September:
- Montreal’s “multicultural” station CJNT switches to a mostly-celebrity-gossip format, keeping the bare minimum of foreign-language programming as required by the CRTC (a limit they tried to have reduced).
- CKUT Radio McGill loses access to its funding over a dispute about using “McGill” in its name.
- La Presse’s workers union orders employees to stop blogging as a pressure tactic. Their contract doesn’t include provisions for blogging, and the paper isn’t offering any additional salary or overtime for the activity. The exception is Patrick Lagacé, who has a separate contract for his blog.
October:
- Global TV announces 200 layoffs across Canada, but concentrated in the east. The Quebec City and Sherbrooke bureaus are toast, and local newscasts will be replaced with “virtual sets” controlled by master control centres in Toronto and Western Canada. It’s unclear how this will affect programming at Global Quebec, since they’re already at their bare minimum of 18 hours of regional programming a week.
- TQS announces cuts of 40 jobs across the province to get skyrocketing debt under control. It also offers itself up for sale, but nobody bites.
- The Gazette offers another round of buyouts to editorial staff, seeking to reduce its numbers by about 20. It loses some well-known columnists as a result.
- Astral Media takes over Standard Radio and does a laughable job convincing people that CJAD, CHOM and Mix 96 won’t be affected at all.
November:
- Newspaper circulation numbers come out, and fourth-place Le Devoir is the only newspaper to have its numbers go up.
- TVA cuts 15 full-time jobs in Quebec City.
- CTV News Montreal declines to renew the contract of weatherman Frank Cavallaro.
- CHOM FM loses star Terry DiMonte to a Calgary station after DiMonte gets an offer he couldn’t refuse and CHOM refuses to match it.
December:
- With nobody willing to buy the deficit-ridden network, TQS files for bankruptcy protection.
- Info 800’s potential new owners plan to cut what few journalist jobs are left at the station and focus more on sports.
- Radio-Canada cuts a journalist job in Quebec City just as its 400th anniversary celebrations are starting.
Info 800 to be stripped of its info
CHRC Info 800, the Quebec City version of Info 690/940 News, is going to be eliminating its news-gathering operation by firing all its journalists, a move which journalists aren’t too pleased about.
Ironically, Info 800 is being sold to local interests (including Patrick Roy) by Corus Entertainment for $282,177.40, becoming one of the few locally-owned media outlets there. It’s the new owners who want to make the cuts, despite reassuring the CRTC that the takeover wouldn’t reduce local programming (they even referenced the “montrealization of the airwaves” in their submission as an argument in favour of the purchase), and that they didn’t expect any journalists to be affected:
The idea is to turn Quebec City’s only remaining AM station into a news/sports talk station, with emphasis on sports. Its schedule will be all-sports in the afternoons and evenings, and the station would cover local sports events such as Rouge et Or university football games and Roy’s Quebec Remparts junior hockey team.
The request for transfer of ownership of the station will be heard by the CRTC on Feb. 26 in Vancouver. Submissions are due by Jan. 23.
Wikipedia flame wars make good news filler
Janice Tibbetts of CanWest News Service has discovered the Wikipedia war between inclusionists and deletionists.
My favourite quote:
“…I started to see a sharp, sharp turn in what people considered newsworthy or inclusion-worthy…”
No kidding.
Even though I can’t find anything actually new about this story (no doubt it’s another banked holiday feature), and I haven’t been active on Wikipedia for a while, I’ll add a brief comment:
I’m not sure what camp I’m in. I think it’s funny that there are things like lists of Stephen Colbert’s Words and other pop culture minutiae. But when every article about some aspect of pop culture has a section that denotes what Simpsons or Family Guy episode references it, things are getting out of hand.
A limit has to be set, and sadly we’re still debating where to put that line.
CBC 2007 news quiz
CBC Montreal has a 2007 year-in-review news quiz. Like Kate, I got 20/20, though about four of those answers were educated guesses.
Jack Todd among columnists leaving The Gazette
You might remember when The Gazette announced it was cutting staff through attrition — offering buyouts to seasoned full-time editorial staff to reduce it by about 20 people. The good news is that the generous offer worked, and enough people took advantage of it that there won’t be any layoffs.
The bad news is that the paper is losing a lot of seasoned staff, including some well-known columnists.
Jack Todd is the most visible of those names. He writes his goodbye column in the New Year’s Eve edition of his rapid-fire-judgment and grammatically-challenged Monday Morning Quarterback column. He’ll be leaving on Jan. 11 to “concentrate on writing fiction.” Though he won’t be a full-time staffer anymore, he’s expected to stick around doing freelance, and will start a “very different and more serious Monday sports column.”
Other columnists departing the paper within the next few weeks include:
- Julian Armstrong, food editor
- Lisa Fitterman, lifestyles columnist (a coincidental departure — she’s been freelance since taking an earlier buyout years ago) also put out a goodbye column this week
- Mary Lamey, business writer and Homefront columnist
- Donna Nebenzahl, lifestyles writer and Working columnist
- Matt Radz, theatre critic
The paper is also losing copy editors, writers, support staff and section managers. It’s unclear how many of them will continue writing freelance and how many will cut ties completely. But at least they all left of their own accord.