Monthly Archives: June 2008

| In the news, Montreal, TV

No more glass ceiling at RadCan

Since I don’t want to be the only person not talking about it, I should mention the big news this week that Céline Galipeau will take over from Bernard Derome in Quebec’s most prestigious news position, anchoring Radio-Canada’s Téléjournal, starting next year. This ironically comes after the Quebec council on the status of women went all pissy on RadCan for moving Dominique Poirier and Pascale Nadeau out of their current jobs. (Nadeau takes over as weekend host of the TJ, and Poirier is considering her options, which include Ottawa Bureau Chief.) The council issued a statement today saying it’s totally cool with this appointment.

So is Josée Legault, who writes today that Quebec is a leader in putting female faces in its news broadcasts.

As for the anglo TV broadcasts, while CBC is still relegating women mostly to the sidelines, Global has Jamie Orchard and (currently-on-mat-leave) Amanda Jelowicki, and CTV has, of course, The Great Mutsumi Takahashi, plus the team of weatherbabes, reporterbabes and weekend anchorbabes (including Lori Graham, who’s currently hosting Good Morning Canada from Montreal).

This isn’t the first time the CSF and its president Christiane Pelchat have put their foot in it. Last year, it famously suggested that the Quebec charter be changed to include a hierarchy of rights, putting equality of the sexes above freedom of religion. It also suggested (and continues to suggest) that people in professional positions such as teachers be prohibited from wearing any visibly religious symbol, except for crosses, of course, because Christianity is the One True Religion.

That said, RadCan hasn’t given a satisfactory explanation for why Nadeau and Poirier are being tossed around. By all accounts they’re very capable journalists and anchors. Were they unpopular? Are new shows being launched to take their places? Do they have to fit Jean-Luc Mongrain in there somewhere? What’s the deal?

UPDATE: Poirier says she won’t move to Ottawa and is quitting RadCan.

UPDATE (June 18): The Globe and Mail covers Galipeau vs. Thibault.

| Opinion

Concordia’s Lowy gets honorary degree

It’s a sad reality that university recognition of members of the community – and especially the grand-daddy of them all, the honourary degree – have just as much to do with how generous someone is to the university than how generous someone is to society. Though there are no rules – give a certain amount and you’ll get a certain honour – and the amount of money involved would make buying such things outright prohibitively expensive to all but the most ego-maniacal of  it’s almost expected that a university’s most prestigious donors will be thanked publicly in some way. A seat on its board, a building or program named after them, an honourary degree, or a combination of these.

I explored this issue in an article I wrote for a journalism class in 2005 and had published in The Link, Concordia’s student newspaper. I’ve included it below.

I bring this all up because Concordia has just released the names of its honorary degree recipients for this year, and a familiar name is on it: Frederick H. Lowy. Lowy served as Rector/President of Concordia University from 1995 to 2005, a time when doing so was hardly an easy job.

The community’s respect for Lowy only grew after his departure, when his replacement turned out to be a disaster. People started wishing or the good old days, when the warring factions – students vs. administrators, part-time faculty vs. full-time faculty, Senate vs. Board, were kept at a warm simmer by Lowy’s diplomacy.

In other words, they could have done worse.

And fortunately, there are no obvious conflicts with the other three honorees, one in the business management area (former CP CEO Robert Richie), one in the education field (former École Polytechnique head Robert Louis Papineau), and one in the arts (professor Laura Mulvey). That might be enough to help us forget the fact that three of these four are here for their skills managing a large organization and not, say, fighting malaria in Sudan.

Continue reading →

| Media, Opinion

How many exclamation marks are too many?

Another media-related question that I’ve been thinking about recently has to do with publishing reader opinion gathered from online forums, which some industry snobs have termed “reverse publishing” for reasons that escape me.

As newspapers and other media have opened up their websites to comments, some have in turn used those comments to supplement their reporting. For example, this piece which recently appeared in The Gazette about the Hockey Night in Canada theme issue, which has elicited a tonne of opinion just about everywhere it’s mentioned.

Despite my concerns about how much people have to sign their lives away to participate in media websites, publishing people’s opinions in the paper makes sense, if only because it replaces the tedious task of having a reporter go out in the street and convince people walking by to give their name and two cents on an issue they might have never heard of. (It’s gotten so bad in some cases that reporters have resorted to granting requests for anonymity in exchange for man-on-the-street views.)

Then again, I despite streeters with every essence of my being, and think random people’s opinions shouldn’t be published unless they’re interesting in some way.

My ethical dilemma, though, has to do with the process rather than the planning: How much should copy editors edit these comments before publishing them?

On the one hand, comments like “I hope RDS gets it. :))))” seem to be excessive with their use of punctuation for no good reason (what’s the difference between four smiley faces and three?). Typos, one would think, should also be corrected so the newspaper doesn’t look stupid. And if the comments are going to be edited anyway for space, they might as well be edited for style.

On the other hand, there’s always the possibility of introducing error or subtly changing the meaning of a comment by fixing its language. And people can just as easily check the source themselves and notice that their words have been altered. Instead of a direct quote, it becomes an interpretation, a translation of what the person is saying into “proper” English.

So what do you think? Should editors just cut and paste from forums when they quote from them, or should some editing be allowed? And if so, how much? Typos? Grammatical errors? Punctuation? Clarity? Style?

| Media, Opinion

Cars sell

This week, my job has taken me closer to cars and driving, which is ironic since I don’t have a driver’s license.

Sunday night was the last night of production of the Gazette’s Grand Prix special section, much to the delight of exhausted sports editor Stu Cowan, who worked tirelessly for eight straight days putting together sections that were anywhere from six to 26 pages long. (At last report he was at home in the fetal position mumbling something that sounded like “need another sidebar Randy”)

Yesterday, I spent my shift working on the regular Driving pages, which appear three days a week in front of the classifieds.

Some might wonder why newspapers focus so much on cars, but one look at the Grand Prix section gives the obvious answer: Ads. Lots of them.

It’s one of those subtle pressures that advertising places on editorial. No direct dictation of content, but the understanding that if a newspaper focuses on a certain subject, advertisers will follow.

Unfortunately, as newspaper budgets shrink, the power of this advertising force becomes stronger. As the news holes are shrinking for foreign news, feature stories and books sections, the cash cow sections for cars, homes, employment, electronics and movies are maintained.

That means pages of stories lauding the new Ford Focus and very little talking about global warming (unless an oil company has a new marketing campaign about it), poverty, fine arts, science, religion, or anything else that can’t be used to sell people overpriced stuff.

It’s a problem not just here, but across the entire newspaper industry, and will spread to the blogosphere once that industry matures.

The question is: Where should the line be drawn? How much should the money-making sections be used to subsidize the money-losing ones?

| Business, Opinion

Conditioned

I’m glad to hear that the global warming/energy crisis has been solved, and local businesses can go back to cranking up the air conditioning full blast and throwing open their doors so they can cool the sidewalk in front of their stores.

I’m not sure what’s more outrageous: the fact that this happens, or the fact that consumers fall for it and/or don’t care enough to protest.

Not to mention the fact that air conditioners displace heat, so for all the air that’s cooled in front of a store, hot air in the back is heated even further. The result is a net increase in heat that just makes hot days in the city even hotter.

| Media, Web design

Le Devoir works its feeds

Le Devoir, whose RSS feed I had to unsubscribe to a while back because it was a monolithic feed that had 60 articles a day, has overhauled their feed system and now offers multiple feeds. Not only do they have feeds for different sections (their media news feed has a welcome new home back in my feed reader), but they have feeds for individual journalists, which is something I’d like to see other websites copy.

The next step will be having feeds for each individual keyword (they’ve been tagging articles with keywords for quite a while now, but haven’t done anything useful with it online yet)

| Montreal, Video

Videos of the storm

For those of you who missed it, through the magic of YouTube we have plenty of shaky, noisy home video clips of today’s kinda-freak storm (Cyberpresse also has a photo gallery; The Gazette has galleries of professional and amateur photos):

Close call for window washers at Place Montreal Trust (LCN has some details about this story, The Gazette too — dramatic part’s at the end):

(UPDATE: Also available from another angle in four parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

Continue reading →

| Media, Web design

No regrets

The Gazette has taken the leap, putting its heart and reputation on the line in the name of accuracy, and setup a corrections page on its website. It becomes only the second Canwest daily after the National Post to do so. It’s also the first Montreal daily to have a visible, dedicated page for people to find corrections.

Craig Silverman, who has been pushing for such pages on newspaper websites for quite a while on his Regret the Error blog, celebrates by using one of The Gazette’s corrections against it.

| Sports, TV

The theme that wouldn’t die

After being dead, then maybe-not-dead, then absolutely positively dead (as I tried to explain previously), the Hockey Night in Canada theme is once again maybe-there’s-hope, as the CBC brings in a lawyer to maybe hammer out a new deal.

It shows, I think, that the CBC vastly underestimated people’s connection with the song, and wants to do everything it can to save it.

UPDATE: Looks like it’s closer to dead again. CBC negotiators aren’t very optimistic.

UPDATE: CTV has just announced it secured rights to the song and plans to use it on TSN (and RDS). Wow.

UPDATE (June 12): Thank you Stephen Colbert. (CTV owns the Canadian rights to the Colbert Report through the CTV and Comedy networks, so he’s actually being half-serious about licensing the song.)

| My articles

TWIM: GM/CAW FYI

I filled in once again for Master Bluffer Peter Cooney in this week’s Bluffer’s Guide as he was having a busy week. I wrote about GM’s closing of a plant in Oshawa, Ont., and what the Canadian Auto Workers union is doing about it.

Naturally, because I’m drunk with power, I included a near-non-sequitur about Stephen Colbert:

But what about Stephen Colbert? True, the city did name March 20, 2007 “Stephen Colbert Day” after the mayor lost a bet with the TV satirist over a game between the Oshawa Generals and Colbert’s favourite Saginaw (Mich.) Spirit, who named their mascot after Colbert. This came after Colbert encouraged Spirit fans to throw copies of GM’s earnings reports onto the ice during a game, a gesture that would perhaps seem not so tongue-in-cheek now.

| Montreal, Opinion

Slow down, Lewis

Les autoroutes ne sont pas des pistes de course

This sign appears on highway notice boards this week in anticipation of the Canadian Grand Prix Sunday on Ile Notre-Dame. It’s there because the F1 season awakes the armchair race-car driver in too many people who push their way-too-loud engines to the limit speeding recklessly down roads and putting people’s lives at risk.

Respectez les limites!

In case that doesn’t work, the second part of the message reminds drivers of how much they’ll have to pay if they’re caught speeding.

I was reminded of this tonight when, as I walked through the late-night F1 celebrations on Peel St. and McGill College Ave. and St. Catherine St., I came across a vehicle collision at the corner of de Maisonneuve Blvd. and Jeanne-Mance St.

Above is the result: A young family (with a small child) stand outside shocked (but unharmed) after their car was hit in the back and spun around. A bystander points west toward where the car that hit them had sped off.

The other vehicle didn’t get far. After speeding away from the scene with a right front tire ripped to shreds, it pulled over two blocks away at the corner of City Councillors (total distance: about 1,000 ft or 300 metres). They were quickly joined by police, who asked some questions of the driver (in the far left of this photo, trying to explain to an outraged bystander how this wasn’t a hit-and-run). Shockingly, the driver turned out to be a man about 20 with his girlfriend (the one with the see-through shirt) in the passenger seat.

The driver, who denied having drunk any alcohol, said he drove the two blocks because he was looking for a place to park, not because he was trying to get away.

The damage could have been a lot worse. A bumper and turn signal is much easier to replace than a child.

As to whether this qualifies as a hit-and-run, or whether speeding and/or alcohol might have had something to do with this midnight crash, I’ll leave that judgment to you (and, possibly, the courts).

| Business, Media

Gazette call centre gets pink slip

The notice from the union was in my mailbox when I came in today: The Gazette and its workers union, the Montreal Newspaper Guild, have reached an agreement concerning workers in the Reader Sales and Service department whose jobs are being outsourced to a Canwest call centre in Winnipeg.

The deal essentially turns the layoffs into forced buyouts, with a deal similar to what many in the editorial department took in January. It comes after the union lost a bid to merge the RSS bargaining unit with the editorial and advertising ones, which would have leveraged the power of the latter to save the former.

It’s sad that the jobs are going, and that people calling about their morning paper are going to speak to a minimum-wage call centre guy on the night shift in Winnipeg than someone in the Gazette building who knows about the paper and the city and actually cares about readers.

| Navel-gazing

I’m touched

As most of you know, I’m blessed with an incredibly thick skin, but also a sense of vanity so vast it’s a wonder I ever pull myself away from a mirror.

So I always have a smile on my face when someone talks about me without my having asked them to.

A case in point in a local media discussion forum:

Fagstein =
Just another
Asper blog

Poetic, isn’t it? I’ve never met any of the Aspers, but you’re damn right I swear unfailing allegiance to them. That’s why I’ve never criticized any Canwest media. And I never will. Because they’re so perfect.

| Media, Montreal

Hi, I’m Chris Hansen…

Cara, a catering company at Trudeau airport, says it apprehended a journalist sneaking into a secure area passing himself off as an employee. It won’t name the journalist, or say which media outlet the journalist was from (*cough*), but it says it is handing the matter over to police.

For those of you wondering what happens when these journalist on security exposés actually get caught in the act, now you know.

Patrick Lagacé has some thoughts on the situation as well.

| Montreal, Radio

940 News switching formats, slashing staff

Workers at 940 News (including host Dennis Trudeau above) came in today to find out that the station is switching to an all-music “greatest hits” format as of the end of next week, eliminating its news division and most of its anchors.

18 people, including 14 journalists, will be out of a job.

Apparently the week’s notice they did get wasn’t the company’s idea. They had to spill the beans because of a leak.

Info 690 is unaffected.

UPDATE: Here’s the Gazette story from Paul Delean. Dennis Trudeau is out of a job. And here’s 940’s announcement. And a Canadian Press story.

The change takes effect 8pm next Friday.

UPDATE (June 10): Host Jim Duff says his goodbye.

UPDATE (June 11): From Mike Cohen of the Suburban:

940 Montreal officially becomes AM 940 — the Greatest Hits on Friday night. While the station let a lot of staff go, staying put are program director Chris Bury, newscasters Barry Morgan and Caroline Phaneuf and traffic reporters Greg Charlebois and Sean McMahon. I will miss the talk format, but I look forward to hearing the greatest hits from the 60s, 70s and 80s…

UPDATE (June 13): It’s over. CBC discusses how this move relates to the overall gutting of private broadcaster newsrooms in Canada.