Monthly Archives: October 2008

| Media, Navel-gazing

Vultures circling as talks continue

I’ve been a bit quiet about contract negotiations at the Gazette since the strike vote, and that’s mainly because there’s nothing to report. Both sides were in talks Thursday and will return to the table Friday. People are optimistic, but the work-to-rule campaign and byline strike continue, and the guild has suggested employees bring personal effects home.

The Montreal Newspaper Guild website has the latest update, which also points out that talks for the 37 employees in the (non-classified) advertising department have broken off.

UPDATE (Oct. 10): No strike is being called for the foreseeable future. Friday’s talks had progress, though jurisdiction remains a roadblock. Conciliation talks are set for Oct. 20 and 21, and the guild says that “additional measures” are necessary to show that the union is “serious” about its demands.

Meanwhile, management is apparently preparing for the worst, with Canwest News Service making inquiries of Concordia University journalism students (and Gazette freelancers) who might want to work freelance for them in the event of a strike. Because they’d be working for Canwest and not The Gazette (even though Canwest owns The Gazette), they would not be breaking Quebec’s tough anti-scab laws, even if what they write is of local interest and would only appear in The Gazette.

Concordia’s journalism department director, Mike Gasher, has sent a letter to students cautioning them against working as freelance scabs, Macleans reports.

UPDATE: CBC has picked up the story (with requisite “CBC has learned” which implies they didn’t just read it from Macleans’ blog), and J-Source has picked it up from CBC. The CBC story includes a denial from Canwest News Service’s editor-in-chief that the inquiry has anything to do with a possible Gazette strike.

Thanks mostly to the CBC, other blogs are also picking up the story.

UPDATE (Oct. 14): La Presse also writes about the story, this time including a new explanation from Canwest: that the freelance copy would be needed in the event of a Gazette strike in order to provide material for Canwest News Service and other newspapers across Canada, to compensate from the loss of Gazette copy (Canwest has no non-Gazette journalists in Montreal). Of course, as a subscriber to Canwest News Service, The Gazette would have access to this copy as well.

Journal in negotiations

As if that weren’t enough, workers at the Journal de Montréal are also at the bargaining table for a new contract, mere months after their sister union at the Journal de Québec accepted a new contract that removes their four-day work week and requires journalists to perform multiple multimedia jobs.

Updates are on the Journal du Journal website. So far nothing too serious is coming out, besides low-level pressure tactics like wearing yellow lanyards.

Still, management at La Presse are no doubt creaming their pants multiple times over at the thought of their two main competitors both being crippled by work disruption simultaneously.

Ozzy Osbourne too

Just figured I’d throw this in there: the Writers Guild of America is telling members not to work for Freemantle Media, which produces a new Ozzy Osbourne “reality” show, because they couldn’t reach a deal that would involve paying writers less in order to write less (because it’s “reality” and therefore “half-scripted”).

| Media, Montreal, On the Net

Here Rover

Some Montreal-based anglo writers have put together an online magazine called Rover, which bills itself as an “independent review of the arts.” You might recognize some names if you obsess over freelance bylines in the Gazette (and we all know you do).

So far, everything is free, though the plan is to eventually support the site through advertising.

Considering that Maisonneuve magazine is almost perpetually starving for cash and subsidies, don’t expect much of a financial windfall here.

| Media, Opinion, Slow News Day

That one.

I’m sorry, apparently I forgot during last night’s debate to be offended that John McCain used the words “that one” and pointed to Barack Obama when pointing out something about Obama’s senate record. Apparently it’s a codephrase that everyone but me knows about and is inherently racist.

Remember all those white racists in Alabama chanting “that one” and pointing to MLK? He was clearly trying to appeal to the racist electorate.

Now we need to make this into the issue of the election, because it’s so much more important than those boring things like the economy, tax policy, the environment or foreign policy.

| Media, On the Net, Opinion, Sports

Time to vote for something important

There are now just a few hours left to vote for one of the five semifinalists in the CBC Hockey Anthem Challenge. Sadly, Hockey Scores is not one of them.

In order to help you visualize them, CBC has set the songs to video of the HNIC opening (even including the “Hello Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland” voice intro). In all of them, the absence of the old theme is jarring, especially next to familiar video.

Here are some thoughts of mine off the top of my head for the five semifinalists. I’m not a music expert (but I know a few who will no doubt chip in), so don’t take these as gospel because I have no clue what I’m talking about.

(Warning: CBC forces you to watch the same stupid Bell ad before each video. Sorry.)

1. Ice Warriors (by Gerry Mosby): A complicated melody, but without any climax. It sounds like a good part of a song, but it’s missing the rest. Even as a fan of rock music, the guitar really threw me off. It belongs in a 70s album, not on the Hockey Night theme.

2. Sticks to the Ice (by Robert Fraser Burke): This one builds energy, and the professional arrangement is a huge improvement over a 13-year-old on a piano. But it’s still lacking. Just when you think it’s going to hit you hard, it sulks back into a melody that doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

3. Eleventh Hour (by Graham McRae): McRae is a skilled composer, and this one doesn’t lack for energy. He seems to really get the point. CBC’s orchestral recording of it seems a bit muted though, especially compared to McRae’s original. The melody in this one is my favourite, but that doesn’t necessarily seal the deal.

4. Let the Game Begin (by Christian St. Roch & Jimmy Tanaka): This contribution from two Montrealers echoes the original in a non-copyright-infringing way. Similar use of instruments. It is very successful at building energy and anticipation, and best of all it doesn’t waste any time getting there (this is, after all, a minute-long intro, not a three-minute song). It has punch, but the theme gets a bit repetitive. Still, if your goal is to find as close to the original as possible, this is probably the one for you.

5. Canadian Gold (by Colin Oberst): I like this one, not so much because I think it’s better than the rest but mainly because it’s so different. It’s the only one I think that comes out swinging after it gets going, and has that feeling of raising an army to defeat the enemy. It doesn’t sound like it’s holding anything back, and it’s not as repetitive as the others. It’s also more upbeat, almost to the point of cliché, which I think will appeal to less hard-edged hockey fans. But I could do without the bagpipes.

All five are works worthy of praise, and the CBC chose well. I don’t think any of them nail it 100%, but they surprise me with their quality (I had earlier suggested the contest might not be worth it). The fact that there were close to 15,000 entries is kind of astonishing.

Voting closes at 11:59pm Tuesday. Two finalists will be announced Thursday, and then the winner will be on the Hockey Night in Canada premiere on Saturday.

| Media, Opinion

The USA-Todaying of newspapers

The Chicago Tribune has become the latest newspaper to unveil a dramatic redesign, which emphasizes dramatic visual elements instead of boring words (the News Designer blog has more).

Sans-serif type, drop shadows, giant cutout clip art overlapping adjacent elements, words over photos, columnist headshots everywhere, and little one-paragraph snippets of text where there were once articles.

The result makes these newspapers look much more like magazines, and conventional wisdom is that the more design-y these pages look, the more interesting they will become to readers.

But these new designs have two problems that you’d think would make them highly unpopular in an age of declining newspaper revenue and tightening budgets.

First, they take up more space, which means either more pages need to be added to the newspaper to fit the same amount of content (this isn’t happening – in fact many of these redesigns are done in order to fit a reduced page size), or dramatically cutting the amount of content that goes into the paper. Where a copy editor’s instinct is to cram as much information as possible onto the page, the designer’s is to waste as much space as possible to make it visually attractive. And it looks like the designers are winning.

Second, these things are complicated, which means design staff have to essentially be laying out all these pages, and in the case of sports they have to keep working late into the night. Where newspapers are shrinking budgets, this increase in staff hours will have to be offset by a drop in the number of copy editors or reporters. It makes me wonder how long these dramatic designs will stay dramatic before we start seeing cookie-cutter default designs used everywhere to save time.

Don’t get me wrong, I love good design. I think far too few stories are told using charts, maps or illustrations, in many cases where they are desperately needed. One of my pet peeves is opinion poll stories, which include a couple of paragraphs of opinion from the pollster and then hundreds of words trying (and failing) to translate a table of numbers into prose. Whenever I can, I try to convert those back into tables, which are easier to read and easier to analyze.

But I look at newspapers like Metro, which has coloured boxes with numbers all over the place, tied to articles that have only a handful of sentences to them. I wonder, looking at this: At what point does substance throw in the white towel against the towering forces of style?

| Business, Media, Technology

Sun Media begins using electronic newspapers

Sun Media, which owns the Sun papers, Journal de Montréal/Québec, London Free Press, 24 heures and the Osprey chain (Kingston Whig-Standard, Sudbury Star et al), has signed a deal with NewspaperDirect to make electronic versions of the papers available to subscribers. No word on when this is going to start.

The NewspaperDirect service, which is used by the entire Canwest chain including The Gazette, produces exact copies of the paper, almost like PDFs, except with DRM so you can’t save them (at least on a Mac) and only two levels of zoon (my personal pet peeve). On the other hand, it provides some bells and whistles like having an automated reader read articles aloud.

With Transcontinental also working with NewspaperDirect (and over 700 publications in their repertoire), it’s clear that the Vancouver-based company provides a service that is either too hard or too expensive to try to duplicate.

I used it for about a year in order to save on recycling hassle, save the environment and save on subscription price. Though the saving on paper was fun (especially as I look around my living room now), reading the newspaper on my computer screen (and having to manipulate it with my laptop trackpad) and then watching TV and doing other stuff on my computer screen all day can put stress on the eyes, not to mention my posture.

Sure, I could go outside and have a life or something, but let’s be realistic…

| Media, Montreal, Navel-gazing

Gazette staff start byline strike

You know, everything happens on my day off.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Thursday’s paper was missing names on top of articles written by Gazette reporters (and under photos by Gazette photographers). The union called for a byline strike as a pressure tactic after being frustrated by negotiations.

For those who want some background, Slate explains what byline strikes are all about. The last time Gazette staffers did this was in 2001 to protest a new national editorial policy by Canwest, one that many people have asked me about years later thinking it’s still in effect.

UPDATE: Bylines are also being pulled from Habs Inside/Out.

So you all can just go ahead and assume all the articles are being written by me now. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

| TV

Ways around duelling debates

Tonight, seven politicians take the stage in much-awaited debates that will set the stage for the future of two countries. Five of them in Ottawa, in the English leaders’ debate, and two of them in St. Louis, in the one and only U.S. vice-presidents’ debate.

In case you want to watch one live and another later (or you’re switching between the two and miss something), you can catch replays on TV and online. Clips from both will no doubt be on the Internet quickly as well.

Unlike most TV programs, the debates don’t really have any copyright or licensing concerns attached to them, so there should be no problem finding copies of them online.

Leaders’ debate

  • Live tonight at 9pm on CTV, CBC, Global, CBC Newsworld, RDI, CTV NewsNet and CPAC
  • CPAC replays the debate at 11pm ET and it will be available as video on demand (as they have already done with the French debate)

VP debate

  • Live tonight on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News
  • CNN replays the debate at 1am ET
  • CPAC has the debate live online and will replay it on TV at 9pm tomorrow