Monthly Archives: November 2008

| Canadiens, Media, Montreal, Opinion

I … must … have … the MEDALLIONS

Proving once again that Canadiens fans will buy anything, the Gazette and the Journal de Montréal got involved in this scheme marketing idea whereby Couche-Tard would sell medallions for each player and would need a corresponding coupon from the newspaper to get it (actually, requiring the purchase of a newspaper to get such a thing creates legal implications, so you can bypass the newspapers altogether, but they hope you won’t notice that).

Unfortunately,the people involved didn’t realize how truly gullible Canadiens fans really are, and the medallions sold out in record time. Reports of people getting up at 4am every day and still not having any luck. Those who are lucky enough to get them are now selling them on eBay for $20 a pop, a 669% profit on the original $2.99 purchase price.

The two papers are falling over themselves apologizing for the shortfall and have ordered new ones, but they will only come in December. Suckers readers are being asked to hold on to their coupons until then.

Perhaps they’ll use that extra time to rethink spending $72 on glorified Pogs.

…

I’m sorry, I’m being told this scheme is keeping me employed. Please disregard all of the above.

| Montreal, Public transit

Turnstile terror

Turnstiles at Peel metro

Turnstiles at Peel metro

As students were forced into the new Opus smart card system when their reduced-fare passes expired on Oct. 31, the STM took the opportunity to change the configuration of turnstiles at metro stations, switching more to the newer smart-card machines.

Instead of one or two newer turnstiles and the rest using the old punch-card and magnetic-strip systems, the ratio is now reversed with a single older turnstile and the rest on the new system. Besides working with different cards, I’ve noticed the newer turnstiles are also lower, which means that instead of being whacked in the gonads when the turnstile locks up, you’re smacked in the legs.

The change quickly began irritating riders using the magnetic bus passes, who have already taken to writing letters about their frustrations.

I’m going to miss quite a bit about the older turnstiles when they’re eventually phased out entirely. Instead of reading miniature punch cards, they’re scanning RFIDs. Instead of a welcoming two-tone acknowledgment of a fare paid, there is only a single soulless beep.

| Media

Franc-négocier

Steve Proulx has the scoop on the employer’s demands for the Journal de Montréal union, whose contract expires Dec. 31.

Some are debatable points that the Journal de Québec union eventually conceded, like bringing the work week to a more reasonable 37.5 hours per week (5 days) instead of the spoiled-rotten 32 (4 days), or having people work in multiple media and being able to reuse content online.

Others go against the entire point of having a union, like having carte blanche to subcontract and outsource work.

And then there’s the 20% salary reduction. Ouch.

Needless to say, the union has rejected all of these demands.

UPDATE: Lagacé has more insight, and Michel Dumais has some inside perspective from La Presse.

| Business, In the news, Opinion, Technology

The failed business model by Circuit City

The Source outlets in Canada (including this one in the Eaton Centre downtown) remain open for business

The Source outlets in Canada (including this one in the Eaton Centre downtown) remain open for business

Dear Circuit City,

I’ve never been to any of your U.S. stores, so I can’t really comment on why you’re facing bankruptcy right now. But I have been to The Source, your Canadian outlets that used to be Radio Shacks, and it doesn’t surprise me that your Canadian subsidiary is also filing for bankruptcy protection.

I realize it’s convenient to blame this on the economic downturn, but may I offer some other suggestions:

And yet, shockingly, you’re in the hole. I guess that means this job you just posted in TMR isn’t getting filled…

| In the news

How to run a campaign (into the ground) 101

PQ supporter: Hey, we’ve got a problem here. The ADQ is taking in the polls and it looks like we might be the official opposition again. We can’t let this happen. Is there some way we can make ourselves look like idiots?

Another PQ supporter: Didn’t we put sovereignty – the very purpose of this party – on the back burner, giving people no reason to vote for us?

Yeah, but it’s not doing enough. Our support is still climbing.

How about if we just started fighting each other?

Brilliant!

Liberal supporter: Crud. The PQ’s infighting, the ADQ’s coming apart at the seams, and we’re within majority territory here. What can we do to get people to hate us?

Another Liberal supporter: Promise to raise tuition?

Nah, we tried that last time and it backfired.

Let’s not overthink this. How about if we just tore our competitors’ signs down and replaced them with our own?

Brilliant!

| Media, Slow News Day

Paperweight story

Reporter: Hey, the Sun’s been shut down for a month now, but I still see those plastic paperweights holding down papers at the newsstands. I bet they must be collector’s items by now.

Editor: Sentimental. Talks about the media in a way only journalists care about. I love it!

(later)

Reporter: I talked to newsstand people, and they say nobody’s asking them for the paperweights as collector’s items. There’s only this guy who worked there who wants some mementos. I guess a seven-year-old fourth-rate newspaper isn’t as cool as we think it is.

Editor: Damn. You’ve wasted all this time on the story, write it up anyway.

Reporter: OK. Here it is.

| In the news, Opinion

Benevolent dictators, with rules

The Quebec government is planning a new law that would impose minimum requirements on university boards of directors/governors/regents/Imperial Senate. They include ridiculous things like gender quotas, and things that seem to make sense like requiring community consultation before big decisions.

One of the provisions requires that at least two thirds of the boards’ members must come from outside the university and be chosen from the “community”

That sounds great, in theory. Universities are government-funded, so they should belong to the people.

But in practice, there’s a major problem with these boards that the law doesn’t fail to address: How they are appointed.

Currently, board members are chosen out of applications from the community by a committee set up by the board, who then make recommendations to the board which are then approved by the board.

In other words, these boards are self-appointing. They literally dictate their successors like some sort of monarchy.

Fortunately, the boards of universities (which, in theory, can be overruled by the Quebec government) are benevolent dictators, take their responsibilities seriously and work to better the universities out of a sense of civic responsibility.

But these boards also have a very strange sense of what “community” really means. They’re predominantly business elites, CEOs of large corporations and their friends/wives/tennis partners. You won’t find many plumbers, community activists or artists here unless they bought their way onto the board with huge donations to the university. Though there’s never a formal quid pro quo, the reality is that your chances of being appointed to a university’s board are much greater when you’ve given a substantial amount of money in donations.

This is what the Quebec government has to deal with, this idea of informal shareholders who buy a stake in a university in exchange for a bit of control over it. But the government won’t do that because they rely on these donations to offset the huge cuts the government made to education over the past two decades.

All this makes the new law seem a bit silly, don’t you think?

| Business, TV, Video

Globaltv.com to stream Family Guy, 24

Canwest (disclosure: my employer) has announced that it has signed an online streaming agreement with Fox which will give it Canadian online distribution rights to Family Guy, 24, Prison Break and Bones. This is in addition to House, Heroes and .. uhh … all those great Canadian programs that Global produces, like … uhh … that thing about the hair salon… yeah.

The full episodes are streamable on Global TV’s video site here, which a lot of people still don’t know about. CTV has a similar site at watch.ctv.ca for its programs and programs owned by its specialty channels, such as ER, Grey’s Anatomy and the Daily Colbert with Stephen Stewart.

| Media, Opinion, Web design

Is individuality overrated?

Le Droit (left) and Le Soleil (right): Can you spot the difference?

Le Droit (left) and Le Soleil (right): Can you spot the difference?

If you talk to newspaper journalists about their employers’ websites (privately), one of their chief gripes is that the site is designed by corporate management and even the newspaper’s own management has little control over its website.

Above, you see the websites for Le Droit in Ottawa and Le Soleil in Quebec City. Both are Gesca papers, and part of the Cyberpresse portal. Aside from the newspapers’ logos, the design is identical. (I would have used La Presse as an example here, but La Presse doesn’t really have a website. Instead, people are directed toward the “Montreal” section of Cyberpresse.)

It’s the same case at Quebecor, where websites for the Journal de Québec and 24 Heures are identical, worrying the Journal de Montréal union who think the same would happen once a JdM website launches.

Whether it’s Canwest’s Canada.com portal (which, as a Gazette editor, I’ve worked with on the back end), Sun Media’s canoe.ca or Transcontinental Media’s community weekly newspaper sites, each newspaper chain sets up a massive content management system and gives only bits of control to the individual papers.

The obvious reason for doing this is to save money and avoid the needless duplication of work. Stories can be more easily shared across the network when they’re all on the same system. New features like blogs can be introduced across the chain simultaneously. And there’s certainly something to be said for consistency.

On the other hand, this cookie-cutter web design removes whatever individuality the individual media outlet might have. It creates a tug of war between the paper and the chain, which can be manifested in something as simple as having to send an email or make a phone call to head office in Montreal or Toronto to get something changed on your website. The worst part is that if there’s a bug or other problem, it affects everyone.

So what’s the alternative? How do you keep individuality alive in individual media outlets while keeping those websites from degenerating into utter pieces of crap?

Beats me. But allowing individual newspapers more freedom over their site designs (while keeping the underlying structure the same) would be a good start.

Or am I being silly here? Do readers care that all these websites look and function alike?

| Media, Opinion, Web design

Com Ed

Mathew Ingram, who works at the Globe and Mail as a technology columnist and has his own very popular blog on technology and new media, has recently gotten a promotion: The Globe has named him its first “communities editor”, a job that is not very well defined (and that’s a good thing), but essentially means that he’ll be working to bring people together and encourage discussion on the Globe’s website.

In his blog post announcing the change, Ingram says the Globe should experiment:

As I told the senior editors at the Globe, in order for us to do this properly, we need to be committed to opening up our content in ways we haven’t even thought of — including some ways that might seem strange or contentious, and which could at least initially be met with considerable internal resistance. Among other things, we need to make it easier for people to find our content, share our content, link to our content and even make use of our content (in some cases to create their own content).

What this might mean (or should mean) is the end to the archive subscriber block, shorter URLs, less duplication of stories (many newspaper stories are uploaded when they are filed and then uploaded again as part of the next day’s paper), less clutter on pages, easier commenting, more tagging, and lots more user-generated content.

How much of that the Globe will go along with is anyone’s guess.

(via J-Source)

| In the news, Media

Gazette freelancer runs for ADQ in Marois riding

Apparently Mark Cardwell, who has been writing freelance articles for The Gazette (and other publications) out of Quebec City, is running for the Action démocratique in the riding of Charlevoix, just northeast of the capital. Charlevoix is currently held by the PQ, by someone named Pauline Marois.

His reason for running:

“To be quite honest, I saw that the ADQ was perilously low in the polls and I don’t want to see that party disappear. I don’t want to go back to the barren landscape of Liberal versus PQ and every provincial election being like a mini referendum.”

That’s a pretty solid endorsement by ADQ standards.

Good luck.

| In the news, Navel-gazing

A journalist’s wet dream: Time for Election #3

Last night was my second of what will probably be three election nights at the paper in a span of two months. Election night is always fun (as I recounted in my previous post), and this one was no exception with the president, Senate, House, governors, ballot initiatives and everything else on the line.

First, Canada re-elected the least charismatic person on the planet. Then the U.S. elected the most charismatic person on the planet. Now, Quebecers go to the polls. Who will they elect?

(Yes we can?)

| In the news, Media

Something about history and a mountain and changing…

Some other Canadian Page Ones can be found at Newseum’s site, which also has a special video on Obama-related newspaper front pages (if you can watch it, the site is very slow).

Among my recommendations for U.S. covers:

The links are now all old, but the covers have been archived here.

Favourite headline, only because nobody else used it: “Tide of hope“, from the St. Petersburg Times.