Station C, the Montreal coworking space I wrote about a year ago (and which got some attention in La Presse as it nears the first anniversary of its opening), has apparently spawned a similar effort in Joliette. Copartage Bureau Joliette opened this week to great local fanfare.
Monthly Archives: January 2009
R.I.P. Mix 96
In case you haven’t heard, Mix 96 ends today. In what is no doubt a bid to save some money, CJFM 95.9 is rebranding itself a Virgin Radio station (on orders from owner Astral Media). The change will take place at a time that for some stupid reason has been kept secret until later this morning, but will definitely be “during the day” today. (UPDATE: 4pm, you can watch the countdown in case you’ve forgotten how to count to 4pm)
Because the entire identity of the station is changing, anything with the word “mix” in it has to be replaced. They’ll have a new logo, new station IDs, new vans, a new website and even a new call-in number.
The format is saying the same (“Today’s best music”, or top 40 lowest-common-denominator pop songs), but there are programming changes that see some good local talent go out the window.
In case you haven’t heard the endless plugging on the air, the station is being hyped everywhere (and that will only increase now that it’s actually been launched). Program Director Bob Harris has started a blog to get everyone hyped up.
One of the first obvious questions is: Why change a brand everyone knows and replace it with the equivalent of a giant McDonald’s sign?
Astral Media (our parent company) has the rights to use the Virgin Radio name in Canada.
The Virgin Brand brings some amazing power. It represents an edge of cool, it’s irreverent, it’s sexy, its fun, it’s world class and constantly surprising.
Are you sold yet? They bought a brand and it has a good marketing team behind it. How could they not abandon their brand for this?
MIX 96 is one of Astral’s Montreal English radio stations (CHOM and CJAD the other two) and as we roll the Virgin radio name out across the country to other stations, we need to be part of it here too. Just because head office made the decision don’t think for a second that we had to do it.
Translation: If I pretend to like this horrendous gutting of a local station’s identity, I might get a promotion some day from a corporate executive who wants yes men working for him. Or at least I won’t be fired.
Bob shot the Sherriff
Murray Sherriffs: Gone.
The main face that has left the station is Murray Sherriffs, of Cat, Lisa and the Sherriff. He left last month in what is being described as “a programming decision.” Now it’s Cat, Lisa and classified third morning person to be announced in February.
Harris describes Sherriffs as a stand-up fellow despite the station’s apparent falling out with him, which also involved scrubbing any reference to him from their site and deleting all his past blog entries (you can get a taste in Google’s cache).
Sherriffs also took the high road when asked by Fagstein about his departure:
As you’ve heard, the radio station is being rebranded and sometimes hard business decisions have to be made.
But with the closing of this door comes other opportunities and I’ll be meeting this challenge as I have met others.
As I said on my MIX blog, the sentiments of one of my favorite songs by ”Chumbawamba”, ring especially true these days;
”I get knocked down
But I get up again
You’re never going to keep me down
We’ll be singing
When we’re winning”.
No word on Sherriffs’s next move, but we’ll let you know when it happens.
Seacrest in
Ryan Seacrest: Cheap filler
The new faces coming? The biggest one appears to be Ryan Seacrest. Yes, that Ryan Seacrest. He does this radio show which will air during weekday evenings at 7 p.m. It replaces the RJ Daniels show, though Daniels will stay on to cut in with local information (like the Habs score and weather) and follow with his own show until midnight.
Harris for some reason needs to confess that Seacrest won’t do his show from Montreal (no, really?), and instead does it from L.A. where it’s beamed to hundreds of stations. Now 95.9FM in Montreal will be one of those faceless stations rebroadcasting Ryan Seacrest. Doesn’t that sound awesome?
Feel for the Rhythm
The other programming change is the disappearance of Rhythms International. The Sunday night program, which had been on the station for more than 20 years, aired its final show Dec. 21, and is being replaced by UK Hit 40, another syndicated show replacing a local production. Like the ousting of Sherriffs, this is described as a “tough programming decision,” but essentially comes down to ratings.
Other programming, such as Nat Lauzon and the 80s/90s Nooner, will stay (though the latter will undergo a name change).
A sad day for local DJs
What particularly sucks about all this is that, unlike local television production, local radio production doesn’t require all that much work. A host and a producer. That’s pretty much it. When all you’re doing is playing music singles and doing small-talk between them, it should make sense to just have someone do it in-house.
But instead Astral is spending money to act as a rebroadcaster of foreign content. And not even good stuff. We’re talking about Ryan Seacrest here. The fact that Astral thinks Montrealers would prefer that (with the occasional local guy giving a 30-second weather report and local sports score) to spending an evening with a local DJ is sad.
Sadder still is that Astral might be right. Despite a few comments on my blog and a few emails to CJFM management, there isn’t much outrage over this. A Facebook group started up to fight it has less than 50 members. There’s been nothing in the other media about it.
It seems either Montrealers don’t know about what’s going on, or they don’t care.
Well, I do. Long live Mix 96.
UPDATE (Jan. 13): In case you missed the moment of launch, the station has posted a video of it on Facebook, which is apparently serving as their primary communications tool as their website is beyond simplistic.
Media coverage of the launch is light, but there are brief articles about it at Voir, Radio-Canada and the Journal de Montréal. Julien Brault also mentions it.
Infopresse has the two 15-second TV spots that are running on CTV.
UPDATE (Jan. 17): Clear Channel is planning massive job cuts in the U.S. in a move to nationalize radio production and gut local programming, according to the New York Post.
No Pants Day and the observer effect
Evil media vampires plot to suck out the fun
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, according to Wikipedia (and the article sounds nerdy enough to be true) is a theory about observation in quantum physics that says you can know the position or momentum of a particle, but not both (it’s an argument used against Star Trek’s molecular transporter device, which the show’s writers conveniently solved with the creation of a mythical Heisenberg compensator). It’s a principle often confused by idiots like myself with the observer effect, in which observing an event alters it. For humans, psychologists call this “reactivity”
Today, as I walked to St. Louis Square to participate in Montreal’s first No Pants metro ride, I noticed an abnormally large number of television cameras and professional photographers gathered behind a hilariously small fence. They’d been banished from the group by its leader.
This event, which was supposed to catch metro riders off-guard, got a bit too much media attention in advance. My post begat some others (including one from Dominic Arpin) and culminated in an article in La Presse the morning of the event. From there, it seems to have made every assignment editor’s desk and with nothing else going on today, they decided it would make a great photo op.
Of course, if any of the journalists had familiarized themselves with Improv Everywhere or had bothered to talk to the organizers in advance (only The Gazette and La Presse made any effort to do so), they’d have learned pretty quickly that a giant television camera and journalists with notepads would ruin the entire event.
No Pants metro ride participants
Complicating matters was the fact that, despite the attention it got, there were only about a dozen people who showed up to participate. More people came to observe the event than take part in it.
After waiting for stragglers and discussing it with some of the people gathered, organizer Robin Friedman yelled “It’s cancelled!” and everyone went their separate ways.
Later, she told me she was really pissed about the media presence (myself excepted), and slightly less so by the fact that when Facebook says someone’s going to be there, it’s anyone’s guess if that’s actually true.
So don’t expect any big articles or front-page photos about the event in Sunday’s paper. Instead, you’ll read an article next Saturday in the Gazette about how the media ruined Montreal’s participation in a global day of fun.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to publicize an event like this to get enough participants but not so much that the news people get wind of it and blow everyone’s cover. A solution to that problem is being thought out, hopefully in time for Montreal’s Second Annual No Pants Subway Ride.
Elsewhere
The event in Toronto seems to have gone off well. The Sun has a story with video (though I couldn’t make it play) and there’s already a video on YouTube as well.
Other regional reports can be found at Improv Everywhere along with the reports from New York.
Reminder: No Pants Day today @ 3pm
Details on the pantsless action from my earlier blog post. 3pm at Carré St-Louis (Sherbrooke metro)
Facebook shows 54 confirmed, which could mean anything really.
Just remember to bring a bag to put your pants in, and don’t bring a camera because that will ruin the effect.
Young Girl Talking About Herself
Guillaume sent me this video, from the maker of Hampster On a Piano (Eating Popcorn)
To most of us, YouTube is a giant library of random videos, some of which were even posted by the copyright owners.
But to many others, YouTube is a community of video bloggers, and people who talk to each other by staring into a low-quality webcam and posting their unedited thoughts to their channel in an effort to get friends and seem cool … or something.
Personally, I’ve always wondered: Who, other than pedophiles, wants to watch a 16-year-old girl spend five minutes saying nothing of consequence about herself?
Heck, even pedophiles have to be pretty bored to watch some of this stuff.
Globe to publish on three Sundays, layoff staff
The Globe and Mail today gleefully announced that during the 2010 Olympics, it will produce special Sunday editions for the first time in its history. Unfortunately, they’ll only be distributed in British Columbia, where the games will be hosted, and they’ll only go out on three days: Feb. 14, 21, and 28, 2010.
Naturally, the article rams down our throats that these will be collectors’ editions and that people should buy 150 copies each.
What it didn’t so gleefully announce, according to J-Source, is a “voluntary separation” program to reduce staff at the paper. The email also threatens non-voluntary layoffs if not enough people choose to leave, which it suggests is likely. No hard number is given as far as the number of reductions the Globe needs. UPDATE: The Globe says between 80 and 90 people need to go, representing about 10% of the total workforce. Other coverage from AP and Reuters.
This appears to be unrelated to the 105 jobs CTV cut in November, as those were at its television assets.
For those who may know someone facing less-than-voluntary separation, Globe blogger Craig Silverman has some suggestions on how to deal with them.
Analog TV shutdown is a mistake
We’re about a month away from the end of broadcast television. … Maybe.
The United States, eager to auction off valuable spectrum space, has set Feb. 17 as a mandatory cut-off date, when all televisions must stop analog transmission and switch to digital.
The problem is that millions of television sets are not capable of receiving digital television signals and won’t be able to receive anything after this date.
No problem, the government says. They’ll institute a rebate program on converter boxes that receive the digital signal and spit out an analog one that the TV can read. Every household can get a $40 coupon, and the program will cost about $1.3 billion. Yeah, sure, that’s throwing an insane amount of money at the problem, but it’s much less than they would gain in auctions of the spectrum to various wireless interests.
But there’s a problem. The budget has run out, the coupons are on a waiting list and millions of people don’t have their converter boxes a month before the turnoff and switchover is supposed to take place. It’s gotten so bad President-elect Barack Obama is already suggesting there be a delay in the switchover.
In Canada, the switch happens on Aug. 31, 2011, for the entire country except the North. We’re facing the same issues two years down the road.
CTV/Rogers announce Olympic lineup
The consortium of private broadcasters headed by CTV has announced a huge lineup of play-by-play announcers, news anchors, former Olympians and other analysts who will travel to Vanvouver and Whistler for the 2010 Winter Olympics. It also tells us what networks coverage will appear on.
In English, the team is headed by Olympic veteran Brian Williams, who left CBC in 2006 after CTV won the rights to the 2010 Games. English Games coverage will be carried on CTV’s main network, CTV-owned TSN, Rogers Sportsnet, Rogers-owned OMNI, Rogers-owned OLN (Outdoor Life Network), and ATN, along with Rogers radio stations, CTVOlympics.ca and the Globe and Mail.
There’s also, I’m sorry to say, entertainment (eTalk/Ben Mulroney) and music (MuchMusic) reporting to go along with it. (I’m not quite sure how much music-related coverage there can be of the Olympics, but whatever…)
In French, the team will be headed by Canadiens play-by-play man Pierre Houde and Olympic broadcasting veteran Richard Garneau. French Games coverage will be carried on RDS, RIS Info-Sports, the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network and … TQS.
There’s a certain irony in TQS being part of the deal. Its participation predates its bankruptcy and change in ownership, going back to when it was part-owned by CTVglobemedia. At the time (2005), TQS was supposed to be the primary broadcaster of French Olympic coverage. Now it seems clear that, even if TQS is going to have original Olympic programming and priority for the big-ticket events like hockey, the main network behind coverage in French is RDS.
TQS also has another problem: Unlike Radio-Canada (and to a lesser extent TVA), it doesn’t broadcast outside Quebec. So francophones outside Quebec who don’t get TQS or RDS on cable or satellite (let’s for the moment assume this is a nontrivial figure) are out of luck. On the plus side though, apparently a deal has been worked out to give cable users outside Quebec free access to RDS and TQS during the Games.
Meanwhile, advertisers are noting the highly inflated rate card CTV is using to make up for the $150 million it spent to secure rights to the 2010 and 2012 Games.
Worst government website ever
Remember the 90s in website design? The random colours, the clip art, the Geocities horizontal line images, the bad anti-aliasing?
For all that and more, I give you the Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat! That’s the organization that supposedly organizes conferences and such between the provinces and federal government.
Its website, however, looks like it’s for organizing a church bake sale.
Overburdened
Media blogger Tim Burden interviewed me yesterday and has a post on his blog with quotes that make me sound really smart. So you should check that out.
And then adore me.
As usual.
Bye-Bye won’t go away
Quebec has two New Year’s traditions: one is watching Radio-Canada’s Bye-Bye variety show. The other is spending an entire fucking week MONTH talking about it in the press.
- What were the ratings like?
- Did someone post it illegally online?
- Was it racist?
- Was it not funny?
- How many people complained?
- What do black people think about it?
- What does Radio-Canada have to say about it?
- How much did Radio-Canada know was going to be aired ahead of time?
- Should Radio-Canada even be doing Bye-Byes? (with response from Therrien)
- Has Radio-Canada turned into trash TV?
- Why haven’t they said anything yet?
- Does Jean-François Mercier regret being on it?
- OMG HE GOT A DEATH THREAT FROM SOME WACKO?!?!
- What did Nathalie Simard think of all the jokes at her expense?
- What are Véro and Louis going to say when they respond to the controversy?
- Will Véro lose her job as spokesperson for the Royal Canadian Mint?
- Why haven’t Véro and Louis talked yet?
- What did René Angélil think of it?
- What did the federal heritage minister think of it?
- What are they going to do next year?
- Will Bye Bye 2009 have to make jokes about Bye Bye 2008?
- OMG THEY DIDN’T APOLOGIZE about making fun of anglos!
- Isn’t it great that Quebecers protested this racism?
- Doesn’t the CBC make fun of Quebecers just as badly?
- Will Radio-Canada apologize to the Black Coalition?
- Will Radio-Canada’s apology satisfy the Black Coalition?
- Will this finally put an end to the issue in the media?
- What more does Radio-Canada need to do?
- Did the mea culpas satisfy Nathalie Simard?
- Isn’t this all Nathalie Simard’s fault?
- What did writer François Avard think of all this?
- How does Taxi 0-22 get away with these racist jokes?
It’s gotten so bad the anglo media is starting to take notice, with belated articles in the National Post and Globe and Mail. Naturally, the Journal has an article talking about how there’s articles in the anglo media about this now.
Now that this is officially a thing, the media is putting together stories about the stories:
- Are we exaggerating the issue?
- Has this been in the news too long?
- Has the Journal gone crazy with Bye Bye stories?
- Has the media in general over-covered this?
- Is that because the Journal is owned by Quebecor, which owns TVA, RadCan’s competitor?
- What other random points of analysis can we put together about this?
This doesn’t even include all the stuff that was written about it before it aired.
And this is just the beginning folks. Some actual news better break to push this off the front page or Jean Charest is going to have to create a commission on this.
UPDATE (Jan. 9): Véro and Louis’s mea-culpa-but-not-really has ensured at least a few more days of this.
YULblog relaunches tonight
Local bloggers (and their groupies) might recognize YULblog … yulblog … Yulblog … however you capitalize it … as a monthly meeting of local bloggers (and their groupies) for drinks, discussions and oggling iPhones.
But once upon a time it was also a website that republished Montreal-centric blog posts from its members. That part fell by the wayside because the people behind it (essentially Patrick Tanguay) didn’t have enough time to maintain it (see Patrick’s comment below).
Now, organization of Yulblog‘s monthly meetings is being handed over to the new, less busy hands of Michael Boyle, and the website is being relaunched tonight to coincide with this month’s Yulblog meeting (8 p.m. at La Quincaillerie, 980 Rachel St. E., near Parc Lafontaine). It’s worth braving early January weather to go see.
I hope.
Star runs You Be The Editor quiz
The Toronto Star, still looking for some holiday filler, has produced a journalism ethics quiz which it invites readers to answer on its website. (via J-Source)
The Gazette did something similar a while back.
Editors deal on a regular basis with tough ethical decisions, and must choose between publishing something or holding it back. The Star gives some examples, at least some of which were based on actual events which were published in the paper and got complaints.
Most are unfortunately a bit too easy to answer for me.
As holiday filler for this blog a public service, here are my answers to the quiz and the explanations for them:
Gazette photos of the year
The Gazette’s Phil Carpenter (who has a blog now, by the way), has created a little movie of Gazette photographers’ pictures of the year.
Yeah, we get it, Being Erica is set in Toronto
I just watched the premiere of CBC’s Being Erica, a show I was hopeful about a few weeks ago because of stuff it produced that it turns out has nothing to do with the show.
I was worried that this would turn into another amateur-produced series with cliché-crammed scripts that scream “this is a Canadian-produced show that wouldn’t survive 10 seconds south of the border”.
After the first episode, it’s too early to tell either way whether the show is worth watching. There’s plenty of cliché in it (rain starts pouring instantaneously when her date totally disses her). But there’s just enough nudity insanity later on to make up for it… I think.
I’ll let you know when I form an opinion. Until then you can watch it and form your own.
One thing that does annoy me (and, I imagine, most of the country) is the constant unnecessary references to Toronto. The high-school setting is set in 1992 (and makes a joke about a home computer that is at least a decade older than that), and references to the Blue Jays winning the World Series are inserted everywhere. The actual printed word “Toronto” appears at least four times in the 45-minute episode by my count. Even Sex and the City doesn’t reference its home city as often.
I’m starting to wonder if the city doesn’t have some product placement contract with the series somewhere, or if the Torontonians behind CBC television programming are really that obsessed with name-dropping their home town.
UPDATE: The premiere’s ratings were good or awful, depending on who you ask, but it’s hard to judge because the World Junior Hockey Championship on TSN sucked away most Canadian viewers. Nevertheless, critics seem to like it.
Inside the CBC has a post about Being Erica’s social media strategy (which will no doubt be analyzed to death on every Canadian social media blog). It includes the blog and YouTube videos I raved about earlier, as well as a fake Facebook profile (isn’t that a no-no on Facebook?).
UPDATE (Jan. 16): I just watched Episode 2, which apparently tried to make up for all the Torontoing of the pilot by mentioning Montreal seven too many times, and name-dropping some other towns too (Etobicoke?). Is the CanCon Committee paying them for every mention of Canadiana?