Monthly Archives: January 2009

| Humour, TV

Les Appendices: A promising start

Les Appendices

Les Appendices: Jean-François Chagnon, Dave Bélisle, Jean-François Provençal, Julien Corriveau, Dominic Montplaisir

Télé-Québec just finished airing the premiere of Les Appendices, a half-hour rapid-fire sketch comedy show by Québécois 20-somethings that focuses on wordplay and what I can only describe as absurdity.

I was first exposed to this troupe a few years ago at screenings of Tivijournal, a mock news show with mock ads that targetted the media. (Sadly, that troupe has been inactive for almost two years now, though I’m hopeful they’ll come back someday.) Before screenings, they’d show some bonus material, which would include a short episode of Les Appendices.

I didn’t go to comedy writers’ school, so it’s hard to describe the type of comedy involved. Just go to the website, which allows you to see the entire episode for a week, and you’ll see what I mean. (You can also see a repeat Wednesday at 12:30pm)

But as an example, from their premiere: Julien asks Dave if he can play with Dave’s guitar. Dave hands over his guitar, and what follows is a minute-long montage of Julien frolicking outdoors with the guitar, pushing it on a swing and playing hockey with it. It’s this kind of silly wordplay that they excel at.

Aired without a laugh track (and for many good reasons), the series has a good habit of doing a sketch, moving on and then revisiting it a few minutes later for an extra laugh. They cut it off just before it reaches annoying-running-gag level.

The first episode (it’s not clear if they’re going to keep doing this) has a DVD menu theme, with fake behind-the-scenes footage and fake audio commentary. It’s a bit odd for a series premiere, but they make it work. I just hope they go beyond it, because there’s just so many audio commentary jokes you can make.

As someone who watched their before-they-made-it-big episodes (which, sadly, are not online), I have some suggestions for their new show:

  1. I liked the old opening. The guys would each be shown running out of class, and they’d all jump in the air outside for the cliché frozen-in-mid-jump celebratory picture, only to have it unfreeze and see them tumble to the ground. The new version has the same gag in CGI form, but I find it loses a lot of the punch.
  2. Tighten it up by just a bit. You can take a single play on words only so far. I know writing dozens of these things every week is hard, but we’re in an ADD world and the more of these you can cram in the better off your show will be.
  3. Add a female. Sorry, you gotta. You can fake being black, but you can’t fake femaleness. That young lady you were performing with tonight, she seems nice. Add her to your cast permanently. I know she doesn’t have glasses and doesn’t play DND, but we’ll get over that.

Les Appendices has also been getting attention from the media (Therrien, Dumas, Arpin, Martel). They all seem to like it.

Here’s hoping that the series will only improve from here.

| Public transit

STM on new schedule today

I was going to have my usual quarterly post analyzing changes to the STM’s bus schedules, which take effect today, but:

  1. I didn’t have time
  2. There aren’t many changes, besides already-announced service improvements
  3. The Gazette’s Linda Gyulai Max Harrold writes about those in this morning’s paper

At the top of the list (PDF) is the 105 Sherbrooke, which gets a much-needed 26% increase in service during rush hour.

| Navel-gazing

Blog software upgrade

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7, which has a whole new backend and some new features for comments. One is a reply feature, which allows you to respond to specific comments (I haven’t tested comment threading yet but hopefully it won’t explode). The other is comment paging, which will split comments to multiple pages when the discussion gets too much (ahem).

Let me know if you see any bugs as I’ve had to update the template myself.

| Humour, TV, Video

Bye Bye online

I was going to write a post about how Radio-Canada doesn’t put their television programs online for us to watch (unlike Global and CTV) despite being paid for by our taxes.

Turns out they have posted the Bye Bye and other New Year’s Eve programs for viewing, for a month. I realize licensing can be a complicated issue sometimes, but is it really so hard to get new programming to include unlimited online broadcast rights?

You can see the Bye Bye starting here in Windows Media format (and decide for yourself whether it’s as racist as everyone says it is). There’s also Laflaque, Infoman and TLMEP.

Unfortunately, the battle to get CBC and RadCan away from that horrible video format is still ongoing.

UPDATE (Jan. 6): Presse canadienne reports that 28 people complained to the CRTC about the Bye Bye, which doesn’t really tell us anything since it’s the nature of the complaints that matter. Radio-Canada has received hundreds of complaints.

| Fun, Montreal

Montreal’s No Pants subway ride

No Pants Day in New York (Improv Everywhere photo)

No Pants Day in New York (Improv Everywhere photo)

Robin Friedman, who has been behind metro parties, scavenger hunts, bubble battles and other fun free stuff in town, is putting together a Montreal event for Improv Everywhere’s famous Global No Pants Subway Ride next Saturday. New York-based Improv Everywhere has been performing this stunt every January since 2002, having its “agents” ride the subway with no pants on (in the middle of winter) and pretend that it’s perfectly normal.

Here’s the Facebook event. For the benefit of those not on Facebook, the details are as follows:

Meeting point is 3pm at Carré St. Louis (near the fountain). From there, agents will receive further instructions and be sent to nearby metro stations to prepare for the no-pants ride. Bring a backpack to hide your pants in, and don’t wear underwear that’s indecent or is designed to attract attention.

Full details are copy-pasted below.

For those of you worried about the legal implications, the STM’s rules do not require the wearing of pants, though they prohibit being barefoot, subject to a fine of $50-$500. So make sure to wear shoes or boots.

An important note: The event is contingent on at least 25 people participating and will be cancelled if it doesn’t get that amount. So make sure to indicate your presence if you plan on going (and bring your friends).

A similar event is also being planned for Toronto.

UPDATE (Jan. 6): “Someone should call the police or something. I would not want my children/nieces/nephews to have to be subjected to this.”

Continue reading →

| Business, Media, Slow News Day

Le Devoir says goodbye to its printing plant

Le Devoir has changed printing plants, from a Quebecor-owned plant in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu to two other plants also owned by Quebecor Media.

One, Imprimerie Mirabel, prints the Journal de Montréal, Ottawa Sun and some Quebecor-owned weeklies, and will print Le Devoir for the western part of Quebec, including Montreal. The other is the Journal de Québec, which will print Le Devoir for the eastern part of Quebec.

Rather than just note the change or have an editor’s note with marketingese about how excited they are with all the changes, the paper wrote a day-night-in-the-life piece as a thank you to its former plant. (via J-Source)

The biggest change that readers will notice with the change is that the early edition (distributed outside Montreal) has a later deadline – 10:45pm instead of 8:50pm. That puts it in line with other daily papers, including The Gazette, and will make a huge difference for things like election results. Later deadlines for papers distributed in the city are unchanged.

Besides being owned by a competitor, the two printing plants have both been in the news in the past year. Imprimerie Mirabel was the centre of a dispute between former corporate siblings Quebecor Media Inc. and Quebecor World Inc. (the latter a commercial printer which is under bankruptcy protection). QMI thought it had a deal on shared use of Imprimerie Mirabel, but QWI never signed the deal and bought its own press. QMI sued and lost.

The Journal de Québec printing plant, of course, went on strike to join locked-out editorial workers on the picket lines.

| Canadiens, Media, Opinion

Kovalev is better than Ovechkin

At least that’s what NHL all-star ballot stuffers think. Because of rampant stuffing from Canadiens fans, and then counter-stuffing from Pittsburgh Penguins fans, the Eastern Conference starting lineup has four Canadiens players (Alex Kovalev, Andrei Markov, Carey Price and Mike Komisarek) and two Penguins players (Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin).

Though Habs and Penguins fans should be embarrassed by this, the fault lies in the National Hockey League, which setup a system of unverified voting for its all-star lineup and even encouraged people to vote as many times as they wanted.

Maybe it’s time to realize that online voting isn’t a proper way to poll the public on anything.

| Media, Opinion

Media predictions: how did we do?

Looking back a year for my media year in review, I stumbled on some forward-looking posts about 2008. Let’s see how things turned out.

My 2008 online media wishlist

What I wanted: Clean up your online layouts

What happened: Layouts got more complex.

Even though mobile use is growing, media outlets respond not by simplifying their websites but by creating separate iPhone sites. Pages are optimized for 1024×768, and each redesign copies the previous one, so they all look the same. All are cluttered with far too many links on the homepage and far too little structure to their layouts.

What I wanted: Use video right

What happened: More junk videos

Experimentation is painful, I know. A lot of talking-head videos were tried and failed, but far too many are still doing this and assuming someone wants to watch it.

Forcing your reporters to shoot video isn’t going to help you unless that reporter knows how to do a good job. But reporters aren’t given the time, training or equipment to do so. Their videos are about the quality of cellphone videos, and are about as useful.

What I wanted: Stop trying to get random people to replace journalists

What happened: User-generated content doesn’t go far beyond comments and pictures of cats

Fortunately, nobody has seriously tried to replace journalists with free Internet labour, though I’m sure they’d jump at the chance if they could. News outlets have learned that you can get the public involved in sharing information and news tips, offering comments on news stories and providing pictures of snow, pets or other uninteresting things. But journalists are the ones you actually assign to produce news.

What I wanted: Setup RSS feeds by category and tag

What happened: Some movement, but not enough

Le Devoir introduced more specific RSS feeds this year, but there wasn’t much other movement in this regard. People who want feeds on specific topics from various media outlets are more likely to decide to rely on Google Alerts instead.

What I wanted: Add more tags to stories

What happened: Tagging introduced, but not exploited

Website redesigns, including the one at The Gazette, allow some form of keyword tagging. But we haven’t seen this truly exploited yet. Most systems are still automated, so getting related stories to link to each other is still hit-and-miss in a lot of plaes.

What I wanted: Larger photos

What happened: Slightly larger photos

Website redesigns understood that with faster Internet connections and larger screens, people can accept photos that are larger than 200 pixels wide. But we’re still far from where we could be. Many still max out around 500 pixels, even though their websites are designed for screens 1024-pixels wide.

What I wanted: Fixed search engines

What happened: Better search engines, but still frustratingly inadequate

The Gazette’s redesign brought in a search engine that works properly, though it’s still pretty basic. Cyberpresse brought in what it thought was a more full-featured search software. If you search for Patrick Lagacé, for example, you get his picture, his bio and a link to email him. Unfortunately, you don’t get a link to his blog, which is what people searching for him might be looking for.

What I wanted: Deportalization

What happened: Uberportalization

You’d think media ubercompanies would learn from successful websites like Google, whose homepage is very simple. Instead, their redesigns shove even more content on their homepages, making them almost infinitely long (five, six, seven screens’ worth). I have no idea who’s going to scan all the way down there for what they want.

Individual section pages help a bit, but they’re still part of a massive system that’s difficult to navigate due to its sheer size.

What I wanted: Give local outlets more control

What happened: Some get more, some get less

Canwest finally gave its daily newspapers their own websites with proper URLs. The Gazette’s website became montrealgazette.com instead of canada.com/montrealgazette. La Presse and the Journal de Montréal still don’t have their own websites, instead being hidden inside the Cyberpresse and Canoe portals.

What I wanted: Less reliance on wire services

What happened: More focus on locally-produced content

Fortunately, local media is more likely to promote its own productions over stuff it syndicates from other sources. Sections like health and technology, however, and especially sports tend to be filled with automatically-generated wire content.

What I wanted: Setup internal blogs to communicate with readers

What happened: Blogs started, forgotten

La Presse and The Gazette started blogs about themselves, but neither is updated very often now. No major news organizations communicate with readers on a regular basis about themselves through blogs, which is a shame because they need all the help they can get in these times.

What I wanted: Niche blogs

What happened: Columnist blogs

Lots of columnists started blogs about their beats, though many holes are still evident and not enough effort is being made keeping those blogs updated and publicizing them.

Worse, when the columnist goes on vacation (or just doesn’t feel like updating), the blog goes dead. No effort is made to bring in guest bloggers for those times. These niche blogs are about the people, not the subject, and most people don’t care where they get their soccer/TV/food/environment news from.

What I wanted: Static content

What happened: Disappearing content

I pointed to CBC’s “In Depth” section as an example of stuff that news agencies should look at doing. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen much of it. Feature stories go up and disappear within days as new content is uploaded. Archives have to be searched for instead of being browsed.

We still have an article-based mentality, where journalists summarize past events of a story instead of linking to a static article with all the information so far.

So when bloggers, for example, want to point to a page that explains a person, place or issue, they point to Wikipedia, even if the Wikipedia page is about three sentences long.

What I wanted: Solving article duplication

What happened: More article duplication

This is a problem a lot of newspapers experience: A story is written for the paper, uploaded to the web the night before, and then uploaded again automatically with all of the newspaper’s content. The result is two copies of the same article, though often with different headlines, photos or formatting.

No significant moves have been made to solve this problem that I can see.

What I wanted: Stop splitting stories across multiple pages

What happened: Users given “all on one page” option

With the speeds our computers operate at and all the Flash ads, videos and other junk that need to be downloaded on every page, it seems ridiculous that newspaper websites split text articles up on different pages. It’s obviously not to reduce page load times, it’s to increase ad impressions by forcing people to load multiple pages.

Increasingly, “all on one page” is being offered as an option, but this isn’t the default. I have no idea why anyone would want only part of a story to load when they click on it.

Le Devoir’s big media issues for 2008

In January, Le Devoir pondered what the media’s going to have to deal with this year.

  1. What do we do with TQS? Well, we gave it to Remstar and they promptly fired everyone. Their ratings are crap, but they don’t have many expenses.
  2. How do we finance television? The CRTC said no to cable providers handing money to conventional TV broadcasters, so it looks like advertising is still the way to go.
  3. How long will the Journal de Québec situation go on? Just when some people thought it would last forever, a deal was reached in June and the employees were back to work in August. Now we wonder if the same will happen at the Journal de Montréal.
  4. How do we handle journalist multitasking? La Presse dealt with job classification in a way that its union was happy with. The Journal de Québec did it in a way the union could live with. Others are still trying to figure it out. But besides dealing with union roadblocks, the media needs to figure out whether it’s worth it for reporters to take crappy videos and photos instead of relying on professional photographers.
  5. How will online distribution royalties be handled? The U.S. writers strike ended in a way that still hasn’t resolved that issue. Royalties won’t really be resolved until someone starts making money online.
  6. Will we have Internet CanCon? The CRTC decided it would not regulate the Internet, and media companies were happy with that. Net neutrality is still a problem we have to deal with though.
| Media

Quebec/Canadian media 2008 in review

(Because, unlike some media outlets, I like to wait until the year is actually finished before I summarize what happened)

A year ago, I called 2007 “a bad year for Quebec journalism”. Had I known what was in store for 2008, I would have called it an omen for worse things to come. What were dozens of job losses then became hundreds of layoffs a year later.

And above all, that’s what 2008 is going to be known for: layoff figures in the triple digits from Torstar, Canwest, CTV, Sun Media and Rogers.

TQS, the Halifax Daily News, the Journal de Trois-Rivières, Global’s This Morning Live, 940 News, the Carleton Free Press, MediaScout, all shut down because they couldn’t justify themselves financially.

The stock market crash correction, housing crisis and credit crunch didn’t make it easier, but they didn’t cause these problems. The media revolution affecting newspapers and other traditional media is only getting more violent, and hundreds of people are losing their jobs while the industry figures out how to make money again. Quality journalism, which was never much of a money-maker in the first place, becomes among the first things to suffer.

Grab a bottle of your favourite booze, ’cause this one’s long.

Continue reading →

| Montreal, Opinion, Slow News Day

Snow

This is what it’s come to folks: Snow is the No. 1 story in this city in 2008.

Now, it would be easy to blame the media for over-hyping this issue, pushing snow as news during a season when very little other news happens.

Instead, I blame you.

You who talk about nothing but the weather, who whine incessantly about how there has been snow on your street for a whole five minutes and the city hasn’t done anything about it yet. You who want your street cleared ASAP but are too lazy to move your car out of the way first. You who made the Weather Network one of the few networks not to face a significant downturn this year. You who are so disconnected from society that the weather is the only conversation material you have available in half your conversations.

It’s snow. Get over it.

| Media

Off the Hill, out of a job

In November, when Canwest announced it would be cutting 5% of its workforce, everyone at The Gazette started getting nervous. Would there be layoffs? How many people is the paper going to lose?

The last round of buyouts was less than a year before, and the paper is still paying those people not to work for it anymore.

Shortly after Canwest’s announcement, details of a buyout offer were circulated and people started applying. In the end, more people applied than The Gazette was willing to part with, and that number was less than some had feared (it’s less than 5% of the newsroom, probably in part because of those buyouts last January).

The cuts in the editorial department number only three. Of them, only one is a reporter. But, as Editor-in-Chief Andrew Phillips pointed out, combined they represent 95 years of service to The Gazette.

As of Jan. 1, all three are unemployed, albeit with a sack full of cash.

Elizabeth Thompson was The Gazette’s Ottawa bureau chief, and as it turns out she will be its last. With the establishment of Canwest News Service in Ottawa, coverage of Parliament Hill at Canwest newspapers has been centralized reporters from the regional papers have been sent home. Even the Ottawa Citizen has cut down its Parliamentary staff.

On one hand, it just makes sense to avoid duplication. In the United States, the number of reporters covering Washington has plummeted as smaller regional papers decide to simply rely on wire services than go through the expense of setting up their own bureaus.

On the other hand, Quebec-Ottawa relations are complicated to say the least, and Thompson had carved a niche for herself covering the Bloc Québécois and other Quebec interests in Ottawa. Her final story, which appears in Friday’s Gazette, is an interview with Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser. It includes a video.

I spent Thursday evening with Thompson, resolving some issues about the Fraser video which for some reason couldn’t be read or uploaded. Because she was based in Ottawa, her presence in the office was rare (we’d communicate over the phone), but she was in town so she stopped by the office. During various uploads, downoads and processing cycles, I asked her what she’ll be up to next. Though she has a few ideas, nothing is set in stone beyond a few freelance gigs she’s lined up. But she says that, for now, she’s not leaving journalism and she’s not leaving Parliament Hill. She’s promised to let Fagstein readers know when future projects launch.

UPDATE (Jan. 24): Thompson has accepted a job as a parliamentary reporter for Sun Media.

In her final goodbye post at her On the Hill blog, Thompson looks at the history of The Gazette’s Ottawa bureau, and the legacy that is leaving with her. She mentions the difficult choice she had to make, between returning to Montreal with The Gazette and leaving altogether.

The buyout money probably helped with that decision.

Peter Cooney was The Gazette’s Insight section editor, soccer blogger, as well as the author of its weekly Bluffer’s Guide. He was also the person who setup the Quark-based publishing system that’s still being used to put out the paper (with Quark 3.32!)

He was also one of my journalism professors at Concordia, where he taught me a class on, funny enough, copy editing. He taught me British words like “lorry” and “petrol” and “spot on” and “Wolves rule“. I promptly forgot everything he taught me.

Cooney doesn’t have the foggiest idea what he’ll be up to next, though he plans to keep blogging for The Gazette for now. If you have any suggestions, let me know and I’ll pass them on.

Finally, Leon Harris is the Ted Stevens of Gazette copy editors, and worked for the paper most of his adult life* (almost half of those 95 years of service are his). He retires as a copy editor, though I knew him best as the night assistant city editor, which meant he was the guy who city reporters filed their copy to in the evening.

Harris had a reputation as being a grumpy old man (hence the Stevens reference), but also someone who demanded a lot of his reporters, especially younger ones. Summer interns would quickly learn to fear him, with the knowledge that every error, every weak lead or insufficiently explained fact would be called out with an angry demand that it be fixed.

On the other hand, when he handed out praise, even faintly, those same reporters would take that as a badge of honour, knowing they achieved a near-impossible task.

Harris was also, due to his decades of experience, a walking encyclopedia about Gazette style, Gazette history and Montreal in general. Many questions would be more easily answered by asking Leon than by looking it up in a book.

Since he was close to retirement anyway, the buyout was almost a no-brainer. For a man who doesn’t even own a computer at home, the revolution in the media landscape gave extra incentive to take the money and run.

*UPDATE: Leon tells me The Gazette wasn’t actually his first job, but he started working for it in 1967, so he’s been at it 41 of 65 years.