Monthly Archives: February 2009

| Montreal, TV

Canwest considers selling E! network, including CJNT

Canwest (my employer) issued a news release today saying it is “exploring strategic options” for its second network of broadcast television stations, including CJNT in Montreal, which form the E! network (formerly CH). The options, it says, could include selling them.

Canwest, which has been struggling with huge debt, has been exploring options in its vast media empire, saying it wanted to protect its core assets (11 major dailies, comunity weeklies, the Global television network, cable networks and Canada.com and related websites).

The press release says specifically that “as they are currently configured, these stations are not core to our television operations going forward.”

CJNT, broadcasting on Channel 62, is Montreal’s ethnic TV station. It changed hands a few times, finally going to Canwest in 2000. Its CRTC license requires a minimum amount of locally-produced ethnic community programming, but for the rest of primetime the station carries simulcasted U.S. shows. In 2007, CJNT and other CH stations were rebranded as E!, focusing on celebrity gossip, but keeping the primetime sloppy seconds from Global.

Affected stations

So, anyone wanna buy CJNT?

UPDATE: The Globe and Mail, obviously, is all over this story, saying that someone picking up the stations for peanuts would be easier than Canwest continuing to run money-losing operations or having to face severe shutdown costs.

The Globe also says that Astral, Rogers and others aren’t interested in buying broadcast television outlets, preferring cable channels instead. Getting rid of these might end up being as difficult as getting rid of TQS.

La Presse quotes from CJNT’s general manager (one of six employees at the station) saying it’s not bad news if it gets sold.

| Blogosphere, Media, Montreal

McDonnell on Daybreak

CBC Daybreak this morning explored newspapers vs. the Internet, and interviewed local blogueuse Kate McDonnell as well as Linkie Giuseppe Valiante. The interview is online (sadly, in streaming RealAudio format) on CBC’s website.

Both McDonnell and Valiante agree that local news outlets have to focus on local news, because international news is so accessible.

| Montreal, Radio

Cohen on Sherriffs

Murray Sherriffs

Murray Sherriffs

The Suburban’s Mike Cohen interviews ex-Mix 96 morning man Murray Sherriffs in his column this week (where he totally name-drops this blog), about Sherriffs’s departure from the station. It makes it pretty clear that it was the station’s decision to let him go:

When Mix announced in early December that it was being rebranded to Virgin 96 Radio, Sherriffs said he was called into the office of Bob Harris, vice-president of programming for Astral Radio’s three Montreal radio stations. After three and a half years of partnering with Cat Spencer and Lisa Player, while contributing to the most unique newscast in town, Sherriffs was told he was not a good fit for the new label.

“I was shocked,” he said, “but not surprised. This is radio after all. It was done very professionally and I have no hard feelings. Our ratings for the Mix morning show were very strong, especially with the new PPMs (Personal People Meters) so to be truthful I had felt kind of safe in my position.

As for what’s next, Cohen says Sherriffs isn’t rushing:

He finds his extended vacation very relaxing and spends most of his time making furniture. Soon, though, he will begin knocking on a few doors.

Cohen makes some offhand suggestions for where he might end up next. Unfortunately, this is about the worst time to try to get a job in just about any media, even for someone with a modest following like Sherriffs.

The article, unfortunately, can’t be linked to directly, but it’s part of the freely available online version of this week’s Suburban, starting on Page 4. It’s followed by a piece on The Monitor shutting down, which quotes people who used to work there.

| Media, Navel-gazing

Former Gazette intern makes me look unaccomplished

Heba Aly (slight dramatization)

Heba Aly (slight dramatization)

The way media outlets hire has changed dramatically over the years. Once upon a time, if a newspaper needed a new reporter, you’d just find the kid of a veteran reporter and assume that the journalism gene was passed down through a chromosome. It’s no coincidence that some of the reporters of today share the same family names as the reporters of yesterday.

But recently, as the demand for journalism jobs has far outpaced supply, the media have gotten more picky. The Gazette goes through a process every year where dozens of journalism students go through a screening and interview process, and only a handful of them are hired as summer interns.

Even then, most summer interns don’t last. The employees they replace inevitably come back from summer vacation, maternity leave or wherever else they went, and around September most of the interns either go back to school, move away or look for another job.

For many of those former interns, The Gazette is a footnote in their careers. They move on to the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, or sometimes even greater things.

I was first hired as a Gazette intern in 2005. Along with me, the copy editor, were four reporters. One of them was Heba Aly.

I hadn’t heard much from Heba since she left the Gazette after that internship. But I came across her name in a news article. It seems she’s been expelled from Sudan where she had been working as a reporter, freelancing for outlets like Bloomberg, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Globe and Mail, though mostly she has been filing to the UN humanitarian news service. She’s been touring Africa, going to Senegal, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Ghana, and I’m pretty sure she had a two-week stint reporting from the surface of the moon at one point. She scored a trip there through the Pulitzer Center, after she’d worked for the CBC and Toronto Star. I got this from her biography page.

She has a blog with her dispatches to various news outlets, and a personal blog about what it’s like living in these places.

My CV, meanwhile, reads something like: Gazette copy editor: 2005-2006, 2008-present.

In other words, she’s making me look bad.

This needs to stop.

UPDATE: Aly speaks to Reporters Without Borders about her experience (via J-Source).

| Media

Journal Daily Digest: The union cause is growing

Journal picket line

Support for locked-out Journal de Montréal workers seems to be growing, or at least solidifying. After provincial politicians agreed to boycott the Journal and Quebecor Journal-replacement journalists, federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has also agreed not to grant the paper any interviews. He joins the rather expected NDP and Bloc caucuses, but not the Conservatives (at least, the ones who weren’t dodging the question from Le Devoir).

Meanwhile, the Union des artistes and the Fédération autonome de l’enseignement have both decided to support the union (again, not unexpectedly) and say they’ll refuse interview requests. The UDA’s boycott (and the stated reasons for it) were enough to prompt an open letter from Pierre-Karl Péladeau to set the record straight.

Sign, sign, everywhere they sign

All this gave the union a kick in its step as it took to the street today to protest against Quebecor. The theme speficially was the we-take-all-your-rights contracts that Quebecor is making freelancers sign. (I can’t help but point out how self-serving it is to only worry about freelancers’ contracts now that you’re on the street.) Plenty of coverage of the pickets from:

How much do they make?

There’s still lots of confusion over how much journalists at the Journal make in a year. The employer says the average is $88,000, while the union counters that the average salary is more like $50-$60,000 a year. (Editor Lyne Robitaille, feeling that her reputation is being threatened, took another page out of the Journal (PDF) to explain her position to readers again.) Richard Martineau rakes Richard Therrien over the coals for Therrien’s blind acceptance of the union’s figures, I guess as revenge for all the stuff Therrien has written about Martineau lately).

I don’t have access to the figures, but I’m willing to bet this is merely a difference in interpretation. The employer is using figures on T4 sheets, which represent the total money being paid to employees, including overtime and other monetary benefits. The union is probably using the base salary as set in the contract for its figure, which doesn’t include the perks and is therefore significantly lower. If you’re getting paid $88,000 for 30-hour weeks, that’s one thing; if it’s for 42-hour weeks because of all the overtime, that’s another.

Also of note (and nobody disputes this) is that the staff at the Journal is tilted toward the higher end of the scale because the average age is high and the average level of experience is also high.

In other news

| Montreal, Radio

12 jobs to be cut at Info 690

Corus today announced it is cutting 12 people at its Info 690 all-news Montreal radio station, representing about half of its 30 unionized employees. This comes about six months after it decided to effectively shut down anglo sister station 940 News, laying off 18 people.

Corus says it’s reorganizing the station, though it’s unclear if that reorganization will be as severe as what happened to CINW. They hope to avoid layoffs through attrition and voluntary leaves.

Still, those people amazed that a staff of 30 can run an all-news radio station will be even more impressed if a staff of half that can continue doing so.

UPDATE: La Presse has a story about the job cuts, which also affect 10 administrative employees.

| Media, Montreal, Video

Gazette explores anglo exodus, DiMonte

It’s really a story only The Gazette can do. And therefore it’s a story The Gazette must do: The exodus of anglophones from Quebec.

So in a five-part feature series that ends today, the paper went all out, sending reporter David Johnston and photographer/videographer Phil Carpenter out to Calgary and Vancouver to interview ex-Montrealers.

DiMonte

Of particular interest to media watchers is probably Part 3, which interviews former CHOM morning man Terry DiMonte and his sidekick Peppermint Patti MacNeil (ex-Lorange). Although focused on language and culture, it also goes into a bit more detail about DiMonte’s decision to move to Calgary and work at Corus’s Q107 (it was business, not language politics, that was behind the change):

DiMonte’s more recent departure can be seen as an example of the “normalization” of anglo migration from Quebec. As political and linguistic uncertainty has subsided in Quebec, anglos now leaving Quebec are tending to leave for the same ordinary dull reason that people everywhere move – opportunity. In DiMonte’s case, there was also the added complication of a troubled relationship with a new boss; but there again, as he says himself, there’s nothing so unusual about that. Here he was, a big fish in a small English market in a large French city, breezing along in midlife at the top of his profession, when suddenly he was presented with a new contract that called for him to sign in and out of work every day.

Until that offer was put before him by Bob Harris, newly arrived operations manager at CHOM, DiMonte had worked for years under simple contract terms: a 2-per-cent annual salary increase, and a car. But now he was being asked to sign a 15-page contract with a lot of fine print. DiMonte says he went to see Astral Media vice-president Rob Braide about it all, and Braide warned him, “Don’t you dare try to bring in a lawyer.”

The day after the 15-page contract was put before him, Corus Entertainment, owners of Q107 in Calgary, called DiMonte. A five-year offer; big money. Patti MacNeil remembers being at home on the day she heard DiMonte was moving to Calgary, and thinking, “Cool, someone new in the market, someone I know and like and will listen to.” But then the incumbent morning-show team at Q107 was let go, and the next thing she knew, DiMonte phoned her up and asked what she would say if Corus were to approach her – about teaming up with him.”

Of course, some might call this whining.

If the name Bob Harris sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the guy in charge of CJFM, aka Virgin Radio 96 aka the crap they replaced Mix 96 with. Both are owned by Astral Media. (Q92, where DiMonte phones in a noon show, is owned by Corus.)

Video

Aside from the big features are two video series from Carpenter (all compiled on this page): a documentary of interviews from those same ex-Montrealers (including DiMonte), and some interviews with young students here about their future.

Carpenter goes into some behind-the-scenes detail on his blog, saying it took him four months (on and off) to put the three-piece, half-hour documentary together.

And more

There are also two Flash animations with graphical data (one points out that unlike most regional newspapers, The Gazette’s online traffic comes primarily from outside the province), and a blog from Johnston, in which he explains the story idea came from a conference he went to combined with a report from Statistics Canada showing anglos growing again for the first time in decades.

| Fun, Montreal

Board games I’d like to play

Sure, there’s Montreal-as-Boardwalk Monopoly, but how about some board games that are all-Montreal?

Metro

From metrodemontreal.com

From metrodemontreal.com

I have no clue how this game is supposed to work, but it looks fun. Spotted in a metrodemontreal.com forum post.

Montreal Risk

Montreal Risk

I played this at a Geek Montreal GeekOUT, and won. (Hint: Controlling the West Island is key.)

Sadly, I wish I could point you to somewhere to buy/download/copy these things, but my searches have come up empty. So just stare at the pictures and imagine the fun of some day conquering the Plateau.

| Video

Gazette does yoga videos

My newspaper today launched (with press release and everything) Office Yoga, a web video series which has instructional videos on exercises you can do sitting in an office chair during your lunch break. It’s paired with an article in this morning’s paper.

The videos feature Kelly McGrath of Joy of Yoga, sitting in the office of Arts&Life editor Mike Shenker. One will be uploaded every weekday for at least a month.

Office exercises are nothing new (Craig Silverman shamelessly points to an article of his from two years ago talking about it), but it’s not often you see this kind of thing being done by a newspaper.

| Media

Another day of newspaper pink slips

The Globe got 60 people to agree to buyouts, but that still wasn’t enough, and they’ve laid off 30 more for a total reduction of 90. The cuts were previously announced, but now we know a third of them are involuntary.

Meanwhile, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, which we’ll remind you is newly without competition, is firing a quarter of its newsroom staff, confirming previous rumours.

| Media

Said, Sid, whatever

He looks like a terrorist, doesn't he?

He does look like a terrorist, doesn't he?

A fellow journalist spotted this on Canoe’s website. It’s a story (from “Agence QMI”) about a man on trial for his alleged role in a bomb plot.

Only the guy in the photo isn’t Saïd Namouh, it’s Sidhartha Banerjee, a reporter for Canadian Press who has been covering the trial.

The photo has since been removed from the story. I don’t know if that’s because someone told them it was a CP reporter, or because someone realized that Saïd Namouh actually looks like this:

Saïd Namouh

Saïd Namouh

UPDATE: Rue Frontenac says Banerjee himself called up Canoë to complain.

It’s not the first time the news has put up the wrong picture in a criminal case (usually it’s the lawyer being identified as the client), but it’s pretty rare that a journalist gets the rap (especially since most journalists are familiar with each other).

And some people suggested that a Journal de Montréal lockout would cause a degradation in the quality of reporting…

Steve Proulx also has a blog post about this, based off the same screen grab. News has since spread to Branchez-Vous and Regret the Error.

| Media

Journal Daily Digest: Martineau a hypocrite?

Richard Martineau: Pauvre moi!

As Journal de Montréal columnist Richard Martineau whines about the hate mail he’s getting after his appearance on Tout le monde en parle Sunday night (he’s still getting plenty of blog hate too, but I’d love for someone to setup a blog solely for the purpose of making fun of me), someone dug up a column he wrote for Voir back in 2003 bashing Quebecor’s convergence and has apparently been emailing it to Richard Therrien, Steve Proulx, Rue Frontenac and others. Considering he now blogs for Canoe, writes for the Journal and has a show on LCN, it does kind of make him look like a hypocrite.

In other news