Monthly Archives: March 2009

| Media, Opinion, Technology

New Media Fund helps new media (as long as it’s television)

The Canadian government today announced that it would combine the Canadian Television Fund and Canadian New Media Fund, two government-run funds that give money to Canadian productions, into the Canadian Media Fund, which would give $134.7 million a year to support both conventional television and “new media”, meaning those Internet things.

It’s being described as removing funding guarantees from CBC/RadCan (the CTF “crisis” started when cable companies refused to hand over money because they said too much of it was going to unpopular programming), though the Mother Corp is happy about the announcement because it allows its in-house productions to be eligible for the fund.

The Conservative government emphasizes that the new “fixed” fund will be focused on funding popular programming like Flashpoint, and not those boring CBC dramas that only get a few hundred thousand viewers. I’m hoping this means there will be more Canadian porn out there, because porn is always popular.

So, where can innovative Canadian new media developers get their cash? Not so fast:

“Applicants will be required to make their projects available across a minimum of two distribution platforms, including television.”

In other words, you can’t apply for the Canadian Media Fund unless “media” is television. It doesn’t matter if you’re popular or not, whether your content is primarily video or not. Canadian productions like LoadingReadyRun or Prenez Garde Aux Chiens are not eligible, because they’re not on television.

Just the kind of forward-looking outside-the-box ideas we’ve come to expect from our federal culture overlords.

UPDATE: Michel Dumais agrees with me, and has other critical comments about the new media fund.

| Canadiens, Media

Guy! Guy! Guy! Bye! Bye! Bye!

For those wondering, RDS had the scoop (and more importantly, the Twitter scoop) on Bob Gainey firing Canadiens coach Guy Carbonneau. They’ve cut scheduled programming of extreme winter sports on RDS and replaced it with a feed from its RIS all-sports-news network. A press conference is scheduled for 7pm.

Both RDS.ca and The Gazette’s Habs Inside/Out website are experiencing unusually high loads and are noticeably slow.

| Media

Canwest sells The New Republic

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but the company that signs my paycheques announced today that it is selling The New Republic magazine to its former owners for an undisclosed amount. This is news pretty much everywhere from Canwest itself to the International Herald Tribune and even a sarcastic post from Gawker.

Facing a deadline on Wednesday for negotiating part of its debt, Canwest has been looking to sell off “non-core assets” like its E! network of television stations (which includes CJNT Montreal), and non-Canadian media outlets certainly fit into that category.

I always thought Canwest and TNR were an odd fit. Though what got me was that a U.S. political magazine was owned by a Canadian media giant and nobody down there seemed to care besides a few media analysts.

| Media, Public transit

La Presse in the metro

Yesterday as I left my apartment to go to work, I was surprised when my paper wasn’t there to greet me. Instead, there was a copy of La Presse in its place. It’s not the end of the world if I don’t get a paper once in a while (it’s not like I pay for it, and I can just grab another one at work), and since my apartment is the only one of 11 units in the coop that gets any sort of newspaper subscription, I’m guessing it was just the delivery person throwing out the wrong paper.

The cover certainly piqued my interest (though I was aware of its contents having read a Montreal City Weblog item earlier that day): a special report on life in the metro.

Saturday’s stories include discussions with the various people you see in the hallways: buskers, shopkeepers, cleaners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, old people, and some of the less common sights like monks and blind people figuring out station layouts. There’s also a multimedia component online that includes some audio slideshows of interviews with other people.

Jean-Christophe Laurence also has a peek into the shift of a metro changeur, who says the most annoying thing about working there is having to be confined in a box and asking permission whenever you want to leave it.

But more interestingly, there are articles from Katia Gagnon on the workers who perform maintenance on the tracks between 2am and 5am when no trains are circulating and the power to the rails is cut, as well as those who monitor the tracks while the trains are running.

It reminds me of a piece that Alex Dobrota did for the Gazette three years ago in which he spent the night with maintenance workers.

Intervention des ambulanciers

Today, La Presse continues on a sadder note, talking about suicide in the metro. Hugo Meunier discusses the statistics, the most interesting of which is that 2/3 of people who throw themselves in front of metro trains survive, though they’re left with serious injuries and disabilities. He reports on a specific incident as an example (an article with a staggering seven anonymous sources, perhaps demonstrating how little people want to talk about it) and asks whether the STM, police and media’s policies of pretending suicides don’t happen is actually helpful at preventing copycats.

I’ve never actually witnessed a metro suicide (though I’ve seen the cleanup), so I can only imagine how disturbing it can be.

I can’t help but think that the statistic that shows you’re more likely to be seriously hurt than die attempting suicide in the metro would make a lot of people think twice about using that method to end their lives. Of course, then they’d just choose a method that wasn’t so public and we’d never know.

| Opinion, TV

Won’t someone think of the children?

The past few days, the local media (and hence my news feeds) have been inundated with stories about Jean-François Harrisson. If you don’t know the story by now, you’re clearly out of the loop.

Harrisson is a star on VRAK.TV, a Quebec franco youth cable channel. He was arrested this week and charged with possession and distribution of child pornography, as well as drug possession. As you can imagine, being a children’s television star not only makes this ironic but puts the channel in an awkward position.

On Friday VRAK.TV reacted by saying it would pull all programming that features Harrisson until further notice. Similarly, Radio-Canada had to spike an episode of Pyramide with him and a youth employment centre said it would ask schools not to show an educational video for students that features him.

Though I think these decisions are more about good PR and silencing outraged parents than they are about protecting children, it’s their decisions to make. This kind of thing is always arbitrary and tends to have more to do with a cost-benefit analysis than morality (banning Chris Brown’s music is simple after he beat up his girlfriend, but I don’t recall cable channels cutting Seinfeld reruns and Lethal Weapon movies when everyone found out that Michael Richards and Mel Gibson were racists).

But child porn is a pretty serious charge, above most celebrity DUI/assault/drug charges but below O.J.ing your wife. So go ahead and throw the baby out with the bathwater, banning countless hours of television footage because one guy did something bad when he was off the set.

Keep in mind, of course, that he hasn’t been convicted of anything yet. A press conference is scheduled for Monday so his agent can present a public response ot the charges. UPDATE: The press conference was cancelled at the last minute after the agent realized there’s an ongoing criminal investigation and commenting on it is a bad idea.

Let’s talk about kiddie porn, kids!

The measure taken that really gets me is opening up a discussion forum on VRAK.TV about this issue so the children themselves can talk about it. The forum has the rather vague title “Derniers événements” and the introductory text doesn’t mention Harrisson by name or give any clue what it’s talking about.

Maybe I’m missing something here. I understand the need to talk to children when bad grown-up things happen. But how does an anonymous web forum devoted to the discussion of a guy charged with child pornography help children in any way?

Am I the only one that finds it ironic that they consider his face taboo and will pull all scenes with it from the airwaves but seem perfectly content to invite children to comment on a web forum about the child pornography charges he’s facing?

Discussion of things like this online by children is inevitable. If they didn’t have a dedicated forum, the discussion would happen on other forums, or on Facebook or somewhere else. But having an adult explain the issue to them and answer their questions in a heavily moderated forum would make a heck of a lot more sense than this online chat free-for-all, no?

| Public transit

Un gros merci

About a week and a half ago Mike Boone wrote a column about a discarded tea bag he found at the Georges-Vanier metro station (hey, it’s a slow news week), asking why we’re so disrespectful to our public places that we can’t walk the extra five feet to the trash can. The column sparked a lot of response.

I found it funny because at about the same time he spotted that tea bag, I used the station for the first time since its renovation and found this, thanking users for dealing with the station’s summer-long closure:

Un gros merci

| Public transit

Nuit Blanche Part 3: The all-night metro

Télécité time

The count stands at three. Only three times since it opened in 1966 has the Montreal metro run throughout the night:

  1. March 4, 1971, during the “storm of the century”
  2. Jan. 1, 2000, to help New Year Decade Century Millennium partiers get home
  3. March 1, 2009, during the Nuit Blanche

There are reasons beyond financial ones for the metro to stop running during the night. Overnight is when the tracks are cleaned, when maintenance is performed, when money is transferred. Subways that are open 24 hours (like in New York) have extra tracks that can be used when one is closed, but Montreal doesn’t have that luxury (unless it wants to run the metro only one way).

But, as in the examples above, exceptions can be made once in a while. The STM decided to make one this year, and organized itself to keep all 68 metro stations open throughout the night, and have trains running on all four lines.

Continue reading →

| Media

What’s amateur hockey analysis worth to you?

In November, The Gazette’s Canadiens blog Habs Inside/Out launched a guest-blogging section in which they brought in four contributors whose only real expertise was that they were hard-core Habs fans and loved to write about it. Three of the four, in fact, blog about the Habs on other blogs.

Called the Other Wing, it’s a place devoid of news but filled with amateur analysis of the Canadiens. (I use the term “amateur” in a technical sense of unpaid non-expert, not in any derogatory Christian-Bale-like way.) Though the opinions don’t come from with any background of insider knowledge, they’re still well read because hard core Habs fans are insatiable information wolves who will stop themselves in the middle of sex to find out who’s in nets for the next game. Just look at the number of comments on Mike Boone’s liveblogging and other posts from a fan’s perspective.

This week, one of the more active contributors to the Other Wing quit, posting a final post in which she said that she couldn’t continue writing for free for a for-profit media outlet and a website that is getting millions of hits a month:

I write here as an unpaid volunteer, and I’ve been having some serious second thoughts about what that means for others. … In an age when my professional colleagues in the newspaper business are struggling to keep their jobs and keep their papers viable, a site like Inside/Out could be an important source of work for them. Therefore, I believe it’s wrong for me to undermine the work they depend upon for their livelihoods by providing content for nothing.

The contributor, Leigh Anne Power, is herself a paid journalist. She’s co-host of the CBC Radio morning show in Central Newfoundland, which makes note of her Habs fandom. And she blogs (for free) about the Habs on her own blog.

The post prompted quite a bit of reaction, including some argument over whether such contributions should be paid or not. One commenter who agreed with her even wrote a blog post of his own blasting Canwest and Boone (who’s on staff at the Gazette and so paid for his work – though he does sacrifice quite a bit for this labour of love).

I won’t comment on the merits of the argument since the website is run by my employer, but I’ll point to some arguments on both sides of the equation, taken from the comments attached to the post (it’s worth a read to see other opinions on the subject).

Pro

As long as the gazette is profiting from this site they should pay their contributors. Anything less is exploitative.

FSLN

I don’t provide other media outlets with free content because that’s undermining my profession and preventing me from actually getting a paying job in the industry. Did you know that when you submit photos or comments to news sites, that outlet owns them at perpetuity and can reproduce them in more or less any shape or form… for ever… without EVER paying you? Even if your pic spearheads a national ad campaign that ends up bringing in a whole lot of money.

How can J.T. justify providing free content to the Gazette when her job might not be safe from people providing free content to her place of employment?

Naila Jinnah

Con

One thing you are perhaps undervaluing regarding providing free content to a media outlet like the Gazette is the exposure you receive. Blogs are a great way to express one’s opinions, build a portfolio, etc. But a blog that receives no traffic is not as useful as one that does. One way to build a reader base, as we have commonly seen here at this website, is to contribute a lot of thoughts and comments to a “mainstream” site while also linking to one’s own blog. Readers that like your comments will want to read more, especially if that contributor slowly begins to scale back their input to the mainstream site.

…

From the outset, the Other Wing was a spotlight for some of us fans to get a bigger spotlight for our comments based on whatever criteria the HI/O powers used, comments that were being made before in the general comments section prior to the creation of the Other Wing.

Chris

So what do you think? Is this journalism? Should these contributions be paid? Is Habs Inside/Out building a community or profiting off of it?

| Sports

Deep Impact

They were up 4-1 after 135 minutes. Club Santos Laguna needed four goals in 45 minutes. Hard, but not impossible. The CBC analyst said it was probably not going to happen.

It was 4-2 with 20 minutes to go. Three goals in 20 minutes is extremely unlikely, but miracles do happen.

It was 4-3 with only a few minutes of added time left before the whistle. This game was over with a goal to spare (under the tie-breaking rules, they would have lost had it ended 4-4). The guy on Radio-Canada talked about people getting tickets for the next game at the Olympic Stadium, about how great it is that a Montreal-based soccer team would enter the CONCACAF Champions League final four.

And then, the meltdown. Choke. Of. The. Century. Humiliation.

I’m still proud of my team. They beat out Vancouver and Toronto FC to become the Canadian champion, and then slowly rose through to reach the quarterfinals, beating everyone’s expectations. I don’t regret buying my blue T-shirt at last week’s game, and I’ll cheer for the team during the upcoming USL season.

But what an awful way to end that run.

At least I know my disappointment is small compared to the heartbreak of the players who let it happen.

| TV

Being Erica’s regrets

Two months and nine episodes into the series, the team behind CBC’s one-hour drama Being Erica seem a bit more comfortable in their gimmick format. But unfortunately, that comfort hasn’t boosted its ratings, which slowly eroded into Sophie territory through a change from Monday to Wednesday nights.

Faced with tens of thousands abandoning the show every week, and ratings dropping to just over 400,000, the show sexed it up this week, promising HOT GIRL-ON-GIRL action. As a red-blooded male, that got me interested, as it did plenty of other TV-watching-watchers.

Nudity and sexuality are my two favourite words

Nudity and sexuality are my two favourite words

That was a good start. Unfortunately the warning neglected to mention Spice Girls music, which I think requires the most viewer discretion.

Those of you in Canada can watch last night’s episode (and all the other episodes) on CBC’s website in pretty-good-definition. If you’re wondering how far the sex scene goes, here’s the juiciest bits:

Kissing close-up

Topless

Even more topless

That’s about as far as it gets before an (admittedly hilarious) interruption. But that’s still pretty hot. Of course, Erin Karpluk could spend an entire episode reading the phone book and I’d be entranced, so perhaps I’m not the best judge. And Anna Silk (whom you might remember from that Nicoderm commercial) kind of looks like Mary-Louise Parker, another of my many TV crushes.

The reviews range from “lesberrific” to … well, I’ll let you know. In any case, it did see a ratings boost of about 100,000 viewers. Bill Brioux says that might have as much to do with less competition than increased interest.

Mid-season review

I’m not a TV critic any more than I’m an art critic, so I can’t tell you if the show is good or not, topless scenes notwithstanding. I can’t even tell you whether or not I like it, because I just don’t know. I think I’m stuck between liking it and not liking it. I’m still annoyed a bit by the constant references to Toronto, as if living in Toronto to Being Erica is like living in New York to Sex and the City.

But the show is growing on me. It’s becoming a bit less cliché, a bit less predictable. And most importantly, I’m still watching it.

New media get old quickly

One disappointment I have with the show is its apparent abandonment of new media marketing. The thing that first got me attached to it was the pre-launch campaign which included a blog and YouTube videos, which were actually pretty entertaining. But the blog and YouTube channel stopped being updated after the show launched, and I don’t see any original new media outreach. Since the show is plunging in the ratings and desperately trying to gain an audience, this would seem to be the last time to abandon marketing efforts.

Americans like us!

A couple of weeks ago, Being Erica premiered on ABC’s SoapNet cable channel. That led to reviews in U.S. media, most of which were positive (and all of which I got off the most excellent TV, Eh? blog).

  • New York Times: Likes, especially compared to previous Canadian imports
  • Detroit News: Likes, saying it fills the void left by Sex and the City.
  • Variety: Likes, calling it “frothy” and “refreshing”, but pointing out that its very premise (that changing the past doesn’t help) will make it difficult to sustain the show for long
  • Boston Herald: Likes, following that whole “it’s Canadian so it’s exotic” motif, but saying it’s more relatable and likable than over-Botoxed American fare.
  • South Coast Today: Likes, calling it smart and sympathetic
  • The Jewish Week: Likes, because of the strong Jewish identity of the family

So if it’s so good and we can relate to it so well, why aren’t we? Is Being Erica’s cancellation something we’ll end up regretting?

| Fun, Montreal, Photos

Nuit Blanche Part 2: Art Souterrain

Art Souterrain

I’m not an art critic. Or an art lover. Or really an art anything. So when I look through the guide to the Nuit Blanche, I glaze over all the art galleries, dance performances, films, plays, DJs or anything else of the sort. Instead, I concern myself with fun things in the Old Port or anything that’s funny.

But something about this “Art Souterrain” project caused me to want to go there. It was free, it was in a heated environment, and you could walk through it all without waiting in lines, checking your coats or feeling guilty about leaving early. You could spend about 10 seconds at one installation and then move on to the next one. And that’s pretty much what I did.

Continue reading →

| Media, Video

Journal Daily Digest: SCANDALE!!!

Rue Frontenac had the news EN PRIMEUR this morning, a result of an ENQUÊTE EXCLUSIF: The Journal de Montréal is subcontracting its subscription marketing to a company that’s not registered and is perhaps not being entirely honest with people. (THE HORROR!) This investigation involved the usual Journal technique of going undercover and exposing all of the inner dealings, then talking to experts about how this might be illegal if anyone cared to prosecute. It caught Lagacé’s attention, at least.

Meanwhile