Télé-Québec announced this week that a new show is going to start this fall that has the Voir newsroom talking about culture. This is to replace Ça manque à ma culture which was recently cancelled.

If this idea of an alt-weekly doing a cultural TV show is familiar, I can’t imagine why. ICI does the same thing, but it’s on Vox where nobody watches it. (I watched that show for the first time yesterday, it’s not bad for a Vox production, but hardly compelling either.)

Of course, they deny that they’re copying ICI’s idea.

It’s interesting to see if this becomes a bigger trend, having print journalists do TV shows related to their beats. It certainly saves money (yay convergence!) paying one person to do two jobs (ICI and Vox are both owned by Quebecor), and these roundtable discussions are super-cheap to produce – just put some guys in front of a camera and have them chat for a while.

But it also means we have fewer voices. Eventually we’ll be down to one journalist each from CTVglobemedia, Canwest, CBC/RadCan, Gesca and Quebecor covering a given beat. And maybe not even that.