Monthly Archives: May 2009

About those escalator pictograms

The Laval police department is stubbornly standing by its officers who arrested and ticketed a woman for not holding an escalator handrail and having the gall to protest when they demanded she do so. This action caused outrage that is still giving Patrick Lagacé column ideas.

The argument for the police isn’t logically wrong. The STM’s bylaws require people to obey pictograms and there is a pictogram telling people to hold handrails. The fine issued wasn’t excessive legally.

But there’s a reason why courts are run by human judges: laws must be interpreted through the filter of common sense.

For example, if we posit that escalator pictograms must be always followed to the letter, what to make of this:

Pictograms on the moving carpet at Beaudry metro

Pictograms on the moving carpet at Beaudry metro

So strollers have to be held in front of you.

But strollers are prohibited.

Perhaps this is why the STM doesn’t ticket people routinely for ignoring these warnings. Even they don’t take them seriously.

Canwest: Still here

Everyone expected there would be yet another extension in the Canwest interest payment saga, but the company that signs my paycheques also announced it has gotten another $175 million in financing, which is a good thing I think.

The reports from Reuters, the Globe and Mail, CBC, Canadian Press and the Financial Post use the same long business terms as the press release, like “senior secured revolving asset-based loan facility”, but from what my business-challenged mind can gather, there’s another deadline coming on June 15, when the company has to present a restructuring plan.

CBC funeral lacks names to mourn

I'm horrible at crowd estimates. Guess for yourself how many people turned out.

I'm horrible at crowd estimates. Guess for yourself how many people turned out.

Tuesday was the day the CBC was supposed to announce which of its employees it was going to lay off. The SCRC, which represents CBC and Radio-Canada employees in Quebec and Moncton, planned for a day of mourning at noon to draw attention to those names.

Unfortunately, the CBC made no such announcement, and the people who turned out still don’t know who’s being fired and who’s being kept on, even though the corporation has already started the process of laying people off.

UPDATE: CBC says 180 people will get the pink slip on May 27 and 28.

Continue reading

Dear editor, it’s me again

Patrick Lagacé has some numbers from Influence Communication about letters to the editor, and which Quebecers get their letters published most often: Sylvio Le Blanc and Jeannot Vachon.

The study also shows The Gazette prints more letters to the editor than any other publication, and more than 60% more than the next-largest, Le Soleil. The paper prints a handful of letters every day, and last year redesigned its opinion section to give more space to letters (and less space to editorials).

UPDATE: Lagacé has a response from Vachon.

Nelson Dumais and Cyberpresse need to stand up for integrity

A few weeks ago, Cyberpresse technology blogger Nelson Dumais had a curious post on his blog attacking the Quebec Press Council. It seems the Conseil de presse du Québec had issued a decision which blamed him for accepting free trips, a violation of the council’s code of ethics.

The situation is somewhat nuanced, so let me explain:

The council only acts based on complaints. In this case, a reader who has a beef with Dumais accused him of being biased in favour of corporate software and against free software, because of these free junkets he went on. The complainant also accuses Dumais of censoring his comments on Dumais’s blog. The council rejected both of these complaints, failing to find any bias in Dumais’s work and ruling that Dumais has the authority to moderate his blog as he sees fit.

But the council did give Dumais a slap on the wrist for accepting free travel sponsored by the companies he writes about, without fully disclosing the trips to his readers. He hasn’t hidden the fact that he gets these trips for free, he even wrote a blog post about it in 2006, but since not all readers will have seen that post, he should disclose it whenever there might be a conflict of interest.

Paid travel is listed as an example in the council’s section on responsibilities of the press to avoid conflicts of interest:

Preventing Conflicts of Interest

The Press Council recommends that media enterprises develop clear policies to prevent and deal with conflict of interest situations. Those policies should apply both to reporters and opinion writers. All situations that risk compromising the independence and impartiality of journalists should be addressed. Examples include paid travel, privileges and gifts, as well as awards and prizes offered by any group whose main purpose is to promote something other than journalism.

It acknowledges that there might be exceptions (reporting from war zones or other far-off places where commercial travel is unfeasible), but that there must be full disclosure in those situations.

Of course, these are all guidelines. The council has no official power. It cannot fine or discipline journalists for violations, and participation in the council is optional.

So a body with no power has mostly cleared Dumais of wrongdoing, only saying that he should disclose where the companies he writes about give him free travel to their junkets. Simple, right?

Obviously not, because Dumais is pissed. And I must be missing something, because most of his readers are too, and even fellow journalists.

Dumais’s argument is also nuanced. First of all, he’s not on staff at La Presse or Cyberpresse. He’s a freelancer, which means he basically has to look after his own expenses.

He also trots out that well-worn of excuses that everybody else does it, so that makes it okay.

Finally, he adds that in no way have these junkets affected how he reports, and requiring disclosure on every piece he writes would give people the false impression that these companies are paying him for his opinion.

But none of these excuses justifies accepting all-expenses-paid trips from software companies, much less deciding not to disclose them fully.

First of all, as any ethics expert will tell you, it’s not just about conflict of interest. It’s about the appearance of conflict.

Second, if these junkets truly had absolutely no effect on how journalists report, they would not exist. These giant software companies aren’t morons. They know if they give you free food and free travel, you’re a lot more likely to talk about their product. There might not be any direct quid pro quo, but they know you’re a lot more likely to say something positive about them. And if you have a reputation as someone who bashes the products promoted on these junkets, you won’t be invited to them in the future.

Finally, Cyberpresse should not be exploiting freelancers as a way of getting around paying expenses. Dumais is right that if he billed Gesca for all these trips, he wouldn’t be allowed to go on them anymore (an argument that makes it clear these trips are of value to him). But if we accept that journalists should not get free travel, then even freelancers should have their expenses paid for, no questions asked. This judgment is as much a stain on Gesca as it is on Dumais.

Dumais says he doesn’t have a choice in this matter. That’s bullshit. He can refuse these junkets. He just doesn’t want to, and neither does Cyberpresse, because they both (indirectly) profit financially from them.

Dumais and Cyberpresse must put an immediate stop to this, and stand up for journalistic integrity. These junkets should be outright banned, Dumais’s previous articles online should be edited to add disclosure statements to them, and a policy should be setup to ensure that freelancers do not feel they have to deal with their own expenses when they write original pieces for Gesca-owned properties. Other media organizations should follow suit with similar policies, including full disclosure of any gifts, sponsorships, favours or expenses paid for by companies seeking favourable coverage.

Someone must stand up for ethics, even if that means he stands alone.

If Frank Zampino is getting raked over the coals for accepting a yacht trip that he paid for, why should Nelson Dumais be allowed to accept trips that were provided for free? Do we expect stronger ethics in politicians than journalists?

Holding the handrail of justice

TENIR LA MAIN COURANTE

TENIR LA MAIN COURANTE

On behalf of the news media, I would like to extend a thank you to Bela Kosoian and Laval police.

Our jobs can be hard sometimes, and during these spring months, as everyone goes outside and tries out their BIXIs and stuff, it’s hard to find something to be unequivocably outraged about.

But a Globe and Mail story came out on Saturday reported a woman was fined for not holding the handrail on an escalator (and not following police demands that she do so), and the need for outrage was obvious.

Reporters filed stories about her ordeal, photographers took pictures of a sad-faced woman holding a ticket in front of an escalator, columnists turned the outrage meter to 11 and bloggers just went ahead and called Laval police Nazisrepeatedly.

It even got some international attention in the “news of the weird” category, and a mention on Boing Boing, which was in turn Dugg.

For the benefit of those who haven’t gotten the story emailed or Facebooked to them a thousand times already, here’s what supposedly happened:

Kosoian, a 38-year-old student and mother, was heading down an escalator at the Montmorency metro station, and either ignored, didn’t hear or didn’t understand repeated instructions from a Laval police officer to hold the handrail. When she got to the bottom, she was handcuffed and issued two fines: One for not holding the handrail ($100) and another for obstruction ($320). Oh, and she also says there was OMGPOLICEBRUTALITY!!! because the handcuffs were too tight.

There’s no specific provision in the STM’s regulations that requires holding handrails on escalators, so a more general one was cited instead:

4. Dans ou sur un immeuble ou du matériel roulant, il est interdit à toute personne:

e) de désobéir à une directive ou un pictogramme, affiché par la Société;

Of course, the fine was excessive and the supposed infraction entirely benign (the escalator pictogram also prohibits strollers, a provision which is also routinely ignored). Even the STM said they don’t fine people for such things.

Kosoian will probably win her case in court, if it isn’t dropped outright by the prosecutor, especially after all this media coverage. Laval police, for their part, are justifying the actions of their officers, but that kind of blind loyalty is to be expected, especially where the officers were technically in the legal right to do what they did.

For next week, can we get a phone company who’s abusing a grandmother by not letting her cancel her service?

Sharx: Canada’s credit hell

Sharx Pool Bar at Ste. Catherine and Guy

Sharx Pool Bar at Ste. Catherine and Guy

Sharx, a pool/bowling bar on Ste. Catherine St. W.,  has a reputation as an elegant, relaxing place to spend an evening and have fun with your friends. It’s a perennial favourite in the Mirror’s Best of Montreal under the “best pool hall” category, which it won again this year.

But thanks to an article in the New York Times on Sunday, it now has the additional honour of being the most credit-unfriendly place in Canada.

It’s not Sharx’s fault, but apparently, according to a study done in 2002 based off data from Canadian Tire credit cards, 47% of people who used their cards here missed a credit card payment over the next 12 months. That’s higher than anywhere else in the country.

(Of course, this only applies to people who use Canadian Tire credit cards at Sharx. Perhaps those who use cash or bank-issued cards are more trustworthy with credit?)

Thankfully, such fine-tuned criticism of people’s credit card histories isn’t the norm (yet), because of concern from the industry that people might resent the companies knowing so much about them.

Especially when they can’t always be trusted with that data.

Union to mourn as axe falls at CBC

Maison Radio-Canada

Maison Radio-Canada

“D-day for some..or maybe me” is how Ange-Aimée Woods describes the Facebook group she setup to spread the word about a “day or mourning” organized by her union. On Tuesday, the real brunt of those 800 job cuts hits as the corporation reveals a list of the positions deemed “redundant”, and the employees it has decided it can live without.

The union, which as you can imagine is steadfast against this move, is planning an hour-long demonstration outside Maison Radio-Canada (corner René-Lévesque and Panet, metro Beaudry) at noon, in solidarity with those getting pink slips (who don’t yet know who they are):

We are organizing a demonstration to mark this day of mourning.

We will be out on the sidewalk with our “redundant” colleagues, a callous classification of the employees who are the heart and soul of the CBC.

We will gather on René-Lévesque in front of the main entrance to the Maison de Radio-Canada at noon to show our colleagues that we stand with them and management that we don’t agree with sacrificing the next generation of employees for flashy equipment. Senior management likes to say that the CBC’s most valuable asset is its people.

Let’s counter their cynicism with our most valuable asset: our solidarity and our voices.

Some people should not be designing websites

I have a feeling I’m going to break someone’s heart with this post, but it’s true. There are professional web designers, and there are people whose pages belong on Geocities in the 90s.

The website for (long-shot) mayoralty candidate Louise O’Sullivan belongs in the latter camp:

partimontrealvillemarie.ca

partimontrealvillemarie.ca

Let us count the ways:

  • <title>Test2</title>
  • Candidate’s photo in 256-colour GIF
  • Photo of the city stolen from Google Image Search
  • Drop shadows on everything
  • Scrolling marquee
  • Coloured boxes inside other coloured boxes inside even more coloured boxes
  • Text is all in bold
  • Date written via JavaScript
  • No links in main text

I’m sure you can add more in the comments. Feel free.

Sadder still, there are other atrocities where this came from, people who presumably spent hundreds of dollars for these sites. Perhaps the “© 1999” at the bottom might have something to do with it.

How to win Eurovision

  1. Get a pretty person to sing a happy love song in English. Bonus points for constant smiling and similarity to Sanjaya
  2. Have dancers in the background, wearing black, do lots of crouching and jumping
  3. Use tall, pretty, female backup singers
  4. Involve string instruments, especially violins and/or cellos
  5. Include lots of sound that clearly does not come from any instrument on stage
  6. Exploit screens, fireworks and coloured lights in the background

Am I the only one to have expected a bit more from a pan-European talent competition?

CTV wants you to help save [insert local station name here]

Todd Van der Heyden wants to show you inside CTV Montreal

Todd Van der Heyden wants to show you inside CTV Montreal

CTV has gone on the offensive in its campaign to “save local television” by forcing cable companies through legislation to give them money. Ads have already started appearing on TV, and a website and online petition has been setup to get people to tell their MPs to approve a “fee for carriage” scheme that would give CTV, Global, Rogers and other conventional television broadcasters hundreds of millions of dollars, with very vague ideas of where that money would actually go.

I’m still kind of on the fence about fee for carriage or related schemes. On one hand, I agree that it’s unfair for cable broadcasters to be able to charge subscription fees and get advertising revenues while spending little money on original programming (and no expensive local programming whatsoever). I also think cable and satellite distributors like Videotron and Bell have profit margins that are way too high and more of that money should be going either to the broadcasters or back in the pockets of consumers.

On the other hand, as a consumer, I object to the idea that I could be forced to pay for a signal I get over the air for free. It’s like adding a surcharge on an air conditioning bill for the oxygen. My cable company doesn’t “take” or “sell” CFCF programming, it simply retransmits the station’s signal to my television set (should broadcasters also demand fees from antenna manufacturers?) And my solution to the disparity between cable channels and conventional broadcasters would have more to do with eliminating cable subscription fees altogether, except for channels like HBO that provide a large amount of original programming.

What is “local television”?

Besides, what exactly are we saving when we talk about saving local television anyway? There is no local television production besides the newcasts anymore, at least not in Montreal. Where once you could count on your local station to carry the Christmas or St. Patrick’s Day parades live, now they produce five-minute packages for the evening news. Current affairs, entertainment, consumer affairs and other programming has been merged into mid-day and weekend newscasts on shoestring budgets. Even local sports teams can’t get their games televised on local TV. They have to hope they can get a spot on the schedule of TSN, RDS or Rogers SportsNet.

So when we’re talking about “local television”, what we’re really talking about is “local newscasts.” That’s not necessarily so bad. Local newscasts are the most important part of local television, and it’s what people care about the most.

But what exactly do we get on local newscasts? We get:

  • two-minute package reports about issues that were reported in the morning newspapers
  • briefs about road accidents they could scramble a cameraman to get B-roll for
  • softball interviews with newsmakers, activists and politicians
  • whatever sounds good on a press release and can provide good visuals
  • reports on criminal court proceedings (reporter stands in front of courthouse cut with B-roll of lawyers and family members walking down hallways)
  • 20-second anchor voice-overs with B-roll from community events they didn’t want to send a reporter to
  • recaps of sports games with footage taken from other networks
  • entertainment listings
  • a weather presenter (usually female) showing us the latest fashions and waving her hands over forecast maps
  • silly banter between anchors to fill time
  • packaged reports taken from the national network, other regional stations or international sources like CNN.

This isn’t to bash CFCF, which produces the best of Montreal’s three anglo newscasts (and has the ratings to show for it). But they want us to pay for this in addition to seeing all the advertising?

Your friendly neighbourhood corporate conglomerate

CFCF12 logo

Former CFCF12 logo

This slick marketing campaign really rubs me the wrong way. It’s a giant corporate behemoth owned by an even more giant corporate behemoth, and it hasn’t exactly shown a commitment to local television in the past. What was once a member-owned collective of television stations across Canada has since been bought up by a corporate profit-seeking enterprise that has imposed its power on local stations. CFCF Television in Montreal was forced to dump its iconic logo and rename its signature newscast solely to please the whims of head office that wanted all the stations in the network to look identical.

Now, suddenly, it’s in CTV’s interest to get people to feel nostalgic about their local television station. So it created this campaign and setup this website, which has cookie-cutter versions for each CTV and A-Channel station (it even has a French version which is actually mostly English). They’ve produced 30-second ads where community leaders read from nearly identical scripts that give vague references to how important local TV is in promoting local events. They’re running ads on local television stations and even arranging one-sided fluff interviews with their news employees.

CFCF opens its doors

CTV Open House contact info

They’re also organizing open houses next weekend at all their stations. CFCF, which has offices at Papineau and René-Lévesque, will be open as of 9am on May 23. People who want to visit are asked to call or email to “reserve your tour.”

Whether or not you agree with or even care about this issue, this is a rare opportunity to see what it’s like inside a local television station and meet some of the people you see on air. I’d recommend against passing this chance up.

How to get me on board

Despite my reservations about their funding idea, despite how much they’ve destroyed local television so far through budget cuts and local brand suppression, despite how obviously self-serving it all is, despite the fact that they still made money last year (though not the hundreds of millions of dollars that they’re used to) and despite the fact that they want us to pay for the fact that they made unwise investments and couldn’t see that their business model was doomed, I’m willing to hear CTV’s case and even open to the idea of supporting their cause, on one condition:

I want to see their numbers. All of them.

While the CRTC releases so-called “aggregate” financial information about conventional broadcasters so we know how much money they make as a whole and how much they spend in total on certain types of programming. From that we learn that they’re spending more on licensing U.S. programming than creating Canadian programming (including news). The argument is that the advertising profits from simulcasting U.S. programming subsidize the Canadian programming and newscasts. But we have only their word that this is true.

The CRTC has moved to increase such transparency in reporting of financial information, but that has met resistance from broadcasters who argue it may expose trade secrets.

If CTV wants my support, they have to get over that paranoia and let the public see those numbers. How much are senior executives getting paid? How much does their Canadian programming cost? How much are they spending on public relations and marketing? How much of the cost of importing U.S. programming is shared with the cable channels that also broadcast it?

These are questions I’d like answers to before I start pressuring my MP.

UPDATE (June 1): CTV says “100,000 expressions of support“, with 30,000 visiting open houses.