Monthly Archives: August 2009

| Montreal, Radio

CJAD cancels three shows, fires eight

If you notice some of your favourite shows have suddenly disappeared from CJAD’s schedule, it’s because they’ve been cancelled.

Montreal’s news/talk station has canned four of its shows:

In all, The Gazette reports, eight on-air personalities are leaving the station:

  • Peter Anthony Holder, overnight host
  • Laurie MacDonald, Laurie & Olga host
  • Olga Gazdovic, Laurie & Olga host
  • Kevin Holden, Kevin & Trudie host
  • Al Gravelle, Solid Gold Saturdays host
  • Jake Lawrence, Solid Gold Sunday Nights host
  • Kathryn Coulombe, news anchor
  • Rod Dewar, editorialist

Trudie Mason will remain with the station, expanding her morning news role.

Holder was the latest to get the news… yesterday. He received so little notice that he had to cancel a booked guest. Holder confirmed he’s been fired but wouldn’t comment further (UPDATE: See below). Laurie MacDonald told The Gazette they were told to give in their pass keys as soon as they were told they were fired.

As for what’s taking their places:

  • Dan Laxer will be taking the Kevin and Trudie spot from 2-4 weekdays
  • Laxer’s weekday evening slot is taken over by a syndicated show, The Ryan Doyle Show, from CFRB
  • Ray Scott takes over Solid Gold Sundays from Jake Lawrence
  • Former CBC host Anne Lagacé-Dowson takes over (on an interim basis) the spot left by Laurie & Olga at 1-4 Saturdays
  • Saturday evenings will have “weekend” versions of weekday shows

Bendixen says other announcements will be forthcoming “in the next couple weeks.” Operations Manager Bob Harris told The Gazette that negotiations are ongoing.

Sports reporter Rob Martier has also left CJAD to move back to Chicago, though that move was for personal reasons and is unrelated to the shakeup.

More coverage:

UPDATE (Aug. 11): Holder talks to The Gazette’s Kathryn Greenaway, saying “they can only fire you, they can’t kill you.” Holder’s fans are making themselves heard loud and clear, starting up a Facebook group, Facebook cause and commenting en masse on his Facebook wall. The Gazette piece resulted in lots of feedback from readers.

And The Mirror points us to “Why CJAD sucks“, published exactly 10 years ago this week.

Meanwhile, Kim Fraser, who survived the cuts, responds to criticism of her on the Radio in Montreal group.

| Montreal, TV

CFCF cameraman dies on the job

CTV cameraman Hugh Haugland (photo from his Facebook page)

CFCF cameraman Hugh Haugland (photo from his Facebook page)

Today isn’t a happy day at CFCF.

Hugh Haugland, one of the station’s cameramen – and son of former anchor Bill Haugland – died in a helicopter crash this morning while shooting video of the aftermath of last night’s tornado in Mont Laurier. The pilot, Roger Bélanger, also died in the crash. Canadian Press reports that the helicopter had engine failure and was attempting to land when it crashed, but hit a cable holding an electrical pole. Witnesses report the helicopter caught fire after it crashed and nothing could be done to save the occupants.

CFCF led its noon newscast with a clearly distraught, distracted Mutsumi Takahashi breaking the news in a hastily-packaged 40-second brief. Takahashi continued the hour-long newscast with watery eyes despite just being exposed to the devastating news. At 6pm, she again led the newscast with news of Haugland’s death, but it wasn’t any easier. This time a full report on the crash from Daniele Hamamdjian and an obit from Rob Lurie. The CBC and Global local newscasts both led with Haugland, while the franco newscasts led with the Mont Laurier tornado in general.

Bill Haugland, meanwhile, never expected when he woke up today to be spending the day talking about how his granddaughters are going to live without their father. But even while he was contacting other family members to break the news to them, he accepted interview requests from almost a dozen different news outlets to talk about his son.

Hugh Haugland, 44, is survived not only by his father but by two teenage daughters, Evie (who just celebrated her 19th birthday) and Lianne, 14. He had been working for CFCF for 24 years. His Facebook wall is getting inundated with messages.

More coverage:

And briefs from:

CTV has issued a formal statement and CTV Montreal has put up a piece with condolences. Pauline Marois and the PQ and Michael Ignatieff and the Liberals also issued statements expressing condolences for Haugland and Bélanger.

UPDATE (Aug. 9): L. Ian MacDonald has some thoughts on Haugland and his job.

UPDATE: The official obituary notice, in Aug. 10’s Gazette, is here (it’s huge by paid obit standards, taking up more than a quarter of a page). A guest book is attached.

| Media, Montreal

Transcon makes bilingual papers French-only

CTV seems to be the only outlet so far to note that five Transcontinental community weeklies in Montreal have given up on trying to be bilingual and have switched to French-only publication.

The papers in question are:

Transcontinental says they’ll keep some English content online (and by that I assume they mean they’ll link to stories from the anglo papers like the West Island Chronicle and Westmount Examiner).

The anglos CTV talked to complained about the lack of news about their community as a result of this change, but when we’re talking about 12-page issues that contain maybe a page and a half of editorial content (most of which is fluff pieces or borough announcements), I think it’s a bit too late to complain about the loss of community news.

| Media

Maxine lives the dream

You might have missed it, but just over a week ago, Maxine Mendelssohn’s final column for The Gazette was printed along with a long goodbye text.

Mendelssohn, some of you might recall, began writing for The Gazette while still a journalism student at Concordia University in 2003, and on July 15 of that year she began a city column in the A section. At 23, she was young and inexperienced, but that was the point.

In her debut column, she said that “unlike some other columnists, I am not a card-carrying member of Navel-Gazers R Us. I’d rather not be in the spotlight but shine it on other people.”

Over the ensuing months and after the column was killed less than a year later (May 4, 2004), Mendelssohn’s column was called everything from “a unique perspective” to “an insult to my generation”

Mendelssohn continued writing for the other end of the paper (she wrote for the fashion section when she started), doing profiles of young people for the now-defunct Urban Life section, and more recently profiling stores Q&A-style for a column called Retail Detail, which will continue under different writers.

The reason she’s leaving: she got married and she’s moving to New York.

Columnist casualties light this year

Despite the increasing crunch on newspapers in general, and the shrinking size of the paper, the number of columnists that have been dropped recently has been on the low side, at least compared to the house-cleaning that was done in January/February of 2008.

Among the recently departed:

Martin Coles had been writing Camera Angle, a photography column on a monthly basis since 2001, and on a biweekly basis starting Nov. 21, 1987, making for about 450 columns. But his articles go even further back, to July 28, 1979. He is a part of Dawson College’s faculty teaching professional photography. His last column was published on Feb. 21.

Gaëtan L. Charlebois was one of the paper’s ambassadors to francophone popular culture, writing about francophone television for a column called La Télé and francophone vedettes for Chaud Show. He came to The Gazette from Hour, where he had served as theatre critic. Before that, he was doing the same job at the Mirror. He began writing theatre reviews, contributing especially during festival season, and writing his two columns on Saturdays and Sundays starting in 2002 and 2003. His final La Télé column appeared on March 7. His Chaud Show column ended on Jan. 27, 2008.

Other more minor cutbacks also included dropping seniors columnist Hugh Anderson and the HealthWatch column to biweekly (the latter runs on alternate weeks with Shaping Up columnist June Thompson*), and killing off the sports crossword puzzle.

* An earlier version of this post said June Thompson’s column had been dropped to biweekly. In fact, it was always biweekly. HealthWatch was dropped to biweekly when it was moved from Monday to Tuesday because of the slimming of Monday’s Gazette. And calling it recent might be a bit of a stretch too since it happened in September. But what the hey, facts aren’t important, right?

| Montreal, Public transit

Tramlicious

Union Montreal's Tram plan: Orange lines denote planned routes

Union Montreal's Tram plan: Orange lines denote planned routes

Saturday’s Gazette has a feature from transportation reporter Andy Riga about whether trams are the future of transportation in Montreal.

There are two schools of thought on the matter. On the one hand are people like Projet Montréal’s Richard Bergeron, who get a hard on every time he hears the word and thinks there should be thousands of them (250 km worth) criss-crossing the city. He even has a proposal to replace Mont-Royal Ave. with a tram. Tram proponents (which also include Mayor Gérald Tremblay) say they’re clean, they’re fast and they’re fun, and they’ll attract tourists as well as those who think buses are too crowded and smelly.

On the other hand, there are those who think trams are too expensive for their purported benefits. They’re inflexible, require large infrastructure costs, and won’t actually pull more people out of their cars even as they necessarily reduce the amount of roadway available to traffic. The Gazette’s Henry Aubin, for example, thinks that trolley buses, which are also electric but can navigate around roadblocks and don’t require tracks, are a less sexy but much more sensible option.

The story comes in many parts, in print and online:

Having heard arguments on both sides, I’m still on the fence about tramways. I like the coolness factor and appreciate how efficient they are, but I also agree with the argument that trolley buses are more flexible. The idea of testing them out on routes that are simple, straight and begging for transit infrastructure (like Pie-IX) makes sense to me. If it’s successful, then we can ponder more complicated routes like Côte des Neiges, Park and Mont-Royal.

| Media, My articles, Navel-gazing

A1

Page A1 for Monday, August 3, 2009

Page A1 for Monday, August 3, 2009

It will probably stand as the last of my firsts for at least a little while. After four years (off and on) of doing just about every other editing job at the paper, last night I sat at the desk reserved for the Page 1 editor. For the next seven hours, I would be writing the headlines that first hit peoples’ eyes the next day, the ones that they would glance at on the newsstand as they make their decision whether or not to buy it. It’s a very important job, and I’m happy to say I don’t think I screwed it up too much.

As the size of newspapers and their staffs shrink, the prestige of various jobs has diminished somewhat with it. Where a few years ago you had a staff of three working under you, now it’s the size of the entire desk working on the A section on the weekend. And their workload has increased as well. The Page 1 editor used to spend the whole shift concentrated on a single page (and not even all of it). Now they work on A2, A3 and A4.

In my case, it wasn’t so much work. A4 turned into a city news page, A3 had been mostly done in advance, and A2 had the Monday Calendar and Bluffer’s Guide, both of which were written by me (and therefore neither needed any editing, right?).

The other thing to keep in mind about this job is that there’s no real layout involved. Page 1 isn’t laid out, it’s designed by a professional page designer, who tweaks tracking and leading to make sure everything looks perfect. After a few hours, the Page 1 editor gets a page with photos and a bunch of dummy type to be filled out.

Since this was a Sunday, news was kind of light, even with the deaths of two Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and the deportation of Karlheinz Schreiber. It was quite late in the evening before the subject of the main photo was decided on (the calls for what go on Page 1 are the responsibility of the Assistant Managing Editor and the Night Editor, both of whom are usually managers). Other candidates included the Highland Games in the West Island, flooded basements in N.D.G., Schreiber being deported, or something sports-related. My passing thought about taking a picture from the water gun battle on the Plains of Abraham was nixed mainly due to the fact that we had dead soldiers on the page (juxtaposition is everything). Besides, it was a Reuters photo and we had plenty of stuff from our staff photographers. So an Osheaga photo (the second time in two days that Osheaga has been the main art on the front page), but with a playful weather element, became the centrepiece, and the inspiration for my pick of quote of the day.

So yeah, Mom, go ahead and save that page. The rest of you, go read the Bluffer’s Guide, which is on the subject of the vicious lies being told about our health care system south of the border.

| Montreal, Photos

Where’s a cop when you need one?

A row of cars parked in the middle of a high-traffic bike path on Boyer St.

A row of cars parked in the middle of a high-traffic bike lane on Boyer St.

It’s bad enough when a car ignores the signs and painted lines and decides to park in the middle of a bicycle lane – actually, straddling both bicycle lanes – but it’s even more annoying when other drivers follow the lead and park there too. Here we see at least half a dozen cars and vans parked on Boyer St., which is part of the Route Verte.

There were some mitigating circumstances here. There was construction in this area and the bikes were being detoured on to St. Hubert St. That also meant those green poles that normally separate the lane from the roadway were removed.

Still, there was no indication that the lane had been cancelled or that parking was allowed on it. So I wondered, where’s a cop – or a parking enforcement officer – when you need one?

A parking enforcement officer surveys the scene and chats with an errant driver

A parking enforcement officer surveys the scene and chats with an errant driver

A police officer on his bike leaves the scene without giving tickets or ensuring the vehicles are moved.

A police officer on his bike leaves the scene without giving tickets or ensuring the vehicles are moved.

Oh, there they are. They didn’t end up giving any tickets that I could see. The drivers agreed to move their cars, and the two officers left while most were still parked in the lane.

Still, it felt good to know that occasionally the authorities do notice these things.