An elevator at Berri-UQAM sits just above a recently reopened escalator.
The STM has asked the media to assemble at the Lionel-Groulx metro station on Monday morning to mark the inauguration of elevators there and at Berri-UQAM.
The elevators, whose construction began more than a year ago, are the first to be put in service on the island, and will join the three stations in Laval as the only ones so equipped. Elevators at Bonaventure, Côte Vertu and Henri-Bourassa are also under construction.
There’s a perception among us working stiffs sometimes that upper management play by different rules than the rest of us. We’re expected to be loyal to our employer, and when we get fired or are forced to resign over something serious, we can kiss that company (or even that line of work) goodbye. Big-time management folk, however, can jump around between competitors as much as they want, even after they’ve been fired.
Maybe it’s because managers are fired more often, so it’s not as serious to them as it may be to someone who has spent 20 years in the same job.
Still, you can’t help but laugh at the news that Brunswick News (the corporation, controlled by the Irving family, that controls almost all media in New Brunswick) has re-hired Jamie Irving to be its vice-president. Irving had been removed as publisher of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal in June after it published a false report that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had pocketed a communion wafer. Although a ridiculous issue on its face, the report got national attention.
Irving quickly appointed Globe business columnist Neil Reynolds to be Brunswick’s “editor at-large”.
So I guess the moral of the story is: publish fake news, lay low for a bit and get promoted!
I’m not a music critic (I’m also incredibly white). Make up your own opinions.
The music is from Hometown Glory by London-based singer Adele.
A tour of the St. Laurent garage, following a bus driver on his daily between-routes.
I’m sure you’ve heard about it by now, but a reminder that the STM is holding a rare open house at its Legendre garage next to Henri-Julien Park near Crémazie metro on Sunday, Sept. 13, from 8am to 5pm.
The FAQ is here. The open house includes a 75-minute guided tour, for which they require registration at a specific hour.
The Legendre garage got a $102 million makeover, particularly to handle the new articulated buses that the STM is putting into service this fall. Those will be on display, along with a bunch of other stuff that’s a mix of cool behind-the-scenes information and PR BS.
t.o.night, the new free Toronto evening newspaper, launched on Tuesday.
Reaction has been mixed:
CBC and the Doon Valley Journal have previews of the new paper.
The Bluffer’s Guide this week in The Gazette looks at t.o.night and evening newspapers in general. It also debunks one of the arguments used by t.o.night’s backers that this concept worked in London (England) by pointing out that the free evening daily there probably won’t last another month.
CFCF's new "cozy corner"
Those of you who watch CFCF’s noon newscast might have noticed something looking a bit different. The “cozy corner” (as Todd van der Heyden calls it) looks dramatically different.
The set before (Sept. 6)
Gone are the vertical columns of dull blue, purple and grey. Instead, a solid blue wall and shelves which feature red highlights and a CTV logo. The chair are the same style, replacing black with bright red to match the set. The table and floor are unchanged.
This set is used rarely during the evening newscasts, but is where sit-down interviews with guests and columnists are shot. As we learned from our visit in May, the set sits in a corner of the set just next to the anchor desk.
Dumont 360 set
TQS haters were eagerly anticipating the premiere of Mario Dumont’s new daytime talk show Dumont 360, one of the star attractions to V’s fall lineup.
Though the rebranded station launched on Aug. 31, Dumont’s show made its premiere a week later (ironically, on Labour Day, when most people with weekday jobs would take the day off) with Dumont introducing himself.
The critics’ analysis: It could have been a lot worse (updated Sept. 9 with more links).
After: 24 Heures Montréal Sept. 8
The lesser of the two free dailies in Montreal launched with a new look today. In addition to a new logo, it includes a new colour scheme (orange and white instead of black and yellow) and new fonts (ones that seem to make it look more like Metro).
Where is this?
UPDATE: A few of you got this right, but Amanda was the first. It’s a park, it’s a founfain fountain, it’s Lafontaine Park. The Théâtre de verdure is on the left.
The fountain rotates through various colours and shapes, giving a nice show at night.
Nick Murdocco and Gary Whittaker of The Franchise
It’s not every day someone moves straight from hosting a campus radio show to hosting one on the commercial airwaves, but Nick Murdocco and Gary Whittaker have done exactly that. The hosts of The Franchise, a sports talk show on Concordia’s CJLO 1690AM, will be moving up the ranks and down the dial to The Team 990 (CKGM) to host a weekend morning show starting Sept. 12.
You can take a listen to what kind of show they offer by listening to their podcasts.
The tearful goodbyes were apparently premature…
When Canwest announced in February that it was putting its five “E!” network conventional television stations under “strategic review” – considered code for “sell them off or shut them down” – staff at one of those stations decided to take matters into their own hands.
Employees and fans of CHCH in Hamilton, Ont., began a campaign to save the station, and one of the ideas floating around was to have the employees and community pitch in to buy the station from Canwest and run it themselves.
Turns out that wasn’t necessary. In June, a broadcaster most had never heard of called Channel Zero announced it was going to buy CHCH and CJNT in Montreal. It also promised that all the jobs would be kept and the station would increase its focus on local news. That sale got CRTC approval and became final just before the Aug. 31 deadline set by Canwest (based on the end dates of licenses for the stations).
More recently, when CHEK-TV in Victoria found out it wasn’t going to be saved and would be closed down along with CHCA in Red Deer, Alta., staff there began a similar campaign. It actually got to the stage of submitting a $2.5 million bid to Canwest to buy the station, just a week before it was to be shut down. The money would come from staff and local investors who were committed to having a local voice on Vancouver Island.
The deal was rejected by Canwest as being insufficient. The sale price of the station wasn’t the issue, they said, but investors would need to have enough money (about twice the amount offered) to cover early losses, which would be substantial because the station had no advertising sold after Aug. 31.
Over that last weekend of August, it looked like CHEK was gone for good. CHCA shut down on Monday morning, and CHEK was scheduled to go out after some special programming remembering the 53-year history of the station.
(The fifth E! station, CHBC Kelowna, was brought into the Global television network, an option not available to either CHEK or CHCA because of license restrictions that prevented them from carrying the same programming as Global stations in Vancouver and Calgary, respectively. It will operate as Global Okanagan, and with 11 fewer employees.)
But CHEK’s employees weren’t done. They submitted a revised bid, and Canwest agreed to keep the station on life support for an extra day. And another. And a few more.
The news officially came just after the close of business on Friday, in the form of an internal memo to employees and a press release: Canwest had agreed to sell CHEK-TV to a group of local investors, led by the station’s employees.
Coverage:
The actual price was nominal (the Globe and Mail has it at $2), but the important part is that the station’s new owners would pay for any losses suffered while the station was awaiting CRTC approval of the sale.
That approval should come quickly, if the Channel Zero case is any indication. The move is a win-win-win. It makes Canwest look good (or at least less bad) compared to what would happen if they shut the station down (in all, Canwest says it saved 90% of the almost 300 employees at the five stations). It saves the jobs of CHEK’s 45 employees (they’re really happy about that part), and it keeps a local television station in Victoria (CTV’s CIVI-TV, part of the A network, is the only other station indigenous to Vancouver Island).
But the tough part of this story is just beginning.
People buy money-losing TV stations with optimistic business plans only to see them go down the drain. And employees often think they can do a better job running a company if they just got those know-nothing managers out of the way.
The investors behind the CHEK bid say they have a solid business plan. Now we’ll see if they can make it work. If they do, we could see lots of other small-market money-losing stations across the country try the same thing (or we’d see Canwest and CTV buy them back and change all of their stations to fit that working business model). If they don’t, it’ll make others think twice before trying a similar move.
I hope CHEK succeeds. I don’t think the odds are in its favour, but I applaud them for trying.
Good luck CHEK. You’ll need it.
On Thursday morning, La Presse editor Guy Crevier sent out a mass email to all employees saying in no uncertain terms that, unless the union agreed to $13 million in concessions, the newspaper would be shut down on Dec. 1.
Within minutes, the email was forwarded to other news outlets all over the place (including Fagstein), the first news stories appeared within two hours, and the union quickly organized a press conference to respond.
Stories with the basic facts are all over the place:
and, of course, La Presse itself.
The big question now becomes: Is this a bluff? There are reasons to think it might be, and reasons to think it might not.
Right now my gut feeling suggests that “it’s a bluff” is more likely.
But it’s not my job that’s on the line.
UPDATE: Patrick Lagacé doesn’t know what’s going on (just like I don’t know what’s going on at Canwest – being an employee of a media outlet gets you some inside information, but only on the small scale). Talks are on behind closed doors.
Meanwhile, locked-out Journal de Montréal workers (remember them?) are calling for Quebecor to release the Journal’s financial information like La Presse is doing.
Steve Kowch: CFRB to CJAD
Mike Bendixen: CJAD to CFRB
Who knows why people in commercial radio make their decisions anymore. But as if to emphasize the point that Montreal’s CJAD and Toronto’s CFRB talk radio stations are completely interchangeable in the eyes of Astral Media, the two stations have switched program directors.
Last week, after having to make painful cuts in staff to CFRB radio personalities, program director Steve Kowch learned that he too would be one of the casualties. CJAD program director Mike Bendixen, who himself just had to make painful cuts, was immediately sent to Toronto to replace him.
Now we learn that Kowch has accepted a six-month contract to be program director at CJAD after mulling it over for a bit.
The timing suggests that this is a demotion for Kowch and a promotion for Bendixen (no doubt reflecting how Astral feels about the Toronto and Montreal anglophone markets), but I’m sure Astral will find some positive way to spin all this that doesn’t make anyone look bad, assuming they even bother to issue a press release at all.
Kowch’s Twitter post says he’ll meet the staff on Friday and start his new job on Tuesday (after Labour Day).
Feel free to include a comment below about how middle managers always seem to land on their feet.
It was heralded as part of a renewal, a refocusing on local news and information that would bring people back to the CBC: Local newscasts in Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Montreal, Halifax, Calgary and Toronto would be expanded from an hour to 90 minutes. This comes just a few years after they were expanded from half an hour to an hour.
There’s just one hitch: There’s no additional staff to fill that extra time. In fact, the CBC is having to deal with much fewer staff than it had last year. So the idea, the CBC says, is to have three separate 30-minute newscasts back-to-back, each giving a different angle on the top stories of the day. People could watch the entire 90 minutes, or they could just watch a 30-minute segment and get the top headlines.
That’s led to some criticism from the usual sources that the new newscast would be more repititious or even vacuous. The competition collectively yawned.
Yesterday, I watched the entire 90-minute newscast with my stopwatch laptop and crunched the numbers on how exactly they’re filling their airtime in these extra 30 minutes.
Here’s what I found. Note that these numbers are based on a single newscast, and so the average could be wildly different from what we see here.
As with my previous analysis, I broke the newscast down into major categories:
If we consolidate the categories into local news (including sports and weather) and non-local news (including the arts segment), it looks like this:
That actually doesn’t look too bad, but it’s more complicated than that, as you’ll see.
Comparing before and after, we see most proportions are about the same, but local news has taken a substantial hit, mainly at the expense of more weather and more national news.
Here’s the changes in chart form:
| Category | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Advertising | 25% | 23% |
| Filler | 8% | 7% |
| Local news | 31% | 23% |
| National news | 16% | 20% |
| Wire news | 2% | 3% |
| Weather | 11% | 14% |
| Sports | 5% | 5% |
| Business | 1%* | 1% |
| Arts | 1%* | 4% |
* Business numbers weren’t included in the previous charts, but represented about 1% of the average newscast. Arts numbers also weren’t included. The Scene is not presented daily, and was aired during only one of the three studied newscasts, where it was categorized as national news.
The CBC big-wigs say you could watch the entire 90 minutes, but you don’t have to, because the main headlines will be in each of the three newscasts, but each time a different angle will be presented.
Technically that’s true. The three main local stories (the Opus card lineups, drunk driving sentence and Peel St. pipe burst) were presented once in each of the newscasts (a live reporter stand-up or packaged report in two of them, and a brief without the reporter in another), and the reporters did seem to file two slightly different packaged reports, with different interviews or a slightly different angle.
But the story was the same. I don’t feel I learned anything new from the second time I watched it.
The repetition even got annoying at times. It led to at least one case where a story would be teased as “coming up” 13 minutes after it was reported (in the same half-hour block).
Of course, the real reason for all this kinda-repetition is the lack of additional staff. Five reporters presented local stories (four news, one sports). This is the same as the average from the 60-minute newscast. The number of (distinct) local briefs actually went down compared to the 60-minute newscast average.
Meanwhile, the use of national packages tells a different story. The number used was double the 60-minute average (8 vs. 4), and not a single one was repeated throughout the 90-minute broadcast. Not even the national and international briefs were repeated.
This forces us to ask: Why does local news need to be repeated in each of the three broadcasts, but non-local news doesn’t? Is national news (like, say, the fact that the Liberal Party no longer supports the government) unimportant?
Andrew Chang, anchor
Andrew Chang is currently anchoring solo. He’ll be joined by Jennifer Hall starting next Tuesday. You could definitely see the bright green glow under that stylish suit as he somewhat nervously stumbled on the occasional line. But he was comfortable enough that it didn’t seem awkward. Plus, he’s adorable. I’m comfortable enough in my masculinity to say that. My gut feeling is that he’ll do a good job in the chair.
Michel Godbout, the former anchor and now a Really Important News Correspondent, seemed a bit odd in his new role. It wasn’t that Godbout was bad. Rather, having him talk to Chang in a split-screen (one designed in such a way that Godbout looked much bigger than Chang), it was hard to see Chang as the anchor and Godbout as the reporter. Especially because Godbout still has many of his anchorisms – explaining stories to us in the “now, what that means is” way that he would do so often in the anchor chair.
I’m not sure if this feeling is because the two still need to get used to their new roles, or because we need to get used to them being in their new roles, or a mixture of the two.
Let it not be said my criticisms are not constructive. Here are some suggestions for the new newscast(s).
Have any other suggestions? Add them below.
The new set at CBMT
Finally, the set looks like something that’s larger than a phone booth for once. Hopefully they get some good use out of it.
CBC News: Montreal at 5:00, CBC News: Montreal at 5:30, and CBC News: Montreal at 6:00 air weeknights at … well, you get the idea.
UPDATE (Sept. 9): Chang explains during one of the newscasts (Windows Media Video) the subtle diferences behind each. If you can’t see the video, here’s how it breaks down:
UPDATE (Sept. 16): Toronto’s newscast is about the same as ours.
There wasn’t much in the way of big announcements, but CBC Radio One’s local afternoon show Homerun has been expanded to three hours from two. It’s now 3-6pm instead of 4-6pm, starting today (Sept. 1).
The expansion comes at the expense of national programming including Spark with Nora Young and Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald.
Fortunately, all these shows are available on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. You can see a full schedule here (PDF) (which hasn’t yet been updated with the extended Homerun).
The move is part of that big CBC “renewal” effort to focus more on local programming but with less money to do so.
In Quebec City and elsewhere in the province, the afternoon program Breakaway is unaffected yet. It continues from 4-6pm.
It’s also worth noting for those who haven’t tuned in in a while that Radio Noon, the province-wide call-in show, is one hour long when it used to be two hours. So this additional hour of Homerun simply brings the station back to the same amount of programming it had last year.
