You know, if I’m going to make fun of V for spelling mistakes, it’s only fair that I point out errors by the networks with higher budgets:
A typo during Le Verdict (Episode 3)
I realize even Habs players can’t spell Cammalleri (and I’m sure it’s been wrong at least a dozen times in my newspaper), but this is Radio-Canada primetime, folks.
UPDATE: A bunch of people have pointed out that Bell also has trouble checking the spelling of “Cammalleri”.
Ted Bird's new haircut, from K103Radio.com
K103 thought to bring a video camera as Ted Bird got a mohawk shaved into his head during his first show.
He said during the show that he had decided not to shave his head because he wanted to be embraced by the community rather than do some silly stunt thinking it would impress everyone.
It was all an act, though, part of the publicity stunt for the station that is betting quite a bit on Bird’s personal popularity to bring listeners and advertisers. They insisted he get his haircut, and he obliged.
Bird will be appearing with his new haircut on his Bird’s Eye View segment on CFCF tonight at 6, where I assume he will explain why he looks like he does. Bird the chicken wussed out and wore a Habs cap during his Bird’s Eye View segment on CFCF, though he did explain at the end, and included footage of the shaving.
Bird has a post about his haircut on his blog. There’s also a short story about Bird and the new show at KahnawakeNews.com. Other than that (and this post), not much bite from the media.
Radio watcher Sheldon Harvey has some thoughts on the debut at Radio in Montreal. Noah Sidel also weighs in.
Oh, and K103 Operations Director Chuck Barnett sent in this pic of Bird at his new roost:
Ted Bird struts his stuff at K103 (photo by Chuck Barnett)
UPDATE (April 21): Bird has also started writing a column for Iorì:wase (aka the Eastern Door, aka KahnawakeNews.com) about his experience working in the community.
UPDATE (April 22): I’ve gone through my recording of their first show, and compiled this 15-minute excerpt of banter between the hosts. It includes Bird’s first words on air at 5:30am, a conversation over the phone with Terry DiMonte, the new Revisionist History, and a couple of promos.
Where is this?
UPDATE (April 26): One comment was on the right trail, but nobody posted a correct answer a week later, so here it is: It’s the end of Legendre St. in St. Michel, looking toward the old quarry. That tower at the centre – your guess is as good as mine.
Il n’y aurait plus de fautes de français dans les tableaux et dans les réponses.
Douglas Honegger, of Call-TV, to La Presse’s Hugo Dumas last month, in response to concerns that this awful, ethically questionable pay-to-play lottery show that aired during late nights on TQS might return to making awful gaffes when it returned to the network now called V.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRsOCIhO30o
And this week, they forget how to spell “Lionne”.
You know how they say it’s so bad it’s good? This is worse than that. No wait, it’s even worse than that. It’s so bad, it’s not even the bad that’s worse than bad, it’s so bad people watch it and live-tweet about it to talk about how bad it is.
I don’t know if it’s because of the recession, because nobody expected the Canadiens to even make the playoffs – much less be able to compete against the Washington Capitals – or just because the Justiciers Masqués aren’t on the air anymore, but the number of Habs songs and Habs-related song parodies produced in preparation for this year’s playoffs is pretty sad compared to previous years.
And if there was ever a year we needed more songs, it’s this one. We can’t just take the songs from last year and replay them – it’s hard to get excited about Saku Koivu, Alex Kovalev, Mike Komisarek and Christopher Higgins since they all play for other teams now.
Still, a few amateur songsters have stepped up to the challenge:
by Clermont (featuring Kra-Z-Noize)
by Vince Colletti/Tanya Kassabian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtnicmGhXfg
by Alex G.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve1fzkvHMTA
by Alex G. (also available in French)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeUNBp6spgs
by Martin Scully
(also translated – badly – into English)
by Patrick Charles, Cat Spencer and Mark Bergman for CJFM. Sung by Lissa Vescio
UPDATE:
by Annakin Slayd
by CHOM FM
by Daniel Iorio
by Justiciers Masqués
by Virgin Radio
by Porn Flakes
by Christopher Pennington and Felicity Hamer
West Island Chronicle's Talk of the Town: Advertorial or business section?
If you haven’t read it already, this piece by David Yates (former Gazette business editor, and one of my journalism professors at Concordia) is worth reading. It appears on Thursday’s Business Observer page in the Gazette, and takes direct aim at another newspaper, or perhaps more accurately its owners.
Yates sets his sights on the West Island Chronicle, which used to be much larger than it is now. Many eons ago, people used to pay to get it, it used to have a reporting staff. Now, he says, it “is barely a shadow of its former self, as are other community newspapers taken over by Transcontinental Inc. … almost indistinguishable from the advertising fliers for grocery stores and other retail outlets that it accompanies.
Yates doesn’t pull his punches. He accuses it of running advertorials, of running pictures of its publisher with advertisers to keep friendly with them, and of contributing to its own demise by slashing its quality and inviting competition. He says similar papers like the Westmount Examiner are doing the same thing, which is why we now have independent papers in Westmount and the West End.
This piece comes as the Chronicle is struggling to get back on its feet editorially. Just before Christmas, news came down that its editorial staff of two would be reduced to one with the dismissal of reporter Raffy Boudjikanian. Editor Albert Kramberger refused to be demoted to reporter and left the paper, leaving it with an editorial black hole.
(Since then, Boudjikanian has been seen heard working for CBC radio in Montreal, while Kramberger has had freelance pieces in the West Island Gazette.)
Announcement welcoming Sarah Leavitt in April 7 issue
After a rough few weeks, in which stories were borrowed from other papers (some translated from Cités Nouvelles, which covers the West Island in French), they hired Concordia journalism student Sarah Leavitt as the new reporter.
“I’m going to try my best to bring the Chronicle into the Web 2.0 world and make it better than David Yates thinks it is,” she tells me, figuring out that my email inquiry about her new job was in part related to Yates’s piece.
Even without the dramatic staff turnover, the paper is struggling. People within Transcontinental agree with that (though, of course, they asked me not to identify them). People simply aren’t going to pay for a community newspaper anymore, and declining ad revenue means less money to spend on staff, which means the quality goes down, which means fewer people read it, which means less advertiser interest, and the spiral just gets worse.
Transcontinental is looking to fix that, in part because of competition from Quebecor. But the threat Yates talks about is from a mom and pop organization.
With the NDG Monitor reduced to online-only status and the Westmount Examiner barely worth reading anymore, newspapers have moved in to steal the readership. One is the Suburban, which publishes separate editions for the West Island, the central city and the East End. Two others are published by David Price, the weekly Westmount Independent and twice-monthly NDG Free Press. Both claim a distribution of about 13,000, have more high-end ads (mostly from real estate agents) and a lot more editorial content that ruffles feathers instead of placating businesses.
Yates’s suggestion about a similar thing happening in the West Island (where it would also go up against a weekly section of The Gazette) comes at the same time as a rumour that Price is starting up a third newspaper to focus on the West Island.
Price denies such a thing is in the immediate future. “Fun as that sounds, there is no expansion plan at this time,” he tells me.
As for those standalone photos of business leaders with the newspaper publisher, a Transcontinental insider tells me that the Chronicle’s “Talk of the Town” page and similar pages in other newspapers doesn’t involve a quid pro quo with advertising. In other words, there’s no requirement to buy anything to get covered. Instead, the purpose of the pages seems to be to allow the newspapers to tell businesses that “yes, we had something about your Subway franchise opening in the strip mall” without actually wasting a reporter on the story.
Whether that’s a big enough distinction for you is up to you. Smaller papers have a particular problem with keeping the walls between advertising and editorial separate.
All this controversy also comes just after the nominees finalists for the Quebec Community Newspaper Association awards are released (PDF), showing a lot of honours for the Chronicle’s two departing staff. Reporter Boudjikanian got seven nods, Kramberger one, and the paper a total of 12, second in total behind the Low Down to Hull and Back News (still my favourite name for a newspaper) at 17.
Though Leavitt is no doubt a capable journalist, it is expected that the paper will sink in quality compared to its peers over the next week or two as it re-establishes its institutional memory. The Chronicle, which has often been a dominant force at the QCNA awards, could come into them next year without making a very big splash.
Is there room for a new West Island paper with the Chronicle, Suburban and West Island Gazette already fighting over the anglo market? Have Trancontinental’s papers, like the Chronicle and Westmount Examiner, gotten so bad that there’s no journalistic value in keeping them going? Could a community paper that invests in staff become profitable before it’s run out of business?
Can the Chronicle be saved? And if it could, should it?
The CRTC will be holding a hearing this month about community television, and at least one group is hoping they will close loopholes (or even just curb abuses that aren’t even loopholes) that allow cable companies to use these channels as promotional arms.
The CRTC requires cable companies to devote 5% of their gross revenues to Canadian programming. Of that, 2% must go to a community channel, kind of like those “cable access channels” we hear about in the U.S.
Even though it’s a very small fraction of their money, the cable companies decided they would put it to good use. Instead of just giving it over to an independent community broadcaster, they’d run their own community networks. Rogers uses the moniker RogersTV. With Videotron, it’s VOX. Shaw TV, TVCogeco, you get the idea.
The problem with having the cable companies in control is that this can lead to abuses. Rogers is being accused of having too much advertising. Others of not keeping proper records (which, admittedly, is a chronic problem for many low-budget broadcasters).
But the biggest problem seems to be that the programming itself isn’t fulfilling its mandate:
The CRTC audits found that Cogeco, Rogers, Shaw, and Persona all classified staff-produced news and other programming-even MTV promos in one instance-as “access programming”. Some Eastlink systems reported no access programming at all.
“The CRTC’s data show that Canada’s ‘community’ channels have become promotional tools for cable companies,” said Catherine Edwards, spokesperson for CACTUS.
A look at VOX, Videotron’s community channel, and you can see what they mean. A show devoted to TVA’s Star Académie. A show put together by a (former) Quebecor-owned weekly newspaper. Quebecor personalities are all over the schedule.
Sure, there’s the “Mise à jour [city name here]”, and the half hour where they show traffic cameras. But I don’t see much access here, nor do they make obvious how someone could get involved.
Perhaps the era of community television is over. We no longer need cable access when we have Internet access. People can just put their videos on YouTube. (Ratings certainly suggest that, with market shares of 0.1 and 0.2%.)
But until the CRTC makes that determination, cable companies should start playing by the rules – the spirit as well as the letter.
UPDATE (May 15): La Presse’s Marc Cassivi also thinks Vox isn’t doing what it should as far as community programming.
Not that I would in any way use this photo to make an unfair generalization about television news reporters…
Back to transit this week, on a suggestion from reader Zain Farookhi:
What bus stop is shared between the most bus lines?
(Note that for the purposes of this question, a terminal with multiple stops is not considered one stop.)
UPDATE: Steve Hatton is the first to get the right answer.
STM bus stop at René-Lévesque and Mansfield (westbound)
This stop at René-Lévesque Blvd. and Mansfield (that’s the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in the background) has 10 bus lines serving it as of March 29:
Of those 10 routes, two are less than a month old and two others are less than two years old. Before last week, the answer would have been (unless I’m mistaken) the stop at Brunswick Blvd. and St. John’s Blvd. outside the Fairview mall in the West Island, which is served by nine routes all coming out of the terminal.
Kellergraham points out an alternative that also has 10 routes serving it.
