Loto-Québec made a big presentation today about a group of Rona employees who are sharing in a $55-million Lotto Max jackpot they won in Friday’s draw.
But none of those employees learned about winning by reading the numbers in Saturday’s paper, because they weren’t there. Instead, the papers had the results of Thursday’s draws.
And it wasn’t a misprint or error, but rather an unfortunate consequence of a decision to push back draw times.
Starting a week ago, the Interprovincial Lottery Corporation, which includes Loto-Québec and four other lottery corporations covering Canada’s provinces and territories, pushed back the deadline to buy tickets for the Lotto 6/49 and Lotto Max draws from 9pm to 10:30pm Eastern Time. Loto-Québec decided “in the interest of consistency” to apply the same deadline to its other draws.
On the plus side, this gives people more time to buy tickets, particularly out west where the time difference put the deadline as early as 6pm. But on the minus side, it also pushes back the publication of results of the draws to around midnight, too late to make it into the next day’s newspaper.
The change also affects TV broadcast of the results, though the change is more minor. CTV Montreal used to broadcast the results at 11:30pm, just before the late-night local newscast. Now the results are broadcast around midnight. On TVA, results appear in the ticker the next morning during Salut, Bonjour and the noon news, and throughout the morning on LCN.
For newspapers, under the previous system, Loto-Québec purchased ads every day that would be filed on deadline. Often the page with the results ad would be among the last typeset, because results would come in between 10 and 10:30pm.
Results coming at midnight means they could only make some editions of the next day’s newspapers at best. So Loto-Québec is now running newspaper ads on a one-day delay. Wednesday’s paper gets Monday night’s results, Thursday’s paper gets Tuesday’s results, and so on.
It’s perhaps another sign of the declining influence of print media. The fact that there has been so little discussion about this change is perhaps another.
And here I thought the Gazette had decided to make subscribers pay extra to get the results !
If I was the winner, I wouldn’t want my name or picture published, that’s when some long lost friends come crawling out of the woodwork! I would prefer to be known as Mr Incognito.
If you were the winner, you wouldn’t have a choice. Lotteries require publishing winners of jackpots as a condition of winning them.
And they’d have to be satisfied to have a picture published with my finger stuck up my nose. Because I have no class whatsoever (but you knew that already), but also because I intensely dislike companies thinking my picture is their property.
Isn’t there a court case in BC concerning the fact that the winner doesn’t want to
have his/her name published?
Lotteries in this backwards country. Most US states and numerous other countries realize lottery winner want their privacy and don’t publish names or photos.
There are six U.S. states that allow lottery winners to remain anonymous, though some lawmakers are looking to expand that number.
Daily newspapers are going the way of shortwave radio and the VCR, right now they are in a comatose state. I have a subscription to The Gazette and I have not cancelled it because I still read the editorial page, other than that all the news are already old
A pretty solid indication that at a minimum, print media is no longer something that is catered to and worked around. There are just too many ways to get the results online and via TV and such, putting print media at a huge disadvantage. Give it a while longer, and perhaps they won’t even bother to buy the space anymore, and instead just issue a press release that you guys can do what you like with.
If only people could read the results somewhere (whether print or online) instead of scanning 200 lottery tickets while 10 people are waiting in line behind you at the “quick” supermarket/gas station/dépanneur checkout I’d be happy :)