News about news

• The number of published commentaries on Andrew Potter has surpassed 50. I compiled links to them on last week’s digest.
• The Globe and Mail has reportedly suspended columnist Leah McLaren for a week after Twitter lost its mind over a column she wrote claiming to have tried to breastfeed Michael Chong’s baby. Judith Timson in the The Toronto Star was among those to note that, similarly to Andrew Potter in Maclean’s, McLaren could have been saved by more aggressive editing.
• More organizational changes at CBC News.
• Jean-François Lisée thinks Radio-Canada wants Quebecers to think they’re racist. Or something.
• The Journal de Saint-Lambert was ordered to pay the former mayor $130,000 for defamatory articles against him, driven by the man who is now the new mayor.

At the CRTC

• The commission was busy this week hearing applications for new aboriginal radio stations in Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. There were some tense moments discussing how the federal government deals with indigenous people, and an acknowledgment from the chair that there are no aboriginal members at the CRTC. (It’s the government that has failed to appoint any.) Transcripts are here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.

TV

• NBC has finally seen the light and decided that it should show the next Olympics live in all U.S. time zones rather than on tape delay to ensure the big events are in primetime.
• CTV has eliminated its sports departments at Kitchener, London and Windsor, which will no longer have local sportscasts and will cover sports as news stories. Unifor is not happy about this. Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton have also lost staff and apparently won’t have dedicated local sports segments on local news anymore.
• Quebec’s budget announced this week includes an additional $10 million over five years ($2 million a year) for Télé-Québec.
• Channel Zero, which owns CHCH television in Hamilton, has announced a $1-million settlement with former employees who were laid off as the company that employs them was forced into bankruptcy. Because the deal was reached with the union, the actual former employees who would be getting money didn’t get to vote on the settlement, which gives them less than they would have been entitled to as severance under their collective agreement.
• After some people expressed worries that The Handmaid’s Tale, a Hulu series based on a Margaret Atwood novel, wouldn’t be available in Canada, and after repeated promises from Atwood that there would be a way to see it here, Bell Media finally announced that it has acquired the Canadian rights to the show and will air it on Bravo. It will add the show to its Crave TV library after the Bravo run is complete.

Radio

• Quebec City radio host André Arthur is facing another libel lawsuit. Meanwhile, he’s also being criticized for suggesting it’s okay to run over cyclists during winter.

Print

• Quebec’s budget has a $36-million gift to the local newspaper industry. Two thirds of that will go to vaguely described programs meant to help written news outlets. The other third will subsidize a fund that newspapers pay into to compensate municipalities that have to recycle their products. A coalition of newspapers that called for government assistance says this isn’t enough.
• Last Friday was bad news day at the Vancouver Sun and Province. J-Source compiled “so I’ve been laid off” tweets from staff there.
• Nominees for the Magazine Grands Prix, the breakaway competitor to the National Magazine Awards, have been announced
• Postmedia rolled out a new national brand campaign: “Built on trust”, featuring full-page front-page ads in 10 daily broadsheets.
• The Link, one of the student newspapers at Concordia University (of which I’m a former editor-in-chief), is going from a weekly publication schedule to a monthly one. The change was approved by students at the paper’s annual general meeting on Thursday. The paper remains a daily news source online.
• The Fulcrum, the student paper at the University of Ottawa, got a legal threat from the student union president after reporting what was said at a student council meeting.

Online

• Brendan Kelly profiles Montreal-based video creator WatchMojo
• CBC Montreal is starting up a new podcast, Montreapolis, hosted by Steve Rukavina

News about people

• Traci Melchor, who left CTV’s The Social temporarily, has decided to make the departure permanent and focus her efforts on eTalk. Marci Ien, formerly a co-host of Canada AM, has been named to the permanent Social host team to replace her.
• Paul Wells is going back to Maclean’s after a brief stint at the Toronto Star.
• Catherine Lévesque, who was HuffPost Québec’s Ottawa correspondent, is heading to Quebec City to cover the National Assembly instead. She takes the office of Patrick Bellerose, who was the first online media journalist to work full-time at the Quebec press gallery. He was recently poached by the Journal de Québec.
• Martin Patriquin, recently laid off as Quebec correspondent for Maclean’s, will be writing columns for iPolitics
• Mike Strobel will be retiring from the Toronto Sun
• Nova Scotia journalist Alexander Quon is leaving CBC to join Global Halifax

Good reads

• The Toronto Star on an insanely long process trying to get information out of Toronto Hydro.
• Actress Mariloup Wolfe opens up to La Presse about the difficulty being a celebrity with everyone talking gossip about you, and how she manages social media.

Obituaries

• Janine Sutto, Quebec actress (so important to its cultural scene there are even some obits in English)

Jobs

• Head of special publications, Le Devoir (deadline: March 31)
• Assistant general manager, FPJQ (deadline: April 2)
• Photojournalist, Global Montreal (deadline: April 4)
• Digital content editor, CTV News (deadline: April 6)
• Two reporters for Report on Business (Globe and Mail)
• Journalists, Journal de Montréal (deadline: May 2)

Upcoming events

• April 8: Montreal Media Celebrity Hockey Marathon, Pierrefonds (CBC will be there)
• May 20: Canadaland in Montreal

With any luck this should return to its usual schedule starting next Wednesday.