News about news
- There was another school shooting in the United States. That’s not a media story, but there were a few problems with social media reaction to it. Poynter points out that people were creating fake tweets from real journalists to make them look bad (and reduce public confidence in professional journalism). Meanwhile, an oft-reported fact about there being 18 school shootings so far in 2018 was debunked by the Washington Post as an exaggeration based on overly broad criteria from an interest group about what constitutes a “school shooting.”
- Two Quebec journalists won’t have to divulge their sources of leaks from the province’s anti-corruption squad UPAC. The judge cited the federal government’s new journalism source protection law. The decision is being appealed.
- Meanwhile, the province’s minister responsible for access to information is presenting a new law that would restrict it somewhat, exempting communication between ministers. That isn’t playing well with the government’s promise of more transparency.
- A Newfoundland judge has dismissed a charge against a man who yelled FHRITP at a journalist, ruling that emotionally disturbing a news reporter did not constitute a public disturbance according to the law. He was careful to note that this doesn’t make FHRITP legally protected, and suggested the government could amend the law to add emotional disturbance to the criteria.
- The Globe and Mail explains why media are using Facebook photos of accused killer Bruce McArthur instead of his mugshot. Simply put: because police didn’t release the mugshot.
- Quebec superior court has upheld a labour board decision ruling that a government employee who gave a whistleblower interview to Radio-Canada denouncing insufficient resources for environmental protection should not have been fired for giving an interview without authorization.
- CBC’s ombudsman ruled that a former Calgary school board trustee candidate cannot get previous articles about her de-indexed.
- Quebec’s journalism federation is offering government-subsidized workshops to teach high school students how to recognize fake news.
At the CRTC
- Télé-Québec’s CRTC licence is up for renewal, and among the interventions was one from the English Language Arts Network, which Vincent Brousseau-Pouliot found, writing a story about its demand that English be more represented in TQ’s programming, and even a 10% English quota imposed. Specifically, ELAN is asking the CRTC to:
- Require TQ to develop and publish a policy to reflect the full diversity of Quebec society,
- Require TQ to develop and publish an action plan for creation of content that fulfils its diversity policy and a promotion policy to encourage viewership from members of Quebec society who have not traditionally felt reflected,
- Require TQ to track the language of its viewers so that it knows which language groups are watching which programs,
- Create a consultative committee that includes the diversity of Quebec society, which will advise the board of directors on issues concerning the broadcasters diversity of programming throughout the license period.
- Place ads in English-language media when pertinent programming for the English- speaking minority is scheduled and when new programs are being developed,
- Create an on-line playlist of Anglo-Que?be?cois reflective content (following the NFB’s example),
- Require TQ to increase the production and programming of content reflecting the Quebec minorities, especially English-language, indigenous, and visible minority communities to at least 20% of the schedule, and at least 20% of the production budget; and
- Require TQ to establish English-language programming for 10% of its schedule, and 10% of its production budget, to reflect the English-language community in Quebec.
- The commission has approved the acquisition of four Ontario radio stations by Bell Media, which will pay $15.64 million to Larche Communications for CICZ-FM Midland, CICX-FM Orillia, CJOS-FM Owen Sound and CICS-FM Sudbury. Bell will pay $1,022,004 to various funds and development initiatives as a CRTC-mandated tax on the acquisition.
- The CRTC has dismissed a complaint by Electronic Box (aka EBOX) against Bell Media, which accused the company of refusing to make Bell’s specialty channels available for a TV distribution service EBOX plans to launch in Ontario and Quebec. Bell says it is willing to negotiate, and the CRTC agreed Bell was willing to act in good faith. If they can’t come to an agreement, they can come back to the commission for mediation or arbitration.
- TVA is appealing a CRTC arbitration decision to the federal court of appeal, arguing that the commission was wrong to accept a Bell deal that would set Bell TV per-subscriber rates for TVA Sports lower than Bell’s RDS.
TV and video
- Unifor is raising the alarm about cuts at Global News, and in particular the decision to have local evening newscasts in Atlantic Canada be anchored out of Toronto. (Late-night and weekend newscasts are already done this way.) On the other hand, Global is expanding its local newsgathering operations by hiring online journalists in three markets where it doesn’t have local TV stations: Ottawa, Barrie and Kitchener. (CTV has stations in all three markets.)
- Télé-Québec is turning 50, and has some special anniversary programming this month.
- A judge has ruled against a website called TVAddons, which provided add-ons for the Kodi media player that allowed users to access copyright-infringing content. The ruling overturns a lower court ruling that denied an injunction.
- Britbox, an over-the-top service providing classic British TV series, has launched in Canada. It costs $8.99 a month.
- CBS All Access is launching in Canada in June. But its exclusive series Star Trek Discovery and The Good Fight will remain on Bell Media’s Space and Corus’s W Network, respectively.
- Richard Therrien at Le Soleil is wondering if the ubiquity of viewer content warnings at the end of every commercial break is desensitizing TV viewers to them, which causes them to miss when there are scenes that really need viewer discretion.
- CBC says more than 23 million Canadians tuned in during at least part of the first three days of the Olympics, including an average audience of 1.3 million for the opening ceremony. About 4.3 million tuned in to watch Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s gold-medal-winning ice dance free skate, plus another 700,000 on Radio-Canada. On NBC, Olympics ratings are down 6% from Sochi, but the network says that’s what they expected.
- APTN has responded to popular demand and added the classic Canadian drama North of 60 to its schedule.
- YouTube is promising changes after top recommended videos related to the Parkland Fla. shooting were found to be conspiracy theory videos accusing people involved of being actors.
- The New York Times explains how TV networks like NBC handle compensation for the rights to broadcast music that is included with figure skating performances during the Olympics.
Radio
- Jerry Howarth, radio voice of the Toronto Blue Jays, announced his retirement, effective immediately. He says health issues are affecting his voice, and it’s time to pack it in.
- CIBL 101.5 has slowly resumed programming as it continues to try to find a way out of its financial crisis.
- Corus-owned radio stations have suspended play of songs by Canadian band Hedley after sexual misconduct allegations were published against the band. The band has also pulled out of the Juno Awards following this flurry of anonymous Twitter allegations.
- Urbania did a statistical analysis of CHOM’s playlist to determine objectively if it really is playing the same songs over and over again. Its conclusion: songs aren’t being repeated that often, but you do hear the same artists a lot.
- The New York Times is offering its Daily podcast to public radio stations.
- Le Soleil will stop printing a Sunday edition starting March 18, and instead publish a digital-only edition on Sundays. Groupe Capitales Médias’s other newspapers (which didn’t have Sunday editions) will also add Sunday digital editions. The move will leave only the Journal de Montréal and Journal de Québec as Quebec newspapers printing seven days a week.
- Quebecor is asking the court to invalidate a $10-million aid package from the Quebec government to Le Soleil publisher Groupe Capitales Médias, arguing that the investment, through Investissements Québec, is discriminatory and unfair. GCM says it’s a political move by Pierre Karl Péladeau.
- The Toronto Star is sounding the alarm about the industry’s financial state in dramatic fashion: it has put its internship program on hiatus, cut budgets for travel and freelance, and its chair gave an interview to the Globe and Mail in which he says the paper is “very, very close to the end.” (At least one person thinks the Star’s internship program, while very useful, has some serious structural problems.)
Online
- A new website, La Torche 2.0, is offering editorial cartoons as a subscription service for $1/week. It’s already signed up Beaudet, Bado and Fleg, former newspaper standards. Le Devoir has details.
- The New York Times profiles The Players’ Tribune, the website that features first-person essays by athletes, and the thorny issue of giving them a public forum unfiltered by journalists.
- Google’s Chrome browser has begun blocking website ads by default from sites that don’t respect ad standards.
- The Globe and Mail has a long (paywalled) feature about 5G, the new wireless technology being tested that would increase mobile data speeds mainly by adding many more smaller cell towers in big cities.
- Newsweek is continuing to implode, as evidenced by the epic editor’s note atop this story reporting on itself.
News about people
- CBC has poached Vassy Kapelos from Global to host its Power & Politics show, finally replacing Rosie Barton, who left for The National. Kapelos had been host of Global’s weekly politics show The West Block.
- V’s new late-night talk show hosted by Stéphane Rousseau has announced a co-host (or, perhaps more accurately, sidekick): Sonia Cordeau, best known from Les Appendices.
- Former Impact captain Patrice Bernier has been added as a contributor to TVA Sports.
- Jonny Harris (Still Standing, Murdoch Mysteries) and Emma Hunter (The Beaverton, Mr. D) will co-host the Canadian Screen Awards on March 11.
- TSN 690’s Sean Coleman is going back to school to get an MBA.
- Gerry Forbes, CJAY Calgary morning man, is retiring.
- Jean-François Breau replaces Jean-François Baril as host of La guerre des clans, the Quebec version of Family Feud, which V is bringing back from the dead.
- La Presse profiles Mathieu Beaumont of 98.5 FM.
- NPR has released a report into alleged sexual harassment by Michael Oreskes, former senior vice-president of news. It’s not good news for Oreskes.
The Toronto Star’s announcement isn’t surprising at all. Basically, it’s a question of when and not if. The only question is “can they get into a digital format that makes enough money” before they run out of money.
The CHOM playlist story is interesting for a bunch of reasons. Marketing / positioning means that a station like CHOM tends to stay with a fairly tight playlist of material. You want to stay on your product point. In that way, CHOM faces a couple of problems:
1 – there isn’t enough new real rock music out there getting released. The big classic artists are either surfing on their past product, or release slowly. A big band like U2 only has 1 album every 3 years. Many of the other artists are not producing new albums at all.
2 – The numbers of new bands are considered “rock” and tolerable for an aging baby boomer CHOM audience is pretty limited.
3 – Generally the music director will only have a certain number of approved cuts per artist in their systems to work with. That can lead to certain songs from certain artists (like the example Heart song) coming up more often, especially if it happens to be a size that just nicely fills out a time block.
4 – The desire to hit a mix of old, new, hard, soft, and the like means that in some cases, there are less option in “hard classic” and in say “new soft”. In those categories, you may have more replays.
CHOM got really stuck on this a number of years ago before Picard came in and did a bang up job to add many of the alternative and grunge artists that were doing well on 99.9 but were not at all on CHOM. Today they are sort of at the same point, and the corporate masters aren’t likely to make a change any time soon. CHOM’s market share, while not anywhere near best, isn’t terrible, certainly not at the point of needing a format change. Give it another 10 years for the audience to die off a bit, and maybe some things will happen.
I actully gave up on CHOM because the same bands kept popping up. There are many bands I wish they would play that are popular in other markets. Many are alternative bands. Not saying Montreal needs alternative rock radio. Just saying maybe include a few more alternative rock bands that are doing well on the Canadian rock charts.
Sure they play a good mix of new and classic rock, but I feel the younger rock audience is being left out. Therefore having them listen to 99.9 The Buzz. For bands I love and can’t get on Montreal radio I will often switch to The Buzz. Maybe its time to do a little more rock music younger listeners want to hear while still playing the musix older audience still loves.
I agree.
CHOM however is in an odd place. Being part of the Bell group means they can only compete with “non-bell” stations for listenership. Since there is only perhaps one competitor in the ratings book that they can really go against (The Beat), and because the music formats have no overlap, it’s pretty difficult. CHOM is in third place in the ratings not because of anything they have done, rather than The Beat has taken a big chunk out of Virgin (another shriveled up husk of a format at this point)
Competing against the Buzz sounds good in theory, but since the Buzz isn’t “in market” for ratings, it’s not meaningful or measurable. Without competition, CHOM’s listenership basically has gone sideways for the last decade or so.
In a normal market, CHOM would be spicing up their morning show with maybe better sports coverage (attract the guys) or what have you, trying to get listeners from other stations. They can’t really do that, as they are tied to corporate everything, news, weather, sports, traffic… it all comes from the same bucket that does every other Bell station in the market. So there is little to differentiate, little to make people move.
It’s unlikely to change. The market is “full”, no new stations are coming along, and there is nothing that suggests any change to that.
Radio is a bit like newspapers. They are tied to an older delivery format that isn’t particularly compatible with younger people. With competition from streaming, media players, satellite, and other delivery options, new listeners are not coming in at the same speed they were. Radio is, more than every, dependent on listeners trapped in their cars. I don’t even have a functional radio receiver in my home anymore, just a little MP3 player with FM on it.
CHOM? They won’t change formats until they change owners and become independent of Bell. That’s not going to happen until the CRTC grows some, and that’s really unlikely!
True. If Canada had unlimited data I’d make the switch to The Buffalo Radio which is a local web radio station that plays new/classic country and rock. A much better rock presentation then CHOM. Love the mix with country because I’d always switch between CHOM and CKKI