CBC crew out in full force- photobomb courtesy of Stephen McCarthy from Valcartier fire department @stpatrick_qc pic.twitter.com/W5fBqd8FRP

— Julia Stewart-Page (@JuliaBPage) March 24, 2018

News about news

• The Canadian Association of Journalists has announced its award finalists. The Globe has 6 nominations, CBC 17, APTN 8, Ottawa Citizen 3, Maclean’s 3. Two are from Quebec:
  • Nicolas Mesly and Hugo Jolion-David of HuffPost Quebec for Quand l’agriculture tue in the online media category
  • Shrinkhala Dawadi and Julia Dick of the McGill Tribune for ‘It doesn’t matter because it didn’t happen on campus’ in the student excellence category
• A survey shows Quebecers have more trust in the media than they did a year ago
• Broadcast Dialogue’s podcast interviews Corus executive Troy Reeb, who’s in charge of news, radio and local stations. He talks frankly about the kind of stuff Global News has been doing lately — the need to rethink TV news stories (get rid of B-roll and make stories shorter), rebroadcasting TV newscasts on the radio (he says the newscasts were rewritten with that in mind), and opening new bureaus in cities they didn’t serve before (Ottawa, Kitchener, Guelph and Barrie).
• Le Devoir looks at Rad, the journalism laboratory at Radio-Canada.
• NBC is reactivating the @BreakingNews Twitter account, which has been dormant for more than a year despite having 9 million followers.
• India is not a safe place for journalists.

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News about news

• Finalists for the National Newspaper Awards have been announced. The Montreal Gazette didn’t get any nominations, and the Journal de Montréal only one, but subscription sports website The Athletic got its first nod. Winners will be announced May 4. The usual outlets led nominations:
  • Globe and Mail: 18
  • Toronto Star: 12
  • La Presse: 8
  • Edmonton Journal: 3
  • Winnipeg Free Press: 3
• Google is putting $300 million into supporting quality journalism. Among the things it plans to do is make it easier for people to subscribe to paid journalism outlets. The blog post explaining the Google News Initiative is here, and there’s a website here.
• Radio-Canada Enquête host Marie-Maude Denis will be asked to testify about her sources in the trial of Marc-Yvan Côté and former Liberal cabinet minister Nathalie Normandeau, though a judge has limited what she can be asked about. Radio-Canada is appealing the ruling as a blatant violation of the public’s trust in journalism.
• Maclean’s has a new politics newsletter.
• A BuzzFeed investigation has shown that a PR firm is paying pundits to write opinions for conservative publications in order to sway public (and political) opinion, and those writers are failing to disclose the financial link.
• Bloc Québécois leader Martine Ouellet is threatening political commentators with libel suits.

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News about news

• Radio-Canada journalist Antoine Trépanier was arrested on Tuesday after sending an interview request to a source for a story. The source had agreed to an interview, then changed her mind at the last minute. He reiterated the request the next day in an email, leading to the source filing a criminal harassment complaint. The FPJQ understandably wants an explanation from Gatineau police, which released this statement. The source, a woman who is allegedly acting as a lawyer but is not licensed as one, says she’ll give her side on Monday. In the meantime, this story exposes how easy it is to get someone arrested by a police department that doesn’t want to bother investigating such minor cases. And that’s besides the whole constitutional issue.
• The Toronto Star finally won a two-year battle with Toronto police to get them to admit that they used IMSI catchers — devices that spy on cellphones — during investigations. The story highlights flaws in access to information laws.
• The Mercier hyperlocal news website Pamplemousse might not be so dead after all. They’re going to try a crowdfunding campaign to save it before they pull the plug.
• National Geographic admits it spent decades looking at the world through racist eyes, and is hoping to rectify that problem.
• ProPublica issued a long correction/mea culpa after incorrectly saying the woman who has since been named the new head of central intelligence in the United States had overseen waterboarding of infamous Al Qaida suspect Abu Zubaydah.
• The Canadian Press has corrected its stylebook after errors related to terminology of Inuit people were discovered.
• The Canadian Psychiatric Association has released new guidelines on reporting on suicide. The organization recommends stressing ways to get help and emphasizing that suicide is not the answer.
• RTDNA Canada has announced its regional award nominations: West (B.C./Yukon), Prairie (Alberta/Saskatchewan/Manitoba/N.W.T.), Central (Ontario/Quebec) and East (New Brunswick/P.E.I./Nova Scotia/Newfoundland and Labrador/Nunavut). Central Region finalists from Quebec, who will find out April 14 if they win, are:
  • CBC Montreal: 22 nominations (12 digital, 1 multiplatform, 7 radio, 2 TV)
  • CBC Quebec City: 4 nominations (1 digital, 3 radio)
  • CTV Montreal: 3 nominations (1 digital, 2 TV)
  • Global Montreal: 3 nominations (1 digital, 2 TV)
  • CJAD: 3 nominations (3 radio, including one shared with CHOM)
  • HuffPost Quebec: 1 nomination (digital)
• The family of former Democratic Party staffer Seth Rich is suing Fox News for peddling a conspiracy theory about his death. Rich’s 2016 shooting death is a common element in conspiracy theories tying all the world’s evils to the Clinton family somehow. But people peddling those theories either don’t know or don’t care what impact that has on Rich’s family.
• Reuters, whose parent company has sold off the business terminal business that made it rich, now has a guaranteed $325 million a year income for 30 years. Recode says it needs to figure out what it’s going to do with that $10 billion.
• Nearly 200 journalists in Italy are under some form of police protection because of right wing threats against them.

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News about news

This is quite a correction pic.twitter.com/TnFZmbCIQV

— Jon Steingart (@jonsteingart) February 26, 2018

• The federal budget is providing $50 million to support local journalism over five years, though the details are light so far. There’s also talk of opening up charitable donation rules to make journalism eligible. Though it’s better than nothing, it’s also being criticized as being far too little.
• The NETendances study by CEFRIO shows Quebecers continue to get their news mainly from television, but also mostly use multiple platforms to inform themselves. Radio is on the decline, while online sources continue to rise.
• The New York Times has decided to write obituaries for women who died long ago, as a make-up effort for ignoring them when they died. The “overlooked” series, which will continue, includes obits for people like Charlotte Brontë, Ada Lovelace and Sylvia Plath.
• La Presse’s Marie-Claude Lortie visits the New York Times to talk about its business model and what lessons other media can learn from it.
• A widely shared opinion piece by CTV personality Marci Ien claiming to have been racially profiled by Toronto police was challenged by the department after it consulted video of the incident. The police’s case is pretty convincing, though it doesn’t mean that Ien isn’t being racially profiled in general and doesn’t face a different standard because of race. Ien says the police are missing the point, and it’s about her feelings (though her opinion piece makes several statements of fact that, if she was not racially profiled in this case, would be factually incorrect). There’s also a history of racism to consider, even if race may not have played a factor in this incident.
• Facebook is testing a new feature that allows select publishers to label a post as breaking news (once a day). Apparently only four Canadian news outlets are being given this power to start with: Global News, CityNews, CBC and the Journal de Montréal. Meanwhile, the website is ending an experiment in some countries that tried to separate feeds related to friends from feeds related to organizations and brands.
• Joel and Jerome Vangheluwe are suing alt-right websites after they spread rumours that the two were behind the Charlottesville attack.
• TVA is still blacklisting Hugo Dumas of La Presse.
• The Journal de Montréal profiles three women who cover the Canadiens, including CBC’s Jessica Rusnak. It’s the kind of story you expect on every International Women’s Day, but this one goes into a bit more depth about their careers and the sexist crap they’ve had to deal with.
• An open letter to the Quebec government by organizations including the FPJQ asking it to reconsider legislation that would restrict what information can be obtained through access to information laws.
• Fake news travels faster on Twitter than real news, a study has found.
• Press Forward is a new campaign to end sexual harassment in media workplaces.
• Prime Minister Justin Trudeau travelled to India, and there were lots of hot takes by columnists about how much a disaster it was, but not much context about the issues separating India and Canada. Supriya Dwivedi points out some of them in a column at GlobalNews.ca.

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