News about news

• Rogers and Village Media have teamed up for another local news website, KitchenerToday.com. Like HalifaxToday.ca and OttawaMatters.com, the site will be fed by a Rogers-owned all-news radio station and Rogers TV community TV channel on a Village Media platform.
• The Globe and Mail has a new feature online that adds helpful process info on, for example, how it uses anonymous sources, right in the stories.
• The Professional Hockey Writers Association, for the first time, is publishing the individual ballot selections of its members that led to the choosing of NHL Awards recipients. The Gazette’s Pat Hickey and TVA’s Renaud Lavoie are among those listed as having submitted ineligible all-star team votes.
• A consortium of broadcasters denies that there was any threat from them to cut coverage of the Ontario election results after a concession speech by Kathleen Wynne was delayed too long.
• The Link has some more details about Concordia University’s new institute for investigative journalism.
• Charges have been laid against a man alleged to have led a right-wing group’s storming of Vice’s Montreal offices last month.

At the CRTC

• The commission held a hearing this week where four radio stations begged for their lives, err, I mean explained their chronic issues with licence compliance — CKMN-FM Rimouski, CHOC-FM Saint-Rémi, CKWR-FM Kitchener and CKUN-FM Christian Island. The transcript is here.
• A commission letter to the Bell Fund, an independent production fund set up by Bell to dole out some of its mandatory contributions to Canadian content, says that its board makeup appears to be insufficiently independent of Bell. This is part of a complaint by several broadcasting groups that a new program set up by the fund unfairly discriminates against smaller broadcasters.
• RNC Media has asked the CRTC to maintain its Independent Local News Fund allocation despite having shut down TV station CKRN-DT in Abitibi. RNC says it has moved all CKRN’s news resources to CFVS (its V affiliate) and produces the same amount of local news in the market as before.
• Colba.Net has thrown in the towel on a TV distribution service in Ontario, and handed its licence back to the commission.
• Native radio station CKOK-FM Nain, N.L., has been told it can’t be exempt from the national public alerting system, despite the argument that such a regulation is at odds with UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.
• Licence renewals for Pattison-owned radio stations CKWD-FM (Wild 95.3) Calgary and CKNO-FM (102.3 NOW!) Edmonton

Ethical reviews

• Canadian Broadcast Standards Council: A Doc Mailloux broadcast was not discriminatory against old people nor overly sexually explicit.
• Toronto Star Public Editor: When is it appropriate to use the term “elderly“?
• CBC ombudsman: CBC can’t delete an article about the former mayor of St. Albert, Alta. violating the Municipal Government Act, even though the judge in the case found the mayor was acting in “good faith”.

TV

• Roseanne is coming back, but without Roseanne. The producers of the hit revived sitcom are going ahead with a “spinoff” that does not star or have any financial links to Roseanne Barr.
• Sportsnet has announced its national NHL broadcast schedule for 2018-19. The schedule includes national broadcasts for the seven Canadian teams, but since Rogers also has regional broadcast rights to the Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers, and shares those rights with Bell for the Toronto Maple Leafs, some additional regional broadcasts could be upgraded to national for those teams. Here’s how it breaks down per team so far out of 82 regular-season games each (of the Canadiens broadcasts, 22 are on Saturday, 5 on Wednesday and 5 on Sunday, including a Super Bowl matinee game):
  • Toronto: 40
  • Montreal: 32
  • Ottawa: 27
  • Vancouver: 24
  • Winnipeg: 22
  • Calgary: 22
  • Edmonton: 22
• CBC has cancelled the daily business news show On the Money with Peter Armstrong, leaving CBC News Network without a regular business show.
• Worse for CBCNN, the network is moving to a format during the day where the first half of each hour will be live and the second half a repeat of the first.
• V is working on a new talk show in which Phil Roy interviews celebrities in their homes.
• Workers at TVA have voted 97% in favour of a strike mandate. But the union has no immediate plans for a strike.
• TSN will broadcast the home opener of the Humboldt Broncos hockey team, which was devastated when many of its players died in a bus crash during last season’s playoffs.
• Serinda Swan has been cast in the lead role in a new Toronto-set CBC original drama Coroner (8 episodes), set for broadcast this fall.
• ABC pulled an episode of reality series The Proposal after an accusation against one of its contestants related to a previous case of sexual assault surfaced online.

Radio

• Community station CIBL-FM Montreal appears to have made its crowdfunding goal of $35,000, with 91 contributions. One of the station’s recent radiothons was streamed by MAtv.
• Toronto’s CHUM-FM 104.5 went through a rebranding on Friday, and though it built up a lot of hype for the change, it’s unclear what exactly is different, beyond a lot more pink in their logo.

Print

• The Quebec Community Newspaper Association awards winners list has been posted. In the overall newspaper category, first place goes to Kahnawake’s Eastern Door, and second and third place to two editions of The Suburban.

Online

• Sony’s Crackle, the free video streaming service, is shutting down access in Canada as of June 28.
• Paid subscription services YouTube Music and YouTube Premium (formerly YouTube Red) are now available in Canada.
• MUCH has published a five-episode series of videos on LGBTQ issues.
• The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states can require retailers who don’t have a physical presence in their state to collect and remit sales taxes.

Corporate

• Quebecor has officially bought out the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec’s stake in Quebecor Media, and is now the sole owner of that subsidiary. But the Caisse still has a stake in Quebecor Inc. itself, and some of that payement is in the form of a convertible debenture.
• The union representing CBC/Radio-Canada employees in Quebec and Moncton have once again rejected a contract offer.
• Disney upped its bid for 21st Century Fox in response to an offer by Comcast. It’s almost $15 billion higher than its previous bid.

News about people

The countdown is on! @SarahRitchieTV is joining Global Halifax as our lead anchor. She'll bring you the latest in local news starting June 25. #Halifax pic.twitter.com/YB94f8GXus

— Global Halifax (@globalhalifax) June 18, 2018

• Marie-Andrée Chouinard has been named the new editor-in-chief of Le Devoir. She replaces Luce Julien, who was poached by Radio-Canada.
• Irene Gentle has been named the new editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star. She is the first woman to hold the role.
• Luc Bellemare has been named the new permanent primary host of RDS’s l’Antichambre. He replaces Stéphane Langdeau, who left RDS because he shares initials with someone else.
• Emmanuelle Latraverse has decided to leave Radio-Canada, where she was the host of its weekly political talk show until she was mysteriously demoted amid rumours about her behaviour.
• Alain Dubuc is leaving La Presse for a teaching job, and going out with some reflective columns.
• Jane Gerster, formerly health reporter at the Winnipeg Free Press, is now the national features reporter for Global News.
• Radio-Canada reporter Véronique Prince has been named president of the Quebec Press Gallery.
• Emilie Perreault had her last day at 98.5 FM.
• La Presse’s Yves Boisvert talks to cartoonist Serge Chapleau
• Netflix has dropped its head of PR, Jonathan Friedland, after he apparently used the N word.

Obituaries

• Charles Krauthammer, U.S. political commentator

Good reads

• FPJQ’s Trente magazine on Radio-Canada’s spotty acceptance of non-Quebec accents.
• The Columbia Journalism Review looks at Consumer Reports magazine and its plan to stay viable in the future.
• The Toronto Star fact-checked a week’s worth of Question Period at the House of Commons, and rates questions and answers as true, false, dodge and stretch.
• A look at Toronto’s high school newspapers

Jobs

• Videojournalist, Radio-Canada Hamilton (deadline: June 28)
• New York correspondent, Globe and Mail (deadline: June 30)
• Editor-in-chief, MAtv Montreal (deadline: July 6)
• Social media manager, MAtv Montreal (deadline: July 6)
• Reporter, Breakfast Television Montreal