News about news

• Members of the Ottawa Newspaper Guild, which represents workers at Postmedia’s Ottawa Citizen and Ottawa Sun, are voting on a new contract offer after the employer threatened to lock them out if they did not accept it. The results will be known on Wednesday, and if the offer is rejected, the lockout begins at 12:01 a.m. Thursday. The Montreal Newspaper Guild, which represents workers at the Montreal Gazette (including me) has a pact with the ONG that means a lockout in Ottawa would trigger a strike in Montreal.
• Hyperlocal Montreal news site Pamplemousse.ca, covering the Mercier, Plateau and Petite Patrie neighbourhoods, is back in business after a successful crowdfunding campaign brought the website back from the dead.
• Brampton, Ont., has a new subscription news site called The Pointer.
• A new non-profit called the Fonds québécois en journalisme international will provide up to $75,000 a year in grants to Quebec journalists doing international reporting. Individual journalists can get up to $6,000, or $9,000 for a team.
• Québec solidaire isn’t getting much demand for journalists to follow its campaign bus, so it is opening up media accreditation to just about anyone who wants it. People covering the campaign would be given freedom to say what they want, but they would have to pay for the privilege to compensate the party for expenses related to their seat on the bus.
• The Globe and Mail is now pre-moderating comments on all its stories.
• The Halifax Chronicle-Herald’s Hamilton Spectator’s Susan Clairmont has been allowed back in a courtroom to cover a Family Court case.
• Freelancers have vowed not to work for The Outline after it fired all its staff writers.

At the CRTC

University of the Fraser Valley radio station CIVL 101.7 FM Abbotsford, B.C., has asked the #CRTC to add a retransmitter in Chilliwack (92.3 MHz, 4,600 watts) pic.twitter.com/L0oXeIBcus

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) September 7, 2018

• Ten Cricket (formerly ECGL Cricket TV) has had its licence revoked by the CRTC. The ethnic specialty channel shut down on June 12.
• The CRTC has authorized a new transmitter for Radio-Canada’s ICI Première service in La Romaine, a 50W transmitter at 99.9 FM to replace an old AM transmitter there. CBC has been systematically replacing low-power AM transmitters across the country with FM ones.

Ethical reviews

• The Globe and Mail Public Editor Sylvia Stead says she agrees with readers that an op-ed on the Energy East pipeline by Derek Burney should have disclosed that he is a former director of TransCanada Corp., the company behind the pipeline project. Four days after Stead’s column was published, the op-ed has not been edited to include this disclosure.
• A guy who believes you can be allergic to radio waves (“electromagnetic hypersensitivity“) complained about a CBC story about a human rights tribunal decision. The ombudsman said the purpose of the story was to report on the decision, not analyze whether its conclusion was correct.

TV

• Workers at TVA are threatening to strike at the worst possible time for the employer: during an election campaign. They’ve set Sept. 22 as a strike date.
• RDS has released its NHL broadcast schedule for the coming season. As usual, it includes 60 regular-season Canadiens games and 52 Senators games. It also includes all six Canadiens preseason games, plus the special intrasquad game (on RDS Info). For the Senators, it’s three of the six preseason games, two of which are against the Canadiens. TSN has yet to release its schedule, which should include an announcement on their new play-by-play announcer.
• The Gazette’s Bill Brownstein talks to TV anchors Mutsumi Takahashi, Jamie Orchard and Debra Arbec about their preparations for the first televised English-language leaders’ debate on Sept. 17.
• Global’s weekly Focus Montreal show is organizing debates with representatives of the four main Quebec parties about various topics as it launches its new season in the leadup to the election. The first one, this weekend, was about education.
• A Globe and Mail report about NAFTA negotiations suggests that cross-border television advertising was an issue raised by the Americans. It’s not clearly spelled out, but this appears to be about a proposal to require consent from Canadian TV distributors to rebroadcast American stations. This is being spun as a way to eliminate simultaneous substitution of advertisements, but it would probably make that issue moot since the U.S. stations couldn’t authorize their signals for distribution in Canada when carrying programming that the Canadian rights have been sold for.
• Designated Survivor has been picked up by Netflix for Season 3 after being dropped by ABC.
• NBC has added new episodes to the next season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which it rescued from Fox, bringing the total from 13 to 18.
• Switzerland’s public broadcaster SRG is ending over-the-air television transmission.

Radio

• The Ottawa Citizen talked to Jesse Reynolds and Jenna Mo about losing their jobs at Corus’s Jump! 106.9.
• Former NHLer Carlo Colaiacovo has been named the new morning co-host on TSN 1050 in Toronto, alongside Michael Landsberg.
• CTV Montreal has at least twice aired an advertisement for Rouge FM’s Véronique et les fantastiques. The ad doesn’t say much, just singing “Véronique et les fantastiques” with an on-screen caption saying “lundi au jeudi, dès 16h”. It’s rare to see ads in the other language (imagine an English ad for The Beat on TVA!), and I think it’s interesting that Bell Media thinks there are either enough francophones watching CTV Montreal or enough anglophones who would be interested in listening to Rouge FM.

Print

• The Montreal Gazette has ended Marc Richardson’s millennials column, which appeared Mondays for the past six months. His final column was last week.
• Toronto’s Now magazine is no longer running classified sex ads in print (but will still host them online).

Online

• Twitter has finally brought the permabanhammer down on Infowars.

At the CBC

• Radio-Canada, which is moving out of its Montreal tower soon, has decided to give its non-heritage furniture to the Salvation Army. Museums that might be interested in some old artifacts that aren’t considered heritage items have until Sept. 27 to express their interest.
• CBC’s Annual Public Meeting is Sept. 25 in Edmonton.

News about people

• Les Moonves has stepped down as chief executive of CBS after another report by the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow about complaints over his behaviour.
• Norma Lee MacLeod hosted her final episode of Maritime Noon on CBC Radio One last Friday before her retirement. The show was video broadcast on Facebook and you can watch it here.
• Lucy van Oldenbarnev Lucy van Oldenbarneveld has taken a temporary leave from CBC Ottawa. She explains it’s to care for her sister, who has breast cancer.
• Carla Oliveira is the new anchor of Radio-Canada’s Téléjournal week-end Estrie.
• The Gazette’s Christopher Curtis is getting 15 minutes of fame for his unconventional coverage of the Parti Québécois campaign bus. (As if that wasn’t meta enough, Global News wrote a story about his interview with TVA. And here I am writing about that.)
• La Presse profiles 98.5 FM radio host Isabelle Maréchal.
• The New York Times talks to Robbie Praw, formerly a VP at Just For Laughs, who is now overseeing the expansion of stand-up comedy specials at Netflix (including many shows recorded at JFL).
• Lisa Fuoco, who did promotions at CJAD for many years, is now overseeing promotions at Corus’s radio stations in Toronto.
• Emna Achour, formerly of Presse Canadienne and The Athletic, has left journalism.
• Murat Ates is now The Athletic Winnipeg’s full-time Jets reporter.
• Josh Hargreaves, formerly of the Globe and Mail, is joining The Athletic as senior editor.
• Former Vancouver Province hockey reporter Jason Botchford has joined The Athletic.
• Sean McIndoe, aka Down Goes Brown, has joined The Athletic.
• Calgary’s Scott Cruickshank (Calgary Herald) and Darren Haynes have joined The Athletic.
• Stefani Langenegger has taken over as host of Morning Edition on CBC Radio in Saskatchewan. She answered some rapid-fire questions.
• Louis Lemieux, former RDI anchor, has become the latest former journalist to try his hand at politics, announcing a run with the Coalition Avenir Québec (which needed a candidate in the Saint-Jean riding after the previous one quit amid questions about his bar). Other journalists in this election include CAQ’s Mathieu Lacombe (formerly at TVA in Gatineau), the Liberals’ Paule Robitaille (formerly Radio-Canada) and Québec solidaire’s Vincent Marissal (ex-La Presse columnist).

Obituaries

• Lise Payette, former journalist, TV host, cabinet minister, screenwriter and newspaper columnist
• Burt Reynolds, actor

News about companies

• The Getty family has retaken control of Getty Images.

Good reads

• Slate has a story on The Athletic, and its business model of hiring people who leave jobs at mainstream media, and how that means it reads a lot like those old media outlets.

Jobs

• Journalist, L’Actualité (deadline: Sept. 17)
• Journalist, Acadie Nouvelle in Edmunston/Caraquet (deadline: Sept. 21)
• Station manager, CJLO at Concordia University (deadline: Sept. 21)
• Broadcast journalist, VOCM in St. John’s (deadline: Sept. 21)
• Reporter/writer, CTV News Toronto (one-year contract; deadline: Sept. 23)
• Afternoon News Anchor/Reporter, The River/More FM in Niagara Falls/Fort Erie (deadline: Sept. 24)
• Evening anchor/reporter, Bell Media Toronto (deadline: Sept. 24)
• Anchor/reporter, CP24 Toronto (one-year contract; deadline: Sept. 30)
• Reporter/editor, paNOW.com in Prince Albert, Sask. (deadline: Sept. 30)
• Economics and Money Editor, Vice News in Toronto
• Video journalist, CityNews Montreal
• News anchor, Zoomer Radio/Classical FM in Toronto
• Staff writer, Vice.com in Toronto
• News reporter, Y95.5 in Yarmouth, N.S.
• Reporter, Pattison Broadcast Group in Prince Albert, Sask.