Media News Digest: Tax breaks for journalism, Roundhouse Radio sold, more cuts at Bell Media
News about news
The federal government has issued an economic update (read: mini budget) that among other things offers $595 million in aid to the journalism industry through tax breaks over five years. A lot of the details (particularly what eligibility criteria there are) are still to be worked out, but this is what is being proposed:
Allowing non-profit journalism enterprises (like La Presse) to become registered charities, which would allow them to issue tax receipts for donations
A refundable tax credit applied to labour for “qualifying news organizations” as of Jan. 1, 2019, the details of which are still to be worked out
A temporary, non-refundable tax credit for subscriptions to “eligible digital news media”
An application has been filed to purchase the corpse of what was once Vancouver’s Roundhouse Radio, a serious talk radio that couldn’t find an audience and went out of business in May. The application is by South Fraser Broadcasting, owned by Sukhvinder Singh Badh, which also owns 107.7 Pulse FM. South Fraser proposes to buy the station for $600,000 and establish a 50/50 mix of music and talk (call-ins limited to an hour each on Saturday and Sunday), on condition that it be allowed to reduce its Canadian content obligations to something closer than the standard for commercial stations. The application blames Roundhouse’s failure on a lack of advertising and on Numeris’s small sample size. Over two years of operation, it had projected $3.7 million in local ad revenue, but got only $137,000. South Fraser is also asking to be relieved of Roundhouse’s Canadian content development contributions, though it will accept to buy the station even if that isn’t granted.
The CRTC has approved the sale of CJAN-FM in Asbestos, Quebec, to a cooperative made up of three employees of the station, for $103,715. The station is a money-loser, with its current owner taking only $12,000 salary and holding several roles. This transaction is seemingly its best hope of keeping it alive.
The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services has released its annual report, showing a 57% increase in the number of complaints. That increase affects all major telecom companies, though the vast majority of CCTS cases get resolved to the client’s satisfaction.
The Public Interest Advocacy Centre is so displeased with the CRTC’s proposed “Internet Code” consumer rights rules and its tight deadline to comment on them that it is boycotting the proceeding.
The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council received a complaint about HIFI, a Blue Ant Media channel, for inappropriate language and scenes of violence and sexuality that did not have appropriate viewer advisories. When it asked HIFI for logger tapes (i.e. recordings of the full broadcasts), the channel could not provide them, instead saving only the short segments that contained language and scenes mentioned in the complaint. The CBSC cited HIFI for the violation, and required it to broadcast that failure on air.
CBC Comedy is no longer going to try writing stories online, much to the disappointment of smartasses on Twitter that love to make fun of it. The website will keep posting videos from CBC comedy productions including This Hour Has 22 Minutes, the Baroness von Sketch Show and Working Moms.
It’s Bell Media layoff season. Five jobs were cut at CTV Montreal — a researcher and a cameraman/editor have been laid off and three vacancies won’t be replaced. Elsewhere, Devon Soltendieck has left eTalk and there were cuts in Bell Media PR. Bell Media doesn’t announce these publicly so we have to rely on the rumour mill for details. (See below for radio cuts.)
The Hockey Night in Canadaretro jacket auctions to benefit Hockey Fights Cancer have ended. Unsurprisingly, Don Cherry’s logo pattern jacket was the highest seller, at $17,709. Ron Maclean was next at $13,510, and Bob Cole at $6,510. Lowest was Greg Millen at $2,030, but most were in the $2,000-$4,000 range.
Videotron is preparing to add some new channels: BBC Earth, BeIN Sports en Español, ERT World (Greek), MAVTV (motorsports), and Italian channels RAI News and RAI World. They’re also adding Quebecor’s QUB Radio to its audio channels, which might raise some eyebrows because QUB does not have a CRTC broadcast licence.
Montrealer Ari A. Cohen has a new documentary for CBC’s The Nature of Things, about animals where the father stays at home and cares for offspring. It airs on Sunday. Here’s a trailer.
Cogeco says it has completed its acquisition of 10 RNC Media radio stations in the Saguenay and Abitibi regions, plus Hawkesbury and Lachute, for $18.5 million (or $19.2 million, depending how you count it). The Cogeco network now comprises 23 radio stations. No announcements were made about changes to branding or format.
Claude Gagnon, president of Groupe Capitales Médias, which owns Le Soleil, Le Droit and other papers in Quebec, says they will likely stop having print editions in five to 10 years, but that wasn’t nearly the kind of commitment that headlines about the speech suggested it was.
9 thoughts on “Media News Digest: Tax breaks for journalism, Roundhouse Radio sold, more cuts at Bell Media”
media man
This is awful about CTV,and their annual firings..
1. Why are these firings always just before Xmas, do these heartless suits in Toronto have any feelings?
2. Is Bell trying to run CFCF-12 into the ground with a shoestring operation?
3. They were down to only one researcher after last year, is H H ,the one that’s gone.
Why are these firings always just before Xmas, do these heartless suits in Toronto have any feelings?
They’re not. First of all, it’s November. Second, they also make cuts in the summer. But patterns in the timing of such decisions are probably a question of fiscal years and quarterly earnings reports.
I actually think Bell as a company has identified that the Federal government will, at some point, try to regulate and dissolve the mega-media conglomerates. Bell is taking every step possible so that they can say “these stations couldn’t be profitable alone, so you have to let us keep them”.
Bell isn’t stupid. They pulled the wool over the CRTC’s eyes for decades now, and they aren’t going to want to give that up any time soon. Massive integration into the whole is about the bottom line, and about the long term suitability of the concentrated media business model.
Bell is taking every step possible so that they can say “these stations couldn’t be profitable alone, so you have to let us keep them”.
They don’t need to do this, since (a) CTV isn’t profitable as a network either, and (b) I’m not aware of any standalone television station in Canada that is profitable. Bell is doing what is expected of it as a for-profit enterprise — trying to maximize profits.
Bell firing people is like Postmedia declaring losses and launching “new initiatives” that lead to job losses. They both seem to be seasonal and sadly predictable.
The interesting question I guess is “will Bell hire new people for those jobs, or will those jobs just disappear into the head office?”. If you consider that most stations have on air jocks 18 hours per day or so (6 am to midnight, the “regulated hours” of radio), it’s not like they can really cut back much. Now admittedly, they can toss out the people who have been around for 10+ years and hire new recruits who will do the job for half the price to get experience, and that might be a plan going forward.
Bell long since went past cutting fat, past cutting meat, and now they are scraping away the bones bit by bit.
Different topic (but the same in many ways) is the government handout to the journalism industry.
My thoughts are that this is perhaps the last step towards propping up what is more and more becoming a legacy industry. While collection and dissemination of news isn’t going to go away, much of the industry is still operating in a pared down version of the past methods – much of it attached to deals made during the salad and main course days of feast and plenty.
Want to see how bad? Consider the CBC contract with the media workers. It’s pretty damn expensive for the CBC to produce anything in house with rules like these.
re: the journalism tax breaks.
I’m sure many on this board recall when a $2 coffee was the limit reporters were permitted to take from someone they were interviewing.
Forget impartiality: when media outlets avail themselves of taxpayer largesse, how critical of the Liberals can they be?
Consumers, not government, should decide what companies and products survive. And it’s become a vicious circle as cost-cutting erodes news coverage and social media erodes readership and interest in news.
First, they only have 125 members, which seems hardly representative of the Quebec journalism sphere as a whole.
Second, their listed highest rate – $175 – is significantly lower than the lowest rate I’ve accepted as a freelance journalist living in Quebec in quite some time. In fact, it’s close to half.
But the weirdest part is that that rate is linked to a 250 word article. Which is really stretching the definition of the word ‘article.’
Anyways, bottom line for me is that the members of this organization seriously need to broaden their markets. If they can’t survive in a market of 8 million, look elsewhere and buttress their client list accordingly.
First, they only have 125 members, which seems hardly representative of the Quebec journalism sphere as a whole.
It’s about a third of the total number of freelance journalists in Quebec according to the AJIQ, which is not bad as far as I’m concerned.
But the weirdest part is that that rate is linked to a 250 word article. Which is really stretching the definition of the word ‘article.’
In the Quebec francophone market, the rate is described as being per “feuillet” or sheet of 250 words. That doesn’t mean the article is only 250 words. So $175 per 250-word sheet would work out to, say, $700 for a 1,000-word article.
It’s definitely not a lot of money, but neither the $175 nor the 250 words are upper limits.
This is awful about CTV,and their annual firings..
1. Why are these firings always just before Xmas, do these heartless suits in Toronto have any feelings?
2. Is Bell trying to run CFCF-12 into the ground with a shoestring operation?
3. They were down to only one researcher after last year, is H H ,the one that’s gone.
This is so sad..
They’re not. First of all, it’s November. Second, they also make cuts in the summer. But patterns in the timing of such decisions are probably a question of fiscal years and quarterly earnings reports.
I actually think Bell as a company has identified that the Federal government will, at some point, try to regulate and dissolve the mega-media conglomerates. Bell is taking every step possible so that they can say “these stations couldn’t be profitable alone, so you have to let us keep them”.
Bell isn’t stupid. They pulled the wool over the CRTC’s eyes for decades now, and they aren’t going to want to give that up any time soon. Massive integration into the whole is about the bottom line, and about the long term suitability of the concentrated media business model.
They don’t need to do this, since (a) CTV isn’t profitable as a network either, and (b) I’m not aware of any standalone television station in Canada that is profitable. Bell is doing what is expected of it as a for-profit enterprise — trying to maximize profits.
Bell firing people is like Postmedia declaring losses and launching “new initiatives” that lead to job losses. They both seem to be seasonal and sadly predictable.
The interesting question I guess is “will Bell hire new people for those jobs, or will those jobs just disappear into the head office?”. If you consider that most stations have on air jocks 18 hours per day or so (6 am to midnight, the “regulated hours” of radio), it’s not like they can really cut back much. Now admittedly, they can toss out the people who have been around for 10+ years and hire new recruits who will do the job for half the price to get experience, and that might be a plan going forward.
Bell long since went past cutting fat, past cutting meat, and now they are scraping away the bones bit by bit.
Different topic (but the same in many ways) is the government handout to the journalism industry.
My thoughts are that this is perhaps the last step towards propping up what is more and more becoming a legacy industry. While collection and dissemination of news isn’t going to go away, much of the industry is still operating in a pared down version of the past methods – much of it attached to deals made during the salad and main course days of feast and plenty.
Want to see how bad? Consider the CBC contract with the media workers. It’s pretty damn expensive for the CBC to produce anything in house with rules like these.
http://www.cmg.ca/en/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/CMG-CBC-collective-agreement-2014-2019-ONLINE-141214.pdf
… and they are somewhat better than they were!
Tax breaks do little except perhaps prolong the suffering a little bit more.
re: the journalism tax breaks.
I’m sure many on this board recall when a $2 coffee was the limit reporters were permitted to take from someone they were interviewing.
Forget impartiality: when media outlets avail themselves of taxpayer largesse, how critical of the Liberals can they be?
Consumers, not government, should decide what companies and products survive. And it’s become a vicious circle as cost-cutting erodes news coverage and social media erodes readership and interest in news.
That article about AJIQ and pay rates….
First, they only have 125 members, which seems hardly representative of the Quebec journalism sphere as a whole.
Second, their listed highest rate – $175 – is significantly lower than the lowest rate I’ve accepted as a freelance journalist living in Quebec in quite some time. In fact, it’s close to half.
But the weirdest part is that that rate is linked to a 250 word article. Which is really stretching the definition of the word ‘article.’
Anyways, bottom line for me is that the members of this organization seriously need to broaden their markets. If they can’t survive in a market of 8 million, look elsewhere and buttress their client list accordingly.
It’s about a third of the total number of freelance journalists in Quebec according to the AJIQ, which is not bad as far as I’m concerned.
In the Quebec francophone market, the rate is described as being per “feuillet” or sheet of 250 words. That doesn’t mean the article is only 250 words. So $175 per 250-word sheet would work out to, say, $700 for a 1,000-word article.
It’s definitely not a lot of money, but neither the $175 nor the 250 words are upper limits.