Media News Digest: NNA noms, Lilly Singh gets late-night show, telecom bureaucrat in conflict of interest

News about news

At the CRTC

  • After concluding that these markets near Quebec City could support new radio stations (but the Quebec City market itself could not), the CRTC has published the applications from Michel Lambert and Arsenal Media for new stations in Portneuf and Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, respectively. The former would be a pop music station, but the Arsenal station would have a country/folk format, which is pretty rare in Quebec radio (in part because the French-language country music library isn’t as robust). A pro forma hearing will be held May 16, and comments are being accepted until April 11.
  • The same hearing will also look at the licence renewal request for Sirius XM Canada. Besides a (seemingly) minor change to the definition of new and emerging artists, the company wants to drastically reduce its required contributions to Canadian content development funds, from 4% of gross revenues to 0.5% by the third year of the new licence. The CRTC believes it hasn’t met its existing licence conditions related to CCD contributions, and it’s generally CRTC policy to deny licence amendments to remove conditions that a licensee has failed to meet. If you want to suggest other changes in light of the Canada Laughs/Just For Laughs saga, now’s the time.

Ethical reviews

TV

Radio

Online

Telecom

  • The Globe and Mail reports a bureaucrat with Canada’s ISED department involved with telecom regulation was hired by Bell and worked as a consultant for that company while still employed by the government, a very obvious conflict of interest, and one that he apparently tried to hide when asked about it in a court case related to the failure of Mobilicity.

News about people

Obituaries

Good reads

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5 thoughts on “Media News Digest: NNA noms, Lilly Singh gets late-night show, telecom bureaucrat in conflict of interest

  1. Dilbert

    Putting up press releases under your name is effectively agreeing with them and asserting that you think they are true.

    As you said, AP is also a source for many newspapers, and risk is that something like this gets run out to every paper, radio, and TV station in the country and treated like fact (“according to AP…”).

    Solution is to run the press releases under a different moniker, like “associated press releases”.

    Reply
    1. Fagstein Post author

      AP is also a source for many newspapers, and risk is that something like this gets run out to every paper, radio, and TV station in the country and treated like fact (“according to AP…”).

      That’s less likely, because these press releases are not distributed to news organizations the same way AP news stories are. Even if they’re distributed using the same wire service, they are coded differently, and journalists can easily see the source.

      Reply

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