Finalists for the National Newspaper Awards have been announced. The Globe and Mail leads with 20 nominations (including a sweep of the business category), the Toronto Star and La Presse have six each, and The Canadian Press has four. The Montreal Gazette has one nomination.
RTDNA Canada has announced its regional award finalists (East,Prairies, West). In the Central region (Quebec and Ontario), which gives out the awards April 6 in Toronto, Quebec nominees include:
18 for CBC Montreal
4 for CTV Montreal
2 for Global Montreal
2 for CBC Quebec City
1 for MAtv
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.
Quebecor boss Pierre Karl Péladeau has started a campaign of some sort to rally public support behind his contention that TVA’s specialty channels should be getting more subscription revenues. He published an open letter in the Journal de Montréal, TVA Sports and Le Devoir, and started a website with charts. But it’s unclear what he’s asking for specifically. Does he want the CRTC to step in and renegotiate its carriage contracts? Does he want it to just change how it evaluates value when it steps in to arbitrate these contracts (putting less emphasis on historical rates)? The website has no real call to action. Péladeau has a point, and is still very peeved that RDS gets more subscriber money than TVA Sports, but he seems to be decrying government intervention in private business while at the same time calling for more of it.
TSN had to face a bit of embarrassment on Sunday when it couldn’t broadcast the final of the WTA tournament in Indian Wells, Calif., because it didn’t have the rights to do so. Canadians who wanted to watch Bianca Andreescu win the title of the premier event had to either watch it in French on TVA Sports or via DAZN (which broadcast it on Twitter). If Canadian tennis continues to improve like this, TSN might want to be more aggressive about acquiring these rights.
Numeris is making big changes to how it measures radio ratings in most markets in Canada. For markets that use diary ratings (i.e. everywhere but Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary), instead of just surveying people’s listening preferences twice a year, listeners will be polled every two weeks, and averages will be released twice a year for all measured markets. This is a measure to counteract the increasing unreliability of Numeris data for smaller markets as it becomes more difficult to recruit participants. The transition to the new system will begin this summer.
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.
From Darrin Laidman’s Facebook “My final show happened this morning on 95.3 Fresh Radio. 20 wonderful years with the company has come to end. With change on the way I decided to say goodbye.” https://www.facebook.com/darrin.laidman/posts/10161598449910788
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”.
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.
From Darrin Laidman’s Facebook “My final show happened this morning on 95.3 Fresh Radio. 20 wonderful years with the company has come to end. With change on the way I decided to say goodbye.”
https://www.facebook.com/darrin.laidman/posts/10161598449910788
I’ve added a link to this, thanks.
The WTA match from Indian Wells could also be seen on WTATV, the online streaming service of the WTA.
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”.
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.