Category Archives: Business

| Business, Movies

No more no more late fees

Hey, remember No Late Fees? Yeah, not so much anymore. Turns out economic reality still requires a financial incentive for a high turnover of new releases, otherwise video rental outlets would have to have huge stocks of these films and then get rid of them after a couple of weeks.

It makes sense. How many people really need to rent a movie for seven days? It’s better to pay a set price per day (or even per hour) and leave it at that.

Personally, I don’t remember the last time I rented a movie.

| Business, In the news, Opinion

Gas company critics are hypocrites

Think the Quebec government isn’t doing enough with its time to pass meaningless laws that don’t change anything?

Well, I give you Bill 41: “An Act to foster transparency in the sale of gasoline and diesel fuel.” This bill will do two things:

  1. Force gas companies to justify increases to gas prices at the pump
  2. Force gas companies to display the minimum gas price calculated by the Quebec Energy Board at the pump.

This will accomplish two things:

  1. Waste a lot of time
  2. Waste a lot of money

It’s a stupid solution to a stupid problem. You see, Quebecers (and most North Americans) hate the sky-high gas prices they see at the pump every day when they fill up their car to go to work. They reject the idea of supply and demand and want the government to do something about it. Change the laws of economics I guess.

But they also care about the environment and want the government to step in to do something about that too.

News flash folks: the No. 1 deterrent to carbon-emitting wasteful motor vehicle use is high gas prices. It’s fair, it’s self-regulating and it’s transparent.

Yes, it’s a bummer for suburban soccer moms who use their gas-guzzling minivans to bring kids to school. And it sucks for the transportation industry, which will increase the price on goods (and especially fruits and vegetables). But it’s still the best method available.

The ADQ has quickly panned on the idea (not because they don’t pander to the lowest common denominator, but because they can easily criticize a plan without offering any better solutions). If they can convince the PQ, that’ll put an end to the bill.

Greener doesn’t mean green

Meanwhile, a think tank has argued that a federal “freebate” program, which offers economic incentive for people to buy less-polluting cars, needs to be extended to pickup trucks.

This program isn’t as obviously stupid as the Quebec gas plan, but it’s based on a faulty assumption: That the economic incentive will cause people to buy vehicle X who would otherwise buy gas-guzzling vehicle Y. That may be true for some people, but others will probably choose to buy a cheap hybrid car they can afford instead of not buying a car at all. That will have a net negative impact on the environment.

The problem is that while many of these cars are better for the environment than their non-hybrid, fully-gasoline powered cousins, they are not good for the environment compared to public transit, biking, walking and other methods of getting around.

If you’re interested in a zero-emissions car, you can look at Zenn Motor Company, which builds zero-emission, no-noise cars in Quebec. But their cars weren’t even legal in Canada until this month.

These are the kinds of vehicles that have to be promoted, not Toyota’s slightly-less-emissions hybrid car or a bus that runs on 3% biodiesel.

| Business, Montreal, Technology

Kanuk not above outright spam

In my ongoing fight against spam, I tend to give local businesses a bit of slack when it comes to netiquette. They’re small and inexperienced, so you might forgive them for minor glitches.

But spam is still spam. Last week I received this email message from Montreal-based Kanuk, maker of those winter coats you’ll all be buying in the coming weeks. Since they have a privacy policy which implies they only send email messages to people who opt in, I have to call them on a violation.

Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:37:55 -0500
From: Kanuk <info@kanuk.com>
Subject: Rappel : Solde Kanuk directement à la manufacture, jusqu’à lundi

Le grand solde Kanuk bat son plein jusqu’à lundi 12 novembre.
C’est le meilleur moment pour choisir votre manteau chaud Kanuk.
Chez Kanuk, au 485, rue Rachel Est à Montréal.
http://www.kanuk.com

Deux étages de soldes vous attendent à l’atelier-magasin Kanuk au
485, rue Rachel Est à Montréal, dès 8h00 tous les jours
pendant le Solde d’entrepôt Kanuk.

Au plaisir,

Daniel Poirier,
au nom de l’équipe Kanuk

As usual, I’ve sent them an email and will update if and when they respond.

The email was sent through Canadian B2B Internet service provider Radiant, which should also have better measures to prevent such things.

| Business, Media

CanWest continues to spread

Despite cuts at their newspapers, CanWest has plenty of money to buy up media properties. Today it added six new community publications in the Windsor area, bringing its total up to 30.

CanWest, the largest newspaper publisher in Canada, called the acquisition “yet another example of CanWest’s commitment to developing strong community voices across this country.”

Also today, CRTC hearings into CanWest’s bid to take over Alliance Atlantis are being held.

| Business, Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion, Video

Pay me, dammit

There’s an interview on YouTube with Harlan Ellison that really struck a chord with me. In it, he rants about how Warner Bros. wanted to use an interview with him on a DVD but didn’t want to pay him for it. He talks about how outrageous it is that this is now accepted practice, and how amateurs seeking a big break are willing to whore themselves out for nothing.

I’ll admit to being somewhat of a hypocrite on this issue. On one hand, I want to be paid for my work (because I need to eat). On the other, most of that work is based on interviews I do with people, and I don’t pay any of them for their time or thoughts.

Suckers.

| Business, Opinion, Web design

Rogers not above outright spam

Going through my spam folder again today, I noticed an email from Rogers, my wireless provider. It was a promotional message (as opposed to the one I get every month telling me my bill is ready) announcing, and I kid you not folks, that they redesigned their website.

Rogers spam

(Email sent Nov. 13, 2007. Click to embiggen)

Since I’m not a fan of spam, especially from large companies that should know better like Chapters/Indigo and CIBC (the latter — a bank — has still not responded to my request for an explanation beyond assigning it a support ticket number), I couldn’t let this one go without mentioning it as well.

The big difference here is that I am a Rogers customer, so they didn’t harvest my email or take it from an old form gathering dust in their basement. But I call it spam because I never asked for it and it’s purely promotional in nature.

Also problematic:

  • The email is not personalized, even with my name, violating one of Rogers’s own anti-fraud policies. Further complicating matters is that I’m invited to click on image links that bring me to addresses that start with http://mailtrack.rnm.ca… (which redirects me to a Rogers website).
  • The message is HTML only, with no plain-text version
  • Clicking on links to visit the “new” Rogers.com brings me to this horribly-designed web page which asks me to choose my province (and language). Don’t they already know this information? They provide me wireless service after all.
  • Like a lot of these messages I see, there’s a tiny link at the bottom for people who want to “opt-out of future email communications” (which I can assume implies I never opted-in in the first place). That link brings me to a login page. Once I login, I’m brought to the standard homepage with no clue given on where I should go to opt out of emails. I’ve looked around for about 10 minutes now and still haven’t found it.
  • I’ve had to login three times browsing the site. And now they’ve just suspended my account for 24 hours because the password I used 5 minutes ago is no longer the right one. Oh wait, it hasn’t. My previous login is now still valid. Top-notch security there, Rogers.
  • There’s no difference between the “new” Rogers website and the old one, except for a few trivial changes. It looks exactly the same. The entire purpose of the email is put into question.

I’ve filled out an “abuse” form and emailed the sender of the email message asking for an explanation of how I got this email. I’ll update if I get one.

| Business, Humour

Future Shop needs translators

From Blog Story comes this hilariously awful translation on Future Shop’s website:

Obtenir commencé - Future Shop

Yes, folks, they translated “get started” into “obtenir commencé”.

UPDATE (Nov. 22): A representative of Future Shop responds below (Comment #5, basically a cut-and-paste of what he sent Pat Lagacé), blaming a U.S.-based subcontractor for the bad translation job. He says the link to this page has been removed (in both languages) and the company has been asked to fix it.

I tried to send a message to the company (iGo Digital out of Indianapolis, IN). But when I filled out their contact form (the only electronic way to reach them), I got this:

Server object error ‘ASP 0177 : 800401f3’

Server.CreateObject Failed

/contact.asp, line 15

800401f3

It really inspires confidence.

Blaming subcontractors is becoming a more common tactic for big companies, I notice. It absolves them of responsibility when those subcontractors cut corners. If the error is bad enough, they just cut ties with the company and find a new one.

I don’t doubt that an Indiana-based technology company would fail horribly at translating a web page (apparently resorting to some sort of automated translation). But why doesn’t Future Shop have proofreaders? Surely someone there must have at least looked at the page in question before it went live?

| Business, Media, Technology

“Hyper-local” doesn’t mean anything

I just read another news story that quotes a media company using the term “hyper-local”.

Can someone explain to me what the heck this term is supposed to mean? I’ve looked far and wide over the Internet Googled for an explanation, and many of the “definitions” include words like “paradigm” that sound like they explain things but really don’t. In the end all I could find was that “hyper-local” meant “local news”. So why not just call it that? Why make up a new word for something that already exists and has been done for centuries?

Of course, the answer is it’s mostly marketingese, a way for newspaper companies to sound like they’re doing something new and exciting while they cut staff in their newsrooms.

Newspapers can no longer afford to each have their own foreign bureaus. So they concentrate their reporters locally, covering news that they can’t get from wire services. Maybe they’ll have one writer in the state/province or national capital, one on special assignment and one travelling with the local sports team. The rest comes from services like Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse who provide truckloads of content for a hefty annual fee.

(TV is even worse, with a handful of local and national reporters repackaging what was in the newspaper that morning. Most radio newsrooms, meanwhile, consist of a guy reading articles from the local newspaper on air — and maybe crediting the source)

So what’s new then, if reporters are already focused on local stories?

Well, there’s a trend toward “citizen journalism”, in which newspapers setup community websites and encourage its citizens to provide the site with free content. Then they can fire reporters who have the audacity to expect payment for their work.

From a business perspective, it sounds fantastic. It’s cheap, it’s new, and it’s local, so there’s less likely to be a lot of competition.

But from a journalistic perspective, it’s a nightmare: a race to the bottom to see how much news can be “crowdsourced” freely to the community. Investigative journalism, feature writing, fact-checking and objectivity thrown out the window in favour of political name-calling, thinly-veiled press releases and dozens of uninteresting opinions about the plot developments of prime-time TV shows.

Perhaps I’m being a bit too idealistic, but I’m not that worried. Most media companies don’t have the online expertise to understand how to make these websites work. They underestimate the amount of competition they’ll have for even the smallest markets, and they overestimate the quality of journalism that crowdsourcing can provide. They think they can replicate a for-profit version of Wikipedia (or, more accurately, Wikinews) without any incentives for contribution.

What I am worried about is how much further big media is going to sink in quality before real, quality competition from new media starts to emerge. My blog can’t compete with over a hundred experienced journalists at the local paper. But when the local paper is down to three interns and a web forum, that’s going to change.

| Business, TV

The Globe on TQS

The Globe and Mail has an interesting article today about the state of TQS. The network is in pretty bad shape, sitting a far third behind RadCan and TVA, cutting jobs and desperately looking for a buyer.

One idea being thrown around is to have TQS be bought by Power Corporation’s Gesca, which owns La Presse/Cyberpresse/Le Soleil. Apparently some would find it funny if Gesca was running the station behind Bleu Nuit.

UPDATE (Nov. 10): Le Devoir looks at Radio Nord, which owns two TQS affiliates in Gatineau and Abitibi.

| Business, Media

Journal de Québec problems not hurting bottom line

A new financial report from Quebecor Media thumbs its nose at striking and locked-out Journal de Québec workers, saying that profits have exploded since the work stoppage in April.

It’s funny how giant media conglomerates are swimming in profits but still feel the need to cut cut cut journalism jobs.

And while the Journal is saving a lot of money in salaries, it’s hard to say how sustainable it is to run a newspaper without journalists. (Though no doubt Quebecor would love to find a way to make it work.)

| Business, Media

CanWest outsourcing more layout to non-union workers

The Tyee has an article about work being outsourced from the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province newsrooms into non-unionized positions in Hamilton, Ont. Currently, Hamilton takes care of things like stock pages and sports scoreboards, work which can be replicated for more than one paper. The TV Times is also produced out of one location, with the local programming grids and paper’s logo slapped on at the end. But now CanWest’s Vancouver papers are sending more pages to be done there, which is worrying union leaders.

This is kind of one of those grey areas with unions. Is it OK to hire non-unionized workers for union jobs if it’s being done in another city? Can you shift jobs from a unionized part of a company to a non-unionized part without problems?

Sun editor-in-chief Patricia Graham calls the layout being transferred “essentially a mechanical function.” The article doesn’t give details about what exactly is being transferred, but I’m guessing it’s debatable how “mechanical” such a function really is.

UPDATE (Nov. 10): J-Source has another post on the CanWest situation, including a union response alleging that Global is violating its CRTC licenses by centralizing its newsrooms.

| Business, Montreal, My articles

TWIM: Kids, money

Bryce Durafourt

This week, I talked with Bryce Durafourt (above), who’s running in the school board elections for the English Montreal School Board in TMR/Saint-Laurent. He’s 20, a McGill microbiology student, curler, and ran for city councillor the 2005 municipal election in Saint-Laurent, only to come dead-last as the only independent candidate.

So I asked him: What’s up with that?

Also this week (though not online) is an explainer about the status of the Canadian dollar, which is constantly hitting new highs compared to the U.S. dollar. It also mentions the situation in Zimbabwe, home of the least-valued currency in the world and one of the worst examples of hyperinflation since the 1940s.

| Business, Montreal

Staff reductions at The Gazette

The Gazette

The news hit the fan today thanks to a CP story about a Gazette memo which indicates the company wants to reduce the size of its editorial staff to save money.

Publisher Alan Allnutt said in a memo to employees that management is doing all it can to avoid layoffs (which it’s required to do under its union agreement), and is offering another round of buyouts for those who want to leave voluntarily. (The formula offers a lump sum payment based on how long an employee has worked for the paper: 4.5 weeks per year of service, which works out to a year’s pay if you’ve been there 11.5 years).

Still, most people are looking at this story with disappointment, especially considering recent job cuts at TQS and Global, as well as a general feeling of a decline in quality at mainstream publications due to budget cuts.

It also puts into perspective moves like this:

The Gazette: “Send us your news”

First appearing last week, this new page on the paper’s website encourages visitors to “share your news” by submitting text, audio, photos or video in the hope that such an action will either get a story written about a subject or that your submission will be posted online.

Just about every major media outlet is doing this (see CNN’s iReport for another example, or the Ottawa Citizen version), because it preys on people’s desire to get their 15 minutes of fame, it sounds all Web 2.0-ish and pleases their marketing departments who can say they “get it”, and of course it helps the bottom line because these amateur reporters aren’t paid a cent for their work.

I’ll be looking into some of these issues of “user-generated content” for upcoming articles in this same newspaper (can you feel the irony?), so stay tuned.

In the meantime, what do you think of all this? Should newsrooms be squeezed even further? Are journalists not working hard enough? Are TV, radio and newspaper news departments destined for extinction? Is free, user-generated news the future? Feel free to comment below.

UPDATE (Nov. 4): Deborah Jones of J-Source has some thoughts on the CanWest situation in general.