Category Archives: Media

| Opinion, Radio

Rogers strikes another big blow to AM talk radio

It was just over three years ago that Bell Media announced it was shutting down a bunch of AM talk radio stations in markets like Vancouver, Calgary and Hamilton.

This week, it’s Rogers’s turn to do the same.

As part of cuts to 230 jobs across the country, Rogers Sports and Media is shutting down the following stations:

  • CKWX 1130 NewsRadio Vancouver
  • CISL Sportsnet 650 Vancouver
  • CFFR 660 NewsRadio Calgary
  • CFAC Sportsnet 960 Calgary
  • CKGL 570 NewsRadio Kitchener
  • CJNI-FM 95.7 NewsRadio Halifax

Rogers tells Broadcast Dialogue that it will return the stations’ licences to the CRTC. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some interest in buying them, particularly the FM station in Halifax (though it does come with a specialty talk licence, so a buyer would need to either change that or propose a talk format). Though Bell and Rogers don’t see much of a future in AM outside Toronto, others might. Akash Broadcasting, for example, bought the station that used to be TSN Radio in Winnipeg and tried to buy an AM station in Calgary from Bell Media. If you’re interested, get in touch with Rogers now before they hand back the licences.

The dozens of people laid off as a result of these closures may struggle to find other jobs. Vancouver’s other sports radio stations, both TSN, switched to other cheaper formats in 2018 and 2021 and were eventually shut down. Radio news people in Vancouver and Calgary could maybe look for jobs at the Corus talk stations in those cities, but Corus isn’t exactly swimming in extra cash these days.

Some media outlets have sprung up to take over some of the slack from these cuts. Stingray started Sports 1440 in Edmonton in the wake of TSN Radio’s shutdown in that city. CHEK TV in Victoria brought in TSN orphans Rick Dhaliwal and Don Taylor after TSN Radio in Vancouver pulled the plug. But no one in radio has infinite money and they can’t hire everyone.

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| TV

CBC, Citytv will no longer air NHL games

The news came in a brief, simple joint statement from Rogers Sports and Media and CBC, issued a day and a half after the end of the Stanley Cup Playoffs: “the public broadcaster will no longer carry NHL broadcasts after the current season…”

Sunday’s game, in which the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup against the Vegas Golden Knights, was the last NHL game to air on CBC Television.

Here’s what we know so far about how this shakes out:

Citytv is out too

I asked Rogers to clarify what this means for Rogers-owned Citytv, which also airs Saturday night games as part of Hockey Night in Canada. A Sportsnet PR spokesperson said NHL Saturday night and playoff games will be exclusive to Sportsnet, so no more games on Citytv either. A Citytv spokesperson said Citytv will air “entertainment programming” instead on Saturday nights, so expect reruns of Hudson and Rex and other shows unless they come up with something else.

What CBC will do with Saturday nights

CBC, meanwhile, plans to start a new Saturday night primetime show with Olympic-style sports, the kinds of sports they currently air on weekend afternoons.

CBC owns the Hockey Night in Canada brand and trademarks, and says it will continue using them for non-NHL hockey content. Right now the only organized hockey content on CBC is some weekend afternoon regular-season PWHL games.

(Sportsnet’s Hockey Night in Canada theme song, which it commissioned when HNIC lost the rights to the original hockey theme, remains Sportsnet’s property.)

How Sportsnet will schedule Saturday nights

One of the reasons Sportsnet kept CBC as part of its NHL broadcast network in 2014 is that it needed more channels to show simultaneous national games on Saturday nights. At the time, Sportsnet’s main network, the four regional channels, carried the same programming for national games, because many households didn’t have access to all four of the regional channels.

Twelve years later, most people are on a digital cable system or streaming and do have access to those channels. Add in Sportsnet One and Sportsnet 360 and it gives six channels, which for most Saturdays should be enough, even if there’s also a Blue Jays game, UFC Fight Night, curling or some other event they need to broadcast. And in a pinch, they can also bring Citytv back into the fold, use a non-sports channel like FX or have something exclusive to streaming.

OMNI and APTN third-language broadcasts

It’s unclear how this will affect Sportsnet’s partnerships with Rogers-owned OMNI or independent APTN, which broadcast some Saturday NHL games in Punjabi and Cree/Inuktitut, respectively.

Asked about these agreements, Sportsnet PR said there were no updates on this and we’d know more closer to the start of the season.

OMNI still has some over-the-air transmitters in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, and APTN has transmitters in Yellowknife and Whitehorse, so there might still be some NHL on over-the-air TV.

Both adopt the “Hockey Night” branding so would probably have to change their names if they continue.

A history recap

CBC and Citytv have been part of the Rogers HNIC plan since Rogers first acquired national NHL rights starting with the 2014-15 season. The deal with CBC was first established at four years, then extended to the full 12 of the original NHL contract.

Under the deal, CBC essentially gave over control of its signal to Rogers, who retained all advertising revenue from the (mostly Leafs) games in exchange for some on-air promotion of other CBC shows. The broadcasts also counted as free Canadian content for CBC, which was not a trivial consideration back when the broadcaster was a bit more budget-sensitive.

This fall, Rogers moves to a new NHL deal that will see it pay more than double to the league on average. And it looks like it has decided it needs to give people more of a push to subscribe to Sportsnet, even if that means losing some Saturday night fairweather fans.

The reason for this decision (and whether it was Rogers or CBC who made the call) wasn’t announced, but the fact that Rogers is also pulling Citytv out of the mix gives a pretty big hint. CBC says it tried to negotiate a new deal but the two sides couldn’t come to an agreement.

The writing was a bit on the wall two years ago when CBC lost the rights to stream NHL games that aired on CBC TV on its Gem streaming service.

The risks of going subscription-only

Whether to broadcast on over-the-air television is always a tough decision for sports leagues and their partner broadcasters. Some games for free can give people a taste of the action that would then spur them to subscribe. But too much for free and people might decide they can live without the rest.

Some leagues, like the NFL, have prioritized over-the-air while still offering some games to streamers and pay TV. Others, like MLS, have gambled on giving exclusive rights to pay services, only to face anger from teams in the league that nobody watches their games anymore.

I suspect this decision will put the NHL somewhere in the middle. The NHL is more popular in Canada than MLS, and Sportsnet is a popular service among people who follow sports. But the decision to pull playoff games from free TV means we probably won’t see record-setting audiences the next time a Canadian team goes deep. (They’ll still be high though, Sportsnet and TSN alone can still draw in millions for the right event.)

I suspect we’ll also still see Rogers running games on Citytv when they also air on ABC, to recoup that simultaneous substitution money. And if Rogers keeps running Hockey Night in Canada in Punjabi on OMNI, people who have that station over the air or on basic cable will still be able to watch the games, even if they don’t understand the language.

One winner of this decision might be TVA Sports, if it renews its deal with the NHL. There were a non-trivial number of francophone Canadiens fans who watched Saturday nights on Citytv because they either didn’t like the TVA broadcast or didn’t subscribe to TVA Sports. If TVA retains the French-language national rights (and we still don’t know if they will), then we might see a slight uptick in people who subscribe for those games.

Money talks

At the end of the day, what matters is money. Yes, Sportsnet may lose some audience and the ad revenue that comes with it, but over the past decade the focus has shifted from ad revenue to subscription revenue. And Rogers has decided that it needs to use those Saturday and playoff games to push people to subscribe to Sportsnet, because that’s where they make their money.

| Radio

The sad but understandable end of government-run automated radio services

As Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government has been tightening its belt on the public purse (while simultaneously making huge promises that push the country’s budget back in the red), various federal departments have been looking at things they can cut to save money. The most obvious targets for such cuts are things that (a) cost a non-trivial amount of money, (b) use old technology and are hard to maintain, (c) have cheaper alternatives, (d) are not used by a public that isn’t even aware of its existence, and (e) don’t employ a large number of people.

So it probably shouldn’t be surprising that this year is seeing the end of two government-run radio services that you probably didn’t know existed.

Weatherradio

On March 31, Environment and Climate Change and other buzzwords Canada’s Weatherradio service shut down for good. The network of more than 200 transmitters across the country broadcast automatically-generated English and French audio weather reports on VHF frequencies (162.55 MHz in Montreal) that could be received by anyone with a receiver tuned to those frequencies (which, in practice, meant amateur radio operators and people who had AM/FM radios that offered a “weather” option).

Besides some radio and weather enthusiasts, there was little reaction to the decision to shut down the service.

The government argues that other, more widely adopted technologies make Weatherradio obsolete. Most communities within the reception areas of these stations can access the internet on their phones and use the WeatherCan mobile app to get their forecasts. Emergency weather information can be transmitted through wireless public alerting and through emergency alerts on AM and FM radio stations, that people are more likely to be listening to anyway. And sailors will still have access to the marine VHF channels run by the Coast Guard.

Opponents to the shutdown talk about how unreliable the cell network is, particularly in more remote communities, and particularly in a weather emergency that might, say, knock out power to cell towers. While it’s a good point, it’s hard to make a case that an automated system that few people have the technology to receive would be better than (or must be paired with) a system that uses AM and FM radio stations, cellphone towers, TV stations and TV providers to all simultaneously broadcast emergency messages when ordered by the government to do so.

CHU

The other radio service being shut down is Canada’s shortwave time signal station, which operates under the callsign CHU.

The station, which broadcasts from Ottawa on 3.33 MHz, 7.85 MHz and 14.67 MHz, gives you the current time, and emits a tone every minute on the minute so you can synchronize your clock to it.

CBC radio listeners may remember when the stations emitted a tone at 1pm so people could synchronize their clocks (until they stopped doing it in 2023 in part because many people listen to the radio in ways that make it inaccurate). This is a similar service.

Run by the National Research Council, the broadcasts were ultra-precise, boasting an accuracy of under a millisecond based on atomic clocks.

But most people don’t set their clocks by radio these days. Computers and other internet-connected devices use the Network Time Protocol, and NRC is keeping its NTP servers going. Mostly, the time signal is used to test shortwave radios, or as a curiosity for someone who hasn’t heard it before.

And, though “don’t rely on the U.S.” has been a slogan of late, people who want to listen to a time station will tend to tune in to the broadcasts from WWV (Colorado) and WWVH (Hawaii) on the sexier and easier to remember frequencies of 2.500, 5.000, 10.000, 15.000, 20.000 and 25.000 MHz.

The news of CHU’s shutdown, set for June 22, has generated even less buzz, with a few hobbyists lamenting its nearly 100-year-old history but not much else.

I’ve listened to both CHU and Weatherradio over the years, and I will miss them. But if that’s the price to pay to finally get high-speed rail between Montreal and Toronto (it will, of course, actually cost way more than the price of these services), then I’ve reached the stage of acceptance that this era of automated radio is behind us.

Goodbye, soulless number-reading machines.

| TV

TSN loses Saturday night CFL games in new 6-year deal

If you hear Bell Media talk about it, it’s a “landmark” deal that “solidifies” its “position as Canada’s Home of the CFL.”

The reality is that while it’s a big deal for the CFL, it’s a big change for CFL fans, who will now have to subscribe to a new service to get their games, after many years of TSN having 100% exclusive rights to CFL games within Canada.

The six-year deal, which starts in 2027, is as follows:

  • TSN keeps about 3/4 of regular-season games (60 games total), including Thursday and Friday night games. It also keeps seven of nine playoff games (in an expanded playoff format that also begins that year), including the Grey Cup.
  • DAZN gets an exclusive window for Saturday 7pm ET games (21 games total), and one preseason game. It also gets two playoff games in the first two rounds. DAZN also becomes the exclusive broadcaster for all CFL games outside Canada and the United States.
  • YouTube gets some preseason games not carried by TSN or DAZN, as well as some non-game content including “enhanced” CFL Combine coverage.
  • RDS remains the exclusive French-language broadcaster with all Alouettes games and all playoff games. (It presumably can show non-Alouettes games on Saturday nights as well, though it’s not clear if there are any limitations on this.)

The CFL doesn’t mention U.S. rights in this announcement. Those rights are held by CBS Sports, but are apparently in their final year, so we’ll probably get another announcement about that later. It also doesn’t include radio broadcast rights, which are unaffected.

DAZN costs $35 a month for its basic plan, $25 a month if you subscribe for a year or $250 a year if you pay upfront. That’s a high price to pay if you just want to watch the once a month on average your team will play on a Saturday night.

The deal makes sense for DAZN, which also has NFL games, but I remember the hype when that deal was first announced in 2017, how DAZN was going to be the “home of football” in Canada. The reality is that while it remains the only place you can stream every game, Bell Media still has rights to Thursday, Sunday and Monday night NFL games and at least half a dozen Sunday afternoon games.

I also remember when DAZN got the English Premier League exclusively, and how much of a pain that was not just for viewers but for bars and pubs wanting to show them as well.

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| Radio

Alouettes sign French radio deal with 99.5 FM

The Alouettes are changing radio stations after a decade and a half with Cogeco’s 98.5 FM.

It’s not a huge shocker, but what’s surprising is that they’re not going to Montreal’s French-language all-sports station, BPM Sports 91.9, but have instead signed a deal with CJPX-FM 99.5, owned by Leclerc Communication (which also owns WKND 91.9 and BLVD 102.1 in Quebec City, both music stations).

It’s effective immediately, and 99.5 will broadcast all the Alouettes games starting with next Friday’s preseason opener. They haven’t announced who will be doing play-by-play or analysis. UPDATE (May 19): Jean St-Onge, who did play-by-play at 98.5, will continue to do so for 99.5. Former Alouettes offensive lineman and coach Luc Brodeur-Jourdain will do analysis, replacing former Redblacks defensive back Jean-Philippe Bolduc.

The deal doesn’t affect English radio rights, which are held by Bell’s TSN 690, or television rights, held by TSN and RDS.

The 99.5 station, which doesn’t have any branding besides its frequency, is a de facto rebroadcaster of Quebecor’s QUB Radio during the day (a loophole to get around CRTC ownership limits), and broadcasts mostly music during evenings and weekends. The fact that Quebecor is owned by Pierre Karl Péladeau, who also owns the Alouettes, has been noted by some people online. Did existing relationships grease a deal here, or will Quebecor produce Alouettes broadcasts or something? We’ll see.

One quirk of this deal means Montreal’s three main sports teams are on three different French language radio stations — or, well, they would be if BPM Sports hadn’t stopped broadcasting CF Montréal games. But at least it means Alouettes games won’t be online-only in French when they conflict with Habs games.

This isn’t the first time a sports team has gone with an odd choice for broadcasting rights. The Alouettes had previously been on NRJ/Énergie before going to CKAC Sports 730, and recently the Laval Rocket chose the online-only media outlet Sick Media for radio broadcast rights.

Anyway, now the station has to establish a sports department, or at least find a way to produce home and away Alouettes games. And there’s a week left to do it.

| Media

Sherbrooke Record to become a weekly in print

A letter, titled 'Strengthening the future of local news', on Sherbrooke Record letterhead.

Notice from the Sherbrooke Record published April 22 saying it would move to a once-a-week schedule.

Quebec’s other English-language daily newspaper will soon no longer be that. This week, the Sherbrooke Record sent a letter to subscribers saying it would only produce print editions on Fridays starting in May.

Currently, the Record publishes in print five days a week (Monday to Friday).

The letter from publisher Sharon McCully explicitly states that “this is not a reduction in news” and breaking news would still be produced online. Instead, it is a way to cut production costs that are increasingly hard to justify for many daily newspapers. Others like La Presse and La Tribune, Sherbrooke’s French-language daily, have already eliminated print editions entirely and gone fully online.

The decision can’t come as much of a surprise. The paper has a community weekly feel to it anyway, and recent non-Friday editions have been only 12 pages long. Being a daily print publication comes with some prestige, but we’re long past the point when that prestige is worth the cost. (And La Presse and others have shown that you can still have that prestige even if you don’t have the paper.)

Brome County News, which was distributed with the Tuesday edition of the Record, will still be produced and distributed on Tuesdays, the note reads, and will also be included in the Friday Record along with the Record’s weekend edition.

UPDATE: In an interview with CBC’s Quebec AM, publisher Sharon McCully points to various reasons for the change, including the fact that the Record could no longer share distribution resources with the Montreal Gazette and had to rely on Canada Post instead, increasing those costs.

| Radio

Torres Media to acquire CHSV-FM 106.7 in Hudson/St-Lazare

A bit over a decade after it went on the air as the first English-language radio station serving the Vaudreuil-Soulanges area, CHSV-FM (Lite 106.7) is being sold to Torres Media, the owner of Ottawa’s Rebel 101.7.

The purchase price wasn’t announced, but we’ll learn that when the CRTC publishes the application. The commission has to approve the change in ownership before it can take effect. Until then, the station remains property of Evanov Radio, which launched it as Jewel 106.7 in 2015.

Evanov and Torres are trending in opposite directions in terms of radio ownership.

In the 2000s and 2010s, Evanov was expanding aggressively, launching new stations that include CHSV but also CHRF 980 AM in Montreal (Radio Fierté at first), and stations in Halifax, Winnipeg and Meaford, Hawkesbury, Ottawa and Clarence-Rockland, Ont., and acquiring others including Montreal’s CFMB 1280 AM. At its height it owned about 20.

But in 2023, three years after founder Bill Evanov died, the group began shutting down or selling off its stations. CHRF was shut down, as was Pride FM in Toronto, while stations in Halifax and eastern Ontario were sold to other owners, including the Jewel (later rebranded as Lite) station in Ottawa to Torres Media.

CFMB is Evanov’s only remaining station in Quebec, and if someone wants to buy it, now might be a good time to give them a call.

Torres, meanwhile, is in expansion mode. After launching The Rebel (originally Dawg FM) in Ottawa in 2010, in 2015 it launched CIUX-FM in Uxbridge, Ontario, and acquired CKOD-FM (Max 103), a French music station in Valleyfield. In 2020 it launched a country station in Georgina, Ontario. And last year it acquired The Jewel/Lite in Ottawa.

I asked Torres Media President Ed Torres about their plans for CHSV.

“We will conduct some research first. We’ve done some preliminary work, but not yet enough to conclude as to what direction to take the station format-wise,” he told me. “When we do, we will be locally focused on Hudson and environs.”

Roxanne Guérin, general manager of CKOD, will manage both stations, he said.

CHSV launched with some fanfare back in 2015, hiring Ted Bird for its morning show. (He was dropped in 2024.) It also gave shows to Paul Zakaib (Tasso Patsikakis) and Frank Cavallaro that didn’t last long. Nowadays it doesn’t move the needle much, with its announcers being mostly imports from other Evanov stations. At least that means Torres will have a blank slate to work with.

| Radio

The Beat drops Nat Lauzon

Nat Lauzon in The Beat’s studio in … I don’t know, a while back whenever I took this photo.

It’s an unfortunate reality in the radio business that while your arrival is announced with great fanfare, your departure is often met with a silent scrubbing of any evidence of your existence.

Such was the fate of Nat Lauzon, who announced on Thursday that her time at the radio station had come to an end. “We’ve parted ways,” she wrote in a Facebook post. (She clarifies in a video that the decision to leave wasn’t hers.)

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| Radio

Is Hits FM back? Not quite, says its owner

The old Hits FM logo

Remember Hits FM? It was a cross-border station in New York State at 94.7 FM that made no secret about targeting Montreal, even having a sales office in the city and choosing WYUL as its callsign. Its signal wasn’t as strong or Virgin or The Beat or CKOI, but it was unencumbered by CRTC regulations that included a quota on Canadian music, another for French-language music on French stations, and a limit on the number of hit songs on English-language stations.

But it shut down in 2021, the station’s licence sold to a religious broadcaster who turned it into K-LOVE 94.7.

Not included in that sale was Hits FM’s Facebook page, which went dormant (except for a single repost of some viral joke image) until November 2025, when it began actively posting again. No announcement, just a bunch of reshares of viral content, the kind you’d see on any radio station’s social media trying to build cheap engagement.

Just after the new year, the page announced (in a since-unpublished post) that Hits FM was back as an online radio station, kicking off with 10,000 commercial-free songs and announcements about DJs and other details to follow.

A new logo for Hits FM (via hitsfmradio.com)

It linked to a new website, hitsfmradio.com, which for now is just a playlist of songs, a live streamer, and links to download apps.

At first I thought this might have been someone’s attempt to take advantage of an abandoned brand. But the use of the existing Facebook page seemed to suggest some official link to the old station.

So I asked Tim Martz, CEO of Martz Communications Group, which owned Hits FM until it was sold in 2021, about the new station.

“Oops, that release was premature,” he told me in an email. “We’re working on possibly launching this to the public, but have not made a decision on how it would work and who would be involved.”

The Facebook post disappeared after that message, but the page is still posting reshared content.

Could it work?

The internet has plenty of online radio stations, and a handful of those specifically target Montreal. But those tend to be one-person mostly automated operations with no connection to traditional broadcasters.

If Martz wants to make a serious go at online radio, with live DJs, news and traffic reports, etc., he might be able to find enough of a niche audience like 94.7 Hits FM did, maybe with a smaller staff. But even with the advanced technology of today, it’s still a lot easier for people in cars to scan the FM band for stations than to try to connect to an online station.

| Radio

Arsenal Media buying BPM Sports from RNC Media

Arsenal Media, which has been slowly expanding its Quebec radio station holdings over the years to the point where it is now the largest radio broadcaster in Quebec by number of stations, announced today it is acquiring the three BPM Sports stations from RNC Média:

  • CKLX-FM 91.9 in Montreal
  • CHXX-FM 100.9 in Donnacona (Quebec City)
  • CHLX-FM 96.5 in Gatineau

The acquisition, if approved by the CRTC, would expand Arsenal from 25 stations to 28 (with another station in Joliette to launch by spring), and add its first stations in those three markets. (Arsenal specializes in stations in smaller and medium-size markets.)

Arsenal’s president and founder Sylvain Chamberland said in the company’s statement that he’s a listener of BPM Sports and plans to use its “business model adapted to new advertising realities, listening habits and advanced technologies” to improve BPM’s bottom line.

RNC Media, meanwhile, will exit the Montreal market with this transaction and see its once sprawling network of stations reduced to just two: CHOI-FM 98.1 Radio X in Quebec City and CHLX-FM 97.1 in Gatineau, which licenses the Rythme FM brand.

You have to wonder if those might also be sold (Cogeco might be interested in the Gatineau station, but it’s unclear who could or would buy CHOI). But RNC says it will continue to develop those stations, as well as its four TV stations in Gatineau and Abitibi (affiliates of TVA and Noovo).

RNC says it’s proud of what it accomplished with BPM Sports and the decision to sell was “difficult” but Arsenal “has the resources and expertise to ensure the sustainability of these stations.”

Sustainability had many of these stations’ employees concerned. BPM Sports has a loyal audience but its ratings remain poor. Some personalities like Tony Marinaro left the station, while others complained about late payments. The sale is no surprise, and we’ve known for months that Arsenal would probably be the buyer.

CKLX-FM launched in 2004 as Couleur Jazz, a new station that thought it could gain a niche audience by focusing on jazz music in the home of the Montreal International Jazz Festival. In 2012, realizing that wouldn’t work, it tried to turn the station into a Montreal version of Radio X, then a different talk format as Radio 9, and finally shifted to sports in 2015. In 2022, it made the Quebec City and Gatineau stations part of the BPM Sports network to save money by sharing programming.

Something I learned from Chamberland when I interviewed him years ago is that Gatineau is a tough market. You have all the Ottawa radio stations with English-language music, and the francophone population of Gatineau is not that big. BPM Sports doesn’t even have French-language rights to Ottawa Senators games (those are held by Cogeco’s 104.7).

But Chamberland is a radio guy. He told me he believes in making investments where necessary to make stations successful. So at least in the short term, employees and listeners of BPM Sports should be pretty happy about this move.

The purchase price was not disclosed, but should become public when this goes in front of the CRTC. In an interview on BPM Sports, Chamberland said the price was more than Canadiens player Jake Evans’s salary, which is $2.85 million. That sounds about right to me. Earlier this year Arsenal spent $6.5 million buying seven stations from Bell Media, with the largest markets served by them being St-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Drummondville.

Until the deal approves and closes, RNC Media remains in charge. But Chamberland said he would like to see more local programming on the Gatineau and Quebec City stations. He also said BPM’s Montreal staff would be moving to Arsenal studios in St-Lambert.

Correction: This post originally contained a typo in the callsign for CHLX-FM Gatineau.