News about news

Victory pic.twitter.com/Vftsp6or67

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) June 14, 2019

• The eight groups that have been asked to name experts to a panel to determine eligibility criteria for the federal government’s journalism bailout have selected their representatives:
  • Canadian Association of Journalists: Esther Enkin, former CBC ombudsman
  • News Media Canada: Bob Cox, chairperson of NMC and publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press
  • Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec: Pierre Sormany, journalism professor, formerly of Le Soleil, Radio-Canada and magazines including Québec-science and Vélo Mag.
  • Quebec Community Newspaper Association: Brenda O’Farrell, director of QCNA and editor-in-chief of Rabble.ca
  • National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada: Thomas Saras, CEO
  • Association de presse francophone: Pierre-Paul Noreau, publisher of Le Droit
  • Unifor: Brad Honywill, retired journalist and union representative
  • Fédération nationale des communications: Pascale St-Onge, president
• The New Brunswick Telegraph Journal has won the Michener Award for public service journalism, for an investigation into deficiencies in the province’s ambulance service.
• The Canadian Association of Journalists says it supports the recommendations of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls as they related to journalism.
• The Reuters Institute has released its Digital News Report for 2019. The report shows that very few people are paying for news online, and most of those that are pay only one or two publications. Highlights of findings from Canada show that only 9% said they paid for any form of digital news in the past year.
• Simon Houpt throws some cold water on a report that most Canadians fall for fake news.
• Quebec’s ombudsman has denounced the firing of an agronomist in the agriculture department after he blew the whistle about conflicts of interest related to a report on pesticide use. The report has resulted in the resignation of the deputy minister, but the minister (who said he approved the firing himself, then said he didn’t) is still in his job.
• John Kennedy’s Pop Goes the News website has some accusations of plagiarism against the website FYI Music News.
• The City of Montreal is changing its public notice rules so that it no longer has to publish them in newspapers. That will save the city hundreds of thousands of dollars, but also cost print media (like my employer the Montreal Gazette) lots of money. The FPJQ has condemned the decision because of its effect on newspapers (though, notably, not its effect on its intended purpose, because few people pay attention to those print public notices).
• J-Source explores the implications of CTV News’s move toward videojournalists at its local newsrooms.
• La Presse has started a morning newsletter called La Matinale.
• The Canadian Journalism Foundation has presented its annual awards, as well as its William Southam fellowships.
• The Canadian Press discovered recently that CSIS destroyed a secret file on Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1989, concluding it did not meet the criteria for being kept. Historians are upset at this loss of a potentially historic document.
• Russian journalist Ivan Golunov has been released after a public outcry, including several competing newspapers running identical front pages in support of him. His arrest on drug-dealing charges was seen as trumped up to punish him for reporting that embarrassed the government.
• Police have arrested a man in the death of Northern Irish journalist Lyra McKee.

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News about news

• The Canadian Association of Journalists has agreed to participate in the federal government’s panel to determine eligibility criteria for its media bailout money, after the government agreed not to require members sign confidentiality agreements. The CAJ has appointed former CBC ombudsman Esther Enkin as its representative on the panel. The CAJ says it will continue to push for increased transparency for this program, including full disclosure of recipients.
• A man has pleaded guilty to inciting violence against a journalist from L’Actualité. He suggested people attack her after she fact-checked a claim he made about an incident involving Faith Goldy.
• Quebec’s press gallery has filed a formal complaint against the government for choosing to hold committee hearings into the controversial proposed legislation on religious symbols in a room that has limited resources for media, even though two new rooms have just opened in a new $60-million extension to the parliament buildings. The government appears to be scheduling the hearings here intentionally to make it difficult for the media to report on them.
• Radio-Canada has launched a disinformation desk, with Jeff Yates and Bouchra Ouratik. Their first story looks at the genesis of one of Quebec’s most popular fake news stories, about Dorval’s mayor keeping pork in schools.
• Australian Federal Police raided the Australian Broadcasting Corporation after ABC News reported on leaked documents about unlawful killings and misconduct in Afghanistan by Australian forces. Naturally the raid has been condemned internationally as an attack on freedom of the press.
• A conservative student group at Rutgers University succeeded in convincing enough students to vote against renewing funding for the university’s student newspaper, in retaliation for the paper exposing that the group used language from a white supremacist group in its recruitment material.
• Facebook is giving $2.5 million to 11 organizations as part of its “local news accelerator” program. Or, rather, it will spend $2.5 million bringing in experts to tell those organizations what to do. The participating media outlets are:
  • Brunswick News
  • Daily Hive
  • Winnipeg Free Press
  • Glacier Media
  • Le Soleil
  • London Free Press
  • Northern News Services
  • The Discourse
  • The Tyee
  • Vancouver Observer
  • Village Media
• Canadian Community Newspaper Award winners have been announced.
• Winners of the Digital Publishing Awards and National Magazine Awards have been announced.

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News about news

• The Canadian government has selected eight organizations to choose a panel that will decide the criteria for news organizations to meet to be eligible for part of its $595-million subsidy: News Media Canada (the newspaper association/lobbying group), the Association de la presse francophone (representing francophone media outside Quebec), the Quebec Community Newspaper Association (representing anglophone media inside Quebec), the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada, the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec, Unifor and the Fédération nationale des communications (the last two being unions representing journalists). Links are to their statements on the matter. Some of those statements are telling: The FPJQ said it was only told Tuesday that it was part of this group. The CAJ says it’s not sure if it will participate. QCNA says it already wants to expand eligibility criteria beyond what the government announced. Unions, naturally, are focused mainly on jobs.
• The Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments in a case of a former Quebec cabinet minister trying to get Radio-Canada journalist Marie-Maude Denis to reveal her sources. The decision will set precedent for the limits of journalistic protections.
• The Journal de Mourréal, a fake news, parody or satire website depending on your interpretation, lost its court battle against its near-namesake, who convinced a judge it was using the Journal de Montréal’s brand and was profiting off being confusingly similar. The website must change its name and pay $23,500 to Quebecor.
• A lawsuit launched by Quebecor columnist Richard Martineau against news website Ricochet has been settled out of court. Ricochet claims total victory, in that they paid nothing and did not apologize or pull the satirical obituary they wrote about him. Martineau said he wanted to avoid a circus and compared himself to a sexual assault victim.
• Postmedia has reached a deal in principle with journalism startup The Logic that will see some of The Logic’s stories in Postmedia publications and the two groups partner on “content licensing, marketing projects and events.” Postmedia will take an unspecified minority stake in The Logic, which was started last year by David Skok, formerly of the Toronto Star. The Logic, which covers the “innovation economy,” explains the deal to its subscribers here.
• Postmedia (my employer) has registered a lobbyist in Alberta to try to get the company involved in some way with the new Alberta government’s “energy war room”.
• An anti-Muslim “pundit” named Kevin J. Johnston was ordered to pay $2.5 million in damages in a libel case brought on by Mohamad Fakih of Paramount Fine Foods. Johnston didn’t hire a lawyer, his defence was poor and his statements so egregious that it warranted one of the largest defamation judgments in Canadian history.
• The Canadian Press newsroom in Toronto held a retirement party for a reporter’s guide dog.
• The U.S. government is charging Julian Assange of Wikileaks with revealing government secrets under the Espionage Act. This is chilling for journalists, who could in theory face similar charges for publishing leaked classified information.
• A CNN Greece journalist’s car was destroyed by a homemade fire bomb. The Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned the attack.

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News about news

• Two Reuters journalists have been released after being detained for more than a year in Myanmar.
• La Presse has updated its public donations website with some statistics from the first three months of the program: they’ve raised $1.7 million, which works out to an average of $40.47 for 42,000 contributors. Presumably the enthusiasm for donations was stronger right off the bat, and many of those are either one-time donations or larger than they will be in the future, but if that pace holds, it would put them well ahead of their goal of raising $5 million a year through voluntary donations.
• Former CTV Montreal reporter turned Concordia professor Aphrodite Salas took a group of students to Gull Bay First Nation in Northern Ontario to do a short documentary about a solar power project being set up there, and the history of the community that led to Ontario’s government setting up the project as a sort of apology. The documentary was posted to a special section on CTV Montreal’s website. Bill Brownstein writes about the project in a Gazette story and Salas appeared on CTV News to discuss it as well.
• Cult MTL has released the results of its annual readers’ poll. Here are the results in the media category.
• The Toronto Star is offering free digital subscriptions until Oct. 31 to post-secondary students and faculty. They only need a school email account to register. Meanwhile the paper says digital subscriptions are up 50%, but that’s not enough to counteract the plummeting print ad sales revenue.
• The Toronto Star is also “enhancing” the labels on its online articles to better explain to readers the different types of journalism.
• The owners of the New Orleans Times-Picayune put on a master class on how not to fire an entire newspaper. It’s being shut down in favour of its younger rival, also owned by the same company.

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News about news

• It’s the Semaine de la presse et des médias in Quebec this week. Various local news outlets are opening their doors to tours or holding open houses on May 3. The latter includes Les Affaires and Urbania in Montreal, but many others too.
• The FPJQ isn’t impressed by small-town governments in Quebec barring journalists from public information meetings about flooding.
• Montreal news reporters and authorities were scrambling to find a pink-maned pony after a photo circulated on social media. The image turned out to be a hoax by Vlog, the TVA viral video show.
• The South China Morning Post has a story about Karen Lin Woods, who has been expressing opinions about Canadian politics without fully disclosing her employer’s connections with the Chinese government. Lobbyists for foreign governments are considered diplomats and don’t have to register with the lobbyist registry.
• The Walrus has a story about how the cuts to local news affects political reporting in Canada, which is bad news going into a federal election.
• La Presse is launching a new mobile app.
• The Montreal Gazette and other Postmedia publications have switched from Facebook commenting to a new system run by Viafoura, which hopes to cut down on spam and abusive comments below news articles. So far it seems to have put an end to automated get-rich-quick-by-working-from-home spam comments.
• The editor of Your Ward News, convicted of hate speech, is trying to stay out of jail, arguing he was giving a voice to angry people.
• The New York Times is “deeply sorry” for a cartoon about the U.S. and Israel that appeared in its international edition and was condemned by critics as anti-semitic. The cartoonist tells the Jerusalem Post he didn’t feel the cartoon was anti-semitic.

At the CRTC

• Approved: New English and Indigenous-language radio station in Afton Station, N.S.: Indigenous non-profit, 104.5 FM, 50W. Afton Station is about halfway between Antigonish and the start of Cape Breton.
• Approved: New English commercial radio station in Listowel (North Perth), Ont.: Owned by Five Amigos Broadcasting, 100.1 FM, 8,000W. Listowel is about 50 km northwest of Kitchener and is not served by other radio stations. It plans an adult contemporary format.
• Licences for 23 Indigenous radio stations, including CKHQ-FM in Kanesatake, have been extended to 2022 as the CRTC prepares a review of its Indigenous radio policy.

Ethical reviews

• National Newsmedia Council: A Globe and Mail opinion piece did not include a significant factual error in citing how much money Bombardier received from the federal government, even though it lacked some context and qualifiers (such as the money being adjusted for inflation).
• Globe and Mail readers say they want more fact-checking and analysis in election coverage.

At the CBC

• The corporation is being less than forthcoming about documents concerning the construction of its new Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal. But Radio-Canada decided to remind people that the new building comes with no additional cost to taxpayers, because they’re paying the same rent as before.

TV

Pierre-Luc Dubois est fin prêt pour le match avec un cri de ralliement très particulier! ? pic.twitter.com/awtXSYSQMq

— RDS (@RDSca) April 30, 2019

• Some colourful language got onto the Sportsnet/CBC NHL playoffs broadcast.
• Rogers has picked up the rights to the Eurovision song contest, and will be broadcasting the two semifinals and the grand final this month on OMNI and streaming it on OMNITV.ca. (ICI, the Montreal ethnic station that partners with OMNI and carries some of its programming, won’t be airing the shows because of scheduling conflicts, president Sam Norouzi tells me.) Canada isn’t participating (and so Canadians can’t vote), but Greece’s entry is sung by Katerine Duska, who was born in Montreal.
• Corus Entertainment has joined a group that’s developing a video measurement standard that hopes to finally solve the problem of how you properly measure the TV, online streaming and social media audience for a broadcast.
• Amazon is bringing its Amazon Channels service to Canada, according to The Logic. Amazon Channels is sort of a cross between TV and streaming, offering subscriptions to services like HBO on an individual basis at different prices.
• YouTube has scored the exclusive rights to 13 MLB regular-season games this season in the U.S. and Canada. The exact games haven’t been announced, but those games won’t be available on TV.
• APTN workers voted 39-1 in favour of a new labour contract.
• APTN is still feeling the energy of its NHL broadcast in Plains Cree, though there are no specific plans for future sports broadcasts on the network. They do want to do more sports in Indigenous languages though.
• APTN has started airing a French dubbed version of Mohawk Girls, called Belles, fières et Mohawks.
• CBC has revived Battle of the Blades, six years after its last season aired. The show will air this fall, and contestants are to be announced.
• Bell Media has greenlit a new sci-fi mystery drama series called Albedo starring Evangeline Lilly. It will be broadcast by streaming service Vudu in the U.S. Bell doesn’t say where it will broadcast the eight-episode series.
• Bell Media has commissioned a new six-part documentary series for Crave, called We’re All Gonna Die, about the various ways humanity could go extinct.
• Séries+ has announced its first original series since it stopped making them during a failed sale to Bell: Winnebago, a six-episode miniseries starring Guylaine Tremblay and Josée Deschênes, to air in 2020.
• Radio-Canada is working on a new comedy series that takes place in a universe where the Yes side won the 1995 Quebec referendum.
• Netflix’s first original Quebec production, a film called Jusqu’au déclin, has finished filming.
• Netflix and other foreign streaming services paid the Quebec government almost double what it was expected to in sales taxes, according to La Presse.
• You know that lawsuit that was obviously inevitable from Bell after the TVA Sports debacle? Yeah, it’s happening. Bell wants $150 million, for being forced to offer Sportsnet for free, the additional work for customer service, the misleading ad campaign that tried to blame Bell for cutting the signal, and Pierre Karl Péladeau breaking a confidentiality agreement by revealing the wholesale rate that Bell TV paid for TVA Sports. There’s also a separate class action lawsuit in the works by Bell subscribers.
• J-Source has a story about TV newsroom automation, and CBC’s efforts to implement it. It’s using a similar system that Global put in place a decade ago, though it’s not going as far as Global did in terms of centralizing on-camera functions.
• RDS’s 85 or so newsroom employees have been accredited as a union.
• Jimmy Kimmel is bringing back All in the Family and The Jeffersons for a primetime special.

Radio

• A strange story about a Labrador City francophone community radio station called Rafale FM that was collecting ad money for ads that it never aired because it was off the air. And it wasn’t just an honest mistake, either. The general manager confirmed in writing that the ads had aired.
• Rogers Media has acquired the podcast company Pacific Content, which mainly creates branded podcasts for companies.
• Matt Cundill’s Soundoff Podcast interviewed two people in the radio industry with Montreal connections: Ian Howarth is a freelance writer who wrote a book about Montreal’s top 40 radio heydays of the 60s and 70s. And Steve Anthony worked at CKGM and CHOM, along with stations in Toronto.
• The National Post has launched a new business podcast.

Print

• The National Magazine Awards nominations are out. Nominees include Toronto Life (19), The Walrus (14), L’actualité (9), Nouveau Projet (9), Maclean’s (9), Hazlitt (8), the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business (7) Maisonneuve (6), Fashion Magazine (5), Canadian Geographic (5), Cottage Life (5) Dînette magazine (5), The New Quarterly (5) and The Site Magazine (5).
• La Presse and Groupe Capitales Médias are seeking more bailout money from the Quebec government. The latter, which owns Le Soleil, Le Droit, Le Nouvelliste, Le Quotidien, La Tribune and La Voix de l’Est, says it could run out of money by the end of summer.
• Métro Média, the company that owns Métro in Montreal and the former Transcontinental community weeklies on the island, is launching a new free magazine aimed at people over 50, called Nouvelle Liberté.
• ESPN The Magazine is shutting down its print edition.
• The Guardian in the U.K. has finally stopped losing money. It gets more revenue from online than print, and getting money directly from readers has helped a lot in getting to this point.

Online

• Facebook broke several privacy laws, the Canadian and B.C. privacy commissioners find in a new report. It’s enough that the Canadian privacy commissioner has deleted its Facebook page and no longer wants to be associated with Facebook. But Facebook promises it will take privacy more seriously now.
• HuffPost Canada is shutting down its unpaid blog section and will be paying writers for opinion pieces. HuffPost Québec us doing the same.
• Websites owned by Microsoft and Google will not be taking Canadian political ads this year, and others are still considering their options, according to a CBC News survey. The new registry requirement for political ads is the main reason why, although some websites don’t allow any political ads in any country.
• Blackberry is shutting down its BBM messaging platform for consumers on May 31. People are sad.
• Twitter deleted tweets with links to stories about copyright infringement after a company hired by Starz to deal with copyright infringement went a bit overboard.
• The group behind the Ontario Proud Facebook page has started a federal version aimed at making sure Andrew Scheer defeats Justin Trudeau this fall.
• The Globe and Mail on Hollywood studio Voltage Pictures’ attempts to sue thousands of internet users in a reverse class action for movie piracy.

Other

• Tony Award nominations are out.

News about people

https://twitter.com/chrishallcbc/status/1121416290961436675

• CBC freedom-of-information specialist Dean Beeby has retired from the Ottawa bureau.
• Pierre Karl Péladeau, CEO of Quebecor, is buying the remnants of the bankrupt Téo Taxi, including the Montreal taxi companies it bought, Taxi Diamond and Taxi Hochelaga. They are being bought by him personally, and not by Quebecor.
• Péladeau was interviewed by Esther Bégin for her CPAC show. It focuses mainly on Péladeau’s career path and the intersection of his personal and professional life. Part 1, Part 2.
• Marc-Olivier Brouillette is the new play-by-play analyst for Alouettes games on TSN 690. He gave an interview to the station when the hiring was announced. He replaces Bryan Chiu, who left during the season last year because of family issues and has since gone back to coaching.
• Anne-Élisabeth Bossé is Véronique Cloutier’s summer replacement on Rouge FM’s afternoon show in Montreal.
• Jeff Douglas, formerly of As It Happens, is the new host of Mainstreet, the afternoon show on Radio One in Nova Scotia.
• Nabil Karim, formerly of TSN, has joined ESPN.
• Simon Coutu is leaving Vice Quebec.
• Political reporter Elise von Scheel is now permanently at CBC’s parliamentary bureau.
• Amir Nasrabadi, former president of Pixar Canada, has been hired to head up animation at DHX Media, which owns Family Channel.
• Stephanie Myles, a former Montreal Gazette sports reporter who has been writing about tennis since leaving it, was the target of Genie Bouchard’s fans after the tennis player tweeted “fake news” at Myles’s report that she was taking time off the court to get healthy. Two weeks later, Bouchard confirmed the news herself, saying she was rehabbing her “ab”. Réjean Tremblay writes about how unfair that was to Myles.
• Gazette Alouettes reporter Herb Zurkowsky, on leave to be treated for bladder cancer, is in the middle of six weeks of immunotherapy treatment.
• Quebecor columnist Richard Martineau got blocked from Facebook for three days after comments that were deemed transphobic.
• Radio broadcasters Boyd Kozak of Winnipeg and Bob Ridley of Medicine Hat are being inducted into the Western Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
• Krzysztof Pelc of Montreal has won the CBC Short Story Prize. Jacques Lemaire is the winner of the Radio-Canada French equivalent.
• More RTDNA award announcements:
  • Lifetime Achievement Award (Network): Troy Reeb of Corus
  • Distinguished Service Award: George Browne
  • President’s Award: RTDNA regional chairs Dan Appleby, Rhonda Brown, Ron Kronstein, Liam Nixon, Manny Paiva, Jill Smith, Les Staff and Kathryn Stewart

Obituaries

• Gordon Beck, Montreal Gazette photographer
• Nigel Armstrong, PEI Guardian reporter and photographer
• Gordon Stimmell, Toronto Star wine critic
• Jason Botchford, Vancouver sports writer
• Fitzroy Gordon, founder of G98.7 FM in Toronto
• Wayson Choy, author
• Teva Harrison, cartoonist

Jobs

• News editor, Ottawa Citizen/Sun (deadline: May 3)
• Provincial affairs reporter, Radio-Canada in Toronto (deadline: May 9)
• Summer journalist, Iorì:wase in Kahnawake (deadline: May 10)
• Digital broadcast journalist, Global News in Toronto (deadline: May 10)
• Extended-Term Appointment in Digital Journalism Futures, Concordia University (deadline: May 10)
• Report On Business Magazine editor
• Calgary reporter, Globe and Mail

News about news

• The FPJQ, Quebec’s journalist federation, is organizing a weeklong festival of news media, with various talks and exhibitions related to journalism, April 29 to May 5.
• A Conservative Party fundraising campaign asked supporters to rate major media outlets based on how biased they are against conservatives.
• The town of Outlook, Saskatchewan says the local newspaper cannot ask it questions on behalf of citizens.
• A Newfoundland and Labrador appeals court dismissed a contempt of court charge against Justin Brake*, who acted as a journalist following a protest at Muskrat Falls that violated an injunction.
• The Quebecor case against parody website Journal de Mourréal went to court, and a surprise witness was RDI anchor Anne-Marie Dussault, who testified that a false story about her having a relationship with former minister Gaétan Barrette led to a lot of awkwardness from people who thought it was true. As Craig Silverman notes, the man behind this website also runs fake news site World News Daily Report. Its owner is arguing freedom of expression and freedom to parody, and says the website doesn’t make much money.
• Journalism awards announcements:
  • Canadian Association of Journalists award finalists.
  • RTDNA Central Region award winners: CBC Montreal takes home 10 awards, and Global Montreal one. They also join nominees for national awards, along with winners from the East, West and Prairie regions.
  • RTDNA Network award finalists
  • Finalists for the FPJQ’s Judith Jasmin awards. La Presse, Radio-Canada, le Journal de Montréal, Le Devoir and the Gazette have multiple nominations.
  • Finalists for the FPJQ’s Antoine Desilets photojournalism awards.

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