Category Archives: Media

| Media, Web design

Star PM: Good on paper, but still a failure

Just over a year ago, with much fanfare, the Toronto Star launched a new service called “Star P.M.”, which was a dozen-page letter-sized PDF file that could be downloaded on weekday afternoons.

The idea was simple: Office workers would download the paper, which had afternoon updates of important stories, as well as things like Sudoku puzzles, print it out and take it with them on the ride home. There are certainly lots of people who take public transit to whom this might appeal.

And from some who fit that criteria there was initial praise of the project, which was the first of its kind in North America.

But there was also criticism with what now looks like keen foresight, pointing out that people won’t download as a PDF what they can get faster in HTML. And then there were numbers to back that point up.

And so it was, this week the Star announced it is killing Star P.M. to focus more on its mobile website, which is a format more friendly to the cellphone-toting workforce. The last issue will be Wednesday, October 17.

The format is what ultimately killed Star P.M. The Star underestimated the amount of effort involved in printing such a document every weekday. They overestimated how fast non-junkies need to get their news (busy workers could just wait until the next morning to read stories in the paper). They underestimated how much time news junkies would spend bored at work reading the paper’s website, or getting any news they cared about from their favourite blogs.

The new mobile website (“mobile version” is the new “non-Flash” or “low-bandwidth” — making me wonder why the rest of the website can’t have such a simple design) is a better way for the Star to spend its time. It updates faster and it’s much more interactive.

But what about the other PDF papers out there? The Ottawa Citizen has Rush Hour, which is still running. Other such papers in the U.S. and Europe have quietly shut down. Expect Rush Hour to have a similarly sad end.

You might also see obituaries being written for “Game Day” issues, which are special afternoon before-the-game downloadable PDFs with rosters, last-minute updates and other stuff the newspapers think you’ll want to take with you to the game. The Ottawa Citizen has one for Senators games, the Vancouver Sun just started one for Canucks games, and the Montreal Gazette runs one for Alouettes games. Considering these publications have even stricter audience limitations, I just can’t see them getting popular enough to support the work put into them.

There’s also G24, the PDF paper produced by the Guardian, which has the advantages of being somewhat customizable and more up-to-date because the PDFs are produced automatically. This also means that even if nobody reads it, it doesn’t cost the paper anything. Sure, it doesn’t have the newspaper-like modular layout, but is that really necessary in these kinds of circumstances?

By the end of the year, we’ll probably be able to conclude once and for all that these PDF papers are a failed experiment. But, as one blogger commented, at least it was an experiment. We have to at least give them that.

UPDATE (Jan. 9, 2008): The London Daily Telegraph has killed its “Telegraph PM” PDF paper. So I was off by a few days…

| Media

Irving really doesn’t like competition

The CBC has a story this week about how the Irving Family (which owns New Brunswick) is suing a former manager who is starting a competing paper.

Though a search of William Kenneth Langdon’s home found documents from the Woodstock Bugle-Observer, he swears he just forgot about them and anyway they would be useless in making a newspaper.

Besides the stupidity of having such documents at your home, don’t managers leave for competing news media all the time? Imagine what would happen if they could all be sued for it.

This case, of course, takes on added meaning because Langdon is starting a new newspaper in a province where every major newspaper is owned by one company. And he left the old paper because of Irving’s ruthless anti-competitive activities. In the end, the Irvings come out looking like megalomaniac supervillains of comical evility.

But perhaps more important, is Woodstock, New Brunswick (pop. 5,000) really the town in that province most in need of a second competing newspaper?

UPDATE (Oct. 26): J-Source gives a roundup of some more coverage of the case, including allegations that Irving papers aren’t reporting on it fairly.

UPDATE (Nov. 5): J-Source’s Deb Jones says Langdon has won a court case and will be allowed to compete against Irving’s papers.

| Blogosphere, Montreal, My articles, TV

TWIM: Racial profiling, dream listener and dancing!

This week was a productive one here at Fagstein WorldMedia Ltd., so much so that I’m three days behind on reading my newspapers. Here’s what’s in Saturday’s paper from yours truly:

No racial profiling here

First up is an interview with Paul Chablo, the communications director at the Montreal police department. He’s the first anglophone to hold the job and has been trying to reach out to anglophone media. He’s also a really nice, charismatic fellow.

But we weren’t talking about him. Instead, the interview is about the police’s response to allegations of racial profiling. It was prompted by allegations from Kamrol Joseph, a 25-year-old black man who was questioned by police after stepping into the street to hail a cab in Cote-Saint-Luc last month. He refused to provide ID and was arrested so he could be ticketed. He was released after his identity was established, with a ticket for jaywalking. He went to the press.

Chablo says this wasn’t a case of racial profiling, and that Joseph only told the officers he was trying to hail a cab after he was arrested. Instead of targetting a black man in an affluent neighbourhood, they were responding to a man in the street sticking his hand out, thinking he was gesturing at police to get their attention.

Believe it or not, that’s the explanation. There were some other insightful comments he gave during the interview:

  • No Montreal police officer has ever been found guilty of racial profiling. There are about 20 complaints per year, but they’re all either shown to be unfounded or inconclusive.
  • A case that went in front of the ethics committee involving Gemma Raeburn, a woman who got a visit from police after neighbours mistook two black men helping her clean her garage for burglars, also wasn’t racial profiling, even though the officers who responded were sanctioned. The police ethics committee ruled against the officers and imposed short suspensions for the comments made to Raeburn, which included “bullets don’t see colour” and “why don’t you go back to your country?” Though the comments were racist, the committee said, the initial reason for the intervention was apparently considered justified from the police’s perspective.
  • In addition to lots of training of new recruits, the police are outreaching to the community, employing the services of Community Contact editor Egbert Gaye as a mediator. (Despite an email asking me to verify, some well-meaning copy editor changed his email address to a grammatically correct but factually incorrect spelling. It’s comtact@bellnet.ca)
  • In all cases where a complaint is brought against officers, the department likes to have sit-down meetings with the citizens and officers involved to solve the matter informally. And such meetings often work, giving people a chance to vent and clear up misunderstandings. A lot of these complaints, Chablo says, come from people who think they’ve been singled out for minor offenses, only to later learn that dozens of other people were ticketed for the same offense on the same day.

UPDATE (Oct. 23): Gemma Raeburn has a response opinion in Saturday’s paper, which takes issue with the “criminal profiling” vs. “racial profiling” comments Chablo made about her case. Some of her outrage I feel might have been my fault, as she understood from my article that Chablo supported the officers in this case. To be clear, he didn’t condone the racist remarks (and freely labelled them as such). His point was simply that this wasn’t “racial profiling” because the police were acting based on a phone call.

I dreamt I read this weird blog

This week’s blog is dream listener, a blog about the hand-painted cardboard signs being posted around the city by its author. It’s a project that started last November and runs for a year, with the author (who wants to remain anonymous due to her quasi-legal activities) writing about her dreams. An audiobook of the project is being released next Friday, with all proceeds going to the St. James Drop-in Centre.

So You Think You Can Pun?

Finally, an explainer about U.S. TV series (mostly reality shows) having their formats licensed to Canadian companies who create Canadian versions and sell them to the CRTC as Canadian content. It was based, of course, on this blog post where I wonder what this is doing to Canadian television. That, in turn, was based on news that CTV has secured the rights to make So You Think You Can Dance Canada. Apparently the Idol franchise is worth more than $2 billion.

| Montreal, TV, Video

More CFCF12/Pulse News nostalgia

Speaking of old YouTube clips from CFCF, here’s some more fond memories of Montreal’s 1/2 Watch:

And as a special bonus, a pair of clips of Tarah Schwartz (Tarah Black back then) doing a light-hearted Halloween-themed anchoring on the Weather Network in 1996.

| Montreal, TV, Video

Howard Schwartz, Pulse News

The progression of Howard Schwartz

Remember Howard Schwartz? Yeah, neither did I at first, until investigative reporter J. D. Gravenor (who’s a great guy by the way) pointed out this video he posted interviewing Luciano Pavarotti at the airport in November 1982.

Schwartz was a reporter for Pulse News (which has since been de-branded into the pathetically generic CTV News Montreal) from 1982 to 1995. He left the station to enter the evil world of public relations (for, among other things, giant pharmaceutical companies), and now lives in the U.S.

He’s also a prolific YouTube user, having posted a couple of dozen videos. Perhaps the most interesting one is this video of him anchoring Pulse News in 1994:

| Sports, TV

Is “fuck” gratuitous?

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that a live TSN interview with junior hockey star Jonathan Toews violated the industry’s voluntary obscenity standards because he uttered the F-bomb moments after his team won the gold medal at the world junior hockey championships.

Specifically, he said (emphasis mine):

Oh, it’s unbelievable. It’s a great feeling. You know, we’ve come, uh, overcome so much and, uh, you know, tonight was a battle from start to finish and we did a fucking great job.

The decision was not unanimous. Two of the seven council members dissented, arguing that TSN should not have reasonably predicted that a hockey player would swear on live television.

TSN won’t be forced to pay any fine, but they do have to broadcast the decision in prime-time.

In general, Canadian television is expected to restrict use of obscene language between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m., when children tend to be watching. But even then there’s some wiggle room. The council also distinguishes between thoughtful use of these words and gratuitous uses.

Which brings me to my question: Is “fuck” gratuitous in this context? Is there another word that would more properly convey his feelings at this point?

I’m always frustrated that professional athletes, even after they win world championships, bite their tongues in front of the cameras. They talk about how great a game their opponents played, how this was a team effort, how the coach helped a lot, how honoured they are. When they’re asked how they feel, the response tends to be a throw-away “oh it’s great”. This problem is likely only to get worse as a result of this decision, which also urges broadcasters to ask athletes to watch their language before live interviews.

Jonathan Toews’s use of the word “fucking” is a breath of fresh air. It’s not gratuitous, it’s insightful. It’s news.

| TV

So you think you can produce original programming?

News outlets all over the country are rewriting a CTV press release into news. It’s announcing that the network has secured Canadian rights to the show So You Think You Can Dance, and like Canadian Idol, our version of the show will be in the same format but with different hosts.

Am I the only one getting tired of Canadian networks creating Canadian versions of shows developed in other countries and selling it to the CRTC as original Canadian content? Think of what we’ve done so far:

  1. Are You Smarter Than a Canadian 5th Grader? (Global), adapted from Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? (FOX)
  2. Canada’s Next Top Model (Citytv), adapted from America’s Next Top Model (CW)
  3. Canada’s Worst Driver (Discovery), adapted from Britain’s Worst Driver
  4. Canada’s Worst Handyman (Discovery), adapted from Britain’s Worst DIYer
  5. Canadian Idol (CTV), adapted from American Idol (FOX), which was in turn adapted from Britain’s Pop Idol, all part of Simon Cowell’s empire
  6. Deal or No Deal Canada (Global), adapted from Deal or No Deal (NBC)
  7. Entertainment Tonight Canada (Global), adapted from Entertainment Tonight (Syndicated)
  8. No Opportunity Wasted (CBC), adapted from No Opportunity Wasted (New Zealand)
  9. Project Runway Canada (Slice), adapted from Project Runway (Bravo)
  10. Who Do You Think You Are? (CBC), adapted from Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC)

And that’s the only ones I can find on a quick search.

I’m not the only one who thinks this is a problem. Canadian actors, writers, and other artists are objecting to the trend, demanding the networks invest in Canadian ideas instead of American ones, and stop sending hundreds of millions of dollars down south to license their shows.

What’s wrong? Is it because we don’t have as much money as they do? Is it because our ideas suck? Is it because Canadian viewers are so allergic to home-grown content that we have to be weaned onto it using comfortable American shows?

Or is there nothing wrong? I enjoy Canada’s Worst Driver/Handyman, and I watch American TV a lot during prime time. Is the problem me?

| Media, Montreal

Self-centred drivers have short-sighted views

The Journal has a feature article today about a survey they organized which shows rush-hour drivers want heavy trucks banned from bridges during rush-hour. The article doesn’t include any interviews with truck drivers or transport companies or anyone else who might provide a balanced perspective.

Had they done so, they might have come up with this simple argument: Truck drivers don’t like rush hour any more than office workers do. They try to arrange their schedules, whenever possible, to avoid high-traffic situations which slow them down and eat into their productivity. When they travel during rush-hour it’s because they don’t have a choice.

The survey, with 71% in favour of creating such a restriction, is also misleading. All drivers want less rush hour traffic. If they could, they’d have everyone but them banned from the road. But if you explain the economic consequences of unnecessary regulation of truck traffic (like higher retail prices), you might start seeing those numbers change.

| Montreal, TV, Video

More suggestions for Vlog

After the Domster asked me to hold my judgment about his new show Vlog, I promised to take a look at their second episode and report back.

The second episode was pretty well identical to the first in format and style. Still, I’m noticing more things about the show worthy of improvement.

The show’s format seems to be pretty simple. Borne and Arpin stand in an all-white room with TV screens and a couch, banter among each other like a cheesy infomercial and show clips (between 5 and 15 seconds) of videos that are popular online, including:

  • Corporate “viral” advertising campaigns: The first video that played for more than a few seconds was the latest video of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, which features a young girl bombarded by images from the media presenting unrealistic ideas of the ideal female form. Ironically, it was introduced by Geneviève Borne, who while I’m sure isn’t a bimbo in real life, was clearly hired to do this show because she looks like one.
  • Game shows in other countries: This week, it was other-language versions of Deal or No Deal (or Le Banquier, which amazingly enough is a TVA show). There’s also more Japanese game show videos, which look like they’re going to become a weekly feature here.
  • YouTube’s top 10: Clips we’ve seen before but maybe TVA’s grandmother demographic hasn’t, like ol’ Miss U.S. Americans and the Swiss firefighters. The argument, and I suppose it makes sense, is that their target audience isn’t us web geeks but normals who aren’t browsing the YouTube or the blogs. I think that audience will be shrinking.
  • Blatantly transparent cross-promotion: In this case, their “top 3” videos from Occupation Double, the reality show that precedes it (for those unfamiliar, it’s like porn, only the plots aren’t as interesting, the makeup is more caked on and the sex isn’t as graphic). As bad as it is to feature clips from your own network’s show as if they were the most popular videos on YouTube, what’s worse is that the clips are meaningless and entirely uninteresting to people like me who avoid such crap programming.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, allow me to make some additional suggestions on how to improve the show:

  • Kill the silly banter and lame jokes. You’re not actors, and it comes across as fake. It’s bad enough I have to endure that on the local news, but at least they can make the excuse that it’s live TV. (For that matter, why does this show have two hosts anyway?) Dominic, you don’t have to pretend to be hip and cool, because you’re already hip and cool.
  • Find some unsung heroes. Look at videos that haven’t yet become popular and give them some mainstream attention.
  • Forget the Occupation Double videos. Your viewers aren’t idiots, and you’ll lose what little respect you have if you start giving special treatment to everything TVA/Canoe/Quebecor.

I wish I had some more suggestions, but you’re really going through uncharted territory here. In the U.S., ABC’s iCaught seems to focus on interviewing video creators and discussing issues related to online video. I’m not sure if that’s the way to go, but it’s an option. And it feels less weird than just profiting off other people’s creativity.

That said, my criticism’s of the show’s website still stand. It’s nice that it shows the videos you use, but it’s still far too hard to navigate. Fix that and you’ll earn more respect from me.

| TV, Video

Vlog can get better if they try

Dominic Arpin, whose new TVA show Vlog premiered last week, wants us bloggers to take a chill pill about criticizing the show. He points to posts by me and MédiaBiz’s Michel Dumais which were highly critical.

My regular readers know I’m somewhat … critical of things, especially the mainstream media. But while I make jokes and use sarcasm and I highlight the negatives instead of the positives, I always try to make my criticisms constructive. I don’t say something sucks unless I have a reason to back it up. And when organizations improve, I try to make it a point to highlight that and offer praise.

Just to be clear: I don’t dislike the show. I have no wish to see it cancelled. If anything, I would like Mr. Arpin and the producers of the show (and its website) to read my post and make improvements.

But I’m also not going to hold judgment just because it’s the premiere, as Arpin asks. People watch the premiere, it’s what gives them a first impression. If you don’t put your best foot forward from the get-go, you’ll have a hard time winning back audiences. (Even then, I cut the show some slack for showing old videos, since they haven’t had the chance to talk about them before.)

I stand by what I wrote in the original post: The show is a slightly better version of a similar concept ABC launched this summer called iCaught. And obviously done on a much smaller budget. I think it has the potential to be very good or very bad depending on what habits they settle into. But the website is still atrocious and needs fixing.

Anyway, the show’s first attempt at user-generated content, having people lip-sync to Mes Aieux’s Dégénération, seems to be moderately successful with six videos submitted so far. That, at the very least, shows people are watching and engaged.

Vlog’s second episode airs Sunday at 9:30 on TVA. If they improve on their mistakes, you’ll definitely hear it from me.

| Humour, TV

Air Farce Live: A gimmick won’t magically increase ratings

I just finished watching the premiere of Air Farce Live on CBC. The umpteen-year-old show, which has been sagging in the ratings these past few years because it’s a Friday-night show and it’s not funny, came up with the idea of doing it live as a gimmick. It worked for me, at least this first night.

The first episode had a bit too much “hey look at us we’re live now!” moments, which should hopefully disappear by next week. There were also three pre-packaged segments, which is a lot for a supposedly live half-hour show. And it became clear through the first few sketches that actors wouldn’t appear in consecutive segments, which will mean fewer actors in each.

I used to be a big fan of the Royal Canadian Air Farce as a kid. I had fond memories of the Chicken Cannon, which now seems to have been retired. But the jokes were too obvious, too immature, compared to the more nuanced ones of shows like This Hour Has 22 Minutes. By the time I got a high-school diploma, I stopped watching.

After a few years away, not much has changed. There’s new faces, and the old faces are a bit greyer (and in the case of Don Ferguson, balder), but the jokes are still the same. I laughed only a couple of times, mostly during a strange, Weekend-Updateish rapid-fire news segment with some guy in front of a laptop. (The joke, after one about Brian Mulroney’s massive book of memoirs: “Kim Campbell is planning to release her memoirs in a pamphlet later this year.”)

The Air Farce will always have its audience. And even if it doesn’t, the CBC’s commitment to Canadian content will probably keep it on life support for many years. But the idea of making it “live” seems like little more than a gimmick shark-jump to try and jump-start sagging ratings. Unless it’s matched by better writing (or some unpredictability that you can only get when live) it’s just not going to work.

| Montreal, TV

Global TV outsourcing local news production

Global

LCN was the first with the news: Global TV is laying off 200 employees across Canada, and shutting down its Quebec City and Sherbrooke bureaus.

Quebec City, which had a skeleton staff in a small building, was mostly a news-gathering operation. There were no studios there and the only original program was a half-hour-a-week repackaging of news reports called “QC Magazine” (it’s unclear if that show will continue to be produced). The only people left will be a reporter at the National Assembly and a few others covering the local beat.

Sherbrooke, meanwhile, was already vacant. The bureau there consisted of a reporter and cameraman and hasn’t been producing anything in months (the reporter was reassigned and the cameraman quit after a leave of absence).

It’s not just here. The Maritimes, where 41 jobs were cut (11 in Saint John, 30 in Halifax), cancelled yesterday’s 11pm newscast.

In all, about half of the job cuts come east of Montreal.

CanWest, which issued this BS-laden press release about how it’ll consolidate news gathering in a multimillion-dollar broadcast centre, laughingly called it a “progressive approach to local news production” and mentions HDTV as a positive result of this decision. (Someone want to explain to me how local news staff impedes the introduction of HDTV?) Then they get into how this is going to work:

News staff in each market will continue to generate local content. All
content will be delivered to a Broadcast Centre and packaged into a program
format for air. Local anchors will continue to deliver the news from their
local stations.

In other words, newscast will involve local anchors in front of green screens. Footage of them in front of their “virtual sets” will be beamed to Toronto along with reporters’ news packages. People in Toronto will actually produce the newscasts, and then beam them back to local broadcasting transmitters.

This idea is hardly new. CBC TV and radio use similar techniques (sending their signal to Toronto and then having them send it back to their transmitters), though their production facilities are still local. And recently, CBC decided to reverse a decision years ago to cut local evening newscasts from an hour to a half-hour. That decision killed Montreal’s CBC Newswatch newscast as a major force in Montreal, handing the market over to CFCF. The decision to re-invest in local news helped the newscast slightly, but it’s still way behind.

The new Global broadcast centres, where 50 employees will be reassigned (in addition ot the 200 laid off), will be located in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto. (Doesn’t that sound a bit skewed westward to you?). Funny how most of the cuts are in the East while all of the new jobs are in the West.

In a memo sent to CanWest employees (which newspapers like The National Post got hold of somehow), management explains the real reason behind the cuts:

“Stations in the two regions are underperforming financially, according to the memo.”

In case it wasn’t obvious from their prime-time schedule and E! network, Global believes in profit, not local TV production. The layoffs will save the company up to $10 million a year. But don’t expect the savings to go to regional news-gathering. Instead, they’ll use it to acquire more cable channels that do little but rebroadcast American TV shows.

Naturally, some people are pissed about the news, and feel it will erode local news coverage. (CanWest makes it seem as if it’s just production and not journalism that will be affected, but editorial cuts in Quebec City and Sherbrooke tell a different story.)

That’s what’s so funny. The reason Global is doing so badly monetarily is because they don’t have viewers for their newscasts. They don’t have viewers because they put on crappy newscasts. These cuts will make the quality deteriorate even further and drive even more people to competing regional news from CBC and CTV. Global is shooting itself in the foot in its rush to the bottom. But they don’t care. Their profits lie in rebroadcasting American content. If they could get away with having no original production whatsoever, they would do it in a heartbeat.

CRTC must step in

But what about CKMI‘s CRTC broadcasting license? Doesn’t this go against the rules by which we offer them free access to our airwaves?

Here’s what the license says about their investment obligations:

With respect to specific tangible benefits, the Commission notes the applicant’s commitment to expend over a projected seven-year period, $9.64 million on additional programming to be acquired from third-party producers and program developers. This total will include $3.16 million to be spent on new Canadian entertainment programming for national distribution and $180,000 to be expended in new programming development investment. The licensee also proposes to expend $2.1 million to license and broadcast during the evening broadcast period on CKMI-TV, and on the entire CanWest Global system in circumstances that ensure national exposure, six one-hour special events programs produced by Quebec independent producers, during each year of the licence term. It also notes TVA-CW’s commitment to acquire and broadcast during the evening broadcast period on CKMI-TV, a minimum of eight music and variety specials produced by Quebec independent producers, during each year of the licence term, at a projected cost of $2.8 million over seven years.

When was the last time you remember seeing Quebec-based special-events programming on Global? They barely even cover provincial elections.

The applicant further committed to co-license with CanWest, in each year of the licence term, a “Movie of the Week“, produced by a Quebec independent producer, to be broadcast in French on the TVA network, and in English on the entire CanWest Global system, including CKMI-TV. The Commission notes the applicant’s commitment to expend $1.4 million in this regard over a seven-year period.

The main issue is original regional programming (because Global Quebec is a regional network, it does not have to produce local programming and can offer no local advertising). They are required to provide 18 hours of original local programming a week, including news. This is largely filled with This Morning Live, the morning talk show of fluff produced out of Montreal, that runs three hours a day or 15 hours a week. The half-hour weekday evening newscast gives another 2.5 hours a week, and QC Magazine fills out the remaining half-hour.

In other words, Global Quebec already provides the absolute bare-minimum of local programming.

CanWest isn’t stupid (OK, they’re stupid, but they’re not THAT stupid). They’ll abide by the letter of their broadcasting license and keep the minimums they’re required to have. But in terms of the spirit of local news production, they’re clearly running a scam.

The solution is simple: The CRTC should review Global TV’s licenses in Quebec and the Maritimes, and consider suspending them in places like Sherbrooke where they have given up on covering local issues.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere:

UPDATE (Oct. 8): The Globe has a follow-up story tying this to the overall decline of local TV news, and how national networks drowning in profits from simulcasting U.S. programming and taking advantage of CRTC rules are complaining that their bare-bones requirements for locally-produced programming are too much to bear.

| In the news, Media, Technology

Nicolas Ritoux, h@x0r

La Presse’s tech freelancer Nicolas Ritoux … err… |\|içø145 ®1†0úX … has exposed some security flaws in government websites, a story that got him good placement in today’s paper.

For obvious reasons, he doesn’t go into too much detail about the pages or vulnerabilities involved, but he mentions SQL injection, which is a serious problem for any website with a database backend.

The fact that many government-run websites are vulnerable is hardly surprising. I see plenty of examples of horrible web programming every day.