Category Archives: Media

| In the news, Media

Montebello, welcome to your 15 minutes

The press is all over the summit at Montebello, partly because George W. Bush seldom visits this country, and partly because the protest is expected to be on a scale similar to what happened at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001.

So far the protests have been peaceful. Things like a caravan starting here at 8:30 this morning are well-planned photo ops to get the media on-side. And left-wing papers like Hour have been supportive, writing about them in a good light. The Globe, meanwhile, has a piece from Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, denouncing the meeting’s lack of transparency. Le Devoir is also on their side, suggesting that three conservative leaders (even by their countries’ standards), combined with executives of the largest corporations in North America might not have everyone’s interests at heart.

And there’s always the NDP. And The Dominion.

Of course, not everyone’s a hippie or hippie ally. The Gazette has a long editorial accusing the left of being paranoid, and trusting that the three amigos are not made of pure evil. It (only half-fairly) paints the environmental and labour lobby as obstructionists who oppose all progress just for its own sake. While it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to see that happening, I’m not one for believing that these corporate leaders wouldn’t similarly object strenuously if a policy being considered hurt their bottom line in even the most minute way.

The editorial then curiously uses the example of the harmonization of pesticide regulations to make the point that being screwed over by the U.S. is good because it raises awareness about how we’re being screwed over by the U.S.

Antagoniste also wonders what everyone’s complaining about.

Other Montebello-related tidbits from the papers this weekend:

Finally, La Presse’s André Noël gets the award for lamest story lead related to this issue:

Connaissez-vous le PSP? Oui, bien sûr, il y a la PlayStation Portable de Sony. Mais soyez francs: connaissez-vous le Partenariat nord-américain pour la sécurité et la prospérité?

| Media, Montreal, Slow News Day

Beyoncé has too much power over the media

Remember when Le Devoir was banninated from a Police concert because they wouldn’t play ball with promoters? (And other Montreal media stayed mostly silent on the subject?)

Well, in the continuing saga of mainstream publications whining about the crappy treatment they receive when trying to treat concerts as news, some members of the media are saying they weren’t given enough time to shoot photos during the Beyoncé concert this week.

Maybe newspapers should consider not going to big-time Bell Centre concerts altogether. I, for one, don’t care what the song order and costume choices were for some big-time musician’s sold-out show that I couldn’t see if I wanted to.

| Montreal, Radio

Some retirement, Dennis

Dennis Trudeau on 940 News

Remember Dennis Trudeau? He used to be the anchor of CBC Newswatch (that was before CBC gutted local TV news — a decision they’ve thankfully begun to reverse). Two years ago he decided to retire, though he left the door open to other projects, saying he had “lots of ideas” he wanted to work on:

“In this wired world of 500 television channels, opportunities are limitless. I might like to be a commentator. I might like to write. But I do want to try something different from the daily news grind.”

Today comes the news that Trudeau will be joining 940 News as the new morning man, starting Sept. 3, along with Aphrodite Salas (who will move from her current late-morning show on the same station).

Trudeau is no stranger to radio. He’s hosted Daybreak, As it Happens and Cross-Country checkup. I’m sure he’ll do well in front of a microphone. But why oh why would someone who’s tired of the daily news grind agree to host a weekday morning radio show from 5:30 to 10 a.m.?

As for Ken Connors, who currently hosts the show, he’ll move to a “new” afternoon drive-time show on Q92.

UPDATE (Aug. 29): Two weeks later, Mike Boone adds his take with some words from Mr. Trudeau, who insists he’s never retired. It also adds a clarification: that it was Ken Connors moving to Q92 that prompted the station to seek Trudeau, rather than the other way around.

| Montreal, Radio

CKUT license renewed until 2014

The folks at CKUT Radio-McGill can rest easy. The CRTC today renewed their license for seven years until 2014, with only a minor change to its Canadian content rules. The decision also includes “suggestions” (to have board positions be longer than a year) and “reminders” (that board positions must be mostly university community members and at least 80% Canadian citizens).

Oh yeah, and make sure not to be discriminatory and stuff, even though you weren’t actually discriminatory before.

| TV

TQS needs better arguments for the CRTC

TQS has a request for the CRTC: Allow it to demand money from cable and satellite companies in exchange for carrying their signal, just like cable channels do.

At first, the argument seems compelling. TQS has more original programming … (ok, “programming”), higher expenses and can’t offset those with more advertising time than the specialty channels.

But TQS also has a broadcasting license. They’ve chosen a business model that says they distribute their signal freely and make money by charging advertisers based on the number of viewers they get. The more viewers, the more advertising revenue. It’s in their interest to be on cable and satellite, and they’re already given advantages like a low spot on the dial and a guaranteed spot in basic packages.

TQS wants more money they can funnel into their crappy programming (what the heck are they spending it on now? Hair treatments for Jean-Luc Mongrain?). That’s not an excuse to demand the government change laws that are already advantageous to over-the-air broadcasters.

Meanwhile, in happier TQS/CRTC-related news, a recent decision (PDF) means that a TQS Montreal retransmitter in Rimouski has transferred ownership to TQS affiliate CFTF-TV in Rivière-du-Loup, and part of the deal will add some local programming and a small news department in Rimouski. (And the CRTC has warned that they’ll need to increase that local programming when they apply for license renewal.)

| Media, Web design

So. Many. Ads.

I just went to a page on the Kingston Whig-Standard’s website:

Ads run amok

My God.

Un case you can’t tell, the article starts at the very bottom of the page. And there’s so much advertising on it that they can’t even fit the entire headline on the first screen.

When are mainstream media web properties going to learn how to properly place their ads online? Would you read a newspaper whose front page was almost exclusively advertising? Why are we expecting different for websites?

| TV

TLC: What exactly am I learning?

I used to be a fan of The Learning Channel. Owned by Discovery (in the U.S. where the idea of one educational network owning the other apparently didn’t strike anyone as odd), it had some low-budget educational programming that differed from a Discovery Channel that then was more focused on nature programming.

But then something changed. As Discovery added Mythbusters and dozens of Mythbusters knockoffs, TLC shifted its focus to reality programming and home renovation shows. “Bringing Home Baby”, “Take Home Chef”, “Flip That House”, “My Skin Could Kill Me” are among the shows on today. It’s the Medical Diagnosis Channel/Vehicle Repair Channel meets Home and Garden Television.

As if to underscore the fact that learning isn’t important to them, the channel has announced that it is carrying the exact opposite of everything that learning stands for:

The Miss America Pageant.

Just what am I supposed to learn from that?

| Business, Media, Web design

More bad web programming

CanWest has launched a new classified website, househunting.ca, for real estate listings. It’s still in beta, which is good because it still has problems with the way it’s coded:

Househunting.ca error message

Guess this Canadian website’s code wasn’t written in-house.

There are larger problems. The search results (there aren’t enough listings to analyze whether their search is good or not) produce a MapQuest map that’s centred on some random location that’s not where you searched for. When you move the map so you can see where you actually searched, the page forces itself to reload and change the search results to wherever you have the map pointed to.

The search box also doesn’t provide fine-tuned price ranging (or, for that matter, any search beyond location, price and size). If your range isn’t in their pre-set list, you’re out of luck (or you have to search a few times).

CanWest isn’t alone in these badly-designed online classified sites. All the websites owned by big media companies have downright awful designs. When a simple site like Craigslist is so successful, you wonder why people are trying to make these overly-complicated sites work instead of stealing a good idea.

| Media

Don’t edit your competition out of your news

Le Devoir has an article about how the television networks aren’t talking about each other’s shows. The reason is obvious: Not wanting to give free publicity to the competition. But at the same time they’re all going after newspapers to report new TV shows as news.

Le Devoir says that the newspapers are covering the upcoming season fairly. The implication is that newspapers are more fair than TV stations.

But newspapers aren’t immune to this “don’t talk about the competition” idea. Articles about stories written in other papers make vague references to “a Montreal newspaper” or “the Montreal newspaper The Gazette“, either deliberately obscuring the source or acting as if we’ve never heard of one of the four major daily newspapers in this city.

This is a small part of the reason why people are turning to blogs for news. Bloggers don’t try to hide when information comes from somewhere else. In fact, most successful bloggers welcome competition and cooperate with them.

Yeah, it’s embarrassing when you’re scooped on a story, or when their feature creates a big impact, or when their TV show is more exciting than yours. But don’t insult our intelligence by thinking your deliberate manipulation of the news for pure self-interest isn’t being noticed by readers and viewers.

| Humour, TV

Poor Debra

Debra sad

For those of you who haven’t been following NBC’s Last Comic Standing (what are you doing, having a life or something?), you missed Canada’s pride, Video-on-Trialer Debra DiGiovanni, getting eliminated tonight.

She was the last of the Video-on-Trial Toronto comics to survive the show, and ended up reaching No. 8 on the series’ first international foray. Not bad if you ask me.

Give her a round of applause as she heads back home with her cats.

(UPDATE: Wow, a lot of people like to talk about what they saw on TV, even if they admit it isn’t funny.)

| Media, Montreal

CBC needs to check out a map

CBC doesn’t know its bridges:

Quebec police closed down Highway 19 in both directions Wednesday to investigate a crack in a bridge between Montreal and Laval not far from the Concorde overpass that collapsed last September killing five people.

Police were called to Pont Viau late this morning to investigate a pothole on the bridge.

The Viau bridge, of course, actually connects des Laurentides in Laval with Lajeunesse in Montreal, and is part of Route 335, not Highway 19, which goes over the Papineau bridge. (If you need a map, may I suggest mine?)

The bridge has now re-opened, after engineers concluded the hole in it is superficial. And therefore there’s no reason to worry, right?

(via Metroblogging Montreal)