Category Archives: Media

| 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.)

Continue reading →

| 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.

| Radio

CRTC validates Quebecor’s QUB Radio loophole

Quebecor’s QUB Radio can stay on FM radio in Montreal.

On Friday, the CRTC finally issued a ruling on a joint complaint from Cogeco and Bell Media against an arrangement whereby CJPX-FM 99.5, the Montreal station that once broadcast classical music, then tried a pop music format, now outsources its programming for 12 hours a day weekdays to Quebecor’s QUB Radio.

In the ruling, the CRTC finds that the station, owned by Quebec City-based Leclerc Communication, does not give Quebecor de facto control over the station and does not violate a cross-media ownership policy. And so it can continue.

Cogeco, which went so far as to begin court proceedings to force the CRTC to rule on its complaint, arguing the commission was taking too long, wasn’t happy about the final ruling, even issuing a press release denouncing it.

But as I said a year ago, this ruling should have been expected, because the letter of the law, if maybe not the spirit, is being respected.

Continue reading →

| Canadiens, TV

TSN and RDS will keep the Canadiens for a few more years

We were expecting some big changes to NHL TV rights deals after the Rogers 12-year deal expired in 2026. As it turns out, less and less is set to change.

On Friday, Bell Media announced a renewal of a regional rights deal between TSN and RDS and the Montreal Canadiens, which will see them continue to broadcast regular-season games “for years to come.”

The announcement didn’t say how many years, or how much will be paid, so it gets added to an annoyingly long list of rights deals whose expiry dates are unknown.

Under the deal, which starts with the 2026-27 season, TSN will get 50 games a season, the same as it does now (but in an 84-game season, that means two more national games for Sportsnet). But RDS will get only 45 games, down from the current 60.

Continue reading →

| TV

CTV News Montreal moves to virtual set

CTV Montreal’s new virtual set.

Starting Monday, CTV News Montreal looks a lot more flashy … and a little more fake.

The station, which has been operating out of the Bell campus on Nuns’ Island since a water main break flooded its studio in August 2024, launched a new virtual set, in which the anchor sits at a desk in a green room and the background is digitally added during the broadcast.

It’s a first for CTV, though Global Montreal has been doing the same since 2008, and plenty of TV stations with big and small budgets have embraced the green-screen virtual set model.

The advantage is flexibility — you can create new sets, change them on the fly, incorporate dynamic elements. The limit is your imagination and digital artist budget.

The disadvantage, besides the feeling that you’re presenting something fake to viewers, is that despite the advances in the technology, it still doesn’t look 100% polished. You can still see edges that are a bit too sharp, things in perfect focus when they should be slightly beyond the depth of field, unnatural brightness and contrast.

But for CTV Montreal, it’s an understandable move. Things were extremely chaotic in those first days after the move, with cables lining the floors of makeshift studios, shared between CTV and RDS, where one team would have to keep quiet if the other was on the air. Probably the biggest benefit of this new set isn’t so much the green screen, but just being in their own room. (Except it’s not really their own room, the studio is shared with Noovo’s nightly debate show Les Débatteurs.)

Continue reading →

| TV

Children’s TV massacre: Family Channel, ABC Spark, Nickelodeon, Chaîne Disney, Disney XD, Disney Jr., Family Jr., WildBrainTV, Télémagino all to be shut down

In a matter of weeks, the number of specialty television channels in Canada for children is going to drop dramatically.

Earlier this summer, Corus began telling distributors it planned to shut down ABC Spark, Nickelodeon, La Chaîne Disney, Disney XD and Disney Jr., effective Sept. 1. While it’s not a complete pullout of children’s TV — it will keep Cartoon Network, Boomerang, the English Disney Channel, Treehouse and YTV — it’s a major cutback, driven by the broadcasting company’s dire financial situation.

Then on Monday, WildBrain informed its investors that it was pulling out of regulated Canadian TV completely, shutting down Family Channel, Family Jr., WildBrainTV (formerly Family CHRGD) and Télémagino, 37 years after the original Family Channel launched. (No date has been set, but it will happen “in the coming months.”)

In their case, the move was driven mainly by the fact that both Bell and Rogers chose to drop the services, and WildBrain was unsuccessful in getting the CRTC to rule that they had subjected them to unfair treatment. The result of these decisions was a failure of its planned sale of two thirds of its TV assets to a company called IoM Media Ventures.

Outside of the public broadcasters like CBC and foreign streaming services, Corus and WildBrain were responsible for just about all English-language children’s TV in Canada.

Neither Corus nor WildBrain is required to provide full public info on specialty channel financials in their CRTC reports, but what we do know is:

  • ABC Spark saw its revenues drop from $15.9 million in 2020 to $7.5 million in 2024, and despite an 18% cut in programming expenses last year, it continued to lose money
  • Boomerang’s revenues dropped from $2.4 million in 2020 to $1.5 million in 2024, which was less than half its programming costs alone
  • Disney Jr. saw its revenues decline an average of 8% a year, while its programming costs increased 28% a year
  • Disney XD saw its revenues decline an average of 10% a year
  • La Chaîne Disney was losing an average of 18% a year in revenues
  • Nickelodeon was seeing average revenue declines of 12% a year and spent more in programming than it got in total revenue despite a 37.5% cut in its programming budget in 2022-23

Based on their CRTC returns for 2023-24, these nine channels invested $11.1 million in Canadian programming that year. That’s a small fraction of the $387 million spent on Canadian children’s programming that year across the industry, but when it was described as a “crisis” even before these cuts, you can imagine how they feel about it now.