Category Archives: Radio

| Opinion, Radio, TV

Who killed Corus? Assessing blame for the media company’s decline

Corus Entertainment, which owns Global TV, specialty channels like Showcase, YTV, History, W Network, Home and Flavour, and radio stations in Ontario and western Canada, is dying a slow death.

It’s currently awaiting CRTC approval for a plan that would dilute its stock enough to hand 99% of its equity to its debt holders, which means the Shaw family giving up control of the company to private equity, whose main focus will be the bottom line.

The transaction has become necessary because of Corus’s very heavy debt load. According to its most recent financial report in June, the company has more than a billion dollars in debt, and its total liabilities exceed its total assets by more than 50%. It’s spending more than $10 million a month just on debt interest payments. The proposed deal would cancel $500 million in debt in exchange for 99% equity, which effectively values the company at $505 million.

As recently as 2017, Corus’s market capitalization was over $2 billion. Now, because of the dire financial situation and pending dilution, Corus stock is trading at 3.5 cents and its market cap is $6 million.

While the deal would go a long way to bringing Corus closer to a break-even point, the company will probably continue to struggle going forward unless something dramatic changes.

How did we get here? Who caused this once great company to get to this point? Turns out there’s plenty of blame to go around if you’re trying to find people to point fingers at. Here are my prime suspects:

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| Radio

CRTC approves Arsenal Media’s acquisition of BPM Sports

Arsenal Media, already Quebec’s largest radio broadcaster by number of stations, has been given the green light by the CRTC to acquire BPM Sports, the network of French-language sports talk stations in Montreal, Gatineau and Quebec City.

The transaction, worth $1.45 million for all three stations, can now go ahead and should close in the coming weeks, Arsenal Media said in a press release. The result will see Arsenal owning 29 stations, while RNC Media’s radio family, which once numbered 15, will be down to two: CHOI Radio X in Quebec City and CHLX-FM, its Rhythme FM affiliate in Gatineau. (It also owns TVA and Noovo affiliate TV stations in Gatineau and the Abitibi region.)

The good (or maybe bad) news for listeners is that Arsenal is not planning major changes. The stations will retain the BPM Sports branding and continue to have most of their programming originate from Montreal, though there would be some local programming on weekends at the Quebec City and Gatineau stations.

“This acquisition is fully aligned with our strategy to strengthen the presence of sports across all our platforms and stations. Our ambition is clear: to quickly propel the BPM Sports brand throughout Quebec and offer fans an essential sports destination, both on radio and on our digital platforms,” Arsenal CEO Sylvain Chamberland is quoted as saying in the company statement.

The one change mentioned in the application adds some music programming, particularly on the non-Montreal stations. CFTX-FM (96.5 in Gatineau) would broadcast country music on weeknights and weekends (Arsenal owns the Hit Country network, which doesn’t have a station in the Outaouais), while CHXX-FM (100.9 in Quebec City) would broadcast adult pop music. CKLX-FM (91.9 in Montreal) would also have some unspecified music on weekend evenings.

While Arsenal is not planning to take away much from the stations, it also isn’t planning to add much either. It made no commitments to increased programming or new investments. Instead, it argued it was saving the stations from being shut down, and for that reason it should not have to pay tangible benefits, one of a few issues the commission had to look at with this sale, and that prompted a dissenting opinion from a commissioner.

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| Radio

CRTC approves plan to turn Quebec City’s 92.7 FM into a country station

Fans of country music in Quebec will have reason to celebrate today, though it will be at the expense of fans of classical music in the provincial capital.

On Wednesday, the CRTC approved the sale of CJSQ-FM 92.7 to Arsenal Media, and its proposed licence change from a specialty classical music format to a mainstream format, which Arsenal says it will use to turn the station into a country music station.

Arsenal currently has four country stations under its Hit Country brand — CKGS-FM 105.5 in La Baie, CKYQ-FM 95.7 in Plessisville, CHCT-FM 105.3 in Sainte-Marie and CJIT-FM 106.7 in Lac-Mégantic, plus CRTC approval for a fifth station at 107.9 in Joliette. The Quebec City station will be its largest market for country, though the station’s transmitter is in the mid range at 2,840 watts.

It wasn’t long ago that Quebec was a wasteland for country radio, with a few independent stations and a few time slots on community stations like CKRK in Kahnawake. The biggest reason for this was CRTC regulations that require French-language songs on French-language stations. There just weren’t enough popular francophone country music songs to make that format work.

But Arsenal has decided it can work, and is investing in it. And in an era where even major-market radio stations are being thrown in the trash, that’s worth acknowledging.

The company, which is less than 15 years old, has grown through various acquisitions to become Quebec’s largest radio broadcaster by number of stations. And it isn’t done. It’s also waiting for approval to buy BPM Sports from RNC Media (a CRTC hearing was held in April). And it’s always ready to pounce on other opportunities.

But what’s great for Arsenal and country music sucks for classical music fans in the Capitale-Nationale region. The writing has been on the wall ever since Radio Classique’s sister station in Montreal (CJPX-FM 99.5) was sold to Leclerc in 2020. Even owner Gregory Charles’s love of classical music can only sustain a money-losing station for so long. And so with the $525,000 purchase price, he’s out.

| 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.

There’s also the question of what happens to sports radio broadcasts where Sportsnet had the rights. The Vancouver Province says Canucks games will remain on a Rogers station, which would mean either Kiss 104.9 or Jack 96.9. But Flames games are up for grabs. Without a sports station in the market, the most logical landing spot would be the remaining commercial talk station, Corus’s CHQR 770. But we’ll see what happens.

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| 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.

| 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.

| 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.