Kate McDonnell, author of the much-read Montreal City Weblog, does her yearly anniversary post and writes about how local media has changed since her blog was launched in 2001. A recommended read for people interested in the local media scene (like me).
Some thoughts to add:
Major local media have all redesigned their websites multiple times since 2001. Most now copy each other (much like print newspaper layouts copy each other), their homepages excessively long, far too much focus on Javascript, Flash and throwing as many links as possible into a tiny space. The idea of the Internet portal died a long time ago, but many still concentrate on the homepage as the single point of entry.
I don’t own an iPhone, and I use my cellphone strictly for making calls (and sending text messages), so I can’t comment on mobile offerings. But it would be nice if content-providing websites would open up their content a bit and let us make it work with our devices. Force us to go to your page for the full article if you’re worried about page impressions, but let us spread the technology to better connect those pages with the people who want to see them.
At some point in the future, the idea of paying for wire copy will be considered ridiculous. It made sense for newspapers. It doesn’t make sense online. Sure, keep your Canadian Press subscriptions for now, but at least separate the copy-paste wire dreck from original content your journalists create. Don’t lump it all into one feed and put it all on one page.
Local media need to hire more programmers and geeks. Even with all the advances there is still so much inefficiency when it comes to news websites and how journalists and editors perform their craft.
For many people, Twitter is replacing the RSS feed. That can be both good and bad. But a lot of people just use Twitter to replicate their RSS feed. That’s just bad. If I want to follow your feed, I’ll do it in Google Reader, instead of getting a truncated headline and bit.ly link. If I see “via twitterfeed” on your Twitter page, I won’t be following.
I can’t help but agree about the “old arts weeklies”. I don’t read Voir much (Steve Proulx excepted), but my interest in the two anglo weeklies has diminished considerably. I thought it was because they focused less on news and more on arts, but I think they’re falling behind in both categories, going through the motions instead of spending effort coming up with something new. I find I get more interesting news from The Suburban than Hour or Mirror, and that’s not saying much.
As for Metro, Transcontinental’s free daily, it has improved a lot since its launch in 2001, when it was exclusively wire copy. Now it has actual journalists. They’re not doing groundbreaking investigative reporting, but considering their budget it’s surprising the amount of original local content they get in. I’m not sure how much of their recent quality is based on competition with 24 Heures, whose journalists seem to exist right now solely to provide filler for the locked out Journal de Montréal, though. That might change if that labour conflict is ever solved.
Which brings us to Rue Frontenac, which has been working hard, but doesn’t look like the kind of website that needs 253 people to put together. Obviously people have other responsibilities like picketing, and not all of those employees are journalists, but the small core of people putting out most of the stuff at that website is arguably exactly what the Journal and Quebecor want.
Finally, as far as local bloggers are concerned, well, that’s the subject of another post.
Oh, and Kate, maybe it’s time to install WordPress and start allowing comments on that blog. That way I don’t have to write a response on my own blog to get it published.
That may look like unexplored prairies beyond, but it will soon become an important traffic link on the island of Montreal. Where is it?
UPDATE: It is, of course, Cavendish Blvd. in St. Laurent, overlooking its coming extension to Henri-Bourassa Blvd. Of course, who knows when it will actually happen. Marc was the first with the right answer and is this week’s winner.
I just noticed them today, but Hour (you know, the alt-weekly) has setup a community website with two blogs: Up to the Hour, a newsy group blog by the editorial team of stuff that won’t fit in print, and The National Beat: Music News, whose focus should be obvious.
Celebrities* and big media have this desperate yet well-choreographed symbiotic relationship. Celebrities need the media for exposure, to get in the minds of young consumers and get them to buy albums, go to concerts or movies, buy DVDs, or otherwise consume stuff that financially benefits the artist. Media need big-name artists to prove they’re cool, show off how much access they have to celebrities, and draw readers, listeners or viewers.
Because both sides benefit from this relationship (and neither really cares about the needs of the consumer), the interactions between the two are tightly controlled. There isn’t much of an alternative – there is no other way for a celebrity to get that much media exposure in so little time. The media call publicists and arrange interviews in advance of local concerts or before new albums/movies/etc. are released. The celebrities, meanwhile, put themselves out there, going on TV talk shows, Saturday Night Live, anything to get their name and face out there.
For smaller media (like, say, Mosé Persico), the relationship is far less elegant and more formulaic. A movie star sits in a chair with the film’s poster behind, while no-name media interview them one by one. The journalist tries desperately to ask a question that might result in an interesting answer, while the star tries desperately to give the same answer for the hundredth time without making it seem like a standard message from a cashier at McDonald’s.
For print media, the interview is usually in the form of a telephone call in advance of a local event. Different form, same result: two sides trying to make an uninteresting interview seem interesting even though they ask the same questions and give the same answers. The only energy comes from the tension of the journalist trying to get the celebrity to talk about personal scandal while the celebrity tries to keep on message marketing the latest production.
Tight control
Then there are those local events themselves, particularly concerts. During a concert by a big-name artist at the Bell Centre (the only concerts big media are interested in usually), photographers are let in for two or three songs (sometimes getting as little as 30 seconds to take a photo) at the beginning and then ejected from the venue so the fans can enjoy the concert without giant lenses all over the place. Writers and reporters are allowed to enjoy the entire event with their free tickets, but other than that they aren’t done many favours.
You’d think the media would balk at any restrictions on their freedoms to report, but instead they sign on the dotted line. The alternative – not having a story thousands of people are just expecting to be there, leaving coverage of celebrities to the less ethical competition – isn’t acceptable.
There’s also another factor, of course: journalists like going to free concerts. In 2007, when Gillett Entertainment Group (which handles Bell Centre concerts) didn’t give tickets to a Police concert to Le Devoir, the newspaper threw a fit. Considering that Le Devoir doesn’t cover concerts like other big media, it might seem strange that they’d be outraged at this, until you remember that journalists like free concert tickets.
Draconian demands
As celebrities’ need to micromanage their events grows, even those restrictions I mentioned above aren’t enough. Increasingly, promoters are requiring media to agree to one-time-use-only deals, which doesn’t allow the reuse of images from the concert.
Friday night at the Bell Centre, with Lady Gaga as the headliner, the rule was simple: No media. Period. No photos, no reporters, nothing. They wanted no media coverage of the first three stops of her tour (Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa), so they just said no.
In order to write his review, The Gazette’s T’Cha Dunlevy stood in line and actually bought a ticket like a commoner. To illustrate it, photos were taken of the lineup outside.
Let the fans do it
These concert reviews always seemed kind of silly to me. What’s the point? The concert is over already, anyone who cares has already seen it. Even in the event there are shows over more than one day, those extra shows are usually long sold out by the time the newspaper comes out with a review. And, most of all, the explosion of citizen media means anyone can take pictures of a stage and write about what they thought of the concert.
Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened after the Lady Gaga concert. Despite the ban on big-media photographers and video cameramen, fans captured the concert with all kinds of electronic devices, and uploaded over 200 videos to YouTube in the 24 hours after it, including the one above. You could probably edit them all together to create a (really bad) video of the entire concert.
One blogger for Tourism Montreal eagerly uploaded “exclusive” video of a rehearsal to YouTube, after sneaking in off the street. But the video was pulled due to “a copyright claim by a third party”. It was then uploaded to Facebook, but yanked off there as well.
This is all silly in so many ways. I don’t go to concerts often, but I’d be annoyed if I went to enjoy a show and all I saw were thousands of people blocking my view or blinding me with flashes trying to take really bad pictures or video. Much as I like the freedom, I’d think everyone would be better off if the concert organizers provided a professional video and professional photos of the concert to those in attendance (and the media), so we’d only see a few cameras instead. (Those cameras are already there – most of the YouTube videos were pointed at the giant screen above the stage.) The media already use press shots of cars, movies, plays and all sorts of other stuff. Why not extend it to live concerts as well? It can’t be about ethics if they allow themselves to be controlled so tightly.
An embargo with 14,000 exceptions
Brendan Kelly has a rant on his blog about an embargo on reviews of Pour toujours les Canadiens. A rant shared by Marc Cassivi and Marc-André Lussier. You see, the film officially comes out on Dec. 4, the 100th anniversary of the Canadiens franchise. But they screened it in front of 14,000 people at the Bell Centre on Nov. 16. So it’s already premiered. People have seen it. Thousands of people. But the media is forbidden from reporting on it.
The media can whine about embargos, but nobody forces them to agree. Maybe it’s time big media flex those big muscles and just say no. Show they have ethics, buy a ticket like the rest of the world if they want to see a movie or a concert, and that they’re not about to get pushed around by those who are most desperate to control the media.
I’m not holding my breath though. If not for free tickets to big-name concerts or previews of Hollywood movies, how would we differentiate big media from small?
*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post referred to big-name music performers and movie stars as “artists”. I’ve changed it to “celebrities”, though perhaps “celebrity artists” or “pop culture stars” might be more accurate. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with a more accurate description.
The article, which was apparently written from the mythical “casual dining headquarters”, includes an absolutely adorable picture of Hand taken by Hawco.
Two obits, one in the Gazette and one at Hour, about Henry Lehmann, a visual art critic who contributed regularly for the Gazette for many years (and before that, the Montreal Star) and CBC Daybreak.
Most recently, he was an art history teacher at Vanier College, where he died of a heart attack in his office on Thursday.
Though Lehmann stopped writing for the Gazette in 2008, many of his later articles are still online (on the old Gazette website). Among them:
At midnight Friday night, CN locomotive engineers went on strike, following their 72-hour notice that sent everyone in a panic because two AMT train lines (Deux-Montagnes and Mont-Saint-Hilaire) are run by those engineers and would have been disrupted or even shut down if there was a strike.
As you can expect from the AMT’s deficient customer service, there’s no mention of this late-night, last-minute change – or even of the strike itself – on their website’s homepage, despite all the media attention it has been getting. Even under “avis aux voyageurs”, there’s no mention of the potentially crippling strike, and users get the very unhelpful “aucune information disponible” for the status of all five train lines. You have to know to go to the AMT’s corporate website to find a press release saying service won’t be affected.
Contrast that with VIA Rail, which has its own engineers and so wasn’t going to be affected in the first place. Nevertheless, there’s a section of its homepage for travel advisories, and it says very clearly that service won’t be affected by the CN strike. (VIA has some experience with this, going through a strike of its own this summer.)
At GO Transit in Toronto, it’s not as clear if there will be disruptions (and there’s nothing on the homepage), but the status page (updated regularly even on weekend afternoons) makes it clear the service is still running normally.
As for CN itself, the homepage makes it look like nothing’s wrong at first, but under “news releases” there’s mention of the strike, and the “state of the railroad” page has a few details about what’s going on.
I realize nobody likes to work weekends, and those who do can’t change the elaborate web page design that the boss’s nephew was paid lots of money to put together, but when engineers go on strike, we don’t care about your new train cars or how you’re fighting for the environment. We want to know what’s going on.
Two pieces of good news for La Presse today: They’ve reached a deal in principle with their last union – representing distribution workers – and the editorial union has voted 93% in favour of a new contract. Later today, two smaller units, representing IT workers (11/11 in favour) and office workers (29/55, or 53% in favour) also approved their new contracts.
This effectively means that La Presse won’t be shut down on Dec. 1 as it had threatened to do.
The distribution workers will vote on their deal Monday, so we won’t know the details until then.
But we know what’s in the editorial contract (or at least most of it). I’m waiting for a copy of the full contract, but here’s what’s being reported (Radio-Canada, CP, Gazette, Trente, Rue Frontenac):
The work week changes from 32 hours over four days to 35 hours over five days, at the same salary. Those who want to keep the four-day work week can become part-time employees (28 hours a week).
Salaries remain frozen for 2010 and 2011, but will go up by 2% for each of the last two years. The maximum salary goes to $90,000 in 2012 and $95,000 in 2013. Those who work 40 hours a week have their salaries frozen until 2017.
Employees will now pay 100% of dental insurance premiums, and 60% of medial premiums
As of Jan. 3, pensions will no longer be adjusted to the cost of living
Less vacation: they get 5 weeks at 14 years of service instead of nine, 6 weeks at 22 years instead of 20, and the 7-week vacation plateau has been eliminated. But employees get six more mobile vacation days a year.
Employees of La Presse and Cyberpresse are merged under the same unit and will be treated equally.
As a result of the deal, La Presse foresees no layoffs of permanent editorial employees, but expects five to take voluntary departures.
From February 2008: Will all weekends be like this?
The snow hit the fan Tuesday morning, with La Presse reporting that Projet Montréal plans to change its snow removal policy for the Plateau and Ahuntsic-Cartierville (the two boroughs it holds the mayor’s seat for).
Instead of paying expensive overtime and equipment charges, the borough would increase the minimum amount of snowfall before they bring in the dump trucks from 8 to 15 centimetres. They would also no longer truck away snow on weekends, instead leaving it until Monday, to save money.
Note that this applies to snow removal, not snow clearing. The plows will still push snow to the side of the street and clear the way for traffic. What this will affect is parking, which tends to get creative when there are snowbanks.
Note also that this won’t apply to major thoroughfares, which are the central city’s responsibility, and so probably won’t apply to most places travelled by city buses.
But small residential streets that get significant snowfall on weekends might have to live with it for a day or two more.
Even though I’m perhaps a little biased because I don’t have a car, I’m willing to give Projet Montréal the benefit of the doubt and let them try this plan. I’m just as skeptical as the rest, in fact I have an added concern: If the idea is to save money by trucking away snow only during business hours, wouldn’t that cause incredible traffic chaos? Plus, why can’t truck drivers be regularly scheduled to work on weekends?
This is the first major policy initiative that Projet Montréal has come up with since the election, and unlike many of its promises during the campaign, it’s a logical, conservative, money-saving idea rather than a bold vision for massive spending. If we’re going to use their control of the Plateau borough as a testing ground for their eventual control of the city, we need to let them try stuff. If it fails, they can always switch it back with relatively little work.
They’re talking and listening
Part of this plan that intrigues me is also how Projet is going about it. While the Tremblay regime would just declare it a fait accompli and present it to city council, backing down only under overwhelming public protest like they did the Park Ave. name change, Projet is setting up a public consultation, Dec. 16 at 7 p.m. at the police brotherhood office on Gilford St.
Luc Ferrandez, the Plateau mayor, has also taken to his blog to get his message out directly to the citizens, bypassing the media filter. While I don’t think La Presse or other media got anything wrong here, hearing directly from a politician on his own terms can help people understand a bit more of the context and reasoning behind Projet’s plan. This is a clear example of why Ferrandez was right not to shut down his blog after the election.
Even if this project fails, doing so with democratic principles and by deferring to common sense would go a long way toward showing responsible leadership on behalf of Projet Montréal.
For the sake of municipal budgets, let’s hope this idea is a lot smarter than everyone thinks it is.
Let’s expand our horizons a bit and get off the island this week.
The following is a geography quiz question unrelated to Montreal, but not too far from it either.
What is this the shape of?
UPDATE: Well, I didn’t fool nobody this week. Everyone clued in, but Mathieu Leduc-Hamel was the first to say the magic number: 132. The entire highway from the U.S. border at Dundee all the way up to Gaspé and then back to form a loop that ends at Sainte-Flavie is 1,577 kilometres long (according to Google Maps), but only 678 kilometres if you don’t do that loop at the end.
Following a straighter line is Highway 138, which is 1,373km including a ferry trip at Tadoussac on the mouth of the Saguenay river. But that doesn’t include a 70km section near the Labrador border at Blanc-Sablon. Since there’s no road from Natashquan to Vieux-Fort, getting there requires doubling back, taking the ferry to Matane, travelling through northern New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, taking another ferry from Sydney to Newfoundland, driving the western Newfoundland coast and taking yet another ferry to Blanc-Sablon, a trip of 2,395km that would take almost two days of continuous driving.
The Gazette’s Max Harrold looks into an issue I’ve wondered about since I started urban cycling: If a cyclist is always supposed to keep to the right, how do you make a left turn on a multi-lane road?
Either go to the next intersection and cross there or, if and only if there aren’t many cars around, signal you are shifting lanes with your left arm and move into the left lane and then turn at an intersection, like a vehicle would, said Suzanne Lareau, head of the cycling advocacy group Vélo-Québec.
Vélo-Québec is an advocacy group, so its interpretation isn’t legal, but it seems to indicate that when it comes to left turns, cyclists should act like drivers and move into a left lane (except when there are lots of cars around, making multiple lane changes more difficult). Which means that the police officers on bicycles above that I spotted earlier this summer on Côte Vertu Blvd. were making a legal turn.
Of course, that doesn’t stop drivers from honking at you.
In case you forgot, La Presse is shutting down on Dec. 1.
While many have dismissed this over-the-top threat (they’d also shut down cyberpresse.ca) as an insane bluff, Gesca has reinforced it, reportedly arranging for BlackBerrys to be returned next week. Managers and employees are clearing out their desks, and the atmosphere in the newsroom is very tense.
Also joining the team is fellow Astral castoff Sarah Bartok, whose previous job was at Astral’s CISL AM 650 in Vancouver. She’ll be the traffic reporter. She replaces Shaun McMahon, who moves from traffic to show producer.
