Is it captured by the telecom industry? Is it too inclined to bow to the demands of special interest groups? Is it too consumer-focused? Is it too liberal? Too conservative? Too bureaucratic? Too arbitrary? Too micromanaging?
The answer to all these questions is yes. Or at least very good arguments can be made for each of these, and some very good arguments can be made that on the whole, it tries its best to balance competing interests.
But one way the commission shows bias that really gets me is its deference to the status quo, how it will bend over backwards to keep things the way they are, to keep everyone happy, to resist changes in business models that might threaten industries.
That instinct isn’t all bad. The Canadian broadcasting system needs supports, and a well-regulated system is better than a chaotic one that can’t sustain itself or its many jobs.
But the desperation to prop up failing business models leads to some very inelegant policies that have glaring holes in them. And the way the CRTC subsidizes local television is a prime example of that.
This week would be a good one to stop consuming a lot of media.
Like many, I was glued to the internet and TV on Tuesday night to watch the results of the U.S. presidential election. I watched as states that were expected to be easily blue took a while to call, and swing states all turned red. I knew of the effect of the “red mirage” where ballots from larger cities or from mail-ins took longer to count, leaving open the possibility that the races would get closer. But then that didn’t happen, or didn’t happen enough, and eventually the math got to the point where, one after another, those critical states were called and the result of the election could be declared.
Once the suspense was over, I stopped watching TV. On social media, particularly platforms like TikTok, I first saw a lot of videos of people being shocked, or sad, or angry, or happy. Then I started seeing people offering their analysis of why Kamala Harris lost the election.
She wasn’t aggressive enough against the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. She didn’t do enough to court Jewish voters. She was too tied to the Biden administration. She didn’t spend enough time defending the Biden administration. She was too far to the left, alienating centrist voters. She was too centrist, alienating her base. She wasn’t a good communicator. She focused too much on abortion. Blah, blah, blah. All sorts of theories, very little evidence behind them other than gut feelings.
About the only thing everyone seemed to agree on is that she and her campaign failed. It doesn’t matter if she got 47.5% of votes when the other guy got 50.8% of votes.
In a sense, of course, they’re right. He won. She lost. But what bothers me is that we’re focused on 130,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 80,000 in Michigan and 30,000 in Wisconsin, instead of asking questions about the other 150 million or so votes. We’ve become so consumed by the horse race mentality that we ignore the big picture.
On the day after the election, one common sentiment I saw from people I don’t know is that yes, it is perfectly acceptable to paint more than 70 million Americans as racist, sexist, transphobic, horrible people for voting the way they did. It is perfectly acceptable to hate those people.
And in a free country, you are allowed to dislike people for their political views. You can dismiss them or ignore them or call them names.
But you’re not going to change anyone’s mind by hating them. And you’re not going to win elections if you can’t change minds. And you’re not going to change the world if you can’t win elections.
Did the Supreme Court of Canada ban the use of the word “woman” because it’s gotten too woke?
Reading the coverage of a recent decision, you might be justified in thinking that’s the case. It’s not, of course. A simple reading of the decision would confirm that by any reasonable analysis. But even when presented with the facts, the people who cranked the outrage machine insist they’re right.
Which is a bit concerning because they’re all people who work or have worked as journalists for mainstream media.
The decision in question is called R. v. Kruk, and dated March 8 (coincidentally, International Women’s Day). But the outrage circus started March 13 when the National Post published its daily opinion newsletter from Tristin Hopper, titled “Supreme Court decision opts for ‘person with a vagina’ over ‘woman'”. It starts as follows:
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a recent sexual assault case that it was “problematic” for a lower court judge to refer to the alleged victim as a “woman,” implying that the more appropriate term should have been “person with a vagina.”
In a decision published Friday, Justice Sheilah Martin wrote that a trial judge’s use of the word “a woman” may “have been unfortunate and engendered confusion.”
Martin does not specify why the word “woman” is confusing, but the next passage in her decision refers to the complainant as a “person with a vagina.” Notably, not one person in the entire case is identified as transgender, and the complainant is referred to throughout as a “she.”
Martineau repeats the two key points of Hopper’s analysis, that the Supreme Court ruled a lower court’s use of the word “woman” was problematic, and that the Supreme Court says judgments should instead say “person with a vagina.”
Martineau’s column, in turn, prompted Martine Biron, Quebec’s minister responsible for the status of women, to present an emergency motion in the National Assembly condemning the Supreme Court’s words. Co-signed by Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, Liberal MNA André Morin and independent (formerly Liberal) MNA Marie-Claude Nichols, it passed unanimously.
En choisissant de ne pas utiliser le mot «femme», nous les invisibilisons.
Après tant d’années de combat, les droits des femmes doivent continuer d’être respectés.
There’s just one problem. That stuff about the Supreme Court finding a problem with the word “woman”, and saying courts should use “person with a vagina” instead? It’s not true.
It’s hard times in the journalism industry, and the government wants to help.
The first part of that sentence isn’t really arguable. News outlets that haven’t shut down completely have significantly downsized, and though there are new sources of news these days, they don’t have anywhere near the kinds of resources that newspapers, magazines and television and radio stations used to have. As a result, many stories go unreported or underreported, and society is poorer for it.
Governments are aware of this and have put forward ways to help. Some make sense and are fairly uncontroversial, like tax credits for news subscriptions or allowing news outlets to receive charitable donations. Others have been spectacular failures, like Bill C-18. Most have been somewhere in between, consisting of direct or indirect funding to those organizations who qualify based on criteria set by bureaucrats at (hopefully) an arm’s length from the political machine.
Deciding who is and isn’t a journalist, and deciding how much money they should get, creates a lot of problems. It could lead to a slippery slope where some CRTC-like body starts micromanaging journalism and infringing (in fact or in practice) on our rights to free expression.
But handing out money isn’t the only thing that could help the news industry these days. Here are 10 suggestions from me on things the government can do that would make things better that don’t include direct handouts.
Bill C-18, the Online News Act, aka “An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada,” has been passed by the House of Commons and Senate and signed into law.
Now, finally, after desperate demands from Canada’s news media, big tech companies like Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google) will be required to compensate them for use of their news content.
Except, no.
Instead, Meta has already announced that it will choose to block access to Canadian news content on its platforms (including Facebook and Instagram), as it said it would do when the bill was working its way through the legislature. Google has done the same after failed talks with the government. Both have already begun tests of how they would accomplish this, though it’s not entirely clear how they will implement such blocking when they go ahead with it.
On top of that, both have announced that they will end existing programs that help fund news media, including a Facebook deal with The Canadian Press and the Google News Showcase.
This clearly is not what the government or the news media want. Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez says the government needs to “stand up for Canadians against tech giants,” while just about every media outlet has issued a statement accusing Meta and Google of censorship.
Canadian content. Depending on your views about the broadcasting industry, it’s either an important public policy to ensure Canada has its distinct culture and its citizens consume it, it’s a nationalist protection of cultural sector jobs to prevent talent from moving to Hollywood, or it’s a waste of taxpayer money for poor-quality TV shows that no one wants to watch.
Or maybe a combination of all the above.
This winter and spring saw a bigger than usual crop of new English Canadian scripted series on TV, and with a mix of curiosity and patriotic obligation, I decided to sample each of them.
While funding has always been a challenge for homegrown Canadian TV, discoverability has been an increasingly large one as well. You’re no longer limited to a handful of channels on TV, and even most people with TVs don’t watch a lot of their shows live. Without discoverability, a fantastic Canadian series could be lost to history because no one gave it a chance.
Canadian TV networks are trying. CBC has been pushing its series during Hockey Night in Canada, while CTV has aired endless commercials for its series during more popular programs.
They could do better, though. CTV and Citytv have their series behind online paywalls, requiring TV subscribers to sign in even though CTV and Citytv themselves are available free over the air. And if your TV provider doesn’t have deals with those networks (like, say, Videotron), then you can’t sign in to get access to these series. You’ll either have to wait for reruns or hope they show up on Netflix some day.
Anyway, to help give these series a discoverability boost, I watched a few episodes of each and provide a quick review. Some probably aren’t your cup of tea, and that’s okay, but if some sound interesting to you, and you have access, maybe give them a shot.
Are we witnessing, finally, the death of the newspaper?
I don’t necessarily mean it in a bad way. Most of the time when you hear about a newspaper or magazine going “online-only” it’s a cost-cutting measure that signals the publication’s impending death (no matter how much they claim otherwise).
But as the business model for print media changes, the balance appears to be tipping to the point where it makes more and more sense to go online-only even if you still employ dozens or even hundreds of professionals doing daily journalism.
La Presse publisher Guy Crevier explained the math to me 10 years ago, before that publication decided to make the big leap. Publishing a print edition comes with a lot of overhead costs. The pages have to be designed, both in terms of news content and advertising. The newspaper needs to be printed, either at your own plant or by a third party. The newspaper then needs to be distributed through a network of delivery people who need to work before sunrise every day the paper publishes. And you need a subscriptions department to manage print subscriptions and deal with all the issues that come up.
What’s more, many of those costs don’t scale linearly. As print subscribers and print ad revenue dwindle, it costs more per subscriber to produce. And subscribers will tolerate price increases only so much.
In January 2016, La Presse took the first step toward weaning itself from its identity as a newspaper by cutting down to one print issue a week. Two years later, it abandoned print entirely.
Other once-daily newspapers have also taken that first step in going weekly, like Métro. Some, like Saltwire and Postmedia publications, have taken a more gradual approach, dropping Monday editions.
More newspapers dropping the paper part
On Wednesday, the Coopérative nationale de l’information indépendante (CN2i) announced its six newspapers — Le Soleil in Quebec City, Le Droit in Ottawa-Gatineau, La Tribune in Sherbrooke, Le Nouvelliste in Trois-Rivières, Le Quotidien in Saguenay and La Voix de l’Est in Granby — would cease producing print editions at the end of the year. The six newspapers had all dropped down to weekly publication at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, mere weeks after they had been sold to employee cooperatives out of the ashes of Groupe Capitales Médias. (This month the group announced its cooperatives would merge into one to cut down on overhead.)
The CN2i sugarcoated the announcement with news about a new website and mobile app, saying this was the plan all along. They expect to drop 100 print-centric jobs but will do what they can to encourage voluntary departures and otherwise minimize layoffs.
A week ago, Quebecor’s 24 Heures, which was born as a free commuter daily in 2001, announced it too would cease publishing in print. A note to readers was not quite as upbeat as the one from CN2i, talking about grieving but still promising to be active online and social media.
How long before more take the plunge? Maybe not that long.
The Montreal Gazette, my employer, has also stuck to print editions, partly because its print readership skews older, but even then it dropped Monday print editions.
Le Devoir has also stuck to print editions, in part to separate itself from La Presse. But I would not be surprised if they too eventually decide print isn’t worth it anymore (especially because they’re printed by Quebecor and at the whims of the business decisions of Quebecor’s printing plants).
Will it work?
A decade after the launch of La Presse+, which the publication quickly dubbed its flagship product, things seem to be going well. In its latest annual report, it reported a surplus, which it is using to build a reserve fund. And while the nonprofit is accepting donations from readers, it would still have had a surplus even without those donations. It says 80% of its revenue still comes from advertising.
That’s not to say the iPad app is a runaway success. La Presse has put more effort into its website and mobile apps, understanding that it can’t push everyone toward tablets. And the Toronto Star’s StarTouch project, based on La Presse+, was a spectacular and expensive failure.
But this is proof there’s hope out there for what were once daily subscription newspapers. If they are willing to invest and innovate, and stop trying to prop up the old business model by cutting expenses until they whittle themselves into nothing, they might be able to come out of this.
Noémi Mercier hosts the first episode of Le Fil on March 29.
In the lead-up to its launch on March 29, Noovo (formerly V, formerly TQS) hyped that its new daily newscast called Le Fil would be, above all else, different.
Different in how it told stories (longer, more in-depth), different in what stories it would tell (younger, more diverse), and different in how it presented itself (two Black anchors, a more industrial-looking studio).
After two weeks of watching these programs, I can conclude that it’s definitely different. In some ways that are good, but in many ways the difference is a stark reminder of how few resources are being put into news-gathering at the network, even though its new owner Bell Media has extensive English-language resources across the country, francophone journalists at radio stations across Quebec, and lots of money.
Rather than being an alternative newscast to TVA and Radio-Canada, it might be more fair to say Le Fil isn’t even in the same league, and isn’t trying to be.
History
A recap of what led to this: TQS, founded in 1986, was the first television network to try to compete directly with the duopoly of Radio-Canada and TVA in Quebec. It was owned by the Pouliot family, who also owned CFCF (CTV Montreal) and CF Cable.
Its newscast, Le Grand Journal, promised to be different, but looking back seems very generic — an anchor in a studio, tight two-minute packaged news reports with reporter voiceover, and weather and sports.
TQS would eventually be bought by Quebecor, but then sold because Quebecor bought Videotron, which owned TVA. Cogeco and what was then Bell Globemedia bought TQS in 2002 (with Cogeco as the controlling owner) and injected money into its news operation, but by 2007 Cogeco gave up and pushed the network into bankruptcy.
It was bought by Maxime Rémillard, a film producer and distributor, who disbanded the entire news operation and renamed the network V. Rémillard convinced the CRTC to drastically reduce the network’s local and news programming requirements in order to keep it alive, and tried various cost-effective ways of doing the bare minimum of news programming, with forgettable newscasts like Les Infos and NVL that were outsourced to other companies.
Rémillard’s massacre of the news operation was heavily criticized, but it worked. V stopped bleeding money and managed to survive.
In 2019, Rémillard agreed to sell V’s five stations (Montreal, Quebec City, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières and Saguenay) to Bell Media for $20 million, and Bell promised to bring back newscasts to get the CRTC to approve the purchase. The CRTC approved the deal last year and brought in higher local programming requirements, with each station needing to broadcast five hours a week of local programming and two and half hours a week of “locally reflective” programming. Next year, the local programming requirements for Montreal and Quebec City go up to 8.5 hours a week.
Bell must also spend 5% of V’s revenues on local news. In 2019-2020, V brought in $35.7 million, which was about half of its expenses. This would mean about $1.8 million a year minimum on news.
Enter Le Fil.
Structure
Le Fil is a series of newscasts:
Le Fil 17h: An hour-long newscast at 5pm weekdays, hosted by Noémi Mercier, a long-time journalist who had been seen mainly on Télé-Québec before joining Noovo.
Le Fil 17h30: Though billed as a separate newscast, it’s more of a regional cutaway for Noovo’s owned-and-operated non-Montreal stations (Quebec City, Saguenay, Trois-Rivières and Sherbrooke). About 15 minutes total not including a commercial break, each region’s newscast is anchored out of Quebec City by Lisa-Marie Blais, who comes from LCN but was part of TQS in the last days of Le Grand Journal. For Montreal viewers, Mercier continues to anchor with more local segments during this time. After the regional cutaways, the regions come back to Mercier who does a signoff opinion/analysis monologue.
Le Fil 22h: The 10pm half-hour newscast is hosted by Michel Bherer, who spent 13 years at Radio-Canada but also worked at TQS back in the day. It consists mainly of a selection of stories that were presented at 5pm. Regional cutaways, also hosted by Blais, begin at 10:10pm. (They’re not posted online, so I haven’t seen their content.)
Le Fil Week-end: Two hour-long shows that strangely air at 9am on Saturday and Sunday, respectively, and mostly repeat stories from the week, sometimes with fresh introductions. The shows include an original feature interview near the end. They’re hosted by Meeker Guerrier, who previously worked at Radio-Canada and since last fall has been a regular columnist on Bell Media radio stations and RDS.
For all of them, the structure is pretty simple: five-minute blocks, either packaged reports, often introduced by the journalist, or perhaps an in-studio chat with a journalist or a columnist.
Contributors include big names like La Presse columnist Yves Boisvert and freelancers like fact-checker Camille Lopez and U.S. politics watcher Valérie Beaudoin.
Laid-back news
The biggest difference between this newscast and a mainstream one is how it tells stories. Rather than a standard two-minute heavily narrated package including B-roll of people walking and ending with a reporter standup, these packages are about five minutes long, adopting a slower pace, and let their subjects do a lot of the talking. Almost like a mini documentary. Many packages include music, to further accentuate that feel. The reporters are also present, but more casual and engaging in how they talk to the camera.
There are “live” chats between the anchor and the reporter, either in studio, or via double box, and I notice the reporters tend to be introduced by first name only.
The rough edges can be seen in the reports, which often show technical issues that I have difficulty just dismissing as first-week flubs or COVID-19 compromises. Subjects in interviews often don’t have a microphone on them, leading to poor-quality audio. This probably wouldn’t have been an issue if they hired both reporters and experienced camera operators who would be more concerned with those technical aspects. Many reports are done entirely by the reporters alone.
Diversity
The other big difference Noovo highlights in its approach to this newscast is diversity — not only of its staff, where two of four anchors are Black, but of the story subjects. They spend more time talking about issues facing young people, racialized communities, Indigenous communities. I don’t know if they’re necessarily covering these issues better than their well-funded competitors, but that’s where they’ve decided to put their focus.
Being a brand new operation, most of their journalists are pretty young, and so much of this focus on different types of stories may come naturally.
Look and feel
Michel Bherer next to the window in the Montreal studio.
Reporter Audrey Ruel-Manseau on the side of the anchor desk in Montreal.
Lisa-Marie Blais at the Quebec City studio.
Lisa-Marie Blais and Alexane Drolet in Quebec City.
I suppose Bell Media was trying to get away from the standard TV studio look with its design for the studios in Montreal and Quebec City. It’s very industrial, like you might expect for a tech startup or something. White-painted brick, exposed metal conduits, a light wood desk, coloured lights, vertical screens. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they were going for something new and cool, but it comes out to me looking a lot like moderate-budget community TV.
The graphics are better. Bold white text on dark blue backgrounds for the most part. Overlays are squarish on the side rather than going along the bottom.
No weather or sports
Despite being built by the same company that runs CTV News, there’s very little of the usual building blocks of a newscast. There’s no weather report, no sports highlights (Bherer briefly gives out the final score at the end of the night when the Canadiens play), no market numbers, no entertainment news, no stories from foreign news services, and no ambulance-chasing fire and car crash briefs.
Bell owns RDS (in fact, the two broadcast out of the same building), so it would not have been difficult to incorporate a sports component, so it seems this was done intentionally. And honestly, it would have been odd to shoe-horn something like sports highlights into this show.
News briefs are often presented on screen with no visuals or only a faded still image to accompany them — literally the text of the brief is presented as a graphic as the anchor reads it. They’ve gotten a bit better at this as the days went on, with some briefs presenting visuals now, but it’s an odd thing to see so much text in a newscast.
One thing I have seen a lot of, though, is vox pops. For a newscast that promises to do things differently, adopting one of the news media’s laziest, most useless forms of journalism — asking random uninformed people on the street what they think of some topic — would be a head-scratcher if we didn’t already know why it’s done. It’s an easy crutch for an uninspired assignment editor.
They’re not in every newscast, but in less than three weeks I’ve seen a handful of them.
Recycling the news
The most glaring way Le Fil saves money is through reusing its content. The 10pm newscast is largely stuff that aired earlier in the day. The weekend newscast is mostly stuff that aired earlier in the week.
Even the regional cutaways involve a lot of reuse. The 15 minutes mean they have three stories. But for most of the regions, the third story is common, regardless of what region it comes from.
So for the Mauricie, Saguenay and Estrie regions, we’re talking about 10 minutes per weekday of actual original local news. Less than an hour a week.
Since Bell has not deemed those three regions worthy enough to even have their own anchors or studios, it’s probably unsurprising that even their local news isn’t that local.
Will anyone watch?
The first broadcasts of Le Fil got just over 100,000 viewers, according to Richard Therrien of Le Soleil. That’s relatively decent, but also a lot of curiosity factor. Later broadcasts got smaller ratings.
Working against Noovo is the schedule — if you want news at 5pm, you can watch TVA. If you want news at 10pm, you can watch either TVA or Radio-Canada. And if you want news at 9am on weekends … well, I guess you have that now, assuming you don’t have LCN or RDI on cable?
I would have liked them to, say, push the late newscast to 11pm and offer some counter-programming in the 10pm hour. Or try to do something more with the weekend news than an hour-long in-case-you-missed-it.
Multiplatform
I can’t say Noovo really sets itself apart by promising its news will be on a bunch of platforms, since everyone is doing that now, but it’s worth noting here. At the moment, there isn’t much along these lines. Packages and newscasts are posted to their website, a few clips are posted to YouTube, and they have Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, and now TikTok too.
A new Noovo Info website is promised to launch later, which will give a better idea of the digital facet of this operation. By then, Bell will probably have found a way to integrate its journalists at Rouge and Énergie radio stations throughout Quebec into the system, and maybe even found some synergies with CTV and CTV Montreal in particular.
Bottom line
So with some aspects still marked incomplete, and taking into account the usual early-day bugs that will work themselves out as everyone gets more familiar with the daily routine, I would rate Noovo Le Fil as … OK.
Noovo doesn’t have the same news resources as Radio-Canada and TVA, which both have all-news channels and close relationships with other journalists on different platforms (Radio-Canada has digital and radio journalists, while Quebecor has the Journal de Montréal, 24 Heures and other platforms for journalism). But Bell has deep pockets, so if it wanted to, it could create a new competitor on that same level.
As a news operation, it’s definitely better than what it replaced. As a newscast on TV, it’s also better, though probably not better enough to become a real threat to the duopoly of Radio-Canada and TVA. (And we’ll see if, down the line, Noovo’s desire to be different will hold or if it will slowly morph into a similar kind of generic TV newscast that its competitors have settled into over the decades.)
Some of its longer-form documentary-style reports might have some success on digital platforms, I suppose, but it’s really unclear what target audience they’re trying to reach here. Le Fil doesn’t have the flash of TVA nor the reporting depth of Radio-Canada, and despite their promise to be more diverse and reflective, I don’t see that many people who don’t normally watch the news flocking to this show.
Which leaves us with the distinct impression that, despite all the hype, Le Fil exists not because Bell wants to shake up the marketplace when it comes to local news on TV, but simply because the CRTC required Noovo produce local news, and this is what they came up with to fill that minimum requirement.
I hope I’m wrong there.
Noovo Le Fil airs at 5pm and 10pm weekdays and 9am Saturdays and Sundays on Noovo.
Jamie Orchard at her desk in the Global Montreal studio
In 1997, as the Global Television Network was preparing to launch a new station in Quebec, it tapped a 31-year-old entertainment reporter for market leader CFCF to be one of its anchors. Jamie Orchard told the Montreal Gazette at the time that “it was one of those offers I couldn’t resist. Being part of a new station getting off the ground is rare opportunity and an unbelievable challenge.”
At first, she hosted an entertainment show on the local station. Then the morning show, another entertainment show, the late-night newscast, and since 2004 she has been the senior anchor and the face of the station and its local news.
Or had. On Thursday, Orchard announced that she had been laid off, one of apparently dozens of people across the country that Corus Entertainment has decided are no longer needed.
I'm very sad to let you know that tonight will be my final broadcast on @Global_Montreal. Like many of my colleagues, and many of you, I have fallen victim to pandemic layoffs. Very grateful to have been given the chance to say goodbye tonight. Please tune in at 5:30 or 6:30. xox
It’s a testament to the trust Orchard has built with the station, and its viewers, and station manager Karen Macdonald, who has also been with it since the beginning.
The union, headed by veteran reporter Anne Leclair, also issued a statement saying “Jamie is an excellent journalist who always approached every subject with great professionalism. She is a model for ethical journalism. We are also losing an important voice and key connection between our newsroom and Montreal’s English-speaking community.” The statement notes that the station has lost 10% of its newsroom permanent staff this summer, not including Orchard.
Naturally, the news angered Global Montreal’s viewers. Not that it has too many of them, falling well behind CTV Montreal in audience for its entire existence.
Its small audience may be loyal, but their threats to change the channel won’t matter. Local news is a money loser for Global in eastern Canada, and cutting costs has more of an effect on the bottom line than feeding that loyalty.
My reaction to this news isn’t so much anger as it is disappointment. Global seemed to be headed in the right direction. After years of cutting to the bone and centralizing the tasks of news production, there seemed to be an air of renewal, with new staff being hired and a new focus on online reporting as the future of journalism. But this summer, facing a budget crunch caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Global backtracked and laid off that young, diverse workforce it had just hired.
Since I first visited Global Montreal and met Orchard more than a decade ago, I was left with the impression that the small station with limited resources had one special thing going for it: its staff was close, like a family. That’s why, I was told at the time, staff turnover was so low.
It’s why Orchard said she would stay as the station’s anchor for as long as it would have her. It’s why she was allowed to say goodbye on air, because she could be trusted with that.
It’s unfortunate that, 23 years later, Corus Entertainment couldn’t be nearly as loyal to Orchard as she was to her employer.
(b) because they had tipped former Ontario Liberal premier David Peterson as its vice-chair, the paper would become more entrenched as the Red Star so-liberal-its-actually-communist propaganda machine.
In reality, neither is true. In the short term, at least, the Star (and its other newspapers, the Hamilton Spectator, the Waterloo Region Record, the St. Catharines Standard, the Niagara Falls Review, the Welland Tribune, the Peterborough Examiner, Sing Tao and all of the Metroland community papers) will stay the same. The last thing a new investor wants to do is scare off a loyal customer base.
That’s not to say that political allegiances, whether real or imagined, aren’t a problem. It’s uncomfortable, not to mention demoralizing, when journalists are told they can’t participate in protests or express controversial opinions when their bosses openly donate money to political parties and/or used to work for them.
But more important than ensuring its apparent impartiality is ensuring its survival. Torstar as a whole was sold for $52 million. Its 63-cent buyout offer is a premium on its current share price, but a tiny fraction of Torstar’s value before the internet hacked away at its business model. In 2003, Torstar was worth up to $30 a share.
By comparison, Postmedia bought out the Canwest newspapers in 2010 for $1.1 billion, out of bankruptcy protection. Postmedia bought Sun Media in 2015 for $316 million. TVA bought Transcontinental’s 14 magazines for $55.5 million in 2015. Two years earlier, Quebecor sold 74 community newspapers to Transcontinental for $75 million. In 2007, Quebecor’s Sun Media bought Osprey Media (20 dailies and 34 weeklies) for $575 million.
Is Torstar really worth less than all of these? Unfortunately, yes. Because the newspaper business model has collapsed, especially over the past 15 years.
