Category Archives: Opinion

| Media, Opinion

La Presse+: It doesn’t make sense

La Presse+

La Presse+, the iPad app that’s supposed to revolutionize the newspaper industry, launched this morning after a glitzy party last night.

You can read news stories about the new app from Canadian Press, the Globe and Mail and J-Source, or just go to the website and read the press release (also in English), or see the note to readers from André Desmarais or the introduction from publisher Guy Crevier.

I don’t have an iPad, so I can’t really review it (see links to early reviews below). Based on what I’ve seen and heard from others, it seems to be very well designed with plenty of cool features. It might be the best newspaper iPad app ever created. (A version for Android tablets is expected by December.)

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that’s true. Then what?

La Presse is giving this app away for free, arguing that there’s an “irreversible” expectation that content online should be free. This despite the fact that most other large newspapers in Canada have either adopted a paywall or are in the process. And despite the fact that many apps on the iPad actually do manage to get money out of their users.

The paper doesn’t stop there. Seeing this as a transition, from the printed medium to an electronic one, it is essentially encouraging its readers to cancel their print subscriptions and move to this new platform. If enough people do so, they could shut down the print newspaper completely.

In a world where print advertising and print subscription fees remain the largest sources of revenue for newspapers, where the increase in online ad revenue is met by a decrease in print ad revenue that’s an order of magnitude higher, all of this seems absolutely insane.

It’s not that I don’t think newspapers should be investing during this transitional time. Nor is it that I don’t want La Presse to succeed (though professional jealousy might be a small part of it). I just don’t see how the numbers work. They spent $40 million and almost three years producing this app. They’ve hired 100 extra people, who will work alongside the 200 journalists already on the print side. And they expect that all of this extra spending, plus the loss of subscription fees from people who abandon the print edition, will be made up for by iPad advertising alone.

The numbers just don’t make sense to me. Nor, according to the articles above, do they make much sense to analysts and competitors.

We’ve had a situation like this before. The Daily, an iPad newspaper launched by News Corporation, failed after two years because it didn’t get a large enough audience. To his credit, La Presse’s Guy Crevier has an answer to that, telling the Globe that The Daily didn’t have big scoops and its content wasn’t worth paying for.

But The Daily also had a much larger potential audience, while La Presse is limited to the French-speaking Quebec market.

That’s not to say that making this work would be impossible. It just sounds very difficult.

And the thing is, we won’t know whether it is successful, unless they tell us. La Presse is owned by Gesca, which is owned by Square Victoria Communications Group, which is owned by Power Corporation. Power, the only one of these that reports its finances publicly, doesn’t break that information down much, and so we know very little about La Presse’s balance sheet. Many critics of Power Corporation suspect that La Presse in particular is a big money-loser that is kept afloat as a vanity project of the Desmarais family. I don’t know if that’s true (nor am I necessarily against very rich people owning money-losing newspapers for reasons of ego, provided they’re at arm’s length), but the fact is we don’t know whether La Presse pays for itself, and we won’t know if this app will help or hurt its finances in the short, medium or long term unless something changes.

One thing we do know, and that everyone can agree on, is that La Presse is taking a big bet on this project. If it succeeds, it could very well revolutionize the newspaper industry. And if it fails…

Reviews

  • Patrick Pierra, the former publisher of Branchez-Vous, reviews the app for the Tab Times, calling it “gorgeous”. But he also lays out the first criticisms: It’s landscape-only, the download is 100MB (at least for the first day), and the navigation options could be confusing
  • Michelle Blanc, the local social media/marketing expert, says she was skeptical, but quickly became convinced after trying it that the app with revolutionize the industry
  • Maxime Johnson, tech columnist, provides a detailed analysis and offers a more optimistic, though still realistic, take on its future
  • Radio-Canada talks to experts, including one specializing in digital advertising who points out that the La Presse+ rate card is a lot more expensive than other digital ads, that it charges extra to add interactivity (which means some ads won’t be interactive at all), and that it uses non-standard formats, which means advertisers will have to design ads specifically for this platform instead of designing a few standard web ad formats and using them on multiple sites.
  • Adviso does usability testing on the app by bringing an iPad to a café and asking random people to try it. The results are interesting. For one thing, many people don’t know how to read the articles. They tap and double-tap, unaware that they’re supposed to expand the text with two fingers. It’s a minor issue that people will get over, but the next version should also go to the text of an article on a double tap.
  • The Talking New Media blog calls it the best newspaper app it’s seen, and credit it particularly for the fact that it’s not just replicating the website or the paper in tablet form.
  • Garcia Media on how the app isn’t “newsy” enough
  • Open source advocate Fabian Rodriguez complains that La Presse didn’t just create an API and let people develop their own apps (which, of course, would mean people could circumvent the ads)
  • La Presse columnist Patrick Lagacé explains how this new platform will change the way journalists think about storytelling
| Opinion, Radio

Bell/Astral’s radio divestment plan still looks self-serving

Bell’s list of radio stations for sale. The “Market Rank” column has limited use, because it doesn’t list how the stations to be divested compare to the ones being kept.

In its revised application to the CRTC to request regulatory approval for the purchase of Astral Media, Bell parent BCE promised that its revised plan would handle the commission’s concerns about concentration of ownership. Bell would sell off some popular Astral specialty channels including Family, MusiquePlus, and Musimax, and offload its half of Teletoon, Historia and Séries+ to Corus. The result would put Bell at just above the 35 per cent mark where the CRTC, according to its own policy, would normally approve such an acquisition (though the commission said in rejecting the first deal that this was more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule).

But what about radio? On that front, Bell’s plans are identical, with the exception of its revised proposal for CKGM in Montreal (asking for an exemption to keep it instead of requesting it be converted from English to French). For the rest of the country, Bell would keep all the Astral radio stations, except in markets where they would put the combined company above the CRTC’s common ownership limits (two AM stations and two FM stations in any market with eight or more commercial stations).

That comes out to 10 stations, in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto and Ottawa (Bell has already agreed to sell the two Ottawa stations to Corus). Bell submitted a list of the 10 stations it planned to sell during the CRTC hearing on the first application last September. It included seven stations currently owned by Astral and three by Bell.

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| Montreal, Opinion, Radio

TSN 690’s CRTC exemption: The pros, the cons and the misconceptions

With apologies to National Lampoon

With apologies to National Lampoon

If there’s anything that everyone can agree on, it’s that this is a passionate issue. Even Bell Media says it was taken aback last year by the outpouring of outrage over its plan to convert CKGM from TSN 690 to RDS 690 as part of its acquisition of Astral Media. Even though it was a minor related application of a $3.38-billion purchase, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission spent a great deal of time discussing the proposed change to this one radio station because of all the reaction. It was during questioning about CKGM that CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais held up a thick binder and said he didn’t have a summer vacation last year because he was busy reading all the public comments.

More than 700 people filed individual comments with the CRTC, the vast majority opposed to Bell’s proposal, and most not really caring about the larger acquisition. Three people without any financial interest actually showed up at the hearing to plead for the station, which is very rare and was greatly appreciated by commissioners.

This time around, things are different. Bell is taking the side of the fans, asking for an exemption to the CRTC’s common ownership policy to allow it to keep TSN 690 while also acquiring three of its four competitors in English-language commercial radio (including its main competitor CJAD). It started a petition and its radio personalities asked fans to fill it out (listen to Mitch Melnick explaining the situation the day the application was published), telling the CRTC why it should keep the station alive.

According to the CRTC’s website, there are now about 980 comments on this petition. You can read them in a series of PDF files posted here.

I went through a few hundred of them, and most of them are the same: heartfelt, angry, worried. These are the station’s loyal listeners, who say they will swear off radio altogether if their beloved station is pulled off the air. Many are from people in other cities who say they listen to the station online. Most argue that CKGM in its current form provides something unique to Montreal’s English-speaking community, and that alone is a reason to grant the exemption.

I’ve read at most a handful that say anything about the larger acquisition of Astral by Bell. Most couldn’t care less who owns the station or the others, as long as TSN retains its format, its personalities and its Canadiens games. Some even rant against large corporate media, which is odd when you’re indirectly supporting a mega merger of media companies. Some are even against the larger merger of Bell and Astral. One demands that Bell be forced to sell CHOM, CJAD or CJFM (Virgin Radio) instead.

But they’re all unanimous in that they want TSN 690 to be kept as is.

In reading these letters, it became clear to me that many of the writers have misconceptions about the application, about the CRTC’s intentions and about what could happen to CKGM. I hope to clear some of those up here. But first, I’ll present, as dispassionately as I can, the big reasons the CRTC should approve the exemption requested, and the big reasons it should not.

Why the CRTC should give an exemption to allow Bell to keep TSN 690

1. The format will go on: Bell has promised that, if it gets its way, it will commit to keeping CKGM as an English-language all-sports radio station for seven years, and will continue to air Canadiens games on it (as long as it continues to have the rights). This is, at least on the surface, the best possible outcome for the station’s listeners. Gone, for at least until 2020, would be the threat that the station might shut down because it’s unprofitable. And implicit in this promise is that the station’s staff would continue to have jobs (at least subject to the usual turnover that happens in radio). Plus, it would finally end all this uncertainty over the station’s future.

2. Consolidating sports on TSN: Bell hasn’t said that this would happen, but it stands to reason if it owns both CJAD and CKGM that Bell would move sports broadcasts to the latter. CJAD currently carries Alouettes games and select Impact games. CKGM could carry live broadcasts of all three Montreal teams (except where they directly conflict, which would logically see spillover go back to CJAD). Fans wouldn’t have to keep track of which station owned the rights to which franchise, and CJAD listeners who aren’t interested in sports wouldn’t have their regular programming interrupted by sports.

3. Retaining synergies with TSN: Though theoretically the station could continue if it was sold to, say, Rogers, any sale would strip the station of its branding as well as the advantages that come with being a member of the TSN family. With Bell’s claws firmly entrenched in the Canadiens, even if its ownership stake is minor, this becomes very important for an all-sports station.

4. Money for journalism and amateur sports: You could practically qualify it as a bribe, but in reality cash promises are encouraged by the CRTC and often help get things passed. Bell has promised to give $105,000 over seven years ($15,000 a year) to Concordia University for sports journalism scholarships (just what we need, more journalism students), and $140,000 over seven years ($20,000 a year) to support amateur sports in Montreal. These are not inconsiderable sums for a station that has been losing money since it launched in 2001. Though it may be pocket change for a $30-billion company, the fact that Bell is willing to spend it to keep a money-losing station on the air says something.

5. The cat’s already out of the bag: The truth is this same type of exemption has already been allowed. In 2010, the CRTC allowed a similar exemption in Montreal’s French-language market when Cogeco bought Corus’s Quebec stations. The acquisition resulted in Cogeco owning three French-language FM stations in Montreal (it already owned CFGL Rythme FM, and acquired CHMP 98.5 and CKOI). The commission said it could keep all three, despite the normal limitation, in exchange for setting up the Cogeco Nouvelles agency which would have CHMP as its flagship station. The request was billed as a way to save CHMP. Now it’s the most popular radio station in Quebec. By comparison, the CKGM request is for a station on the AM band and is for the station that’s last in the ratings.

Why the CRTC should not give an exemption to allow Bell to keep TSN 690

1. It would make Bell a dominant force in Montreal English radio: Allowing Bell to own both CKGM and the Astral stations would mean it would own four of the five established commercial English-language radio stations in Montreal, with only The Beat competing with it. The combined commercial market share would be over 70% for one company. This will be mitigated somewhat when the TTP Media group launches an English talk station at 600 AM, and when Dufferin Communications launches a low-power music station in Hudson/St. Lazare, but those will take a while to get established.

2. It would reinforce a bad precedent: Bell doesn’t have to put CKGM on the block. It could sell one of the other stations instead. But it’s forcing the CRTC’s hand by saying the sports station would be the one to go. Allowing an exemption here would be caving to Canada’s largest broadcaster by allowing it to get bigger, but also send a message to everyone that as long as you can spin a station as a charity case (even if it’s not actually losing money), you can get the CRTC to rubber-stamp an exception to its own rules.

3. There isn’t enough space for new competitors: Because Montreal is a bilingual market, and languages are counted separately in the CRTC’s policy, the airwaves are twice as saturated here as in other markets like Toronto or Calgary. Bell/Astral would actually own six stations in Montreal, with Cogeco owning five. There aren’t any more full-power FM frequencies available, and with new entrants like TTP Media and Dufferin Communications snapping up vacant AM frequencies, those are disappearing too. The more severe scarcity of channels here makes limitations on common ownership even more important.

Top misconceptions about Bell, the CRTC and TSN 690’s future

1. The CRTC wants to shut down TSN 690 / The CRTC has made a decision it is being asked to reconsider: The CRTC has not made any decision about the station, other than its decision last year to deny its request to switch to French (and that was only because the larger acquisition was denied). The request for an exemption is not being made in reaction to something the CRTC has done, but is a request from Bell to get an exception to a rule it anticipates the CRTC will apply. The fact that Bell bills this as “Save TSN Radio” may be leading to this misconception.

2. The CRTC wants to turn TSN 690 into a French-language radio station: This mistake is likely due to confusion between the two applications. It was Bell, not the CRTC, that requested that CKGM be converted from English to French in its first attempt to get approval for the Astral acquisition. It was done for the same reason, to get around the commission’s common ownership policy. In the new application, that’s gone, and there’s no threat of it coming back. Even if Bell is forced to sell the station, it would remain an English-language station unless the new owner requested a change, and that would be subject to a brand new hearing.

3. If Bell does not get an exemption, TSN 690 will be shut down: The reality of the situation may be that TSN 690 as we know it would be radically altered if Bell is forced to divest it. But it’s unlikely the station would be shut down. The 690 AM frequency is the best AM frequency available in Montreal, and another company would probably scoop it up if only for that. A company like Rogers or TTP Media might even keep the all-sports format, though there are no guarantees.

4. Granting an exemption is the only way Bell can continue to own TSN 690: The exemption is what Bell wants because it would be the best outcome for it financially. But there are two other ways it could keep the station: It could sell one of the Astral stations (or the CRTC could force it to sell one of the Astral stations), or the CRTC could deny the Bell/Astral acquisition again.

5. This is a language issue – TSN 690 can’t keep running because it’s an English station: Somewhat related to No. 2, this sentiment popped up in a lot of public comments. While it’s true that language is relevant to this discussion (because English and French stations are treated as if they’re in different markets), the rules don’t treat English and French differently. There is no Office de la langue française or official languages rule that is forcing the CRTC to limit the number of English-language radio stations in Montreal. There’s merely a rule that limits how many stations in one language in one market a company can own.

An event on Tuesday to show support for TSN 690

An event on Tuesday to show support for TSN 690

A show of support

Some of the station’s bigger fans are pushing harder to rally support to save it. In addition to the Facebook groups and blog posts, there’s a show being scheduled for Tuesday, April 2 at 6pm with some local bands. It doesn’t look like it’s official in any way, but it’s an idea of how important this station is to its small but loyal audience.

Deadline for comments is Friday

People wanting to comment on the Bell purchase of Astral, or the request for an exemption to the rules to allow Bell to own four English radio stations in Montreal, have until 8pm on Friday, April 5, to file an intervention. To do so directly to the CRTC, click here, select Option 1 and select the first application (2013-0244-7). Keep in mind that all information submitted to the CRTC this way, including contact information, is on the public record.

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| Media, Opinion

Why aren’t journalism students interested in journalism?

Freelance writer Justin Ling, who tried journalism school but abandoned it, makes a point during a recent panel discussion hosted by the McGill Daily

Freelance writer Justin Ling, who tried journalism school but abandoned it, makes a point during a recent panel discussion hosted by the McGill Daily

A few weeks ago, I was invited by my alma mater The Link at Concordia to give a talk. The editor didn’t really care what it was about, she knew me and had invited other people from The Gazette to speak to her staff and contributors on various topics, so she figured I’d be good for just about any subject. I decided to focus on something I thought might be useful for student journalists: how to become an expert in something to increase your chances of getting hired or getting regular freelance work when you graduate.

I came in with the notes I’d scribbled onto a notepad during the metro ride over, and for about half an hour bumbled on about how good it is to become specialized, and how starting a blog and starting to write about something that isn’t getting mainstream media attention would be a great way to start that. It is, after all, how I became an expert on local media even though I started out having no contacts and no formal education in media analysis.

After lots of “umm, one more thing I wanted to mention” and other disjointed thoughts, I opened it up to questions. I got a couple of the pity questions the organizers plant so you don’t feel bad, and a couple of actual ones that I tried my best to answer. But of the 20 or so people present, I could tell by the way they were playing on their smartphones that there wasn’t much interest in what I was saying.

It’s okay. I won’t be auditioning for TED any time soon. I didn’t mind so much that I wasn’t the most riveting speaker they’d ever seen. But I was curious about these 20-somethings (or even 19- or 18-somethings). What were their plans after graduation? What kind of careers do they want to fashion for themselves? I tried to get an idea through a show of hands, but I couldn’t. I don’t know if it was because they were shy or because they didn’t know, or because their vision of the journalism industry was fundamentally different from mine. Without grilling them individually I wasn’t going to get an idea what these journalists of tomorrow were thinking of their future, or if they were thinking of it at all.

What bothered me wasn’t so much that they weren’t interested in me (I’m not terribly interesting, or at least I wasn’t that day), but that they weren’t interested in talking about their future as journalists. If they didn’t want to specialize, find beats to cover and become experts in their fields, just what exactly did they plan to do? Be the 100th applicant for that general-assignment TV reporter job that’s going to go to an industry veteran anyway? Coast on internships until their 30s? Find that mythical left-wing publication that has perfect ethics and yet is stable enough financially to pay its writers? Freelance for pennies for the few publications out there that pay but don’t require much effort? Or just leverage that journalism degree into a cushy PR job? I couldn’t figure it out.

What’s worse is that the students I saw that day are the involved ones. These are the ones who will show up at the office of a student newspaper on a Friday afternoon. Many of them applied for editorial positions at the paper (the deadline for candidacies was the same day I was speaking). When you look at Concordia’s journalism school as a whole, and I suspect many others like it, the situation looks even worse.

I want to be a travel writer for the New York Times

On Thursday, I didn’t have much to do, so I sat in the audience of a panel discussion, hosted by the McGill Daily as part of their student journalism week, about whether or not people looking to go into journalism should bother with journalism school (McGill, I should note, doesn’t have one.). Take a moment and imagine this question being asked of any other field, of people contemplating becoming doctors or engineers or teachers or bankers without getting educated in those fields first.

Justin Ling, a freelancer who writes for a variety of publications, told an anecdote of being in a journalism class and the teacher asking what types of journalists the students wanted to become. For most answers, only a few hands were raised. But when the teacher mentioned travel writing, those hands that had stayed down suddenly shot up. Ling pointed out in recalling this story that travel writing is essentially dead, replaced by wire stories or by stories written by people sitting at desks looking at tourism websites. It’s gone, just like the foreign correspondent and other dream jobs young journalists aspire to.

When I talk to young student journalists these days, they still aspire to these kinds of jobs (foreign correspondent and magazine feature writer are common dreams), though the good ones are realistic, knowing that the chances of them scoring such prestigious jobs are one in a million.

I don’t want to trample on any dreams here. Most journalism students are well aware, or at least they say they’re well aware, of the difficulties the industry is going through. They know they’ll have to make compromises once they enter the workforce, sacrificing the salary they would like, the location they would like to work in, or the exact type of job they would like to do. And the truth is that there actually are journalism jobs out there, if you look hard enough, if you’re willing to make those compromises and think outside the box.

But you get the impression that few of these future journalists are spending any time thinking outside that box while they’re in school. Journalism schools have to practically force some of their students to get published at some point during their three-year degrees. Many graduate having barely or never been published even in their student newspapers, but apparently expect a job to be waiting for them when they get that certificate.

I didn’t get my first paid freelance gig until a year after I was hired at The Gazette, so I’m not going to sit here and lecture university students on not getting a front-page Globe and Mail story in their first year. But I was actively involved in my student newspaper for three years before entering journalism school, and my being hired as an intern at The Gazette had a lot more to do with that than it did my grades in that magazine writing class. My application for that internship included five clippings of articles I’d written (and laid out and even taken photos for). It did not include a university transcript.

Experience > grades

You can’t practice medicine or law or even operate heavy machinery before getting an education and a licence. But you can practice journalism. While that fact kind of puts the very existence of journalism schools into doubt, it’s also a big opportunity for students to get started in their field before they’ve finished their education. And that’s an opportunity that, if you’re not taking advantage of it, someone else will.

This is why, when I talk to journalism students, I implore them to start doing journalism, to start covering stories that aren’t being covered. It doesn’t matter if it’s for a blog or a university paper or the New York Times magazine (though the latter would certainly be preferred over the former). It doesn’t matter that you don’t have a big name publication behind you. If you’re covering something that isn’t being covered, you’re not competing with the big guys for access.

Practicing the art not only allows you to get better at it, it shows to potential employers that you know how to do it. Writing for a university newspaper doesn’t bring in money, but it shows to that person hiring for that internship that you can meet deadlines, write to assigned word lengths and turn in readable copy in real-world situations. That’s always going to be an advantage.

Being an expert is an even bigger plus. Covering an industry or a topic regularly makes you familiar with it eventually, and turns you into an expert that can be relied upon by others. Knowing your stuff is a big part of being a successful journalist, and having a beat already established is a big plus in finding work.

The faster these young journalists realize this, the better off they’ll be in this industry that is already extremely difficult to succeed in.

I’m participating in a panel discussion hosted by the Professional Writers’ Association of Canada called Working in the Blogosphere: How to create and maintain a successful blog (spoiler alert: I have no secrets about how to make money directly from a blog). It’s Monday at 7pm at the Atwater Library, and it’s free. Hopefully I can impart some of this wisdom on the attendees, though many will be well past journalism-school age.

| Media, Montreal, Opinion

Living English: Un peu de respect, SVP

CBC Living English panel, from left: Debra Arbec, Kevin Tierney, Terry Mosher, Jean-François Lisée, Anne-France Goldwater, Tamy Emma Pepin, John Stokes, Mike Finnerty

CBC Living English panel, from left: Debra Arbec, Kevin Tierney, Terry Mosher, Jean-François Lisée, Anne-France Goldwater, Tamy Emma Pepin, John Stokes, Mike Finnerty

It started with a chuckle when Jean-François Lisée raised his hand after moderator Mike Finnerty asked who in the crowd thought the English language needed protection in Quebec. It could have been seen as a good-natured laugh at the idea that a Parti Québécois minister, a member of a cabinet that pushes for stronger language laws, believes the English language needs help.

It got worse about 16 minutes in when blogger Tamy Emma Pepin tried to explain language conflicts in a historical context, saying that while historically francophones have felt oppressed by anglophones who had economic power here, her generation has no recollection of the days before the Quiet Revolution and there’s less resentment on both sides of the language divide. (She didn’t explain it very well, using the word “superior”, but it wasn’t hard to figure out her point.)

The crowd got angry. One person sitting near me actually said out loud that she was lying about history.

As the night went on, the interjections from the crowd got worse, and the entire event even more awkward and infuriating for spectators like me who came to hear a polite discussion.

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| Opinion, TV

Videotron’s Netflix isn’t for anglos

Videotron CEO Robert Depatie introduces the new Illico Club Unlimited

Videotron CEO Robert Depatie introduces the new Illico Club Unlimited

They sent us an invitation, even had English versions of their press release printed out, but they might as well not have. Videotron’s “Illico Club Unlimited” is about as interesting to an anglophone audience as a free dinner with Guy A. Lepage.

The Netflix-like service, which was shown off to the media on Thursday at Quebecor headquarters, will have almost a thousand movies (I couldn’t get an exact number, but around 800-900), about 20 television series, plus children’s programming and concerts. But it’s all in French. Any English titles are actually bilingual ones, and even then represent only about 10% of the initial offering.

The plan to focus on the French market makes sense. According to a recent monitoring report, about 21% of anglophones in Canada had a Netflix subscription, versus only 5% of francophones. With Netflix Canada’s French offering very poor, now’s the time to launch such a service, before Netflix has a chance to catch up.

But for anglophone Videotron users, it probably won’t be worth it. Instead, an $8 Netflix subscription makes more sense than a $10 subscription to Videotron’s service on top of everything you’re already paying them.

You can sign up for a free trial month of Illico Club Unlimited here.

| Media, Montreal, Opinion

Urbania explores the other solitude

Urbania's Anglo issue

Urbania’s Anglo issue. Apparently that is actually a jar of (pig’s) tongues, but no word on what language they spoke

One of my pet peeves living in Montreal is how so many people who should know better have little to no knowledge of what life is like on the other side of Quebec’s language divide.

To many francophones, Quebec anglos are no different from Torontonians or Albertans, a bunch of Harper supporters who have paintings of the Queen of England on their walls, who despise the French language and have no culture of their own, and who live here only because they can’t find a better job across a provincial or international border.

To many anglophones, Quebec francos are all hard-core separatists, card-carrying members of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, obsessed with language issues and with eliminating the English language from the province so they can impose their new world order which consists mainly of blackmailing the rest of Canada to send more money its way.

The media, sadly, doesn’t help this much. The French media don’t pay much attention to anglophone Quebec culture or local issues in their communities, while the English media pay so much attention to those things they don’t have the resources to explore Quebec’s francophone culture with more than a passing glance.

So it was with some excitement that I heard last month that Urbania, a hip and irreverent magazine that I’d heard about and had followed on Twitter for a while, was coming out with an issue focusing on anglophones.

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| Opinion, TV

Global’s national morning show: Not worth waking up for

Global's new national Morning Show

Global’s new national Morning Show: Four people at a desk talking

On Monday, Global television debuted its new national morning show. It was kind of a surprise announcement before Christmas (unlike the local morning shows in Montreal and Halifax, which we’ve been waiting for since 2010), and didn’t get a lot of hype.

Having watched the first episode, it’s easy to see why. Though the idea of something to compete with Canada AM sounds pretty exciting, Global’s national morning show feels like exactly what it is: A half-hour extension to the Global Toronto morning show that doesn’t offer much that would take people away from their laptop screens, recordings of the previous night’s shows, or reruns on cable.

Now, I’ll admit that a lot of what I don’t like about this show is the kind of stuff I don’t like about most morning shows: a lack of actual information and depth, and this idea that we care about the most boring aspects of the hosts’ personal lives or their impromptu, uninformed thoughts about the news. It’s one thing when banter fills the 20 seconds at the end of an hour-long newscast, but to base an entire show off of this sounds like a waste of everyone’s time.

But I’m obviously not the target audience for this show. I might feel differently if I was a stay-at-home mom who apparently wants to watch this stuff.

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| Media, Opinion

It’s hard for journalists to turn down free gifts

No free gifts.

It’s a simple rule, really. It seems so easy to understand, so hard to get wrong. In the past few months, as we’ve heard stories about Quebec politicians and civil servants getting free things from construction companies, we’ve become collectively outraged. How could people not realize how obviously unethical this all is? How could people be so stupid?

The assumption, of course, is that they’re not stupid or naive, but evil. They’ve done wrong because they want to be corrupt, they want to profit from their positions and screw the taxpayer for personal gain.

Frii böoz

Last week, as the Charbonneau Commission was getting yet more scandalous detail of the too-cozy relationship between government officials and the companies they hire, a story came out of Winnipeg that raised a few eyebrows among the journalistic community. Ikea, the Swedish retailer, opened a store in the Manitoba capital, and invited media and bloggers to a party the night before, where they were given free alcohol, gift bags and a 15% discount (CBC’s video shows the crowd cheering as the latter is announced, though it’s unclear how many of the cheering fans were journalists and how many were bloggers, marketers and other invited guests).

CBC Winnipeg apparently didn’t like this whole thing, and focused a story on the ethical problem. (The story doesn’t make it clear who brought up the ethical issue in the first place, leaving me with the impression that it was the CBC itself – and that it hid this with the use of the passive tense in its headline and lead paragraph. Marc Weisblott also points out that CBC itself regularly gives out freebies during its media events.)

The CBC story got picked up by a media ethics blog, which took aim at a couple of bloggers bragging about the swag they got.

It’s not that an Ikea opening in a city like Winnipeg isn’t news. But a lot of the news surrounding it has been of the fluffy variety (quizzes, anyone?). A Winnipeg Free Press story, which reads almost like an advertisement, has three bylines. The Free Press also provided this bit of “investigative journalism” (in their defence, used with tongue in cheek) about how long the walk is in the store. Dozens of stories have been written on this store by the FP alone, most of them in a positive light.

At the Winnipeg Sun, the event was important enough to send a handful of journalists, who livetweeted the event, taking pictures of themselves with the merchandise and even bragging about the free wine they were getting.

Imagine, for a moment, government officials bragging on social media about all the free stuff they were getting from construction companies.

Now, I’m not saying that all these journalists are on the take, or that the free stuff they got prompted them to be more positive about Ikea when writing their stories. But I wonder if this opening would have gotten this much media attention if Ikea hadn’t been so … welcoming … to journalists.

Tough decisions

As I’ve become more known in this industry, I’ve been invited to more of these kinds of events. There was The Beat’s exclusive first anniversary party, and a party (mainly for advertising clients) at Astral’s new radio studios, both of which I went to more as a way to chat with the people I cover than because of the music or free food and booze. It’s always kind of awkward when I have to come up with an excuse for why I’m not drinking away their promotion budget like everyone else.

It’s hard to say no when things are offered to you. Much of journalism requires getting access to people and places that normal people aren’t allowed or have to pay a price to reach. Journalists – particularly those in entertainment – get free swag sent to them all the time, usually in the form of cheap branded stuff, stuff they don’t really have much use for.

I myself haven’t been perfect. I let a certain radio DJ entice me into stocking up on candy. I’ve let a couple of sources pay for a (modest) meal we’ve shared, mainly to avoid the awkwardness of getting into an argument on principles. In these borderline cases I’ve relieved my guilt by making an equivalent donation to the Gazette Christmas Fund at the end of the year, but I should probably be more firm about these kinds of things.

It’s hard to set a clear line between what’s acceptable and what’s not. You can be fundamental like the New York Times and say no gifts whatsoever. You can be practical like other companies and say no gifts over, say, $20, to distinguish the silly swag junk from the stuff that people really crave.

What’s important, I think, is that journalists understand why they’re being given free stuff. Companies aren’t stupid. They know that giving free stuff to people in media works, if not to ensure positive coverage then at least to ensure some attention (which means free advertising).

And not to get too far into Media Ethics 101, but rewarding this activity discriminates against those without the big budgets. Those mom-and-pop businesses that don’t have a social media strategy or an event planner who can ensure journalists get nice gift bags. Hell, many of them don’t even have the time or money to send out a press release to all the mainstream media in town. Think about that too when you’re getting all this attention from the people with lots of money.

Journalists are always going to be a special class. They’ll have free access to events they’re covering when everyone else has to pay. They’ll get to meet celebrities that everyone else can only dream of getting an autograph from. They’ll get their requests for information quickly upgraded to a higher priority. And often they’ll get special treatment just because.

These are great privileges, in some cases necessary to do their jobs properly. But it’s up to journalists to ensure that these privileges aren’t abused.

What happened in Winnipeg is an example of such abuse. A minor one. I’m not calling for anyone’s head. I just ask that these journalists think a bit more next time and look their gift horses a bit more squarely in the mouth, and not to be excited at the prospect of shiny things being put in front of your faces. Not to let your sources get you drunk. And certainly not to brag about that to your less privileged audience.

Unfortunately for us, it’s the stuff that we want the most that is the most unethical to take.

And if Quebec politics has taught us anything, it’s that “c’était Céline Dion, quand même” isn’t an excuse people will accept for something that looks so much like quid pro quo.

| Opinion, Radio

Jacques Fabi suspended a month for being stupid

One question is bouncing around in my head: What on Earth was Jacques Fabi thinking?

Fabi, the overnight host on Cogeco stations in Quebec (with CHMP 98.5FM as the flagship), allowed a caller to his phone-in show to say the Holocaust was “the most beautiful thing that could happen in history” – and then, rather than cut her off or challenge the ridiculously offensive statement, warned her that Quebec society looks down upon expressing opinions like this.

Even though it’s an overnight show, it didn’t take long for people to be outraged. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs sent a letter to Cogeco within hours denouncing the broadcast. Marto Napoli talked about the exchange on his radio show on Radio Pirate (when the Jeff Fillion radio station says you went too far, you know something’s seriously wrong). The National Post wrote a story about it. So did La Presse’s Rima Elkouri. So did the Journal de Montréal’s Sophie Durocher. For whatever reason, the story didn’t get much traction until the weekend, when we learned that Cogeco would suspend Fabi.

On Monday, we got the details: Fabi is suspended for a month, without pay, for his actions. With an official statement from Cogeco, just about every media outlet is reporting on the news now, not only in Montreal but across Canada and around the world.

Some aren’t satisfied with this, and want him to be fired outright. At least one commentator (a Radio X host, it should be noted) thinks that’s going too far.

Honestly, I don’t know what to think. Because it’s just so mind-boggling. Fabi isn’t some rookie who forgot how to run a radio show. He’s a veteran, and a man with years of experience managing calls on the radio. Does he really support the massacre of Jews? Is he an absolutist when it comes to freedom of speech? Was he drunk, or tired, or high? Was he so desperate to fill airtime that he was ready to let absolutely anything on the air?

It took Fabi only four minutes and 11 seconds to torpedo his reputation. But as anyone in radio will tell you, that’s a lot of time. Whether he’ll be able to build it back is doubtful. He’ll need to apologize profusely, but more importantly he’ll need to come up with some plausible explanation for why he thought what he allowed to on the air might be anything even close to appropriate.

This isn’t just an error in judgment. It’s a fuckup of epic proportions. One whose response will require him starting by saying he does not support the mass slaughter of millions of Jews.

And maybe Cogeco should look into providing better screening of its calls and/or better real-time monitoring of its programming.

As for “Maria”, the woman who cheered for the Holocaust because of what’s happening to Palestinians right now, I hope she gets some help. People like her are the reason the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has dragged on for decades.

UPDATE: Fabi has apologized. Though he’ll probably need to do more when he’s back on the air. Marc Cassivi also weighs in (almost by necessity, since some were suggesting he was being silent on the matter out of some bias)

UPDATE (June 28, 2013): The Quebec Press Council has issued a decision against Fabi.

| Media, Opinion

The journalistic fraud of “exclusive”

I’m going to tell you a secret about journalism. Some of the most thoroughly-researched reports, the ones splashed across the front pages of newspapers and magazines and given top billing in newscasts, take a gamble on the truth.

It’s not just the sensationalist media like Sun News or the Journal de Montréal, it’s La Presse, The Gazette, Le Devoir, CTV, Global, CBC. It’s almost everyone (I’m hedging my bets here – I don’t know of any media that outlaws this practice by policy).

It happens almost every time journalists or their editors use the word “exclusive”.

Now, it’s very rare that they get this wrong. It’s like betting that Université Laval wins the Quebec football championship (says the frustrated Stingers fan). And when it does go wrong, it’s not the end of the world. Nobody gets sued, nobody loses their job, it’s just a bit embarrassing when someone points it out.

La Presse reports as “exclusive” a story that also appeared in Le Devoir the same day.

Take this story. It happened a year ago. La Presse finds out that Bixi is expanding to Longueuil, and presents it as an exclusive. But Le Devoir also found out, and published its own story that same day. Le Devoir didn’t use the “exclusive” label, but did write “a appris Le Devoir”, which is, of course, correct.

I tweeted about it, and there were some giggles, but that was it. No scandal here.

So how does this happen?

For most journalism, particularly for the mainstream media, the source of stories is easy to figure out. Some stories come from the police media spokespeople, reporting on the car crashes and crimes and other events that required emergency services. Some stories come through press releases or other ways that companies push the media to talk about them in a good light. Some stories come out of things said publicly by politicians or published by government bodies. Some come at prearranged sporting events, or special screenings given to journalists. Some stories are stolen from other media (“matched” is the term – crediting the other media only when the story has facts that can not be confirmed).

But then there’s the rest. The stories that require real work. The ones that require months of investigation through talking to sources and filing access to information requests. That ones that come because a journalist is the only one paying attention to a story when it breaks. And the ones that are handed to journalists on silver platters by people who may or may not have personal agendas wanting to see secrets exposed.

When these stories are published, the question comes up: Is this an exclusive? Does some other journalist have this? Could anyone else also possibly be reporting on this?

For long investigations, the answer is almost always no. I mean, what are the chances that another journalist has also been working for days, weeks or even months on this same story and is going to publish it the same day? Virtually impossible.

For stories based on polls, exclusivity is contractual. Exclusive polls are paid, with the understanding that the company or companies that pay for it get first dibs at reporting its results. And even if another poll comes out that reports the same thing, a newspaper can still say that their particular poll is exclusive to them.

Stories that are leaked to journalists, however, are more likely to suffer the embarrassment of being proved wrong. After all, if someone wants to leak something, they might tell more than one journalist about it. In these cases, journalists are extra careful, relying on how much they trust the source when that source says that he or she hasn’t told any other journalist about this story.

“Exclusive”, at its very basic, is the statement that “no other media is reporting this story”. But it’s impossible to prove this kind of negative. Even if you could poll every single news outlet that might have an interest in a story (and there are a lot of them out there), they’re not going to tell their competitors about a major investigative story they’re working on.

So it’s a gamble. The journalist asks “what are the chances that someone else has this?” and if the answer is “infinitecimally small”, then the “EXCLUSIVE” label is slapped on. And fingers are crossed that the infinitecimally-likely doesn’t become true.

Sun News bills the translation of a two-year-old TV interview as “EXCLUSIVE” and “BREAKING” (the story online has since been updated)

Redefining “exclusive”

This week, there was a less ambiguous abuse of this term by Sun Media. It published a story on Thursday afternoon reporting “exclusively” about comments Justin Trudeau made about Albertans running the country.

They knew about the comments because Trudeau made them two years ago on an episode of Les Francs-Tireurs, a current affairs series on Télé-Québec. They just haven’t been reported much in English until now (though the segment’s end, with Trudeau demonstrating how to fall down stairs, did go a bit viral).

The Sun story (which was also referred to as “breaking” in the hours after it came out) was uniquely about Trudeau’s comments. It had no new exclusive information. So was it an exclusive? Can publicly-available information be considered exclusive if you’re the first to report on it in your language? Arguments could be made either way.

It’s one thing to argue that information contained in a publicly-accessible government database, compiled by a reporter, could be considered “exclusive” even though others could have just as easily found that information. But that’s a far cry from re-reporting information contained in a publicly-broadcast television interview.

What’s worst about this is that public mocking of the Sun News “exclusive” hype detracted from the story, which is perfectly fair game. Trudeau’s comments are newsworthy, and seem to fit the narrative of a politician pandering to Quebec by demonizing another part of the country. Trudeau predictably walked the comments back and apologized for them, and the situation rightly got coverage in mainstream media. But none of that required Sun News to call the story an “exclusive.”

It’s particularly sad that the story is by David Akin, one of the more respectable figures associated with Sun News Network. I’m hoping that the decision to play this as an exclusive wasn’t his but an editor’s, and his loyalty to his employer is preventing him from contradicting them on it.

I’m not sure how Akin and Sun found this story, either. Did a Conservative opposition researcher leak it to him because the Tories were worried about losing Monday’s by-election in Alberta? Or was Trudeau’s past researched in light of his decision to enter the federal Liberal leadership campaign? Or do Sun Media journalists just spend their downtime looking through Télé-Québec video archives?

Explaining process is important in journalism, because transparency builds trust. But too often, these kinds of stories don’t explain process. They don’t explain what turned a journalist onto a story, even if that might be very revealing. And they don’t explain why they think a story is exclusive to them, because often they can’t explain it.

So next time you see someone say a story is an “exclusive”, ask yourself how they know that. Chances are, it’s just a (really good) guess.

And I’m telling you that exclusively.

| Media, Opinion

It’s time to step out of the echo chamber

XKCD’s take on the accuracy of polling

By now, you probably know about Nate Silver, the guy behind the New York Times’s Five Thirty Eight blog whose in-depth analysis of opinion polling data produced an electoral map that has correctly predicted the outcome of the presidential race in 49 of 50 states, and likely Florida as well if Obama maintains his slim lead there.

He’s being heralded as a wizard by Democratic supporters after being vilified as a left-wing hack by Republicans in the weeks before the election because he predicted a strong possibility of Obama winning enough swing states to take the election.

Silver is a very smart man, and his model has shown to be correct in multiple elections now. He’s no wizard, just someone who took in a lot of data and applied a formula to it (using yet more data) that made projections with it that turned out to be correct. Few things are polled as much as U.S. presidential elections, and Silver had a lot of data to work with, particularly in those swing states. Simply averaging all those polls together would have given a pretty good, and other projections based on multiple polls produced nearly identical maps. Silver’s model was more complex, counting for pollsters’ biases by looking at their accuracy in previous elections.

Silver got some things wrong. He called the North Dakota senate race “safe Republican”, but it went to the Democrat in a squeaker. Silver could easily blame the lack of polling in that state – only one published poll in the final two weeks of the election campaign. In next-door Montana, where Democrat Jon Tester (first elected during the Democratic wave of 2006) was widely expected to lose his seat, Silver’s model ignored the fact that polls consistently showed Tester in the lead, and instead used “state fundamentals” numbers (i.e. that the state is very red) to push the race in the “lean Republican” category. No doubt he’ll take a look at that when revising the model.

(I’ll give you a moment to note the irony that where Silver was wrong, it was that he leaned too far toward Republicans.)

And Silver got maybe a bit too defensive when people criticized his work, leading to a poorly-thought-out bet with Joe Scarborough that got him into trouble with the Times.

But what’s important here is that Silver has shown that in general, elections with a high amount of public polling from different sources can get a very accurate view of how people are going to vote. Biases, like the inability to reach people with cellphones, or the type of people who respond to pollsters, or the strength of get-out-the-vote efforts, can be counted for quantitatively and compensated.

Mocking the mockers

Silver’s critics acted, it seemed, not because they disagreed with his methodology, but because they disagreed with its results. Projecting a 90% chance of an Obama win didn’t fit in with people’s gut feelings that the race was too close to call. Even though it didn’t take an expert to see that Romney’s path to 270 electoral votes was much more difficult than Obama’s for what were generally agreed to be the swing states up for grabs, pundits refused to accept that the race was all but over.

So many on the conservative side made their own predictions.

There was George Will predicting a huge electoral college victory for Romney. There was The Weekly Standard predicting a Romney win mainly because it felt Republican voters were more motivated than Democratic ones. There was that guy behind the website Unskewed Polls that said Silver is “extremely biased” toward Democrats and had to eat crow when not only did the expected big Romney win not arrive, but those projections he attacked turned out to be right.

There were more reasoned criticisms of the models used by Silver and others. This piece in the National Review complained about the weights Silver gave polls, suggesting they were entirely subjective (they weren’t), and probably deserves better than me pointing out that the same writer called Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin for Romney, and all seven of those states (if we assume Florida doesn’t flip) went to Obama.

And there was Karl Rove famously questioning the Fox News election desk after it declared Obama the winner, saying the vote in Ohio wasn’t clear yet, leading to Megyn Kelly confronting their supernerds and getting them to explain why they made their call, and plenty of mockery of the news network for going through the five stages of grief.

Shades of 2004

Even though it was clear by about 11pm that Obama was going to win the election, and networks started calling it around 11:15, there was defiance of yet more math by Romney’s supporters. Even Romney’s staff had apparently deluded themselves. Romney himself refused to concede at first, the story went, and didn’t prepare a concession speech, resulting in a delay before he gave it.

While this was happening, I thought back to 2004. The election counting went well into the night, but eventually George Bush was declared the winner after taking the state of Ohio by about 120,000 votes. His Democratic opponent, John Kerry, wouldn’t concede until the next day, and many hard-core Democrats still believe Kerry should have won that state and some secret trickery prevented it. To many Democrats, Bush’s unpopularity was so obvious, so widespread that a landslide Kerry win was simply inevitable.

The echo chamber of the right

This reminded me of that year because it wasn’t just a question of right-wingers being disconnected from reality. It was about how everyone seems to have constructed their own reality based on facts they choose to listen to.

I think of people like Ezra Levant, who despite billing himself as a free-thinking voice seemed to regurgitate just about every Republican talking point, even on election night. The things he retweeted on his Twitter account all went in the same direction: the polls are wrong because Romney will win. The day before the election, he discussed on his show how a CNN poll showing a dead heat was obviously biased toward Obama because it oversampled Democrats. He and his guest concluded that the number of Democrats who would vote in the election was overestimated based solely on their gut feeling that enthusiasm for Obama must be lower than it was in 2008.

Levant predicted “a big Romney win“, four years after having predicted “McCain will win“. Levant’s electoral map showed seven states – Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire and Florida – all going for Romney when they all went for Obama. Online polls on the Sun News website show that voters believed that Romney was more likely to win, by a huge margin.

When Levant turned out to be wrong, again, rather than take the Nate Silver approach and adjust his baseline, he went into an apparent on-air depression, saying America is now doomed and Canada should look to other countries to do trade with. He concluded that America has changed and that they’re all just freeloaders who want government handouts. When I pointed out how his prediction differed from those “biased” polls he complained about so much, he accused me of not having “courage” for not making a public prediction on TV, as if my lack of public prediction somehow made him less wrong.

What’s ironic about all this is that this is the exact same kind of stuff that Sun News itself accuses its competitors of: sitting in an echo chamber, listening only to people who agree with them, and putting out journalism that is biased toward their personal views because they block out people they don’t like. Levant and colleague Brian Lilley sometimes have a point when they criticize other journalists for their often liberal views about things, but they’re hardly setting an example when they go even further in the other direction, no matter how much they might pat themselves on the back for being honest about it.

The election result on Tuesday provided rare hard evidence that the echo chamber Levant and other conservatives choose to live in has led them to beliefs that are quantifiably wrong. Unfortunately, their response seems to have been to dismiss this like one would a failed bet on a hockey game, and move on without questioning what led them to incorrect conclusions.

The echo chamber of the left

Before this blog post gets passed around on Rabble.ca as if it’s the greatest thing in the world, I’ll point out once again that the echo chamber isn’t restricted to Republicans, or even Americans. A quick trip to Facebook and I saw plenty of anti-Republican ridiculousness passed around by people who should know better. Posts about how Romney’s slogan was taken from the KKK (it wasn’t). Exaggerations of a case where a single miscalibrated voting screen caused an input for Obama to be recorded as an input for Romney. In general, anything that made Romney and the Republicans look bad, or Obama and the Democrats look good, got lots of attention and very little verification.

We know that Obama would do well in Canada, and certainly in this part of it. But people with only friends in Montreal might be left with the impression that everyone loves Obama, and that only the really stupid and the truly evil support Romney and the “Rapepublicans”. That’s about as large a brush to paint on Romney supporters as Romney himself painted on the 47% of Americans he called freeloaders because they don’t pay federal income taxes.

And before you start thinking that left-wingers are just better at math and science than the right, I’ll remind you that when I tried to use a scientific approach to measure the size of a large protest over tuition, my numbers were challenged by people on the left. Why? Because the total number that came out of the process didn’t match their gut feeling of how large the crowd must have been.

How we can fix it

The polling part is easy. Don’t overanalyze. People broke down polls and picked at the ones that didn’t show things the way they wanted. They adjusted the assumptions, convinced that the pollsters have some vested interest in being incorrect and that their amateur fiddling would correct their internal biases. Silver’s model doesn’t involve tinkering with individual polls, it simply adjusts for known quantifiable data (including things like how well those pollsters did in the last election). There is still plenty to disagree on or debate about polling methodology, but people on both sides have to acknowledge that when they start playing with the numbers themselves they tend to inject bias more than they remove it.

For the rest, it means being more critical of stuff you hear that you and your friends agree with, and being more receptive to those you don’t. It means, for those on the left, spending less time accepting at face value what’s said by people who worked on the NDP campaign in the last election, and more time listening to reasonable people whose political views you don’t like.

I’d say start watching Sun News, but it’s hard to take them seriously. Maybe start off with some light conservatism, like Andrew Coyne.

And to those on the right, well if the re-election of Barack Obama didn’t provide enough proof that your assumptions are wrong, I honestly don’t know what to say.

| In the news, Opinion, Radio

CJAD and Bain: Calmez-vous

It seems everyone was up in arms on Thursday after hearing that CJAD radio had given Richard Henry Bain, the man accused of killing a man at Metropolis on the night of the election, a 40-minute interview in which he was given free reign rein to spout his political views, and on top of that deciding to schedule the interview to coincide with the same moment that Pauline Marois was announcing her new government.

Of course, much of the previous paragraph isn’t true, but that shouldn’t stop us from being outraged, right?

What happened

Here’s what happened on Wednesday, based on what we’ve heard from station management and CJAD staff during interviews since then:

Just after 9:30am on Wednesday, the CJAD newsroom received a phone call. Trudie Mason, who does morning newscasts, took the call. The man at the other end at first wouldn’t identify himself, but eventually said he was Richard Henry Bain and that he was calling from the Rivière des Prairies detention facility. By this point, Mason was recording the phone call.

Mason and the main identifying himself as Bain spoke for 38 minutes. Mason repeatedly asked him to comment on what happened the night of Sept. 4, when Denis Blanchette was shot dead and Dave Courage severely injured in what some suspect may have been a politically-motivated attack on premier-elect Pauline Marois. But the man wouldn’t answer questions on that subject, instead preferring to discuss his political views, including his opinion that Quebec should be split up into its sovereignist and federalist regions.

Throughout the day, CJAD worked to verify that the man speaking was, in fact, Bain. They held on to the story while they tried to verify the caller’s identity. In the meantime, there was a significant amount of discussion – more than Mason said she has ever had in her career on an issue like this – about how to handle the story. Newsroom staff checked the caller ID and asked people who knew Bain to identify the recorded voice. Eventually the confirmation came, from Bain’s lawyer, a bit before 3:30pm: The man in the recording was, indeed, Bain.

The next newscast being at 4pm, CJAD decided to break the story then. Care was made to restrict the amount of audio that went to air. In the end, less than a minute of audio from that 38-minute conversation was broadcast, and 10 seconds of that is just Bain saying his name and where he’s calling from.

There was a very basic discussion of Bain’s political views – and by that I mean there was about enough time to read out the slogan on a bumper sticker. Details were cut out and not aired. The first airing of the news story was immediately followed by a discussion between Mason and Aaron Rand on his show, that went into the process of reporting this story. You can listen to that discussion on this podcast, beginning around the 16-minute mark.

At the same time, a written version of the story was posted on CJAD’s website, with a timestamp of exactly 4pm. The written version includes no direct quotes from Bain, and no link to audio.

CJAD’s sister stations at Astral, NRJ and Rouge FM, also used French-language clips from Bain in their newscasts. You can hear their news story here and an excerpt of audio about a minute long of Bain talking in French.

Blind outrage

Unfortunately, most of this nuance never reached the Twittersphere. All many heard was that CJAD had aired an interview with the man accused of a politically-motivated killing. And so the condemnation was quick and severe. There was even a new hashtag created for the occasion, #NouvelleÉmissionCJAD, in which heinous criminals discuss subjects that their victims would no doubt find highly offensive.

But reading much of those comments, it was obvious how many of them came from people who had not heard the news story. (Many said so when I asked, even adding that they didn’t want to and should not have to hear what was aired in order to judge it wrong.) Comments on social media said the decision to air the interview was a slap in the face to victims, that it was dangerous, and even that it was intentionally scheduled to air at the same moment Marois was presenting her new cabinet as part of some vendetta the anglophone community has against the PQ leader. From the information presented, it’s very hard to come to either conclusion.

Far too many of those comments came from people who should know better than to condemn something they had not witnessed.

The outrage caused Astral to send out a press release Wednesday afternoon re-explaining itself.

It’s called journalism

There are some, when challenged on their outrage about this, who say that affording even 10 seconds of airtime to Bain is wrong, that people should not be hearing his political views. I’m sympathetic to that argument, and clearly CJAD was as well.

But the problem is that Bain’s motivations (assuming he’s guilty of what he’s accused of) are, in fact, very important and newsworthy. The man is already being described as an anglophone, even though he has what sounds like a francophone accent and seems to speak French well enough. And people assume this was an attempt on Marois’s life, even though there’s no evidence yet to suggest this.

It may be distasteful for journalists to interview (presumed) bad people, whether they’re convicted murderers or third-world dictators. But what they think does matter, even if we think those views are dangerous. They should be treated with care, perhaps even sanitized and heavily censored, but they should be reported.

So much of what makes this story important is based on the presumed motivations of the man accused of this killing. What the man accused of it says about his views becomes important as a result.

CJAD couldn’t pretend Bain never called them. It had to report the story. It did so carefully and deliberately. I might hesitate to say it was done “with restraint” as Dan Delmar tweeted, since the station did promote the story and slapped an all-caps EXCLUSIVE label on it when it was published. But what actually made it on air was tame.

Unanswered questions

There are some serious questions to ask about this case. The main one is how a man who is sitting in a detention facility had access to a phone for more than half an hour. It was a question that CJAD itself asked on air right away.

And there might be questions to ask of CJAD as well, about whether it was right to air even short clips of Bain’s political views rather than just explaining that Bain called the station and leave it a that.

But if you’re going to criticize them for something they did, please make sure you first have a clear idea of what it is exactly that they did.

Because, like with the shooting itself, context is everything.

Coverage

Unfortunately, I can’t find audio of the actual news story on CJAD’s website. But in addition to the Rand show link above, you can also hear about this from this podcast of the Andrew Carter morning show from Thursday morning.

| In the news, Media, Opinion

How exaggerating protest numbers could backfire on students

12,250.

That’s how many people, according to a firm hired by Radio-Canada, were at Place du Canada at 2:35pm on Wednesday during the monthly protest against tuition hikes and Bill 78.

As I predicted, the number prompted outrage among protesters and their supporters. Reactions from “no way” to “fraude“. Some presented evidence to back up their cases, but in all cases they involved subjective comparisons. Many judged based on a single aerial photo (whose source I couldn’t find easily). Others based their numbers on known capacities of large stadiums. But many just pulled numbers out of nowhere. CLASSE’s official estimate was 100,000. Numbers as high as 250,000 were being thrown about.

My estimate was 24,000, and I provided my methodology. I stood at the corner of Berri St. and René-Lévesque Blvd., estimated that people were crossing a line on the pavement at about 10 per second on average, and multiplied that by how long it took the whole protest to pass by – about 40 minutes. (I had to leave early to go to work, so I estimated that based on the tail end being at St. Laurent and de Maisonneuve 25 minutes after the first people crossed at Berri and René-Lévesque. I figured it would take the tail end about 15 minutes to reach where I was originally counting from.)

Comparing apples and pineapples

Measured in time, the protest was about half as large as the one I saw on May 22, whose size I also tried to estimate. That estimate was 50,000, but with the understanding that I was only counting the people who passed my location.

The closest thing to an official estimate we’ve had of one of these protests before now is QMI Agency’s call of about 150,000 for that May 22 protest. They did not reveal their methodology, but it was the only time a news agency offered its own number.

So the media have been relying on protesters’ own estimates of the protest size. And obviously, there’s clear motivation for them to inflate those numbers.

It’s not just the student protests. Remember that big march against the Iraq war in 2003, that drew 200,000 or 300,000 people? Radio-Canada did an official crowd estimate there too, and the actual number was much lower (see the video at the bottom).

In first-day stories, the media have been careful about their estimates. They refer vaguely to “thousands” or “tens of thousands”. When they use the protsters’ numbers, they’re clearly attributed. But as time passes, the care starts to slip, and without any competing numbers to refute them, those estimates of 100,000 or 200,000 people slowly become fact.

So now, as media outlets start to realize they can’t abdicate their responsibilities and really need to do their own crowd estimation, more accurate numbers show a dramatic drop. People start to make comparisons in their heads: If the May 22 protest drew 200,000 people and the Aug. 22 one drew only 12,000, the student movement is clearly dying out.

Let’s compare

The biggest problem with amateur estimates of crowd sizes is that people don’t know what a crowd of 10,000 people or 100,000 people looks like. So they try to compare with the Bell Centre (21,000), the Olympic Stadium (60,000), or the Place des festivals (which they say is 100,000 based on estimates of Jazz fest mega show sizes, but those estimates include crowds watching secondary screens on de Maisonneuve Blvd., at Place des Arts, on Ste. Catherine St. or even on Clark St.)

But these can be deceiving. The Bell Centre and Olympic Stadium look a lot smaller than they are, because of all the empty space in the middle. And crowds there are packed in very tightly, unlike a moving protest march.

Rather than subjective comparisons of size, let’s compare the crowds using another method: transit.

  • 20,000: A packed show or hockey game at the Bell Centre causes a strain on the metro system as it clears out. The STM routinely adds extra trains at the Lucien L’Allier station to handle the thousands of people who hop on at the same time. There’s a noticeably large crowd at transfer stations like Berri-UQAM, consistent with what you’d find during a busy rush hour.
  • 50,000: The biggest events at the Olympic Stadium have been in the 50,000 range. When they end, the metro system is severely strained. Extra trains are parked near the Pie-IX station, and for a good hour they fill up and depart westbound toward Berri-UQAM. Even then, extra trains are added to the other lines as well, and security officers herd crowds towards the ends of the platforms to get as many people as possible onto the trains.
  • 80,000: Remember that U2 show at the Hippodrome? Officials pleaded with people to take public transit because parking would have been a nightmare. Though the shows let out before midnight, the metro was kept running past 2am because that’s how long it took to get everyone on the trains. It was so bad that not only were people directed to walk to two metro stations, but a fleet of dozens of buses was brought into service to shuttle people to the Jean-Talon station via a special reserved lane marked with pylons for the whole route.

Which of these do you think is the best comparison to Wednesday’s protest?

When 10,000 isn’t enough

What’s most disconcerting about all this is that the bar has been set unreasonably high for large protests in this city. Tens of thousands of people taking to the streets isn’t enough anymore. It has to be hundreds of thousands before anyone starts noticing.

That’s unfortunate. Whether you agree with the student movement or not, they amassed enough people that it took them more than half an hour to walk by in a march as wide as five traffic lanes. No matter their actual number, a descriptive word that’s synonymous with “enormous” is called for here.

But so long as we continue to measure protests like we do penises, this obsessive war over numbers will only distract from any real issues we might be trying to debate.

UPDATE: OpenFile, in a story about how difficult crowd estimates are, comes up with 80,000 based on a march 3 km long and 18.5 metres wide with 0.7 square meters per person. That seems a bit too dense to me. But at least it’s a scientific effort.

| In the news, Opinion

Anglophones: Vote PQ (ha ha, just kidding)

It happens, it seems, during every election. Reporters stuck on campaign buses to Saint-Félix-de-who-kn0ws-where look for some unusual story to report on inevitably throw out the idea that anglophones might somehow be interested in voting for a sovereignist party.

The sovereignist party – the Parti Québécois during a provincial election or the Bloc Québécois in a federal election – are never ones to say no to any votes (they are, after all, politicians), so they indulge, pretending Quebec anglos might have a reason to vote for them.

The party leader explains that this is an election, not a referendum, and federalists can still vote for a sovereignist party that will (in the case of the Bloc) be a voice for all Quebecers in Ottawa, or (in the case of the PQ) be an alternative to the Liberals. They remind the anglos that an independent Quebec would continue to respect their rights and that they, too, are Québécois.

Then comes election night, and the big victory speech, in which the leader proclaims a huge win for sovereignty, as if every vote for that party is a vote to make Quebec into an independent country.

Jean Charest alluded to this phenomenon just before the last provincial election in 2008.

But then, maybe we think it’s more commonplace than it is. The night of the 2008 federal election, Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe said the vote for the Bloc was not a vote for sovereignty, according to an article in The Gazette from way back then. Though he did say the vote showed that Quebecers wanted Ottawa to recognize the supremacy of the French language in this province, and insist that Quebec’s French-language charter apply to federally-regulated institutions.

I’d compare this with other recent sovereignist party victories, but unfortunately for them there haven’t been many. The PQ hasn’t won a provincial election since 1998. The Bloc was doing well until last year, when it collapsed into near-oblivion.

Few options for anglos

All this anglos-voting-PQ silliness highlights the problem that there really isn’t an alternative to the Liberals for federalist anglophones in Quebec. Of the five parties with a chance of winning seats, three of them are openly and proudly sovereignist, and four of them want to strengthen the French-language charter in some way to counteract a perceived threat to the French language in Quebec. Even the Coalition Avenir Québec, which is being seen as an alternative hope for anglos, makes it clear in its platform (PDF) that it would strengthen the role of he Office Québécois de la langue française and put in place measures to ensure more immigrants to Quebec speak French.

The Liberals, meanwhile, aren’t exactly the Equality Party. The best that anglos can hope for with them is the status quo.

It’s no wonder, then, that there won’t be an English-language leaders’ debate, even with the offer to have Pauline Marois do her part in French. The PQ really has little to gain from such an event, and the Liberals and CAQ don’t want to be seen as too friendly to federalists or anglophones, which might scare off soft nationalists.

It’s to the point where francophones are asking about how anglophones are being treated here.

I won’t use some of the ridiculous hyperbole being used by some, comparing Quebec to some totalitarian government or its leaders to some iron-fist dictators who think nothing of murdering millions of their citizens.

But let’s just say that you can understand why there are some people here, maybe some whose families have been in Quebec for generations, or who might be perfectly bilingual but have the misfortune of having the incorrect mother tongue, who feel that on the ballot will simply be yet another list of parties for whom this umpteenth-generation Quebecer isn’t really Québécois enough.