Tag Archives: 24-Heures

| Media

Canadian newspaper readership stable

It seems to go against conventional wisdom, but NADBank results released this morning show that readership at major Canadian newspapers remains stable, with three quarters of Canadians reading at least one daily newspaper each week. Online numbers also remain stable, which is disappointing because they represent so little.

Both the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail cherry-picked results to declare victory. The Star has more print readers on a daily, Saturday and weekly basis, but the Globe has more online readers and a higher total readership of both online and print (the Globe also says it won “key” demographics and implies that its readers are smarter). Other newspapers trumpeted their gains, especially the Calgary Herald, whose readership jumped 7% over last year,

In Montreal, the Journal de Montréal is still the undisputed print leader, with 578,800 having read it “yesterday” and 1,129,600 in the last week, 40% more than second-place La Presse (even throwing in Cyberpresse readers, against the Journal’s lack of a website, the paper still comes up short). Note that this is all before the lockout.

For those who care about comparing competing papers, there’s not much new here. The market percentages are almost identical to last year. A slight uptick in online readers for Cyberpresse, but only from 9% to 11% of the market.

In terms of raw numbers:

  • The Journal de Montréal lost about 3% of its weekday and Sunday readers.
  • La Presse lost about 30,000 weekly print readers but gained about 26,000 weekly online readers.
  • The Gazette (my paper) gained modestly in all categories, but online growth is robust, rising 11% since it relaunched its website last fall. In the Greater Montreal Area, it rose 31%. (Still, most of the website’s traffic comes from outside Quebec, an oddity among Canwest’s papers)
  • Metro lost almost 5% of its weekly readers, and though it gained almost 20% online, its web readership is still negligible.
  • 24 Heures gained 2.4% in weekly readers (perhaps partially at Metro’s expense). Its online numbers are similarly negligible.

In general, 49% of Montrealers 18 and over read a newspaper on the average weekday, 74% read at least one a week, and 76% read a newspaper or go to a newspaper’s website in a week (which means a tiny number – 4% nationally – go to newspaper websites but don’t subscribe). Freebie newspaper readership is at 24% here, with 717,000 people having read either Metro or 24 Heures in the past five weekdays.

| Media

Journal Daily Digest: Boycott 24 heures?

Youssef Shoufan, the guy behind this video about Journal de Montréal workers, has suggested through his blog and a Facebook group that Montrealers boycott Quebecor’s 24 Heures free newspaper in protest of its alleged bias in favour of Quebecor companies like TVA and Videotron.

It’s very unlikely such a move is going to make any difference, for the simple reason that people who care about the state of the news industry don’t read the free papers, and the vast majority who don’t care about media convergence won’t give this a second thought and will go on reading the newspapers boycott or no. You can’t threaten to cancel your subscription to 24 Heures.

Meanwhile, at the Journal, there’s little going on. Le Devoir had a piece from Paul Cauchon on Monday summarizing the stalemate, and focusing on all the anti-Quebecor articles that have appeared on RueFrontenac.com now that journalists have the freedom to say what they really think about their corporate overlords.

And at the little brother Le Réveil, which was also locked out by Quebecor, advertisers are pulling out of the publication in solidarity with workers (so says the no-agenda-here RueFrontenac). Saguenay’s mayor is under pressure to pull the city’s $130,000 worth of advertising from the free paper.

Keeping the machin running

I’m starting to like this overly-enunciative fellow. (The original, for those missing context)

Elsewhere

| Canadiens, Media

The Great La Presse Habs Scoop of 2009

La Presse scored the jackpot in Friday’s paper when it combined the four things that journalists and their bosses have wet dreams about:

  1. A scoop, a story that nobody else has
  2. A story filled with anonymous sources about a crime boss/drug lord/mafia king
  3. A story about a celebrity scandal
  4. A story about the Canadiens

The news dominated coverage yesterday and today, even as everyone was talking about Alex Kovalev’s performance problems.

Part of that was because of La Presse, whose hockey analysts were dropping hints on every TV sports show they could find Thursday night to say that a huge scoop would appear in the next day’s paper.

The various news sources did all they could to try and match La Presse’s story before it came out, but couldn’t gather enough before publication to put it all together. So while most just waited until it was out and summarized La Presse’s story or re-researched it, Quebecor-owned 24 Heures put out its exclusive story that four Canadiens players had been arrested.

The story, still available in the Google cache, by reporter Maxime Deland, quotes a single anonymous source “very close” to the Canadiens saying four players had been arrested on Thursday night on their return from Pittsburgh.

Of course, no such thing happened, so 24 Heures deleted the story. I found no correction on their website, and the story was not in Friday’s edition of the paper.

The story has gotten so big now we have the second (third?) day stories about whether the media is blowing this out of proportion. This piece at Fanatique summarizes the timeline of stories from the various news outlets, while Yves Boisvert, Patrick Lagacé and Mike Boone defend the media’s insane interest in the Canadiens as a mere reflection of what the fans want to read.

UPDATE (Feb. 26): Pierre Trudel says La Presse did a good job with its scoop… in an article in La Presse.

| Media

Journal Daily Digest: Do they regret the errors?

The big link for today is (like many of the ones below) from Rue Frontenac, the website put out by locked-out Journal workers. One of the pieces put up Thursday goes through editions of the Journal over the past week and points out some of the errors in the paper. (It didn’t take me long to find one myself – the Sunday paper’s inside index of columnists had the wrong page number for Benoit Aubin.)

Most of the errors are fairly small (misspelling hockey players’ names), some are a bit more severe (getting a hockey player’s team wrong), and some are just grammatical nitpicking. What is clear, though, is that they spent a lot of time going through the paper in order to catalog and report on these flaws. I guess they have a lot of free time on their hands now.

One of their criticisms, of the use of the phrase “setting a new record” (as if one could set a record without it being new) made me smile because it’s something that I’ve done a few times in headlines and has been marked in red ink by fellow editors more than once.

The rest

Last week I got a consumer survey in the mail, inviting me to fill it out and win crazy prizes. I actually started filling it out until I noticed it was asking me information that went way beyond what I’m prepared to divulge.

I did notice it had a section on what newspaper you read. But something didn’t seem right.

Notice something missing?

Notice something missing?

| Blogosphere, Media

Big media is stealing your photos

Local blogger Julie Belanger is peeved at 24 Heures. They published a photo of hers, without permission or credit, to illustrate a story.

It’s the kind of stuff you expect from amateur operations. Do a Google Image search and copy whatever looks good. Take a stock photo from Getty Images or iStock without paying for it. Or just go on Flickr, ignore the copyright or copyleft notices and use a photo for commercial uses, with or without attribution. TVA isn’t above it.

What makes this case interesting is the response she got from the editor: The photo was sent along with a press release, so they’re not responsible.

Bullshit.

Whether or not this was done (the organization that sent it denies that any photo was attached and the release on Telbec backs them up), it’s the newspaper’s responsibility to ensure that photos and text they publish are not protected by copyright. Just like you can’t get away with having stolen merchandise just because you bought it from someone dirt cheap in good faith, you can’t simply pass the buck on copyright infringement.

If the organization sent the newspaper a photo and made it clear that there was no problem publishing it, then the newspaper should sue the organization and the photographer should sue both.

Sadly, because these photographers don’t have copyright lawyers on retainer, big media can simply screw them over.