Tag Archives: CanWest

| Business, Media

Time to remember the number for EI

Some Canadian media companies reported earnings this week, but everyone’s eyes were on my parent company Canwest. And by “everyone” I mean “The Globe and Mail, the CBC and the Toronto Star”, and by “eyes” I mean “daggers of hate”.

Canwest’s earnings report showed some bad numbers, made worse by both the current economic situation (which doesn’t look highly upon companies with a lot of debt) and the newspaper crisis. There are suggestions that the company might have problems making its debt payments and may be forced to sell assets, though upper management is forever optimistic (at least in its intracorporate literature). A bright spot apparently is that the National Post showed a profit for the first time, making the free-market economists they have as columnists seem slightly less hypocritical.

Unsurprisingly, the Globe had fun at Canwest’s expense, with a couple of pieces lamenting the company’s impending doom.

| Business, Media

Debt crisis hurts HugeMediaCorps

After Canwest announced it was cutting jobs and CTV announced it was cutting jobs, Rogers is now announcing it is cutting jobs, about 100 of them, including staff at Maclean’s, Sportsnet and CityTV.

You know what these three megacorporations have in common? They all thought they could get rich by acquiring other media companies.

Canwest was still paying off the debt it took on when it bought the Southam newspaper chain (which includes my employer, The Gazette) when it decided it needed more cable channels and acquired Alliance Atlantis. This gave them channels including Showcase.

Bell Canada responded to Canwest’s consolidation by planning a megacorporation of its own. Bell acquired CTV and the Globe and Mail and eventually most of CHUM’s assets. In exchange for the latter, BCE sold shares in the company to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Torstar and the Thomson family, and BellGlobeMedia became CTVglobemedia.

A lot of Rogers’s acquisitions have been in the form of CTV’s sloppy seconds (oh wait, can I not use those words?). This includes Sportsnet, which CTV had to dump when it acquired TSN, and City TV ($375 million), which CTV had to dump when it acquired CHUM. It also acquired the Blue Jays, Fido, as well as specialty TV networks and radio stations within the past decade.

I’m no financial expert, and I don’t have a very clear idea of the balance sheets of these three companies, but this is a really bad time to have debt, especially risky debt (say, holding a bunch of assets in an industry that might disappear entirely in 10 years). The economic downturn that the mortgage debt crisis precipitated is certainly affecting these companies and worrying their management, but I think the debt problem is more significant here than the advertising or subscription revenue problems.

Perhaps this might serve as a warning that consolidation isn’t always the best way to go.

Or perhaps not.

UPDATE (Dec. 9): The New York Times, which I can only assume got the idea from this blog post, has a similar analysis of U.S. newspapers (though in that case, it was taking on debt to acquire other newspapers that got them into trouble).

| Business, In the news, Media, Navel-gazing

Canwest cuts 560 jobs nationwide

CBC and CP and Reuters and the Star and the Globe and AFP and The Tyee have the stories, based largely on Canwest’s own press release. Others have inexplicably slapped bylines on stories that are based entirely on the press release. Canwest’s own news service also has a story, which exclusively quotes Canwest.

There aren’t any specific breakdowns beyond 210 in broadcasting and 360 in publishing, but it represents more than 5% of the entire workforce.

This all comes less than a month after the CRTC said Canwest and other conventional TV broadcasters couldn’t charge fees for local cable companies carrying their stations.

As a contract worker, it means I probably won’t be hired as a permanent employee any time in the coming century.

We’ll see.

UPDATE: Bill Brioux of TV Feeds My Family has some analysis of the broadcast side. Meanwhile, J-Source has some not-too-flattering comments about Canwest’s money troubles

| Media, Montreal, Navel-gazing

Petition time

17 79 413 983 1944 2599 3165 3849 4668 signatures and counting…

UPDATE: Link love from CJAD, Montreal City Weblog, Montreal LJ and various Facebook pages, blogs and twitter statuses.

Of course, some people seem to think outsourcing editorial work is a good idea.

UPDATE (Oct. 24): I’ve seen some reactions on the level of “good riddance” from people who don’t like The Gazette or who think its quality has already degraded to the point where they don’t care. That’s really sad. Especially since I doubt any news outlet that swoops in to replace it would be any better. Instead, you’d see a version of Metro or a Sun Media paper or something. It’s a scary thought. Besides, if you’re not crazy about the paper’s management, why not support the union against them?

| Media, Opinion, Slow News Day

Nobody reads fine print (except ours, right?)

The Gazette has a Canwest-penned article in today’s paper (complete with adorable photo of Montreal-guy-who-visits-websites) about how people don’t read the fine print when visiting websites and entering into contracts with web companies. It cites their obscene length as a key factor:

In the case of online ticket purchases, if you actually click to read Ticketmaster’s fine print before buying concert tickets, the terms run nearly 6,200 words. It takes far longer to read than the three minutes and 15 seconds Ticketmaster gives you to make a decision to buy tickets.

It also points out that the terms can be abusive to the point of absurdity:

They’re often lengthy and complicated. Sometimes they can be changed unilaterally by the company, and they usually include a limited corporate liability clause.

Readers are encouraged to comment on this article. In order to do that, you have to agree to this 785-word license release, which also requires you to read and agree to this 10,509-word general website terms of service. Both contain an absolute liability waiver, and the latter contains a clause that allows the company to unilaterally change the terms without notice. It also contains gems like these:

  1. Except as provided herein, you agree not to reproduce, make derivative works of, retransmit, distribute, sell, publish, communicate, broadcast or otherwise make available any of the Content obtained through a canada.com Site or any of the Services, including without limitation, by caching, framing, deep-linking or similar means, without the prior written consent of the respective copyright owner of such Content.
  2. You shall not have any right to terminate the permissions granted herein, nor to seek, obtain, or enforce any injunctive or other equitable relief against canada.com, all of which such rights are hereby expressly and irrevocably waived by you in favour of canada.com.
  3. You acknowledge having obtained independent legal advice in connection with this license, release and waiver, failing which, you shall be deemed to have voluntarily waived the right to seek such independent legal advice.

Don’t let it be said my bosses don’t have a sense of humour.

(By submitting a comment to this blog post, you hereby agree that Fagstein is awesome.)

| Business, Media

Gazette call centre gets pink slip

The notice from the union was in my mailbox when I came in today: The Gazette and its workers union, the Montreal Newspaper Guild, have reached an agreement concerning workers in the Reader Sales and Service department whose jobs are being outsourced to a Canwest call centre in Winnipeg.

The deal essentially turns the layoffs into forced buyouts, with a deal similar to what many in the editorial department took in January. It comes after the union lost a bid to merge the RSS bargaining unit with the editorial and advertising ones, which would have leveraged the power of the latter to save the former.

It’s sad that the jobs are going, and that people calling about their morning paper are going to speak to a minimum-wage call centre guy on the night shift in Winnipeg than someone in the Gazette building who knows about the paper and the city and actually cares about readers.

| Media

Corporate executives dishonest, oh my!

The Globe and Mail accuses Canwest head Leonard Asper of talking out of both sides of his mouth, telling the CRTC that Canadian television is in financial peril and telling shareholders that Global TV is making a gazillion dollars with profit margins going up.

On the one hand, it’s true. On the other hand, it’s neither surprising nor is it unique to Canwest. As the article points out, Globe owner CTVglobemedia made the same statements to the CRTC, and I don’t think that company is telling its shareholders that it’s near bankruptcy.

| Business, Media

Welcome to the new Canwest

New Canwest logo

Canwest (note the lowercase W, which is apparently the new style) has changed its logo again, unifying its various brands under the one big banner.

They do this at the same time they announce healthy earnings in the latest quarter:

Canwest’s publishing business, which includes The Gazette and metropolitan newspapers across the country as well as the National Post, performed well, with revenue up five per cent to $362 million and earnings up 16 per cent to $102 million.

This is before the buyouts.

| Business, Media

CanWest continues to spread

Despite cuts at their newspapers, CanWest has plenty of money to buy up media properties. Today it added six new community publications in the Windsor area, bringing its total up to 30.

CanWest, the largest newspaper publisher in Canada, called the acquisition “yet another example of CanWest’s commitment to developing strong community voices across this country.”

Also today, CRTC hearings into CanWest’s bid to take over Alliance Atlantis are being held.

| Business, Media

CanWest outsourcing more layout to non-union workers

The Tyee has an article about work being outsourced from the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province newsrooms into non-unionized positions in Hamilton, Ont. Currently, Hamilton takes care of things like stock pages and sports scoreboards, work which can be replicated for more than one paper. The TV Times is also produced out of one location, with the local programming grids and paper’s logo slapped on at the end. But now CanWest’s Vancouver papers are sending more pages to be done there, which is worrying union leaders.

This is kind of one of those grey areas with unions. Is it OK to hire non-unionized workers for union jobs if it’s being done in another city? Can you shift jobs from a unionized part of a company to a non-unionized part without problems?

Sun editor-in-chief Patricia Graham calls the layout being transferred “essentially a mechanical function.” The article doesn’t give details about what exactly is being transferred, but I’m guessing it’s debatable how “mechanical” such a function really is.

UPDATE (Nov. 10): J-Source has another post on the CanWest situation, including a union response alleging that Global is violating its CRTC licenses by centralizing its newsrooms.

| Montreal, TV

CJNT: Multicultural American celebrity news

Once upon a time, Montreal had a low-budget multi-ethnic television station whose mission it was to provide a space where allophones could communicate. The station was called CJNT, and broadcasted over the air on channel 62.

Then the channel was acquired by a media company, which was in turn acquired by CanWest/Global. CanWest forced the station to declare bankruptcy, and has been egging the CRTC to allow it to reduce its ethnic content to put more commercially viable programming on instead.

The latest sad move in this direction came in April, when CanWest announced that its CH stations would be rebranded as “E!” entertainment (read: celebrity gossip) channels. That change took effect last Friday, and the channel’s been running all sorts of “E!” programming from the U.S. network ever since.

But what about its commitment to 60% multicultural programming? The channel still runs its multicultural shows, many during prime-time (the CRTC rules require this). And in between, they provide E! celebrity gossip shows dubbed in other languages. Now you can hear about Britney Spears in Portuguese!

Not only is celebrity gossip bad in and of itself, but to take a channel designed to give a voice to those who can’t get access to commercial airwaves, and use that channel (to the extent allowable by law) to broadcast unimportant information about people who have so much television coverage that they take great pains to limit it…

Kind of ironic, don’t you think?

Needless to say, the only reaction this change has gotten in the blogosphere is bad: “Tripe.”

| Media

Wire services are a double-edged sword

There’s an interesting trend happening in the news media. As wire services become ubiquitous, providing almost all the content for crappy, journalist-free newspapers like Metro, major news organizations are beginning to realize that they need to provide good, original content to distinguish themselves from these free alternatives. Otherwise, why would people buy their paper or visit their website when they can get the same wire story from another source?

Earlier this summer, CanWest completed its pullout of Canadian Press, the only nationwide news service in Canada. The decision cut CP’s budget by 9 per cent, and had some people crying that the sky was going to fall.

Although we’re only a couple of months into it, that looks unlikely. CP’s reliance on the big papers was already much lower than it had been previously, thanks to these free papers and other organizations like radio stations who are too cheap to have a news staff of their own. They’re also expanding their online presence, providing things like those Flash-based election tickers. (It’ll be interesting to see how CanWest papers handle general elections where the CP wire is of critical importance.)

I’ve heard a lot of people criticize the move, both inside and outside affected newsrooms, because it limits access to news from small regions, and because other outlets will run news they don’t have access to.

But I see it as a good thing. CanWest used some of the money they saved from dumping CP (though very little compared to how much they’re pocketing for shareholders) to expand its CanWest News Service, which before this summer was basically just the newsrooms of CanWest papers and a few reporters scattered in places like Ottawa, New York and Washington D.C. Now instead of one news service, we have two competing ones, and more journalists covering news.

In a similar vein, as of today CNN is no longer a client of Reuters news service. (If your first reaction to that news was “CNN was using Reuters?”, you’re not alone.) Instead, the news channel and Internet news giant will be boosting its own news-gathering, while still using Associated Press copy. That’s probably just some marketing speak and the investments will be trivial, especially when you consider that they were just looking for a better deal, but it’s better than nothing.

Wire services are very important, because they allow small news organizations to get news from far-away places, and provides an alternative to, say, expanding the White House Press Briefing Room to the size of a small stadium.

But in the Internet age, where a story carried by a wire service can be read from hundreds of different websites, news media have to provide strong original reporting to send eyes their way.

It’s vain, self-serving, greedy and transparent, but it’s good for journalism.

UPDATE (Sept. 11): CNN dumping Reuters comes back to bite them in the ass when they couldn’t run the Bin Laden video that Reuters had gained access to and started distributing. I wonder if Reuters paid Bin Laden royalties?

| Business, Media, Montreal, TV

CJNT: America is a culture, right?

It seems Global’s second network of stations they don’t know what else to do with is being rebranded. Starting in September, CH stations (including Montreal’s CJNT-62) will become E! Yes, that E! Only it’s E! in Canada.

This is significant for a number of reasons, the most distressing of which is that CJNT is supposed to be Montreal’s ethnic station, but because ethnic programming isn’t a money-maker, the station was bought out by a company which was in turn bought out by CanWest/Global. They petitioned the CRTC to agree to only 50% ethnic programming during prime time, and though they were denied that request, they still have quite a bit of U.S. network programming in their prime time schedule.

So what was once a struggling 100% ethnic programming station (albeit one that only broadcast for about 12 hours a day) will now include programming that Canadians clearly need on an over-the-air channel: Celebrity gossip and second-rate U.S. network TV shows.

They even have a video with Ryan Seacresty good ness (he even mentions our country’s name!)