Tag Archives: CBMT

| Montreal, Opinion, TV

The Alouettes parade and the two solitudes

A TV camera setup for live coverage of the Grey Cup parade and party in 2009.

Last year, when the Alouettes won the Grey Cup with a spectacular last-second field goal against the Saskatchewan Roughriders (though TSN’s placement of it as the #1 wacky CFL moment of all-time was a bit over-the-top), I went down to Ste. Catherine St. and the new Place des Festivals and joined in the party, taking a few photos of the assembled media. It was fun being in such a large crowd celebrating a pro sports championship.

This year, the Grey Cup wasn’t as exciting. (I barely noticed it was over, looking up from my copy editing station.) And with the same parade-and-party planned, and the weather not looking too hot, I reluctantly stayed home to watch the coverage on TV.

Thankfully, there wasn’t a lack of live parade coverage on television, but where it was covered and where it wasn’t made it clear to me how geographically biased Canada’s English and French-language networks are.

On the English side, both CFCF (CTV) and CKMI (Global) aired live parade specials, as they had last year. Some kudos are due to Global here, which has awfully few resources and doesn’t even produce its own newscast. I’ve criticized the station for barely meeting CRTC minimums on local programming (and even then by airing repeats of their newscasts at 6am and 6:30am), for outsourcing their production and using a fake, misleading green-screen set, and even having a weatherman who’s based in Toronto (but pretends he’s in Montreal). So to be able to put together a two-hour live special, with Mike Le Couteur in studio, Richard Dagenais at the Place des Festivals and Domenic Fazioli along the parade route, must have been quite the feat for this tiny group. CFCF’s special may have been technically better, but was half an hour shorter and replaced their noon newscast.

CBMT (CBC Montreal) didn’t air a parade special. I can’t remember the last time this once-great station aired a live local special event. A CBC camera was on site with local sports reporter Sonali Karnick, but it was only used to give some live hits for CBC News Network. Online, they had a webcast of the parade and party without any commentary or interviews.

I went over to the all-news and all-sports networks: CBC News Network, CTV News Channel, TSN and Rogers Sportsnet. I figured they all had good reason to cover this parade. It’s not like anything else breaking was going on at noon on a Wednesday.

You know what I found? Nothing.

CBC and CTV’s news channels were going through the motions, recapping the latest headlines. TSN was recapping the previous night’s Maple Leafs game, followed by a broadcast of competitive darts.

Darts!

TSN, which two days earlier had been crowing about how it had 4.94 million viewers for the Grey Cup game (a further 1.1 million was watching on RDS), just short of the previous year’s record, apparently thought that showing SportsCentre and darts was more interesting than a Grey Cup victory parade.

What annoys me most was how little effort would have been required to give this a national audience. Nothing important would have to have been pre-empted. And because CTV owns CFCF, CTVNC and TSN, they could have simply had the national news and sports channels take the CFCF feed for an hour and a half and shown the parade nationally as Montreal viewers were watching it. There are anglophone Montreal expats across the country, not to mention simple fans of the Canadian Football League (surely that 4.94 million wasn’t all Roughriders fans, considering Saskatchewan’s total population is just over 1 million).

CBC would have needed more effort, but even then it already had plenty of resources in place. RDI was covering the parade live, and Sonali Karnick was in place with a CBC camera and live feed. Would it have really been that much more difficult to just air the common parade feed and provide some colour commentary?

Montréal = français, Toronto = English

On the French side, it was the opposite problem: The cable channels had parade specials, but the local channels didn’t air them. LCN, RDI and RDS all had specials lasting more than two hours. Radio-Canada and TVA stuck with regular programming, which at noon means newscasts. Brief stories about the parade, but no live special. V and Télé-Québec, well, they don’t have news departments so I didn’t exactly expect much from them.

Part of me wants to see the Toronto Argonauts win the next Grey Cup so I can contrast the coverage plans. Does anyone seriously believe that CTVNC, CBCNN, TSN, CP24, Sportsnet and the rest wouldn’t give this wall-to-wall coverage if it was in Toronto? And, conversely, that LCN, RDI and RDS would all ignore it completely if it was anywhere other than Montreal (or maybe Quebec City)?

LCN, RDS and CTV are privately-owned networks, so they can do whatever they want. If they want to be homers for the cities their broadcast studios are located in, if they have little interest in covering any event that’s not happening within 50 kilometres of their offices, if they want to be de facto regional news networks, that’s up to them.

But CBC is publicly-financed, and their geographical bias really annoys me, particularly with RDI, which can often be mistaken for an all-Montreal-news channel. I realize that a large part of its market lives within the greater Montreal area, but as a national French-language news channel it has a mandate to cover the entire country, not just wherever they can get to on a tank of gas from the Maison Radio-Canada.

CBC should have been there. And if the Roughriders had won, RDI should have been in Regina.

You might think this is a silly discussion to have over something as trivial as a Grey Cup victory parade, but it’s a symptom of a larger problem. We see the same decisions being made during municipal and provincial elections, or provincial budgets, or just about any other prescheduled major local news events. During the last municipal election in 2009, the local anglo stations couldn’t be bothered to cut into their American programming, so updates were limited to their websites, the 11pm newscasts and the occasional news break during commercials. The last provincial election was better, but there was more national interest in that vote. That press conference of Alouettes president Larry Smith announcing his resignation? Live on RDI and LCN, but all but ignored by CTV News Channel and CBC News Network.

As local stations get gutted of their resources and national networks continue to figure out ways of centralizing the basic functions of broadcasting, the ability to do special event programming is severely reduced. And as those same network bigwigs continue to put competitive interests above their duties to serve national populations, these geographical biases from our national news and sports networks will only get worse.

You can re-watch the parade specials (or parts thereof) online from CFCF, CKMI, RDS (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10) and RDI

| Montreal, TV

Kai Nagata takes over CTV’s Quebec bureau

Kai Nagata reporting live from outside in the cold last January

More than three months after posting an opening for a Quebec City reporter to replace the retiring John Grant, CFCF reached out and stole an up-and-comer from its direct competitor, hiring CBC Montreal reporter Kai Nagata for the job.

The station didn’t get much demand for the job internally, with much of its staff consisting of veterans who aren’t eager to move to a city that’s more than a two-hour drive away and doesn’t have much of an English scene.

“I think our current staff of reporters are pretty happy with what they’re doing now, and simply chose to stay put,” CTV Montreal news director Jed Kahane told me. “Most of them have deep roots in Montreal, with families and other personal commitments here, so I wasn’t expecting any internal applicants.”

So instead, he reached out to Nagata and offered him the job, which Nagata formally accepted last Friday.

“I’ve been watching Kai since he started at CBC and was always very impressed with his work,” Kahane said in a totally not-press-release-y way. “He’s a serious journalist with a lot of insight and commitment. He’s also a great storyteller who is at ease in front of the camera. I think what matters most in this profession is curiosity, a critical eye and a strong desire to inform the public responsibly. Kai has all of that; the rest he’ll learn.

“I saw him cover the opening day of Marc Bellemare’s testimony the other day for CBC’s The National, and he did a great job. I’m really excited he’s joining our team, and like his predecessor John Grant who is retiring at the end of the month, I’m confident Kai will earn the respect of our viewers.”

Nagata, 23, has only been working at the CBC since the spring of 2008. He moved to Montreal from Vancouver a year earlier to take Concordia’s graduate journalism diploma program. I’ve known him since then – we play the occasional soccer or board game. (So feel free to compensate for any bias this post may have in his favour.)

“A chance to step up my game”

Asked about his move, Nagata said he was both excited about this new adventure and sad that “I’m leaving behind the only journalistic family I’ve ever known. These are people I respect professionally but I also shared a lot of laughs and frustrations and cold cafeteria meals with. It’s not an easy thing to walk away from.”

Still, Nagata said he has felt “a sense of restlessness” that this new opportunity can help alleviate. “They’re giving me the chance to cover the biggest stories in the province for the biggest anglophone audience in the province and to immerse myself in francophone culture in a beautiful city and find out what I’m made of.”

“CBC went out of their way from the very beginning to challenge me and to present me with opportunities to cover these interesting stories and to go places and talk to people and to file nationally for radio and TV, but when it came down to it I just felt like the job that CTV is offering me is a chance to step up my game as a journalist.”

Nagata said he’s particularly glad that he’ll have something few television reporters have the luxury of these days: a beat. “Politics is about people,” he said. “There’s a lot of beats that I admire, but politics has always attracted me.”

What about CBC?

The CBC was gracious about Nagata’s career advancement, while putting a positive spin on it.

“Kai is very talented and we’ll miss him around here, but we’re happy for him and wish him all the best,” said News Director Mary-Jo Barr. “I’m proud to know our journalists at CBC Montreal are second to none, and are sought after by other organizations.”

Barr can hardly fault Nagata’s move. She herself used to work at CTV, and plenty of people have jumped from one station to the other.

Nagata gave his two weeks’ notice and plans to keep working until next Friday. He’s currently passing on specialized videojournalist training he received (“videojournalist” being CBC-ese for “working without a cameraman to save us money”) to one of the station’s other up-and-coming young journalists (and a former classmate of mine), Catherine Cullen.

Mind you, this hasn’t stopped him from already becoming friends with CTV staff through Twitter.

Nagata will join the CTV family starting Sept. 27, and spend a few days training with Grant. He takes over the beat on Oct. 1.

| TV

Butterfingers

It was really hot today, but that’s nothing compared to the forecast for next week, apparently:

CBC's Kenny Bodanis realizes he's made a typo in his weather forecast

One thing about putting your newscasts online is that the errors of live TV remain accessible long after they’ve aired. This is Kenny Bodanis (sitting, err, standing in for Frank Cavallaro), who accidentally added an extra digit to next Tuesday’s high during Tuesday’s weather segment on CBMT (fun starts about the 15-minute mark). He assures us it won’t actually be 234 degrees next Tuesday, though it might feel like it.

Then again, I have it on pretty good authority that the weather people just pull numbers out of nowhere for forecasts six and seven days ahead, so he could very well be right!

(via Alex Leduc on Facebook)

| Montreal, Radio, TV

PJ Stock too cool for Montreal

PJ Stock

P.J. Stock, a former journeyman NHL player turned hockey analyst, has come to the realization over the past few months that he was stretching himself a little too thin. His main gig at Hockey Night in Canada involved a lot of travelling between Toronto and Montreal on weekends.

Though he contributed regularly for CBMT’s evening newscast, he cut that weeks ago (CBC says it’s looking for a replacement). Last week, he said goodbye to an afternoon radio show on the Team 990. He’ll be replaced there by Randy Tieman of CFCF.

Stock says he wants to spend more time with his family. And admiring himself in the mirror.

| Opinion, TV

What if we stopped subsidizing local TV?

One of the arguments used against conventional television broadcasters in Canada – CTVglobemedia and my corporate overlord Canwest especially – in this whole fee-for-carriage debate is that they’re both giant megacorporations and own a slew of cash-cow specialty television channels.

The broadcasters counter that they can’t take profits from one part of the business and subsidize another.

As much as the knee-jerk consumer reaction might be that this is exactly what they should do, they’re right. It makes no business sense for a profit-generating enterprise to not be generating profit. If conventional television doesn’t make money, then subsidy or no subsidy, it will eventually be shut down.

CTV and Canwest purchased their specialty arsenals knowing the conventional model was going down the toilet. If it came down to it, neither would have any trouble shutting down their entire conventional network and moving completely to specialty channels. But conventional TV is still making money (only just) and they’re betting on a fee-for-carriage solution to get them more.

But as much as the broadcasters are arguing against subsidizing their own operations, they have no trouble demanding exactly that from cable and satellite broadcast distribution companies. Not only do they benefit directly from the new Local Programming Improvement Fund in small markets, but their expensive Canadian dramas and comedies get large subsidies from the Canadian Media Fund, formerly the Canadian Television Fund. Both of these funds get their income from cable and satellite companies.

And cross-subsidization is what the conventional broadcasters do for local programming. In fact, even though they constantly whine that the “model is broken”, the basic premise of using profits from reselling U.S. programming to fund Canadian and local programming remains. This isn’t done because CTV and Global have hearts of gold and see the value in homegrown television, it’s because the CRTC forces them to air this kind of programming as conditions of license.

Continue reading →

| Montreal, Opinion, TV

The New CBC Montreal

On Monday, the great renewal of CBC television took shape, with all sorts of minor pointless changes new, attention-catching refreshening of look and feel.

Nationally, CBC Newsworld was renamed CBC News Network, gained some on-screen furniture (a clock, weather, CNN-like animated lower-thirds, and an obnoxious non-transparent bug in the corner) and got a new schedule which has more one-hour shows and less 24-hour newsroom.

The National was similarly changed to reflect the network’s new look (block serifs and pointless coloured square dots). Most importantly, Peter Mansbridge does the newscast standing up, which is kind of awkward.

Peter Mansbridge, kickin' it old-school - and standing

Peter Mansbridge, kickin' it old-school - and standing

Other reviews of changes on the national level:

Changes in radio were minor: a new World Report at 5am for early risers, and additional local radio newscasts at 6:30pm (short) and 7pm (long).

Online, very little has changed, other than the new block-serifed logo and the Inside Politics blog with Kady O’Malley, freshly poached from Macleans.

But what interested me was the local television news. CBC Montreal hasn’t had a late-evening newscast in a long time, and I was curious how they would do this one ever since I heard about it last month.

It starts with the 6pm newscast, which still has the 90-minute format but gets a new graphical look:

Continue reading →

| Montreal, TV

CBC 11pm local newscast launches Monday

Remember that 11pm local newscast that I told you about last month? CBC has announced that it’s launching on Monday.

The new newscasts are being brought in across the country, and will start at 10:55pm, cutting a few minutes into The National.

As I explained last month, the 10-minute newscast would be a rapid-fire recap of the day’s events, with some late-breaking news that’s updated from the 6pm newscast.

And as I explained, there won’t be much of a new budget for this extra programming, so employees will be stetched even further.

CBC Montreal news director Mary-Jo Barr tells Fagstein that Andrew Chang will be the night host, which will have a night reporter filing an updated story, Frank Cavallaro doing live weather, and updates on things like evening Canadiens games. The local newscast will also feature new graphics (an improvement that is sorely needed if you’ve seen some of those graphics over the past few years).

Among other changes on the docket:

  • CBC Newsworld gets renamed CBC News Network. This sounds very similar to CTV rebranding CTV Newsnet as CTV News Channel, and about as pointless. The new CBC NN (not to be confused with CNN) will have a new schedule with some new shows, for anyone who actually cares about the schedule of a 24-hour news network.
  • An online 10-minute version of The National by 6pm. A good idea, provided they can provide it in enough formats for it to be accessible (like, say, in a downloadable podcast form for those of us on the go). The newscast will also be “customizable”, in that viewers will be able to select which stories will be part of it. Not quite sure how that will work, but the concept makes sense.
  • The National moves to 6pm on Saturday to avoid conflicting with NHL coverage. Because hockey is more important than news.
  • A “faster pace” and “new format” for The National which includes more stuff from Marketplace and the Fifth Estate. In other words, reusing staff from one show to provide cheap content for another.
  • More “transparency” in news reporting. It’s unclear what they mean by this, though they give the example of explaining the CBC’s policy on reporting on kidnappings. Of course, this would be welcome by people like me, but I’m skeptical that CBC News can get a culture of true transparency going without it getting torpedoed by marketing interests eventually.
  • Wendy Mesley will appear regularly on The National to generate “debate”. Make your own Wendy Mesley/Peter Mansbridge joke here.
  • Kady O’Malley starts a political blog. You know Kady, she used to blog for Maclean’s before CBC poached her.
  • World Report, which airs mornings at the top of the hour, will add a newscast at 5am for those poor souls who are up at that hour. This sounds a bit odd, considering Daybreak starts at 5:30. Are they going to fill that extra 20 minutes with national content, or just continue their overnight programming?
| Montreal, TV

CBC Montreal to start 11pm newscast: sources

It’s not a secret at the CBC, but it’s being treated that way with the outside world: CBMT, CBC’s Montreal television station, is planning to launch an 11pm newscast next month.

According to multiple sources within the CBC, the new 11pm newscast would be a short, 10-minute recap of the top stories, similar to what airs currently in Vancouver.

You can see an example of Vancouver at Eleven here. It’s five minutes long, sandwiched between The National and The Hour. Vancouver’s newscast will be expanding to 10 minutes, which should hopefully give the anchor an opportunity to breathe properly. Other markets are also planning similar newscasts.

CBC Montreal news director Mary-Jo Barr was coy when I asked her about the new newscast, neither confirming nor denying its existence. She would say only that “there’s some excitement over here at CBC Montreal” and hinted at an upcoming announcement.

Ten minutes might not sound like much, but when you add local news in the evening newscasts together, you get to about that figure. Vancouver at Eleven contains no advertising, and only a brief weather segment. It’s not clear whether that would still be the case in a 10-minute newscast.

CBMT hasn’t aired an 11pm newscast since Newswatch was cancelled in 2000. Drastic cutbacks at the CBC led to the idea of “Canada Now”, a one-hour evening newscast whose first half-hour was hosted by Ian Hanomansing in Vancouver and the rest by local anchors. That finally ended in 2007, when plummeting ratings forced the CBC to reconsider and bring back one-hour local newscasts. CBMT has been slowly building back the audience it forfeited to CFCF ever since.

Sources tell Fagstein the 11pm newscast should begin around Thanksgiving (in other words, mid-October).

| Montreal, TV

CBC Montreal News at Five: Filling time with repeats

CBMT News at Five

It was heralded as part of a renewal, a refocusing on local news and information that would bring people back to the CBC: Local newscasts in Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Montreal, Halifax, Calgary and Toronto would be expanded from an hour to 90 minutes. This comes just a few years after they were expanded from half an hour to an hour.

There’s just one hitch: There’s no additional staff to fill that extra time. In fact, the CBC is having to deal with much fewer staff than it had last year. So the idea, the CBC says, is to have three separate 30-minute newscasts back-to-back, each giving a different angle on the top stories of the day. People could watch the entire 90 minutes, or they could just watch a 30-minute segment and get the top headlines.

That’s led to some criticism from the usual sources that the new newscast would be more repititious or even vacuous. The competition collectively yawned.

Yesterday, I watched the entire 90-minute newscast with my stopwatch laptop and crunched the numbers on how exactly they’re filling their airtime in these extra 30 minutes.

Here’s what I found. Note that these numbers are based on a single newscast, and so the average could be wildly different from what we see here.

Breakdown

As with my previous analysis, I broke the newscast down into major categories:

  • Advertising: Commercial breaks. There were nine of them through the broadcast, an average of 2:21.
  • Filler: Includes show openings and closings and “coming up” previews. There were an astonishing 10 of the latter (13 if you include the ones in the show openings). The newscast spent more than five minutes telling you what they were going to talk about later.
  • Local news: This includes six local briefs and the following news stories done by local reporters:
    • Opus card troubles by Amanda Pfeffer (two packages and a brief)
    • Drunk driving sentence by Amanda Margison (two packages and a brief)
    • Peel pipe burst by Tim Duboyce (two packages and a brief)
    • New surgery technique by Kristin Falcao (one package)
  • National news: Eight story packages provided by the national network, and a single national news brief.
  • Wire news: Five briefs about world news stories with video provided by wire services.
  • Weather: Frank Cavallaro got a lot of air time: eight weather segments, averaging 1:37. And this doesn’t include the short 5-second bursts he presents during the “coming up” segments.
  • Sports: There was no separate sports segment, so I’ve included these two local sports stories under the sports banner (a third story, about the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, has been filed under national news):
    • Impact thinking of leaving the USL by Kim Brunhuber (two packages)
    • A brief on funeral services for former Alouette Sam Etcheverry
  • Business: Graphics with closing numbers were shown twice (once with anchor’s voice-over, once without)
  • Arts: Consists entirely of The Scene, a national arts roundup by Jelena Adzic, which was presented once at the end of the 5pm newscast.

If we consolidate the categories into local news (including sports and weather) and non-local news (including the arts segment), it looks like this:

  • Local: 43%
  • Non-local: 27%
  • Advertising: 23%
  • Filler: 7%

That actually doesn’t look too bad, but it’s more complicated than that, as you’ll see.

Before and after

CBMT before and after

Comparing before and after, we see most proportions are about the same, but local news has taken a substantial hit, mainly at the expense of more weather and more national news.

Here’s the changes in chart form:

Category Before After
Advertising 25% 23%
Filler 8% 7%
Local news 31% 23%
National news 16% 20%
Wire news 2% 3%
Weather 11% 14%
Sports 5% 5%
Business 1%* 1%
Arts 1%* 4%

* Business numbers weren’t included in the previous charts, but represented about 1% of the average newscast. Arts numbers also weren’t included. The Scene is not presented daily, and was aired during only one of the three studied newscasts, where it was categorized as national news.

Repetition

The CBC big-wigs say you could watch the entire 90 minutes, but you don’t have to, because the main headlines will be in each of the three newscasts, but each time a different angle will be presented.

Technically that’s true. The three main local stories (the Opus card lineups, drunk driving sentence and Peel St. pipe burst) were presented once in each of the newscasts (a live reporter stand-up or packaged report in two of them, and a brief without the reporter in another), and the reporters did seem to file two slightly different packaged reports, with different interviews or a slightly different angle.

But the story was the same. I don’t feel I learned anything new from the second time I watched it.

The repetition even got annoying at times. It led to at least one case where a story would be teased as “coming up” 13 minutes after it was reported (in the same half-hour block).

Stretching the staff

Of course, the real reason for all this kinda-repetition is the lack of additional staff. Five reporters presented local stories (four news, one sports). This is the same as the average from the 60-minute newscast. The number of (distinct) local briefs actually went down compared to the 60-minute newscast average.

Meanwhile, the use of national packages tells a different story. The number used was double the 60-minute average (8 vs. 4), and not a single one was repeated throughout the 90-minute broadcast. Not even the national and international briefs were repeated.

This forces us to ask: Why does local news need to be repeated in each of the three broadcasts, but non-local news doesn’t? Is national news (like, say, the fact that the Liberal Party no longer supports the government) unimportant?

The new anchor

Andrew Chang, anchor

Andrew Chang, anchor

Andrew Chang is currently anchoring solo. He’ll be joined by Jennifer Hall starting next Tuesday. You could definitely see the bright green glow under that stylish suit as he somewhat nervously stumbled on the occasional line. But he was comfortable enough that it didn’t seem awkward. Plus, he’s adorable. I’m comfortable enough in my masculinity to say that. My gut feeling is that he’ll do a good job in the chair.

Michel Godbout, the former anchor and now a Really Important News Correspondent, seemed a bit odd in his new role. It wasn’t that Godbout was bad. Rather, having him talk to Chang in a split-screen (one designed in such a way that Godbout looked much bigger than Chang), it was hard to see Chang as the anchor and Godbout as the reporter. Especially because Godbout still has many of his anchorisms – explaining stories to us in the “now, what that means is” way that he would do so often in the anchor chair.

I’m not sure if this feeling is because the two still need to get used to their new roles, or because we need to get used to them being in their new roles, or a mixture of the two.

Suggestions

Let it not be said my criticisms are not constructive. Here are some suggestions for the new newscast(s).

  • Split or get off the pot: This whole different-angle thing isn’t working. Either design a newscast that people can watch for 90 minutes, or tape a 30-minute newscast and replay it twice.
  • Reschedule: If your mantra is that you want people to check in whenever they’re free, why are you limiting them to a 90-minute segment of the day? CBMT is the only one of the three anglo stations without a late-night newscast. Why not take out one of those 30-minute blocks and move it to 11pm? Then it won’t matter if you’re repeating the same stories because you’ll be reaching an entirely different block of viewers.
  • Get a local arts reporter:  “The Scene” is a joke and an insult to your viewers. Its top story was about a new Cirque du Soleil show opening … in Toronto. And that’s the next stop in a worldwide tour for the show which began in Montreal. I realize you’re under budget constraints. Steal someone from radio or something. Even if they’re just in studio talking to the anchor without visuals, it would still be better than canned filler from Toronto. This is one of the reasons CFCF is the market leader in local newscasts – its competition isn’t even trying with local entertainment reporting.
  • Ease up on the “coming up”: Seriously. And don’t tease stories you’ve already reported. But that brings us back ot the first point.
  • Stop telling us the obvious: It may sound cool to say “you’re watching CBC News: Montreal at [time]”, but it’s completely useless information for us. We know we’re watching the newscast. Just give us the news already. Besides, this is a sure way to get anchors to screw up by saying “CBC News: Montreal at Six” when it’s actually 5:17. I see no purpose in having each newscast given a different name based on what time it airs.
  • Update your website: The “top stories” part of your newscast’s website hasn’t been updated since Friday. It also wouldn’t hurt if you put video up in a more accessible format than streaming Windows Media.

Have any other suggestions? Add them below.

The set

The new set at CBMT

The new set at CBMT

Finally, the set looks like something that’s larger than a phone booth for once. Hopefully they get some good use out of it.

CBC News: Montreal at 5:00, CBC News: Montreal at 5:30, and CBC News: Montreal at 6:00 air weeknights at … well, you get the idea.

UPDATE (Sept. 9): Chang explains during one of the newscasts (Windows Media Video) the subtle diferences behind each. If you can’t see the video, here’s how it breaks down:

  • CBC News Montreal at 5:00
    • Top local stories
    • Weather (next 48 hours)
    • National/international news in brief
  • CBC News Montreal at 5:30
    • Advancing (read: repeating with new angle) top local stories
    • Weather (seven-day forecast)
    • National/international news in depth
    • Arts, opinion, environment segments
  • CBC News Montreal at 6:00
    • Complete (read: repeated) top local stories
    • Weather (short-term and long-term forecasts)
    • “Developing” national/international news
    • Arts

UPDATE (Sept. 16): Toronto’s newscast is about the same as ours.

| TV

Welcome to the new TV

This week has a lot of changes for television both local and nationally. Two main reasons for this: it’s September and the fall season is starting, plus CRTC broadcast licenses for conventional television stations end on Aug. 31.

This week’s Bluffer’s Guide (courtesy of yours truly) looks at the changes happening on the local television dial. The Globe and Mail’s Grant Robertson also has a piece this morning, looking particularly at the upheaval at small money-losing stations owned by Canwest and CTVglobemedia.

Here’s a timeline of what’s going on this week in television:

Today, Aug. 31

Tomorrow, Sept. 1

  • 12am: The CRTC begins billing cable and satellite companies 1.5% of their revenues for a Local Programming Improvement Fund, to help small-market television stations. Bell and Shaw, Canada’s satellite providers, have responded by adding a 1.5% fee to consumers’ bills beginning today. Videotron, Quebec’s main cable provider, hasn’t decided to follow suit yet.
  • At the same time, the CRTC lifts the cap on the amount of advertising conventional television stations can air. It had previously been at 15 minutes per hour. The CRTC believes that the market will self-regulate the amount of advertising (after all, a station with too many ads is going to lose viewers).
  • 1am (10pm in Victoria): CHEK-TV in Victoria goes off the air. See below.
  • 6am: As conventional broadcast stations across the country (at least the ones that are part of large networks like Global, CTV, CityTV and TVA) get new one-year licenses, new local programming requirements come into effect. They require 7 hours of original programming for small markets and 14 hours for large markets (the latter includes Montreal on both the anglo and franco side). TVA’s local programming numbers are defined on a case-by-case basis: 18 hours a week for Quebec City and 5 hours a week for Rimouski, Chicoutimi and Sherbrooke. TQS, because it got special consideration from the CRTC after going bankrupt, isn’t affected by these changes.
  • Three stations formerly of the E! network but owned by the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group – CHAT-TV in Medicine Hat, Alta., CKPG-TV in Prince George, B.C., and CFJC-TV in Kamloops, B.C. – begin airing programming secured from Rogers. It includes the Price is Right, the Tyra Banks Show and Judge Judy in daytime, and Hell’s Kitchen and Law & Order: SVU in primetime.
  • 6pm: Global Quebec CKMI becomes Global Montreal with a rebranded evening newscast after a CRTC decision this summer allowed them to relicense and accept local advertising. Global Ontario is similarly changing to Global Toronto.

Wednesday, Sept. 2

  • 1am (10pm in Victoria): CHEK-TV in Victoria goes off the air. See below.

Thursday, Sept. 3

Saturday, Sept. 5

Monday, Sept. 7

  • 5pm: Dumont 360, a talk show hosted by former ADQ leader Mario Dumont, premieres on TQS V.

Tuesday, Sept. 8

Wednesday, Sept. 9

  • 9pm: Télé-Québec premieres Voir, a show by the people behind the newspaper of the same name.

Also of note this week are the 25th anniversaries of MuchMusic (video, CP story) and TSN.

Did I miss anything? Suggest additions below.

| Montreal, Opinion, TV

How local is your local TV newscast?

A quantitative study of Montreal's local newscasts

A quantitative study of Montreal's local newscasts

Next week is a pretty big one for local television. TQS becomes V, CJNT gets its new owner, Global Quebec becomes Global Montreal and CBMT expands its newscast to 90 minutes.

As Global’s CKMI starts embracing the city (they’ve launched a campaign with anchor Jamie Orchard for us to tell them what we like about Montreal) and CBC touts how much it’s expanding local news (though without any additional money or staff), CTV continues its campaign to “Save Local TV.”

It’s clear that all three anglo stations in Montreal are proud of their connection with the city.

But how deep does that connection go?

It doesn’t go deep enough to allow for local branding. There’s no “Pulse News” or “Newswatch” anymore. It’s “CTV News Montreal” and “CBC News: Montreal” and “Global Quebec Evening News”. Everything about the stations seems to indicate they’re just duplicates of a national template with a note saying “insert local flavour here.”

Nor do any of these stations provide local programming other than their newscasts. CTV cancelled its remaining non-news programs Entertainment Spotlight and SportsNight 360 last fall. Global Quebec cancelled This Morning Live in early 2008, and CBC cancelled Living Montreal earlier this year. All that’s left are the newscasts (and Global’s “Focus Montreal” – an interview show in which the anchor talks to a newsworthy interview subject from her anchor desk, indistinguishable from the regular newscast unless you’re paying attention).

But at least the newscasts themselves are pure local programming, right?

It depends on your interpretation. I noticed a trend recently, particularly at Global, where local newscasts would take packaged TV reports from affiliated stations and national reporters and use them to fill the back end of their one-hour shows. Did this serve to give a taste of a national perspective and bring this country together, or was it a way to save on staff by replacing local news with canned filler from other stations?

To answer that, I decided to quantitatively study these newscasts the only way I knew how: I’d watch them.

Over the summer, I watched three one-hour newscasts (picked pseudo-randomly) from each of the networks, timing the length of each segment with my laptop and marking down what they were talking about. I wanted to figure out how much of the newscasts were devoted to local versus non-local news.

Here’s what I found out:

Continue reading →

| Montreal, TV

Bell TV adds CBC Montreal in HD

Bell announced today that its Bell TV satellite service (formerly Bell ExpressVu) will be adding CBMT (CBC Montreal) HD to its channel lineup as of June 10.

It is also adding high-definition versions of some other channels that have setup HD feeds within the past six months:

  • CFCN-TV (CTV Calgary)
  • CICT-TV (Global Calgary)
  • CKXT-TV (SUN TV, Toronto)
  • TV5

And Bell is adding CBOFT (Radio-Canada Ottawa) to its lineup in both standard and high-definition versions.

Those hoping they might find some room for even a highly-compressed standard-definition version of Global Quebec’s CKMI are unfortunately out of luck again.