Tag Archives: CityTV

| TV

CBC, Citytv will no longer air NHL games

The news came in a brief, simple joint statement from Rogers Sports and Media and CBC, issued a day and a half after the end of the Stanley Cup Playoffs: “the public broadcaster will no longer carry NHL broadcasts after the current season…”

Sunday’s game, in which the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup against the Vegas Golden Knights, was the last NHL game to air on CBC Television.

Here’s what we know so far about how this shakes out:

Citytv is out too

I asked Rogers to clarify what this means for Rogers-owned Citytv, which also airs Saturday night games as part of Hockey Night in Canada. A Sportsnet PR spokesperson said NHL Saturday night and playoff games will be exclusive to Sportsnet, so no more games on Citytv either. A Citytv spokesperson said Citytv will air “entertainment programming” instead on Saturday nights, so expect reruns of Hudson and Rex and other shows unless they come up with something else.

What CBC will do with Saturday nights

CBC, meanwhile, plans to start a new Saturday night primetime show with Olympic-style sports, the kinds of sports they currently air on weekend afternoons.

CBC owns the Hockey Night in Canada brand and trademarks, and says it will continue using them for non-NHL hockey content. Right now the only organized hockey content on CBC is some weekend afternoon regular-season PWHL games.

(Sportsnet’s Hockey Night in Canada theme song, which it commissioned when HNIC lost the rights to the original hockey theme, remains Sportsnet’s property.)

How Sportsnet will schedule Saturday nights

One of the reasons Sportsnet kept CBC as part of its NHL broadcast network in 2014 is that it needed more channels to show simultaneous national games on Saturday nights. At the time, Sportsnet’s main network, the four regional channels, carried the same programming for national games, because many households didn’t have access to all four of the regional channels.

Twelve years later, most people are on a digital cable system or streaming and do have access to those channels. Add in Sportsnet One and Sportsnet 360 and it gives six channels, which for most Saturdays should be enough, even if there’s also a Blue Jays game, UFC Fight Night, curling or some other event they need to broadcast. And in a pinch, they can also bring Citytv back into the fold, use a non-sports channel like FX or have something exclusive to streaming.

OMNI and APTN third-language broadcasts

It’s unclear how this will affect Sportsnet’s partnerships with Rogers-owned OMNI or independent APTN, which broadcast some Saturday NHL games in Punjabi and Cree/Inuktitut, respectively.

Asked about these agreements, Sportsnet PR said there were no updates on this and we’d know more closer to the start of the season.

OMNI still has some over-the-air transmitters in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, and APTN has transmitters in Yellowknife and Whitehorse, so there might still be some NHL on over-the-air TV.

Both adopt the “Hockey Night” branding so would probably have to change their names if they continue.

A history recap

CBC and Citytv have been part of the Rogers HNIC plan since Rogers first acquired national NHL rights starting with the 2014-15 season. The deal with CBC was first established at four years, then extended to the full 12 of the original NHL contract.

Under the deal, CBC essentially gave over control of its signal to Rogers, who retained all advertising revenue from the (mostly Leafs) games in exchange for some on-air promotion of other CBC shows. The broadcasts also counted as free Canadian content for CBC, which was not a trivial consideration back when the broadcaster was a bit more budget-sensitive.

This fall, Rogers moves to a new NHL deal that will see it pay more than double to the league on average. And it looks like it has decided it needs to give people more of a push to subscribe to Sportsnet, even if that means losing some Saturday night fairweather fans.

The reason for this decision (and whether it was Rogers or CBC who made the call) wasn’t announced, but the fact that Rogers is also pulling Citytv out of the mix gives a pretty big hint. CBC says it tried to negotiate a new deal but the two sides couldn’t come to an agreement.

The writing was a bit on the wall two years ago when CBC lost the rights to stream NHL games that aired on CBC TV on its Gem streaming service.

The risks of going subscription-only

Whether to broadcast on over-the-air television is always a tough decision for sports leagues and their partner broadcasters. Some games for free can give people a taste of the action that would then spur them to subscribe. But too much for free and people might decide they can live without the rest.

Some leagues, like the NFL, have prioritized over-the-air while still offering some games to streamers and pay TV. Others, like MLS, have gambled on giving exclusive rights to pay services, only to face anger from teams in the league that nobody watches their games anymore.

I suspect this decision will put the NHL somewhere in the middle. The NHL is more popular in Canada than MLS, and Sportsnet is a popular service among people who follow sports. But the decision to pull playoff games from free TV means we probably won’t see record-setting audiences the next time a Canadian team goes deep. (They’ll still be high though, Sportsnet and TSN alone can still draw in millions for the right event.)

I suspect we’ll also still see Rogers running games on Citytv when they also air on ABC, to recoup that simultaneous substitution money. And if Rogers keeps running Hockey Night in Canada in Punjabi on OMNI, people who have that station over the air or on basic cable will still be able to watch the games, even if they don’t understand the language.

One winner of this decision might be TVA Sports, if it renews its deal with the NHL. There were a non-trivial number of francophone Canadiens fans who watched Saturday nights on Citytv because they either didn’t like the TVA broadcast or didn’t subscribe to TVA Sports. If TVA retains the French-language national rights (and we still don’t know if they will), then we might see a slight uptick in people who subscribe for those games.

Money talks

At the end of the day, what matters is money. Yes, Sportsnet may lose some audience and the ad revenue that comes with it, but over the past decade the focus has shifted from ad revenue to subscription revenue. And Rogers has decided that it needs to use those Saturday and playoff games to push people to subscribe to Sportsnet, because that’s where they make their money.

| TV

Highlights from the Canadian TV 2019-20 upfronts

Last week, Bell Media was the last of the major English-language broadcasters to present their fall schedules to the public and advertisers. The big sells are the new (mostly American) series they’re adding to their primetime schedules. I haven’t seen any of them, so let’s instead focus on everything else that was announced and that I find interesting:

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| My articles, TV

What to expect from CityNews Montreal, which launches Monday

Gazette photographer Dave Sidaway composes a photo of CityNews Montreal journalists Andrew Brennan, Akil Alleyne, Emily Campbell, Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed and Giordano Cescutti at the Citytv Montreal studio on Friday.

A handful of young journalists have been spending a couple of weeks rehearsing for the launch of Montreal’s fourth English-language daily evening local newscast. On Labour Day, ready or not, it goes live.

CityNews Montreal is part of the second half of five local City stations that have decided to join Toronto in having local news at 6 and 11pm. Rogers has determined that these evening newscasts are worth investing in as part of meeting their new requirements for “locally reflective news” established by the CRTC as of last year.

To get an idea what we can expect from this newscast, I watched the existing ones in Edmonton and Winnipeg, and talked with Dave Budge, VP of news and information at Rogers, plus briefly with Melanie Porco, supervising producer in Montreal.

The result is this Montreal Gazette story, published in Saturday’s paper. It explains how the anchorless newscast works. But for the TV and policy nerds, a few extra tidbits here.

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| TV

Citytv to launch local evening newscasts in Montreal Sept. 3

More than a year after it was announced that Citytv is creating local evening newscasts in markets including Montreal, we finally have a launch date: Sept. 3.

On that date, CityNews launches newscasts at 6pm and 11pm in Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.

Rogers has also announced staffing for those newscasts. In Montreal, the anchorless newscasts will be staffed by the following reporters (bios from the press release):

  • Akil Alleyne – Alleyne is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he studied constitutional and international law. His previous experience includes stops at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) as a Research and Program Associate; and CBC where he assisted with production, and writing.
  • Andrew Brennan – A newly-minted reporter with Breakfast Television Montreal, Brennan will continue to engage Montrealers with the local buzz on CityNews. For the last five years, Brennan has been a news anchor and reporter at CJAD 800. He graduated from Concordia University with a double-degree in Communication Studies and Journalism. (He announced his move last week.)
  • Emily Campbell – Campbell is an experienced video journalist, most recently having worked in reporting and as an anchor with CJAD 800 News and her work has appeared on CNN.
  • Giordano Cescutti – With a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Concordia University, Cescutti is a recipient of the Sportsnet Scholarship in Sports Journalism for excellence in journalism and sports reporting. His previous experience includes MAtv, Montreal Gazette and CJLO 1690AM, where he was co-host and producer of award-winning sports talk show The Starting Rotation.

They will work under Supervising Producer Melanie Porco, who has been with Citytv Montreal since its launch in 2013. Two people have also been hired to work behind the scenes with the newscast in Montreal, which will be directed out of a centralized control room in Vancouver.

Last fall, Citytv hired two reporters in Montreal in preparation for the new newscasts: Tina Tenneriello and Cora MacDonald. MacDonald left Citytv recently to join Global Montreal. (UPDATE July 20: Tenneriello is also gone. She’s leaving to host a web series about “inspiring people transforming their communities through social initiatives”)

As previously announced, the newscasts will be an hour long, at 6pm and 11pm, seven days a week.

When the announcement was made, the plan was to have the newscasts running in the winter. Rogers wouldn’t say what caused the delay, beyond this: “The fall launch is reflective of our commitment to ensuring we are delivering a gold standard of local news in these markets.”

In Vancouver, the staff is:

  • Ashley Burr, formerly of CKPG in Prince George, Alta.
  • Kyle Donaldson, producer and on-air personality with Breakfast Television Vancouver
  • Travis Prasad, formerly a news writer at CTV Vancouver
  • Isabelle Raghem, formerly of CHEK News and CHCH
  • Tom Walsh, Breakfast Television reporter since 2017
  • David Zura, formerly of Roundhouse Radio in Vancouver
  • Mary Cranston, Thor Diakow and Greg Harper, existing Breakfast Television Vancouver reporters

In Calgary, the newly announced staff is:

  • Kristen Fong, formerly of Global News Radio
  • Kendra Fowler, formerly of 660 News
  • Crystal Laderas, formerly of 660 News.
  • Michael Lumsden, reporter for Breakfast Television Calgary since 2017
  • Jonathan Mumam, formerly of 660 News
  • Brittany Rosen, formerly of CTV Regina

CityNews launched in Edmonton and Winnipeg last fall (those stations had dropped their Breakfast Television programs, so launching newscasts became a requirement to meet new local news quotas). Once the new newscasts are running, City will be able to meet its local programming and local news conditions of licence with just the evening newscasts, meaning Breakfast Television will no longer be required.

“There will be no changes to BT as a result of the launch of CityNews Montreal,” Rogers spokesperson Michelle Lomack tells me, repeating what has been said previously. But that could always change as the decline of ad revenue puts more pressure to cut costs.

| Opinion, TV

The federal leaders’ debate was good, but the analysis of it was awful

Though it was in the middle of a busy newsroom close to deadline, I tried my best to watch and listen to the federal leaders’ debate last night. It could be the only time during this election season that we see those four party leaders on a stage together.

If you missed it, it’s on YouTube (I can’t embed it here because Maclean’s doesn’t want me to).

Especially in the context of a simultaneous circus of clowns south of the border, it was nice to see four smart, articulate leaders lay out their policies and policy differences under the bright lights. I saw Stephen Harper defend his record on his own without his party machine behind him. I saw Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau set out their economic policies and criticize the current government on its record, all without losing their temper. And I saw Elizabeth May, my pick as winner of the debate, establish herself as an excellent debater with a solid grasp of economic issues.

Sure, there were some annoying things about the debate itself, like the constant interrupting, the repeating of scripted talking points, and the useless closing messages. And limiting the debate to four topics meant a lot of stuff did not get addressed, which is a big issue if Harper doesn’t want to engage in any more general-issue debates in English.

But in general, I was pretty well informed. Maclean’s, moderator Paul Wells and broadcaster City TV deserve credit for this.

Unfortunately, I also watched the hour-long post-debate analysis show, as well as three useless non-commercial breaks during the debate, and it sent me into a bit of a rage.

Rather than discuss whose economic policies make more sense, or fact-check what the leaders said, or really discuss the issues in any way, we got the same old post-debate “who won” discussion, as if leading a country is more about showing off your dramatic presentation skills than having a better plan.

It’s one thing if you don’t take yourself too seriously (like BuzzFeed), but I expected better from the official broadcaster of the debate (even though Rogers pushed the analysis show to OMNI so it could air another U.S. primetime drama on City).

A discussion of a useless Facebook poll after about 20 minutes of debate.

A discussion of a useless Facebook poll after about 20 minutes of debate with Kevin Chan, right.

After the first half-hour, City took a three-minute break to give us an interview with a journalism student in Toronto and a Facebook poll that its analyst admitted wasn’t really based on anything said during the debate because people hadn’t had the chance to listen to the leaders yet. Even though the result of 50% for Mulcair should have been a dead giveaway that the poll is not at all reflective of the Canadian population, they went with it anyway. They also broadcast results showing Canadians almost unanimously in favour of proportional representation and carbon taxes, even though actual scientific polls don’t show anything even remotely similar. And there was the stunning revelation that people in Alberta talk more about oil than the rest of the country.

How this was useful to viewers is beyond me.

Twitter's Steve Ladurantaye, left, discusses how much people were talking about the leaders.

Twitter’s Steve Ladurantaye, left, discusses how much people were talking about the leaders.

Then there was the Twitter discussion, in which they analyzed how much people were talking about the leaders. What they were saying, of course, wasn’t important, and wasn’t discussed.

I guess what we can learn from this is that Donald Trump would make a great Canadian prime minister. Because volume is more important than content.

"Body language expert" Mark Bowden, right, criticizes Elizabeth May's glasses and dress during OMNI's post-debate analysis show with Gord Martineau, left.

“Body language expert” Mark Bowden, right, criticizes Elizabeth May’s glasses and dress during OMNI’s post-debate analysis show with Gord Martineau, left.

But what infuriated me most was when they brought on a body language expert to literally discuss style over substance. Setting aside the sexist criticisms of Elizabeth May’s attire (there was no mention of how any of the other leaders were dressed), the segment reinforced the fact that during a debate, what you say isn’t as important as how you say it.

Throughout the three-hour broadcast, there were panel discussions about who was winning the debate. Some of that discussion was based on what the leaders said, but much of it was about how they said what they said. Were the leaders confident? Did they make any gaffes?

Don’t get me wrong, the leader of a country should have good public speaking skills. A big part of being a leader is being able to convince people to do things for you, so style matters. But this incessant focus on treating the debate like a boxing match or tennis tournament just hammers in the idea that the issues don’t really matter. That if you want to be a politician, it’s better to hone your skills in theatre school than law school.

We Canadians like to think we’re better than the Americans when it comes to our politicians. We look at Donald Trump and we laugh. But based on what I saw of this debate analysis, I don’t see why, if Trump was in this debate, the media wouldn’t have been unanimous in concluding that he would have “won” it.

| Montreal, TV

Burning questions about CJNT, Citytv and ICI

Sam Norouzi, whose family would own 90% of the company behind ICI, in the Mi-Cam studio on Christophe-Colomb Ave.

I have two stories in Wednesday’s Gazette, explaining to readers the two proposals for new television stations related to the proposed Rogers acquisition of CJNT. The first discusses the plan for CJNT itself, to convert it to an English Citytv station that would air the Citytv schedule and a new local morning show. The second talks to the family behind an application for a new station called ICI that would essentially bring back CJNT’s predecessor Télévision Ethnique du Québec, in which producers acted independently in a cooperative and sell advertising for their own shows.

While the Gazette stories are long and contain a lot of information, there were a bunch of other little facts that I couldn’t cram in there that would probably be of more interest to people who follow local media a bit more closely. So here are some answers:

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| Montreal, TV

Citytv comes to Montreal … kinda

CityLine appears on CJNT on its first day as a Citytv affiliate (the box disappeared a few minutes later)

There wasn’t much ceremony surrounding it, but at 5am on Monday, the beginning of its broadcast day, CJNT Montreal went from being a sister station to CHCH Hamilton to being an affiliate of the Rogers-owned Citytv network.

A month ago, Rogers and Channel Zero, which owns CJNT and CHCH, announced that they had come to an agreement to sell the station for an undisclosed sum. The deal made sense because Channel Zero had done just about nothing with CJNT, instead focusing its efforts for the first two years on the higher-rated Hamilton station. And Rogers needs a Montreal presence for its Citytv network and has plenty of experience with ethnic programming thanks to its OMNI stations. It comes as little surprise that Rogers was interested in buying CJNT for years.

Since buying a television station is a long process, requiring approval from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission before it can close, the deal between Channel Zero and Rogers also included a provision making CJNT a Citytv affiliate as of June 4.

While it’s being branded as a Citytv affiliate, with sitcom reruns in the afternoons, a look at its primetime schedule shows it’s really more of an OMNI station than anything else. Half its primetime schedule is OMNI programming, mainly national daily newscasts in various languages.

The schedule

Citytv has a full weekly schedule for CJNT on its website. Here’s how it breaks down for the new CJNT on weekdays:

  • Midnight to 5am: Episodes of Seinfeld, Two and a Half Men, The Office, Judge Joe Brown, Maury Povich, Cold Case
  • 5am to 6am: CityLine
  • 6am to 7am: Rerun of Italian newscast
  • 7am to 10am: Metro Debut, extended to three hours
  • 10am to 11pm: CityLine
  • 11am to 1pm: Rebroadcasts of other OMNI newscasts
  • 1pm to 3pm: Ethnic programming
  • 3pm to 4pm: General Hospital
  • 4pm to 8pm: Judge Judy, 30 Rock, The Office, Two and a Half Men, How I Met Your Mother
  • 8pm to 9pm: Italian OMNI newscast (Ontario)
  • 9pm to 9:30pm: Cantonese OMNI newscast
  • 9:30pm to 10pm: Mandarin OMNI newscast
  • 10pm to 11pm: Murdoch Mysteries (an original Citytv series)
  • 11pm to 11:30pm: Punjabi OMNI newscast
  • 11:30pm to midnight: Portuguese OMNI newscast (Ontario)

On weekends, the schedule is mainly ethnic programming, with documentaries, movies, weekly newsmagazines and other programs.

Fall schedule announced for CJNT

As part of its announcements last week of its fall schedule, Rogers released programming grids for its stations. Here’s the one for CJNT, which still has the Italian newscast at 8pm (except Mondays when it’s at 7) and filling other parts of the prime-time schedule with OMNI documentaries.

Regulatory requirements

The schedule looks like this because of CJNT’s conditions of license that require half of primetime to be ethnic programming. Specifically:

  • Not less than 60% of programming broadcast annually between 6am and midnight must be ethnic programs (the current schedule shows only eight hours a day on weekdays devoted to ethnic programming, so CJNT devotes 100% of its hours from 6am to midnight on Saturday and Sunday to make up the difference, and it does so with less than half an hour to spare)
  • Not less than 50% of programming broadcast monthly between 6pm and midnight must be ethnic programs (the fall schedule shows 50% for 7pm to 11pm – assuming it continues with OMNI newscasts from 11pm to midnight it would meet this requirement and could still air sitcom reruns at 6pm to 7pm)
  • Not less than 75% of programming broadcast monthly between 8pm and 10pm must be ethnic programs (the fall schedule shows 79% in those hours)
  • Not less than 50% of programming between 6am and midnight must be Canadian (the current schedule has weekdays with 10 of 18 hours being Canadian programs)
  • Not less than 40% of programming between 6pm and midnight must be Canadian (with OMNI newscasts produced in Toronto, this isn’t a difficult threshold to reach)
  • Not fewer than 18 distinct ethnic groups targetted monthly
  • Not fewer than 15 languages monthly (with five language versions of the OMNI daily newscast, much of this and the previous requirement is met with weekly weekend programs)

Then there’s the matter of local ethnic programming.

In the CRTC decision awarding a license to Channel Zero, it’s not listed as a “condition of license” but rather a “commitment” – the new owner had actually proposed a slight increase in the amount of local ethnic programming to 14 hours a week.

But in the three years it owned the station, Channel Zero hasn’t produced a minute of local ethnic programming. Instead, it has been airing years-old repeats of local programs that were produced under Canwest, much to the annoyance of the people who ran those programs who would like to be able to reach their audiences again. When I spoke to Channel Zero’s programming director Jennifer Chen a few months ago, she said that there were setbacks because a deal with a local producer fell through, and that the company was in talks with another producer. But she also admitted that to a large extent Channel Zero focused more on CHCH at first than CJNT.

With the CRTC holding a hearing into the sale of CJNT to Rogers, there’s not much point in complaining about how Channel Zero has failed to keep the station on its mandate. But legitimate questions can be raised over what plans Rogers has for local ethnic programming.

Looking at the fall primetime schedule above, it seems Rogers is prepared to continue with the other conditions of license.

Other OMNI stations have similar programming requirements, and produce regional editions of their newscasts. The Cantonese, Mandarin and Punjabi editions of OMNI News that air on CJNT are national newscasts, while the Italian and Portuguese versions are regional Toronto editions. (This is why, for example, the latter two only go from Windsor to Ottawa when giving the weather.)

No application has been published by the CRTC for Rogers to acquire CJNT. It’s at that point that we’ll have an idea of its plans, whether it will ask the regulator to reduce ethnic programming requirements (unlikely, since it rejected two requests from Canwest to do that) or reduce local ethnic programming requirements in favour of non-ethnic local programming (like Metro Debut or another morning show).

OMNI News

The biggest part of CJNT’s new schedule, and perhaps the most unfamiliar to Montreal audiences, is OMNI News, the foreign-language daily newscasts that make up a large part of ethnic programming requirements for OMNI stations.

The newscasts look about as identical as their title screens make them look. Low-budget with only a single anchor (except the Italian edition which has a separate sports anchor). All are in high definition. The Italian edition is an hour long, the others are half an hour long. The Italian and Portuguese editions are actually local Toronto versions that cover the Ontario region, so they qualify as local programming. Other regions (there are also OMNI stations in Alberta and British Columbia) have other regional editions in various languages.

The newscasts tend to have similar-looking stories, usually with the same top headlines (and using the same video for them). They distinguish themselves where it matters to their communities. More talk of Italian soccer in the Italian edition. More about what’s happening in China in the Cantonese and Mandarin editions. The newscasts make use of foreign news reports in their language and even add the homeland to their weather forecasts.

It might be fun to have something like this in Montreal, a daily newscast perhaps attracting a bit more attention from local ethnic viewers than the low-budget newsmagazines of the old CJNT days. But Rogers’s plans for local programming for the station are still unknown.

Not coming back

With many new programs coming to the station, there’s also a long list of programs that have been pulled off:

  • Fifth-rate American programming (mainly CW network shows) whose Canadian rights are owned by Channel Zero: The Insider, Nightline, Hart of Dixie, The Secret Circle and Supernatural, as well as some NBA games. They have been replaced by third-rate American programming from Citytv.
  • The daily sports show Sportsline, produced for CHCH but also aired on CJNT
  • Shows featuring Ed the Sock that are produced mainly for CHCH
  • Frank D’Angelo’s vanity programming (it’s still airing, at least for now)
  • Much of Metro 14’s music video programming, with shows like The Main Line and World Beats
  • Independently-produced local ethnic programming of questionable technical quality, such as Bossbens Show and Amet.tv. Amet.tv disappeared for the first weekend, but returned to the schedule, taking over Saturday afternoons. Religious infomercial Il est écrit is also continuing to air.

Also gone are those three-year-old reruns of former CJNT local programming, like Soul Call, Foco Latino, Hellas Spectrum and Magazine Libanais.

Evan Arppe hosts Metro Debut, weekdays from 7 to 10am

Metro Debut remains

The only show that remains on the schedule is Metro Debut, the morning show hosted by Evan Arppe, who ironically looks like the whitest man on television. The show consists mainly of music videos (some of which are produced in HD, converted to standard definition then converted back into HD, meaning they take up only a tiny box on the screen), interspersed with the host giving news headlines, traffic and weather information with no help from graphics, reporters, live images or anything else. It’s about as low-budget as you can possibly get.

Another program that was on Metro 14 and will come back to it is Jimmy Kimmel Live. This is just a coincidence – Citytv has picked up the Canadian rights to the show from Channel Zero. It will start airing this fall, and CJNT fills the midnight to 1am hour with Seinfeld reruns in the meantime.

Analysis

There’s still a lot that’s unknown and will be determined through the CRTC process. It’s unsurprising that OMNI content will fill much of CJNT’s schedule, and that the schedule maximizes the amount of American programming that airs during weekdays. A look at the station’s programming page shows that it looks to get a lot of its viewers, at least during the summer, from afternoon programming. And much of that will benefit from simultaneous substitution: General Hospital at 3pm (WVNY), Judge Judy at 4pm (WPTZ), 30 Rock at 5pm (WFFF), The Office at 5:30pm (WFFF) and Two and a Half Men at 6pm (WFFF).

If Rogers is planning on local ethnic programming for CJNT, expect it to take the form of new regional OMNI newscasts (Spanish, Italian and Arabic might be good choices here) and weekly newsmagazines.

Will Videotron pull CITY or OMNI Toronto?

With the arrival of Citytv in Montreal carrying much of OMNI’s programming, there’s a question about what will happen to two Toronto stations on Videotron’s illico digital cable system: CITY-DT Toronto (Channel 78 in SD and 678 in HD) and CFMT-DT Toronto (OMNI.1, Channel 80). I’ve asked Videotron about its future plans for these channels, particularly since one uses up a bandwidth-hogging HD slot. I’ll update this when I hear back.

CJNT’s schedule differs from CITY’s enough that there’s probably a good argument to keep the latter. But with ethnic programming all over CJNT’s schedule, there might be less of one for keeping OMNI.

UPDATE: Mike Cohen talks to Rogers VP Scott Moore about his plans for CJNT.

| TV

Massive cuts at CityTV, but Rogers doesn’t care

Anne Mroczkowski

The axe fell Tuesday at CityTV. Everyone found out yesterday that long-time Toronto anchor Anne Mroczkowski and about 60 others have lost their jobs in a new round of cutbacks at Canada’s fourth-largest English broadcast network, which will also result in a lot of local programming being cancelled.

Coverage at the National Post, Toronto Sun, Toronto Star, Financial Post, Canadian Press, Globe and Mail, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and all the usual Toronto blogs. Eye has a timeline of City cuts. Breakfast Television’s Kevin Frankish has a video of remaining employees talking about how much it sucks.

The irony in this is that CityTV is owned by Rogers, which is part of that Stop the TV Tax campaign by the cable and satellite companies against fee for carriage. Rogers has argued through it and appearances in front of the CRTC that local television doesn’t need the extra funding and that it is committed to local television without government funding.

With the cuts at City, and more importantly the cuts to programming at all City stations, we can formally call bullshit on that claim. Rogers doesn’t oppose fee for carriage because it believes that’s what’s best for City, it opposes fee for carriage because its cable business is more important to it than its TV business.

And so Rogers continues to sabotage its TV stations for its own benefit, and people like Anne Mroczkowski pay the price.