Hey, so remember when they said Musique Plus was laying off production people but wasn’t going to touch the talent in front of the camera?
Yeah, well they’re laying off two VJs.
Tag Archives: job cuts
CBC funeral lacks names to mourn
I'm horrible at crowd estimates. Guess for yourself how many people turned out.
Tuesday was the day the CBC was supposed to announce which of its employees it was going to lay off. The SCRC, which represents CBC and Radio-Canada employees in Quebec and Moncton, planned for a day of mourning at noon to draw attention to those names.
Unfortunately, the CBC made no such announcement, and the people who turned out still don’t know who’s being fired and who’s being kept on, even though the corporation has already started the process of laying people off.
UPDATE: CBC says 180 people will get the pink slip on May 27 and 28.
Union to mourn as axe falls at CBC
Maison Radio-Canada
“D-day for some..or maybe me” is how Ange-Aimée Woods describes the Facebook group she setup to spread the word about a “day or mourning” organized by her union. On Tuesday, the real brunt of those 800 job cuts hits as the corporation reveals a list of the positions deemed “redundant”, and the employees it has decided it can live without.
The union, which as you can imagine is steadfast against this move, is planning an hour-long demonstration outside Maison Radio-Canada (corner René-Lévesque and Panet, metro Beaudry) at noon, in solidarity with those getting pink slips (who don’t yet know who they are):
We are organizing a demonstration to mark this day of mourning.
We will be out on the sidewalk with our “redundant” colleagues, a callous classification of the employees who are the heart and soul of the CBC.
We will gather on René-Lévesque in front of the main entrance to the Maison de Radio-Canada at noon to show our colleagues that we stand with them and management that we don’t agree with sacrificing the next generation of employees for flashy equipment. Senior management likes to say that the CBC’s most valuable asset is its people.
Let’s counter their cynicism with our most valuable asset: our solidarity and our voices.
Musique moins
Astral Media’s Musique Plus is laying off 13 people behind the camera, Rue Frontenac reports (via Richard Therrien).
To think that the production qualities of Musique Plus might get worse now because of this.
Of course, I’m not in a position to judge. I haven’t had Musique Plus on my cable lineup for years.
UPDATE (May 20): Richard Therrien has more details: Cameramen are being replaced by robots.
Quebecor shuts down ICI (UPDATED)
The final issue of ICI, Vol. 12 No. 28: April 30, 2009
Quebecor has just announced that it is shutting down Montreal alt-weekly ICI, with its last print edition coming out tomorrow. From then on, columns will be published online and in an insert in the Thursday edition of 24 Heures, another Quebecor paper. The move results in nine layoffs of permanent employees as well as a loss of income for 15-20 regular freelancers.
Quebecor’s release takes great pains to say that the company did whatever it could to prevent the paper’s shutdown. I guess that’s supposed to include forcing freelancers to sign abusive contracts, a move that led a high-profile columnist to leave. AJIQ, which represents independent journalists, didn’t mince words in blaming ICI’s downfall on its treatment of freelancers, which I think is pushing it a bit.
In the end, it probably made little sense for Quebecor to produce two free newspapers in Montreal in addition to the Journal de Montréal. So ICI is being canibalized in favour of 24 Heures.
The big question now is what happens to The Mirror, the anglo alt-weekly which is also owned by Quebecor. This move leaves two anglo weeklies (Mirror and Hour) and one franco (Voir). Voir and Hour are both owned by the independent Voir Communications.
Then again, The Mirror is older than ICI and the disparity in readership on the anglo side isn’t as high as it was with Voir and ICI. Quebecor confirms this, saying there’s no question about The Mirror being shut down.
It’s unclear where ICI’s voices will head now, though most are expected to stay with Quebecor in some capacity. Sophie Durocher will (continue to*) have a column in the Journal de Montréal’s weekend section, and Pierre Falardeau is expected to stay on in some capacity, according to Le Devoir. Two journalists will move to 24 Heures. ICI’s show on Videotron’s Vox channel, Ici et là, will also continue for the time being.
UPDATE: The final issue is on the stands, and sadly it looks like the plug was pulled after the issue was put to bed, because there’s not the slightest hint that this is the final issue. There are even mentions of future issues:
I don't think so...
Some of ICI’s contributors didn’t find out about the closing until Quebecor’s press release caused journalists to ask them for comment.
UPDATE (May 5): Michel Vézina gives his take in his Montréal Express column.
News coverage:
- The Gazette
- La Presse
- Le Devoir
- Rue Frontenac (which delves into ICI’s history with Voir)
- Radio-Canada
- Presse Canadienne
- Infopresse
- Metro
- Branchez-Vous
- CIBL (audio interview with Quebecor’s Isabelle Dessureault)
- Marketing Magazine
Elsewhere in the blogosphere (no doubt this list will get bigger):
- Steve Proulx
- P45 (a personal perspective from Nicolas Langelier)
- Patrick Lagacé
- Showbiz Chez Nous
- Mange mon blog
- Bande à part
- Deux maudits anglais
- Stanley Pean
- Insécurité Nationale
- Philippe Papineau
*UPDATE (Sept. 25, 2010): Sophie Durocher wishes to clarify that her Journal de Montréal column predates the lockout, so she isn’t replacing any unionized workers. Earlier versions of this post also contained a comment about her that, in hindsight, was somewhat unfair, and may have led people to the wrong impression about her Journal column.
Rogers dodgers
The cuts keep coming. Today, about 40 employees at Rogers Publishing (Maclean’s, Actualité, Châtelaine, LouLou, Canadian Business, etc.) were given their pink slips. No indication yet how that breaks down per publication.
In the U.S., the Chicago Tribune has cut 53, including the guy who was writing about the recession (they deleted his blog post saying he’d been a victim of it) (via Romenesko)
CBC’s “renewal” cuts budget, expands newscasts
Today the CBC announced Part 17 of its huge cost-cutting operation, in which 70 people in its English news department lose their jobs.
The headlines at CBC talk about “24-hour coverage” and “better service” without giving too many details of what that means. CP has the first actual detail: regional supper-hour newscasts will be expanded to 90 minutes (you’ll recall they were just recently expanded from half an hour to an hour), and would start at 5pm instead of 6. Coronation Street would fill the half-hour betwen 6:30 and 7.
This certainly makes sense for Montreal, which currently has three English-language local newscasts competing against each other at 6pm (and two of them always losing that battle). Starting earlier might be the ticket to a larger audience.
Of course the question remains how CBC is supposed to have more product with a smaller staff. We’ll find that out over the coming months.
CP cuts 25 jobs
To those who might think that wire services, whose content is replacing a lot of laid-off journalists, might be immune to the crisis affecting the news industry, Canadian Press is cutting its staff by 25, or 8%. Though the cooperative doesn’t have to worry about servicing a large debt or reversing the advertising decline, it does have to worry about the decreasing membership dues. Quebecor is the latest mega-publisher to pull out of CP, following Canwest two years ago. Though large newspapers don’t represent as much of CP’s income as they used to, Quebecor is still a huge player and the red balance sheet means they have to reduce staff.
CBC cuts hit closer to home
800. It’s really just a number, an abstract concept that we sort of understand. Most of us don’t even have 800 Facebook friends. Our high schools didn’t have 800 students. It’s hard to imagine that many people losing their jobs.
So when the CBC announced it was cutting 800 jobs on Wednesday, we knew it was bad, but we didn’t know how.
Now, details are beginning to emerge about more specific cuts to CBC programming. There are already lists of cuts nationally for English and French services, mainly from the English headquarters in Toronto and the French headquarters in Montreal.
In Quebec, as far as local programming goes, Quebec City will be hit worse than Montreal. Here’s what’s on the chopping block:
- Living Montreal, the last English-language non-news local program in Quebec, will be cancelled, as will similar shows across Canada. This completely rids English Montreal of television programming about arts, life and culture in the city, outside of the newscasts and what you’ll find on CJNT or VOX. Much as I think Living Montreal was a bit too fluffy and relied too much on regular columnists, this cut bothers me the most because it was the last of its kind here. Sue Smith, its host, gets a fairly soft landing, having already taken up a job hosting Radio Noon. Which brings us to…
- Radio Noon, the Montreal-based Quebec-wide call-in show, will be reduced from two hours to one.
- English and French services in Quebec City will be cut, with 15 jobs lost.
- Téléjournal midi Québec with Caroline Gaudreault and Téléjournal midi Estrie with Réjean Blais will be cancelled at the end of June, as will noon-hour news shows in Ottawa and Moncton. Staff will instead combine resources on the 6pm newscasts in those markets. Which brings us to…
- The 6pm Téléjournal in Quebec City and Sherbrooke (along with Ottawa and Moncton) will be cut from an hour to half an hour
- Un dimanche à Québec with Michel Lamarche, the last remaining locally-produced programming in Quebec City on Sundays, will be cancelled.
- The CBC won’t be covering CONCACAF Champions League games anymore, which means if the Impact (or Whitecaps or Toronto FC) make another deep run into the tournament, we won’t see it on TV.
Even with these cuts, it’s apparent that it could have been a lot worse. The network level is taking the brunt of the job losses, and the CBC has promised that no regional stations will be shut down.
Employees at the Téléjournal serving eastern Quebec are breathing a sigh of relief (and perhaps disbelief) that their broadcast won’t be cancelled.
News about cuts at CBC News in Montreal won’t come until mid-April, after employees decide whether or not to take buyouts.
Even with all this, I know of only one person who’s actually been cut. No doubt there will be more in the weeks ahead.
CBC cuts 800 jobs
105 at CTV, plus another 118 at A-Channel
In an environment where about one journalist in six in Canada has lost their job, that number just got a lot worse. CBC/Radio-Canada announced 800 job cuts today (about half split between the two sides to maintain political correctness) as part of an effort to balance a $171-million budget deficit. Even then, most of the money will come not from job cuts but from sales of assets (CBC owns quite a bit of land, for example, including the Maison Radio-Canada downtown, which it is hoping to convert into condos) and other vaguely-described programming cuts. Senior executives’ salaries are also being reduced by 20%.
Some statistics:
- 393 cuts in English services, 336 cuts in French services, 70 cuts at the corporate level
- 80% of cuts will come at the network level, 20% at regions. The CBC says it won’t shut down any regional stations
- 17% of cuts are in radio, 83% in television. No plans to introduce advertising on CBC Radio, and the television schedule is to remain “largely intact” with no additional U.S. programming
Perhaps most telling, the CBC’s Hubert Lacroix said the network wants to transition “from being a TV provider to a provider of video content” (and similarly for radio). Not quite sure what that means exactly, but it sounds nice, doesn’t it?
La Presse? What’s that?
Speaking of the linguistic divide, this from a story in the Globe and Mail about the state of newspapers:
In Canada, every major newspaper company (including The Globe and Mail) has undertaken significant layoffs in the past year and the Halifax Daily News has folded.
Now, I follow Canadian media pretty closely, and it’s true that Canwest, CTVglobemedia, Sun Media, Torstar, FP Newspapers, and the Halifax Chronicle-Herald have announced layoffs. But unless I missed an announcement somewhere, Gesca (La Presse, Le Soleil) and Le Devoir haven’t, and certainly haven’t undertaken “significant layoffs” unless they did so secretly.
But I guess since they’re French papers, they don’t count.
Come on, people, I can’t keep this country together by myself.
CFCF cancels morning newscast, lays off three
Morning news anchor Herb Luft will return to regular reporting
The news hit insiders this morning, and the press release was issued just after the end of business: CFCF (aka CTV Montreal) is cancelling its 6am morning newscast, effective immediately, and replacing it with another half hour of its national morning program Canada AM. (Previously, CFCF would cut into Canada AM after the first half hour.) They’ve already updated their weekly schedule to reflect the change.
The decision, which is being made to cut costs, will mean the cutting of four positions (one of which is already vacant). Herb Luft, who has been anchoring the morning newscast since it started in March 2000, will return to general assignment reporting.
CFCF’s license requires a minimum of 15.5 hours a week of local programming. Since the cancellation of Entertainment Spotlight and SportsNight 360 in January, this has been entirely made up of local newscasts (and the late sportscast at 11:45). The cancellation of the half-hour weekday newscast drops CFCF’s local programming hours from 18.5 to about 16 hours a week with a one-hour weekday noon newscast, one-hour daily evening newscast and 35-minute daily late newscast.
It also means that there is now no morning local news from any of Montreal’s anglophone television stations. Global Quebec cancelled This Morning Live last year and replaced it with a repeat of the previous night’s News Final. CBC Montreal airs a national morning news program.
First News, as it was officially called, was also the last local morning newscast in the CTV network. All the other stations ran all three hours of Canada AM from 6 to 9am.
UPDATE: The Gazette has a brief about it (that’s open to comments), which pretty much repeats everything already in this post. Evening anchor Todd van der Heyden mentioned the cancellation in the middle of the evening newscast (the website has a brief about it as well), pointing out that even with this reduction CFCF has more local news than its competitors.
UPDATE (March 11): How’s this for irony? CTV has laid off 24 people from Canada AM.
CBC to become a lot less fashionable
Steven and Chris in all their Photoshopped glory (CBC photo)
After the federal government said there would be no “bridge financing” to help the CBC in a time of advertising drought and general media sadness, the mother corp has already begun its cost-cutting initiatives, cancelling Steven and Chris and Fashion File at the end of this season. 65 jobs are affected, most of them freelance.
Perhaps more sad is that they won’t be replaced. Instead, CBC will run repeats of the shows in their regular time slots next year.
UPDATE: Bill Brioux looks at the numbers, and says it was ratings more than the economy that brought Steven and Chris down.
Another bad day: Torstar lays off 60
Not as huge as some of the other media layoff announcements we’ve seen recently, but Torstar has announced it is laying off 60 people at a printing plant near Toronto. There are also reports of unspecified numbers of layoffs at 24 Hours in Vancouver and the Winnipeg Free Press (UPDATE: More on the Freep from the Ceeb).
Slash and burn at A Channel
It turns out CTV isn’t quite done with the cutbacks at its secondary broadcast network. After announcing it wouldn’t renew licenses for two southern Ontario stations, the axe has come down on 118 jobs at other stations across the network, including 34 in Ottawa/Pembroke, 18 in Victoria, 24 in Barrie, Ont., and more (42 by my math) in London, representing about 28% of the workforce.
As a result, various local programming is being cancelled. Barrie and London are cutting their morning programs, and like Global Quebec will be re-running their nightly newscasts in the morning.
In Victoria, the morning show will be replaced by “cameras … in the C-FAX 1070 radio station starting tomorrow to broadcast its morning show from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.”
In Ottawa, it’s the reverse. The evening and weekend newscasts will be cancelled.
They can do this and still keep their broadcasting licenses because of a loophole in the CRTC’s local programming rules. It says stations have to air a certain minimum amount of locally-produced programming every week, but it doesn’t say that it has to produce that much, so stations can get away with producing an hour and a half of news and replaying it at 6am, and that counts as three hours of programming.
A Channel has never really made money. And since its acquisition by CTV it’s basically been a dumping ground for second-rate U.S. shows that won’t fit on the main network’s schedule. (The irony is that CTV never wanted the network. They were more interested in acquiring CHUM’s specialty channels and would offload A Channel onto Rogers. But the CRTC intervened and said they had to give away Citytv instead. Had this not happened, we might be looking at massive layoffs at Citytv right now.)
The union has issued a news release blaming CTV for turning its back on small communities, while also drinking its Kool-Aid that the whole problem is because cable companies are making money and not handing it over to CTV (as opposed to, say, CTV spending millions to acquire U.S. programming that could be spent on original programming).
UPDATE (March 12): the Ottawa Citizen looks inside the cuts at A Channel in Ottawa.