Canwest isn’t the only major media company that’s using that recent CRTC ruling against them as an excuse to take a giant axe to their staff. CTV has implemented a hiring freeze, cut budgets and is asking managers to find “efficiencies” so they can start laying people off.
The Tea Makers has a copy of the memo.
Let’s see if the Globe and Mail (which is owned by CTVglobemedia) has a long schadenfreudian story about this latest announcement like they have about Canwest’s recent difficulties.
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
Erik Kohanik and the disappearing TV column
Next time you’re browsing through your digital cable or satellite on-screen guide, give a thought to Eric Kohanik, who until recently provided what little editorial content was left in Canwest’s TV Times. Now even that was deemed too much, according to Bill Brioux.
TV Guide in Canada ceased paper production long ago, and the TV Times that’s distributed in Canwest’s newspapers (including The Gazette) is a shell of its former self (now it’s just a few pages of daytime and prime-time grids for the most popular channels).
This is what you talk about when you’re talking about technology cutting jobs and creating others. Some people with basic analog cable are still attached to their paper-based guides, but more and more are throwing them straight into the recycling bin.
It seems no one watches The Watcher.
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.
Workers at 940 News (including host Dennis Trudeau above) came in today to find out that the station is switching to an all-music “greatest hits” format as of the end of next week, eliminating its news division and most of its anchors.
18 people, including 14 journalists, will be out of a job.
Apparently the week’s notice they did get wasn’t the company’s idea. They had to spill the beans because of a leak.
Info 690 is unaffected.
UPDATE: Here’s the Gazette story from Paul Delean. Dennis Trudeau is out of a job. And here’s 940’s announcement. And a Canadian Press story.
The change takes effect 8pm next Friday.
UPDATE (June 10): Host Jim Duff says his goodbye.
UPDATE (June 11): From Mike Cohen of the Suburban:
940 Montreal officially becomes AM 940 — the Greatest Hits on Friday night. While the station let a lot of staff go, staying put are program director Chris Bury, newscasters Barry Morgan and Caroline Phaneuf and traffic reporters Greg Charlebois and Sean McMahon. I will miss the talk format, but I look forward to hearing the greatest hits from the 60s, 70s and 80s…
UPDATE (June 13): It’s over. CBC discusses how this move relates to the overall gutting of private broadcaster newsrooms in Canada.
Well, you couldn’t say this one was unexpected. TQS is gutting its news departments across Quebec, laying off dozens of workers. (Radio-Canada incorrectly refers to this as “decimating”, when it’s clearly more than 10% of staff).
Regional news will be hardest hit, with just about every newscast outside of Montreal being cut to nothing. The entire news department is being eliminated, with 110% the only locally-produced show left. Here, some newscasts (like the morning Caféine) will be cancelled, and others reduced in length.
The changes are happening over the summer. By fall, TQS will be practically unrecognizable, and will no doubt find ways to suck even more than it already does.
The drastic cuts to local programming will require CRTC approval. But considering the alternative (bankruptcy and the loss of an entire network), a compromise will probably be worked out.
Jean-Michel Vanasse, by the way, will be among the victims.
UPDATE (April 24): The Canoe blog asks whether the loss of TQS’s news department is a big deal, since they don’t do any real journalism anyway. The Canoe blog. Sun Media’s Canoe blog. Yeah.
You might think that my coming back to work there would be the biggest news at The Gazette this week, and it is, but there are a few other things happening too as the paper changes, shifts its focus from print to online, and manages with the impact of losing over a dozen staff to buyouts.
Among changes that directly affect readers:
It’s hard to argue since I don’t read those. I prefer Bizarro and Rhymes with Orange.
An updated list of departing and status-changing columnists appears below. The latest edition is Gaetan Charlebois, whose final Chaud Show column was last weekend.
This blog is less than a year old, so I don’t have much raw data to evaluate long-term trends. But the past few months seem to have hit all of Quebec’s mainstream media simultaneously, with most of them announcing cuts in the number of journalists they have on staff.
Individually, none (except maybe troubles at TQS) is a major turning point for an organization, but taken together a trend appears to be emerging.
February:
April:
September:
October:
November:
December:
CHRC Info 800, the Quebec City version of Info 690/940 News, is going to be eliminating its news-gathering operation by firing all its journalists, a move which journalists aren’t too pleased about.
Ironically, Info 800 is being sold to local interests (including Patrick Roy) by Corus Entertainment for $282,177.40, becoming one of the few locally-owned media outlets there. It’s the new owners who want to make the cuts, despite reassuring the CRTC that the takeover wouldn’t reduce local programming (they even referenced the “montrealization of the airwaves” in their submission as an argument in favour of the purchase), and that they didn’t expect any journalists to be affected:
The idea is to turn Quebec City’s only remaining AM station into a news/sports talk station, with emphasis on sports. Its schedule will be all-sports in the afternoons and evenings, and the station would cover local sports events such as Rouge et Or university football games and Roy’s Quebec Remparts junior hockey team.
The request for transfer of ownership of the station will be heard by the CRTC on Feb. 26 in Vancouver. Submissions are due by Jan. 23.
You might remember when The Gazette announced it was cutting staff through attrition — offering buyouts to seasoned full-time editorial staff to reduce it by about 20 people. The good news is that the generous offer worked, and enough people took advantage of it that there won’t be any layoffs.
The bad news is that the paper is losing a lot of seasoned staff, including some well-known columnists.
Jack Todd is the most visible of those names. He writes his goodbye column in the New Year’s Eve edition of his rapid-fire-judgment and grammatically-challenged Monday Morning Quarterback column. He’ll be leaving on Jan. 11 to “concentrate on writing fiction.” Though he won’t be a full-time staffer anymore, he’s expected to stick around doing freelance, and will start a “very different and more serious Monday sports column.”
Other columnists departing the paper within the next few weeks include:
The paper is also losing copy editors, writers, support staff and section managers. It’s unclear how many of them will continue writing freelance and how many will cut ties completely. But at least they all left of their own accord.
The Link at Concordia has a feature article about CanWest and specifically The Gazette cutting staff in its newsroom. It includes an interview with Gazette editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips, who says the shift from print to online is a “cultural shock.”
Though the article is unsurprisingly negative in tone, it provides quite a bit of insight into the situation at the paper, as well as what the future holds for print media in general.
A couple of things though:
The rapidly increasing downfall of Quebec journalism continues: 15 full-time jobs lost at TVA in Quebec City, to be replaced by part-time positions, multifunction journalist-camerapeople and more Montrealization of local news.
Expected to be affected by the cuts are CFCM‘s local news (Télé 4) and the show La Vie à Québec.
More news is coming out about the staff reductions at CanWest, including union complaints about layout jobs being outsourced, decreased morale at newspapers across the country, and a look at the future of CanWest’s print news operations. J-Source has most of the stories in a roundup.
UPDATE (Nov. 19): Le Devoir takes a look at the situation and the evolving face of professional journalism.
The news hit the fan today thanks to a CP story about a Gazette memo which indicates the company wants to reduce the size of its editorial staff to save money.
Publisher Alan Allnutt said in a memo to employees that management is doing all it can to avoid layoffs (which it’s required to do under its union agreement), and is offering another round of buyouts for those who want to leave voluntarily. (The formula offers a lump sum payment based on how long an employee has worked for the paper: 4.5 weeks per year of service, which works out to a year’s pay if you’ve been there 11.5 years).
Still, most people are looking at this story with disappointment, especially considering recent job cuts at TQS and Global, as well as a general feeling of a decline in quality at mainstream publications due to budget cuts.
It also puts into perspective moves like this:
First appearing last week, this new page on the paper’s website encourages visitors to “share your news” by submitting text, audio, photos or video in the hope that such an action will either get a story written about a subject or that your submission will be posted online.
Just about every major media outlet is doing this (see CNN’s iReport for another example, or the Ottawa Citizen version), because it preys on people’s desire to get their 15 minutes of fame, it sounds all Web 2.0-ish and pleases their marketing departments who can say they “get it”, and of course it helps the bottom line because these amateur reporters aren’t paid a cent for their work.
I’ll be looking into some of these issues of “user-generated content” for upcoming articles in this same newspaper (can you feel the irony?), so stay tuned.
In the meantime, what do you think of all this? Should newsrooms be squeezed even further? Are journalists not working hard enough? Are TV, radio and newspaper news departments destined for extinction? Is free, user-generated news the future? Feel free to comment below.
UPDATE (Nov. 4): Deborah Jones of J-Source has some thoughts on the CanWest situation in general.
TQS, the least-favourite of Quebec’s three french-language TV networks, is cutting 40 jobs across the province to get costs under control. With about 600 employees, that represents about 7% of their workforce.
It’s the same old story: Mainstream media, stocked up on vice-presidents and lots of overhead for journalistic operations, respond to their escalating costs by cutting journalists. The quality drops significantly, people tune out, and the spiral continues.
In TQS’s case, the network was losing quite a bit of money (CP says $1.5 million loss on media operations, which also include Rhythme FM radio stations), and now its owner Cogeco (which is swimming in profits from cable operations, by the way) is trying to figure out what to do with the network by getting CIBC to do a “strategic review”
CTV News (CTVglobemedia owns 40% of TQS, Cogeco owns the other 60%) has speculated that “a decision could be made to sell TQS”.
Anyone want to buy?