Hi there. It’s been a while. Might want to sit down for this one, because it’s a bit long.

News about news, COVID-19 edition

Informer malgré les risques : les médias forcés de s'adapter pour accomplir leur mission.

Reportage de @SDesjardinsRC au #TJ22h#Covid19 #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/9BQVC3tOFy

— Céline Galipeau (@CGalipeauTJ) April 21, 2020

• J-Source has mapped out how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected media across the country.
• Most newspaper websites with paywalls have dropped them for coronavirus stories, including the Montreal Gazette and Globe and Mail. Postmedia went further thanks to a sponsorship by Mary Brown’s Chicken & Taters, which paid to have paywalls dropped entirely for a month at many Postmedia sites (the Montreal Gazette is not one of them).
• Most media outlets are having their journalists and production staff working from home wherever possible. Le Devoir, the Montreal Gazette, the Journal de Montréal, La Presse, CBC and Radio-Canada are among those writing about how they’ve done that. Corus VP Troy Reeb describes what Global News employees are doing, as does Sean O’Shea.
• The Canadian Press looks at how news, culture and lifestyle TV hosts are keeping their shows going in English Canada.
• Postmedia has cut salaries for non-union staff (including senior managers) making more than $60,000 a year, and is asking unionized staff to do the same. Union locals have rejeced this, but the company is still negotiating. Postmedia also won’t be hiring any interns this summer, and has cut down drastically on freelancing (Gazette columnist Jack Todd is among those cut).
• The Montreal Gazette has put its weekly West Island section on hiatus during the crisis.
• La Presse is taking action to boost revenue, including 30-second ads when you open the La Presse+ app, and requiring registration.
• L’Itinéraire, a magazine published and sold by needy people in Quebec, has had to stop production during the pandemic, so La Presse is publishing it instead.
• 24 Heures, a free newspaper distributed in large part by hand outside metro stations in Montreal, has had to stop doing that because of an STM order. Fortunately for them, this comes just weeks after Métro pulled the plug on its exclusivity deal with the STM a year early to save money, so both newspapers have stands inside metro stations together for the first time.
• CTV Montreal has stopped doing local news inserts in Your Morning during the pandemic.
• J-Source has a memo from The Canadian Press outlining bad news and less-bad news stemming from the pandemic.
• Le Devoir looks at how specialty magazines, whose topics are decided months in advance, have reacted to the pandemic.
• Some nursing homes have banned delivery of newspapers and magazines as a safety measure.
• Exclaim! has cut most of its staff.
• BuzzFeed News reports advertisers are blocking their ads from appearing on coronavirus-related news websites, thereby depriving news organizations devoting additional resources to covering the virus the extra revenue they need to keep doing so.
• A Toyota dealership in Ste-Agathe has apologized after running an ad about “Corolla-Virus“ in the local newspaper.
• Bell Media and Global News have been hit by the virus in Toronto, as has a manager at TVA Sherbrooke and Quebecor columnist Antoine Robitaille.
• The Guignolée des médias, usually a Christmas fundraiser involving Quebec media, has reactivated to help people in need during the pandemic.
• Marc-André Gagnon, president of the Quebec Press Gallery, and the guy who runs François Legault’s daily press briefings, writes a bit about how it works.
• The pandemic has led to virtual court hearings, which has some hopes up that technology could open up access to the court system for journalists.
• The pandemic has made things worse for the already poorly functioning access to information system at the federal government.
• The pandemic has devastated newspaper ad revenue, but inflated its obituaries sections. We’ve seen something similar in Montreal.
• Hunger for coronavirus news means ABC World News Tonight is now the most popular show on television in the U.S.

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News about news

Le Devoir a aujourd'hui 110 ans! Pour l'occasion, la Une de notre édition papier du jour reprend la maquette de l'époque. Bonne lecture ! @jeanhuguesroy @edmUQAM @FPJQ @AJIQ pic.twitter.com/SHAjA2MhNR

— Alexandre Shields (@AShields_Devoir) January 10, 2020

• Le Droit is moving across the river from Ottawa to Gatineau to qualify for Quebec’s print media assistance measures. But the paper insists it remains franco-Ontarian at heart. To prove it, the newspaper has appointed its first Queen’s Park reporter in 30 years. Émilie Pelletier will cover the Ontario legislature for the newspaper, as the only francophone outside of Radio-Canada and TFO to do so.
• Les Affaires is dropping its print schedule to 14 times a year, and adding new contributors.
• La Presse gave some insight into its finances, saying it got $3 million in donations in 2019, well short of its $5 million goal. But through severe cuts in expenses, it has gotten its deficit down to a projected $2.6 million in 2020, and hopes to achieve a balanced budget in 2021. It’s working on an endowment with some big-money donations, and will implement new measures like playing a 30-second video ad when people open La Presse+ (a feature that people who donate will be able to turn off).
• Postmedia News is hiring journalists with the funding it’s getting from the Canadian government’s Local Journalism Initiative. The full-time 15-month positions include one in the National Assembly in Quebec City, reporting on the Quebec government and its impact on the anglophone community (and joining Gazette bureau chief Philip Authier). The deadline to apply is Feb. 10.
• The Toronto Star is also using the LJI to hire a journalist specializing in Indigenous issues.
• The Montreal Newspaper Guild, which represents unionized workers in the newsroom, advertising and other departments at the Montreal Gazette (including yours truly), voted overwhelmingly on Jan. 12 to ratify a new four-year collective agreement. The deal has a wage freeze, but maintains most benefits that the employer wanted to cut.
• The Globe and Mail is ending its Report on Business Cannabis Professional standalone publication.
• The Professional Writers Association of Canada and freelance branch of the Canadian Media Guild are merging to form a new union for Canadian freelance writers, called the Canadian Freelance Guild.
• CBC’s The National is dropping its four-anchor format. Instead, Ian Hanomansing will host Fridays and Sundays and Rosemary Barton will become chief political correspondent. Andrew Chang and Adrienne Arsenault will co-anchor the Monday to Thursday editions.
• The Quebec Press Council is changing the structure of its complaints committees, no longer giving members of the public a majority on them. Instead, they will have equal say as journalists and newsroom managers, with the chair still a member of the public and with the ability to break a tie. The change is due to recent issues where news organizations had lost confidence in the council. The council is looking for an employee to help manage complaints.
• Le Devoir talks to local media, including La Presse and Postmedia, about their anti-ad-blocking messages.
• The Toronto Star is adopting standardized labelling language for sponsored and advertiser-supported content.
• The National Observer‘s newsroom is now unionized, after the Canada Industrial Relations Board accepted their certification.
• Infoman talks to the people behind Le Revoir, the Quebec news parody website.
• Science journalist Sarah Everts offers some tips for journalists covering the coronavirus outbreak.
• Selena Ross writes for the Guardian about Canadian media giving Harry and Meghan their privacy.
• Warren Buffett is selling his newspaper business, which means we definitely don’t have a future now.
• The Washington Post is undergoing a bit of turmoil because of its decision to suspend a reporter for tweeting about Kobe Bryant’s sexual assault case shortly after his death. The decision prompted a revolt in the newsroom and she was reinstated after a review found her tweets did not violate policy.

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It’s been a month and a half since the last one of these, and frankly it’s quite the load on my time. I’m going to have to explore ways of lowering the workload if I’m going to keep doing this. In the meantime, I’ve dropped the jobs section and may drop others that are less popular and/or have better sources elsewhere.

News about news

After more than 11 years and nearly 10 million visitors, we want to say thank you to everyone who has visited. You made the Newseum extraordinary. Thank you. Thank you and goodnight. pic.twitter.com/JnxUVpBnZG

— Freedom Forum (@1stForAll) December 31, 2019

• A court has approved the plan to convert Groupe Capitales Médias into a group of workers’ cooperatives. The arrangement has not pleased GCM’s retirees, who have said they will appeal the decision and have gone so far as protesting former owner Power Corp. demanding that they make good on the underfunded pension plan. The six newspapers have formed their boards of directors (Le Droit, Le Nouvelliste, Le Quotidien, Le Soleil, La Tribune, La Voix de l’Est) and begun appointing general managers — Gilles Carignan at Le Soleil, Éric Brousseau at Le Droit. Claude Gagnon, the previous president, has retired.
• Cabinet mandate letters for the new federal government have been published, including that of new Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault. Among the promises he’s being asked to carry out:
  • New legislation requiring online platforms remove “illegal content, including hate speech, within 24 hours or face significant penalties”
  • Modernize the Broadcasting Act and Telecommunications Act to make internet access more affordable and require streaming platforms to offer and contribute to Canadian content
  • “Strengthen the regional mandate of CBC/Radio-Canada to broadcast more local news and require CBC/Radio-Canada to open up its digital platform.”
  • More funding for Telefilm Canada
  • Implement new online rights, including: “data portability; the ability to withdraw, remove and erase basic personal data from a platform; the knowledge of how personal data is being used, including with a national advertising registry and the ability to withdraw consent for the sharing or sale of data; the ability to review and challenge the amount of personal data that a company or government has collected; proactive data security requirements; the ability to be informed when personal data is breached with appropriate compensation; and the ability to be free from online discrimination including bias and harassment.”
  • Review the Copyright Act
  • “Support local journalism and develop business models that facilitate private giving and philanthropic support for professional journalism and local news.”
  • Guilbeault also says the government will impose GST on foreign platforms like Netflix.
• The Canadian government has launched its newspaper bailout. This includes the release of the form to fill out to be considered a qualified Canadian journalism organization.
• Meanwhile, News Media Canada has released the list of recipients for its Local News Initiative. They include my employer, the Montreal Gazette.
• Canadaland has a story about the publisher of the Globe and Mail lobbying the Canadian government for direct funding.
• Radio-Canada is clamping down on excessive use of the term “exclusive” in news reporting, except in very narrow circumstances — notably when getting interviews with important figures who are difficult to access. Investigations will be labelled as such (“enquête”) when they’re the result of significant investigative journalism work.
• A media placement agency presents some potentially self-serving data from a Via Rail experiment showing that advertising in Canadian-owned media gives more return than foreign digital giants like Facebook and Google.
• Alberta’s Canadian Energy Centre, a so-called “war room” set up by Premier Jason Kenney to counter negative news about Alberta oil, has drawn the ire of the Canadian Association of Journalists because the people writing stories for its website have been identifying themselves as journalists in talking to sources.
• As part of its CRTC licence renewal (see below), CBC commissioned an analysis comparing CBC News Network and CTV News Channel. For the most part they were similar, but this remark struck me: “CBC relied more extensively on its local journalists (the majority reporting from the field) for reporting and commenting on events while CTV relied more heavily on third-party speakers and experts, as well as US-based reporters.” And “CBC journalists filed or provided commentary on almost 49% of the network’s international coverage, compared to 24% for CTV.” In other words, CBC NN tends to rely on its network of journalists more, particularly for international stories. That sounds about right based on my anecdotal observation of the two channels.
• The Winnipeg Blue Bombers got mad at TSN reporter Darrin Bauming and pulled him from his job during the Grey Cup, according to the Free Press.
• CBC Manitoba and the Winnipeg Free Press appear to have entered into a content sharing agreement, with each website excerpting from and linking to stories on the other. Here are a few examples of Free Press stories at CBC and CBC stories at the Free Press.
• The new movie Richard Jewell, about a man whose reputation was destroyed by the media, is being criticized for falsely portraying a (now deceased) reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as having traded sex for information. It is hardly the first movie to portray female journalists having sex with sources or subjects, even though this is virtually unheard of in practice.
• A legal battle between radio host Pierre Mailloux and La Presse journalist Rima Elkouri has been settled out of court. The battle stems from a previous legal case that was also settled out of court, but Mailloux blabbed about its contents, prompting lawsuits both ways that have now been withdrawn.
• The Grande guignolée des médias fundraiser has raised $3.6 million for various local charities.
• Staff of the National Observer online news outlet have filed to unionize.
• Daniel Leblanc of the Globe and Mail took some Quebec media to task for allowing sources within the Quebec Liberal Party to say behind the cloak of anonymity that Dominique Anglade should not be leader of the party because of her race. He explains his reasoning here, and notes that the Globe and Mail’s investigative reporting has improved since the paper restricted the use of anonymous sources.
• The Globe and Mail looks at Thunder Bay and northern Ontario after a year of stories it produced from a bureau it set up there, with profiles of 10 people who are making a difference.
• The New York Times takes a couple of peeks behind the curtain, discussing how it decides what goes on the front page, and what technology its reporters use.

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News about news

Every newspaper prepares in advance for the potential outcomes of an election. Here are some of the front-page headlines we wrote but didn’t need. #elxn43 pic.twitter.com/ZLxSiLj3PN

— Derek DeCloet (@decloet) October 22, 2019

• A plan to have employees take over Groupe Capitales Médias and run its six newspapers (Le Soleil, Le Droit, Le Nouvelliste, Le Quotidien, La Voix de l’Est, La Tribune) as a cooperative is continuing. The trustee’s plan has been approved by the court, and now the group needs to secure enough financing to make it a reality. Meanwhile, Le Devoir says it declined to make an offer after realizing it could not export its business model to Le Soleil and make money with it. And retirees who will face cuts to their benefits after the pension plan is shut down are accusing the government of abandoning them. And aid from the Quebec government might force Ottawa’s Le Droit to move to Gatineau.
• A lawsuit by the Subway sandwich chain against CBC’s Marketplace was dismissed under anti-SLAPP law. The defamation suit alleged that CBC recklessly suggested the chicken used in Subway’s chicken sandwiches was less than 50% chicken. CBC says it used a lab for analysis and there is nothing wrong with its story.
• A study by journalism professors at Ryerson University has shown that newspaper columnists have not become diverse at the same rate as the Canadian population.
• A collaboration between 10 universities and nine journalism organizations has produced a national report about lead in drinking water. The project, which was coordinated by Concordia University’s new Institute for Investigative Journalism, was proposed by Robert Cribb of the Toronto Star.
• The Winnipeg Free Press has pulled the plug on its cannabis-centred publication The Leaf News.
• Postmedia meanwhile, has added a new topic-based website called healthing.ca, with health stories from its publications. It promises “a source of verified healthcare information for consumers, caregivers and practitioners.” Some of that content comes from Ebix Inc., designed for an American audience, or comes from health-related organizations. It follows other topic-based websites like The Growth Op (marijuana) and Driving.ca (cars).
• The office of the Turtle Island News in Six Nations of the Grand River near Hamilton, Ont., was set on fire, in what its editor calls “an attack on free speech.” It’s still unclear why the fire was set or by whom.
• Le point d’impact in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines stopped buying stories from freelancer Monic Provost after she wrote a story critical of the mayor. The editor admitted he didn’t want to get into a fight with the city.
• BuzzFeed News and the Toronto Star have published an investigation into the man behind the Buffalo Chronicle, a website that publishes apparently made-up news about Canadian politics.
• An Ontario court has struck down the provincial government’s “Student choice initiative”, which allows university students to easily opt out of paying fees to student groups including university newspapers.
• CBC’s Q got a bit ridiculed after it posted a story about the ADISQ gala and translated the names of albums and even some artists into English. It has since untranslated the names.
• The Google News Initiative has given money to four Canadian news agencies to help them with projects — a data journalism desk at The Canadian Press, an audio news exchange marketplace by Earbank Inc., a “platform for social interaction” (whatever that is) by Village Media, and “a digital-only product that combines quality local news with a community hub” at Torstar.
• Montreal hyperlocal news site RueMasson.com has shut down.
• News website The Logic has raised $1.8 million in seed funding, some of which is from Postmedia, with whom it has a content partnership.
• Two police officers who arrested MNA Guy Ouellette and undertook investigations related to leaks as part of Project Mâchurer have asked Quebecor to not publish the book PLQ Inc. about them that they claim contains falsehoods.
• A New York Times feature story by Catherine Porter has drawn harsh criticism for being “trauma porn” and presenting a distorted and stereotypical picture of what life is like for the Inuit people in the north of Canada. The Times has stood by the story, but except for a Twitter thread, Porter herself hasn’t really addressed the criticisms.
• Vice writes about the New York Times’s habit of failing to link to stories they match. In reality, this goes far beyond the Times, and is a habit of many large news organizations, who see acknowledging that another outlet had a story first as a weakness. And as Vice notes, large news organizations are large and different journalists have different habits when it comes to this.

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News about news

Ok wait I've got one more. In this file, Public Safety *redacted the sections of the act they were using to withhold the information.*

Like, I can't even know why I can't know the information. pic.twitter.com/n2kfUO3ZiH

— Justin Ling (Has Left) (@Justin_Ling) October 4, 2019

• As if it’s not clear how much of a joke Canada’s access-to-information system has become, this example from Justin Ling of redacting the reason for a redaction, or this example from the Ottawa Citizen of CSIS refusing to confirm details about getting an award for transparency. Or this example from Ling about the government redacting details about its plans to reform access to information even after it had already released that information.
• The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Radio-Canada journalist Marie-Maude Denis does not have to reveal her sources in her investigation of former Liberal minister Marc-Yvan Côté. Instead it sent the case back to the lower courts to be reassessed.
• Kahnawake’s newspapers and radio station issued a joint statement explaining why they did not name someone who was arrested before they were charged with a crime, even though many people know the identity of the accused.
• A former Occupation Double candidate is suing three clickbait websites — Narcity, Hollywood PQ and Showbizz.net — for repeating allegations against him posted on another candidate’s Instagram without giving him a chance to respond to them first.
• A Journal de Québec story about former NHL player Donald Brashear working at a Tim Hortons, and the matching stories at other media, led to accusations of “job shaming” from people who apparently think it’s shameful to work at a Tim Hortons. One of those matching stories included a photo of Georges Laraque, which gave Laraque a good laugh. The error was due to a bad caption on a Getty Images photo from 2009. Patrick Lagacé talks to Brashear’s employer to get context.
• Frédéric Marcoux, a journalist at l’Express de Drummondville, has left his job after a dispute with his employer about his coverage of a Liberal candidate’s connections to a Colombian drug trafficker.
• Saint-Lambert mayor Pierre Brodeur hired an external company to investigate leaks to the media. The investigation included looking through councillors’ work emails without their consent or knowledge.
• Enquête’s Marie-Maude Denis explains in a radio interview how the Sûreté du Québec plays favourites with journalists, and rewards those she calls “good ponies” with access to ensure positive coverage.

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News about news

• The Vancouver Sun has apologized after publishing an opinion piece that argued against ethnic diversity. The newspaper’s attempts at damage control have left some wanting.
• Many journalists, particularly at the Globe and Mail, have published an open letter saying that Unifor president Jerry Dias does not speak for them when making partisan comments against the Conservative Party.
• La Presse says the Quebec government will announce a payroll tax credit to help news media.
• Pew Research has data about the tens of thousands of layoffs in journalism in the past decade, which have affected not just traditional media but online outlets as well.
• La Presse is doing YouTube videos with its journalists as part of its fundraising campaign.
• Infoman does a good job debunking the viral Trudeau-getting-too-close-to-people photos by (a) showing video of them in context an (b) doing the same with other politicians.
• New York magazine looks at what’s next for Vice, after HBO dropped its daily news show.

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News about news

• This week was the Quebec National Assembly’s hearings into the future of news media. I previewed them in an article for the Montreal Gazette (in which I, for the first time, interviewed my own boss in an on-the-record capacity). Quebec City bureau chief Philip Authier has been covering the hearings themselves (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), in which just about every person appearing whose name isn’t Pierre Karl Péladeau argued the business model for news is declining and they need help of some sort. Transcripts and video are available here. Among the highlights:
  • Québec solidaire MNA Catherine Dorion used her time with Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau to ask him about the Journal de Québec’s treatment of her, repeatedly telling her she couldn’t criticize Péladeau and pulling her column when she repeatedly did anyway. Péladeau refused to give a meaningful answer, accusing her of making a spectacle. But he told one of his media outlets, reported in another of his media outlets, that he has no knowledge of what happened with her column, but his media outlets offer diverse opinions and it’s perfectly normal to forbid employees from publicly criticizing “colleagues.” Patrick Lagacé explains the issue well.
  • Radio-Canada says it is prepared to help regional media, including through training and collaborations, though it is not offering any specific details in its submission.
  • Le Devoir presented 17 recommendations, including tax credits, abolishing the recycling tax on newspaper publishers, and limiting government spending on advertising on foreign-owned media to 5% of the total. It also wants any measures to be equitable and not be contingent on any editorial standards or press council membership.
  • Another proposal: a 5% tax on internet services to benefit news media. For the average household that spends $54.17 a month on internet service (not including mobile data), that would cost $32.50 a year.
  • University of Ottawa professor Marc-François Bernier has a suggestion of turning Télé-Québec into some online regional news hub, funded by the government. I find this suggestion confusing, since Télé-Québec has no news department and no significant regional presence. (It has transmitters throughout Quebec but none carry programming different from the Montreal mother station.)
  • Journalism professor Dominique Payette brought back her idea of licensing professional journalists (though she refers to it as conferring a “status”). I discuss my issues with this idea in this post from 2010.
• One of the big issues related to the Groupe Capitales Médias financial crisis is its pension plan. Unless some miracle happens, retirees will probably see their benefits cut by a quarter. The CSN has proposed a workers’ cooperative model, and unionized employees also endorsed it, but it’s far from certain how such a model would be sustainable financially. Meanwhile, La Presse reports Quebecor wanted to cut 2/3 of staff if they took over the chain.
• Quebec’s labour ministry says an error led to a press release being mostly redacted in an access-to-information response.
• James Sears, editor of Your Ward News in Toronto, has been sentenced to a year in prison for hate speech against women and Jews. The publisher of the publication, who expressed regret over its contents, has been sentenced to a year of house arrest.
• A Montreal-based journalist for a military news website is trying to use new protections for journalists to have child pornography possession charges against him dropped.
• The Washington Post admits it erred in allowing a source to have his quotes removed from a story.
• A survey shows a minority but still significant number of Americans believe news from satirical websites like The Onion to be true.

News and the federal election

• Moderators have been announced for the leaders’ debates (though Justin Trudeau may not participate in all of them):
  • Maclean’s debate, Sept. 12
    • Paul Wells, columnist, Maclean’s
  • Munk debate, Oct. 1
    • Rudyard Griffiths, chair
  • English debate, Oct. 7
    • Althia Raj, Ottawa bureau chief, HuffPost Canada
    • Susan Delacourt, Ottawa bureau chief, Toronto Star
    • Rosemary Barton, national news anchor, CBC News
    • Dawna Friesen, national news anchor, Global News
    • Lisa LaFlamme, national news anchor, CTV News
  • French debate, Oct. 10
    • Patrice Roy, news anchor, Radio-Canada
    • Hélène Buzzetti, Ottawa correspondent, Le Devoir
    • Patricia Cloutier, National Assembly correspondent, Le Soleil
    • François Cardinal, editorialist, La Presse
    • Alec Castonguay, political bureau chief, L’Actualité
• Unifor’s very anti-Conservative stance in the federal election campaign has made journalists represented by Unifor’s locals uncomfortable.

At the CRTC

Radio Humsafar is trying for a third time to get #CRTC approval for a new antenna location for CIRF, its new station at 1350 AM in Brampton. Last site was rejected for being in Mississauga. New site is 1.5km away from approved site, at 280 Rutherford Rd. S. pic.twitter.com/UYhNe7P3En

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) August 26, 2019

• Radio Humsafar’s desperate attempts to secure a transmitter site for its new Brampton AM radio station before its deadline to launch is coming together. After getting its previous choice rejected twice because it was too far into Mississauga, the new proposal is well within Brampton and seems technically sound. But the deadline is Oct. 21, and the CRTC has already given the group extensions on that deadline, so the latest request is being put to a (shortened) public consultation.
• The commission has begun a formal proceeding to review new 36-month cellphone financing plans being offered by the major telecom companies, to see if they are consistent with Wireless Code provisions that would normally cap such plans at 24 months.
• The federal cabinet has declined to order the CRTC to review the decision granting OMNI a licence extension and giving it millions of dollars of free funding. A petition demanding it be overturned was filed by other applicants looking to offer an alternative.
• A hearing has been called for Allarco’s Super Channel and four McBride Communications radio stations (CFPV-FM Pemberton, B.C., CKPM-FM Port Moody, B.C., CIMM-FM Ucluelet, B.C. & CHMZ-FM Tofino, B.C.) to explain serious licence compliance issues.
• New mandatory closed captioning quality standards came into effect on Sept. 1, though they will only be enforced as of March 1. The new standards limit how many errors can be found in live programming.
• Bell has been ordered to maintain wholesale roaming service for Videotron clients as the commission studies whether some Videotron clients are engaged in permanent roaming on Bell’s network and whether Bell can terminate its contract with Videotron for that reason.
• Stingray is applying for a licence for the Stingray Hits TV channel, since it has passed the 200,000 subscriber mark and no longer qualifies for an exemption from licensing.
• CBC is proposing licence changes to its radio stations in northern Quebec:
  • Creating a CBC Radio One station in Kuujjuaq, transferring its transmitters in Kuujjuaq, Kuujjuarapik, Inukjuaq, Salluit and Puvirnituq from the Iqaluit licence. The purpose is to create a network of stations that blends programming from CBC North (including Kuujjuaq-based Tuttavik) and CBC Quebec (an hour a day of Quebec AM). The station’s schedule would also replay Tuttavik at 9pm weekdays.
  • Creating a CBC Radio One station in Chisasibi, transferring its transmitters in Chisasibi, Wemindji, Waskaganish, Waswanipi and Mistissini from CBC Quebec. The purpose is to transfer Cree-language programming — Winschgaoug (8-9am/4-5pm) and Eyou Dipajimoun (12-1pm)  — from the French stations to the English ones. The ICI Première licence would be dropped and the transmitters transferred to the licence of ICI Première in Montreal.
• English Christian music station CJTK-FM Sudbury (KFM Radio) has received approval for a rebroadcasting transmitter in Kapuskasing (88.5 FM, 510W).
• Community radio station CIHO-FM (Radio Charlevoix) has gotten a renewal for four years. Its new licence requires it to broadcast that it failed to meet licence requirements in the previous term. The station says its former general manager left and forgot to tell anyone that they have to report annually to the CRTC.
• Bell Media has applied to shut down CILC-FM Celista, B.C., which retransmits CILK-FM Kelowna (EZ Rock). The 50-watt transmitter “was originally installed by the previous owner of CILK-FM who spent time in the Celista area allowing him to monitor CILK-FM Kelowna from his recreational property.” The application says Celista residents will be served by EZ Rock Salmon Arm, 27km away.
• The commission has approved an application for a second transmitter of CKBF-FM at Canadian Forces Base Suffield in southeast Alberta. The new transmitter (101.7 FM, 920 watts) will be on the base itself rather than almost 20km southeast.
• Zazeen’s TV distribution licence in Quebec and Ontario has been revoked, as it is no longer necessary. Zazeen continues to broadcast as an exempt service with fewer than 20,000 subscribers.
• The CRTC is giving CKFG-FM (G98.7) Toronto a six-month extension to fulfill its financial obligations for Canadian content development. The station said it needed the extension because it needs to sort out issues related to the estate of founder Fitzroy Gordon, who died in April.
• New foreign TV channels approved for distribution in Canada:
  • Zhejiang International Channel (100% Mandarin, from China)
  • Great Wall Elite (100% Mandarin, from China)

Ethical reviews

• Radio-Canada’s ombudsman confirms that “liquid salt” is basically the same as putting salt in water, at least when it comes to sodium intake. The insistent complaints of the manufacturer, forwarded from the CRTC, were dismissed.
• The Globe and Mail’s public editor explains why there is so much coverage of U.S. politics (and its president in particular) lately. She also doesn’t think the Globe is “Trudeau bashing” with its coverage of SNC-Lavalin.
• Quebec Press Council:
  • CHOI’s Jeff Fillion was blamed for describing Mexicans and Central Americans as hard workers who won’t learn French and won’t join unions.
  • A Denis Lessard story in La Presse was found to have gone too far by stating as fact that former PQ MNA Nicolas Marceau was leaving politics when he had explicitly stated he was still in reflection about his future.
  • A Richard Martineau column in the Journal de Montréal that described the Black Coalition of Quebec as a “sacré bon racket” was defended as fair comment.
  • La Presse was found to have done nothing wrong in attempting to contact the son of Alain Sirard by email hours after Sirard’s suicide. Sirard killed himself after a report of him falsely accusing parents of having beaten their children was published by Radio-Canada and La Presse.
  • Éliane Gamache Latourelle, the “jeune millionnaire” exposed by a story in La Presse as not being nearly as rich or successful as she pretended, filed a long series of complaints against the journalist Nathalie Petrowski. Almost all were dismissed, some because they had insufficient evidence. The one that was upheld related to a factual error saying Instagram photos geotagged to Panama were deleted, when in fact they were still available and had no geotagging.
  • A column by Paul Journet in La Presse about SLAV made an error about the number of cases of slavery in New France. The error was corrected after it was brought to light, and the council was satisfied with that.
  • Audrey Chédor, who asked La Presse to write about a bill related to gender assignment of intersex children, complained about more than a dozen aspects of the resulting story because she didn’t agree with its angle or how she was treated by the journalist. The council found in La Presse’s favour on every point.
  • A La Presse story about an opinion poll related to gun legislation sparked a complaint about its statements. The council found that it was simply reporting the results of a survey and the statements were not inaccurate.
  • The council’s appeals panel has sustained two decisions — one that says it did not violate privacy to say what street someone lived on in a story about flooding, and another that says a TVA report about a school’s prom conflicting with Ramadan lacked rigour and was discriminatory.

TV

• Wow Unlimited Media finally took over Comedy Gold, the specialty channel it acquired from Bell Media in a $6.8-million deal approved by the CRTC more than a year ago. It then immediately shut down all operations, though it says it is “exploring strategic partnerships to structure a financially attractive business plan for a potential WOW!-branded linear channel.”
• Corus is shutting down specialty channels CosmoTV and IFC on Sept. 30.
• Disney+ is launching in Canada on Nov. 12. The streaming service will cost $8.99 a month or $89.99 a year.
• MusiquePlus quietly died, the rotting carcass that was once Quebec’s specialty channel devoted to music has been rebranded as Elle Fictions and now broadcasts mostly imported content that appeals to women. The final nail brought up some nostalgia among former staff and a look back in Le Devoir.
• Star Académie is returning to TVA in 2021, though without Julie Snyder.
• The creators of Radio-Canada legal drama Ruptures are working on an English adaptation. No broadcaster has picked it up yet.
• RDI has a new weekly show this fall about misinformation online. Alexis de Lancer hosts, with Bouchra Ouatik and Jeff Yates.
• Some results on the fight against video piracy:
  • Bell, Rogers and TVA got a court order against a paid IPTV service called GoldTV
  • Hollywood studios say they have shut down Vader Streams, another paid IPTV service
• Regional TV broadcast schedules for Canadian NHL teams are being released (we’re still waiting for TSN):
  • Vancouver Canucks: 36* national games (15 on Hockey Night/Day in Canada, 15 on Sportsnet, 5 on Sportsnet One, 3 on Sportsnet 360 (all of which are on another channel as well, including one on Citytv Vancouver)), and all 46* regional games on Sportsnet Pacific (nothing scheduled so far on the SN Vancouver Hockey overflow channel), plus 5 preseason games on Sportsnet One (2 of them also on Sportsnet Pacific)
  • Edmonton Oilers: 40 national games (10 on Hockey Night in Canada, 1 on Hockey Day in Canada, 16 on Sportsnet, 9 on Sportsnet One, 2 on Sportsnet and Sportsnet One, 2 on Sportsnet 360) and 42 regional games (38 on Sportsnet West, 3 on Sportsnet Oilers, 1 on both), plus 2 preseason games
  • Calgary Flames: 39 national games (14 on Hockey Night in Canada, 1 on Hockey Day in Canada, 10 on Sportsnet, 6 on Sportsnet 360, 7 on Sportsnet One, 1 on Sportsnet and Sportsnet One) and 43 regional games (38 on Sportsnet West, 5 on Sportsnet Flames), plus 1 preseason game
  • Ottawa Senators (French): 30 national games on TVA Sports, 52 regional games (25 on RDS, 26 on RDS2, 1 on RDS Info), plus 3 preseason games on RDS,
  • Montreal Canadiens (French): 22 national games on TVA Sports, 60 regular-season games and six preseason regional games on RDS.
• Fall previews:
  • Radio-Canada
  • TVA
  • Télé-Québec
  • Global TV
  • Séries+ and Historia
  • Canal Vie
  • Casa
  • Vrak
  • Z

Radio

Here are @Shaun925thebeat's last few seconds on air, for those who missed it. It's the end of a longer speech about his gratitude to his listeners and his employer. pic.twitter.com/yifoMOXHo8

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) August 18, 2019

• It didn’t get as much attention as the morning show change at Virgin Radio, but there’s been a change at The Beat 92.5 as well — Shaun McMahon has left the station (saying it was not his decision) and been replaced by Mark Bergman, the former program director and afternoon drive host at Virgin.
• Arsenal Media’s M 103.5 in Joliette has rebranded as O 103.5, which consolidates all of Arsenal’s stations under three brands (Plaisir and the soon-to-launch Hit Country are the others).
• Chris Biggs, Jason Barr and Patsie Jamie are the new morning team on Ottawa’s Chez 106.1.
• A study shows women are getting much less airplay than men on country music radio stations in Canada.
• Quebec City’s WKND 91,9 has signed a new five-year contract with morning host Martin Dalair.
• Peter Mansbridge has a new podcast about the Canadian election. So does Kevin Newman.
• SiriusXM has added a Tragically Hip station on its online and app platforms.
• Publishers are suing Audible, the audio book company, over a speech-to-text feature that automatically generates captions. The publishers argue Audible is illegally converting the works back into books.

Print

Old size @TheSpec vs. new size. Fits in the mailbox better. #HamOnt pic.twitter.com/gHRhN4MRyL

— Greg O'Brien (@gregobr) September 3, 2019

• The Hamilton Spectator’s presses ran for the last time on Aug. 31. The change in printing plant means a change in appearance, with a redesign and a smaller page size.
• Postmedia has shut down Hamilton Magazine.
• Le Soleil is encouraging readers to donate directly to them to support their continued existence.
• CTV Montreal reports on the efforts to resurrect The Gleaner in Huntingdon.

Online

• Montreal Dog Blog, Nat Lauzon’s side project, is being “retired” and transitioning to a social media community.
• Vividata, which measures audiences for newspapers and magazines, is working on a “passive mobile measurement panel” which seems to mean getting people to install software on their mobile devices that lets Vividata track everything they read.

News about people

https://twitter.com/MichelleZilio/status/1167534429251801089

• Several people are departing Sportsnet, including Nick Kypreos, Doug Maclean, John Shannon.
• Sports analyst Derek Aucoin has glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive brain cancer.
• Marie-Ève Bédard has been named Radio-Canada’s new correspondent in Paris.
• The Montreal Gazette writes about Suzanne Desautels’s new job doing podcasts for the English Montreal School Board.
• Jim Connell has been named the new afternoon news anchor at K103 in Kahnawake.
• Dany Dubé will be a hockey analyst for RDS this season, which means he won’t be for TVA Sports. (He remains the colour analyst for Canadiens games on 98.5 FM)
• Scott Dyer has retired as president of Corus production company Nelvana. Pam Westman has been named his successor.
• Sunny Freeman is the new managing editor at The Canadian Press, being promoted from business editor.
• TSN 690 has dropped François Gagnon as an analyst.
• Natasha Gargiulo, recently dropped from Virgin 95.9, has done some fill-in work at Breakfast Television.
• Patrick Jutras has been named head of advertising sales at Quebecor Media. He was previously at its subsidiary Videotron.
• Reporter Kristy Kirkup has begun her new job at the Globe and Mail.
• Alyson Lozoff has lost her job on the Vegas Golden Knights broadcast team … and gotten a new job with the Anaheim Ducks broadcast team. Her replacements in Vegas include Daren Millard, formerly of Sportsnet.
• Laura Lynch has been named the interim host of The Current on CBC Radio One.
• Daryl McIntyre is leaving his job as anchor of CTV News in Edmonton on Sept. 13. Erin Isfeld will anchor solo after that.
• Mark Pupo is the new editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest.
• Elliott Price, formerly of TSN 690 in Montreal and The Fan 590 in Toronto, is now on the Niagara IceDogs broadcast team at 610 CKTB.
• Hailey Salvian is the new Senators beat writer at The Athletic.
• Joel Senick is the new anchor of Global News at 11 in Calgary.
• Billy Shields, formerly of Global Montreal, has joined CTV Montreal as a videojournalist. He also got his Canadian citizenship.
• Marie-Danielle Smith is leaving the National Post, moving from Ottawa to B.C.
• Jordan Timm, former head of news at the National Post, has left to join The Logic.
• Alex Trebek is back at work at Jeopardy! after finishing chemotherapy.
• Sherri van der Veen is the new station and news director at Global Regina. A new station manager will be hired to replace her previous role at Global Saskatoon.
• The Athletic, and in particular Sean Fitz-Gerald, has been doing a lot of profiles of Canadian sports media personalities.

Obituaries

[Dernière heure] L’animateur et journaliste Pierre Nadeau s’éteint à 82 ans. Il était atteint de la maladie de Parkinson depuis plus d’une décennie.

Retour sur sa carrière#ICIRDI pic.twitter.com/rfRmbkiOaa

— Radio-Canada Info (@RadioCanadaInfo) September 3, 2019

• Pierre Nadeau, Radio-Canada journalist
• Kerry Marshall, Vancouver radio broadcaster
• Kenneth McAlpine, The Amazing Race Canada contestant
• Gord McDougall, Ottawa radio reporter
• Kerry Stratton, New Classical FM host

Good reads

Voici la photo que chaque pays membre a choisie sur son site officiel pour illustrer la même réunion au G7. Sept points de vue bien différents… pic.twitter.com/rp0hrlnSrt

— Brut FR (@brutofficiel) August 27, 2019

• A good breakdown of how the G7 leaders released photos that, for the most part, distorted reality to make it seem as if they were leading the other leaders.

Jobs

• Editorial intern, Reader’s Digest in Montreal (deadline: Sept. 5)
• Political reporter, National Post in Ottawa (deadline: Sept. 6)
• Senior news editor, Edmonton Journal/Sun (deadline: Sept. 6)
• Staff reporters, The Logic in Toronto (deadline: Sept. 6)
• Production assistant, Vocal Fry Studios in Toronto (deadline: Sept. 10)
• Managing editor, Montreal Gazette (deadline: Sept. 11)
• Reporter, APTN in Ottawa (deadline: Sept. 11)
• Reporter-editor (one-year contract), The Canadian Press in Toronto (deadline: Sept. 11)
• Host, CBC’s As it Happens in Toronto (deadline: Sept. 13)
• Photo journalist, Global News Montreal
• Canadian government reporter, Bloomberg News in Ottawa
• Online video journalist, Global News in Toronto
• YouTube creator, Postmedia News in Vancouver
• R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship (deadline: Oct. 28)

*Correction: I was off by one on the Canucks games’ regional/national split because of a typo on Sportsnet’s website.

News about news

A day in the life of a journalist… Email person A ?? get out of office reply asking to get in touch with person B ?? email person B ?? get out of office reply asking to get in touch with person A pic.twitter.com/RSIf4yGMk4

— Kelly Greig (@KellyGreig) July 21, 2019

• APTN is launching its new national French-language newscast on Aug. 26. The half-hour newscast, which will focus on Indigenous communities in Quebec, airs Mondays at 6:30pm on APTN E (the eastern, standard-definition feed).
• Nunavik’s regional health board is warning of “media overkill” after a La Presse report about a suicide in that region.
• Canada’s new Leaders’ Debates Commission has announced proposed dates for the leaders’ debates during the federal election campaign: Oct. 7 for the English debate and Oct. 10 for the French one. Included in the consortium broadcasting the debate are CBC, Radio-Canada, Global, CTV, Torstar, HuffPost, La Presse, Le Devoir and L’Actualité. Not included, therefore, are Quebecor/TVA, which has been doing its own debates for federal and provincial elections, as well as Citytv, APTN (even though translation will be available in Indigenous languages), and CPAC (though it will likely broadcast the debate anyway if it can). The broadcasters are also the producers of the debate, which as Chris Selley points out, makes you wonder what the point of setting up this debate commission was in the first place. OMNI will also be broadcasting the debates in five languages (Punjabi, Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian and a fifth to be confirmed), though which of those languages will be on TV and which will be streamed online is still to be figured out.
• Hyperlocal Montreal news site Pamplemousse.ca has shut down, again, after an attempt to revive it failed.
• American social justice magazine Pacific Standard has shut down after its funder pulled its funding.
• A plan by CBC’s The Fifth Estate to have a series on Paul Bernardo is being denounced by those who feel it’s exploiting murders for a transparent ratings grab rather than bringing anything new to the public’s attention. But CBC says it has not yet made a decision whether to go ahead with the plan.
• Postmedia (my employer) has been the subject of stories about worries it is getting too conservative. Canadaland has a long piece about its new management and the centralization of political coverage, and Maclean’s has a piece about worries of a conservative slant.
• Cattle farmers and Saskatchewan’s former premier got mad at the Weather Network for correctly stating that reducing beef consumption would make a difference in greenhouse gas emissions.
• A Canadian Press digital journalist has created a bot that helps journalists get statistical information about federal ridings.
• The Calgary Herald issued a note to readers after journalist Sean Craig learned that columnist Licia Corbella was a card-carrying member of the United Conservative Party and even voted in its leadership race.
• The Alberta government has hired former National Post western business columnist Claudia Cattaneo to help it “fight back” against critics of oil pipelines.
• The Toronto Star reports it now has 19,500 digital-only subscribers since re-establishing its paywall.
• The Athletic, meanwhile, reports passing 500,000 subscribers.
• Facebook is looking at spending millions of dollars to licence new content for a new news section it’s developing.
• I regret to inform you that Pierre Karl Péladeau has found another way to keep his lawyers busy. The Quebecor owner is suing La Presse for a Hugo Dumas story about his ex-wife Julie Snyder. Péladeau doesn’t like the insinuation that he had any role in the fact that Snyder no longer has any contracts with Quebecor’s TVA network.
• A judge has blocked a defamation lawsuit by politicians in the small Ontario town of The Blue Mountains against a local newsletter, after it printed an op-ed by another politician during an election campaign. Under SLAPP law, the plaintiffs have to pay the newsletter’s court costs.
• The New York Times is using statistical analysis to help it keep track of how diverse its obituaries are, and encourage it to chronicle the lives of more women and people of colour.
• Some enterprising scammers are buying up old domains that were linked to from mainstream news stories in order to sell links that have high search engine value.
• The Montreal Gazette got YMCA and SPCA confused on its front page, leading to an apology.
• The News Guild, America’s largest journalism union, has to re-run an election after discovering that more than a thousand members did not get ballots. The CMG guild, which notably represents most CBC employees, had out-of-date postal addresses for hundreds of members.

Continue reading →

News about news

• By now you’ve probably heard the Michael De Adder story, about the cartoonist who was dropped from the Brunswick News papers after he posted an anti-Trump cartoon on Twitter. The company denies that he was fired for a Trump cartoon that they say he never offered to them. Brunswick instead says the decision was made long before that cartoon was published, and they decided to replace De Adder with another cartoonist. That cartoonist, Greg Perry, has decided not to take the gig after being bombarded with angry comments online. The stories of the two sides don’t contradict on the basic facts, so I’m inclined to believe them. De Adder says Brunswick tended to avoid cartoons critical of Trump, of the Irving empire and of the premier of New Brunswick, Blaine Higgs, a former Irving Oil executive.
• Vice News reporter Ben Makuch has lost his final attempt to prevent disclosure of information to the RCMP related to an Islamic State fighter he interviewed. Makuch, who lost his case to the Supreme Court over rights as a journalist, tried to argue that the suspect is dead and the warrant is moot, but the court found there was insufficient proof of that death. Makuch says this is likely the end and he will have to turn over his chat logs.
• Meanwhile in Australia, federal police got airline Qantas to hand over travel history of an Australian Broadcasting Corp. journalist who published information illegally leaked by a government official.
• Statistics are not encouraging for the news industry, with an estimate showing the worst year of layoffs since 2009, and newsroom employment dropping 25% in the past 10 years.
• Le Devoir explains why it chose not to publish images of the crucifix being removed from the Blue Room of the National Assembly: Journalists were not invited to witness the event, and so the legislature filmed and shot the event itself, providing those images to the media. Le Devoir argues this sets a bad precedent of the government choosing what images of the legislature it allows the media to see. The Canadian Press refused to distribute the handout photos for the same reason.
• University of Ottawa student newspaper The Fulcrum had its website hacked and thousands of articles deleted by someone who doesn’t like them. Thanks to backups (keep backups, people!) the site has been restored.
• The latest Cahiers du journalisme is out, from the universities of Ottawa and Laval. It’s mostly think pieces, but this piece provides a good summary of the state of regional newspapers in Quebec, looking at the Quebecor-Transcontinental war, Gesca’s sale of its other dailies, and Transcontinental’s sales of community papers and Métro.
• While everyone’s focused on the news bailout (which by the way explicitly excludes freelancers), Canadaland points out that many large newspaper organizations already get millions of dollars through what are essentially bulk subscriptions.
• Kathy English writes about the Toronto Star’s Mirrored in Media project to get women and people of colour more represented in news stories as sources.
• The Columbia Journalism Review is being criticized for describing beat reporters covering specific other news organizations as “public editors.” The four in question, covering the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, work for CJR and have no affiliation or special access to the news organizations they’re covering. They are in no way ombudspeople for those organizations.
• A Yahoo News investigation shows that the Seth Rich conspiracy theory — that the Democratic campaign staffer was murdered by Hillary Clinton’s henchmen for leaking emails — was propagated by Russian intelligence.
• The Jeffrey Epstein case in the U.S. has prompted a lot of praise for Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist whose reporting on him led to the charges he currently faces. Her articles can be found here.
• Heather Mills, ex-wife of Paul McCartney, and her sister have received a “substantial” settlement from News Corp. as a result of the British phone hacking scandal.
• The Canadian and U.K. governments are giving $4 million to a new global media defence fund.

Continue reading →

News about news

Twitter is good for a lot of things. Today it’s good for the many ways @Steverukavina’s autocorrect is messing up “Jolin-Barrette" pic.twitter.com/C7w9noZNc8

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) June 27, 2019

• There will not be criminal charges filed against Journal de Montréal journalist Michaël Nguyen, whose laptop was seized in 2016 after he broke a story about a judge losing her shit in a parking garage. He was accused of illegally accessing confidential documents when he accessed surveillance video of the incident through a Google search.
• The Hudson’s Bay Company, a publicly traded company, barred journalists from its recent annual shareholders’ meeting, an unusual move that did not sit well with journalists and potentially some minority shareholders.
• A bilingual community newspaper, called Community Digest/Nouvelles Communautaires, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in government money through subsidies and advertising, but its editions are filled with articles blatantly plagiarized from other news organizations. A TFO investigation found that even some of the ads that appear in the paper were put in there without authorization, and circulation figures appear sketchy as well.

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News about news

Victory pic.twitter.com/Vftsp6or67

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) June 14, 2019

• The eight groups that have been asked to name experts to a panel to determine eligibility criteria for the federal government’s journalism bailout have selected their representatives:
  • Canadian Association of Journalists: Esther Enkin, former CBC ombudsman
  • News Media Canada: Bob Cox, chairperson of NMC and publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press
  • Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec: Pierre Sormany, journalism professor, formerly of Le Soleil, Radio-Canada and magazines including Québec-science and Vélo Mag.
  • Quebec Community Newspaper Association: Brenda O’Farrell, director of QCNA and editor-in-chief of Rabble.ca
  • National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada: Thomas Saras, CEO
  • Association de presse francophone: Pierre-Paul Noreau, publisher of Le Droit
  • Unifor: Brad Honywill, retired journalist and union representative
  • Fédération nationale des communications: Pascale St-Onge, president
• The New Brunswick Telegraph Journal has won the Michener Award for public service journalism, for an investigation into deficiencies in the province’s ambulance service.
• The Canadian Association of Journalists says it supports the recommendations of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls as they related to journalism.
• The Reuters Institute has released its Digital News Report for 2019. The report shows that very few people are paying for news online, and most of those that are pay only one or two publications. Highlights of findings from Canada show that only 9% said they paid for any form of digital news in the past year.
• Simon Houpt throws some cold water on a report that most Canadians fall for fake news.
• Quebec’s ombudsman has denounced the firing of an agronomist in the agriculture department after he blew the whistle about conflicts of interest related to a report on pesticide use. The report has resulted in the resignation of the deputy minister, but the minister (who said he approved the firing himself, then said he didn’t) is still in his job.
• John Kennedy’s Pop Goes the News website has some accusations of plagiarism against the website FYI Music News.
• The City of Montreal is changing its public notice rules so that it no longer has to publish them in newspapers. That will save the city hundreds of thousands of dollars, but also cost print media (like my employer the Montreal Gazette) lots of money. The FPJQ has condemned the decision because of its effect on newspapers (though, notably, not its effect on its intended purpose, because few people pay attention to those print public notices).
• J-Source explores the implications of CTV News’s move toward videojournalists at its local newsrooms.
• La Presse has started a morning newsletter called La Matinale.
• The Canadian Journalism Foundation has presented its annual awards, as well as its William Southam fellowships.
• The Canadian Press discovered recently that CSIS destroyed a secret file on Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1989, concluding it did not meet the criteria for being kept. Historians are upset at this loss of a potentially historic document.
• Russian journalist Ivan Golunov has been released after a public outcry, including several competing newspapers running identical front pages in support of him. His arrest on drug-dealing charges was seen as trumped up to punish him for reporting that embarrassed the government.
• Police have arrested a man in the death of Northern Irish journalist Lyra McKee.

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News about news

• The Canadian Association of Journalists has agreed to participate in the federal government’s panel to determine eligibility criteria for its media bailout money, after the government agreed not to require members sign confidentiality agreements. The CAJ has appointed former CBC ombudsman Esther Enkin as its representative on the panel. The CAJ says it will continue to push for increased transparency for this program, including full disclosure of recipients.
• A man has pleaded guilty to inciting violence against a journalist from L’Actualité. He suggested people attack her after she fact-checked a claim he made about an incident involving Faith Goldy.
• Quebec’s press gallery has filed a formal complaint against the government for choosing to hold committee hearings into the controversial proposed legislation on religious symbols in a room that has limited resources for media, even though two new rooms have just opened in a new $60-million extension to the parliament buildings. The government appears to be scheduling the hearings here intentionally to make it difficult for the media to report on them.
• Radio-Canada has launched a disinformation desk, with Jeff Yates and Bouchra Ouratik. Their first story looks at the genesis of one of Quebec’s most popular fake news stories, about Dorval’s mayor keeping pork in schools.
• Australian Federal Police raided the Australian Broadcasting Corporation after ABC News reported on leaked documents about unlawful killings and misconduct in Afghanistan by Australian forces. Naturally the raid has been condemned internationally as an attack on freedom of the press.
• A conservative student group at Rutgers University succeeded in convincing enough students to vote against renewing funding for the university’s student newspaper, in retaliation for the paper exposing that the group used language from a white supremacist group in its recruitment material.
• Facebook is giving $2.5 million to 11 organizations as part of its “local news accelerator” program. Or, rather, it will spend $2.5 million bringing in experts to tell those organizations what to do. The participating media outlets are:
  • Brunswick News
  • Daily Hive
  • Winnipeg Free Press
  • Glacier Media
  • Le Soleil
  • London Free Press
  • Northern News Services
  • The Discourse
  • The Tyee
  • Vancouver Observer
  • Village Media
• Canadian Community Newspaper Award winners have been announced.
• Winners of the Digital Publishing Awards and National Magazine Awards have been announced.

Continue reading →

News about news

• The Canadian government has selected eight organizations to choose a panel that will decide the criteria for news organizations to meet to be eligible for part of its $595-million subsidy: News Media Canada (the newspaper association/lobbying group), the Association de la presse francophone (representing francophone media outside Quebec), the Quebec Community Newspaper Association (representing anglophone media inside Quebec), the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada, the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec, Unifor and the Fédération nationale des communications (the last two being unions representing journalists). Links are to their statements on the matter. Some of those statements are telling: The FPJQ said it was only told Tuesday that it was part of this group. The CAJ says it’s not sure if it will participate. QCNA says it already wants to expand eligibility criteria beyond what the government announced. Unions, naturally, are focused mainly on jobs.
• The Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments in a case of a former Quebec cabinet minister trying to get Radio-Canada journalist Marie-Maude Denis to reveal her sources. The decision will set precedent for the limits of journalistic protections.
• The Journal de Mourréal, a fake news, parody or satire website depending on your interpretation, lost its court battle against its near-namesake, who convinced a judge it was using the Journal de Montréal’s brand and was profiting off being confusingly similar. The website must change its name and pay $23,500 to Quebecor.
• A lawsuit launched by Quebecor columnist Richard Martineau against news website Ricochet has been settled out of court. Ricochet claims total victory, in that they paid nothing and did not apologize or pull the satirical obituary they wrote about him. Martineau said he wanted to avoid a circus and compared himself to a sexual assault victim.
• Postmedia has reached a deal in principle with journalism startup The Logic that will see some of The Logic’s stories in Postmedia publications and the two groups partner on “content licensing, marketing projects and events.” Postmedia will take an unspecified minority stake in The Logic, which was started last year by David Skok, formerly of the Toronto Star. The Logic, which covers the “innovation economy,” explains the deal to its subscribers here.
• Postmedia (my employer) has registered a lobbyist in Alberta to try to get the company involved in some way with the new Alberta government’s “energy war room”.
• An anti-Muslim “pundit” named Kevin J. Johnston was ordered to pay $2.5 million in damages in a libel case brought on by Mohamad Fakih of Paramount Fine Foods. Johnston didn’t hire a lawyer, his defence was poor and his statements so egregious that it warranted one of the largest defamation judgments in Canadian history.
• The Canadian Press newsroom in Toronto held a retirement party for a reporter’s guide dog.
• The U.S. government is charging Julian Assange of Wikileaks with revealing government secrets under the Espionage Act. This is chilling for journalists, who could in theory face similar charges for publishing leaked classified information.
• A CNN Greece journalist’s car was destroyed by a homemade fire bomb. The Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned the attack.

Continue reading →

News about news

• Two Reuters journalists have been released after being detained for more than a year in Myanmar.
• La Presse has updated its public donations website with some statistics from the first three months of the program: they’ve raised $1.7 million, which works out to an average of $40.47 for 42,000 contributors. Presumably the enthusiasm for donations was stronger right off the bat, and many of those are either one-time donations or larger than they will be in the future, but if that pace holds, it would put them well ahead of their goal of raising $5 million a year through voluntary donations.
• Former CTV Montreal reporter turned Concordia professor Aphrodite Salas took a group of students to Gull Bay First Nation in Northern Ontario to do a short documentary about a solar power project being set up there, and the history of the community that led to Ontario’s government setting up the project as a sort of apology. The documentary was posted to a special section on CTV Montreal’s website. Bill Brownstein writes about the project in a Gazette story and Salas appeared on CTV News to discuss it as well.
• Cult MTL has released the results of its annual readers’ poll. Here are the results in the media category.
• The Toronto Star is offering free digital subscriptions until Oct. 31 to post-secondary students and faculty. They only need a school email account to register. Meanwhile the paper says digital subscriptions are up 50%, but that’s not enough to counteract the plummeting print ad sales revenue.
• The Toronto Star is also “enhancing” the labels on its online articles to better explain to readers the different types of journalism.
• The owners of the New Orleans Times-Picayune put on a master class on how not to fire an entire newspaper. It’s being shut down in favour of its younger rival, also owned by the same company.

Continue reading →

News about news

• It’s the Semaine de la presse et des médias in Quebec this week. Various local news outlets are opening their doors to tours or holding open houses on May 3. The latter includes Les Affaires and Urbania in Montreal, but many others too.
• The FPJQ isn’t impressed by small-town governments in Quebec barring journalists from public information meetings about flooding.
• Montreal news reporters and authorities were scrambling to find a pink-maned pony after a photo circulated on social media. The image turned out to be a hoax by Vlog, the TVA viral video show.
• The South China Morning Post has a story about Karen Lin Woods, who has been expressing opinions about Canadian politics without fully disclosing her employer’s connections with the Chinese government. Lobbyists for foreign governments are considered diplomats and don’t have to register with the lobbyist registry.
• The Walrus has a story about how the cuts to local news affects political reporting in Canada, which is bad news going into a federal election.
• La Presse is launching a new mobile app.
• The Montreal Gazette and other Postmedia publications have switched from Facebook commenting to a new system run by Viafoura, which hopes to cut down on spam and abusive comments below news articles. So far it seems to have put an end to automated get-rich-quick-by-working-from-home spam comments.
• The editor of Your Ward News, convicted of hate speech, is trying to stay out of jail, arguing he was giving a voice to angry people.
• The New York Times is “deeply sorry” for a cartoon about the U.S. and Israel that appeared in its international edition and was condemned by critics as anti-semitic. The cartoonist tells the Jerusalem Post he didn’t feel the cartoon was anti-semitic.

At the CRTC

• Approved: New English and Indigenous-language radio station in Afton Station, N.S.: Indigenous non-profit, 104.5 FM, 50W. Afton Station is about halfway between Antigonish and the start of Cape Breton.
• Approved: New English commercial radio station in Listowel (North Perth), Ont.: Owned by Five Amigos Broadcasting, 100.1 FM, 8,000W. Listowel is about 50 km northwest of Kitchener and is not served by other radio stations. It plans an adult contemporary format.
• Licences for 23 Indigenous radio stations, including CKHQ-FM in Kanesatake, have been extended to 2022 as the CRTC prepares a review of its Indigenous radio policy.

Ethical reviews

• National Newsmedia Council: A Globe and Mail opinion piece did not include a significant factual error in citing how much money Bombardier received from the federal government, even though it lacked some context and qualifiers (such as the money being adjusted for inflation).
• Globe and Mail readers say they want more fact-checking and analysis in election coverage.

At the CBC

• The corporation is being less than forthcoming about documents concerning the construction of its new Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal. But Radio-Canada decided to remind people that the new building comes with no additional cost to taxpayers, because they’re paying the same rent as before.

TV

Pierre-Luc Dubois est fin prêt pour le match avec un cri de ralliement très particulier! ? pic.twitter.com/awtXSYSQMq

— RDS (@RDSca) April 30, 2019

• Some colourful language got onto the Sportsnet/CBC NHL playoffs broadcast.
• Rogers has picked up the rights to the Eurovision song contest, and will be broadcasting the two semifinals and the grand final this month on OMNI and streaming it on OMNITV.ca. (ICI, the Montreal ethnic station that partners with OMNI and carries some of its programming, won’t be airing the shows because of scheduling conflicts, president Sam Norouzi tells me.) Canada isn’t participating (and so Canadians can’t vote), but Greece’s entry is sung by Katerine Duska, who was born in Montreal.
• Corus Entertainment has joined a group that’s developing a video measurement standard that hopes to finally solve the problem of how you properly measure the TV, online streaming and social media audience for a broadcast.
• Amazon is bringing its Amazon Channels service to Canada, according to The Logic. Amazon Channels is sort of a cross between TV and streaming, offering subscriptions to services like HBO on an individual basis at different prices.
• YouTube has scored the exclusive rights to 13 MLB regular-season games this season in the U.S. and Canada. The exact games haven’t been announced, but those games won’t be available on TV.
• APTN workers voted 39-1 in favour of a new labour contract.
• APTN is still feeling the energy of its NHL broadcast in Plains Cree, though there are no specific plans for future sports broadcasts on the network. They do want to do more sports in Indigenous languages though.
• APTN has started airing a French dubbed version of Mohawk Girls, called Belles, fières et Mohawks.
• CBC has revived Battle of the Blades, six years after its last season aired. The show will air this fall, and contestants are to be announced.
• Bell Media has greenlit a new sci-fi mystery drama series called Albedo starring Evangeline Lilly. It will be broadcast by streaming service Vudu in the U.S. Bell doesn’t say where it will broadcast the eight-episode series.
• Bell Media has commissioned a new six-part documentary series for Crave, called We’re All Gonna Die, about the various ways humanity could go extinct.
• Séries+ has announced its first original series since it stopped making them during a failed sale to Bell: Winnebago, a six-episode miniseries starring Guylaine Tremblay and Josée Deschênes, to air in 2020.
• Radio-Canada is working on a new comedy series that takes place in a universe where the Yes side won the 1995 Quebec referendum.
• Netflix’s first original Quebec production, a film called Jusqu’au déclin, has finished filming.
• Netflix and other foreign streaming services paid the Quebec government almost double what it was expected to in sales taxes, according to La Presse.
• You know that lawsuit that was obviously inevitable from Bell after the TVA Sports debacle? Yeah, it’s happening. Bell wants $150 million, for being forced to offer Sportsnet for free, the additional work for customer service, the misleading ad campaign that tried to blame Bell for cutting the signal, and Pierre Karl Péladeau breaking a confidentiality agreement by revealing the wholesale rate that Bell TV paid for TVA Sports. There’s also a separate class action lawsuit in the works by Bell subscribers.
• J-Source has a story about TV newsroom automation, and CBC’s efforts to implement it. It’s using a similar system that Global put in place a decade ago, though it’s not going as far as Global did in terms of centralizing on-camera functions.
• RDS’s 85 or so newsroom employees have been accredited as a union.
• Jimmy Kimmel is bringing back All in the Family and The Jeffersons for a primetime special.

Radio

• A strange story about a Labrador City francophone community radio station called Rafale FM that was collecting ad money for ads that it never aired because it was off the air. And it wasn’t just an honest mistake, either. The general manager confirmed in writing that the ads had aired.
• Rogers Media has acquired the podcast company Pacific Content, which mainly creates branded podcasts for companies.
• Matt Cundill’s Soundoff Podcast interviewed two people in the radio industry with Montreal connections: Ian Howarth is a freelance writer who wrote a book about Montreal’s top 40 radio heydays of the 60s and 70s. And Steve Anthony worked at CKGM and CHOM, along with stations in Toronto.
• The National Post has launched a new business podcast.

Print

• The National Magazine Awards nominations are out. Nominees include Toronto Life (19), The Walrus (14), L’actualité (9), Nouveau Projet (9), Maclean’s (9), Hazlitt (8), the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business (7) Maisonneuve (6), Fashion Magazine (5), Canadian Geographic (5), Cottage Life (5) Dînette magazine (5), The New Quarterly (5) and The Site Magazine (5).
• La Presse and Groupe Capitales Médias are seeking more bailout money from the Quebec government. The latter, which owns Le Soleil, Le Droit, Le Nouvelliste, Le Quotidien, La Tribune and La Voix de l’Est, says it could run out of money by the end of summer.
• Métro Média, the company that owns Métro in Montreal and the former Transcontinental community weeklies on the island, is launching a new free magazine aimed at people over 50, called Nouvelle Liberté.
• ESPN The Magazine is shutting down its print edition.
• The Guardian in the U.K. has finally stopped losing money. It gets more revenue from online than print, and getting money directly from readers has helped a lot in getting to this point.

Online

• Facebook broke several privacy laws, the Canadian and B.C. privacy commissioners find in a new report. It’s enough that the Canadian privacy commissioner has deleted its Facebook page and no longer wants to be associated with Facebook. But Facebook promises it will take privacy more seriously now.
• HuffPost Canada is shutting down its unpaid blog section and will be paying writers for opinion pieces. HuffPost Québec us doing the same.
• Websites owned by Microsoft and Google will not be taking Canadian political ads this year, and others are still considering their options, according to a CBC News survey. The new registry requirement for political ads is the main reason why, although some websites don’t allow any political ads in any country.
• Blackberry is shutting down its BBM messaging platform for consumers on May 31. People are sad.
• Twitter deleted tweets with links to stories about copyright infringement after a company hired by Starz to deal with copyright infringement went a bit overboard.
• The group behind the Ontario Proud Facebook page has started a federal version aimed at making sure Andrew Scheer defeats Justin Trudeau this fall.
• The Globe and Mail on Hollywood studio Voltage Pictures’ attempts to sue thousands of internet users in a reverse class action for movie piracy.

Other

• Tony Award nominations are out.

News about people

https://twitter.com/chrishallcbc/status/1121416290961436675

• CBC freedom-of-information specialist Dean Beeby has retired from the Ottawa bureau.
• Pierre Karl Péladeau, CEO of Quebecor, is buying the remnants of the bankrupt Téo Taxi, including the Montreal taxi companies it bought, Taxi Diamond and Taxi Hochelaga. They are being bought by him personally, and not by Quebecor.
• Péladeau was interviewed by Esther Bégin for her CPAC show. It focuses mainly on Péladeau’s career path and the intersection of his personal and professional life. Part 1, Part 2.
• Marc-Olivier Brouillette is the new play-by-play analyst for Alouettes games on TSN 690. He gave an interview to the station when the hiring was announced. He replaces Bryan Chiu, who left during the season last year because of family issues and has since gone back to coaching.
• Anne-Élisabeth Bossé is Véronique Cloutier’s summer replacement on Rouge FM’s afternoon show in Montreal.
• Jeff Douglas, formerly of As It Happens, is the new host of Mainstreet, the afternoon show on Radio One in Nova Scotia.
• Nabil Karim, formerly of TSN, has joined ESPN.
• Simon Coutu is leaving Vice Quebec.
• Political reporter Elise von Scheel is now permanently at CBC’s parliamentary bureau.
• Amir Nasrabadi, former president of Pixar Canada, has been hired to head up animation at DHX Media, which owns Family Channel.
• Stephanie Myles, a former Montreal Gazette sports reporter who has been writing about tennis since leaving it, was the target of Genie Bouchard’s fans after the tennis player tweeted “fake news” at Myles’s report that she was taking time off the court to get healthy. Two weeks later, Bouchard confirmed the news herself, saying she was rehabbing her “ab”. Réjean Tremblay writes about how unfair that was to Myles.
• Gazette Alouettes reporter Herb Zurkowsky, on leave to be treated for bladder cancer, is in the middle of six weeks of immunotherapy treatment.
• Quebecor columnist Richard Martineau got blocked from Facebook for three days after comments that were deemed transphobic.
• Radio broadcasters Boyd Kozak of Winnipeg and Bob Ridley of Medicine Hat are being inducted into the Western Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
• Krzysztof Pelc of Montreal has won the CBC Short Story Prize. Jacques Lemaire is the winner of the Radio-Canada French equivalent.
• More RTDNA award announcements:
  • Lifetime Achievement Award (Network): Troy Reeb of Corus
  • Distinguished Service Award: George Browne
  • President’s Award: RTDNA regional chairs Dan Appleby, Rhonda Brown, Ron Kronstein, Liam Nixon, Manny Paiva, Jill Smith, Les Staff and Kathryn Stewart

Obituaries

• Gordon Beck, Montreal Gazette photographer
• Nigel Armstrong, PEI Guardian reporter and photographer
• Gordon Stimmell, Toronto Star wine critic
• Jason Botchford, Vancouver sports writer
• Fitzroy Gordon, founder of G98.7 FM in Toronto
• Wayson Choy, author
• Teva Harrison, cartoonist

Jobs

• News editor, Ottawa Citizen/Sun (deadline: May 3)
• Provincial affairs reporter, Radio-Canada in Toronto (deadline: May 9)
• Summer journalist, Iorì:wase in Kahnawake (deadline: May 10)
• Digital broadcast journalist, Global News in Toronto (deadline: May 10)
• Extended-Term Appointment in Digital Journalism Futures, Concordia University (deadline: May 10)
• Report On Business Magazine editor
• Calgary reporter, Globe and Mail