News about news

• The FPJQ, Quebec’s journalist federation, is organizing a weeklong festival of news media, with various talks and exhibitions related to journalism, April 29 to May 5.
• A Conservative Party fundraising campaign asked supporters to rate major media outlets based on how biased they are against conservatives.
• The town of Outlook, Saskatchewan says the local newspaper cannot ask it questions on behalf of citizens.
• A Newfoundland and Labrador appeals court dismissed a contempt of court charge against Justin Brake*, who acted as a journalist following a protest at Muskrat Falls that violated an injunction.
• The Quebecor case against parody website Journal de Mourréal went to court, and a surprise witness was RDI anchor Anne-Marie Dussault, who testified that a false story about her having a relationship with former minister Gaétan Barrette led to a lot of awkwardness from people who thought it was true. As Craig Silverman notes, the man behind this website also runs fake news site World News Daily Report. Its owner is arguing freedom of expression and freedom to parody, and says the website doesn’t make much money.
• Journalism awards announcements:
  • Canadian Association of Journalists award finalists.
  • RTDNA Central Region award winners: CBC Montreal takes home 10 awards, and Global Montreal one. They also join nominees for national awards, along with winners from the East, West and Prairie regions.
  • RTDNA Network award finalists
  • Finalists for the FPJQ’s Judith Jasmin awards. La Presse, Radio-Canada, le Journal de Montréal, Le Devoir and the Gazette have multiple nominations.
  • Finalists for the FPJQ’s Antoine Desilets photojournalism awards.

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News about news

• The federal government’s 2019-20 budget gives a bit more detail on its plans to subsidize the news (and particularly newspaper) industry, putting a total figure of $595 million on it. The budget introduces the concept of a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization, whose exact criteria will be established by a panel of experts (it’s not clear who decides who these experts will be). But the criteria already laid out has issues. As Tim Bousquet of the Halifax Examiner points out, it disqualifies very small news operations right off the bat.
• The Quebec budget, meanwhile, didn’t have much of interest to media. There was $25 million for Télé-Québec, and some nickels and dimes for various cultural projects. Also of interest is that the government will move to allow business registry searches by the names of administrators. The government is in a legal battle with the website Open Corporates because that website scrapes the official one and offers the name search function.
• Apple has announced a new subscription service for news, with some Canadian partners on board including the Toronto Star, La Presse, CTV and Global. The service, which grows out of its acquisition of the digital magazine service Texture, costs $13 a month, and Apple will keep half that money. That deal wasn’t good enough for some organizations, like Le Devoir and the Globe and Mail, who make some content available on Apple News’s free service but aren’t part of the subscription tier.
• CTV, CBC, Citytv and Postmedia have teamed up to broadcast the Alberta leaders’ debate on April 4. It will be on all three TV networks plus OMNI, as well as CBC News Network, CTV News Channel, 660 News (Rogers) and CBC Radio One in Alberta. Global isn’t part of the group but has extensive election coverage plans of its own.
• BuzzFeed has successfully defended a libel case brought by the man behind Central European News, which a BuzzFeed investigation accused of being a purveyor of fake news. A story by Craig Silverman and two other reporters called him the “king” of fake news.
• The Globe and Mail looks at a case of a small community newsletter, the kind of one-person operation that’s taking the place of discontinued local newspapers, and the challenge it faces when someone doesn’t like what’s written and decides to sue.
• The Associated Press has announced more style changes, the biggest one being that we’ll no longer be using “per cent” as two words. Instead, the % symbol is to be used when following numerals, and “percent” can be used as one word in other contexts.
• Union protesters at an ABI plant in Bécancour, locked out for more than a year, harassed TVA Trois-Rivières journalist Patricia Hélie and made her fear for her safety. The union has called for calm.
• Peel Regional Police have released complaints they received — including 911 phone calls — after an Amber Alert was sent out late at night. The child in question was found dead.
• CBC employees who are part of the CMG union have voted 80% in favour of a new collective agreement. The five-year deal ends in 2024.
• The Wall Street Journal answers how the National Enquirer managed to get Jeff Bezos’s sexts: from his lover’s brother, by paying him $200,000. (He denies this, sort of.)

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News about news

• The Associated Press’s blind republication of press releases on its website has gotten it in hot water after a press release with right-wing misinformation got published this way. The pages include AP logos and could easily lead people to believe they are AP news stories. Several Canadian websites also automatically post press releases, including the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Montreal Gazette, the Toronto Sun (and other Postmedia papers).
• The federal government is investigating itself after queries from a Postmedia journalist about Irving Shipbuilding were sent by the government to the company before it even responded to the journalist.
• Exo, which runs Montreal’s commuter train network, has ended its agreement with free newspaper 24 Heures that distributed the paper in its stations. Quebecor did an access-to-information request and found an email suggesting the organization may have ended the contract because it was not happy with the paper’s coverage of its service. It’s unclear if that was the main reason, but Exo’s bosses have refused to explain themselves.
• Radio-Canada has cut nine jobs in its Atlantic offices.
• Finalists for the National Newspaper Awards have been announced. The Globe and Mail leads with 20 nominations (including a sweep of the business category), the Toronto Star and La Presse have six each, and The Canadian Press has four. The Montreal Gazette has one nomination.
• RTDNA Canada has announced its regional award finalists (East, Prairies, West). In the Central region (Quebec and Ontario), which gives out the awards April 6 in Toronto, Quebec nominees include:
  • 18 for CBC Montreal
  • 4 for CTV Montreal
  • 2 for Global Montreal
  • 2 for CBC Quebec City
  • 1 for MAtv

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News about news

• There was an element in the SNC-Lavalin/Jody Wilson-Raybould saga that related to the media: Wilson-Raybould alleges that the prime minister’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, told her that the government would “line up” opinion pieces in newspapers to defend a decision to give SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement. That comment set off a wave of denials in the media, with people like Toronto Star public editor Kathy English and this nameless St. John’s Telegram editorial writing that newspapers don’t accept such things. Former Harper communications head Andrew MacDougall and Globe and Mail media columnist Simon Houpt also pour cold water on the idea, though with some nuance. I kind of wish the industry was a bit less defensive about this, and undertook a dispassionate, open-minded review of how the political machine can influence opinion sections. The National Observer points to a similar case in Ontario where a woman was directly asked by the government to write an op-ed favourable to its changes to autism care. It would be naive to assume there’s no attempt to influence, and that attempts to influence will always fail. (Also, the op-eds that have since been published defending the government should come with reassurances that they were not ordered by the PMO.)
• Atlantic Canada’s Saltwire Network is implementing a metered paywall system, with a $15/month cost to get around it. Its publications, which include the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, are also dropping the Canadian Press wire service (after it cut several Halifax employees), replacing it with Postmedia and Reuters. Postmedia has no publications in Atlantic Canada, and its predecessor Canwest tried to ditch CP and go with its own wires to save money before eventually deciding to sign up again.
• A probably made up rumour about a “Momo challenge” to get kids to take their own lives has prompted a wave of news stories that have probably served to only propagate the idea in people’s heads and do more harm than good.
• Canadian actor and comedian Boyd Banks has apologized after repeatedly licking CBC reporter Chris Glover during a live TV hit.
• APTN reporter Kenneth Jackson has a Twitter thread on the difficulties getting access to public documents at the Thunder Bay courthouse.
• Journal de Montréal editorial cartoonist Yannick Lemay (YGreck) has apologized (kinda) after a cartoon depicting Jody Wilson-Raybould as wearing a stereotype of an Indigenous outfit for no apparent reason.
• The Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled that a construction company’s lawsuit against the Globe and Mail should not be summarily dismissed as a SLAPP suit.
• Philippe Papineau at Le Devoir writes about La Presse canadienne (The Canadian Press) and how the media business model crisis is affecting the wire service.
• A new movie about the Rob Ford scandal does a good job of erasing Robyn Doolittle, who’s responsible for much of the original reporting on the case.
• Apparently Exo, the public company that runs Montreal’s commuter trains, doesn’t publish the agenda and minutes of its board meetings, and 24 Heures can’t get a hold of them.
• A judge has ordered a journalist for Le Nouvelliste in Trois-Rivières to turn over photos to a company involved in a lawsuit against the city.

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News about news

I send my FOIA birthday cards when my original requests turn one year older. Does this speed up my FOIAs? Not really, but the cards have to go into some file forever. pic.twitter.com/QjEPnpbzHQ

— Bill Geerhart (@CONELRAD6401240) February 11, 2019

• The FPJQ says 256 journalists submitted 422 stories for its 10 Judith-Jasmin journalism prizes this year, while 54 photographers submitted 213 photos for its six photography categories.
• A Quebec Court of Appeal ruling has said that the Quebec Press Act, which sets a time limit on when someone can sue a newspaper for defamation, does not apply to newspapers’ websites. The case in question was dismissed anyway, but the ruling could set a precedent for such cases in the future. The act dates from 1929.
• Some people were not crazy about CTV’s Omar Sachedina going to Gerald Butts’s home and talking to his wife after he resigned from his position in the Prime Minister’s Office.
• The Toronto Sun fell for a fake Gerald Butts Twitter account.
• Montreal mayor Valérie Plante says her city is being used as a “punching bag” for its handling of snow clearing operations, even though other cities are also experiencing snow-clearing problems and Montreal has received more snow and far more rain than in a normal winter.
• There’s a tendency at the National Assembly for politicians to change their routines to actively avoid journalists. CAQ members are entering caucus meetings by the back door, and PQ members are holding their caucus meetings on a floor inaccessible to journalists.
• Of the federal government’s total advertising spending, about half went to digital ads, and more money was spent on Facebook than TV, radio and print combined.
• Le Devoir has a new weekly newsletter summarizing the week at Quebec’s National Assembly.
• UQAM’s student publication Montréal Campus is actively avoiding using masculin nouns and adjectives when referring to groups of people.
• 12-year-old Hilde Lysiak is putting journalists far older than her to shame with her reporting, filming a police officer threatening to arrest her. The story got national attention. The officer in question was disciplined in some way, but his employer won’t say how.
• CARE International has created a list of the 10 most under-reported humanitarian crises of 2018.
• A study by Northeastern University says viewers engage more with TV news stories that are longer and more emotional and include animation. The study itself actually re-edits some news stories to demonstrate, and frankly I’m not convinced by them. While some of the animations are very useful (like one of a train crash), others (like wacky transitions) add no information to stories, and the study doesn’t really address how much more work animation requires, while TV newsrooms are getting smaller.

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News about news

• So yeah, the Jeff Bezos dick pic thing. Here’s his post accusing the National Enquirer of trying to blackmail him. And here’s Canadaland noting the connections between Enquirer owner American Media Inc. and Postmedia (my employer).
• A Saskatchewan Court of Appeal hearing into the provincial government’s challenge to the federal government’s carbon tax law will be televised, after various Saskatchewan media outlets pushed the court to allow live broadcast.
• Torontoist has been acquired by Daily Hive, which has essentially just used it to push readers to Daily Hive Toronto, though they promise to “carry on the legacy” of the website.
• The Canadian Press has made cuts, particularly in Atlantic Canada, with four layoff notices issued Friday to journalists there: Aly Thomson, Keith Doucette, Alex Cooke and Brett Bundale (a former Montreal Gazette intern). CBC reports that voluntary departures of more senior employees could save some of those jobs. Six positions are being cut in total. They also include Tara Deschamps at the business desk in Toronto.
• There were also, according to Le Devoir, 11 cuts at Vice Canada (including Chris Toman) and two voluntary departures at Vice Quebec. There were also unspecified cuts at Global News, according to the CAJ.
• Radio-Canada is closing its bureau in Beirut, bringing journalist Marie-Ève Bédard back to Montreal. The Middle East will now no longer be covered full-time by the public broadcaster.
• Gazette cartoonist Aislin (Terry Mosher) caused a bit of a kerfuffle when he posted a rejected cartoon on Facebook and Twitter featuring a CAQ logo with a KKK-style white hood. Reaction started with why-is-the-Gazette-censoring-you and grew to anglos-hate-Quebec as the cartoon began being shared in the francophone sphere. It prompted stories by Radio-Canada, La Presse, Presse Canadienne and Énergie, discussions on Quebec AM, Daybreak and columns by Richard Martineau and Rima Elkouri, and a cartoon by Le Devoir’s Garnotte. Mosher now admits even he believes the cartoon went too far and never expected it to be published.
• La Presse has rearranged its arts and lifestyle sections, which includes more books coverage through the week, and added some new columnists:
  • David Goudreault
  • Simon Boulerice
  • Jenny Salgado
  • Noémi Mercier
  • Jocelyn Maclure
• Concordia University’s journalism department has started a new digital publication called The City, fed by journalism students.
• The New York Times is using donations to make its content available free to 3 million U.S. students.
• The Toronto Star is trying to block publication of documents it considers commercially sensitive in the Competition Bureau case against its newspaper deal with Postmedia.
• A secret group of liberal journalists from France that has been coordinating harassment of women has been exposed, leading to resignations, firings, suspensions and other fallout. Le Monde gives some background on it.

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News about news

• La Presse has launched its voluntary contribution initiative, starting up a website to allow people to contribute $5 or more on a monthly basis or give a one-time donation of an amount that they want. Saturday’s edition included a special section of mostly self-congratulatory articles, including an impressive list of investigations that resulted in major changes, as well as the behind-the-scenes story of one of those investigations, and some thoughts on what it means to be a columnist. It’s unclear how transparent La Presse will be about its donations, but its website says that donations are confidential unless the giving party consents to it being publicized. La Presse also published its journalistic standards and practices guide.
• La Presse’s workers have also ratified a new collective agreement. The agreement is retroactive to 2016 and lasts until 2021, with a salary freeze until 2020 and a 1% increase the final year. The employee pension plan (the one that began when La Presse became a non-profit) will transition to a targeted benefit structure. The union will also have some access to La Presse’s financial information once a year, and employees will get an abridged version of that.
• It’s been 10 years since the start of the lockout at the Journal de Montréal. During a panel discussion on the future of media, Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau credited the lockout with saving the paper (and similarly the Journal de Québec, which also went through a lockout).
• Le Devoir has started a new weekly news quiz and is expanding its email newsletter offering. It’s also added three new columnists: Normand Baillargeon (education), Émilie Nicolas (diversity) and René Vézina (business).
• An agronomist with Quebec’s agriculture ministry has been fired after sharing documents with a Radio-Canada journalist and sounding the alarm about corporate interference in studies on pesticides. Despite being apparent retaliation against a whistleblower, the government is standing by its decision.
• James Sears and LeRoy St. Germaine, the men behind the Your Ward News publication in Toronto, have been found guilty of promoting hate against women and Jews. The judge didn’t buy their “but it was satire” defence.
• The woman who lives at the Toronto home where remains were found that led to Bruce McArthur’s murder charges has some things to say about how she was treated by less professional journalists.
• The Telegraph has apologized and paid “substantial” damages to Melania Trump after a magazine profile of her included many facts that both sides now say were untrue.
• The 19 newspapers in Alberta’s Great West Newspapers have joined the National Newsmedia Council.
• The Desjardins credit union in Quebec has rethought its marketing strategy in a way that encourages more advertising with local media and less with big web giants like Google and Facebook.
• Toronto Sun columnist Anthony Furey may or may not be headlining a Conservative Party fundraising event. (It has since been cancelled.)
• The Fonds québécois en journalisme international has announced its second cohort of bursary winners. Among them is Charlie Fidelman, former Gazette journalist, who will get to do some reporting from Mexico.
• Freelance entertainment journalist Phil Brown writes about how he has given up and abandoned that career.
• Montreal lifestyle freelancer Marissa Miller Kovac has some tips for PR people on how to deal with journalists and freelancers in particular.
• The Washington Post on the demise of the Newseum in Washington, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its building and is finally realizing that its ambitions are unsustainable.

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News about news

Why I hate #ATIP. I'm after having trimmed this request a couple of times, and yet I still get this response from a federal department.
2022? Seriousreally? pic.twitter.com/xMZ3mCP3cO

— Tonda MacCharles (@TondaMacC) January 7, 2019

• The Canadian Press is eliminating its French-language radio headlines service, as well as its newsroom video editing service. The latter will instead be outsourced to Pagemasters North America, which may hire (at less favourable working conditions) some but not all of the talented people losing their jobs.
• Vice is not giving up in its legal battle with the RCMP over an order for journalist Ben Makuch to hand over data related to communications with an Islamic State fighter. Vice’s lawyers are now arguing the order should be quashed because the fighter in question is dead.
• The union representing workers at La Presse has reached a deal in principle with the employer on a new contract. It will be presented to members on Jan. 22.
• A recently released study looked at how much of a presence public relations has in news articles from Quebec newspapers, repeating (with some improvements) a similar 1988 study. Although the headline is that more stories have some PR elements in them, a key finding is that the percentage of stories that come from a single PR source has dropped by more than half. It’s also worth noting that a lot of things count as PR here, from attending a press conference to stuff posted on Twitter to getting a quote from a spokesperson. I might argue that as organizations have gotten bigger over the pas 30 years, the use of more formalized PR has become a necessity, and is not necessarily indicative of some sort of problem. (Another finding is that, based on a sample size of two editions, La Presse tends to have more sources per article than the Journal de Montréal.)
• The Globe and Mail is opening a bureau in Thunder Bay, and will even have its editorial board move there briefly.
• The Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec has backtracked on a decision to eliminate the “local and regional” news category from its annual awards, after an outcry from members.
• New legislation proposed by the Ford government in Ontario could cause major problems for student media at Ontario universities. The legislation would make it mandatory for students to be able to opt out of fees for student activities, like student newspapers and radio stations.
• Canadian University Press held its annual national conference this month, and handed out its John H. McDonald Awards for student journalism. Next year’s conference will be in Montreal.
• Concordia University journalism students have voted to strike for a week to protest against unpaid internships. The date of the strike is unclear, meant to coincide with a larger student strike. Note that the strike means not going to classes. It’s unclear how it would affect the internships themselves. The journalism department is reviewing rules that require that for-credit internships be unpaid only.
• It’s Canadian Women’s Hockey League All-Star weekend, which means we have the annual why-doesn’t-women’s-hockey-get-enough-attention story. Meanwhile the CWHL is making covering the game itself difficult for journalists. The game will be broadcast Sunday at 1:30pm on Sportsnet.
• A fake Washington Post newspaper showed up at protests in D.C. claiming Donald Trump had resigned. Obviously the Post was unamused.

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Okay everybody, back to work. Here’s what you missed over the holidays.

News about news

https://twitter.com/PaNormandin/status/1074671122547920897

• The number of journalists in Quebec is going down. (But meanwhile, the number of journalists employed by the New York Times and Washington Post is going up.)
• The Alberta Press Council shut down on Dec. 31. I’d link to the press release, but the website has already been shut down. The group started in 1972.
• Der Spiegel, the German magazine known for having among the most solid fact-checking in the industry, has been humiliated by revelations that one of its journalists, Claas Relotius, apparently invented sources for at least 14 articles he wrote for them. The deception came to the magazine’s attention after a fellow journalist became suspicious of Relotius’s work. This post lays out just how wrong the journalist’s reporting was. It even gets worse, with revelations he was soliciting donations for the fictional people he was writing about. And as the Columbia Journalism Review notes, the magazine is being criticized for being tone deaf in the reporting about its own crisis.
• Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson criticizes her former employer for its anti-Trump coverage in her new book, says a story by Fox News. But Abramson tells The Associated Press her words were taken out of context and she has mainly praise for the organization.
• The Google News Initiative has announced $25 million in funding to 87 news organizations in 23 countries on various technological development projects. Canadian recipients are Global News, Postmedia and TVO. The announcement doesn’t break down what each group got, or what their projects are.
• The Journal de Montréal has started a possibly satirical “Centre d’observation du Québec-Bashing“, and has discovered J.J. McCullough, who for some reason keeps getting published in the Washington Post.
• TVA Nouvelles has finally apologized — almost a year later — for a story it ran that accused a mosque of demanding that women be excluded from a nearby construction site. That turned out to be false after an investigation that TVA has not released.
• Montreal Gazette editor Basem Boshra (my boss) apologized after its website posted a story from American Media Inc. (originally from Radar Online) about a “Tinder Horror Date” who stabbed a woman and was tased by police, later dying because of it. A lot of people on Twitter criticized the headline and tweets about the story for portraying the attacker as the victim or being apparently flippant about a Tinder date that left a woman seriously injured. (Boshra offers some subsequent advice for editors apologizing for screwups).
• Toronto Star public editor Kathy English asked Star newsroom employees about what they wished people knew about their jobs. The result is a bit of a rosy picture of how much journalists care about getting facts right and informing the public.
• Star assignment editor Ed Tubb lists the kinds of stories he’d like to see more of in a Twitter thread.
• A major hack of prominent Germans’ personal data — including that of Chancellor Angela Merkel — was posted online, prompting a major scandal. The fact that far-right-wing politicians were excluded from this hack points to a political motive, and caution from journalistic sources on making use of the data (or even trusting it).

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News about news

Maybe I'm being a little unfair. To provide the government's point-of-view, here's the list of their Access to Information progress, per the freshly-unredacted documents. pic.twitter.com/kwqn128evu

— Justin Ling (Has Left) (@Justin_Ling) December 12, 2018

• The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Vice journalist Ben Makuch will have to turn over records related to interviews he conducted with Farah Mohamed Shirdon, a Canadian man suspected of being a fighter for the Islamic State (and now believed to be dead). The court ruled that there was no journalistic confidentiality in this case, and that the needs of the government outweighed the interests of protecting journalistic work product. Vice nevertheless called it “a dark day for press freedom.”
• Time magazine has named a series of journalists, including Jamal Khashoggi, as its Person of the Year.
• Winnipeg police and Global News disagreed on whether the latter should have published graphic images of a dead body. Global said it did not take the decision to do so lightly.
• Montreal Mafia leader Francesco Del Balso has pleaded guilty to threatening TVA reporter Félix Séguin.
• The Quebec government will study the future of the news media with parliamentary committee hearings.
• The Ottawa Citizen editorial board followed Patrick Lagacé’s lead published an editorial in both languages on the Ontario government’s cuts to French-language services.
• Le Droit published a special 16-page section on Franco-Ontarians.
• The Journal de Montréal has selected a new columnist through its QUB Radio reality show: Madeleine Pilote-Côté. She was interviewed on LCN by Denis Lévesque, while the runners-up got free books published by Quebecor, in what can only be described as the most convergence-y thing ever.
• An Arkansas school district suspended a high school newspaper after it printed a story about students transferring schools so they could play for a better football team. The articles have since been allowed to be republished with corrections after a national outcry, but the district still wants to review all stories before publication.
• The Grande Guignolée des médias raised more than a quarter million dollars in Montreal.
• The National Post’s Tristin Hopper was the latest to accuse CBC of unfairly competing with private media, leading to a rebuke from outgoing VP Heather Conway.
• Québec solidaire went into a closed session during a policy debate and kicked out the media because they didn’t want to appear to be a divided party.
• A public school board is trying to have a teacher fired for talking to the media about problems at her school that are affecting students’ education. A protest was held to support her.
• The Quebec Press Council will not participate in a committee to determine eligibility for the federal government’s journalism tax credits, saying that is not part of its mandate.
• An Ontario Court judge found that the editor-in-chief of the right-wing Your Ward News in Toronto did not commit a crime of making death threats by writing “there was the chance that some hothead who cares deeply about me and my family would lose it and do something illegal, like bludgeon the Kinsella’s to death (sic).”

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News about news

• The federal government has issued an economic update (read: mini budget) that among other things offers $595 million in aid to the journalism industry through tax breaks over five years. A lot of the details (particularly what eligibility criteria there are) are still to be worked out, but this is what is being proposed:
  • Allowing non-profit journalism enterprises (like La Presse) to become registered charities, which would allow them to issue tax receipts for donations
  • A refundable tax credit applied to labour for “qualifying news organizations” as of Jan. 1, 2019, the details of which are still to be worked out
  • A temporary, non-refundable tax credit for subscriptions to “eligible digital news media”
• The Gazette has a story about Cree newsmagazine The Nation, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary.
• The Globe and Mail on the Ontario community of St. Marys, and what happened after it lost its community newspaper, one of several sold by Torstar and immediately shut down by Postmedia.
• Edmonton MP Kerry Diotte is suing the University of Alberta’s student newspaper The Gateway for an article in which it says he “has a history of making racist remarks.” The Gateway has changed the article, but Diotte hasn’t dropped the suit, leading to condemnation from Canadian University Press.
• YouTube is flagging RT videos as being financed by the Russian government.
• The Canadian Media Concentration Research Project has published its annual report. Nothing earth-shattering in it, but it puts some figures to trends we’ve been seeing in media, notably the decline in non-digital advertising and the rise of Google and Facebook.
• Pay rates for freelance journalism in Quebec haven’t increased in the past 25 years.

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News about news

• Ontario’s budget plan to terminate its commissioner for French-language services and cancel plans for a French-language university has prompted a sort of meta debate: Is Canada’s anglophone media (outside Quebec) hypocritical? Patrick Lagacé published an English-language column in La Presse noting how much attention was given to Quebec’s “pastagate” controversy versus how few columnists and editorials are being written about the situation facing Franco-Ontarians.
• iPolitics has laid off five people, six weeks after being acquired by Torstar.
• The CBC/Radio-Canada building in Sherbooke had to be evacuated Monday afternoon because of a fire, forcing the cancellation of the local TV newscast and radio show. The fire didn’t touch the broadcaster’s offices, so they were able to return on Tuesday.
• The Washington Post talks to two people on either side of the fake news divide — one who creates satirical stories so outrageous that you’d have to be clueless to believe them, and another who cluelessly believes them.

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News about news

BREAKING: President Trump, CNN Correspondent Jim Acosta and @NBCNews Correspondent @PeterAlexander engage in tense exchanges in post-election news conference. pic.twitter.com/WUlXemGn7y

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2018

• There was a whole thing about CNN’s Jim Acosta and Donald Trump getting into a thing at a press conference that led to Acosta’s White House credentials being pulled and arguments online about whether a video of the incident was manipulated to make a “karate chop” appear where it didn’t exist. CNN is suing Trump over the de-credentialling.
• Meanwhile in Canada, the Ottawa Citizen/Sun found a video taken and published by an Uber driver in Arizona showing Ottawa Senators players complaining about their coaches, and the (re)publication of that video led to a legal threat from the team to take it down, followed by the team throwing Citizen/Sun reporter Ken Warren off the team’s charter flights (the Senators are the only NHL team that allows journalists to travel with the team in this way).
• La Presse is cutting 37 jobs, including 19 in its newsroom, representing a bit under 10% of its total workforce. It hopes to do so by voluntary departures. The publication is also looking at new ways of generating revenue, including some value-added in-app purchases from readers.
• A Canadaland investigation into the WE charity prompted a threat of a libel suit by WE with various claims about how Canadaland maliciously lied about WE. What’s really unusual about this is that WE hired a “completely independent” retired judge to pre-judge the case in WE’s favour (based apparently only on communications with WE and consulting published works by Canadaland). Canadaland’s lawyer has responded to the WE notice and, besides two clarifications about statements made in the podcast, it’s sticking by its story.
• The Houston Chronicle has completed its investigation into former journalist Mike Ward (no, not that one), and found that it could not track down more than 100 sources. It’s a good bet they don’t exist.

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News about news

• CBC News had to issue an editor’s note after some CBC News Alerts tweets talked about the economic impact of the Brazil election on Canadian companies, which was criticized as being out-of-touch. Paul Hambleton, Director of Journalistic Standards and Practices says the coverage itself was fine, but “the rollout of that article could have been better.”
• TFO talks about what happened in the Ontario community of Kapuskasing after this summer’s closing of its only local newspaper, the Northern Times, by (my employer) Postmedia. It’s being felt by advertisers and politicians, and there are local efforts to replace it with some other source of local news.
• Some news media are finding ways to make money. The New York Times now has 4 million subscribers, the most at any time in its history, including 3 million digital-only subs. The Guardian has had more than a million people contribute financially over the past three years, with 500,000 keeping their subscriptions. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed is trying a bunch of things to make money.
• La Presse is getting into the newsletter game, with a daily hockey newsletter by Mathias Brunet.
• Le Droit columnist Denis Gratton really didn’t appreciate his paper being criticized for ignoring the franco-ontarian community, especially by someone his paper had just given quite a bit of attention to.

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News about news

• La Presse’s Fanny Lévesque looks at the money crunch facing community newspapers in Quebec.
• The Toronto Sun pulled a column skeptical of vaccines, after learning of unspecified “inaccuracies” in the column by a peddler of vitamin C supplements.
• Sunny Dhillon, a Vancouver-based journalist with the Globe and Mail since 2010, resigned suddenly on Monday, and published an essay explaining why, saying he felt ignored and implying racist treatment of the news by his editors. The paper has yet to respond to his story.
• Federal Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer is increasing attacks on the media as we enter an election year.
• Ontario held municipal elections last week, amid complaints about CBC’s decision not to broadcast a live election results special on television (funny how there wasn’t nearly as much uproar during last year’s Montreal municipal election, or elections in Vancouver and Winnipeg). Among the winners was former CTV Ottawa anchor Carol Anne Meehan, who upset an incumbent to get a seat on Ottawa’s city council.
• Global BC and CBC are joining forces for a debate on electoral reform in British Columbia, Nov. 8 at 7pm. It will be broadcast on both Vancouver TV stations as well as their radio stations and online.
• Speaking of debates, the federal government has nominated former governor general David Johnston to be the country’s first official commissioner of election leaders’ debates. Broadcasters won’t be obligated to broadcast such debates and leaders won’t be obligated to participate, which makes me wonder why we’re bothering. Recall that in 2015, the leaders failed to agree to the “official” English-language debate and took part in other debates instead. Presumably even with a debate commission the same thing could happen in the future.

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