News about news

This is quite a correction pic.twitter.com/TnFZmbCIQV

— Jon Steingart (@jonsteingart) February 26, 2018

• The federal budget is providing $50 million to support local journalism over five years, though the details are light so far. There’s also talk of opening up charitable donation rules to make journalism eligible. Though it’s better than nothing, it’s also being criticized as being far too little.
• The NETendances study by CEFRIO shows Quebecers continue to get their news mainly from television, but also mostly use multiple platforms to inform themselves. Radio is on the decline, while online sources continue to rise.
• The New York Times has decided to write obituaries for women who died long ago, as a make-up effort for ignoring them when they died. The “overlooked” series, which will continue, includes obits for people like Charlotte Brontë, Ada Lovelace and Sylvia Plath.
• La Presse’s Marie-Claude Lortie visits the New York Times to talk about its business model and what lessons other media can learn from it.
• A widely shared opinion piece by CTV personality Marci Ien claiming to have been racially profiled by Toronto police was challenged by the department after it consulted video of the incident. The police’s case is pretty convincing, though it doesn’t mean that Ien isn’t being racially profiled in general and doesn’t face a different standard because of race. Ien says the police are missing the point, and it’s about her feelings (though her opinion piece makes several statements of fact that, if she was not racially profiled in this case, would be factually incorrect). There’s also a history of racism to consider, even if race may not have played a factor in this incident.
• Facebook is testing a new feature that allows select publishers to label a post as breaking news (once a day). Apparently only four Canadian news outlets are being given this power to start with: Global News, CityNews, CBC and the Journal de Montréal. Meanwhile, the website is ending an experiment in some countries that tried to separate feeds related to friends from feeds related to organizations and brands.
• Joel and Jerome Vangheluwe are suing alt-right websites after they spread rumours that the two were behind the Charlottesville attack.
• TVA is still blacklisting Hugo Dumas of La Presse.
• The Journal de Montréal profiles three women who cover the Canadiens, including CBC’s Jessica Rusnak. It’s the kind of story you expect on every International Women’s Day, but this one goes into a bit more depth about their careers and the sexist crap they’ve had to deal with.
• An open letter to the Quebec government by organizations including the FPJQ asking it to reconsider legislation that would restrict what information can be obtained through access to information laws.
• Fake news travels faster on Twitter than real news, a study has found.
• Press Forward is a new campaign to end sexual harassment in media workplaces.
• Prime Minister Justin Trudeau travelled to India, and there were lots of hot takes by columnists about how much a disaster it was, but not much context about the issues separating India and Canada. Supriya Dwivedi points out some of them in a column at GlobalNews.ca.

Continue reading →

News about news

• There was another school shooting in the United States. That’s not a media story, but there were a few problems with social media reaction to it. Poynter points out that people were creating fake tweets from real journalists to make them look bad (and reduce public confidence in professional journalism). Meanwhile, an oft-reported fact about there being 18 school shootings so far in 2018 was debunked by the Washington Post as an exaggeration based on overly broad criteria from an interest group about what constitutes a “school shooting.”
• Two Quebec journalists won’t have to divulge their sources of leaks from the province’s anti-corruption squad UPAC. The judge cited the federal government’s new journalism source protection law. The decision is being appealed.
• Meanwhile, the province’s minister responsible for access to information is presenting a new law that would restrict it somewhat, exempting communication between ministers. That isn’t playing well with the government’s promise of more transparency.
• A Newfoundland judge has dismissed a charge against a man who yelled FHRITP at a journalist, ruling that emotionally disturbing a news reporter did not constitute a public disturbance according to the law. He was careful to note that this doesn’t make FHRITP legally protected, and suggested the government could amend the law to add emotional disturbance to the criteria.
• The Globe and Mail explains why media are using Facebook photos of accused killer Bruce McArthur instead of his mugshot. Simply put: because police didn’t release the mugshot.
• Quebec superior court has upheld a labour board decision ruling that a government employee who gave a whistleblower interview to Radio-Canada denouncing insufficient resources for environmental protection should not have been fired for giving an interview without authorization.
• CBC’s ombudsman ruled that a former Calgary school board trustee candidate cannot get previous articles about her de-indexed.
• Quebec’s journalism federation is offering government-subsidized workshops to teach high school students how to recognize fake news.

At the CRTC

• Télé-Québec’s CRTC licence is up for renewal, and among the interventions was one from the English Language Arts Network, which Vincent Brousseau-Pouliot found, writing a story about its demand that English be more represented in TQ’s programming, and even a 10% English quota imposed. Specifically, ELAN is asking the CRTC to:
  • Require TQ to develop and publish a policy to reflect the full diversity of Quebec society,
  • Require TQ to develop and publish an action plan for creation of content that fulfils its diversity policy and a promotion policy to encourage viewership from members of Quebec society who have not traditionally felt reflected, 
  • Require TQ to track the language of its viewers so that it knows which language groups are watching which programs,
  • Create a consultative committee that includes the diversity of Quebec society, which will advise the board of directors on issues concerning the broadcasters diversity of programming throughout the license period.
  • Place ads in English-language media when pertinent programming for the English- speaking minority is scheduled and when new programs are being developed,
  • Create an on-line playlist of Anglo-Que?be?cois reflective content (following the NFB’s example),
  • Require TQ to increase the production and programming of content reflecting the Quebec minorities, especially English-language, indigenous, and visible minority communities to at least 20% of the schedule, and at least 20% of the production budget; and
  • Require TQ to establish English-language programming for 10% of its schedule, and 10% of its production budget, to reflect the English-language community in Quebec.
• The commission has approved the acquisition of four Ontario radio stations by Bell Media, which will pay $15.64 million to Larche Communications for CICZ-FM Midland, CICX-FM Orillia, CJOS-FM Owen Sound and CICS-FM Sudbury. Bell will pay $1,022,004 to various funds and development initiatives as a CRTC-mandated tax on the acquisition.
• The CRTC has dismissed a complaint by Electronic Box (aka EBOX) against Bell Media, which accused the company of refusing to make Bell’s specialty channels available for a TV distribution service EBOX plans to launch in Ontario and Quebec. Bell says it is willing to negotiate, and the CRTC agreed Bell was willing to act in good faith. If they can’t come to an agreement, they can come back to the commission for mediation or arbitration.
• TVA is appealing a CRTC arbitration decision to the federal court of appeal, arguing that the commission was wrong to accept a Bell deal that would set Bell TV per-subscriber rates for TVA Sports lower than Bell’s RDS.

TV and video

• Unifor is raising the alarm about cuts at Global News, and in particular the decision to have local evening newscasts in Atlantic Canada be anchored out of Toronto. (Late-night and weekend newscasts are already done this way.) On the other hand, Global is expanding its local newsgathering operations by hiring online journalists in three markets where it doesn’t have local TV stations: Ottawa, Barrie and Kitchener. (CTV has stations in all three markets.)
• Télé-Québec is turning 50, and has some special anniversary programming this month.
• A judge has ruled against a website called TVAddons, which provided add-ons for the Kodi media player that allowed users to access copyright-infringing content. The ruling overturns a lower court ruling that denied an injunction.
• Britbox, an over-the-top service providing classic British TV series, has launched in Canada. It costs $8.99 a month.
• CBS All Access is launching in Canada in June. But its exclusive series Star Trek Discovery and The Good Fight will remain on Bell Media’s Space and Corus’s W Network, respectively.
• Richard Therrien at Le Soleil is wondering if the ubiquity of viewer content warnings at the end of every commercial break is desensitizing TV viewers to them, which causes them to miss when there are scenes that really need viewer discretion.
• CBC says more than 23 million Canadians tuned in during at least part of the first three days of the Olympics, including an average audience of 1.3 million for the opening ceremony. About 4.3 million tuned in to watch Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s gold-medal-winning ice dance free skate, plus another 700,000 on Radio-Canada. On NBC, Olympics ratings are down 6% from Sochi, but the network says that’s what they expected.
• APTN has responded to popular demand and added the classic Canadian drama North of 60 to its schedule.
• YouTube is promising changes after top recommended videos related to the Parkland Fla. shooting were found to be conspiracy theory videos accusing people involved of being actors.
• The New York Times explains how TV networks like NBC handle compensation for the rights to broadcast music that is included with figure skating performances during the Olympics.

Radio

• Jerry Howarth, radio voice of the Toronto Blue Jays, announced his retirement, effective immediately. He says health issues are affecting his voice, and it’s time to pack it in.
• CIBL 101.5 has slowly resumed programming as it continues to try to find a way out of its financial crisis.
• Corus-owned radio stations have suspended play of songs by Canadian band Hedley after sexual misconduct allegations were published against the band. The band has also pulled out of the Juno Awards following this flurry of anonymous Twitter allegations.
• Urbania did a statistical analysis of CHOM’s playlist to determine objectively if it really is playing the same songs over and over again. Its conclusion: songs aren’t being repeated that often, but you do hear the same artists a lot.
• The New York Times is offering its Daily podcast to public radio stations.

Print

• Le Soleil will stop printing a Sunday edition starting March 18, and instead publish a digital-only edition on Sundays. Groupe Capitales Médias’s other newspapers (which didn’t have Sunday editions) will also add Sunday digital editions. The move will leave only the Journal de Montréal and Journal de Québec as Quebec newspapers printing seven days a week.
• Quebecor is asking the court to invalidate a $10-million aid package from the Quebec government to Le Soleil publisher Groupe Capitales Médias, arguing that the investment, through Investissements Québec, is discriminatory and unfair. GCM says it’s a political move by Pierre Karl Péladeau.
• The Toronto Star is sounding the alarm about the industry’s financial state in dramatic fashion: it has put its internship program on hiatus, cut budgets for travel and freelance, and its chair gave an interview to the Globe and Mail in which he says the paper is “very, very close to the end.” (At least one person thinks the Star’s internship program, while very useful, has some serious structural problems.)

Online

• A new website, La Torche 2.0, is offering editorial cartoons as a subscription service for $1/week. It’s already signed up Beaudet, Bado and Fleg, former newspaper standards. Le Devoir has details.
• The New York Times profiles The Players’ Tribune, the website that features first-person essays by athletes, and the thorny issue of giving them a public forum unfiltered by journalists.
• Google’s Chrome browser has begun blocking website ads by default from sites that don’t respect ad standards.
• The Globe and Mail has a long (paywalled) feature about 5G, the new wireless technology being tested that would increase mobile data speeds mainly by adding many more smaller cell towers in big cities.
• Newsweek is continuing to implode, as evidenced by the epic editor’s note atop this story reporting on itself.

News about people

• CBC has poached Vassy Kapelos from Global to host its Power & Politics show, finally replacing Rosie Barton, who left for The National. Kapelos had been host of Global’s weekly politics show The West Block.
• V’s new late-night talk show hosted by Stéphane Rousseau has announced a co-host (or, perhaps more accurately, sidekick): Sonia Cordeau, best known from Les Appendices.
• Former Impact captain Patrice Bernier has been added as a contributor to TVA Sports.
• Jonny Harris (Still Standing, Murdoch Mysteries) and Emma Hunter (The Beaverton, Mr. D) will co-host the Canadian Screen Awards on March 11.
• TSN 690’s Sean Coleman is going back to school to get an MBA.
• Gerry Forbes, CJAY Calgary morning man, is retiring.
• Jean-François Breau replaces Jean-François Baril as host of La guerre des clans, the Quebec version of Family Feud, which V is bringing back from the dead.
• La Presse profiles Mathieu Beaumont of 98.5 FM.
• NPR has released a report into alleged sexual harassment by Michael Oreskes, former senior vice-president of news. It’s not good news for Oreskes.

Jobs

• Summer intern, Maclean’s (deadline: Feb. 22)
• Video manager, Montreal Gazette (deadline: Feb. 23)
• Audience growth editor, Canada at the New York Times
• Website producer, Global Montreal (deadline: March 2)
• Online journalist, Global News, Ottawa/Barrie/Kitchener (deadline: March 3)

News about news

• The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the CBC did not have to “unpublish” a story it posted about a homicide victim after a publication ban was ordered because the victim was a minor. The decision does not set a precedent that publication bans don’t apply to previously published online articles, but rather says that an injunction to order a news organization to remove such stories has a much stronger test than the appeal court thought. A separate ruling acquitting the CBC of contempt of court is being appealed by the Crown.
• Concordia University’s journalism program is starting a sports journalism course, funded thanks to a 2015 donation from Sportsnet that helped Rogers satisfy CRTC-imposed conditions related to its acquisition of The Score (now Sportsnet 360). The Concordian has also published Concordia’s 2015 pitch to Sportsnet for the donation, which it got through an access to information request.
• La Presse+ is putting out a special edition at noon every day of the Olympics with the latest from Pyeongchang, whose time zone doesn’t work well with its 1:30am ET deadline.
• NiemanLab has a story about the Washington Post’s Arc Publishing system and its growing popularity among newspaper publishers. Its clients include the Globe and Mail.
• Fox News pulled an opinion piece published online that basically said that the Olympics were too diverse.

At the CRTC

• The commission sent a flurry of letters to various media companies asking for confidential information about their users. Included in that list is Netflix, which famously refused to provide similar data during the Let’s Talk TV proceeding. This time the CRTC says explicitly that it has already decided that all information provided will be kept confidential and that decision is final. Other companies who received such requests are Google, Amazon, Apple, Spotify, Facebook, and the usual Canadian broadcasters and telecom companies.
• The battle continues over a proposal by an industry coalition to block piracy websites. The number of comments at the CRTC has passed the 4,500 mark as I write this. The deadline is March 1.

TV and video

Cop Life. Real Life. It’s Messy. @TheDetailCTV premieres March 25. #TheDetail cc: @ShenaeGrimes @Angela_Griffin @Wendy_Crewson pic.twitter.com/2DKcTFuCls

— CTV (@CTV) February 5, 2018

• You probably missed it because it was announced during the Super Bowl broadcast on CTV, but the new Canadian cop drama The Detail has a premiere date: March 25.
• Similarly, the new animated version of Corner Gas debuts April 2 on Comedy.
• Speaking of the Super Bowl, CTV’s ratings were about on par with last year, about 4.4 million, versus 7.3 million when its signal was substituted over the U.S. network feed. Though we don’t know how many Canadians watched on NBC across the country, in Toronto according to Bill Brioux it was 947,000 watching on CTV and 529,000 on WGRZ Buffalo.
• Bell Media has launched an app called Snackable TV, which offers short-form video content, mainly of the comedy variety. Bell says it will be ad-supported and free for consumers. But the design of the app is very clunky, and in general it seems like more of a consultant’s idea of what young people want than something that young people have actually been demanding. Most of the videos on the app are already available on YouTube, FunnyOrDie or other websites.
• Hulu lost almost a billion dollars in 2017.
• Radio-Canada is cutting deep into its daytime TV programming, cutting the number of episodes of Marina and Entrée Principale, and cancelling summer replacement show Indice UV.
• CBC has ordered a second season of The Great Canadian Baking Show.
• Sportsnet has announced its Blue Jays spring training schedule. The first game is Feb. 23, and the preseason ends once again with the two games in Montreal on March 25 and 26, on Sportsnet and Sportsnet One, respectively.
• Professional actors in Quebec are upset that TV and film productions are hiring actual police officers to act as extras. Quebec’s actors union says as long as those off-duty cops are members of the union they can’t stop the practice.
• A story in the Montreal Gazette on how anglos have found success on TVA’s La Voix, which begins its next season on Sunday.
• A new collective agreement has been ratified at City and OMNI in Toronto.
• The New York Post got hold of ratings for the U.S. version of Viceland, and they’re pretty awful.
• NBC apologized after an analyst put his foot in his mouth during the Olympics’ opening ceremony by suggesting that Japan acted as an “example” to Korea.

Radio and audio

• Radio Centre-Ville (CINQ-FM 102.3) is still not out of its financial crisis, and it got to the point last week where a creditor threatened to start seizing equipment forcing the station to shut down.
• CIBL 101.5 finally has its rescue committee in place. Names include Jacques K. Primeau, Alexandre Taillefer and Jean-Martin Aussant.
• BLVD 102,1 in Quebec City has terminated the contract (apparently by mutual agreement) of late morning host Sophie Durocher, as well as dismissing morning show co-host Maude Boutet.
• Nominees for the Juno Awards have been announced. The big show is March 25, on CBC TV.
• Andy Oudman of CJBK radio in London, Ont., has apologized after an open letter accused him of misogynist and sexist comments.
• Canadaland has a new politics podcast, hosted by Jen Gerson (formerly of the National Post) and Justin Ling (formerly of Vice News).
• Shari Okeke is working on a new CBC podcast featuring the voices of teenagers.
• Radio-Canada has a new podcast called Si j’ai bien compris avec Louis T, reviewing the week’s news with the comedian’s unique explanatory touch.

Print

• The Montreal Gazette has new columnists: Karl Lohnes on home decor, and Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed, who previously wrote for the West Island section. Their additions are announced in an editor’s note that also gives the Christmas Fund donations total as $812,186, which is great but also an indication that donations are slipping as readership and ad revenue decline.
• Everyone is abandoning ship at Newsweek as the company self-destructs. To make things worse, the guy who was put on leave after it became public that he lost his previous job as a result of sexual harassment allegations has been reinstated.
• The Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union Tribune have a new owner: a guy with a lot of money spent $500 million on them. Staff there seem more hopeful than under the previous owner, Tronc, which seemed more concerned with cutting costs than investing in a new business model.
• Unions at Postmedia-owned newspapers are banding together to resist the owner’s demands in contract negotiations. The Windsor Star has joined the Montreal Gazette (my union) and Ottawa Citizen/Sun in passing near-unanimous votes in favour of strike mandates. The union locals have vowed to work together, refusing to accept new contract terms unless they apply to each other.
• The editor in chief of The Baron, the student newspaper at the University of New Brunswick Saint John, learned a lesson the hard way about taking a hard line on free speech. After the newspaper published an op-ed by what has been described as a neo-Nazi group, the newspaper’s board has apologized for the incident and has a new interim editor.
• J-Source has some details about staff cuts at the Victoria Times Colonist, owned by Glacier Media.
• The New York Times beat expectations as digital subscriptions went up again.

Online

• Twitter just reported its first profitable quarter ever.
• Facebook is testing a downvote button.

News about people

• A La Presse investigation into former Université de Montréal professor and Radio-Canada host Jean Larose shows several former students he allegedly sought to begin sexual relationships with, including by just jumping them in his office. Some of them complained, including one to the police, but those complaints were rejected, and the police case was closed as “unfounded” (you may have heard that term before). The university admits it didn’t handle the cases well and has changed the way it operates.
• TVO has launched an independent investigation after former Toronto mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson accused Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda, of asking her for sex. Paikin says the accusation is completely false, and several people in the media are coming to Paikin’s defence.
• Former Impact player Hassoun Camara will join TVA Sports as a soccer analyst.
• A change at Radio-Canada’s Saguenay station: Christian Grégoire is the new manager there, replacing Michel Gagné, who is retiring.
• Whitney Stinson is the new managing editor of Global News Saskatchewan.
• Justin Ling, in addition to his new Canadaland podcast, is also joining the Globe and Mail on contract. He did reporting on homicides in Toronto’s gay community that has come to the forefront in the Bruce McArthur case.
• Jason Chow is the new Toronto dining critic for the Globe and Mail.
• Matt Frehner heads the new visual journalism department at the Globe. He’s looking for contributors.
• Ron Kronstein, anchor of Global Halifax and Global NB, is moving to Peterborough, Ont., to become news director for CHEX TV.

Obituaries

• David Shannon, CBC and CKUT journalist, and Montreal Mirror columnist
• Reg Innell, Toronto Star photographer
• John Valorzi, Canadian Press journalist

Jobs

• Reporter-editor (part-time), Canadian Press Atlantic bureau (deadline: Feb. 19)
• Summer intern, Maclean’s (deadline: Feb. 22)
• Audience growth editor, Canada at the New York Times

News about news

• A lot of people got really upset when a story on the Globe and Mail website had a headline saying Tina Fontaine was found with “drugs and alcohol” in her when she died. It was a headline on top of a Canadian Press story that said pretty much the same thing, based on testimony in the murder trial given by a toxicologist. The story was later updated by CP to say that while there was THC (i.e. weed), there weren’t harder drugs. And the Globe changed its headline. But the outrage led to a public editor piece that talked about remembering victims in general but gave few specifics about what happened, and a column from Denise Balkissoon criticizing media treatment of the trial.
• Radio-Canada is correcting the latest episode of its investigative news show Enquête after it broadcast video it believed was from the Sûreté du Québec’s official YouTube account but turned out to be from an account the SQ says is not theirs. The SQ says Enquête never asked it about the video before the show.
• Graeme Roustan, the guy who just bought The Hockey News from Quebecor, now wants to buy La Presse, and get its mysterious but probably negative finances off Power Corp.’s books.
• YouTube is going to start labelling content from state-funded broadcasters, in an effort to counter propaganda concerns about outlets like Russian-funded RT. But that also means labelling videos from PBS and CBC. And that’s ignoring the heavy subsidies that come to just about everything else on Canadian TV these days.
• Quebec’s Liberal Party has started a new Facebook page called “Actualités politiques Québec” which features videos of ministers. But it’s raising concerns about downplaying its partisan nature and possibly misleading people into thinking it’s a news outlet. The party says that’s nonsense even though it has the word “Actualités” in its name.
• A man who tried to sue after TVA didn’t return a book he had sent them has lost his court case.
• The Chicago Sun-Times has reinstated writer Richard Roeper after discovering he had purchased 50,000 of his Twitter followers. Roeper apologized, and the Sun-Times had no specific policy forbidding such actions.
• Bernard Drainville, former PQ minister now radio host, and Gaétan Barrette, former CAQ candidate now Liberal health minister, got into a spat that involved Barrette publishing text messages between Drainville and a member of his staff, and Drainville saying he won’t trust Barrette’s staff ever again.
• The editor of a small-town Kentucky newspaper rushed to the scene of a school shooting to discover that the alleged shooter was her son.

Yet more Weinstein/#MeToo fallout

• Carol Off writes for the Globe and Mail about how the political and journalistic scene acted against young female journalists after they were sexually assaulted or harassed by politicians and political staffers in Ottawa.
• Similarly, the National Post’s Marie-Danielle Smith writes about the little things that women journalists have to deal with on Parliament Hill.
• Uma Thurman opens up to the New York Times about Weinstein, and what she sees as director Quentin Tarantino’s complicity in what happened to her.
• La Presse talks to musicians at the Montreal Symphony Orchestra about former conductor Charles Dutoit.
• The chief content officer at Newsweek, Dayan Candappa, has taken a leave of absence after BuzzFeed discovered he was dismissed from his previous job at Reuters because of a sexual harassment allegation.
• Vice has fired its Chief Digital Officer Mike Germano (though he says otherwise) after two women accused him of sexual harassment.

At the CRTC

• A coalition including Bell, Rogers, Quebecor, Corus, CBC, Cogeco, and lots of artist and distribution groups is asking the CRTC to start allowing internet providers to block piracy websites. You can imagine how Michael Geist felt about that idea. But the coalition is not impressed by his arguments.
• The commission has approved the acquisition of independent TV distributor Zazeen by Distributel. The purchase price, which the companies tried hard to prevent from becoming public, is $3, or $1 to each of Zazeen’s three founders. Distributel is a major creditor, according to the application, so it looks like the purchase price is equivalent to whatever the cost of that debt is. Distributel already offered Zazeen TV with its telecom services, and says other companies that offer Zazeen can still do so.
• Victoria’s CHEK TV has gotten approval for a share buyback plan that would technically result in the local Sampson family moving from a minority shareholder to having more than 50% control when the family’s shares are combined. CHEK made it clear in its application that the Sampsons have no interest in having effective control of the company, which is run by the union, the employees and management, and a special shareholders’ agreement will limit their power. CHEK was bought out by its employees and local investors in 2009 when previous owner Canwest Global decided to shut its secondary E! network down. Several of those employees have since retired or otherwise left and are interested in selling their shares because they provide no income and have actually decreased in value since they were bought.
• You might remember some anonymous person complaining to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council that The Weather Network’s 30-day forecast had only 27 or 28 days in it (and other minor errors). When the CBSC ruled such minor errors do not amount to breaches of its code, the complainant took the matter to the CRTC, which found no reason to intervene. We still don’t know the identity of the complainant.

TV

Radio-Canada has proposed an increase in power of its Quebec City digital television transmitter (CBVT-DT) from 291kW to 361.7kW. Minimal difference in signal pattern (dotted vs. solid) #CRTC pic.twitter.com/Qt5Z8J7k5q

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) January 30, 2018

• It’s Super Bowl Sunday, and CTV is once again pulling out all the stops to get people to watch its feeds instead of the U.S. channel (NBC this year) because NBC’s ads won’t be replaced with Canadian ones (this applies from kickoff to the end of the game only). Bell is broadcasting the game on three channels — CTV, CTV Two and TSN2 — is bringing back its Watch to Win contest, and will have some short segments from Russell Peters throughout the broadcast. It also has its website for Super Bowl ads, though that’s still just a series of YouTube links.
• Speaking of ads only Americans get to see, Old Spice ran an ad during the Grammys that was entirely in French, with no subtitles.
• The NFL finally has some stability for its Thursday night games, with Fox signing a five-year deal.
• The FCC has approved the voluntary roll-out of ATSC 3.0, a new standard for over-the-air television that is incompatible with the current 1.0 standard. The new standard allows two-way communication, which opens up possibilities like dynamic ad insertion. It also offers the possibility of higher-quality picture, sound and a higher frame rate.
• It only lasted a couple of seconds, but TVA’s La Voix got some free attention south of the border when Kelly Clarkson brought up its theme during a day-drinking segment with Seth Meyers.
• British Columbia has surpassed Ontario as the biggest province for television and film production, measured in dollars invested.
• Global is carrying CBS’s Big Brother Celebrity Edition starting next week, which means it has moved the season finale of original drama Mary Kills People to Thursday at 9pm. Which is fine except that it puts that episode right up against the finale of CTV’s own six-part original drama, Cardinal.
• CBC’s ombudsman found that a point-of-view documentary on sled dogs that aired on the Documentary channel and was called Sled Dogs was okay as a POV, but should have been more clearly labelled as such.

Radio

• Quebec City’s BLVD 102.1 has fired André Arthur, apparently for making homophobic comments on the air. This isn’t the first time Arthur has been fired, and the station was banking on his controversial — but popular — speaking style when it hired him in the first place.
• Speaking of controversial radio loudmouths, Doc Mailloux got another hand slap from the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, not for saying men have no control over themselves when sexually aroused, but because his morning show aired sexually explicit comments and vulgarity.
• The city of Gatineau has decided to boycott local Cogeco radio host Roch Cholette, judging him to have been unfair and making personal attacks on politicians rather than their ideas.
• Both the Montreal Gazette and La Presse used the first anniversary of the Quebec City mosque shooting to look at the state of the city’s talk radio scene.
• CBC’s The Current is doing a live taping in Montreal on March 6 on the subject of race in Quebec. Tickets are free but must be reserved in advance.

Print

• The Montreal Gazette profiles Boris (Jacques Goldstyn), a cartoonist whose work is being seen more often in the paper as Aislin (Terry Mosher) transitions into semi-retirement.
• The Globe and Mail has another story (behind its paywall) about Postmedia’s rocky financial future.
• The Charleston Gazette-Mail, a West Virginia newspaper that won a Pulitzer prize, has declared bankruptcy, though it is expected to be bought.
• Recently unionized L.A. Times staff are worried about their employer building a shadow scab news operation in case of a strike or lockout. Meanwhile the paper in general is being described as a “hot mess”.

Online

• Le Devoir has redesigned its website. The new layout is responsive and modern (which also means it looks like every other news website out there and far fewer stories are visible at a time on its homepage). It’s also changing how it does comments: rather than open every story to comments from paid subscribers only, it’s opening a limited number of news stories to comments from anyone — but everyone who comments has to use their real names.
• If you haven’t read it yet, here’s the New York Times feature on the fake Twitter follower game.
• The Columbia Journalism Review looks at news organizations’ use of Facebook’s Instant Articles feature, which allows news stories to be read within Facebook, and finds that about half of the organizations announced in its launch never used it, and most of those who did have reduced their use or dropped it completely.
• Facebook is banning ads from all cryptocurrencies in an effort to eliminate scams.
• Newsweek’s chairman and finance director have resigned amid some sort of financial fraud probe. A BuzzFeed investigation also showed Newsweek bought traffic that it alleged was fraudulent in order to collect ad revenue from fake visits.

Other

• The Financial Post looks at the Bell Let’s Talk campaign, its genesis, longevity, impact, and criticisms.

News about people

• Zarqa Nawaz, creator of Little Mosque on the Prairie, is taking over as host of Morning Edition, the Saskatchewan radio morning show on CBC. She’ll be replaced by Stefani Langenegger, the permanent host, in August.

Obituaries

• Jay Switzer, former CHUM CEO and founder of Hollywood Suite (with appreciation from Bill Brioux)
• James Christie, Globe and Mail sports writer
• Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey comic strip

Jobs

• Contract producer and associate producer, Canadaland

News about news

• Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly suggests government support for print media might be coming, but says they won’t bail out business models that are no longer viable. She told La Presse an announcement could be coming in the next month, which suggests it would probably be in the federal budget.
• The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that a CityNews report about a house explosion in Mississauga that was found to be a likely double suicide did not breach journalistic codes by broadcasting the contents of personal letters from the couple that were found scattered around the neighbourhood after the explosion. The council found there was a genuine public interest in knowing what led to the couple’s decision to end their lives in this way, which not only destroyed their home but damaged dozens of others.
• A CBC Fifth Estate episode on pit bulls naturally upset the pit bull lobby, who demanded an ombudsman investigation. That investigation showed that while there were some minor issues, the episode met CBC’s journalistic policies.
• Journalists Marie-Maude Denis and Louis Lacroix are being asked by Nathalie Normandeau’s lawyers to divulge their sources. Bold prediction: They won’t.
• François Cardinal of La Presse wants the app’s opinion section to be more solution-focused, and is seeking 100 ideas to make Quebec better.
• Canada’s privacy commissioner has released a draft position paper on online reputation, which seems to suggest that requiring search engines to censor search results with personal information could be legal under current privacy law.
• Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new plan to evaluate the validity of news sources: ask users whether they trust them. That may or may not fix the problem, depending on whose hot take you believe.

At the CRTC

• The Super Bowl will not be substituted. The Supreme Court has denied Bell’s request for an emergency stay of the CRTC’s Super Bowl ad substitution decision in advance of next week’s game. But the decision doesn’t dismiss the case entirely, and allows an expedited determination of whether the court will take the case, which means it might be heard in the fall and a decision reached before the 2019 Super Bowl. Barring some miracle, this year’s game will be the same as last one: CTV ads on CTV and U.S. ads on the U.S. network (in this case, NBC). CTV will once again run its watch-to-win contest during the game.
• Juicebox, Loud, Vibe and Retro, four channels that used to be part of the Much family but were sold to Stingray, have been re-licensed after losing enough subscribers to qualify for licence-exempt status, and then gaining enough to lose that status (200,000 is the magic number). Stingray had asked for a below-normal Canadian content spending quota, and interest groups like ADISQ and the directors and writers guilds asked for higher quotas or special music-related conditions. The CRTC threw out all those requests, noting that the channels are not tied to their formats and deserve no special treatment either way. They are required to spend 10% of revenue on Canadian content.
• Vintage TV, a 24-hour music network, has similarly applied for and received a licence after passing the 200,000 subscriber mark. Its licence conditions are standard, but the commission was worried about foreign control since 33% of voting shares are held by a U.K. parent company. The licensee must inform the commission of any changes related to its control bylaws.
• TVA Sports got a minor licence amendment, allowing it to average out the 12-minutes-per-hour advertising limit over a day instead of having to meet it every hour. RDS got a similar condition. This will allow TVA more flexibility when airing content that has fewer chances for commercial interruption (for example, during soccer games).
• The commission has approved acquisition of CHLW-FM Barriere, B.C., and a new ownership structure for CKOV-FM Strathmore, Alta.

TV

• After HBO and Showtime, Bell has signed a content deal with Starz. It plans to rebrand TMN Encore as a Canadian Starz channel. (It’s unclear if both TMN Encore and TMN Encore 2 are being rebranded or just one of the two.)
• P.K. Subban was the guest on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah this week. You can watch it here.
• La Presse has discovered that, to the surprise of no one, ratings for the Montreal Canadiens in Quebec are down from last year.
• We have a premiere date for Season 2 of The Handmaid’s Tale: Sunday, April 29. The series airs on Bravo in Canada, and Season 1 is available on Bell’s Crave TV.
• APTN is launching a new show, The Laughing Drum, from the guy behind satirical news website Walking Eagle News. The first episode is Tuesday at 6:30pm.
• HBO has added Meryl Streep to the cast of Big Little Lies, the series directed by Quebecer Jean-Marc Vallée.
• Last summer’s Just For Laughs galas are coming to television as the next season of Just For Laughs All Access begins Feb. 3 on Comedy.
• NLogic has a couple of tidbits of ratings info from the fall season, including that La Voix was the most highly-rated Canadian program of the season, ahead of The Amazing Race Canada, and that the only market where hockey is among the five most popular broadcasts is Edmonton.
• Videotron’s recent price increases were severe enough to warrant a news story.
• Season 2 of Due South is on YouTube.

Radio

• Jon McTaggart, president of Minnesota Public Radio, sent a message to MPR members about the organization’s decision to sever ties with Garrison Keillor, host of A Prairie Home Companion, over accusations of sexual misconduct in the workplace. The message answers questions about how seriously MPR took the allegations and why they took the very severe step of ending one of public radio’s most popular shows.
• CIBL is slowly forming the committee that is supposed to come up with a plan to manage its finances.
• Don Imus is ending his radio show in March. The move appears to be related to parent company Cumulus’s financial problems.

Print

• The Hockey News, a hockey magazine that Transcontinental sold to Quebecor, has been bought by W. Graeme Roustan for an undisclosed price. Roustan is apparently a hockey fan and sees potential for growth.
• Le Devoir speaks with Pierre Marcoux, the new head of TC Media (and son of its founder). He says he can’t say what’s going on with a possible sale of Métro and other newspapers.
• Vividata has released quarterly newspaper and magazine readership figures. InfoPresse has some numbers for Quebec dailies.
• The Los Angeles Times voted 248 in favour, 44 against forming a union.

Online

• TC Media is shutting down its mobile news application on Jan. 31, directing users to its remaining newspapers’ websites. TC Media is in the process of divesting its newspaper holdings, which once measured in the hundreds, and now amount to a few dozen in Quebec.
• CNN is shutting down Beme, and ending its relationship with Casey Neistat. If you know what those things are, you know more than me.

Telecom

• Bell had to inform 100,000 customers that their contact information had been compromised after being illegally accessed. No credit card data or other critically sensitive information was exposed, but Bell is being secretive over what exactly happened and how it will prevent it from happening again.

Other

• Quebecor has signed a 10-year deal with Sherbrooke’s transit agency to handle its outdoor advertising.
• A settlement in a copyright case means that the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome enters the public domain and can be used without compensation.

News about people

https://twitter.com/katemckenna8/status/955947718966353920

• CBC’s Kate McKenna has a book out, about the difficulty accessing abortion services in Prince Edward Island.
• CTV News Toronto has suspended reporter Paul Bliss following an allegation of sexual misconduct in the workplace brought on by a former employee. His suspension was announced on air at 6pm.
• Richard Zussman is going back to reporting on the B.C. legislature after being hired by Global News. He was terminated by CBC from the same job for a conflict of interest apparently related to his work on a book.
• Jen Gerson and Claire Brownell have left the National Post. The latter is taking a new job at Macleans.
• Among those leaving Vice, either through voluntary layoff or involuntary one, are Sarah MacDonald and Brigitte Noel.
• Geraldine Malone is joining The Canadian Press’s Manitoba reporting team.

Obituaries

• Jacques Languirand, author and former Radio-Canada radio host (In English)
• Hugh Wilson, creator of WKRP in Cincinnati

Jobs

• Part-time traffic reporter, Canadian Traffic Network, Montreal
• Managing editor, Metro Vancouver
• Reporter/Photographer, Metro Vancouver
• Reporter/Photographer, Metro Calgary
• Reporter/Photographer, Metro Edmonton

News about news

Gros sourire ce matin en lisant le donneur de leçon professionnel @YvesBoisvert payé par la famille Desmarais pour écrire dans un média déficitaire dont la seule mission est de tenter de maintenir leur influence politique par le biais des médias. Non Boisvert, je vais m'exprimer

— Pierre Karl Péladeau (@PKP_Qc) January 18, 2018

• Pierre Karl Péladeau, who was leader of Quebec’s opposition then went back to being CEO of the Quebecor Media empire like that was perfectly normal, went off on La Presse’s Yves Boisvert in a Twitter storm after this Boisvert column about Péladeau’s statements on social media. (1, 2, 3, 4) Péladeau trotted out his usual talking points about La Presse being a tool of the Desmarais empire to control Quebecers’ minds for political reasons.
• CNN says Fox News knew about the Donald Trump porn star story before the election and buried it.
• New York prosecutors raided Newsweek, but the magazine says it’s not a content-related issue and its content and sources were safe.
• Donald Trump’s Fake News Awards winners were announced in a post on the Republican Party website. Basically it lists every media error about him, despite the fact that they were all corrected.
• The woman behind the Shitty Media Men list spoke to the New York Times.
• The government in the Philippines has revoked the business registration of Rappler, a popular news media website that’s critical of the government. Officially, it’s about foreign ownership of the outlet, which is forbidden by law. But critics content it’s more about President Duterte wanting to silence dissent.
• Global News has signed a deal with Pattison to become the official news source for TV screens in Toronto’s transit system.

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News about news

• Global News journalist Jeremy Cohn, who found himself arrested by Hamilton police when he showed up at the scene of a fatal accident before the police tape went up has filed a lawsuit against the force. His employer is standing behind him.
• Le Devoir looks at the hyperlocal journalism sites in the Quebec City area that are thriving after more than a decade.
• Bombardier is really unhappy with a recent Globe and Mail feature investigation about it alleging corruption overseas. Bombardier accuses the newspaper of ignoring its own policies about anonymous sources.
• Carrie Grace, BBC’s China editor, has quit her post over the public broadcaster’s gender pay gap.
• Donald Trump’s use of the term “shithole” to describe Haiti and African countries led to a lot of discussion in newsrooms about whether to use the term on the air or in print. Many news organizations used the term uncensored, arguing that the very word was itself newsworthy.

At the CRTC

• The Public Interest Advocacy Centre has made a formal request for the CRTC to investigate high-pressure sales tactics used by large telecommunications providers in the country, following media reports.
• Bell Media has applied to the CRTC to increase the power of CKKW-FM (KFun 99.5 Kitchener) from 4.3kW to 37.5kW, mainly to counter increased interference from WDCX-FM Buffalo, which operates on the same frequency. The increase would improve the signal in Kitchener-Waterloo, but also towards areas like Hamilton and Guelph.

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Here’s what you missed over the holidays.

News about news

? to all those journos around the country out there doing the “it’s cold” story today

Those assignments are great motivation to always come to work with your own story idea to pitch so you can do it instead & force your assignment editor to send someone else out there to freeze

— Douglas Gelevan (@DGelevan) December 27, 2017

• TVA has, as promised, conducted an investigation into how it got the mosque story so wrong. The resulting report shows that a verbal request from the electrical services commission to the contractor to respect the mosque (by limiting work on the mosque’s property during Friday prayers) was misinterpreted by the parties on site, and led the head of the signage company to post on Facebook about an unreasonable accommodation. But the investigation doesn’t look into TVA’s reporting, why the story was broadcast before seeking comment from the mosque, and why the journalist asserted the existence of a written demand “black on white” that she never saw herself. Canadaland summarizes the story if you haven’t been following.
• La Presse (which is now just La Presse+) put out a special edition on Jan. 1 with some behind-the-scenes stories from its journalists. More than two dozen of them. Among the highlights:
  • How the Éric Salvail story came together
  • Reorganizing an edition on deadline the night of the Quebec City mosque shooting
  • On the importance of a good fixer, especially in a place like Syria
  • Finding rubber boots to cover a flood
  • Scoring a helicopter ride to Irma-stricken Barbuda
  • Questions from readers about how journalists do their jobs (How do you develop sources? How do you verify information?)
• The Washington Examiner compiled a long list of mainstream media errors about the Trump administration in 2017 that are worth reading for anyone who has shared stories about crazy things they have done. So many of those I-can’t-believe-Trump-did-that stories are actually wrong, based on a quote taken out of context or a deliberate exaggeration of the facts. There were plenty in there that I remember being reported but didn’t remember being debunked.
• The Toronto Star’s public editor has her annual You Be The Editor survey and a column about some of the paper’s more embarrassing corrections of 2017.
• CBC’s ombudsman has suggested, in response to a complaint, that when incorrect facts appear in a video posted to Facebook, that said video should be deleted rather than a corrective note being appended below it, because the way Facebook works that note will not be seen by many people if that video is shared.
• 65 journalists were killed worldwide in 2017, according to the Reporters Without Borders annual report. Of them, 50 were professional journalists, the lowest number since 2003.

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The TVA mosque debacle

Their info was iffy and scant,
So TVA chose to recant,
Belatedly sorry
For pushing the story
And feeding La Meute and Levant.

— Limericking (@Limericking) December 15, 2017

It took almost three days, but TVA Nouvelles has finally apologized and retracted a story it published Tuesday about a Côte-des-Neiges mosque demanding a city construction crew not have women working on Fridays — and getting that request enshrined “noir sur blanc” in their contract, and several women being reassigned as a result.

The Parti Québécois and influencers like Marie-France Bazzo and Bernard Drainville were quick to denounce the mosque, and right-wing anti-immigrant group La Meute announced a protest at the mosque (it has since cancelled).

The story started smelling fishy almost immediately. The Journal de Montréal posted the TVA story to its website on Tuesday and assigned a reporter to cover it, but pulled the story quickly after discovering facts that contradicted TVA’s report. (The paper has yet to publish a single story about the whole affair.) The mosque issued a statement denying everything and expressing anger that TVA didn’t try to contact them for comment. La Presse summarizes the denials here.

The Quebec Press Council has received at least two complaints about the story.

On Thursday evening, TVA Nouvelles issued a “mise au point” in which it said the facts have “evolved” (you know, from true to false). It was instantly criticized for not including an apology. On Friday morning, another mise-au-point which included an apology and promises of an internal investigation.

Still, many groups still believe the story is true, and many stories published by other media, like The Rebel (which used the term “no-go zone”, suggesting irresponsibly that the area is dangerous), haven’t been corrected. In some cases, wild and nonsensical conspiracy theories have been concocted to save face.

Among the things the investigation should look at:

• Why did the journalist not attempt to contact the mosque before going with this story?
• Were any attempts made to verify what the contractor told her?
• Why did she insist on describing the demand as “noir-sur-blanc” despite never having seen it herself?
• Was she lying when she told the mosque’s representatives that she had “filmed” their written demand that women be excluded? Was her confrontational attitude during this exchange justified?
• Why did TVA broadcast and publish the story before seeking comment from the mosque?
• Why did TVA Nouvelles take so long to retract the story and even longer to apologize?

I’m also not too optimistic that the results of this investigation will be made public.

Other news about news

• The Chamberland Commission, which investigated police spying of journalists, has filed its report, recommending better procedures for investigations that involve journalists and a better separation of politics and the police. It also found that the actions that sparked the inquiry, warrants issued that allowed police to monitor journalists’ phones, were justified. The Quebec government wasted no time saying it would implement the recommendations. You can read the full report here.
• Another mistake — or maybe not? — this time in a report about NDP leader Jagmeet Singh supposedly launching a byelection campaign in the wrong riding. The Canadian Press ran a story that way, with the words “wrong riding” in the headline, but updated it later to say that Singh denied the event was a byelection campaign launch. That didn’t stop at least one editorial cartoonist from making fun of the story. (It’s unclear if there’s a policy at the Globe and Mail about editorial cartoons based on inaccurate stories.)
• The town of Chambly has made it illegal to record video of its council meetings, and threatens fines for people who contravene the regulation. Audio recordings and photography are still allowed. The FPJQ is unsurprisingly strongly against this move.
• The Niagara Region has apologized after seizing a St. Catharines Standard journalist’s equipment and forcing him to leave during a council meeting because of a misunderstanding over an allegation that someone was secretly recording an in camera meeting.
• The CBC has fired a reporter covering politics in B.C., Richard Zussman, for reasons that are still unclear but appear to be related to work he did preparing a book about the recent B.C. election. A Globe and Mail column made the move public, resulting in comments from the B.C. premier. The CMG union is backing Zussman, but other than vague references to conflict of interest, and codes of conduct, neither the CBC nor Zussman are giving details on what exactly he’s being accused of.
• Argentinian newspaper La Nueva Domingo wrote about Quebec City but included a photo of the CN Tower. Oops.
• The Canadian Press has finally ditched referring to the Coalition Avenir Québec as the “Coalition for Quebec’s Future.” Though it isn’t willing to accept CAQ unless absolutely necessary.
• CP writes about various media outlets’ policies about “unpublishing” content, usually at the demands of people mentioned in stories who don’t want information about them found when their name is searched on Google.
• The Washington Post has a new video series on how to be a reporter, in an effort to demystify the journalism process. They start by talking to the journalists who uncovered the allegations about Roy Moore.
• Montreal police has re-hired Ian Lafrenière as its head of communications.
• Mélanie Joly was in town last week to give a speech to the local board of trade. She proceeded to say nothing new about help for print media or taxing Netflix. I wrote about it for Cartt.ca.
• A controversial Supreme Court ruling has found that a man had a reasonable expectation of privacy for text messages he had sent. This could have significant precedent for how police deal with investigations that require access to texts.

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News about news

After I ignited a Twitter firestorm with my comments about @CassieCampbell and @hockeynight, here are some sober second thoughts. I appreciate everyone who kept me accountable: pic.twitter.com/FIk025wz6O

— Ken Campbell (@Ken_Campbell27) December 4, 2017

• The Hockey News’s Ken Campbell sparked a discussion among the hockey broadcasting media (even Sportsnet’s president got involved) when he criticized Sportsnet for having Cassie Campbell-Pascall working a Calgary Flames game when her husband is the assistant GM. He was quickly criticized for bringing this up now when it involves a woman but not when men have been in similar conflicts of interest. Campbell clarified that he should have called those out as well. Unfortunately there hasn’t been a good discussion over what line there should be when it comes to sports broadcasters.
• A CBC ombudsman review of Terry Milewski’s controversial interview with new NDP leader Jagmeet Singh found it was appropriate for Milewski to, at the end of their interview, repeatedly ask him about his stance on posters of Air India bombing mastermind Talwinder Parmar being displayed in Sikh temples and events in Canada. “Raising the question is a journalistically-defensible one. It was based on knowledge and expertise, and the programme staff judged it was relevant.”
• A report on how companies are exploiting the eagerness of established websites to get free content from contributors by paying those contributors to slip in mentions of their brands.
• ABC News is still cleaning up the mess caused when Brian Ross got a key detail wrong in a report about the investigation into Michael Flynn. Ross was suspended for the error.

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News about news

• The Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to hear an appeal by Vice, which is seeking to prevent the RCMP from getting hold of reporter Ben Makuch’s chat logs with a suspected terrorist. Vice and Makuch lost lower court rulings on this case.
• A right-wing group that tries to scam mainstream media in order to discredit them failed spectacularly in a sting against the Washington Post apparently meant to sew doubt about allegations against Republican senate candidate Roy Moore. The Post published the story of what happened.
• A New York Times profile of a Nazi sympathizer was heavily criticized online for “normalizing” such despicable views, forcing the Times to respond with … not an apology really, but an acknowledgment that this is a sensitive issue.
• The Canadian Media Concentration Research Project has published its annual report, with quantitative measures of how Canada’s media ownership is concentrated. The good news is that concentration has declined slightly among the big media/telecom companies. The bad news is that it’s still high, among them and among unregulated industries like web search.
• The U.S. Congress has pulled the media credentials of Russian-owned RT after it registered as a foreign agent. That makes them ineligible, according to the rules.
• The Globe and Mail polled Canada’s provincial press galleries to see how many reporters are working there. The results are pretty depressing. Saskatchewan doesn’t have anyone full-time (though it does have a most-of-the-time reporter). Only three provinces have more than 10 full-time. And interestingly, Quebec’s press gallery is larger than Ontario’s. (With only four anglo reporters — Gazette, CTV, CBC and Global — language doesn’t completely explain the difference.)

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News about news

• News from the FPJQ’s annual conference: Judith Jasmin journalism award winners (La Presse picked up the most prizes), Antoine Désilets photojournalism award winners (almost swept by La Presse), the Arthur-Prévost grant recipient (Christopher Nardi of the Journal de Montréal), an honourary membership for jailed blogger Raif Badawi, and new members of the association’s board.
• The Globe and Mail is joining something called the Trust Project, which based on its description consists mainly of providing better labelling of news, opinion and advertising. Generally it provides greater transparency, but whether it will increase trust is far from certain.
• The Toronto Star has a section on “trust” issues in which it explains how it works to ensure readers’ trust, which includes things like how front-page stories are chosen, how breaking-news stories come together, how election endorsements don’t tie the newspaper to a political party and how corrections are made (here we learn that the public editor handles corrections, which seems a bit odd to me).
• Journalists covering the Nathalie Normandeau trial will get quicker and easier access to evidence presented at the trial after the judge ordered they be given such access as soon as that evidence is presented in court.
• After justices of the peace were criticized for being too lenient in approving search warrants against journalists, chief judge Lucie Rondeau complained that they were getting a bad rap. Rondeau blamed police, the media and the system for the problems revealed at the Chamberland Commission. (Le Devoir’s Brian Myles was not impressed.)
• LaSalle is going to start allowing cameras back in the room during borough council meetings after previously forbidding them with undemocratic and probably illegal regulations.
• A man in Hamilton was arrested for yelling FHRITP at a reporter who was conducting an interview outside a police station. This just days after the same reporter was harassed at Mohawk College. The story doesn’t make clear what the man would be charged with.
• Quebec’s press council is launching a new mediation service to help resolve disputes between news outlets and their consumers before they go through the 12-to-14-month process of a formal decision. Apparently the fact that it takes more than a year to reach a non-binding press council decision is not the problem here.
• The CEGEP de Jonquière has a new pilot project that will adapt journalism courses specifically for aboriginal students.
• The Ryerson Review of Journalism writes about The Sprawl, a Calgary-based news outlet that started up to cover the Calgary mayor’s race and then stopped its coverage after it was over.

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News about news

• The Ottawa CItizen’s tradition of putting together a biography of a fallen soldier based on a name tweeted out at random at 11:11am on Remembrance Day continues. Here’s the latest edition.
• CBC’s ombudsman put out a decision related to a CBC Halifax radio discussion about the Pittsburgh Penguins’ decision to visit the White House to celebrate their Stanley Cup win. A listener complained that more effort should have been made to find balance in their coverage of this, and find more pro-Trump sources. The ombudsman agreed, saying “the coverage was flawed.”
• Various news organizations are reaching deals with these new smart speakers or assistants or whatever you call them: Google Home and Amazon Echo. Amazon’s Alexa service will carry content from CBC, Global News, CTV, TSN, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, National Post and Montreal Gazette. Google Home has a deal with Postmedia.
• Rebel Media’s Ezra Levant has pushed his defamation lawsuit against the man behind the @CanadianCynic Twitter account past a preliminary look at whether it’s an abusive suit against public comment. A judge found that Robert Day’s Twitter posts accusing Levant of fraud in a Fort MacMurray fundraiser were not public comment and not protected by the law.
• Montreal city hall’s new administration is looking for an attaché(e) de presse. The previous media relations person for Montreal’s mayor, Catherine Maurice, previously worked for Projet Montréal before she jumped ship for Coderre’s team.

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News about news

• There’s a new movie coming out at the end of the year, called The Post, about the Washington Post and its battle to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971. (The New York Times’s role in that is, I’m guessing, being downplayed.) It stars Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, so I guess just give it the Oscar right away.
• Speaking of movies, Disney briefly banned the Los Angeles Times from press screenings of its movies after it published a story that Disney thought was unfair. It reconsidered after “productive discussions with newly installed leadership” at the Times.
• Federal environment minister Catherine McKenna called out a journalist for Rebel Media at a press conference for that outlet’s habit of calling her “Climate Barbie”. She found the nickname insulting and sexist.

At the CRTC

• The commission has released the first part of its annual Communications Monitoring Report, dealing with broadcasting — TV, radio and television distribution. The numbers show just how concentrated Canadian media has become, with a handful of companies controlling the vast majority of revenues, viewing share and outlets.

TV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU_TXxhDCQY

• The Canada Media Fund and Broadband TV have put episodes of classic Canadian TV series and movies on YouTube for free on a channel called Encore Plus. At launch, it includes episodes of Degrassi Junior High, Due South, The Littlest Hobo, Mr. Dressup, Da Vinci’s Inquest, Are You Afraid of the Dark and French series such as Cornemuse, Watatatow, Dans une galaxie près de chez vous and La petite vie. Some series are also dubbed in the other language. The full list of series, presented as YouTube playlists, is here. Using YouTube is a great idea, because not only does it save on infrastructure costs, but it also makes it easier for the viewer. No new app to download, and YouTube is already compatible with all sorts of devices and has all sorts of features. They promise “dozens” of new titles every week.
• Sylvain Archambault, a director of some hit Quebec TV series like Mensonges and Les pays d’en haut, has become the latest to learn that verbal abuse of women over years is not welcome these days. La Presse recounted stories of him yelling at actresses, insulting them, and shooting overly sexualized scenes that were not in the script and never broadcast. Those stories were anonymous, but Union des artistes president Sophie Prégent defended Archambault, saying she never experienced such behaviour from him. That comment resulted in several actors, including Marc-André Grondin and Magalie Lépine Blondeau, being outraged that she isn’t defending her colleagues.
• For those who missed the Leonard Cohen tribute concert this week, CBC Television will broadcast it on Jan. 3.
• Bell Media is creating a Jingle Ball North concert to be broadcast Dec. 17 on CTV and Dec. 20 on Much. The concert also includes the Backstreet Boys and some Canadian artists.
• The Russell Peters comedy The Indian Detective debuts on CTV on Nov. 23.
• Quebecor Media says it will start selling six-second ads for TV and other platforms.
• History has special programming for Remembrance Day, including an original documentary, I Am War, about Canadians who served in Afghanistan.
• Canadiens behind-the-scenes series 24CH is back for another season, and promises a new format that focuses more on off-ice activities of players, and includes more Quebec celebrities.
• AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner might mean having to sell assets to meet federal approval, and apparently one idea floated around was selling CNN.

Radio

• Lots of news stories were written about this Canadian Broadcast Standards Council decision that found that a French-language radio station airing a clip with the word “fuck” didn’t violate broadcasting guidelines because that word isn’t as offensive in French as in English.
• Chantal Desjardins is heading back to the radio, as co-host of the weekly Real Estate Show on CJAD.
• Paul Arcand demonstrated how much power he has when he blasted his radio station’s new website on the air and his employer apologized for it. Cogeco later said it had been the victim of a cyberattack, which based on the description I’m guessing was some sort of denial-of-service attack.
• Gilles Parent is officially out of a job, having been dumped by Cogeco’s FM93 in Quebec City. His former colleagues will remain on the afternoon show for the time being.

Print

• Star News Publishing (not to be confused with the Toronto Star), which purchased 13 Saskatchewan-based newspapers from Transcontinental last year, is shutting down the Moose Jaw Times-Herald, one of two dailies.
• The Montreal Gazette’s decision to run an Aislin cartoon of Valérie Plante as Wonder Woman created so much divided reaction that editor-in-chief Lucinda Chodan wrote about it the next day. It defends the cartoon against charges of sexism, but also notes Aislin’s apology for having failed to properly credit the artist whose Wonder Woman drawing he manipulated to add Plante’s face to.
• The Houston Astros winning the World Series was a big boon to the Houston Chronicle, which had to publish a bunch of extra copies the next day.
• Condé Nast is turning Teen Vogue into an online-only publication, ending the print run of the allegedly woke magazine.

Online

• You all know about Twitter expanding to 280 characters, right? OK, moving on…

News about people

https://twitter.com/journorosa/status/926627118171197440

• Turns out Lisa LaFlamme can sing. Last weekend was the Newzapalooza charity fundraiser, in which (Toronto) media people form bands and compete against each other. Despite the punalicious band name Highway to Bell, they didn’t win. Instead, the champion was Conrad Black Sabbath. But the real winners were the kids — the event raised $13,000.
• Steve Bonspiel, editor of Kahnawake’s The Eastern Door, has been named Concordia’s journalist-in-residence for the winter 2018 semester. My colleague Chris Curtis has some nice words for the man.
• Sylvie Courtemanche, head of regulatory and government affairs at Corus, has been named the new chair of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. She begins Jan. 2.
• Véronique Prince, long-time TVA reporter, has been poached by Radio-Canada, and will report from Quebec’s National Assembly starting next week.
• Stéphane Giroux of CTV has been acclaimed to a new mandate as president of the FPJQ. Several board positions were also acclaimed, but two positions will be up to a vote — an administrator representing regional media and one representing independent media.
• Nancy Macdonald is moving from Maclean’s to the Globe and Mail as a national reporter starting Nov. 20.

Jobs

• Summer intern, Montreal Gazette (deadline: Nov. 10)
• Copy editor, Global News Toronto (deadline: Nov. 13)
• Digital content creator, Institute for Research on Public Policy in Montreal (deadline: Nov. 24)
• Fellowship for aboriginal investigative journalism (deadline: Dec. 1)

Upcoming events

• Jonah Keri lecture at Concordia, Nov. 16
• FPJQ conference, Nov. 17-19 in Sherbrooke

News about news

• The Suburban held its election “debates”, which consisted of candidates writing answers to the same question, including Beryl Wajsman, who is a candidate for mayor of Westmount and editor of the newspaper. The issue with the answers includes a note from the publisher explaining that “Mr. Wajsman did not know the questions and agreed to have his answers recorded before any of the other candidates arrived, and has had no hand in any Westmount stories since May.” Christine Smith, the interim mayor who’s running against Wajsman, declined to participate because of Wajsman’s conflict.
• The Montreal Gazette and La Presse collaborated on an investigation into Montreal city contracts. The collaboration is interesting if only because it means the articles need to be translated between French and English.
• For those looking for live TV coverage of Sunday’s municipal elections, the pickings will be a bit slim. RDI and LCN will have live coverage throughout the night, and most media will have online coverage, but the local stations will have mostly regular programming during the evening. Global Montreal will extend its 11pm newscast to an hour for an election night special, while CTV and CBC will incorporate election results into its regular broadcasts, according to their TV schedules. CBC News Network and CTV News Channel don’t appear to have any plans for special programming.
• Le Devoir looks at the new charter created by the Association de presse francophone, representing French-language media in English Canada.

At the CRTC

• Quebec City radio station CHXX-FM (Pop 100.9) has succeeded in getting its licence renewed by the CRTC despite coming short on its requirement for French-language music. Rather than issue a short-term renewal, it has de facto fined the station $920. And once again, the station has been shot down in its request to cut its conditions of licence requiring it to serve the Portneuf region. When it was first approved in 1995, the station was sold to the CRTC as being a local service to Portneuf. Its current owner RNC Media has repeatedly tried to eliminate the requirements to have a studio in Donnacona and 14 hours a week of programming for the region. The CRTC found there was insufficient evidence put forward that such a change was necessary to the station’s financial survival and that the change would be bad for people in the Portneuf region who have no other local station.
• The commission has denied a request from Vancouver radio station CHLG-FM (LG 104.3) to amend its licence to eliminate the requirement that 15% of its music be special interest. The CRTC found there as no compelling economic reason to approve the change. CHLG-FM is owned by Newcap, purchased out of the Bell-Astral deal.

TV

• Much, formerly MuchMusic, seems to be getting more and more attention from Bell Media these days instead of just being a de facto Comedy Network 2 or CTV 3. “Music is part of Much’s DNA,” says the press release announcing that the new Tragically Hip documentary will be the first in a series of music docs airing Friday nights on the channel. Even though Bell has pushed Much away from its music background (even removing the word “music” from its name), it’s coming to realize that youth still like music content, if not an automated feed of music videos. You have to think that new Bell boss Randy Lennox, whose background is in the music industry, has a lot to do with this.
• OMNI has renewed three original series: Chinese drama Blood & Water, South Asian digital dramedy Mangoes, and comedy Second Jen.
• Bill Brownstein talks to Leah Balass about her interview series Montrealers for MAtv.
• Richard Therrien got Videotron to confirm that France’s Canal+ will be added to Videotron’s system on Nov. 15.
• Corus’s History channel will have special Remembrance Day programming, including the original documentary I Am War.
• Radio-Canada will be broadcasting a dubbed version of the City miniseries Bad Blood, based on the life of Montreal mobster Vito Rizzuto. It starts Nov. 11.
• Rogers appears to have gone back to using Canadiens games to drive subscriptions to Sportsnet on Saturday nights. This Saturday’s Maple Leafs game will be on both CBC and City, while the Canadiens-Jets game gets Sportsnet.
• TVA is getting its personalities — even news anchor Sophie Thibault — to record videos about how important homegrown television is. The context, explained more explicitly by producers and writers, is the federal government’s reluctance to tax U.S. services like Netflix.
• The Financial Post’s Emily Jackson looks at Canadian cable providers’ decisions to adopt Comcast’s X1 platform for their new set-top boxes and cloud-based PVRs to better compete against IPTV providers like Bell and Telus.
• One of the judges of the Great British Bake-Off accidentally tweeted the name of the winner hours before the finale aired on Channel 4. But 7.7 million people still tuned in to watch the show. Its Canadian spinoff the Great Canadian Baking Show, debuts Nov. 1 at 8pm on CBC.
• Netflix has suspended production on House of Cards in the wake of an allegation of sexual harassment against star Kevin Spacey.
• Despite its critical acclaim, the Viceland series Nirvanna The Band The Show isn’t getting much audience love. This could be because of a lack of promotion from Rogers, which hasn’t picked up Bell Media’s knack for promoting the crap out of its original programming.

Radio

• Canada’s Copyright Act is undergoing its regular review, and that means music labels are trying to get more money out of royalties. One issue is that royalties for music labels and performers from radio stations with less than $1.25 million a year in revenue are only a nominal amount (Songwriters still get paid though). The industry wants this rule eliminated so small stations pay artists properly.
• Bell Media is flexing its convergence muscle and says that the original songs produced for its reality competition series The Launch will get regular airplay on iHeartRadio Canada radio stations (i.e. Bell Media brands like Virgin Radio).
• Bell has decided to keep its Rouge FM drive show Éric et les fantastiques on the air despite the fall from grace of its host Éric Salvail. The show will be simply “Les fantastiques” and its host chair will alternate between Étienne Boulay, Jean-François Breau, Pierre Hébert and Maripier Morin.

Print

• The rift in Canada’s magazine awards is over. A year after announcing it would break off from the National Magazine Awards and create its own awards system with fewer awards, Magazines Canada has announced it’s rejoining the fold and merging the awards back together. The new “unified” system will have 29 awards, just three more than the Magazine Grands Prix. The fee to enter starts at $100 plus tax per award.
• The Globe and Mail’s new freelance contract is being criticized for demanding moral rights (and just about every other right) for all content produced on a freelance basis.

News about people

https://twitter.com/AlysonLozoff/status/925127505622712320

• Some people have been wondering what happened to Alyson Lozoff, who left City/Sportsnet Montreal three years ago. She finally resurfaced on social media this week, announcing she will be a rinkside reporter for AT&T Sports Network Rocky Mountain region covering the new Vegas Golden Knights.
• Breakfast Television host Joanne Vrakas has begun her maternity leave as she expects her second child.
• Former CTV Ottawa anchor Carol Anne Meehan is leaving her radio job after deciding it was too much work.
• National Public Radio’s editorial director Michael Oreskes has resigned after the Washington Post reported cases of sexual harassment against three women.
• Garry Marr has left the National Post, where he covered real estate. He’s joined the CoStar Group.
• CBC Ottawa videojournalist Roger Dubois has retired after 40 years.
• Dave Hodge isn’t done at TSN yet, and will discuss his future after his show The Reporters was cancelled.

Jobs

• Reporter, TFO Sudbury (deadline: Nov. 3)
• Summer intern, Montreal Gazette (deadline: Nov. 10)
• Digital content creator, Institute for Research on Public Policy in Montreal (deadline: Nov. 24)
• Fellowship for aboriginal investigative journalism (deadline: Dec. 1)

Upcoming events

• Jonah Keri lecture at Concordia, Nov. 16
• FPJQ conference, Nov. 17-19 in Sherbrooke