News about news

• Radio-Canada published a story about Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre’s government and its strict control of information, punishing unfriendly journalists and muzzling city employees.
• The federal government of Justin Trudeau promised to make access to information easier, but as Justin Ling explains, the new rules don’t do anything of the sort. If anything, they make the situation worse.
• The Athletic’s co-founder Alex Mather apologized after telling the New York Times: “We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing.” It was needlessly aggressive, and Mather later clarified that “I am not rooting for newspapers to fail.”
• The FPJQ has announced finalists for the Judith-Jasmin journalism awards. They include two for the Montreal Gazette and one for Vice Quebec. La Presse reporter Gabrielle Duchaine alone has three nominations in the eight categories. For the penis-measurers (*Jeff Yates is nominated for both Radio-Canada and Métro covering fake news):
  • La Presse: 8
  • Radio-Canada: 6*
  • Le Devoir: 3
  • L’actualité: 2
  • Montreal Gazette: 2
  • Journal de Montréal: 1
  • Vice: 1
  • Québec Science: 1
  • Métro: 1*
• Britain’s Evening Standard apologized after digitally manipulating a cover photo of Solange Knowles to remove an elaborate construction of her hair so that the photo would fit better on the cover. They refer to what they did as a “decision to amend the photograph.”
• La Presse reports on the investigation into police leaks to the media thanks to … well, police leaks to the media.
• Le Devoir looks at paid subscription sports journalism sites The Athletic and Recrutes.ca. The Canadiens have accredited both for a year, saying they’re the first online-only news outlets to get media accreditation, and say they’ll re-evaluate after that.

Yet more Weinstein fallout

• Éric Salvail and Gilbert Rozon are selling their ownership stakes in their companies in an effort to save them from artistic blacklisting. But En mode Salvail is gone and its employees have been laid off. And a French publisher has had to pulp 45,000 copies of a book tied with Les Recettes pompettes.
• Julie Snyder has been added to the list of those accusing Gilbert Rozon of assault.
• Michel Venne, former Le Devoir journalist, is another personality to be accused, first by Léa Clermont-Dion but now also others. Columnist Lise Payette defends against the charge she tried to cover it up, saying she was just giving Clermont-Dion advice. The Institut du nouveau monde, has suspended its links with him.
• Catherine Bachand told a gut-wrenching story on the air about Quebec City radio host Gilles Parent grabbing her breasts live on air, presumably as a joke. Parent has been suspended while his behaviour is investigated.
• One anecdote from an interview La Presse journalists Katia Gagnon and Stéphanie Vallet gave to Tout le monde en parle: Rumours about Éric Salvail began years ago, but nothing could be pinned down until the Weinstein scandal broke and people reacted to it on social media. People in Quebec started posting stories on Facebook and Twitter, without naming names, but the journalists picked up on that and managed to get enough to publish a story.
• American political journalist Mark Halperin is the latest casualty of allegedly being a serial abuser of women.
• Director James Toback has had more than 200 women come forward to accuse him of harassment, including Selma Blair and Rachel McAdams.

At the CRTC

• The CRTC is holding a hearing Jan. 11 at which it will consider measures related to two radio stations with severe compliance issues: CFOR-FM Maniwaki and CKFG-FM Toronto. Both are accused of failing to meet a series of licence conditions and regulatory requirements, and could face sanctions as high as losing their licences.
• The notice for the same hearing includes details on the Bell acquisition of four FM stations in Ontario from Larche Communications. The deal is worth $15.64 million.
• Finally, three applications for new radio stations, all Christian music stations by different owners: Sydney, N.S., Regina, and Kelowna/Kamloops, B.C. Deadline for comments on all three of these is Nov. 24.
• The coming review of mandatory distribution orders has all the applicants pushing for public support. AMI, APTN, Canal M, TV5 and the Weather Network have put up websites asking for people to write letters of support to the CRTC. (TWN even has a video to guide people through the process.)
• The commission is giving Cogeco an extension until March 31 to implement changes to its customer service contract required by the new TV service provider code that went into effect on Sept. 1. Cogeco said an “internal structuring project” was delayed, which meant it couldn’t meet the deadline.

TV/video

• Greg O’Brien at Cartt.ca has a long interview with Randy Lennox, the head of Bell Media, mainly talking about the future of television. It describes the strategy of partnering with “rich uncles” like Netflix and Hulu for big projects to increase budgets and get international exposure. It gets Lennox to describe Book Television and Fashion Television as “dormant, non-strategic” channels and confirm that Comedy Gold is the channel that has been sold to the company Wow Unlimited in exchange for an ownership stake. And it discusses why Bell went with iHeartRadio for its radio streaming app while all its competitors went with RadioPlayer.
• TSN has cancelled The Reporters — again.
• V says it’s not for sale even though its biggest star just had his career destroyed.
• Someone complained to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council about the finale of Les Beaux malaises on TVA, that it sexualized children and promotes transgenderism. The CBSC found no issue with the existence of transgender people, but found a scene in which a preteen girl does a pole dance was unacceptable. It also cited TVA for not using both an auditory and visual viewer advisory at all times.
• Star Trek Discovery has been renewed for a second season on CBS All Access and Space. The show is setting records for viewing of specialty drama in Canada with more than a million viewers on average.
• New coaches won’t be the only change to TVA’s La Voix this coming season.
• Bell Media gave some late PR love to SIDES*, which is a Twitter broadcast that is produced by and also airs on Much, where youths talk about stuff that’s in the news. It’s part of “Much’s revamped lineup of topical, millennial-focused programming.” Unfortunately the programming here doesn’t have much in the way of production values, and failed to generate any interest from me. But maybe I’m just not young and hip enough.
• The Globe and Mail has some numbers on (English) Canadian households’ subscriptions to streaming services that show the dominance of Netflix. Of note: 40% of households subscribe to Netflix and no other similar service.
• BuzzFeed is getting into the movie and TV business.
• Canadian TV networks are experimenting more with six-second ads.

Radio

• Énergie has a new monthly show on the last Friday of every month starring Maxim Martin.

Print

• The Journal de Montréal has launched a tablet version of its J5 app. More details in their press release.

Online

• Facebook is testing a new system whereby posts by pages people follow are separated into a separate feed. The result in the areas being tested is that traffic to such pages is down significantly — more than half. Unless of course they pay for Facebook ads.

News about people

• Former CTV Winnipeg broadcaster Steve Vogelsang is accused of robbing two banks in Alberta. More details behind the Free Press paywall.
• Tabatha Southey has been picked up by Maclean’s after being dumped by the Globe and Mail as a columnist. She settles some scores with Canadaland.
• Jeff Glor has been named the new anchor of CBS Evening News.
• Abigail Bimman is joining Global News’s national bureau in Ottawa. She was previously a reporter at CTV Kitchener.

Jobs

• Summer intern, Globe and Mail (deadline: Oct. 27)
• Web journalist, Le Soleil (Quebec City) (deadline: Oct. 27)
• Reporter, TFO Sudbury (deadline: Nov. 3)
• Summer intern, Montreal Gazette (deadline: Nov. 10)

Upcoming events

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

News about news

• Rogers has partnered with Village Media, the people behind SooToday.com and related sites, to launch Halifax Today, which will be powered by Rogers’s all-news station News 95.7.
• A photojournalism award given to a photographer documenting scenes of torture in Iraq prompted controversy because the photographer in question actually participated in some of that torture. AFP’s journalists’ union denounced the awarding of the prize.

Harvey Weinstein fallout

I won’t begin to try to compile all the news reports, opinion pieces, hot takes and takedowns that came out of the Harvey Weinstein case (except the head of Amazon Studios being sacked for similar reasons), but I will point out a couple of things locally:

• La Presse on Wednesday blew the whistle on the behaviour of one of Quebec’s biggest TV and radio stars, Éric Salvail, publishing accounts from 11 people (all but one anonymous) that accused him of inappropriate sexual behaviour in the workplace. The reaction was swift, but also non-committal. His nightly TV talk show has been “suspended” by V, which had basically made him the face of the network. His daily radio show has been “suspended” by Bell Media, which basically made him the face of Rouge FM. Radio-Canada, which has production deals with Salvail’s company, says it will re-evaluate its business dealings with him. Companies that had Salvail as spokesperson have terminated or declined to renew their agreements. Salvail himself says he never intended to make anyone uncomfortable. Everyone will have to make a decision in the coming days if Salvail’s alleged misconduct is something he and his career can recover from. (UPDATE: Salvail has made a longer more fall-on-your-sword apology, pleading for the careers of the people who work for him and saying he would put his career on hold while he gets help and tries to make amends for what he’s done.)
• On Wednesday evening, it was Le Devoir’s turn, publishing devastating accounts from nine women, seven of whom were named, against Just for Laughs founder Gilbert Rozon. Rozon too has resigned from his posts.
• Among the many women to come forward and be counted as victims of sexual harassment and sexual abuse at the workplace, Global Montreal anchor Jamie Orchard published a blog post outlining the times she was sexually harassed at work. She doesn’t name any names or explicitly say where they happened, but before joining Global Orchard worked at CTV Montreal and CBC.

At the CRTC

• The commission has begun its public hearing on the renewal of cable companies’ licences. The oral portion of the hearing focuses on three topics: how they’re dealing with new channel packaging rules, how they’re working toward a system to use set-top box data for ratings purposes, and how they’re supporting their community TV services. The latter part is getting a lot of attention as groups complain about community TV channels owned by cable companies. Transcripts of the hearing, which concludes Thursday, can be found here.
• The CRTC has announced a hearing April 30, 2018, to discuss the renewals of most mandatory distribution orders, which require all TV subscribers to have certain channels in their basic service. Most services are requesting the status quo, but three are seeking increases to their per-subscriber wholesale rate: CPAC, from $0.12 to $0.13 a month, APTN from $0.31 to $0.36 a month, and audio service Canal M from $0.02 to $0.04 a month. APTN is also requesting a reduction in its CanCon quota from 75% to 70%. Other services requesting renewal are AMI, The Weather Network/MétéoMédia, TV5/Unis, and the Nunavut and NWT legislatures (whose distribution comes with no wholesale fee). Others, such as CBC NN, RDI, TVA and OMNI, will have theirs reviewed at a later date. In all, mandatory services would represent $1.63 in French-language markets (slightly less in English-language ones) if all the increases are approved, which in a world of $25 a month basic cable makes a big difference to distributors’ bottom lines.
• The CRTC has published two complaints against OMNI over its decision to outsource the production of its Cantonese and Mandarin daily newscasts to Fairchild, which owns Canada’s Chinese-language TV channels. The main complaint by the Unifor union says that OMNI’s licence clearly says OMNI must “produce” the newscasts in question. Comments on the complaints are due Nov. 16.
• The commission is suspending a proceeding involving a dispute between EBox and Bell Media while it determines how much of the information provided by Bell should be part of the public record.

TV

• Through the CRTC hearing I’ve learned that Videotron has started producing English-language programming for MAtv outside Montreal. The current affairs show CityLife now has an Outaouais version, produced with the Regional Association of West Quebecers and hosted by Linton Garner. Videotron says a community access show will also be produced in English for the Sherbrooke market, to air in 2018.
• The second season of Canadian news parody series The Beaverton begins Nov. 1 on Comedy Network. New this season is that the series will also be broadcast on CTV, Sundays at midnight. And they’re also launching a book.
• The Kahnawake-based dramedy series Mohawk Girls begins its fifth and final season on APTN on Nov. 14 at 8:30pm.
• With the announced death of Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie, CTV has moved up the broadcast of Long Time Running, a documentary about the group’s final tour, to this Friday. It will be broadcast again on its original airdate, Nov. 12.
• Someone complained that The Weather Network’s 30-day forecasts are actually only 28 days. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council noted that TWN changed its wording, and said “the Panel considers that this complaint is also hair-splitting, and even verging on the frivolous.”
• CBC Montreal has begun livestreaming its 6pm local newscasts on Facebook. The commercial breaks are filled with a roof camera skyline shot.
• Le Soleil has its midseason report card on new French TV series. Faits Divers and Trop get the top marks, while Occupation Double is at the bottom of the list.
• RDS’s documentary series 25 ans d’émotions is back with a documentary on Tim Raines, airing Oct. 23 on RDS Info and Oct. 29 on RDS.

Radio

• Rogers has turned its Vancouver-area Kiss radio station into a format based entirely on an audience-voted playlist. This is similar to what other stations — including Virgin Radio 96 in Montreal — have done on a limited basis. But a quick check of their voting system shows only about 200 songs to choose from.

Print

https://twitter.com/UnionSt/status/919256650883698689

• Toronto’s West End Phoenix newspaper has printed its first issue. The subscription-only print-only ad-free publication is meant to reinvent the newspaper business model.
• French magazine Les Inrockuptibles drew a lot of controversy by putting musician Bertrand Cantat on its cover recently, because Cantat was convicted of beating Marie Trintignant to death in 2003. The controversy even sparked some English-language media coverage. France’s Elle magazine responded with an editorial similarly styled with a picture of Trintignant. The magazine eventually responded with a note to readers essentially congratulating itself on sparking a debate but suggesting it could have not put him on the cover.

Online

• The Montreal Gazette has migrated its Hockey Inside/Out website to montrealgazette.com, mainly for technical reasons. But HIO stories posted to montrealgazette.com will be exempt from the Gazette’s paywall, at least for this season. HIO fans are not happy about the change. Meanwhile, Marc Dumont has begun his analytics column.
• U.S. ratings measurement giant Nielsen says it will begin reporting ratings for shows on Netflix, despite the fact that Netflix does not participate in Nielsen nor does it have any interest in publicizing its viewership numbers. Netflix says Nielsen’s numbers are inaccurate.
• Speaking of Netflix, it plans to increase its original programming spend next year to $8 billion. To put that in perspective, that’s about twice the amount of money spent on all television programming in Canada, regardless of language, source or channel, in 2015-16.
• Philippe Papineau at Le Devoir visited Vice’s Quebec offices. No word on the French version of Viceland.
• Craig Silverman has a long story for BuzzFeed about online ad fraud, and the consumer goods companies that are getting screwed over by it.
• The hit web series En audition avec Simon is coming back with new episodes after a six-year hiatus.

News about people

• Jorge Barrera, who has been the most prominent investigative journalist at APTN, is leaving for CBC Indigenous.
• Mathew Ingram, a former Globe and Mail editor who specializes in communities and media, is joining the Columbia Journalism Review as “chief digital writer.”

Jobs

• Tenure-track assistant professor in visual journalism and data negotiation at Concordia University (deadline: Oct. 20)
• Journaliste-pupitreur, Métro (deadline: Oct. 22)
• Columnist – Researcher / Technician, CBC Breakaway in Quebec City (deadline: Oct. 25)
• Summer intern, Globe and Mail (deadline: Oct. 27)
• Web journalist, Le Soleil (Quebec City) (deadline: Oct. 27)
• Reporter, TFO Sudbury (deadline: Nov. 3)
• Summer intern, Montreal Gazette (deadline: Nov. 10)

Upcoming events

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

News about news

Always be nice to your competition @CTVToronto @globalnewsto #needaboost pic.twitter.com/x08eWl9tu3

— Jimmy Dee (@JD_Camera) October 12, 2017

• Canada has passed its journalist shield law, which makes it tougher to compel journalists to identify confidential sources. The bill applies protections only to those whose “main occupation” is journalism.
• CTV Montreal, CJAD and the Montreal Gazette will jointly host the English-language Montreal mayoral debate between Denis Coderre and Valérie Plante, Oct. 23 at 7pm. CJAD will broadcast it live, but CTV will not. CTV and the Gazette will livestream it instead.
• Catherine Wallace, the former Montreal Gazette manager, has reached the end of her one-year Atkinson fellowship studying the news media. She files her final stories, about a day in the life of the Winnipeg Free Press, about an editorial partnership between the Montreal Gazette and Concordia University, and a general look at the search for new business models for news.
• Influence Communication president Jean-François Dumas writes in La Presse about how we’re facing information overload, how news expires much more quickly than it used to, and how opinion-making has gotten much faster.
• The FPJQ has announced nominees for the Prix Antoine Désilets for photojournalism. Nominations include 12 for La Presse, 3 for Le Devoir, 2 for Le Soleil, 2 for Journal de Québec, 1 for Journal de Montréal and 1 for L’actualité.
• CBC profiles the Westmount mayor’s race and talks to Beryl Wajsman, who is a candidate but also editor of The Suburban newspaper. It asks him about the potential conflict: “If I wasn’t allowed to do it, I wouldn’t have run. Obviously, the law allows it,” he said. “I have been scrupulous in not one word being written about my candidacy.” — He is correct. The Suburban hasn’t written at all about the Westmount election. But is that a good thing?
• A new idea to fund the news from Policy Options: Allow Canadians to redirect $100 of their income tax to a journalism outlet of their choice. Of course, this begs the question of how the government defines what a journalism outlet is.

Continue reading →

News about news

• Tom Petty died, then undied, then died again within 24 hours. The confusion began when CBS News reported Petty’s death, citing the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD later apologized for “inadvertently” presenting false information to journalists. Petty had suffered a heart attack, but was technically still alive. The error prompted the usual holier-than-thou handwringing scolding journalists to get it right (without of course setting any standard for when you consider something “right”). The lesson to take out of this, once again, is that even official sources can be wrong.
• The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has come out with decisions against Global News BC and CTV News Vancouver over their decisions to air video of a stabbing at a school in Abbotsford, B.C. Though both broadcasters were aware of the sensitivity of the video, issued warnings about their broadcast (though Global failed to do so in one instance) and even blurred parts of it, the CBSC found that “the video, even in its edited form, did not contribute to the story and therefore showed inappropriate editorial judgment on the part of the broadcaster” on top of being disrespectful to a young victim. Both were required to issue on-air apologies.
• In a decision that is for some reason undated, the National Newsmedia Council has dismissed a complaint against the National Post that accused it of stealing a Blacklock’s Reporter story without credit. The council found that both organizations reported the same story independently, with the Post publishing a day after Blacklock’s.
• TVA has suspended Luc Lavoie after he made a joke on LCN about hunting separatists with guns.
• The Assemblée francophone de l’Ontario has made propositions to protect francophone media in the province, among them requiring the provincial government to devote 5% of ad spending to francophone media.
• The heads of francophone media outlets in Quebec gathered for a panel discussion about the future of media. Le Devoir summarizes how it went.

Continue reading →

News about news

C'est un record! 200 journalistes ont soumis 280 œuvres journalistiques pour les prix Judith-Jasmin! Bonne chance à tous! #congrèsFPJQ pic.twitter.com/nkoft2n9Us

— FPJQ (@FPJQ) September 26, 2017

• If you missed the CBC’s Annual Public Meeting, its video archive is here. But the biggest news about the Ceeb is that its Toronto office is losing its mail robots.
• Meanwhile, CBC Montreal is holding an open house on Sunday as part of the Journées de la culture. Among those present are local CBC/Radio-Canada personalities and the cast of Kim’s Convenience, which is on a cross-country tour promoting the new season of the show.
• Susan Delacourt argues that Canadian all-news channels shouldn’t be as distracted by Donald Trump. She has a point — people who want the latest Trump stuff can go to CNN, MSNBC or Fox News, but we only have two English-language Canadian news channels for stuff from our country.

At the CRTC

• The Globe’s Christine Dobby sits down with new CRTC chair Ian Scott.
• Michael Geist points out an order in council issued last week that requires the CRTC produce a report about how programming is distributed and how that will change in the coming years. This sounds a lot like work the commission has already done in its Let’s Talk TV process and discoverability conferences.
• EBOX, an independent Internet provider in Quebec and Ontario, has decided to enter the TV distribution industry in Quebec’s major cities, but has run into a wall negotiating a distribution deal with … oh, go ahead, guess … yup, Bell Media. According to EBOX’s complaint of undue preference at the CRTC, Bell cut off negotiations, citing something about EBOX’s behaviour, and said it was no longer interested in allowing any Bell Media channels (TSN, RDS, Discovery, Space, Bravo, D, Vie, Investigation, CTV News Channel, Comedy, Much, Z, TMN, HBO) to be distributed by EBOX. Bell’s initial response says it has done nothing against the rules and will explain its dealings with EBOX.
• Michael Geist notes (and CBC picks up) that Bell argued at a committee hearing into NAFTA renegotiations that there should be criminal provisions to prevent piracy and a CRTC-managed list of websites that Canadian ISPs should block for piracy violations.

TV

A message from the alley… pic.twitter.com/rMnDIEqjmd

— Rick Mercer (@rickmercer) September 25, 2017

• Rick Mercer is ending the Mercer Report after 15 years, announcing this season will be its last.
• RDS has picked up broadcast rights to the Laval Rocket, the Canadiens’ American Hockey League farm team, and plans at least 16 home matches this season. Stéphane Leroux and Bruno Gervais will be on the broadcast team. This follows a similar announcement from TSN 690 for English radio broadcasts (tentatively 11 games, all on Friday nights). French radio rights are held by 91,9 Sports, which promises to broadcast all regular-season and playoff games.
• Global has ordered a third season of the Jason Priestly series Private Eyes.
• The Canadian government will be unveiling its new cultural policy Thursday, which is rumoured to involve an announcement of new money from Netflix but otherwise hasn’t been revealed yet. But that hasn’t stopped various parties from trying to get ahead of it. Among them, Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau, who says the government needs to equal the playing field between Canadian broadcasters and foreign ones like Netflix, at the very least charging the same taxes to the latter. Quebec says it’s willing to start taxing Netflix on its own if the feds don’t step in.
• ARTV is taking the web series C’est juste du web, an online-only spinoff of C’est juste de la TV, and putting it on TV, Thursdays at 11:30am and Sundays at 2:30pm.

Print

• The Canadian Press explores the sale process of Transcontinental’s Quebec community newspapers, Since May, TC has announced eight sales of 20 newspapers, all to local independent owners.
• National Post staff in Ontario have filed for unionization after signing membership cards.

Online

• Twitter is expanding to 280 characters, which you’ve heard about a gajillion jokes about if you’re on Twitter.
• The Globe and Mail goes into detail about Bell’s multi-billion-dollar fibre-optic network rollout and why the company (along with Telus and others) is spending thousands of dollars per home to create it.
• DAZN, the streaming service that has exclusive rights to out-of-market NFL games in Canada, is offering a $20 refund because of its crappy delivery of those games to start the season.

News about people

Welcome to #NHLNetwork @Jackie_Redmond!

Think you can stop these shots, @KevinWeekes? pic.twitter.com/ikHEKYmqT1

— NHL Network (@NHLNetwork) September 21, 2017

• Jackie Redmond is leaving Sportsnet for NHL Network.
• Selena Ross is the new Associate Editor for Maisonneuve Magazine
• Ian Morrison, executive director of the lobby group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, is stepping down.
• CBC has announced several changes of duties for senior managers in preparation for the new launch of the National.
• Scott Feschuk is ending his column at Maclean’s.
• Vincent Marissal, formerly of La Presse, has turned to the dark side.
• Lisa Christensen is taking leave from hosting the CJAD Car Show so she can run for office as a borough councillor for Projet Montréal.
• Corus has announced new leadership for its French channels Séries+ and Historia: Catherine Vidal and Julie Potterat, both of whom were already working there in acquisitions and original programming, take over the work of Brigitte Vincent, who is stepping down on Oct. 3.
• Patrick Lagacé interviews Paul Arcand.
• The Athletic Winnipeg has added Leah Hextall as a contributor.
• Elena Cherney, whose previous workplaces include the Montreal Gazette, is now Coverage Planning Chief at the Wall Street Journal.

Obituaries

• David Mainse, religious broadcaster and founder of 100 Huntley Street.
• Joe Gelmon, former reporter and editor at the Winnipeg Free Press, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and Montreal Gazette. He’s remembered at the latter for his style guide, which had a lot of consistency and rigour but infamously tried to convince people to spell the plural of sock as sox.

Jobs

• Newsroom Operations Supervisor, CTV Montreal (deadline: Sept. 28)
• Lead Editor, Halifax Chronicle Herald (deadline: Sept. 28)
• Host, Power and Politics (deadline: Sept. 28)
• Host, CBC’s Power and Politics (deadline: Sept. 28)
• Digital broadcast journalist, Global News Toronto (plus same job but as a 12-month contract) (deadline: Sept. 29)
• The Walrus fellowship (deadline: Oct. 2)
• Editorial assistant, CBC’s The National (deadline: Oct. 4)
• Analyst, Quebec Press Council (deadline: Oct. 5)
• Managing Editor, Nunatsiaq News (deadline: Oct. 13)
• CBC/QWF writer in residence (deadline: Oct. 15)
• Pupitreur surnuméraire, La Presse
• Journaliste-pupitreur, Métro (deadline: Oct. 22)
• Summer intern, Globe and Mail (deadline: Oct. 27)
• Colour commentator for Montreal Canadiennes CWHL home games

Upcoming events

• CBC Montreal open house, Oct. 1 in Montreal
• Bell Media panel discussion on mental health in journalism, Oct. 2 in Montreal
• FPJQ conference, Nov. 17-19 in Sherbrooke

News about news

https://twitter.com/mahoneygazette/status/910284100019392515

• Air Canada went on a bit of a childish rant about unfair reporting at the CBC after it was accidentally copied on an email by Michael Enright. Neither side comes out of this dispute looking good, because Enright’s email says his show should explicitly state that Air Canada boards planes using an inefficient method, while the science is far from settled on such things.
• NBC News has created a media reporting unit.
• The Canadian Press talks to the people behind Toronto’s West End Phoenix and Sault Ste. Marie’s SooToday about alternative independent news outlets.
• Google has offered $500,000 to the Canadian Journalism Foundation promote news literacy among students.

At the CRTC

Evanov proposes changes to Toronto stations:
CIDC-FM (Z103.5) 30.7kW > 100kW dir.
CIRR-FM (Proud 103.9) to 103.7FM, 0.225kW > 10kW#CRTC pic.twitter.com/Hm8haE82rU

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) September 15, 2017

• Evanov Radio has proposed a way out of its Toronto problem: A station licensed to the suburb of Orangeville (CIDC-FM Z103.5) that’s being prevented from formally expanding into Toronto, and another licensed in downtown Toronto (CIRR-FM Proud FM 103.9) that for technical reasons can’t expand its signal beyond 225W. Under the proposed changes, Z103 increases power but adopts a directional lemon-shaped signal that avoids Toronto, while Proud FM goes from 225W to 10,000W and changes frequency from 103.9 to 103.7 to greatly expand its reach in Canada’s largest city. The applications are posted here and accepting comments until Oct. 16. The CRTC has screwed over Z103 by on the one hand preventing it from offering a better signal in Toronto because it’s licensed to Orangeville, but on the other hand licensing another station in Orangeville because it determined that Z103 was too Toronto-focused.
• Maclean’s has a story about how RT (Russia Today) is still available on Canadian TV providers, usually for free or at very low cost. (Videotron is not one of those providers.) The CRTC says its status is not under review. But as Greg O’Brien notes, someone could file a complaint.
• The commission has denied a request from Canal Évasion to lower its Canadian programming expenditure quota from 46% to 32%. The commission found holes in its reasoning (comparing Évasion to Astral channels without taking into account changes since their purchase by Bell Media) and determined it would be better to ask for such changes when their licence is up for renewal.
• The commission has denied a request from the CBC to offer an analog subchannel of CBL-FM (CBC Radio Two Toronto) to a Tamil-language service. The commission felt such a service would compete with a recently-licensed ethnic station and an existing Tamil subchannel service.

TV

Moment cocasse : il était minuit à Barcelone et le journaliste @henrydelaguerie n'avait pas prévu le réveil de son enfant #RobertKelly pic.twitter.com/0YxjTvW6mC

— Patrice Roy (@PatriceRoyTJ) September 20, 2017

• Just days after the series finale of 19-2 (*sniff*), we have a new English-language Montreal-set drama starting: Bad Blood, a six-episode miniseries on City starting Thursday at 8pm, dramatizes the story of the Rizzuto crime family. John Doyle gives it a good review in the Globe, and Peter Edwards, whose book the series is based on, writes a bit for the Star about what he learned in helping create the series. In French, reviews by La Presse and the Journal de Montréal.
• CTV is beginning production on The Launch, the new music reality show that it hopes to export internationally. Names like Fergie and Shania Twain have been named as mentors.
• TSN and Sportsnet have released their Toronto Raptors broadcast schedule. Each side gets 41 games. Sportsnet is putting all of its games on Sportsnet One, while TSN has games on various channels.
• Télé-Québec is bringing back Passe-Partout. Not many details yet, and don’t expect to see it before 2019, but the original cast isn’t involved.
• Radio-Canada, which passed on the Louis Morissette series Plan B, which became a critical hit on Corus’s Séries+, will pick up the series for a second season, now that Séries+ has controversially dropped plans for any original series in the coming year.
• Bell Media has signed a deal with Vice to bring the daily news show Vice News Tonight to HBO Canada and Much.
• Fall programming announcement from The Comedy Network (The Beaverton returns Nov. 1).
• Fox News Channel has announced a new 10pm show hosted by Laura Ingraham.

Radio

• CHOM has named Randy Renaud to replace Tootall on the midday show weekdays, starting Monday. It’s a choice few people would take issue with. Now the question becomes who replaces Renaud on the weekends.
• The CBC Montreal radio show formerly known as Cinq à six has been relaunched as The Bridge, hosted by Nantali Indongo. “While the name has changed, our mission has not,” she says in the first episode, promising “in-depth conversations about culture, style and taste.” The show airs Saturdays in Quebec from 5-6pm.
• CBC is relaunching The World This Hour as an hourly (24/7) 4.5-minute newscast, which will give local shows a bit more time for more local news.

Print

• The National Post is losing its theatre critic, Robert Cushman.
• Rolling Stone magazine is up for sale. This as it faces a revived lawsuit over its embarrassing campus rape story.

Online

• The Northern B.C. independent news site 250news.com is shutting down at the end of the month.
• The University of Toronto student paper The Varsity has launched a Chinese website.

News about people

• Brian Wilde will be a “semi-regular” contributor to Global Montreal’s newscasts.
• Peter Kuitenbrouwer is leaving the National Post to pursue a master’s degree.
• Murad Hemmadi moving to Ottawa to cover politics for Maclean’s.

Obituaries

• Lillian Ross, long-time contributor to The New Yorker
• Harry Dean Stanton, actor

Jobs

@NunatsiaqNews is hiring! Come join our award-winning team or share this ad with someone who might. pic.twitter.com/Z78L3T8VJU

— Nunatsiaq News (@NunatsiaqNews) September 15, 2017

• Assignment coordinator, Global News Toronto (deadline: Sept. 22)
• Senior online national journalist, Global News Toronto (deadline: Sept. 27)
• Lead Editor, Halifax Chronicle Herald (deadline: Sept. 28)
• Host, Power and Politics (deadline: Sept. 28)
• Host, CBC’s Power and Politics (deadline: Sept. 28)
• Digital broadcast journalist, Global News Toronto (plus same job but as a 12-month contract) (deadline: Sept. 29)
• The Walrus fellowship (deadline: Oct. 2)
• Editorial assistant, CBC’s The National (deadline: Oct. 4)
• Managing Editor, Nunatsiaq News (deadline: Oct. 13)
• CBC/QWF writer in residence (deadline: Oct. 15)
• Summer intern, Globe and Mail (deadline: Oct. 27)
• National hockey reporter, The Canadian Press
• Colour commentator for Montreal Canadiennes CWHL home games

Upcoming events

• CBC Annual Public Meeting, Sept. 26 in Ottawa
• Bell Media panel discussion on mental health in journalism, Oct. 2 in Montreal
• FPJQ conference, Nov. 17-19 in Sherbrooke

News about news

• The Toronto Star sparked a lot of WTFs and mockery online when it published an article suggesting wine pairings with movies including 12 Years a Slave. The article has since been “edited” (read: hacked down to just the non-offensive suggestions) and Public Editor Kathy English admits it was a “mistake”.
• A memo about major changes to CBC News operations in Toronto and Vancouver as they prepare to relaunch The National, On the Money, Power and Politics, The World at Six and programs on CBC News Network.
• Vice Canada would like the federal government to drop a case trying to seize reporter Ben Makuch’s notes about a suspected terrorist, since that source is now dead.
• Another plea to save print journalism, this time making the argument that more money to local TV news is unfair.
• The Guardian has a long piece on how the Wall Street Journal covers Donald Trump.

At the CRTC

• New chairman Ian Scott has issued a statement as he begins his mandate. It’s brief, but seems to focus on the consumer-oriented mandate of his predecessor Jean-Pierre Blais. It also continues Blais’s tradition of referring to himself as “chief executive officer”, though not his tradition of beginning every statement by paying tribute to the elders of the closest indigenous people.
• Unifor has announced it will file a CRTC complaint against Rogers’s OMNI over its decision to outsource the production of its Mandarin and Cantonese newscasts to Fairchild, which owns Canada’s biggest Chinese television channel and runs the main competitor in providing Canadians with news in these languages. Unifor argues this goes against the licence granted to OMNI and the accompanying must-carry order, which says “the licensee shall produce and broadcast” daily newscasts in the four languages (it produces the Punjabi and Italian newscasts in-house). The commission may have to split hairs on what the word “produce” means in this context.
• Speaking of OMNI, Rogers filed a request to amend the licence for its new OMNI regional feeds to correct what it saw as a typo: It required ICI in Quebec to produce 14 hours of original local programming a week for the Quebec OMNI feed, when Rogers says it meant to say 14 hours a month. But intervenors including Quebecor, Cogeco and the Community Media Advocacy Centre strongly objected to this, saying it amounts to getting a licence under false pretences. Complicating matters is that the conditions of licence first imposed on ICI in 2012 contain an inconsistency between French and English versions. The French version says “le titulaire doit, au cours de chaque semaine de radiodiffusion, diffuser 14 heures d’émissions locales originales à caractère ethnique, calculées mensuellement”, while the English version says “in each broadcast month, the licensee shall broadcast 14 hours of original local ethnic programming, calculated monthly.” (Emphasis mine.) The preamble in both languages makes clear that ICI’s commitment was 14 hours a week of local ethnic programming, but didn’t specify that this commitment was for original programs. It’s also redundant to say “each broadcast month” and “calculated monthly.” Until this application is approved, ICI’s original condition of licence remains.
• The commission has approved a request by CHOD-FM Cornwall, a francophone community station serving eastern Ontario, for another transmitter farther north in Dunvegan (I first reported on this in April). The new transmitter is on the same frequency, 92.1 MHz, so they’ll either need to synchronize the two (which is tricky) or there’s gonna be interference for people between the two transmitters.

TV

https://twitter.com/Jack_Fritz34/status/907294696032149504

• Former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo seems to be working out well as a TV analyst.
• Global TV launched its Quebec station 20 years ago this week after it purchased a Quebec City station, CKMI-TV, and installed retransmitters in Montreal and Sherbrooke. Global Montreal produced a story by Anne Leclair about the anniversary and the station’s history.
• RDS has announced its Canadiens and Senators broadcast schedule for 2017-18. It includes all eight Canadiens preseason games and the 60 regular-season games it has access to. It’ll even broadcast an intra-squad game on RDS Info and stream two others online. For the Senators, it’s all 50 regular-season games it can, plus two preseason games against the Canadiens and one against the Leafs. All of these games are regional and should be blacked out west of eastern Ontario.
• We’re still waiting for TSN to announce its schedules for regional NHL games. But a look at the schedule shows three Habs preseason games scheduled for TSN2 (Sept. 21, 25 and 29). Other matches are against Canadian teams — two against Ottawa on TSN5 and one against Toronto on TSN4. TSN2 would make sense to solve conflicts between the Habs and Senators over use of TSN5, which is distributed in the teams’ shared region. (15 games during the season would create this conflict.) But it means TSN2 would be blacked out to most of Ontario and all of western Canada up to 50 times, mostly Tuesday and Thursday evenings.
• Good news and bad news for TSN’s The Reporters, which the network proudly announced has been revived: It’s airing at 9am Sunday mornings on TSN2, and simulcast on TSN Radio stations including TSN 690 Montreal. But Michael Farber won’t be on the show regularly because of “budget restrictions.” He’ll be invited on special occasions like NHL free agency and trade deadline coverage.
• TVA Sports has signed a deal with WWE, which includes airing WWE Raw on TVA Sports.
• CTV went so far as to referring to a competitor as “fake news” after Global’s ET Canada billed itself as “Canada’s #1 entertainment news show”. Bell Media’s press release brings out the Numeris numbers to show eTalk has 30% more viewers.
• Unifor members at Global TV stations in Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto and Halifax/New Brunswick, as well as the Ottawa bureau, have ratified a new contract, ending any threat of a strike.
• Missed this earlier, but Brendan Kelly talked to Jay Walker about his food show Resto Mundo on Zeste. I wrote about the show last year.
• Bell Media has announced two new original series for its food channel Gusto. One is Flour Power, hosted by Montrealer Jessica McGovern.
• Richard Therrien on TV5’s programming, which is under new management.
• CBC has renewed its rights deal with Spruce Meadows for equestrian events through 2020.
• HBO has renewed Last Week Tonight with John Oliver for three seasons.
• Trevor Noah has apparently done a good enough job as host of the Daily Show to get an extension through 2022.
• Ditto Conan O’Brien, renewed on TBS until 2022.

Radio

• Radio host André Arthur and a man who criticized him for fanning the flames of hatred in Quebec City are suing each other for defamation.
• Former NHL goaltender Alex Auld, whose career included a brief stint as a backup for the Canadiens, has joined Sportsnet 650 Vancouver as an analyst.

Print

• L’Actualité magazine has made a major change, going from a weekly publication to a monthly one with less news and more features, mirroring a change made by its sister publication Voir. But there’s concern about elements of a proposed new revenue stream that includes selling travel and conferences with journalists. Owner Alexandre Taillefer insists there’s no risk of a conflict of interest, which I think is a bit naive. Coverage by Le Devoir and Presse Canadienne.
• TC Media has sold three more newspapers as part of its Quebec newspaper selloff. The Information du Nord Mont-Tremblant, Information du Nord Sainte-Agathe and Information du Nord Vallée de la Rouge go to Sonème hebdo inc. along with 12 employees. This is the seventh sale of newspapers or groups of newspapers to small local owners, affecting 18 newspapers. There are still 75 left to go.
• The National Post newsroom wants to unionize. At least that’s what some organizers hope. The mood there has changed since Postmedia made major cuts to non-unionized employees’ benefits, an anonymous source tells Global News reporter Sean Craig (himself a former Post employee) and the Globe and Mail.
• Postmedia has partnered with Rogers to publish a monthly section in Postmedia’s broadsheet newspapers filled with content from Rogers’s lifestyle magazines. Life By Design premiered last week in the Montreal Gazette.

Online

• The website Canoe.ca (owned by my employer Postmedia) has been the victim of a data theft, with user information including names, emails, addresses and phone numbers from 1996 until 2008 being copied during a hack. About a million users who signed up before 2008 are affected.
• Streaming service DAZN, which made waves by securing the rights to out-of-market NFL games in Canada, got caught in a PR nightmare when the first weekend of games was bogged with technical problems. The company has apologized and the NFL is trying to salvage the situation with them.
• Fact-checking website Snopes.com, whose control is in dispute after events that followed the acrimonious divorce of its founding couple, has been “saved” thanks to an injunction that requires Proper Media LLC to release ad revenue to Snopes owner Bardav. This is a victory for David Mikkelson against the company his ex-wife sold her shares to.
• The Athletic is looking for correspondents in Winnipeg. It’s also seeking “new and emerging voices” in Toronto.
• The Globe and Mail explains technical aspects of its website redesign.

News about people

• Major executive changes at Bell Media:
  • Stewart Johnston is appointed President, Media Sales, Marketing, and TSN
  • Mike Cosentino is appointed President, Content and Programming
  • Nanci MacLean is appointed Vice-President and Head, Bell Media Studios
• The Toronto Star has hired a democracy reporter, Sabrina Nanji. She’s on a one-year contract made possible by the Atkinson Foundation.
• Jessica Johnson has been named executive editor and creative director of The Walrus. This position replaces editor-in-chief, which was made vacant with the departure of Jonathan Kay. J-Source talks to her about her plans.
• Stephen Maher is leaving iPolitics. He hasn’t said where he’s going except to Italy for a vacation.
• Canadian Graydon Carter is stepping down as editor of Vanity Fair, a position he’s held for 25 years. He’s one of several magazine bosses to announce departures.
• Ashley Csanady has decided to take a buyout from the National Post. She’s contemplating her next move.
• Konrad Yakabuski is now a columnist for Le Devoir in addition to the Globe and Mail. He writes about politics.
• Peter Anthony Holder had a brief speaking role as a reporter on this week’s episode of 21 Thunder on CBC.
• ESPN SportsCenter host Jemele Hill has apologized for calling Donald Trump a white supremacist.

Obituaries

• Gretta Chambers, former host of CFCF’s The Editors and CBC Radio’s The Province in Print, and long-time columnist for the Montreal Gazette. An appreciation from Lisa Fitterman in the Globe and Mail.

Jobs

.@RosieBarton signs off for the final time as host of Power & Politics. The @PnPCBC team wishes her all the best on her new adventure. pic.twitter.com/m3sEx6jEM1

— Power & Politics (@PnPCBC) September 8, 2017

• Host, Power and Politics (deadline: Sept. 28)
• Reporter, Low Down to Hull and Back News (deadline: Sept. 20)
• Vancouver reporter for Globe and Mail (deadline: Sept. 20)
• Host, CBC’s Power and Politics (deadline: Sept. 28)
• CBC/QWF writer in residence (deadline: Oct. 15)
• National hockey reporter, The Canadian Press
• Digital broadcast journalist, Global News Toronto (plus same job but as a 12-month contract)
• Beijing news assistant, Globe and Mail

Upcoming events

• CBC Annual Public Meeting, Sept. 26 in Ottawa
• Bell Media panel discussion on mental health in journalism, Oct. 2 in Montreal
• FPJQ conference, Nov. 17-19 in Sherbrooke

News about news

• How the Houston Chronicle has been covering the hurricane devastation of the area.
• Le Devoir on the recommendations from itself and Quebecor to the Chamberland commission looking into police spying on journalists in Quebec.

At the CRTC

• Ian Scott is now the CRTC’s chairperson. The Globe and Mail and Financial Post look at the files on his table. They include wireless roaming, broadband access and the Bell Super Bowl ad appeal.
• After determining that the two markets can sustain a new radio station, the CRTC has received three applications each for new stations in Georgina, Ont. (southeast of Barrie) and Grimsby/Beamsville, Ont. (between Hamilton and Niagara Falls). All six are for music stations and are from small or mid-size broadcasters like My Broadcasting Corp., Evanov Radio, Durham Radio, Byrnes, Frank Torres and Bhupinder Bola.

TV

Le Téléjournal 22h fait peau neuve. Nouveau décor, nouvelle approche. Qui de mieux que @CGalipeauTJ pour nous en parler !! pic.twitter.com/87zeahCWch

— Alexis De Lancer (@AlexisDeLancer) September 4, 2017

• The Space/Syfy series Killjoys has been renewed for seasons 4 and 5 (10 episodes each), but those will be its last. The series Dark Matter wasn’t so lucky, getting cancelled. The creator explains his disappointment, and some fans are going the petition route (30,000 signatures) to either get it uncancelled or have someone like Netflix pick it up.
• CHCH in Hamilton has announced its fall schedule. Most interesting is that it has acquired the rights to the Netflix series House of Cards. Channel Zero tells me they have acquired the rights to all five seasons of the series, and will air them at a rate of two episodes a week on Wednesday nights starting Sept. 13. At that rate, they’ll get all 65 episodes aired by the end of April. They’ve also picked up Seasons 1-4 of FX’s The Americans, which will air one episode a week.
• Looks like Jimmy Kimmel Live is changing hands in Canada. The show has disappeared from Bell’s Much and Comedy Network schedules, and appeared on Corus’s CMT as of Sept. 18. Global has Stephen Colbert’s Late Show at 11:35pm, while CTV has local news and CTV Two has Jimmy Fallon. There’s been no announcement yet but expect one in the coming days.
• MTV Canada’s fall lineup includes MTV Unplugged, TRL and other imported MTV fare, plus reruns of Friends.
• Hometown Hockey has announced its full schedule, which ends in Montreal on April 1. There’s also a stop in Cornwall on March 17-18. Every province gets at least one event except Newfoundland and Labrador. Ontario gets 10, B.C. and Alberta get four each, and everyone else one. No stops in the territories.
• The U.S. big four networks will air a one-hour special fundraiser for hurricane relief next Tuesday. So far it doesn’t look like any Canadian networks are joining in.
• Jay and Dan started on TSN this week, with a new set. This is how the first minute of their first broadcast went.
• A simple chart shows ad spending for NFL games is going way up while ratings have stayed flat. Advertisers still put a premium on live sports because they’re PVR-proof.

Radio

BEHIND THE SCENES: The @sportsnet650 #StartingLineup launches from 2440 Ash Street! Lots of energy in here!! #AllSportsRadio pic.twitter.com/usIvsWgpwj

— Sportsnet 650 (@Sportsnet650) September 4, 2017

• TTP Media is finally posting jobs. Partner Nicolas Tétrault spread the word on LinkedIn about sales jobs at their two radio stations.
• CJAD has a new parenting show hosted by Orla Johannes and Andrea Elias. Sundays 5pm starting Sept. 10.
• CHOM is organizing a concert tribute to Tootall on Sept. 22 at Club Soda. Tickets are $9.77 (rounded down to $9.75), but it doesn’t matter because it’s already sold out.
• Corus’s CHQR (News Talk 770) Calgary has begun simulcasting audio from Global TV’s evening news on the radio.
• CBC will be airing the Montreal-based podcast interview series Montreapolis Fridays at 11:30am on CBC Radio One nationwide starting this week.

Print

• Concordia’s The Link has published its first issue as a monthly magazine instead of a weekly newspaper.
• The Canadian Press on changes to the Globe and Mail, including a print redesign and a strategy to use online metrics to help shape what ends up in the paper.
• Mort Zuckerman is selling the perennially money-losing New York Daily News to Tronc (the stupid name the Tribune company has since adopted) for nothing. Some additional details from the New York Post (its main competitor), which paints a picture of drastic budget cuts in the near future.

Online

• Clickbait website MTL Blog didn’t help its reputation when a writer responded to a restaurant complaining about false information about a story by suggesting it pay for a sponsored article. The writer took personal offence to a perfectly valid complaint that lots of stuff in the story was wrong, which will certainly look bad if that writer ever applies for a real journalism job.
• Online paid subscription magazine The Athletic is expanding across Canada, planning to cover all seven Canadian NHL markets as well as the Canadian Women’s Hockey League. Among the hires with this expansion is veteran hockey writer Pierre LeBrun, who says he’ll still be contributing to TSN and RDS. The website has also expanded to Philadelphia.
• Mike Walters, former news director at TMZ, has started a competing celebrity news website after falling out with TMZ founder Harvey Levin. The new website is called The Blast.
• A former Hillary Clinton digital adviser has started up a new fake-news-busting website called Verrit, which lets people share info cards that have seven-digit verification codes that people can use to check their veracity. The website is getting justifiably crucified in the media for being useless, and obviously partisan on top of that. A simpler way to combat fake news is to just include links to reliable sources when spreading stuff on social media.

News about people

Today was @maryvallis's last day at The Star. She's had a huge impact on my career, and the paper's gonna miss her. Listen to her, students.

— Bruce Arthur (@bruce_arthur) September 1, 2017

• Amanda Stein, formerly of TSN 690, was on NHL Network talking about herself as she begins a new job with the New Jersey Devils.
• Sean Coleman has a demo reel out with his best-of moments from his short-lived stint as a sports anchor at CTV Montreal.
• Raffy Boudjikanian, formerly of CBC Montreal, is now at CBC Edmonton.
• Kristin Falcao’s social media campaign to help find her dog worked. The dog was returned on Saturday.
• Stuntman Stu Schwartz has returned to the air at Majic 100 in Ottawa after battling leukemia.
• Jean-Luc Mongrain has another TV job, commenting on the news for RDI matin week-end.
• Sportsnet’s Carly Agro is pregro. (She approves of this characterization.)
• Meanwhile, it’s twin boys for Jessi Cruickshank, host of CBC’s The Goods.

Good reads

• The Canadian Press on the 100th anniversary of The Canadian Press.
• Awful Announcing looks at the paid-subscription business model of outlets like The Athletic.

Jobs

• Reporter, Low Down to Hull and Back News (deadline: Sept. 20)
• Host, CBC’s Power and Politics (deadline: Sept. 28)
• Beijing news assistant, Globe and Mail

Upcoming events

• CBC Annual Public Meeting, Sept. 26 in Ottawa
• FPJQ conference, Nov. 17-19 in Sherbrooke

News about news

Journalism lesson: Always ask about the cat, or else you'll pay. #GalvNews #Harvey pic.twitter.com/RhAGpVdbns

— John Wayne Ferguson (@JohnWFerguson) August 29, 2017

• A consortium of news organizations has filed recommendations with the Chamberland Commission looking into spying on journalists. Among them are rules that better separate politicians from police.
• Globe and Mail journalist Nathan VanderKlippe was briefly detained by authorities in western China and had his computer seized after he was asking people questions.
• The World Press Photo exhibition is in Montreal until Oct. 1. Stories about it at the Gazette, Global, Le Devoir, La Presse, Radio-Canada, Métro, HuffPost Québec.
• A war of words continues between La Presse and the Quebec Press Council over the latter’s recent decision blaming La Presse for publishing personal information about convicted killer Karla Homolka. The decision led to Philippe Teiscera-Lessard, the story’s author, to resign from the council (he obviously wasn’t part of the panel that decided on the case). The president of the council, Paule Beaugrand-Champagne, responded with an open letter saying that the council is composed mainly of people from the industry and it is absurd to suggest they are anti-journalism.
• Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against the New York Times has been dismissed.
• Global News would like anarchists to know that no, they do not hand over video footage of protests to police without a court order to do so.
• The FPJQ has announced its next conference will be in Sherbrooke in November. Nominations are open for its annual journalism awards, the Judith Jasmin prizes for news, and the Antoine Desilets prizes for photography. It also announced a new financial backer: Mishmash Media, Alexandre Taillefer’s media company that owns Voir and l’Actualité.

At the CRTC

• It’s Sept. 1, which means a lot of new licences take effect today, including those of TV services owned by Bell, Rogers, Corus, Quebecor and V. Also starting today, OMNI starts charging a mandatory 12 cents a month to all TV subscribers in Canada.
• The commission has finally released financial details of specialty (now referred to as discretionary) channels for the year ending Aug. 31, 2016. Among the highlights:
  • Sportsnet saw a huge nine-figure jump in ad revenue, and made $93.6 million in profit in 2015-16, making it the most profitable television channel in Canada. Add in Sportsnet One ($44.8 million), Sportsnet 360 ($1.2 million) and Sportsnet World ($2.7 million) and the Sportsnet channels had $142.3 million in profit in one year. This is the first year that Sportsnet (just the regional channels) surpasses TSN in total revenue, total expenses and total profit. But TSN still has slightly more subscribers and slightly more revenue from subscriber fees.
  • The acquisition of national NHL rights meant a huge change for TVA Sports, causing its subscriber revenue to quadruple in a year. But its programming expenses also quadrupled, and it went from losing $20 million in the year before the rights change to losing $40 million the year after. Reducing expenses has allowed it to recover slightly in 2016.
  • Early numbers for Viceland Canada don’t tell us much. The channel was rebranded from Bio halfway through the 2015-16 year, and was on free preview for a while.
  • FXX Canada, the little sister to FX Canada, has squeaked into the black in its third year.
  • Numbers for G4 Canada show a dramatic 87% drop in the number of subscribers in 2015-16, pushing it into the red despite spending $0 on Canadian programming. This explains why Rogers has decided to shut down the channel, which no longer exists as of today.
  • RDS Info is continuing to bleed money, with revenue covering only about half of expenses. Profits from RDS more than make up for that, though.
  • Zombie channel Book Television, which has zero staff, zero original programming and little worth watching, still has more than 2 million subscribers and made $1.28 million in profit that year.
• The commission has renewed the licence of CIRA-FM (Radio Ville-Marie) in Montreal and its retransmitters. The five-year renewal reflects some compliance issues, including appeals for donations that said without money the station could cease to exist — CRTC policy prohibits such threats.
• With licences set to expire, the CRTC has given itself an extension until Dec. 31 to process the renewals of several radio stations, including CHXX-FM (Pop 100.9) in Donnacona, Quebec, near Quebec City. It also gave itself another year for CIBL-FM 101.5 Montreal.

TV

Breakfast Television celebrates 4 YEARS today! Happy birthday, BT! You've got a lot of people who sure do love you! ?? pic.twitter.com/o4Gipf8qbJ

— CityNews Montreal (@CityNewsMTL) August 25, 2017

• Sportsnet has released full broadcast schedules for the three NHL teams it has all the rights for, the Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers. Nothing surprising here, with 36 or 37 games of each team being broadcast nationally, and less than 10 of each being forced onto the overflow Sportsnet One channels. The big question this season will be the Canadiens, which move from Sportsnet to TSN, forcing Bell to figure out what to do when both the Canadiens and Senators are playing at the same time.
• Bell Media has confirmed that Mayday will have an 18th season. Season 17 begins next Friday on Discovery.
• Videotron has become the latest TV provider to announce it will incorporate the Comcast XFinity X1 platform in its service. This follows similar announcements from Shaw and Rogers (Rogers had tried to develop its own system but gave up on that after wasting a lot of time and money). X1 allows cable providers to have cloud-based PVRs and other features that will let Videotron compete on features better with Bell’s IPTV service.
• The Canadian Press talked to country music artists who are sad that CMT will no longer air country music videos.
• Fox is going to start selling six-second ads during NFL games.
• CBS is buying Ten Network in Australia, a TV company that was once owned by Canwest.

Radio

• Bell Media is starting a new national afternoon talk show, with Evan Solomon as host, on Tuesday. The show will run on eight Bell-owned news-talk stations, including CFRB 1010 in Toronto, CFRA 580 in Ottawa and CJAD 800 in Montreal. CJAD will carry only the second hour of Solomon’s two-hour show, from 3-4pm. Aaron Rand’s afternoon show will therefore start an hour later.
• Cogeco Media has launched a new smartphone app for its radio stations, called Cogeco Live. The application is the usual you’ll-love-this-if-all-your-favourite-radio-stations-are-owned-by-our-parent-company vibe to it, which can be especially offputting for anglophones since The Beat is Cogeco’s only anglophone station (it even warns you if you try to switch it to English that not all content will be available to you). The big sell is loyalty points you gain by interacting with it, which can theoretically be redeemed for cool stuff (right now it’s just getting into a contest for a vacation).
• Mike FM (CKDG-FM 105.1) has a new afternoon drive show, Radio Montréal France, weekdays 4-6pm, hosted by Julien Cardon.

Print

• The Montreal Gazette has ended some regular columns (but at least gave them a chance to say goodbye): Dogs of Montreal, Mark Abley’s Watchwords and Squeaky Wheels.
• The Globe and Mail is also purging some freelancers, including high-profile ones Tabatha Southey and Leah McLaren. Freelancers were informed via form-letter email, which probably wasn’t the best idea. This follows an earlier announcement that weekday sections would be merged.

Online

• The Associated Press has published newly restored footage of the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana on YouTube, converting the original film to 4K digital video.
• The blog Vancouver Is Awesome has been bought by Glacier Media. Its founder is staying on as editor-in-chief.

News about people

• Tootall is being inducted into the Canadian Music and Broadcasting Hall of Fame next year. The announcement was made live on the air on CHOM, which took the honouree by surprise.
• Peter Anthony Holder, who through his former CJAD show and Stuph File show and podcast has interviewed lots of celebrities, has published a book about those interviews.
• The Vancouver Sun talks to Red Robinson, who is losing his job at CISL in Vancouver now that it is being converted into a Sportsnet station. He suggests he’s not ready to leave the business yet.
• Caroline Locher writes a goodbye letter on her last day as general manager of the FPJQ. She starts at the Quebec Press Council on Tuesday. Catherine Lafrance takes over Locher’s old job.
• La Presse’s Gabriel Béland is moving from sports to be a Quebec City reporter.
• Zi-Ann Lum is joining the Huffington Post’s Ottawa bureau.
• The cofounder of MusiquePlus vehemently denies that he sexually assaulted a teenager in 1980-81.
• Global Regina station manager Mitch Bozak is retiring after 30 years. He sat down for an interview with the morning show.
• Pierre Gang, programming director for TV5, has left the company, reports Richard Therrien.

Jobs

• Associate editor, Maisonneuve (deadline: Sept. 1)
• Evening talk show host, AM640 Toronto (deadline: Sept. 1)
• Reporter/editor, CBC Indigenous in Winnipeg (deadline: Sept. 5)
• Reporter, Low Down to Hull and Back News (deadline: Sept. 20)
• Directeur principal, affaires institutionnelles, Québecor

Upcoming events

• CBC Annual Public Meeting, Sept. 26 in Ottawa
• FPJQ conference, Nov. 17-19 in Sherbrooke

News about news

Protestors wearing black with their faces covered smashed @merjvv's camera. pic.twitter.com/Zv47DW5tf1

— Dan Spector (@danspector) August 20, 2017

• The anti-fascist counter-protest in Quebec City was made controversial when people wearing masks decided to engage in wanton vandalism and violence toward police. They also targeted the media for reasons that are unclear (though some will try to defend the Black Bloc by shifting blame to police*). A Global News camera was damaged, as were equipment of several photographers. An anonymous blog post later justified such attacks saying that the media hands over footage to police, a charge Global News vehemently denies.
• Ezra Levant’s The Rebel has been in the news lately, a lot. I really don’t want to recap everything, but the National Post had a very long story about the organization, lots of people have opinion pieces now that it has parted ways with several high-profile contributors and staff, and Levant himself has promised changes after blaming problems on insufficient management. He’s also disclosed some financial information, showing the website got $1.5 million in the past year from crowdfunding, which covers about 90% of its expenses.
• CBC News has acquired a federal government advertising blacklist of websites that it won’t buy ads from. It includes 4chan and Breitbart, and lots of porn sites, but also Jezebel, Imgur, HollywoodPQ.com and Cosmopolitan.com.
• Our new governor general Julie Payette has dropped her efforts to keep her divorce records secret in order to keep them away from journalists, and instead is appealing to their sense of decency.
• Globe and Mail journalist Nathan VanderKlippe was detained in China and had his laptop seized by authorities.
• CBS Radio in Las Vegas has reversed an ill-considered decision to ban coverage of the Vegas Golden Knights on its radio stations after failing to get broadcast rights to the team’s games.
• A Michigan man falsely accused by right-wing news sites of being the driver in the Charlottesville incident plans to sue the websites that named him.
• The CBC ombudsman has found that referring to a homophobic statement as such is not editorializing.
• The Journal de Montréal has won a court battle over whether lawyers’ fees paid by public institutions should be subject to access to information law.

*UPDATE: Nora Loreto, who wrote the piece linked to above, objects to the way this was originally written and says she does not condone attacking journalists. You can judge for yourself whether she defends the Black Bloc in general in this piece.

At the CRTC

• The government order requiring the CRTC to reconsider its TV licence renewal decisions has been posted. It asks the commission to consider, for the French-language decisions, “how it can be ensured that significant contributions are made to the creation and presentation of original French-language programming and music programming,” and for the English-language ones, “how it can be ensured that significant contributions are made to the creation and presentation of programs of national interest, music programming, short films and short-form documentaries,” and “take into consideration that creators of Canadian programming are key to the Canadian broadcasting system and that, while the industry is going through a transformation, Canadian programming and a dynamic creative sector are vital to the system’s competitiveness and contribute to Canada’s economy.” Nothing specific, but it does bring into question decisions related to quotas for programs of national interest, the elimination of special requirements for contributions to the BravoFACT and MuchFACT production funds by Bravo and Much, respectively, and to the Remstar Fund by MusiquePlus and MAX.
• CJSO-FM 101,7 Sorel has had its licence renewed for two years. The station failed to install a public alerting system before the deadline and failed to provide proper program logs. In addition to the short-term renewal for repeated non-compliance, the station is being required to broadcast a message announcing its compliance failure to its audience.
• Another station getting a licence renewal is CKBK-FM Thamesville, Ont. This despite failure to file annual reports and the fact that it failed to respond to the CRTC’s requests for information about that issue.
• Shaw has gotten a temporary exception from the CRTC about how it distributes TV channels. Shaw had complained about a rule setting a quota on how many independent services to distribute related to the number of related (i.e. Shaw- or Corus-owned) channels. Because there’s a change in categories of specialty channels (which become “discretionary” channels because they no longer have to be specialized), Shaw would be technically in non-compliance as of Sept. 1 for one year. Shaw gets an exception to the rule, but can’t use it to drop independent channels it’s already carrying.
• Bloomberg TV Canada has a broadcasting licence now after passing the threshold where it can no longer operate without a licence. The channel must broadcast at least 35% Canadian content as of Sept. 1, and spend at least 10% of revenues on CanCon. With the channel dropping all its original programming, it’s unclear how that will happen.
• Some uber pedant demanded the CRTC review a decision by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council about a CTV News report that, in the complainant’s view, failed to properly distinguish between a service dog and a support dog. The CRTC found the CBSC was correct in finding that the CTV News story wasn’t wrong.

TV

• CTV’s new 5pm newscasts have a launch date: Monday, Aug. 28. Montreal’s will be anchored by Paul Karwatsky.
• NOVA put together a special episode about the solar eclipse on Monday night, combining interviews and explainers with plenty of day-of footage of people and scientists across the United States watching the event. Unfortunately, Mountain Lake PBS had an issue broadcasting it, restarting the episode 10 minutes in and losing about the last five minutes.
• Bell Media announced that it has sold the rights to the 1980s CFTO-TV game show Just Like Mom, which will become Just Like Mom and Dad and air on Yes TV in Canada and something called BYU TV in the U.S.
• Vrak has announced its fall lineup, which includes a new fiction series, new seasons of existing original series and a new documentary series.
• Le Soleil looks at how much of the fall schedule of V and affiliated channels Musique Plus and Max are devoted to the Occupation Double reboot.
• CMT is dropping country music now that its licence no longer requires it. The conversion into generic discretionary channel allows Corus to turn it into whatever it wants (except news or sports).
• RDI’s fall schedule includes adding a second hour to political has-been show Les Ex, from 4-5pm. The second hour will end with a who-won-the-political-day segment, the epitome of horse-race journalism. Among the documentaries being aired is Québec, my country mon pays, this Friday at 8pm.
• Production has begun on season 2 of Global’s Mary Kills People (another six episodes). Added to the cast are Rachelle Lefevre (Twilight, Under the Dome) and Ian Lake (Bitten, Rookie Blue). For broadcast in winter 2018.

Radio

• The Jewel 106.7 has a new home, in Plaza Pointe-Claire near St-Jean Blvd. and Highway 20. It stresses that it remains committed to serving off-island communities despite moving away from them, but this reinforces the fact that it sees its big market as the West Island, even though it told the CRTC that Hudson/St-Lazare sees itself as separate from Montreal.
• CBC News looks at the coming battle between TSN 1040 in Vancouver and its new competitor, Sportsnet 650. Both TSN 1040 and Sportsnet 650 have since announced their full lineups. Unmentioned in the story is TSN 1410, its second station. With no more Canucks games to broadcast, does TSN really still need a full-time overflow station? Or should Bell consider another vocation for CFTE, like an all-news station with maybe some sports overflow at night?
• La Presse speaks to program directors at francophone music stations about how they’re dealing with competition from streaming services. Talk has a lot to do with it, and stations are impatient for the CRTC to finally review French-language music quotas.
• Canadaland has a guest opinion piece by Nick Fillmore about the issues he has with CBC Radio. It’s a bit harsh, but it makes the point that personal “storytelling” shows of late are taking the place of big-issue shows. I think personal storytelling has its place, but there seems to have been a surge in the number of interview shows where first-person stories are taking the place of journalism and documentary of old, mainly because it’s cheaper to produce.

Print

• TC Media has reached another deal to sell community newspapers: Five weekly papers and one monthly on the South Shore of Montreal are being sold to Gravité Média, which is backed by two local entrepreneurs. This brings to 13 the number of newspapers that have been sold since 93 were put up for sale in April. The affected papers are:
  • Le Brossard Éclair
  • Le Reflet de Delson
  • Le Journal Saint-François de Valleyfield
  • Le Soleil de Châteauguay
  • L’Information d’Affaires Rive-Sud
• The Globe and Mail is dropping print distribution in the Maritimes as of Nov. 30. The announcement comes right after hiring a new Atlantic correspondent, Jessica Leeder. The Globe and National Post have both written off entire provinces as print markets.
• New York alt-weekly the Village Voice is ending its print edition.
• A major leadership shakeup at the Los Angeles Times.

Other

• Quebecor is bailing out the Cinéma Impérial, which otherwise likely would have been crushed by its own debt. In exchange for taking over its mortgage debt, Quebecor gets two seats on a six-seat board, with the Losique family having two and the two others to be independent. Meanwhile, the neverending trainwreck that is the Montreal World Film Festival continues with Serge Losique at the helm, and the Cinéma Impérial acting as the only theatre.

News about people

• Susan Krashinsky, now Susan Krashinsky Robertson, is the Globe and Mail’s new media reporter, adding the beat to her existing advertising and marketing coverage. Krashinsky Robertson had previously been the media beat reporter from 2010 to 2012, replaced by Steve Ladurantaye, who was replaced by James Bradshaw when Ladurantaye left for Twitter. Bradshaw was recently moved to the banks beat.
• Emmanuelle Latraverse is coming back to television after an extended absence, but she won’t be coming back to her weekly political show. Instead, she’ll be joining the Téléjournal as a special reporter, doing more field reporting. The reason for her absence still hasn’t been explained. Daniel Thibeault takes her place as host of Coulisses du pouvoir.
• La Presse talks to Bernard Drainville about his life and his new solo show on 98.5 FM, replacing Benoit Dutrizac.
• Caroline St-Hilaire is joining LCN as a political analyst, just as soon as she’s done being mayor of Longueuil in November.
• Also at 98.5 FM, feminist columnist Judith Lussier and former CAQ MNA Sylvain Lévesque are being paired up for a weekend open-line talk show.
• Ken Rosenthal, best known as a Fox Sports analyst, is joining online sports writing magazine The Athletic. This comes mere weeks after Fox decided its website shouldn’t have any more written articles and instead be just video. Rosenthal will continue contributing to Fox Sports broadcasts and MLB Network.
• Brandon Gonez, formerly of CTV Barrie, is replacing Your Morning weather presenter Kelsey McEwen as she goes on maternity leave. He shows off his hometown in this introductory segment.
• Robin Turnau, president of Vermont Public Radio, is stepping down from her role in March after spending all her adult life at the station.
• Le Soleil journalist Simon Boivin is leaving his job and the National Assembly press gallery for a government job, at the Société des établissements de plein air du Québec.

Good reads

• Deadspin has a story about a filthy paragraph that made it into a small-town newspaper in 1997 because of an immature writer and an overworked editor, and the fallout from it.

Obituaries

• Boris Spremo, former Toronto Star photographer
• Rosaline Désilets-Ledoux, pioneer of Quebec agricultural journalism
• Doug Anderson, Ottawa country music broadcaster

Jobs

• Associate editor, Maisonneuve (deadline: Sept. 1)
• Reporter/editor, CBC Indigenous in Winnipeg (deadline: Sept. 5)
• Directeur principal, affaires institutionnelles, Québecor

News about news

• The news out of Charlottesville, Va., where a move to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee was met with protests by right-wing, extreme-right-wing and white-supremacist activists, and counter-protests by left-wingers, has caused chaos not only for the U.S. president and politicians, but right-wing media in Canada as well. Ezra Levant, the supreme commander at The Rebel, wrote a memo disassociating himself with the “alt-right” over this, believing the group had gone too far. But even that wasn’t enough for several contributors who decided to leave this week:
  • Brian Lilley, Levant’s former colleague at the Sun News Network, announced his departure from The Rebel on Monday. Levant, classy guy that he is, suggested Lilley was being pressured by Bell Media and others (Lilley has a show on Bell’s Ottawa talk radio station), which Lilley said was not the case. Lilley’s interview with As It Happens suggests the two didn’t part on good terms.
  • John Robson, who was also a Sun News Network contributor, also cut ties, citing the shifting “tone” of the outlet.
  • Barbara Kay, a National Post columnist, cited “bad apples” at The Rebel for spoiling its mission and prompting her to cease her contributions.
  • Meanwhile, Candice Malcolm, a Sun Media columnist who contributed to The Rebel, wrote a piece criticizing the alt-right as Nazis but did not denounce The Rebel.
• Speaking of Charlottesville, one of the pieces of early reporting that got a lot of attention was an interview in Ohio with the mother of the man believed to have driven the vehicle that ran into protesters. This Columbia Journalism Review story tells how the Toledo Blade managed to track her down before police did.
• CBC News was caught using bogus footage in a news story about the threat drones pose to airplanes. CBC apologized for using the YouTube clip in its story without checking (and, presumably, without asking permission either). The realistic-looking but fake video was created by a special effects company.
• Queen’s Park Today, a subscription news service covering Ontario’s legislature, is expanding, opening up a franchise in British Columbia. It’s hiring.

At the CRTC

We’ve asked the #CRTC to review its decisions on PNI and French-language content. https://t.co/KkDoNZ7cvv pic.twitter.com/2wvyoqQRlg

— Mélanie Joly (@melaniejoly) August 14, 2017

• The federal government has decided to ask the CRTC to review its licence renewal decisions for major commercial TV broadcasters — Bell Media, Corus, Rogers, Quebecor and V. At issue are two elements of those decisions that have become controversial: standardizing a special quota called “programs of national interest” (defined as long-form documentary, drama, scripted comedy and specific Canadian award shows that celebrate Canadian creative talent) at the lowest minimum the English groups had, and eliminating a special requirement for Corus’s Séries+ and Historia that required expenditures on original first-run French-language content. The actual order hasn’t been posted yet, so Joly’s tweet is actually the most detailed thing we have to go on right now.
• The CRTC is seeking comment on whether to consider a new commercial radio station in the Lloydminster (Alta./Sask.) market. It received an application from mid-size player Vista Radio, which already owns CKLM-FM (106.1 The Goat) in the market. The only other commercial station is CKSA-FM (Real Country 95.9), owned by Newcap Radio.
• Full seven-year licence renewals for three Bell Media stations: Rouge FM in Sherbrooke and Quebec City, and Énergie in Saguenay. ADISQ, Quebec’s music industry association, had complained that Bell wasn’t running enough French music because of the number of music montages being aired.

TV

• The CRTC has approved Rogers’s request to pull the licence for G4, formerly G4techTV. News of the channel’s demise came out last month, but the letter from Rogers confirms the station will shut down Aug. 31 and they don’t plan to just rebrand it as something else. The American G4 was shut down in 2014. G4 in Canada been operating as a zombie channel for a while now.
• Bloomberg TV Canada, a channel owned by Channel Zero (owner of CHCH, Rewind and Silver Screen Classics), is ending its original programming.
• TVA has pulled the plug on its reboot of Piment Fort, the panel comedy show hosted by Normand Brathwaite.
• CBC’s fall premiere dates are out, with most series starting in the third week of September.
• HGTV Canada has announced its fall programming lineup, highlighted by a new Vancouver-set home reno series, Worst to First.
• Food Network Canada also announced its fall programming.
• Canal Vie has a new logo. It used to be an apple, then a stylized crescent cutout of an apple, and now it’s just the leaf. The new season’s programming highlights include a first ever original fiction series for the channel.
• Z’s fall lineup includes a documentary series about Bordeaux prison.
• CASA’s fall programming lineup is highlighted by Le monde selon Chuck, starring Chuck Hughes.
• Canal Vie’s announcement notwithstanding, Richard Therrien finds the French specialty channels’ fall lineups uninspiring.
• Bell Media’s French specialty channels — Vie, D, Investigation, Vrak and Z — are all on free preview until Sept. 18, on Videotron, Cogeco and Bell, and probably others.
• The Rogers Cup semifinal match featuring Canadian Denis Shapovalov was a hit for both Sportsnet and TVA Sports, which had about half a million each on average, and a peak above 700,000 each. For both, it was the most watched tennis match ever.
• Jay and Dan, or rather “SC WITH JAY AND DAN PRESENTED BY TIM HORTONS”, will start Sept. 4 at midnight. Be warned, “the Tim Hortons sponsorship also includes custom product onset integrations”
• Bell is selling ads for the next Super Bowl at simsub prices, hoping again that the CRTC will reverse its decision or that it will win in court.
• The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council came down on HIFI, the Blue Ant Media channel, for airing The Trailer Park Boys and other offensive fare during the day without sufficient viewer advisory.
• The New York Times on Orphan Black’s #CloneClub and the effect the fan base had on the series. (I note the words “Canadian” or “Canada” don’t appear once in the article.)

Radio

• RNC Media has dropped its last Rythme FM affiliate, rebranding CHOA-FM in Abitibi to its new WOW format as of Aug. 7. In January, RNC did the same thing to its Gatineau station CHLX-FM, dropping Rythme in favour of WOW. The only remaining Rythme FM affiliate not owned by Cogeco now is the one in Saguenay, owned by Attraction Radio. The Abitibi station’s format change, billed as a way to make it more local, was nevertheless treated with some resistance by fans on Facebook.
• With Énergie’s on-air personalities going to Rouge, the former had to figure out what to do with its schedule, so among other things it hired two people from CKOI: Kim Rusk and Philo Lirette.
• Sportsnet 650 in Vancouver has announced its play-by-play team for Vancouver Canucks broadcasts: Brendan Batchelor and Corey Hirsch. Batchelor had previously done play-by-play for the WHL’s Vancouver Giants, and Hirsch was part of the national Sportsnet NHL team on TV. The station launches Sept. 4.
• The Gazette’s T’Cha Dunlevy writes about the end of CBC Radio 2’s The Signal, which tapes a sold-out show in Montreal on Thursday.
• Female country singers aren’t getting much airplay on the radio, a Global News analysis finds.

Print

• The Halifax Chronicle-Herald strike is over after a year and a half. About half those who left on strike are getting jobs, and will have to work with the scabs who replaced them. LocalXPress, the site set up by striking journalists to continue reporting, will be shut down, though there’s still some discussion over what happens to its archives.
• Transcontinental has sold off three newspapers in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region to a company run by two of its employees. This is part of a larger process to potentially sell off all its newspaper holdings.
• Postmedia has closed the sale of media monitoring and archive service Infomart. The $38.25-million sale to Meltwater Canada will go to debt repayment.
• The Hamilton Spectator’s editor-in-chief had to run a column justifying the paper’s decision to accept an ad from a local gun store.

Online

• Netflix Canada is hiking its monthly prices by a dollar.

News about people

• Tina Tenneriello, who recently filled in for Joanne Vrakas at Breakfast Television, has been hired at City Montreal. But it’s not as Vrakas’s maternity leave replacement. Rather, she’s been added to the roster of video journalists for the new local evening newscasts set to begin in 2018. Until she starts here she’s training and working for City nationally, including for the Edmonton and Winnipeg newscasts starting next month. Cora MacDonald, who like Tenneriello cut her teeth reporting at CJAD, was hired earlier for the team.
• Bell Media has finally announced the hiring of Martin Tremblay as vice-president, local radio and television, Quebec — put in charge of Quebec’s French radio stations and Virgin Radio Montreal. Tremblay, who had worked at Astral and Bell before, had to sit out a non-compete clause since he left The Beat in the spring.
• Entertainment reporter Tanya Kim, who was let go by CTV’s eTalk, has met the same fate at City’s Breakfast Television in Toronto, a victim of “restructuring” there.
• XL 103’s Don Stevens and Joanne Johnson are retiring after 25 years together on the radio in Calgary.
• Editor Daniel Kaszor is leaving the National Post for the Edmonton Economic Development Corp.
• Ontario legislature reporter Shawn Jeffords is jumping from the Toronto Sun to the Canadian Press.
• Business reporter Armina Ligaya is jumping from the Financial Post to the Canadian Press.

Good reads

• Vice News was in Charlottesville during the demonstration last weekend. You should watch the footage they came back with.
• A golf columnist comes face to face with a player he mocked. They work it out.

Jobs

• Reporter, BC Today (deadline: Aug. 20)

News about news

Top minimum reporter weekly salaries for unions affiliated with CWA in Canada and U.S. pic.twitter.com/iAz0NEdrNa

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) August 5, 2017

• Radio-Canada’s Valerie-Micaela Bain managed to secure an apology from a man who snuck up to her and kissed her on the cheek during a live TV report from Osheaga. The reaction to the incident and media coverage of it prompted a lot of debate online about how severe such an action is, and whether it would be the same if gender roles were reversed. Comedian Louis T tried to put that argument to rest with an experiment.

At the CRTC

• Besides formalizing previously approved changes to regulations about discretionary channels and television and television distribution (the latter including allowing vertically integrated companies to divert money from community channels to local TV stations), and asking for comments about adding dispute resolution measures to video-on-demand services, the commission has been pretty quiet this week.
• The other group that was left empty-handed in the urban Indigenous radio station proceeding is also appealing the result. VMS Media argues that CRTC commissioner Linda Vennard, who sat on the panel for the proceeding, was in a conflict of interest because she accepted gifts from an ethnic broadcaster that the commission argued would be negatively affected by VMS’s proposal for a hybrid ethnic-Indigenous format. Vennard had already been found in a conflict for those gifts in an unrelated proceeding.

TV and video

.@BBCSimonMcCoy providing all the enthusiasm this story about surfing dogs deserves. pic.twitter.com/FsG8TOj5iF

— Chris Gray (@ChrisGSGray) August 7, 2017

• Quebec is about to get a new French-language horror film channel. Frissons TV launches Sept. 1 on Videotron (channel 799 in HD). I’ll have more on this in the coming days.
• Z has picked up the French rights to the CBS All Access show Star Trek Discovery, and will be airing it at the same time that Space airs the English version in Canada.
• Speaking of CBS All Access, the streaming service is expanding to Canada in 2018. It’s unclear how that affects the rights to series like Star Trek Discovery and The Good Fight (which is broadcast by Corus’s W Network here).
• Ottawa has announced rules related to the sale of 600 MHz spectrum that’s being taken from the over-the-air television UHF band. They include set-asides that will benefit Videotron, Shaw and anyone else who’s not the Big Three. The rules also state that affected television stations won’t be required to change channels until whoever buys a licence for the spectrum in question is ready to build its infrastructure and start using it.
• Groupe TVA released financial results last week, and though we don’t have complete details, it says that ad revenue for the three months ending June 30 was up 77.6% year-over-year at TVA Sports and subscription revenues were up 21.7%. This period covers the entire NHL playoffs, which had some Canadian content (and in particular a team from Montreal). TVA Sports is still losing money, but 30% less money than before. The group also announced an expansion to its MELS studio space with a new building and 60,000-square-foot soundstage, to open in summer 2018.
• DAZN, the streaming service that made a splash in Canada by acquiring rights to NFL Sunday Ticket and NFL RedZone, has gotten streaming rights to a bunch of other sports (mainly European soccer) through an agreement with beIN Sports. Rights acquired also include some tennis events and Russia’s KHL hockey.
• For those of you who liked CTV’s Saving Hope, which had its series finale last week, CTV has posted a version of the last episode with audio commentary from actor Michael Shanks and executive producer Adam Pettle on its website.
• David Letterman is coming back to showbusiness with an interview series for Netflix.

Radio

Rouge FM’s new logo

• Rouge FM has announced (or, perhaps, just re-announced) its lineup of mainly personalities moved over from Énergie, including Dominic Arpin and Mélanie Maynard in the morning and Éric Salvail and his billion contributors in the afternoon. They start Aug. 14. The network of stations has also adopted a new logo, with a fat lowercase “rouge” and smaller uppercase “FM” in superscript, replacing the older semi-cursive logo.
• In a story that sounds very 2005, CHOI-FM in Quebec City has gotten a decision issued against it by the Quebec Press Council for commentary by host Jeff Fillion.

Print

After 5 years, I'm retiring my Quebonics column at @CultMTL. Last one in the current issue, out now. It was fun, thanks to all who helped!

— Malcolm Fraser (@worldprovider) August 5, 2017

• Cult MTL is celebrating its fifth birthday this week. And it’s holding a party on Saturday for people interested in celebrating.
• Employees at the Halifax Chronicle Herald, who have been on strike for 18 months, look like they could be heading back to work finally, with news of a deal in principle with the union. The deal must be ratified by employees before the strike ends.

Online

• A German man decided to take hateful tweets that Twitter refused to delete and spraypaint them (in chalk) in front of their office building in Hamburg.

Other

• Looks like an out-of-court settlement is in the works for Billy Two Rivers’ lawsuit against Van Morrison for using his picture on an album cover without consent.
• A Université de Montréal study suggests playing action-based video games could be bad for your brain. I’m skeptical, especially because of the low number of samples (100 people). But my gut feeling doesn’t trump science.

News about people

• Catherine Lafrance, formerly of Radio-Canada in Ontario, has been named the new general manager of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec. She begins Sept. 1, replacing Caroline Locher, who takes over the top job at the Quebec Press Council.
• Sue Montgomery, former justice reporter for the Montreal Gazette, has been nominated by Projet Montréal as the party’s candidate for the Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough mayor job in the coming municipal election. She previously tried and failed to secure an NDP nomination in the 2015 federal election.
• Michael Kane, the Business News Network anchor who you’ve probably seen in snippets on CTV News, got into some hot water after noting the presence of Muslim women at a Victoria’s Secret store. He tried engaging with his critics at first, saying he was just a reporter, but eventually shut down his Twitter account.
• TSN’s Dave Naylor had to eat crow after publishing a one-source story (from a source he said he trusted) about an injury suffered by Toronto Argonauts quarterback Ricky Ray. He later learned that source was incorrect.
• Fox News can’t seem to get off the sexual harassment train. Eric Bolling is the latest personality to get caught up in it after allegations he sent dick pics to at least two colleagues.
• CBC National Assembly correspondent Ryan Hicks is leaving to go to law school at McGill.
• Alain de Repentigny, arts journalist at La Presse, is retiring.
• Gazette columnist Jack Todd has a new novel coming out.
• Peppermint Patti stopped by the CHOM studio to say hi to her old buddy Terry DiMonte on Wednesday.

Good reads

• The New York Times on how the New York transit authority is trying out being honest with people about the real reason for subway delays (i.e. suicide). It won’t get people to their destination faster, but it will cut down on people whining about delays as if a guy jumping in front of a train is about transit managers’ incompetence.

Jobs

• CEO, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (deadline: Aug. 15)

After a week off that we’ll pretend was planned all along, here’s what the media has been up to since the last time.

News about news

• CBC has announced the new hosts of The National: Adrienne Arsenault, Rosemary Barton, Andrew Chang and Ian Hanomansing. Chang is a former co-anchor of CBC News Montreal. The revamped national newscast begins Nov. 6.
• Wendy Mesley, who was another potential National host, moves to a new Sunday morning week-in-review talk show.
• The Canadian Press news service has joined the National NewsMedia Council, a national press council that replaces regional councils in B.C., Manitoba, Ontario and Atlantic Canada (but not Quebec). It’s the first time CP has joined such a council, and gives it significant standing as a respectable body that people can appeal to when they have issues with coverage. Other members of the NNC include the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Postmedia newspapers, Winnipeg Free Press, Victoria Times Colonist, Maclean’s, Glacier Media, TC Media and Brunswick News, representing most of Canada’s English-language dailies.
• BuzzFeed has a story about two producers at NBC News that have created a huge following for themselves on Twitter, and in the process annoyed some colleagues who say they’re getting all the glory for others’ work.
• The Economist sponsored a poll that shows more than 40% of Republicans in the United States favour allowing the courts to shut down news outlets that publish false or misleading news.
• Le Soleil, Le Devoir and La Presse have won an injunction in court to prevent the political news website La Dose from publishing excerpts of their stories online. The newspapers argued that La Dose is profiting financially from including headlines and lead paragraphs of news stories, even though they link to the original stories on those papers’ websites. Depending how the case goes, it could set a precedent for aggregators. La Dose is appealing the injunction.
• Halifax’s Frank Magazine is in some legal trouble, accused of violating a court publication ban. The magazine denies this is the case.
• The Quebec government has put its foot down on Montreal’s LaSalle borough, saying it cannot prevent people from recording its public council meetings.

At the CRTC

• The commission has published financial summaries for the radio and television sectors for the broadcast year ending Aug. 31, 2016. Info for individual specialty channels will come in August, but among the highlights I can see:
  • Overall, the number of subscribers to pay TV (cable, satellite, IPTV etc.) is dropping by about 1% a year, even as the population increases. It’s a mature industry, and one where cord-cutting is a real problem, but the vast majority of Canadians still pay for CRTC-regulated TV.
  • Average revenue per subscriber per month is down ever so slightly from last year after climbing over the previous four years, possibly due in part to new pick-and-pay rules:
    • 2012: $61.88
    • 2013: $63.63
    • 2014: $65.25
    • 2015: $66.08
    • 2016: $65.44
  • Private commercial over-the-air television lost $121 million last year, and $719 million over five years, though subscription and on-demand TV made $1 billion in profit last year. A separate set of disclosures allows us to break that down per major group (the numbers are a bit misleading — Bell actually showed a slight operating profit before depreciation):
    • Bell (CTV and CTV2): $33M loss
    • Corus (Global): $43M loss
    • Rogers (City and OMNI): $35M loss, of which $24M is from City stations except City Saskatchewan
    • Quebecor (TVA): $0.7M profit
    • Remstar (V): $2M profit
  • Rogers gets $8.9 million a year from distant signal retransmission royalties for City and OMNI.
  • Private commercial radio nationwide made $436 million in profit (a 28% margin)
  • In Montreal, the English and ethnic markets (which the CRTC groups together for these purposes) made money in 2015-16, though for AM stations it was a slight loss.
• Bell is trying again to get the commission to rescind its decision to eliminate simultaneous substitution during the Super Bowl. Its application lays out real-world consequences of the action, that went into effect with the last Super Bowl in February: A 40% audience drop and $11 million in lost revenue compared to the previous year, which means $3.3 million less in funding for Canadian programming. It also argues that the decision goes against the objectives of the Broadcasting Act and even Canada’s trade agreements with the United States. And it confusingly takes the position that Canadians don’t care about U.S. ads even though 40% of Canadians decided to watch them. Finally, it promises to air a program of curated U.S. Super Bowl ads on CTV before the game, and launch a public awareness campaign, if the CRTC agrees to reverse the decision.
• The commission has approved the acquisition of Christian music station CFWC-FM Brantford by Dufferin Communications, a subsidiary of Evanov Radio Group, for $440,000.
• The CRTC has approved two more AM-to-FM conversions for CBC Radio One transmitters: Lebel-sur-Quévillon and Senneterre. The conversions will leave only two AM CBC transmitters in Quebec: CBMD Chapais (a retransmitter of CBVE-FM Quebec) and CBOM Maniwaki (a retransmitter of CBO-FM Ottawa).
• The CRTC is giving CBC another year on its licences, in order to allow a new chair to set a direction for the public broadcaster during that hearing. The current conditions of licence will continue until Aug. 31, 2019.
• The CRTC is giving another two and a half months for people to submit proposals for national ethnic television services to replace OMNI. OMNI is being given three years of mandatory distribution (and subscriber fees of $0.12 per subscriber per month) starting Sept. 1, but if another broadcaster can do better, they can propose to replace OMNI as of 2020. The new deadline for applications is Nov. 6, 2017.
• The St. John’s, N.L. market is not healthy enough to sustain another commercial radio station.
• CFTU (Canal Savoir), which was asked to file a licence renewal application by Aug. 31, has been given an extension until Jan. 31. The licence expires Aug. 31, 2018.
• Licence renewals:
  • CJLL-FM Ottawa (CHIN 97.9): Seven years; reduces third-language programming quota from 92% to 70%, but ethnic programming still has a 94% quota; removes requirement for over-and-above $5,000-a-year Canadian content development contribution
  • CFFR Calgary (660 News): seven years; removes unnecessary licence condition related to oldies music
  • CICW-FM Elora, Ontario: seven years
  • CIDI-FM Lac-Brome, Quebec: seven years
  • CKBN-FM Bécancour, Quebec: seven years
  • CFVD-FM Dégelis, Quebec: seven years

TV

Canadian English TV markets, by size (Nielsen):
1-GTA 7.5M
2-Vcr-Vic 3.5M
3-Kit-Ldn 1.9M
4-Edm 1.8M
5-Cgy 1.7M
6-Ott 1M
7-Wpg 1M
8-Mtl 0.9M

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) August 1, 2017

• Two TV series shot and set in Montreal debuted on Monday: 21 Thunder, a series about a soccer team inspired by the Montreal Impact, on CBC, and the fourth season of cop drama 19-2 (the French original only lasted three seasons) on CTV. Links go to sites to watch the first episode online. The Gazette’s Brendan Kelly writes about 21 Thunder being set in Montreal.
• Global TV has uncancelled Big Brother Canada after a big online campaign, and renewed it for a sixth season.
• Global News is facing the possibility of strikes at several stations as contract negotiations continue with staff.
• NFL Sunday Ticket and NFL RedZone, services that allowed viewers to watch any NFL game instead of just the one for their region, will no longer be available on linear TV in Canada. That’s because a streaming service called DAZN has acquired the exclusive rights for these and won’t be distributing them that way. Instead, you can sign up for their service for $20 a month or $150 a year. Three journalists are out, and a fourth employee has been given other work in the company.
• Rogers has announced the news teams for CityNews in Winnipeg and Edmonton, which both start Sept. 4, drawing heavily on local talent in both markets. CityNews will run without anchors in these cities and in those launching next year: Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal.
  • Winnipeg: Lisa Charleyboy Stefanie Lasuik Erica Natividad Mark Neufeld Courtney Rutherford Sarolta Saskiw
  • Edmonton: Randi-Marie Adams Rachelle Elsiufi Haweya Fadal Carly Robinson Hayley Stelmack Courtney Theriault
• Z télé is starting a new series called Comédie sur mesure where a series of comedians go to small towns and perform custom standup performances. Which sounds a lot like CBC’s Still Standing. That’s because the concept is based on a Danish series. The two Canadian versions are being produced by different production companies.
• CBC and Netflix have renewed Anne, the latest Anne of Green Gables series, for a second season.
• NBC has announced its national broadcast schedule for NHL games in 2017-18. They include nine regular-season games that will air on the main network (Toronto’s outdoor game in Washington is the only one involving a Canadian team), and 93 on NBC Sports Network, of which eight involve Montreal.
• Telus, which has purposefully stayed out of the content business as its competitors bulk up on media, has launched its first scripted comedy series, called Android Employed. The four-episode series can be watched online or through Telus’s on demand system.
• Love Nature has launched in 4K in Canada, with Videotron as the first distributor.
• Bloomberg Businessweek devotes a story to the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a company in the U.S. that owns dozens of TV stations and is in the process of acquiring another similar company, which owns among other things Chicago’s WGN. The issue is that Sinclair is using its stations to push a conservative agenda, issuing “must-run” political opinion pieces and showing a disregard for the line between news and advertising.
• Discovery Communications has agreed to buy Scripps Networks for $14.6 billion. Discovery, which owns the U.S. versions of Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet and OWN, would buy the owner of Food, HGTV, DIY Network and Cooking Channel. It wouldn’t affect much in Canada, except that shows might promote each others’ networks. Discovery, Animal Planet and related channels in Canada are owned by Bell, while Canadian versions of Food, HGTV, DIY, Cooking and OWN are owned by Corus.
• Quebec production companies DATSIT and Sphère Média Plus are merging to form a new company called Trending Entertainment.
• The Wall Street Journal reports on the TV carriage dispute that has left many Los Angeles Dodgers fans without the ability to watch their team’s games. Despite the length of the dispute, the team seems to be doing okay.
• The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has issued a ruling against HopeTV (CIIT-DT Winnipeg) after the station aired a sermon last September that, in the context of discussing transgender bathroom access, said things like this:
  • “Because some of you congressmen are faggots yourself!  [crowd applauds]  Talk to me!  You move quick.  What it look like?  A  man dressed like a woman.  Trying to share a toilet! Next to your daughter! And his genitalia is not the same! Thus opening the doors to rape!  Yes, it is! You congressmen, you congressmen, and preachers that are endorsing.  You are pedophiles!”
  • “You men.  You boys.  Who say ‘I’m a girl inside’.  That’s Satan inside of you!”
  • “God is designing for straightness.”

Radio

Still unpacking. Found at the bottom of a box. Next to a rotary phone. pic.twitter.com/4aoqtHott5

— Mitch Melnick (@HunterZThompson) July 27, 2017

• Some Bell Media Radio stations have been made available again on the TuneIn app, including CJAD, TSN 690 and CHOM. My random selection of various Bell Media stations suggests that the only ones that are still unavailable are the Virgin Radio stations. It’s still unclear what the issue it. Bell had earlier said that it didn’t ask TuneIn to pull the stations from its app.
• Sportsnet 650 Vancouver has announced more hirings: Scott Rintoul and Andrew Walker host the drive show. The station, which has acquired Vancouver Canucks broadcast rights, launches Sept. 4.

Print

• The Guardian has put out its financial results, which show 400,000 paying subscribers. But the company is still losing money, and wants to reduce its expenses by 20%.
• Newspaper companies have threatened legal action against LexisNexis because of the way its media monitoring service works. They say LexisNexis’s activities are beyond the scope of their copyright licence, and they want to see more money from them.
• Star Touch is done. The last issue went out July 31, with a thank-you note from the publisher.
• Some journalists in Toronto are planning a print-only community newspaper, to launch this fall and publish 10 issues a year.
• Steve Jobs’s widow is acquiring a majority stake in The Atlantic.
• The National Post and Calgary Herald are no longer available in print in Saskatchewan.
• Postmedia has sold its Islington printing plant in Toronto for $30.5 million, and will lease part of it back for up to 10 years.
• The Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language newspaper, is shutting down next month, less than a year after switching from daily to weekly publication.

Online

• Patreon’s CEO has come out and explained why the crowdfunding site terminated the page of Lauren Southern, a former contributor to Ezra Levant’s The Rebel and a right-wing activist. Canadaland spoke to him to answer some questions, and if you really want an interesting discussion on content policy, you can sit through this hour-long interview with Dave Rubin.
• Snopes.com, the fact-checking and rumour-debunking website, is in crisis, the result of a messy divorce of its founders and a fight for control.
• YouTube has launched a CanCon channel called YouTube Spotlight Canada, devoted to exposing Canadian YouTube artists to a wider audience. The channel has a bunch of CBC videos, Heritage Minutes, Canada 150 stuff, and music from Canadian artists, including a special spotlight on Indigenous ones.
• Facebook is tweaking how its related articles feature works, in an effort to improve how it deals with fake news.
• TC Media has closed an office that provided content to its newspapers’ websites. As it undergoes a sale process, it has determined that the office is no longer needed.
• A blog post from CBC’s digital department on how it built its new website.
• In this totally unbiased news story, the company behind InHalton.com notes that the Toronto Star complained that its website is confusingly similar to Torstar’s Inside Halton website, and demanding it change its name. InHalton is from the same people that created InSauga and InBrampton, so the confusion was certainly not intentional. But you can kind of see Inside Halton’s point.
• The Women’s Tennis Association has launched WTA TV, a subscription streaming service of WTA events. Cost is $100 a year or $13 a month, it’s available everywhere except China, and it doesn’t cover all events (the major tournaments, or some events like the Quebec City one where there are rights issues).
• An Ontario woman has won damages from a company under anti-SLAPP rules after it sued her for comments she made on a local Facebook group about how the company’s actions could have potential toxic environmental consequences.
• A Montreal software developer of apps for TV streaming devices went through a long interrogation at his home by lawyers for major TV providers who are suing Android-based TV boxes for copyright infringement. A judge ruled the interrogation went on too long and elements of it were unlawful. His site was shut down, forcing him to create a new one. The key issue in the case is whether the apps are merely search engines for content, or whether they directly contribute to piracy.
• Adobe is slowly retiring Flash. That’s good news technologically, but it also causes problems for archival purposes. What do we do with all the content that was created using Flash?

Other

• Former wrestler Billy Two Rivers is suing Van Morrison for using a photo of him without his permission on a new album cover.
• Apple is no longer selling the iPod Nano or iPod Shuffle, the last of the standalone music players.
• CBC has finalized the sale of the Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal for $42 million, as well as the building of a new broadcasting centre on another part of the lot, to open in 2020.
• Quebecor has finalized the sale of its wireless licences outside Quebec to Shaw for $430 million.

News about people

• Shannon Brooksbank, aka Brooksy, has left Montreal’s Virgin Radio for Kiss 92.5 in Toronto, a Rogers station. They interviewed her and got her to (reluctantly) pledge allegiance to the Leafs.
• Caroline Locher, who is leaving her position as general manager of the FPJQ, has been hired as secretary-general of the Quebec Press Council.
• TSN 690’s Tony Marinaro went on vacation, and showed off his dance moves on Live with Kelly and Ryan.
• Brian Wilde has put up a first video for his new website Recrutes. He also has a free Call of the Wilde piece up on the site, which is beginning to take subscriptions.
• More cuts in management at Postmedia: Calgary Sun/Herald editor-in-chief Jose Rodriguez and Bev Wake, senior executive producer for sports
• New hires at The Walrus: Hamutal Dotan as senior editor, Lauren McKeon as digital editor, and Judy Ziyi Gu as digital manager.
• David Perlman is retiring as science editor at the San Francisco Chronicle at the young age of 98.
• Sunny Freeman has been named business editor at The Canadian Press.
• Alexandra Posadski joined the Globe and Mail as a business reporter from CP.
• Chris Hanna, formerly of the Toronto Star (and a former Montreal Gazette intern), has been hired on the web desk at the National Post.
• Justin McElroy is the new municipal politics reporter for CBC Vancouver.
• Katie Couric is ending her interview show for Yahoo but will remain involved with the company on a project-by-project basis.

Good reads

• Simon Houpt at the Globe and Mail on how Guelph is doing without a daily newspaper after the Mercury shut down.
• Herb Zurkowsky at the Montreal Gazette talks to Henry Burris about his new career as co-host of CTV Morning Live in Ottawa.
• La Presse on the state of anglophone standup comedy in Montreal. The money is really bad, which kind of makes me feel even more guilty for all the shows I’m squeezing out of a $100 pass at Just for Laughs.
• Data crunching shows how deaths are treated differently in the news media depending on where in the world they happen.
• CBC has a 5,000-word story on Ken Pagan, the former Postmedia employee who threw a beer can during a Blue Jays game last fall. While it goes into lots of detail about what a not-awful person he is, it doesn’t answer the big questions: He says he doesn’t know why he threw the can, and he can’t say why he no longer works for Postmedia.
• Bill Brownstein talks to Mike Paterson, the comedian who was busy performing on a small free outdoor stage during the Just For Laughs festival, and is trying to make a career as an anglo comic in Montreal.
• New York Magazine on Zoë Quinn, the game developer who was the first target of the GamerGate ridiculousness.
• Vanity Fair on the New York Times vs. Washington Post newspaper war.
• The Columbia Journalism Review talks to the people who have held the post of public editor at the New York Times.
• Bloomberg on the failed leveraged buyout of Bell Canada 10 years ago.
• Awful Announcing on whether play-by-play announcers should mention when a game is on its way to becoming a no-hitter. Broadcasters are split on the issue, but seem to favour letting the viewers and listeners know.

Jobs

• Night editor, Globe and Mail (deadline: Aug. 4)
• National Assembly reporter, CBC (deadline: Aug. 4)
• CEO, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (deadline: Aug. 15)

News about news

• Newsday can no longer vouch for a reporter’s reporting after realizing that more than 100 sources he quoted can’t be found to confirm they exist. Newsday isn’t saying they’re fictitious, but it looks really bad for the journalist.
• Just a reminder that the White House is still no longer conducting on-camera press briefings (autoplay video warning).

At the CRTC

• The federal government has finally announced who will be the new chairperson of the commission, as well as the new vice-chair for broadcasting, a seat vacant since 2015. (There are still vacancies at the commission, notably the Ontario seat that’s still being contested by Raj Shoan):
  • Chair: Ian Scott, a former executive at Telesat Canada and Telus and a former CRTC staff member (starts Sept. 5, five-year term)
  • Vice-chair broadcasting: Caroline Simard, a lawyer for the Canadian government and formerly of the International Telecommunication Union (starts Sept. 11, five-year term)
  • Vice-chair telecom (interim): Christianne Laizner, a lawyer in the CRTC’s legal department
• The commission was embarrassed a bit when a decision related to production funds had incorrect dates on it. In the English version of the decision, the date was July 17, 2017 in the introduction and July 17, 2019 in the body. Turns out both were wrong, and it’s actually July 17, 2018. The decision was edited to correct the errors without issuing any correction notice.
• The CRTC has approved the acquisition of Tillsonburg Broadcasting Company, and its two FM stations in the Ontario town, by Rogers, for about $4 million.

TV

Meet the Thirteenth Doctor #DoctorWho #Doctor13 pic.twitter.com/txHGz9tJEe

— Doctor Who (@bbcdoctorwho) July 16, 2017

• The new Doctor is a lady. British tabloids celebrated by reminding everyone she once showed her boobs to a camera.
• Primetime Emmy Award nominations were announced. The full list is here. There were a few Canadian connections, including Samantha Bee, The Handmaid’s Tale and director Jean-Marc Vallée.
• CBC will be showing Canadian movies on Saturday nights until the end of September, and each one will be preceded by a half-hour show interviewing the filmmakers.
• CBC has extended its rights deal with the Calgary Stampede for two more years.

Radio

• Bell Media radio stations have become unavailable in the popular streaming app TuneIn, with app users on mobile getting messages that the stations are no longer available. Bell Media tells me “the removal of Bell Media Radio stations from the TuneIn app was not initiated by Bell Media,” so it’s unclear why this happened. TuneIn is the leading app for radio station streaming, but Bell has its own iHeartRadio app. Just about every other Canadian radio station owner joined forces to launch RadioPlayer.
• La Presse talks to radio hosts who do summer replacement shows, a thing that’s much more prevalent in Quebec than in English Canada (which just has vacation replacements).
• Ted Bird has launched a YouTube channel for his Revisionist History segments, illustrated. The first episode goes up Thursday.
• An 11th-hour (actually 12th-hour) deal has averted a strike at NPR.

Music

• Universal Music Canada shot itself in the foot by releasing a best-of-Canadian-music compilation for Canada 150 that didn’t include a single French song.
• The Polaris Music Prize short list has been announced. And once again not a single francophone album is on it.

Print

the people who'll miss #startouch are meeting in the App Store reviews for its replacement pic.twitter.com/mhQmzSYCUd

— 12:36 ? (@1236) July 18, 2017

• The Toronto Star’s new app was published this week, and former Star Touch users who downloaded it were not impressed, putting out negative reviews on the App Store. Most of those reviews related to the crosswords, Sudoku and other puzzles, which once again reminds journalists what readers really care about.
• The Montreal Gazette has yet another new editorial cartoonist, Oleg Dergachov, as Aislin prepares to cut his schedule down to one cartoon a week next year. The paper is also moving Celine Cooper’s column from Mondays to Tuesdays.
• The Nova Scotia government has launched an industrial commission to try to break the logjam at the Halifax Chronicle Herald, whose workers have been on strike for a year and a half now.
• The Chicago Sun-Times has been bought by local investors, preventing a purchase from its direct competitor Chicago Tribune.
• Sports Illustrated is considering publishing fewer print issues.

Online

1/2 Avec la station Acadie branchée, le réseau mobile est accessible dans 50 % du métro de #Montréal ? https://t.co/04VhCujU8S #stm #techno pic.twitter.com/FfdIOewttr

— STM (@stm_nouvelles) July 13, 2017

• Montreal’s metro system now has mobile connectivity in exactly half its stations. The eastern side of the orange line will be a focus for the latter half of 2017.
• NBC News has launched Snapchat’s first daily news show, Stay Tuned.

News about people

• The Westmount Independent talked to Beryl Wajsman, who told them that he has no plans to step down as editor of The Suburban even if he becomes mayor of Westmount, despite the very obvious conflict of interest.
• Host Rick Campanelli is leaving Global’s ET Canada after this summer. Also leaving the show is Montreal’s Natasha Gargiulo and west coast reporter Erin Cebula.
• Mike Cohen talks to Cora MacDonald, who got the City Montreal news reporter job and starts next month, even though the daily newscast won’t start until 2018.
• BuzzFeed writer Scaachi Koul has a TV deal out of her book.
• Forgot to add this last week: Radio host Mario F. Paquet has retired from Radio-Canada.
• Andree Lau is the new editor-in-chief of HuffPost Canada.

Good reads

• The Washington Post on a news desert, East Palo Alto, Calif., and how the lack of local media is causing issues to go underreported.
• Ryerson’s journalism school looks at the problem of small local newspapers being bought up by larger companies and the loss of local reporting that results.

Jobs

• Atlantic reporter, Globe and Mail (deadline: July 19)
• General manager, FPJQ (deadline: July 20)
• On-Air Host, CHOM 97.7 (deadline: July 28)
• CEO, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (deadline: Aug. 15)

News about news

https://twitter.com/_JamieMac_/status/885189154128224257

• Be careful about your questions, journalists.
• A high school newspaper spotted a cellphone number for the U.S. secretary of defence on a piece of paper photographed by the Washington Post and used it to conduct an interview with the guy.

At the CRTC

• A new affidavit from Raj Shoan appealing (again) his firing as commissioner has been published. The most interesting revelation (at least to me) in the document is that the Shoan case was brought up with Mélanie Joly’s predecessor, Shelly Glover, who eventually decided not to take any action against Shoan.
• Former CRTC commissioner Michel Morin has gotten an opinion piece published in several outlets (Montreal Gazette, Journal de Montréal, Le Droit, Huffpost, Huffpost Québec, Cartt.ca) complaining about the lack of leadership at the commission. Some of his points are questionable, such as the idea that other countries don’t have interim leaders at such commissions, or the idea that ADR TV has solved the problem of wireless emergency alerting in Quebec.
• Another round of radio station licence renewals, this time for Rogers stations in Ontario and Alberta.
• Ethnic station CKIN-FM 106.3 Montreal has had its licence renewed for a full seven years, despite a (dismissed) complaint last year about its shift toward mainly Arabic programming and a short-term licence renewal back in 2013.
• CJRS 1650 Montreal has also gotten a full seven-year licence renewal, despite the strange situation where the station (formerly known as Radio Shalom) has outsourced all its programming to a third party.
• A month and a half after it was approved, I asked the CRTC if it was going to publish the application by Rogers to buy CISL 650 AM Vancouver from Newcap, which it’s turning into a Sportsnet radio station. The commission finally posted the application, which shows a purchase price of $5.25 million for the station (for context, Newcap bought CISL and two FM stations in each of Vancouver and Toronto out of the Bell/Astral deal for $112 million in 2014, so CISL is well undervalued compared to its FM sisters). Rogers is also assuming $750,000 in “assumed liabilities”, the nature of which is redacted from the public documents but appears to be a lease of some sort.

TV

• The final eight-episode season of Montreal-based cop drama 19-2 is being upgraded from Bravo to CTV, where it will air Mondays starting July 31. Each episode will be available on Crave TV the day before broadcast.
• The Eastern Door talks to some of the cast of Mohawk Girls about shooting the series while being, in some cases, visitors to Kahnawake, and in other cases, pregnant or nursing.
• Cogeco has bought yet another U.S. cable provider, MetroCast, for $1.4 billion U.S. The acquisition comes with some financial assistance from the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, which takes a 21% ownership stake in Cogeco’s U.S. operations.
• CTV Toronto has begun rebroadcasting CP24 from 5-6pm weekdays. It’s unclear if this is just for the summer or if it will continue as other stations launch 5pm local news.
• The Daily Show has a new correspondent, Michael Kosta, who takes over from the departing Jordan Klepper.

Radio

• Newcap Radio has rebranded nine stations in small-town Alberta, eight of them to the Boom FM brand. Boom FM is a strange network in that it has stations from three ownership groups, Bell, Corus and Newcap.
• The transmitter of CIFM-FM in Ashcroft, B.C., burned to the ground in a wildfire.

Online

• Sans Filtre, a Quebec version of The Players’ Tribune, is getting republished in La Presse+ biweekly, starting with a piece by David Desharnais.
• The Daily Mail is being sued for copyright infringement over its continued use of viral videos. The suit is actually from a former supplier of such videos, whose contract the Mail terminated.

News about people

"Oops I did it again!" – @joannevrakas announces she's pregnant live on BT pic.twitter.com/1iJhK7yPA5

— CityNews Montreal (@CityNewsMTL) July 7, 2017

• Joanne Vrakas is pregnant with her second child. That means a new mat leave replacement will be needed (Laura Casella filled in last time, but she hosts Global’s morning show now, so that’s not an option.) Tina Tenneriello, formerly of CJAD and MAtv, is filling in for Vrakas on vacation, which would make her a top candidate for the more long-term replacement.
• Meanwhile, Cora MacDonald, formerly of CJAD, has been hired as one of City’s news reporters in Montreal, as it prepares for new CRTC obligations coming into effect Sept. 1 and a new local evening newscast some time in 2018.
• La Presse welcomed its four “diversity” interns this week.
• La Presse’s Jean-François Codère is switching beats after a while on the tech beat. He’s moving to transportation after a few weeks in sports.
• Dan Barnes of the Edmonton Journal will cover amateur sports for Postmedia. He replaces the Calgary Herald’s Vicki Hall, who left the company last month.

Jobs

• Videojournalist, CityNews Montreal
• Associate Producer, VICE du jour in Montreal
• Business reporter, Canadian Press in Toronto (deadline: July 17)
• Atlantic reporter, Globe and Mail (deadline: July 19)
• General manager, FPJQ (deadline: July 20)
• On-Air Host, CHOM 97.7 (deadline: July 28)
• CEO, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (deadline: Aug. 15)