(Late this week because I survived the Great Steve Faguy Man Cold of 2017)

News about news

There was a Class A shitstorm in Quebec media this week about a piece by Andrew Potter (former Ottawa Citizen editor and current McGill professor) tying the clustertruck on Highway 13 during last week’s snowstorm to some greater social malaise in Quebec. It includes statistics suggesting Quebecers are more socially distant than the rest of Canada, but also had some head-scratching generalizations about restaurants offering two bills and bank machines dispensing $50 bills.

Reaction was swift, with columnists (almost all from francophone Quebec-based media) piling on to condemn it: Jérémie Bédard-Wien, Denise Bombardier, Dan Delmar, Bernard Drainville, Sophie Durocher, Sophie Durocher again, Joseph Facal, Patrick Lagacé, Patrick Lagacé in English, Josée Legault, Mylène Moisan, Michèle Ouimet, Nathalie Petrowski and Lise Ravary.

Le Soleil even did a fact-check, as did La Presse’s science blog, and even Maclean’s, all finding that Potter’s statistics about Quebec society were accurate, though his conclusion of a “pathological” problem was exaggerated (they say nothing about the anecdotal stuff like restaurant bills).

Potter finally apologized and distanced himself from his own story (earning at least some praise for that rare move). That wasn’t enough, though. McGill, after publicly throwing him under the bus, “accepted his resignation” from his job as head of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (a Maclean’s story says the resignation was not voluntary, citing anonymous sources who also say “numerous high-profile figures have contacted McGill since Monday to express their personal displeasure with the column”, which prompted figures as high as the prime minister’s office to deny involvement). McGill says academic freedom is not at stake, which convinced precisely no one.

The response prompted another wave of hot takes, this time mainly from anglo media (Paul Adams, Frédéric Bérard, Ann Brocklehurst, Michael Byers, Lucinda Chodan, Colby Cosh, Andrew Coyne, Raymond J. de Souza, Michael Friscolanti, Lysiane Gagnon, Matt Gurney, Allison Hanes, Trevor Hanna, Michael Harris, Joseph Heath, Chantal Hébert, Barbara Kay, Jonathan Kay, Philippe Labrecque, Josée Legault again, Peter Loewen, Emmett Macfarlane, Don Macpherson, Candice Malcolm, Éric Montpetit, Brian Myles, Joseph Quesnel, Aaron Rand, Chris Selley, Michel Seymour, Evan Solomon, Michael Taube, William Watson, Daniel Weinstock, Ira Wells, Margaret Wente, Suzanne Wexler, Peter Wheeland, Barry Wilson, three professors in Maclean’s, a discussion on CBC’s The Current, podcasts at Canadaland and Ricochet, and editorials from the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Maclean’s and Winnipeg Free Press, plus an untold number of letters to the editor and discussions on social media). The hot takes get even hotter, comparing this scandal to everything from a corrupt third-world government to the Rwandan genocide. And that awful episode of Canadaland was rightfully blasted by its own supporters on Facebook.

• Nominations for the National Newspaper Awards and Canadian Association of Journalists awards were announced this week. The Montreal Gazette is nominated for one NNA, for a photo by Dario Ayala, who has since been laid off by the paper. This isn’t the first time this has happened — Viktor Pivovarov, of the Moncton Times & Transcript won a National Newspaper Award for a photo of Moncton shooter Justin Bourque, but was laid off by the newspaper along with the rest of the photographers.
• Vice Canada journalist Ben Makuch has lost an appeal of an order to turn information about a source over to police. The judge found that the balance of needs favoured allowing police to compel him to turn over records of communications between him and accused terrorist Farah Shirdon.
• A man has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon: a GIF. The GIF was a strobe animation intentionally sent to Washington Post journalist Kurt Eichenwald to trigger a seizure, which it did. The accused is apologetic, as most trolls become when they realize there are real-world consequences to their actions.
• Facing criticism about a recent report about the chicken content in Subway chicken, including a big lawsuit from the chain, CBC’s Marketplace has published its entire correspondence with them.
• Meanwhile, another Marketplace story, this one involving people selling white power T-shirts in front of hidden cameras to test people’s reactions, was the subject of a report from the ombudsman, who found the stunt was “not journalistically justified”.
• The Quebec Press Council has released its latest round of decisions. Two involve Richard Martineau, and he went 1-1.
• The FPJQ is proposing a new international journalism fund, to finance staff and freelance journalists working around the world contributing to Quebec media.

TV

Lori Graham on the CTV float

• CTV Montreal won best media entry at last weekend’s St. Patrick’s Parade. Probably on the strength of the very energetic pronouncements from float announcers Lori Graham and Mose Persico.
• Bell and Rogers are requiring business TV customers with liquor licences (i.e. bars) to pay extra to get sports channels as part of their packages. And most bars, who rely on live sports events to draw crowds, will pay up.
• HGTV Canada is launching two new Canadian home improvement series
• W Network is bringing back Hockey Wives, and Maripier Morin is still one of them (even though technically she’s not yet married to Brandon Prust)
• Canadians who watched Last Week Tonight videos on YouTube aren’t getting that luxury anymore, it seems. Clip videos posted as of March 1 are now restricted in Canada. To watch it legally online, they’ll need to use the official TMN GO app.
• The Leafs are getting good enough that Sportsnet is bragging about their ratings again.
• Videotron finally added MLB Network to its lineup, Channel 791 with a free preview until May 2. FXX and Sky News are also coming, according to illicotech.com.
• Saturday Night Live is going to be live on the west coast starting April 15. NBC has come to realize that a three-hour tape delay cuts the west out of the social media chatter, so might as well have them watch it at 8:30 with the rest of us.

Radio

• Mario Girard analyzes Alain Gravel’s morning show on Radio-Canada.
• Toronto Sports Media criticizes Sportsnet’s The Fan 590 for having no female on-air personalities.

Print

• Le Devoir and Le Soleil have stories about the Globe and Mail moving out of the Quebec press gallery, three years after its last Quebec City reporter, Rhéal Séguin, retired.
• The Montreal Gazette has dropped its weekly visual arts column by freelancer John Pohl.
• La Presse finally took down the old logo off the side of its building.
• Applications are open for the FPJQ’s student newspaper of the year award. Any student paper in Quebec is eligible (in French or English or both).
• Vancouver Sun and Province journalists got care packages of alcohol and donuts from fellow Vancouver-area journalists as they prepared to find out who among them is being laid off.
• The finalists for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing have been announced. They include Christie Blatchford and Noah Richler.

Online

• YouTube had to extricate itself from some hot water after its “Restricted Mode” meant to keep children safe from more adult videos started blocking access to any video with an LGBTQ theme. It learned you don’t want to piss off Tegan and Sara.
• Sellers of “Free TV” Android devices lost an appeal to overturn an injunction against them by major TV distributors who argue the devices de facto promote piracy of TV content.

News about people

• Bernard St-Laurent, CBC’s former Quebec political columnist who retired two years ago, is back.
• Robert Dépatie, the former CEO of Quebecor, is going to be a board member at Rogers Communications
• Philippe Orfali, journalist with Le Devoir, is joining the business team at the Journal de Montréal
• Michel Viens is retiring from Radio-Canada this summer
• Lawrence Martin of the Globe and Mail is starting a new assignment in Washington
• Mia Rabson is leaving the Winnipeg Free Press to join The Canadian Press in Ottawa
• Peter O’Neil, former Vancouver Sun parliamentary reporter, is joining the government
• CTV’s Kelsey McEwen is pregnant
• FM93’s Éric Duhaime is gay

Good reads

• Paul Adams at iPolitics on how regional newspapers need reporters at Parliament Hill
• Vice News on right-wing pundit Lauren Southern
• The New Yorker on what’s happening in the White House press corps

Obituaries

• Denis McGrath, Canadian television writer (and vocal Twitter critic of the CRTC and other bodies affecting Canadian television). Tributes from Bill Brioux and Diane Wild, plus many others on social media.
• Normand Grenier, founder of Grenier aux Nouvelles
• Richard Gosselin, Voix de l’Est journalist
• Laurent Laplante, essayist and former editorialist at Le Devoir and other papers — he wrote about his experience getting medical aid to die posthumously in Le Devoir
• Bob Robertson, comedian and co-host of Double Exposure
• Betty Kennedy, journalist, broadcaster and Front Page Challenge panelist
• Richard Wagamese, Canadian author
• Chuck Barris, creator of The Newlywed Game and other game shows
• Jimmy Breslin, New York City columnist (also from the New York Times)
• Bill Walsh, copy editor and author of the blog The Slot (tribute from the Baltimore Sun)

Jobs

• Tenure track professor in data journalism at Concordia University (deadline: March 24)
• Videojournalist, CBC Saskatoon (deadline: March 27)
• Business reporter, Montreal Gazette (deadline: March 27)
• Head of special publications, Le Devoir (deadline: March 31)
• Assistant general manager, FPJQ (deadline: April 2)
• Two reporters for Report on Business (Globe and Mail)
• Journalists, Journal de Montréal (deadline: May 2)

Upcoming events

• March 24-26: Radio-Canada hackathon
• May 20: Canadaland in Montreal

News about news

• RTDNA Canada has published the nominees for its regional awards. CBC Montreal and CBC Quebec laud their 27 nominations for television, radio and digital, which reflects more the surprisingly high number of categories than the work of the public broadcaster in this province.
• J-Source has updated a story from a couple of years ago about diversity among columnists across the country. Unfortunately the response rate was low, so it’s hard to make conclusions, but the data it does show isn’t very promising.
• La Presse published a story noting it lost a Quebec Press Council decision over a story that failed to get reaction from both sides.
• CBC’s ombudsman has a report about journalist Jacques Poitras using two Twitter accounts — one associated with CBC, the other to promote his book. The report mostly defends Poitras, but points out the dangers of wearing two hats online.
• The Courrier du Sud, a Transcontinental newspaper, yanked a caricature of Philippe Couillard after the premier’s office complained about it. Reaction to this story is that while the caricature may be crude, the premier’s office overstepped and it is well within the bounds of fair comment. (Couillard denies asking for the cartoon to be yanked.)

At the CRTC

• Newcap has asked the CRTC to drop its 15% special-interest music requirement for CHLG-FM 104.3 in Vancouver (one of the stations Bell got rid of after it bought Astral). It says the station lost $10 million in seven years.
• CBC has applied to replace low-power AM transmitters with low-power FM transmitters in Lebel-sur-Quévillon and Senneterre.

TV

• The Canadian Screen Awards were Sunday. If you don’t want to watch the nearly three-hour show, CBC has some highlights, mainly from the acceptance speeches that celebrated diversity in the screen. Or if you want to read someone shit all over another culture by celebrating his ignorance of it, you can read Marc Cassivi.
• TVA Sports will be broadcasting the FIS cross-country skiing World Cup event this weekend, after broadcasters were criticized for not showing winter sports on TV live or even at all. (Broadcasters argued the rights were too expensive.) The fact that this event is in Quebec City certainly helps.
• Skiers weren’t the only ones complaining about lack of TV coverage. Caroline Ouellette of Les Canadiennes complained that the team’s recent Clarkson Cup win wasn’t broadcast on television in French (even though most of the team’s players are francophones from Quebec). Producing a live hockey broadcast is expensive, but Sportsnet was already doing it in English, so why not add a couple of franco play-by-play guys?
• Saturday Night Live is planning four half-hour Weekend Update episodes this summer.
• A popular Korean TV series is prompting a lot of Korean tourists to visit the Quebec City locations featured in it.
• Work on the new Maison Radio-Canada is going to cause noise that will force TV series being produced out of the old building’s basement to move.
• For the first time in more than 20 years, a woman will be on the play-by-play team during March Madness.

Radio

• Sportsnet has stolen the radio broadcast rights for Vancouver Canucks games from Bell Media for five years beginning next season. Rogers says it hasn’t decided which station will air the games. It owns one AM station, News 1130, and two FM stations, Kiss 104.9 and Jack 96.9, in the market. So 1130 would be the obvious bet, but another possibility would be starting up a new AM radio station in the market. Or maybe Bell would be willing to part with one of its two Vancouver TSN stations, since there will now be fewer scheduling conflicts. If it does end up on 1130, it could rebrand as Canada’s third Sportsnet radio station, or just do like 98.5 does in Montreal and stay news-talk during the day and sports at night. Or maybe they put the games on FM. There are many possibilities here.

Print

Le Globe and Mail ferme officiellement son bureau de l'Assemblée nationale, qui était vacant depuis la retraite de Rhéal Séguin pic.twitter.com/SeuagQX5gQ

— Charles Lecavalier (@Lecavalier_C) March 14, 2017

• The Globe and Mail has cleaned out its office at the Quebec press gallery, since the newspaper no longer has a reporter based in Quebec City.
• The cuts continue at Postmedia (my employer). That across-the-board 20 per cent job cut is has filtered down to the layoff stage in Vancouver, where 54 layoff notices have been issued, mostly in editorial. (The union has vowed to fight.) Meanwhile, non-unionized employees are seeing major cuts to their benefits, from vacation time to pensions to mental health assistance.

News about people

J'ai le plaisir d'annoncer que je suis la nouvelle correspondante parlementaire de La Presse Canadienne à Québec!

— Caroline Plante (@cplantepresse) March 13, 2017

• Caroline Plante was quickly picked up after being laid off at the Gazette: She’s now a reporter for Presse Canadienne. (And yes, she knows she has to change her Twitter handle)
• Rachelle MacDuff is the new editor in chief of Métro in Montreal
• Adrian Lee is the new opinions editor for Maclean’s.
• Several beat changes at the Globe and Mail: Dakshana Bascaramurty? becomes the paper’s first ever race beat reporter; Justin Giovanetti leaves Edmonton to become the Ontario provincial government reporter; and Janet McFarland moves to the real estate beat.
• Marie-Christine Trottier has left Montreal municipal politics to join the Quebec City parliamentary bureau for the Journal de Montréal/Québec.

Good reads

We’ll pay you in visibility, said the person in the equation who needs visibility.

— Tamy Emma Pepin (@TamyEmmaPepin) March 13, 2017

• Beisan Zubi on why she just endured sexual harassment on Parliament Hill rather than report it
• The Globe and Mail on a copyright imbroglio at Concordia University (and Michael Geist’s response)
• Atkinson Fellow Catherine Wallace on the idea of museums as newsrooms (yeah, make your own jokes)
• The Toronto Star on sports TV people doing podcasts
• La Presse visits a fake news factory in Georgia (the state, not the country)

Jobs

• Copy editor, Les Affaires (deadline: March 16)
• Videojournalist, CTV Winnipeg (deadline: March 16)
• Journalist (contract), Le Devoir (deadline: March 17)
• Deputy executive producer, Montreal Gazette (deadline: March 20)
• Design editor, Globe and Mail (deadline: March 20)
• Tenure track professor in data journalism at Concordia University (deadline: March 24)
• Videojournalist, CBC Saskatoon (deadline: March 27)
• Assistant general manager, FPJQ (deadline: April 2)
• Journalists, Journal de Montréal (deadline: May 2)
• Mandarin-speaking reporter in Vancouver, Globe and Mail
• Reporter, Metro Ottawa

Upcoming events

• March 24-26: Radio-Canada hackathon
• May 20: Canadaland in Montreal

News about news

• A Canadian Journalism Foundation talk about the changing face of media, and how newsrooms are failing at diversity.
• Hamilton City Council continues to have issues with Joey Coleman, who has this weird thing about public meetings being accessible to the public.
• La Presse has a story talking to three women who cover sports. I find it interesting that two of them are anglophones — Amanda Stein and Jessica Rusnak. Because besides Chantal Machabée, how many can you name on the francophone side? Also covered: The nasty comments they get on social media, and the double standards they face in the dressing room (not by the players) and the differences in attitudes among anglophones and francophones.
• The Washington Post also talks to its female sports reporters covering the four major sports teams.
• Similarly, there is another report from La Presse on the hate women get on social media, which includes this very depressing column from Michèle Ouimet.

At the CRTC

• The four open CRTC commissioner positions, including chairperson, were supposed to have application deadlines on Monday, but they’ve been extended, again, until March 15.
• The commission has split the difference in resolving a carriage dispute between Bell TV and MusiquePlus/Musimax. MP/MM complained because Bell was taking the channels out of the first-tier “Good” package in Quebec and leaving them only in the highest-tier “Best” package. And for older subscribers still on theme packs, it would be removed from popular packages there too. The commission rejected Bell’s argument that a channel is considered available in a package even if to take that package a user has to switch packaging systems (and ditch their grandfathered rights). But for the three-tier system, is only requires that Musimax (now just Max) be in the middle-tier “Better” package, and Bell can go ahead and limit MusiquePlus to just the “Best” package.
• CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais wrote a letter in which he bizarrely says there’s no proof that a 40% drop in viewership of the Super Bowl in English Canada is because Canadians watched it on Fox. I get that you can’t know exactly how much of that drop is due to the CRTC’s simultaneous substitution decision, but to say there’s no direct link between the two is ludicrous.

TV

• The Canadian Screen Awards for non-fiction programming were handed out Tuesday night, in advance of the big gala Sunday night on CBC. The list of Tuesday’s nominees and winners — a total of 48 — is here. Winners by broadcaster:
  • CBC: 18
    • CBC TV: 16
    • Documentary Channel: 2
  • Bell Media: 18
    • CTV: 10
    • TSN: 4
    • HBO Canada: 3
    • Discovery Channel: 1
  • Corus: 7
    • Global: 3
    • History Television: 3
    • Food Network: 1
  • Rogers: 2
    • Sportsnet: 2
  • TVO: 3
• AMItv is producing a home improvement show for accessible living, out of Nova Scotia. It expects to air this summer.
• Some statistics showing that the decline in viewing of traditional television is slowing, for those who want to look on the bright side.
• Radio-Canada’s ombudsman criticized RDI for too often running video of people speaking English without translation. The public broadcaster notes that RDI has only one full-time translator, working 9 to 5.
• Jean-Luc Brassard is the latest to try to shame TV broadcasters (CBC/Radio-Canada notably) into broadcasting winter sports events live. Broadcasters say the rights to broadcast these events just cost too much.
• Groupe TVA published its fourth-quarter earnings. The top line is good news. For subsidiary TVA Sports, it’s mixed. Ad revenue is up 15% over the previous year, but for all of 2016 the channel lost more money than the year before, mainly because the Canadiens didn’t make the playoffs (TVA Sports has only 22 of 82 Habs games a season, but it has all playoff games.)

Radio

• Josée Verner, former Conservative cabinet minister and current failed-re-election-candidate-so-Harper-appointed-her-to-the-Senate person, has officially joined FM93 in Quebec City as a weekly columnist, replacing former politician Mario Dumont.
• Catherine Pogonat will take over as late morning host at ICI Musique, replacing the departing Rebecca Makonnen, as of May 15.
• Corus’s radio stations are being brought onto the GlobalNews.ca platform. Toronto’s AM640 is the latest after London’s AM980.
• The Vancouver Whitecaps have extended their radio rights deal with TSN Radio for three years.

Print

• Transcontinental’s media division lost almost 20% of revenue in the last quarter compared to the previous year. The company eliminated 20 jobs at its production hub in eastern Montreal, though some of those cuts are due to technological upgrades.
• Toronto Star unionized employees have approved a new collective agreement. It brings Star Touch employees into the fold.
• Family web magazine Planète F has started a print version, thanks to a government subsidy. They’re boosting that with some crowdfunding.
• Cult MTL is doing its annual Best of Montreal reader poll.

News about people

Excited to start a new adventure! I'm proud to announce I'll be joining the all-star team @CTVMontreal pic.twitter.com/bjtVVjetTd

— Kelly Greig (@KellyGreig) March 6, 2017

• CTV Montreal has poached Global Montreal’s morning news reporter Kelly Greig. Greig previously worked at City Montreal as a producer on its weekly sports show (with current Sean Coleman, who’s manning the sports anchor desk part-time at CTV), and before that worked at CBC Radio in Montreal.
• Senior management changes at CBC News: Brodie Fenlon will manage “daily news”, Jonathan Whitten to “depth and context” and someone yet to be named managing investigative reporting. Also, Steve Ladurantaye, former media reporter at the Globe and Mail turned media and government liaison at Twitter Canada, will be the new managing editor of The National as it reworks itself in preparation for a new anchor.
• John Boynton has been hired as the new CEO of Torstar.
• Chantal Desjardins has a new job in broadcasting, with PokerVision Media, a TV content provider that’s launching as a channel in the U.S. on April 1 and expects to come to Canada “later this year.”
• Marie-Michèle Sioui is the new Quebec parliamentary correspondent for Le Devoir.
• In addition to writing for iPolitics, Kady O’Malley is launching a new weekly politics column at Vice News.
• Mylène Crête is jumping from Radio-Canada to Presse Canadienne covering politics in Ottawa.
• Mike Cohen profiles TSN 690’s Mitch Gallo and Sean Campbell.
• CTV Montreal’s Annie DeMelt is filling in as news anchor on Your Morning this week. You can see her in action here, as of the four-minute mark.
• Paul Haysom moves to Vancouver to join Global News as morning anchor at Global BC and BC1.
• The president of Manitoba’s MTS, Jay Forbes, will leave the company when its sale to Bell closes.

Jobs

• Political reporter in Ottawa, National Post (deadline: March 10)
• Copy editor, Les Affaires (deadline: March 16)
• Tenure track professor in data journalism at Concordia University (deadline: March 24)
• Assistant general manager, FPJQ (deadline: April 2)
• Mandarin-speaking reporter in Vancouver, Globe and Mail

Upcoming events

• March 24-26: Radio-Canada hackathon
• May 20: Canadaland in Montreal

At the CRTC

• A profile of one of the commission’s lawyers gives some insight into how it works on a legal level, and notes the CRTC shot down Bell after it asked for a meeting with commissioners following its Super Bowl decision.

TV

• The CRTC’s Super Bowl decision means the Oscars became the most-watched TV broadcast of 2017 so far. Though the fact that the peak viewing happened so early in the broadcast might be an indication that it goes on way too long.
• Anne-Marie Losique is bringing Hustler TV to Canada, in addition to the existing Vivid TV (formerly Vanessa) channels in French and English. The new channel launches March 21.
• Le Devoir has been reviewing each episode of CTV’s Cardinal, starring Karine Vanasse and directed by Daniel (Podz) Grou. The reviews focus more on the creation of the show or style choices by the director than on the plot or characters.
• Speaking of which, a day before the finale of its six-episode season, Bell Media has announced Cardinal’s renewal for seasons 2 and 3. The series has averaged 1.2 million viewers in Canada.
• HBO Canada is offering more free previews of its series, now letting online or on demand users watch the entire first season of Game of Thrones, Girls, Veep, Silicon Valley and Ballers. It’s also making an episode or two of new series available for free. Both are until March 31. The network has been scoring well, setting viewing records for John Oliver and Bill Maher, each breaking the 400,000 barrier.
• The Journal de Montréal looks at what impact La Voix can have on an artist’s career.

Radio

• Radioplayer Canada launched today. The app, similar to Bell’s iHeartRadio app, has almost every station that isn’t owned by Bell, including all Corus, Rogers and Cogeco radio stations. In Montreal, that includes Cogeco’s The Beat 92.5, 98.5fm, CKOI, Rythme FM and Radio Circulation, plus RNC Media’s 91,9 Sports. So far, at least, it looks like the player doesn’t have preroll ads, and it’s focused less on randomly switching between stations than iHeart. Already found a few bugs related to the location-based station search (it either doesn’t work, or it shows Saskatoon stations for Montreal, and it doesn’t show CBC stations), and neither the Google Play store nor the App Store list this app first when searching for “radioplayer”, which could lead to a lot of people downloading the wrong app.
• Quebec City’s BLVD 102,1, which has become the home of André Arthur and Nathalie Normandeau, has added Journal de Montréal columnist Sophie Durocher to its lineup, which means it’s now a talk radio station during the morning, day and afternoon weekdays. Between this station, Énergie (Stéphan Dupont, Stéphane Gendron, Jérôme Landry), FM93 (Doc Mailloux, Éric Duhaime) and the original CHOI Radio X (Dominic Maurais, Richard Martineau, Jeff Fillion) it’s a lot of opinionative talk during the day on the radio in that town.
• CKZU, a shortwave retransmitter of CBC Radio One in Vancouver, is being shut down by the public broadcaster, which argues it can’t justify buying a new transmitter considering the few people who listen on shortwave.

Print

• The New York Times has a TV ad, which officially debuted on TV during the Oscars, but was online days before.
• Vividata, the company that measures readership of newspapers and magazines, published its third-quarter data. Little has changed from the second quarter. The Journal de Montréal is tops, but mainly because La Presse stopped publishing a print edition.
• Quebec newspapers are trying to resist a government bill that would remove a requirement for public notices from municipalities to be published in local newspapers. For many papers, this small-print doing-it-because-we-have-to advertising about new bylaws and zoning changes represents a significant source of income.
• Sherbrooke’s La Tribune has eliminated bureaus in Thetford Mines and Victoriaville, and will now cover major stories in central Quebec from Sherbrooke.
• Postmedia has a new revenue generation project, based on selling website solutions to auto dealers.

Online

• The Athletic, a sports magazine website started by sports writers laid off from other media, makes an argument for its paywall.

Movies

• Quebecor announced the recipients of its fund’s cinema financing. They include a sequel to La Guerre des tuques 3D.

News about people

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• Jay Onrait and Dan O’Toole were let go from their jobs at Fox Sports 1, and are now looking for work. Though sports networks aren’t exactly itching to spend a lot of money for people to host highlights shows, and this offer wasn’t too serious, TSN announced this morning through a TradeCentre joke that both are returning to their old jobs, hosting SportsCentre at midnight ET as of September.
• Bell Media’s president Mary Ann Turcke is leaving for a job with the National Football League (the two companies have seen a lot of each other recently complaining about the CRTC). Former Universal Music executive Randy Lennox takes over as president.
• Twitter star Kady O’Malley didn’t stay unemployed for long. She has been hired, along with former Citizen coworker Kathryn May, by iPolitics.
• Judith Lussier has ended her column at Métro, citing a form of exhaustion faced with online trolls. That prompted stories by Radio-Canada and Le Devoir and comments by Steve Proulx, Voir’s Simon Jodoin and Cult MTL’s Peter Wheeland.
• Yannick Pinel, editor-in-chief of Métro, has been hired away by Radio-Canada. Le Devoir notes that there has been a series of departures from Métro to Radio-Canada in recent months.
• Mick Côté, the Montreal Gazette’s engagement editor, has been hired away by Presse Canadienne as head of digital news.
• Alexandre Robillard, Presse Canadienne reporter in Quebec City, has been hired away by the Journal de Montréal/Québec.
• Émilie Larivée-Tourangeau of the FPJQ has been hired away by Vice.
• Bruce Rainnie, host of CBC News: Compass in P.E.I., is leaving to take a job at the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame.
• CBC’s Neil Macdonald quit Twitter, apparently frustrated at having to deal with trolls. Considering what happened to other journalists who did the same (Paul Wells, Andrew Coyne, etc.) he’ll probably be back eventually.
• If you missed Pete Marier, the former CHOM and Boom FM announcer will be back on the air next week, filling in on the afternoon show on The Jewel 106.7 in Hudson. He’s filling in for Tasso, who’s filling in for Ted Bird.
• Tuesday was a sad one in the Montreal Gazette newsroom. Layoffs of three photographers, three designers and Quebec City Bureau Chief Caroline Plante took effect, along with a couple of people in other departments. This completes job reductions first announced last year by Postmedia.

Good reads

• Former Ottawa Citizen editor Andrew Potter on the ethical problem of a journalist taking a job doing PR for a government he was just covering, in light of the departure of Postmedia columnist Michael Den Tandt.
• Policy Options magazine on what happens when a local newspaper (in this case, the Lindsay Post) shuts down.
• Harnarayan Singh of Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi on the genesis of that broadcast and how much of his own effort was necessary to start it and keep it going.

Obituaries

• Pierre Pascau, former CKAC and CKVL radio personality

Jobs

• Journalist, 24 Heures (deadline: March 6)
• Fact-checking journalist, Métro (deadline: March 7)
• Copy editor, Les Affaires (deadline: March 16)
• Tenure track professor in data journalism at Concordia University (deadline: March 24)

Upcoming events

• Feb. 25: Day of action to protect press freedom
• March 24-26: Radio-Canada hackathon
• May 20: Canadaland in Montreal

NYT reporter who broke Trump campaign/Russia story is same reporter who broke Clinton email server story. That's called a free & fair press. pic.twitter.com/OPzWQowKSF

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 15, 2017

News about news

• He’s baaaaack! Pierre Karl Péladeau is once again president and CEO of Quebecor. Pierre Dion gets demoted to chairman of the board of Quebecor Media.
• The federal government has released a report from Ipsos about consultations on the future of media. The 55-page document has a lot of vague statements about the need to review mandates and rules and funding models, and is pretty light on concrete proposals.
• 98.5fm interviewed press gallery president Louis Lacroix and The Suburban editor Beryl Wajsman about the lack of anglophone journalists in Quebec City, after learning of the departure of the Montreal Gazette’s Caroline Plante. (The Gazette has not announced what is happening with its Quebec City bureau.) After the previous departure of reporters for CJAD, the Globe and Mail and the Canadian Press, the only other full-time journalists in the provincial capital for anglo media are the three TV reporters and their cameramen.
• A guy whose newspaper has a similar name as a fake media outlet invented to promote a movie had to pay the price for the confusion.
• The Globe and Mail has poll results showing Canadians are worried about fake news.

At the CRTC

• The federal government has extended until March 6 the deadline to apply for four CRTC commissioner positions, including chairman.
• RIDE TV, a specialty channel all about horses, has been approved for distribution in Canada. Telus applied for the authorization.
• The commission has formally revoked the licence of CJBN-TV Kenora, Ont., after Shaw decided not to renew the tiny-market station’s licence. The station, which wasn’t part of the Global TV network, shut down on Jan. 27. Its local programming continues on the local Shaw community TV channel.
• Radio station CKRW (The Rush) in Whitehorse has applied to the CRTC to temporarily switch its main transmitter from a 50-year-old 1,000-watt AM transmitter to its FM retransmitter, after getting an engineering report that the AM antenna has degraded to the point where it is no longer safe. The temporary switch will be followed by another application to do the same thing on a permanent basis. CKRW also has seven other transmitters in Yukon and one in the Northwest Territories.
• Former CRTC Quebec commissioner Suzanne Lamarre has joined law firm Therrien Couture, where she will work at its St-Hyacinthe office.

TV

Good Morning Ottawa! @HenryBurris and @liannelaing sitting in the host chairs. pic.twitter.com/vxBxdtTDGB

— CTVMorningLiveOttawa (@CTVOttMornLive) February 21, 2017

• After its proposal to shut down all but one of its remaining over-the-air transmitters generated a lot of opposition (including 85 interventions for the CRTC application), TVO has decided to reverse its position and keep them running.
• Alexandre Despatie isn’t the only former athlete to get a job hosting morning TV. Former Ottawa Redblacks quarterback Henry Burris has joined CTV Morning Live in Ottawa. His first show was Tuesday, and you can watch it here. He’ll also be a contributor to Bell Media’s talk radio stations in Ottawa.
• Rogers has become the first company to decide to drastically cut community television programming to redirect funding to local TV stations, as the CRTC’s new policy has allowed large vertically integrated media companies to do. 10 people have been laid off at Rogers TV in Toronto.
• TSN and RDS have extended their rights agreement with NASCAR for an undisclosed number of years.
• CBC has ordered a Canadian version of the Great British Bake Off.
• Super Channel will turn one of its four feeds into a 24/7 e-sports channel.
• Bell’s acquisition of Manitoba’s MTS, which includes its telecom and TV distribution services, got approval from the federal government and is expected to close March 17. In addition to selling some customers to Telus, it has also reached a deal with Xplornet, which allows Manitoba to keep a fourth mobile services player.
• HGTV announced its returning Canadian original series this spring.
• Pierre-Yves Lord has been named the new co-host of Deux hommes en or. He replaces Jean-Philippe Wauthier as Patrick Lagacé’s partner on the Télé-Québec Friday night talk show.
• Sportsnet notes that the Feb. 4 Canadian Women’s Hockey League game between Montreal and Toronto had 136,400 viewers, making it the most-watched CWHL game ever.
• Global says the Feb. 11 episode of Saturday Night Live had the best rating since 2004, with 1.7 million viewers.
• A story in The Athletic notes that TSN and Sportsnet have different policies about letting on-air talent engage in political commentary (paywalled).

Radio

• The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council says it’s okay with André Arthur of BLVD 102.1 in Quebec City voicing his own ads.
• CBC Montreal’s Daybreak and host Mike Finnerty got some national exposure on Tuesday after Conservative MP Tony Clement hung up on him during an interview.
• CJAD’s Dr. Laurie Betito got involved in helping PornHub with sex education.

Print

Every NYT front page since 1852 pic.twitter.com/ODtqJe18u8

— Josh Begley (@joshbegley) February 20, 2017

• Le Quotidien in Saguenay will no longer publish a Sunday paper as of April.
• The Montreal Gazette has reversed a decision to eliminate its sports scoreboard page after an outcry from readers. Daily statistics returned in a half-page format.
• Quebec newspaper publishers are trying to fight a new bill that would reduce demand for newspaper advertising by changing the requirement for public notices to be published in local newspapers.
• The St. John’s Telegram apologized after a front-page headline (“Too drunk to remember”) drew complaints that it blamed the victim in an alleged sexual assault.

Online

• Canadaland is doing a tour to promote its new book. In Montreal on May 20.

News about people

• The Montreal Gazette lost half its photo staff to layoffs and buyouts. Gone are John Kenney, Marie-France Coallier, Phil Carpenter and Dario Ayala.
• Former Postmedia columnist Michael Den Tandt has taken a new job as communications advisor for the Trudeau government.
• Jim Slotek took a buyout from the Toronto Sun
• Kady O’Malley has left the Ottawa Citizen
• Geneviève Pettersen has ended her column at Châtelaine, deciding she’s tired of formulating opinions
• Conrad Black has dropped a defamation suit against writer Bruce Livesey

Good reads

• Wired on the digital transformation of the New York Times

Obituaries

• Stuart McLean, CBC Radio host. Too many obituaries to link to them all, from the Globe and Mail to CBC itself and even the New York Times. Tributes from Jonathan Goldstein, Shelagh Rogers, Montreal Gazette’s Celine Cooper, and Vinyl Café fans.
• Steve Buttry, American journalist and editor
• Ben Tierney, Southam News foreign correspondent

Jobs

• Parliamentary correspondent in Quebec City, Le Devoir (deadline: Feb. 23)
• Transportation reporter, Financial Post (deadline: Feb. 24)
• CJF Globe and Mail internship (deadline: Feb. 24)
• Journalist, 24 Heures (deadline: March 6)
• Fact-checking journalist, Métro (deadline: March 7)
• Copy editor, Les Affaires (deadline: March 16)
• Tenure track professor in data journalism at Concordia University (deadline: March 24)

Upcoming events

• Feb. 25: Day of action to protect press freedom
• March 24-26: Radio-Canada hackathon
• May 20: Canadaland in Montreal

News about news

• The Journal de Montréal has filed a complaint against CBC/Radio-Canada after its investigative programs reported a story that it believed it got the scoop on, and even used one of its pictures without authorization. The story is posted here.
• Some marketing genius behind the movie A Cure for Wellness set up a series of fake news websites to help promote the film. They were taken down after BuzzFeed investigated.
• A Pew Research study shows that people who get news online generally don’t remember where they read what they learned.
• Radio-Canada is organizing its first hackathon.
• A discussion on Wikipedia has resulted in the Daily Mail being deemed “generally unreliable” as a source of information, and therefore “generally prohibited” for that use. This is being interpreted as a “ban” by news media, which isn’t that far from the truth.
• The STM took a swipe at MTL Blog last week after it repeated a misleading story falsely alleging that the new Azur trains were too big for the metro tunnels. Spokesperson Amélie Régis told Radio-Canada: “Je me permets de vous mettre en garde contre les articles de ce site, qui sont souvent erronés, les rédacteurs ne vérifiant jamais leurs faits auprès de [la STM]”

TV

Things print reporters do that annoy TV reporters. #youreinmyshot (Now waiting for rebuttal about annoying things TV reporters do…) pic.twitter.com/1ypZEoowmA

— Maya Johnson (@MJohnsonCTV) February 14, 2017

• Keeping Canada Safe is the name of the new Canadian emergency services documentary series that will air on CBC starting in March. Eight half-hour episodes produced by Force Four Entertainment (Keeping Canada Alive, Border Security).
• TSN announced its Major League Soccer broadcast schedule. It has rights to all 34 games of the Vancouver Whitecaps, all 34 games of Toronto FC, and 12 Montreal Impact games (the national ones sold by MLS). TVA Sports will broadcast all 34 Impact games in French. New this year is the opening of a Saturday afternoon MLS window on CTV, which will show 10 games at 1, 3 or 4pm, three of which are Impact games.
• Former freestyle skier Jean-Luc Brassard let loose some steam about Canadian broadcasters failing to pay attention to amateur winter sports, including the championship win by downhill skier Erik Guay last weekend. The story notes that CBC/Radio-Canada, which broadcasts “Olympic” sports on weekends, couldn’t agree to the price the ski federation’s agent demanded for the rights to that event.
• Production has begun in Montreal on FUBAR, the second original scripted series by Viceland Canada.
• Casting is taking place for the next season of Canada’s Worst Driver. The Montreal Gazette’s Bill Brownstein talks to the casting director about what they’re looking for. (Fans of the series will be pleased to know that this season’s “winner”, Krystal McCann, has admitted she has a mental health issue and needed an attitude adjustment, and took steps to get better.)
• CTV has greenlit a new one-hour, 10-episode detective series.
• Distributor eOne sold the CTV miniseries Cardinal to the BBC and other broadcasters in Europe.
• Franco-Ontarians weren’t too happy about the lack of representation of themselves on Radio-Canada. The broadcaster pointed to investments in digital to better connect people with communities, which nicely avoids having to ask itself why almost everything broadcast nationally on Radio-Canada television is based in or about Montreal.

Radio

• CNN visited Quebec City to talk about hate speech there, and that includes interviewing its talk radio personalities.
• The Globe and Mail’s Sean Gordon talks to Ron Fournier about his career.

Print

• Broadcaster Magazine has been shut down.
• Le Devoir, La Presse and Le Soleil have begun legal proceedings against a website called La Dose Pro, accusing it of violating copyright.

Online

• Véronique Cloutier’s Véro.tv channel on Radio-Canada’s Tou.tv Extra launched on Tuesday. C’est juste de la TV lays out what programming it offers on the $7 a month service.
• The Canadaland Commons podcast is coming back, with three new hosts to replace the hosts who left who replaced the hosts who left.

News about people

• Barry Morgan, recently let go by CJAD, tried his hand at doing a video report for the English Montreal School Board, hired on a freelance basis by Mike Cohen, who is in charge of communications there.
• Postmedia columnist Michael Den Tandt has left the company “for another opportunity” that hasn’t been disclosed yet. The departure was immediate upon being announced.
• Jeff Yates, who was the “Inspecteur viral” fact-checker at Métro, has been hired by Radio-Canada. His old employer is therefore looking for a new fact-checking columnist.
• Jean-Philippe Cipriani has left La Presse Canadienne and gone back to L’actualité, to head its digital content team.
• Mike Piperni, a Montreal TV veteran, retired after 40 years. Piperni joined RDS in 2008, and before that he had been news director at CTV Montreal. He also worked at Radio-Canada and TQS, in both cases in the sports department.
• Laura Armstrong is the new Blue Jays beat writer for the Toronto Star.

Good reads

• The Globe and Mail asks if Canada’s 10-point system for determining if TV and film productions are Canadian shouldn’t be expanded to include things like setting. It notes that other countries in Europe have more comprehensive points-based systems.

Jobs

• Digital news editor, Presse Canadienne (deadline: Feb. 17)
• Executive Producer, CBC English Services, London, Ont. (deadline: Feb. 20)
• Fact-checking journalist, Métro (deadline: March 7)

Upcoming events

• Feb. 25: Day of action to protect press freedom
• March 24-26: Radio-Canada hackathon

News about news

• HuffPost Canada reports journalists shouldn’t expect money in the next federal budget to help save the industry.
• The Toronto Star has launched a legal case to get Ontario tribunals to make more information available to journalists.
• A guy charged with sexual assault at the Quebec City courthouse decided to take out his aggressions on two journalists filming him there. So naturally the video goes viral and everyone knows who he is now.
• The National Post has a long story about a former Vice Canada editor accused of recruiting drug smugglers from among the staff there.

At the CRTC

• The broadcasting side is pretty quiet while the commission focuses on the review of its Wireless Code this week.
• The commission has approved a new FM transmitter for ICI Radio-Canada Première in Sarnia, Ont.
• The commission has approved the transfer of ownership of Serdy Média (owner of the Évasion and Zeste specialty channels) from Serge Arsenault to his son Sébastien Arsenault.
• Community radio station CHGA-FM Maniwaki has applied to increase its power as the antenna tower undergoes major maintenance. The new signal would be 16.9kW, up from 2.877kW. It says the increase is necessary to compensate for hilly terrain in the area.

TV

• Food Network has a new original Canadian series: Chuck & Danny’s Road Trip, a six-part series in six locations (two in B.C., two in Ontario and two in Atlantic Canada). Begins March 3.
• Télé-Québec announced it will have a new show this fall about the media. The hour-long weekly show doesn’t have a name, but it does have a host: Marie-Louise Arsenault. The concept comes from media magazine Infopresse.
• Less than two weeks before its scheduled debut, a Canadian network has finally announced picking up the rights to the CBS series The Good Fight. The Good Wife spinoff was an exclusive series to the CBS All Access platform, which would have made it inaccessible in Canada. Corus will put the series on W Network. The premiere on Feb. 19 will be simulcast on Global.
• Sportsnet will be installing three 360-degree VR cameras at hockey rinks for six Saturday night games, including two Canadiens games (Feb. 25 against the Leafs and March 25 against the Senators).

Radio

• CFNV 940 AM is continuing its slow launch. It now has a website, CFNV940.com, and a logo. Its programming will become known “in the months to come” it says.
• CNN apparently visited Radio X in Quebec City on Tuesday. We’ll see what they have to say tomorrow.

Print

• Maclean’s laid off 12 people last week, including national correspondent Jonathon Gatehouse and Quebec bureau chief Martin Patriquin.
• The New York Times has hit 3 million subscribers.
• Kahnawake’s The Eastern Door turned 25. Publisher Steve Bonspiel offers a retrospective and a bit of defence of the community’s journalistic powerhouse. His predecessor Kenneth Deer looks back at its launch.

Online

• BuzzFeed now has a national (U.S.) cannabis reporter.
• Huffington Post Québec is five years old. Editor-in-chief Patrick White looks back on the media outlet’s successes.
• CBC has started a new sports podcast, Off Guard, hosted by former hurdler Perdita Felicien.
• Rob Wreford, formerly of CHOM, is the new morning man at local online-only radio station Mountain City Rock, using the fake frequency 109.1 as part of their brand.

News about people

Congrats to editor Malcolm McNeil, who retires after 32 years w/us. MM leaves wisdom, good taste, high standards & fun times. Best wishes! pic.twitter.com/UhSf05SCEk

— The Canadian Press News (@CdnPressNews) February 3, 2017

• Malcolm McNeil has retired as editor at The Canadian Press.
• Catherine Wallace, former managing editor of the Montreal Gazette, is on a year-long fellowship with the Toronto Star looking at the future of journalism. Her first dispatch was published this week.
• Bernard Descôteaux, former publisher of Le Devoir, has been named the new head of the Centre d’études sur les médias at Université Laval. He replaces professor Florian Sauvageau, who has been president of the centre since it started 25 years ago.
• Martine Turenne is the new editor-in-chief of the legal publication Droit-Inc.
• Le Devoir has named Robert Dutrisac as editorialist.
• Kristine Owram is leaving the National Post for Bloomberg.
• Bruce Cheadle, who just retired from The Canadian Press, has a new job doing PR for federal Treasury Board president Scott Brison.
• Only a few months after being hired as associate editor at the Toronto Star, David Skok has left the company.
• Christopher G. Nardi is heading to Ottawa to work at Parliament Hill for the Journal de Montréal.
• Anne Vivien has been appointed Executive Vice President, Music Development of
  Quebecor Media Group, as the company makes a stronger push into the music market.

Good reads

• Toronto Life interviews Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey, and asks him some tough questions about his retention bonus, the consolidation of newsrooms, and his personal digital habits.
• The Globe and Mail on Shaw’s wireless strategy, interviewing its CEO. (Subscribers only)
• Robyn Doolittle explains the genesis of the Globe’s Unfounded series, gathering data about how police across Canada handle sexual assault complaints.

Jobs

• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)
• Executive Producer, CBC English Services, London, Ont. (deadline: Feb. 20)

Ce n'est pas tout le monde qui aime la Tam Tam Cam.

Not everyone loves the Tam Tam Cam. ??#GoHabsGo pic.twitter.com/JfbYqxh55y

— Canadiens Montréal (@CanadiensMTL) February 1, 2017

Wilder Weir was up to his old tricks again last night.

News about news

• The Public Policy Forum report on the future of journalism in Canada (called Shattered Mirror) has some critics in journalism. Andrew Potter, former editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen, tackles ideas that would have the government deciding what is journalism, and goes on a rant about journalism schools. Paul Wells also is against government meddling in journalism, in a more general sense. Michael Geist unsurprisingly raises an alarm about talk of tightening the fair dealing exception to copyright law.
• The Union des artistes has reached a deal with Radio-Canada to compensate artists who appear on talk shows or other similar programs. It used to be they’d get to plug themselves (a series or movie they’re in, an upcoming album, a stage tour) but get no money. Now they’ll get $110 for appearing on RDI.
• The Globe and Mail’s public editor explains how the paper reported on the Quebec City mosque shooting in the hours that followed it, and why it was the second most prominent story on the front page Monday instead of the most prominent one. Sylvia Stead says journalists were working hard to confirm facts, but little was known about the shooting in the first couple of hours, and the Globe wanted to be cautious about reporting details. Her column also notes that the Globe doesn’t have a journalist in Quebec City.

At the CRTC

• The commission’s biggest story is happening in a courtroom in Toronto, where Raj Shoan, the former commissioner who was fired by the government after a harassment complaint and falling out with chair Jean-Pierre Blais, is challenging his dismissal in court.

TV

• TVO is shutting down eight of its nine remaining transmitters, leaving only the one in Toronto. This is expected to save about $1 million a year. TVO once had more than 100 transmitters across Ontario, but shut most of them down at the same time the CBC killed most of its transmitters. Communities were offered a chance to keep the transmitters if they paid for their upkeep.
• The Globe and Mail has a feature on Canadian series Nirvanna The Band The Show, which premieres Thursday on Viceland.
• E! Canada (which still exists) has a new original series: The Shocking Truth. It appears to be a kind of documentary series based on interviews of actors about roles they’ve played. It starts Feb. 6.
• Bill Brownstein on the second season of CBC’s Interrupt This Program, which begins Sunday.
• TSN is airing something called the Bronze Medal Celebration match, an international friendly of Canada’s women’s national soccer team, on Saturday.
• Also Saturday, Sportsnet will be showing a Canadian Women’s Hockey League game from Montreal. (Well, Brossard actually, since it’s at the Canadiens’ practice facility.) The Canadiennes play the Toronto Furies at 3:30pm.
• Toronto technical workers at Corus television (Global TV and specialty channels) have joined the Canada Media Guild.

Radio

• Two community radio stations in Montreal are in the middle of revolts by their volunteers: CIBL-FM 101.5 dismissed some volunteer hosts and will now face a contentious general assembly on Feb. 8. Meanwhile CINQ-FM 102.3 (Radio Centre-Ville), caught up in a scandal over the selling of airtime on the station, has reached a point where it has two groups claiming to be the legitimate board of directors, and the two are fighting it out in court. One of them has scheduled a press conference for tomorrow.
• Sylvain Bouchard of FM93 is among those Quebec City radio hosts that is doing some soul-searching in light of the attack at a mosque on Sunday. La Presse explores the issue from a broader perspective.

Print

• The New York Times has built up its team covering Canada
• La Presse says its La Presse+ tablet app has 272,000 readers on an average day.

Online

• The Canada Media Fund and Google have reached some sort of deal that allows the CMF to put some classic Canadian content on YouTube as part of Canada’s 150th anniversary. It’s unclear what this content will be exactly.

Movies

• The Harold Greenberg Fund has announced financial support for various film projects in various states of preparation. Among them, I notice, is Us Conductors, the Giller-Prize-winning novel by Montreal author Sean Michaels. It’s at the first stage — story optioning — so don’t get too excited yet.

News about people

@mbockcote entarté lors du lancement de son livre sur Cartier/Québec. La Vie agricole présente@mandrelord @tvanouvelles @SMenardJDQ @RC_ML pic.twitter.com/jm04j7Wdey

— Yannick Patelli (@LaVieagricoleYP) January 25, 2017

• Sue Montgomery, former Montreal Gazette justice reporter, has a new job doing communications for the national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women
• Doug Lamb is stepping down as Chief Financial Officer for Postmedia
• Sarah Bélisle is the new Ottawa bureau chief for the Journal de Montréal
• Oprah Winfrey is a new special contributor to CBS’s 60 Minutes
• Final days at work for Vancouver Sun journalists Peter O’Neil, Jeff Lee and Tara Carman

Good reads

• Yves Boisvert on journalists being in a conflict of interest when talking about the new inquiry into police spying on journalists
• The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple tries to explain why journalists tend to be left of centre politically

Obituaries

• Benoît Aubin, journalist. He worked for so many media outlets that there are obituaries for him everywhere: Montreal Gazette, Journal de Montréal, Le Devoir, La Presse, L’Actualité, plus the official obit. His funeral is Saturday.

Jobs

• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)

News about news

• A lawyer who was to work as chief prosecutor in an inquiry into police spying on journalists in Quebec has stepped down after criticism of things he has written that were critical of the media, and in particular La Presse’s Patrick Lagacé, who is central to the issue.
• Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly is worried about fake news online and want to talk to Facebook and Google about it.
• Edmonton police have made an arrest after Sheila Gunn Reid of Ezra Levant’s The Rebel was allegedly assaulted covering the women’s march there.
• Several journalists face felony charges after they were caught up in mass arrests covering protests in Washington, D.C.

At the CRTC

• With the commission’s seats slowly emptying out, the federal government has finally started the process of filling them, posting notices for several jobs: chair, vice-chair broadcasting, and members for Ontario and Manitoba/Saskatchewan. Deadlines to apply are Feb. 20. The non-chair positions say that “With the exception of decision-making responsibilities, Members report to the Chairperson,” which is actually a point under some contention at the moment in a legal appeal by the former Ontario member, Raj Shoan. Chair Jean-Pierre Blais’s term ends this year, but the posting of his position doesn’t necessarily mean he won’t be re-appointed.
• The commission has approved the purchase, for $1.5 million, of a majority stake (80.1% of voting shares, 50% of non-voting shares) of World Fishing Network to Keywest Marketing, owned by Canadians Mark Yelic and Hugh McKinnon.

TV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDe934lJlqY

• MAtv has a new English-language series, Studios, Lofts and Jam Spaces, starting Feb. 2.
• Projet J reports on the centralization of newscast production at TVA. It notes that the Trois-Rivières and Sherbrooke newscasts can’t be produced simultaneously under the new system, so one is produced live and the other is pretaped an hour earlier (they rotate every two weeks).
• Blue Ant Media’s radX channel officially became a Canadian version of BBC Earth on Tuesday.
• Bell Media’s CraveTV has announced its third original series, What Would Sal Do, launching March 24.
• The FCC’s incentive auction, during which wireless providers bid for frequencies to be reallocated from television in the 600 MHz band, will raise $10 billion to compensate TV broadcasters for changing frequencies, and reassign 84 MHz of TV spectrum.
• Montreal’s MELS Studios will be home to Issues, a fictional series about work at a magazine being produced by NBC Universal. It will air on Freeform (formerly ABC Family) in the U.S.
• CJBN-TV, the Shaw-owned tiny-market TV station in Kenora, Ont., finally shuts down on Friday. Its original programming continues on the Shaw TV community channel in the region.
• How does TV drama deal with a Trump presidency? The New York Times asked some creators.

Radio

• A daytime-only AM radio station in Plattsburgh is one of the few stations sticking to a ’50s and ’60s deep-cuts format.
• The Concordian, one of Concordia University’s student newspapers, has a weekly show on CJLO 1690 AM. Here’s their first episode. It helps that the two have offices about 10 feet apart.

Print

From Influence Communication’s year-end report, the most cited newspapers in Quebec TV and radio https://t.co/y6uq67uBy1 pic.twitter.com/JXBKnQEHP0

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) January 18, 2017

• The Halifax Chronicle-Herald has now been on strike for a full year. A Canadaland story looks at the state of the newspaper and its union.
• Postmedia layoff notices were issued on Tuesday. There are nine jobs being cut at the Montreal Gazette, six at the Ottawa Citizen, and “about six” at the Windsor Star. (iPolitics also has some details.) All this is part of the 20% chainwide payroll cut announced last year, and comes after a buyout package failed to reach the desired number of positions. It will be a while before we know exactly who is leaving (though the Citizen’s Kady O’Malley might be one of the ones affected). The union (which I belong to as a Montreal Gazette unionized employee), unsurprisingly, is unhappy. Meanwhile, other people have announced their departures this week: Susana Mas of the Citizen, Rob Granatstein of Postmedia digital.
• A video from the Toronto Star following a Toronto Star photographer taking pictures of the final days of the Toronto Star printing plant.

Online

• A planned big-budget Star Trek fan fiction project has reached a settlement with CBS and Paramount, who were ready to sue over copyright infringement.

News about people

• Today is Bell Let’s Talk day. I’ve written about it before, the good and the bad and the worrisome. But beyond the financial implications, it’s encouraging a bunch of people to come forward with personal stories. Many of those are Bell Media employees, like Jason Rockman, Andrew Carter, Leslie Roberts, Chris Nilan, Amanda Stein (also at CJLO) and Robyn Flynn.
• Murray Sherriffs stopped by The Jewel 106.7 in Hudson to chat with Ted Bird. He seemed resigned to the idea that he wouldn’t be working in radio again, saying “radio is behind me”.
• Allison Hanes, the new city columnist for the Montreal Gazette, published her first column on Monday, introducing herself.
• FM93 journalist Mathieu Boivin has been named Quebec parliamentary correspondent for Cogeco Nouvelles.
• Rémi Nadeau has been named Quebec parliamentary bureau chief for the Journal de Montréal/Québec. He takes over for Michel Hébert, who is retiring (though he’ll still be contributing regular columns).
• Fiona Conway, executive director of programming for CBC news, has left the company.
• Katie Jensen is leaving her job as producer of Canadaland, where she created more than 100 episodes of the podcast and its sister podcasts.
• A Saturday Night Live writer has been suspended over a bad joke on Twitter about Donald Trump’s youngest son.

Good reads

• Maclean’s on Ezra Levant and The Rebel
• The Globe and Mail on the Toronto Star, its ownership and the tough questions they’re asking about its future (paywalled)

Obituaries

• Len Cochrane, former president of Teletoon (also at Hollywood Reporter)

Jobs

• Copy editor, Le Devoir (deadline: Jan. 27)
• Indigenous community journalism trainer, Journalists for Human Rights (deadline: Jan. 27)
• Toronto Star summer reporting internship (deadline: Jan. 30)
• Web developer, CBC English services in Toronto (deadline: Jan. 31)
• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)

Marc Bergevin tells TSN690 he was surprised by how emotional Montreal’s media is.
…
WHAT’S THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) January 17, 2017

News about news

• Craig Silverman has restarted a newsletter about fake news.
• Ricochet has successfully raised $50,000 to finance its legal defence against Richard Martineau.

TV

Cogeco CEO Louis Audet: cord-cutting is "a phase in the life of a young person" and generally changes when they start a family.

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) January 12, 2017

• Rogers Media has announced the cast of Bad Blood, the miniseries about Montreal’s Rizzuto crime family: Anthony LaPaglia (Without a Trace) as Vito Rizzuto, Paul Sorvino (Goodfellas) as Nicolo Rizzuto Sr., Kim Coates (Sons of Anarchy) as Declan Gardiner, and Enrico Colantoni (Flashpoint) as Bruno Bonsignori. The series will air on City TV in the fall.
• NBC is bringing back Will & Grace for 10 episodes.
• The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council came down against a Global News report that aired in Calgary and Edmonton about a “neighbour from hell” that it found went overboard with editing, using the kind of tricks you’d find in a political attack ad.
• They’re casting for The Bachelor Canada. They’ll be in Montreal on Feb. 7.
• The Gazette interviews Karine Vanasse, star of the CTV series Cardinal, which debuts next week.

Radio

• CHXX-FM 100.9, RNC Media’s other station in the Quebec City region, is switching formats, from rock music to adult hits (70s-80s-90s pop), as of Jan. 30. The station, officially licensed to Donnacona, 45km west of the provincial capital, will lose six on-air jobs as it brings in new talent. This change also happened to the Capitale Rock station in Gatineau last fall. The two former rock stations now adopt the same “Pop” branding. But while the Ottawa-Gatineau market has an anglo rock station to fall back on, Quebec City is left without a full-time rock station.
• Énergie 98.9 in Quebec City will have a new weekly show hosted by the owner of Beachclub in Pointe-Calumet.
• A CRTC application shows CBC has agreed to sell an analog subchannel of CBL-FM 94.1 in Toronto to a Tamil-language service. These SCA or SCMO subchannels require a special receiver.

Print

• The New York Times has released a report about its strategy going forward. Among the report’s recommendations are more emphasis on visual storytelling, and fewer copy editors. It also says the Times has a subscriber-centric, rather than advertiser-centric, business model.
• Some potential good news in the Halifax Chronicle Herald strike as it approaches its first anniversary: A meeting with the labour board has been postponed as the two sides look to maybe head back to the bargaining table.
• The Varsity, the student newspaper at the University of Toronto, has appointed a public editor, believed to be a first for student media in Canada.
• A year after trying the we’ll-be-an-online-only-publication thing with Ottawa’s L’Express, TC Media has finally shut it down for good.
• Postmedia’s latest financial results came out. Good news: Digital revenue is up. Bad news: Print revenue is down an order of magnitude more than that.
• The Globe and Mail’s editor wrote a letter to readers about how much journalism matters.

Online

• Jerry Seinfeld has reached a deal with Netflix to take his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee series there. Since that series is about the only thing people associate with the Crackle platform, it’s really bad news for them.
• Gérald Fillion has an interview with Delphine Poux, general manager of Vice Quebec. But the premise of the interview, that Vice attracts young people to journalism, is far from proven.
• TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin is now streaming live on Twitter.

News about people

Today is my last at The Canadian Press after 29 years. Dog tags (and pucks) tell the tale. What a blast it's been. pic.twitter.com/l40AnjfUNp

— Bruce Cheadle (@BCheadle) January 13, 2017

• Two announcements out of the Montreal Gazette: Allison Hanes becomes the paper’s new city columnist, and Basem Boshra (the former city columnist) becomes the new managing editor.
• Antoine Robitaille, formerly of Le Devoir, has been hired by the Journal de Montréal/Québec as an investigative journalist at the National Assembly. He writes a goodbye column in Le Devoir.
• Fannie Olivier (Presse Canadienne) and Philippe Vincent Foisy (Cogeco Nouvelles) have been hired by Radio-Canada to work on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
• Jessica Rusnak, who left TSN 690 to work for Sportsnet in Toronto, is back, and will fill in as Andie Bennett’s maternity leave replacement on CBC’s Daybreak. (Also, yeah, Andie’s pregnant.)
• Marianna Simeone, a former opinion columnist at CBC Montreal, has been named the Quebec government’s representative in Italy.
• Roberto Rocha, who left the Montreal Gazette and joined CBC, will be part of a new nationwide data journalism team.
• The Journal de Montréal had a two-page spread about Juan Rodriguez, the rock music critic and occasional contributor to the Montreal Gazette.
• Matt Gurney, formerly of the National Post, will be writing a column for GlobalNews.ca. He currently hosts a radio show at Corus-owned AM640.
• Adrian Morrow is changing jobs at the Globe and Mail, from being its Ontario government reporter to Washington, D.C.
• Jonathan Goldsbie, formerly of Toronto’s NOW, is the new editor of Canadaland.
• Hal Anderson returns to Winnipeg’s CJOB.
• Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno’s assault charge has been dropped after she agreed to a peace bond.
• Béatrice Martin, aka Coeur de Pirate, has a new column on Vice’s Noisey website, where she will write about her anxiety.

Good reads

• Last semester, Concordia journalism students started a new website and wrote critical stories about journalism. Concordia’s website explains how that came about.
• The official transition policy for U.S. presidential social media accounts.
• Le Devoir interviews Michel Bissonnette, the new head of French services at CBC/Radio-Canada.

Obituaries

• Clare Hollingworth, war correspondent who broke the news about the start of the Second World War.

Jobs

BEHOLD! An actual job posting for reporter at daily newspaper!! We're back, baby!! pic.twitter.com/u7IEqTwQ6L

— randy turner (@randyturner15) January 17, 2017

• National investigative journalist, Global News (Toronto, deadline: Jan. 20)
• Videojournalist, CBC Montreal (deadline: Jan. 23)
• Indigenous community journalism trainer, Journalists for Human Rights (deadline: Jan. 27)
• Toronto Star summer reporting internship (deadline: Jan. 30)
• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)

News about news

• The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has a report of 2017 predictions. Among them, a boost for podcasting, news outlets using less of things like Facebook Live and going it alone to reap the revenue directly, more mergers and acquisitions, and more fact-checking.
• Métro’s Inspecteur Viral, who fact-checks viral news, also has some predictions for the coming year.
• TVO has announced a $2 million donation it has received that will be put towards setting up “local hubs” doing local journalism in Ontario.
• Chinese authorities asked Apple to remove the New York Times app from its store in that country. And Apple complied.

At the CRTC

• The commission’s release #2017-1 is publishing the applications for stations that would replace Aboriginal Voices Radio. The CRTC revoked the licences for this network of native stations in major cities in 2015, and AVR’s court appeal of the decision was dismissed in November, allowing the commission to proceed with applications to replace them. There is a good amount of competition for stations in the major markets — Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver — but only one of the applications calls for stations in all those markets.
• The CRTC has approved two new radio stations for Edmonton: An ethnic station, 10kW at 580 AM, and a French-language community station, 180W at 97.9 FM. There were 10 applications for ethnic stations, not all of them using the same frequency, but the CRTC decided with one existing ethnic station the market could handle only one more at this time.
• Bell Media and the NFL aren’t giving up on their attempts to reverse the CRTC’s Super Bowl ad decision before kickoff. Super Bowl LI on Feb. 5 will be the first exempt from simultaneous substitution rules.
• The commission has yet another vacancy now that Candice Molnar’s term has come to an end. There are now only seven commissioners left, and more will leave as their terms expire. The Trudeau government has made only one appointment — a temporary six-month one — since taking office.

TV

• Sportsnet has declared itself winner in the ratings war with TSN again, this time looking at the 2016 calendar year.
• Bell got a $350-million patent infringement lawsuit over its IPTV technology thrown out of court.

Radio

• Norway has begun the process of shutting down FM radio, which though it was announced two years ago has gained attention across the world in the past week. (I gave a series of interviews with CBC Radio stations today.) Journalists in other countries are wondering if they could be next. In Canada, at least, that’s just not happening. Digital radio here is still in its infancy.
• There was no announcement of this, but CHLX-FM, the RNC Media radio station in Gatineau that became a Rythme FM affiliate, has dropped that affiliation and adopted the brand of WOW FM. On Facebook, the station has been telling listeners the change was made to become “100% local”
• La Voix de St-Lo, the community radio station based in the Centre communautaire Bon Courage de Place Benoit in Saint-Laurent, is moving toward getting the station’s low-power FM transmitter, which was approved last summer, operational. A consultation was held in December about installing the antenna tower, a website has been set up, and the Industry Canada database lists a callsign for it: CJPB-FM. When it’s operational, it will broadcast at 90.7 FM, but its coverage won’t extend much beyond the eastern part of the Saint-Laurent borough.
• An elementary school has set up a web radio station as an education aid for students.

Print

• RIP Sherbrooke Express, the Transcontinental paper that has been shut down.
• The Toronto Star has launched a new short story contest, with a $5,000 grand prize, which it says is the biggest of its kind in Canada.
• The Saguenay edition of the Journal de Québec published a front page on Twitter (since deleted) that announced Team Canada winning the World Junior Hockey Championship. Quebecor has clarified that this version of the front page was never actually printed.
• Canadian University Press, an association of university student newspapers, has dramatically lowered membership fees, one of the key complaints from member papers that has led many to decide to leave the organization, prompting a financial crisis.

Online

• The Internet Archive has compiled hundreds of hours of interviews with Donald Trump, which it has placed in a searchable archive that can be used to show him contradicting himself.

News about people

It's official! Thrilled to announce I am returning to Canada's Global News as Washington Correspondent. Very excited for this new adventure! https://t.co/JBvlb4woF7

— Ines de La Cuetara (@InesdLC) January 11, 2017

• Ines de La Cuetara, who previously worked at Global Montreal and CNN and was most recently covering the U.S. presidential election with ABC, is Global News’s new Washington correspondent. She joins Jackson Proskow, who remains in Washington.
• Tom Clark, who left his job as host of Global TV’s The West Block, has announced where he’s going. It’s a PR job.
• Greta van Susteren, who left CNN for Fox News, has now joined MSNBC.
• Alex Perron has been added to the afternoon show on Rouge FM in Montreal.
• Paul Wells is back on Twitter, months after publicly announcing he was leaving the social media service. Between him, Steve Ladurantaye and Andrew Coyne, we probably shouldn’t take it seriously when a journalist who’s big on Twitter suddenly decides to quit it in a huff.

Good reads

• Are more celebrities dying than before? Yes, but that’s not 2016’s fault. MIT did a study explaining why.
• Did the way we teach people to be critical toward media, with good intentions, backfire and help create a universe where people don’t believe news that contradicts their world view?
• Interview with Florent Daudens, new head of digital news at Le Devoir.
• La Presse talks to Hockey Night in Canada play-by-play man Bob Cole.

Obituaries

• Andréanne Sasseville, Sirius XM Radio host (CTV has a story in English, Sirius XM has a tribute)

Jobs

• National Post summer interns (Toronto; deadline: Jan. 15)
• National investigative journalist, Global News (Toronto, deadline: Jan. 20)
• Videojournalist, CBC Montreal (deadline: Jan. 23)
• Indigenous community journalism trainer, Journalists for Human Rights (deadline: Jan. 27)
• Toronto Star summer reporting internship (deadline: Jan. 30)
• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)

This column pooh-poohing concerns abt fake news opens w/ a false anecdote about the Spanish-American War: https://t.co/VBMmf0iMS2 So… yeah https://t.co/BK9opEyIjz

— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) December 31, 2016

News about news

• An Oklahoma newspaper was one of many who endorsed Hillary Clinton in the U.S. general election despite being solidly Republican in the past. The fallout from that decision continues to affect the paper’s relationship with its readers.
• Kevin O’Leary has been finally dropped by Bell Media after announcing he’s studying the idea of entering the Conservative leadership race.
• A judge has ruled that the seizure of a Journal de Montréal reporter’s laptop was legal.
• Presse Canadienne has a (mostly Quebec-centric) roundup of media news from 2016.

TV

• Julie Snyder finally has a new TV deal. She’s bringing back reality show Occupation Double, except this time it’s going to V. The network says it’s the biggest investment in a show they’ve ever made.
• With a month to go until the first Super Bowl without simultaneous substitution, Bell Media and the NFL are trying whatever they can to put things back to the way they were. They’re taking the matter to court (again), they’re lobbying the House of Commons, and there’s a new website apparently set up by unions to lobby the public. Bell Media also has a page on its website devoted to the issue, which notes that its contract with the NFL goes through 2019. And chief regulatory officer Mirko Bibic has an op-ed in the Globe and Mail calling for a “time out” (i.e. stalling).
• GameTV learned from the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council that it needs to be more careful about airing David Cronenberg movies before 9pm and with insufficient viewer advisories.
• NBC switched its affiliation in Boston on Jan. 1. Canadian providers who use Boston as a U.S. station source switched to the new feed, and as far as I know none are continuing to distribute WHDH north of the border.
• Saturday Night Live posted a video showing how a set is dismantled during the opening credits.

Radio

• CBC broadcast the final episode of The Vinyl Cafe, though host Stuart McLean hopes to be back someday.
• Corus has rebranded a station in Winnipeg as Peggy 99.1.
• Rythme FM in Montreal has a new morning team: Stéphane Bellavance, Jean-Francois Baril and Annie-Soleil Proteau.
• The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council took a dim view of a suggestion (apparently not made seriously) by a host on Ottawa’s CISS-FM that a contest participant was not chosen at random.

good morning Torstar typo https://t.co/c9iEAbtmub pic.twitter.com/oEg5DmNPg2

— 12:36 ? (@1236) January 3, 2017

Print

• With just days to go before the end of the year, the sale of l’Actualité to a company owned by Alexandre Taillefer was announced. The magazine published an open letter from him. He promises to keep the magazine editorially independent from Voir. Charles Grandmont has been named editor in chief.
• Latest newspaper fatality: The Chilliwack Times. Ownership is billing it as a merger.
• The Toronto Star has published its annual You Be The Editor quiz, letting readers second-guess them on whether something is too offensive to publish.
• New business model alert: A man in upstate New York bought all the newsstand copies of a newspaper so nobody would see the news about his DUI arrest.

Online

• MobileSyrup speaks to former Shomi employees about the downfall of that company.
• Some online publishers are starting to sour on Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, mainly because those pages’ addresses start with google.com.
• RIP @BreakingNews. (Announced in December.)

News about people

Saying goodbye to @CTVMontreal technical director Dave Maynard, who's retiring after 40 years! pic.twitter.com/0e36oGtjk5

— Stéphane Giroux (@SGirouxCTV) December 21, 2016

• Dave Maynard, the technical director at CTV Montreal who oversaw the technical side of the station and until recently directed newscasts, retired just before the holidays after 40 years. Among many other things, he oversaw the station’s upgrade to high definition and the creation of its new studio.
• NBC News won the Megyn Kelly sweepstakes. She’ll host an unnamed one-hour daytime show as well as a weekly Sunday night show, details to be determined later.
• Nathalie Normandeau has settled her legal case against Cogeco Media. The latter fired her from a job at FM93 after she was arrested in a UPAC investigation.
• Pierre Houde didn’t call Tuesday’s Canadiens game in Nashville because his wife had emergency surgery in Tampa. RDS viewers got Alain Crête instead.
• Lauren Strapagiel has been named managing editor for Canada at BuzzFeed. She succeeds former Montrealer Craig Silverman, who still works out of Toronto but is on a media beat now.
• If the name David Fahrenthold means anything to you, the Washington Post has a first-person story from him about his coverage of the Donald Trump foundation and the Access Hollywood video.

Good reads

• The New York Times explores the difficulty of advertisers buying cheap ads automatically without having them appear on fake news sites.
• The Times on the fact-checking website Snopes, which has gotten so big it now has to deal with fake stories about itself.
• The Globe and Mail speaks to Randy Lennox, the head of content at Bell Media, about various strategies, including more of an emphasis on original programming. (Paywalled)
• An ode to the copy desk, something fast disappearing at newspapers these days.
• Stephen Harper’s former communications director on how easily the media can be distracted these days.
• 9 famous quotes from Winston Churchill that were never actually said by Winston Churchill (or were said by someone else first).
• How the quick-churn online media can take an out-of-context quote and turn it into an outrage story.

Jobs

• Producteur(trice) associé(e), Vice (Montreal) (deadline: Jan. 6)
• National investigative journalist, Global News (Toronto, deadline: Jan. 20)
• Toronto Star summer reporting internship (deadline: Jan. 30)
• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)

News about news

• Facebook is trying to address its fake news problem in part by working with third parties (including Associated Press) to flag stories that are disputed by reputable sources. This wouldn’t block or delete links to them, but would make sure users are aware that the facts are disputed before they’re shared.
• Ryerson University is hosting an academic conference on local news next June.
• Canadaland reveals CBC is posting sponsored content to its website, and hasn’t perfected the wall between that and news.

At the CRTC

• The CRTC has approved the acquisition of Manitoba’s MTS by Bell. The CRTC decision concerns only the MTS television provider licence, and an associated licence for its video-on-demand programming, so this approval was expected. The bigger part of the acquisition is MTS’s wireless network and other telecom services. Those don’t require approval by the CRTC, but they do need to be approved by the government, which is now the last step in the approval process for this $3.9-billion deal.
• Various forces are trying last-ditch political efforts to get the CRTC to reverse its decision on simultaneous substitution during the Super Bowl, which is just over a month away. They include an anonymous website being promoted by unions (possibly connected to ACTRA?) urging Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly to take action.
• As NBC prepares to switch its Boston programming from an affiliate to a new owned-and-operated station on Jan. 1, the CRTC has approved the latter for distribution in Canada, so Canadian providers using Boston as their source of U.S. over-the-air networks can make the switch as well. The soon-to-be-former NBC affiliate, WHDH, will fill its schedule with lots of local news, game shows (Family Feud in particular) and filler programming.
• The commission’s final decisions of 2016 come out today at 4pm (the big one is its decision on basic telecommunications services).

TV

• Rogers has scrapped an in-house IPTV project and has decided to adopt one being developed by Comcast, and taking a half-billion-dollar writedown in the process. Experts say it’s the right decision, but should have been made a long time ago. Switching from classic digital cable to IPTV would allow Rogers to have features that Bell Fibe now offers, like rewinding live TV channels you weren’t watching, or cloud-based PVRs.
• Bell Media has greenlit an animated version of Corner Gas. 13 half-hour episodes, to air sometime in the 2017-18 season. The original cast will voice the characters, though they have to cast for Emma in light of actress Janet Wright’s death.
• The Canadian Press reviews the year in online streaming services, and notes that the launch of Amazon Prime Video in Canada has been a disappointment in terms of content selection so far.
• Télé-Québec is bringing back its acclaimed hospital documentary show De Garde 24/7, with new doctors, who all seem to be young and attractive, but that’s probably just a coincidence.
• CBC is airing the P.K. Subban Just For Laughs gala, taped just a month after he was traded to the Nashville Predators, on Jan. 2.

Radio

• Terry DiMonte and Ted Bird did a Christmas podcast together, during which they talk about things like DiMonte’s decision to leave CHOM for a job in Calgary. Nostalgic radio listeners are already clamouring for them to be permanently reunited again. Don’t hold your breath. (UPDATE: It’s been taken down because Bell Media wasn’t happy with it, according to Bird.)
• Still no news out of TTP Media, but the on-air message on CFNV 940 AM has changed. And Industry Canada’s database no longer lists the station as on-air testing.

Print

First day in the new @globeandmail newsroom. pic.twitter.com/nnwi8KQv5Z

— Affan Chowdhry???? (@affanchowdhry) December 18, 2016

Online

• BazzoMag, the tablet magazine that came out of Marie-France Bazzo’s cancelled Bazzo.tv, has (like the TV series) been shut down for failure to attract enough revenue that isn’t a subsidy or grant.

News about people

https://twitter.com/DMacpGaz/status/810108537930207232

• Alexandre Despatie, who was let go from Breakfast Television Montreal a year ago and had a temporary job with Radio-Canada’s Olympic coverage this summer, was hired as a fill-in host on CKOI’s afternoon show. The station says it would like to keep him in some capacity going forward.
• More Postmedia buyout announcements include Cam Cole of the Vancouver Sun. The Montreal Gazette is losing provincial politics columnist Don Macpherson (though he will write weekly as a freelancer) and business reporter Paul Delean (whose weekly Tax Strategy and monthly Gazette Portfolio columns are being retired as well).
• Keith Leslie is retiring as Queen’s Park correspondent for The Canadian Press.

Obituaries

• Bob Moir, executive producer of CBC Sports

Jobs

• Producteur(trice) associé(e), Vice (Montreal) (deadline: Jan. 6)
• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)

Happy holidays, folks. I’m assuming little news will break over the holidays, so I might take a break from this as well until January. If something crazy happens, though, I won’t be away from my Twitter for long.

News about news

• Canada’s spy agency can’t confirm whether it’s spying on journalists. The Toronto Star had the story this morning, apparently unaware that La Presse had secured the exclusive on it. This development is unsurprising since, besides the difficulty in defining who is and isn’t a journalist, one would not expect one’s spy agency to provide any such assurances unless they were required to by law.
• Influence Communication has come out with its media zeitgeist for 2016. There’s one for Quebec, one for Canada and one for the world. Among its findings is that francophones outside Quebec are basically ignored.
• The FPJQ has come out against a proposed law by the Quebec government that, while seemingly protects whistleblowers, does so only when the acts they’re denouncing are a threat to public or environmental safety.
• BuzzFeed is looking for a reporter “to cover Muslim life and Islamophobia in America.”

At the CRTC

• The commission has reiterated a preliminary view that Internet providers can’t block websites without its approval (and such approval would not be given lightly) regardless of a new Quebec law that would make that mandatory for a Loto-Québec-provided list of illegal gambling websites. There’s a court case pending over this, so that view could be overturned by a higher authority.
• During hearings over the renewal of its licences recently, the CRTC asked Corus (which runs The Disney Channel, Teletoon, YTV and other youth channels in Canada) how long its contract with Disney lasts. Corus wrote in a letter that Disney won’t give it permission to tell the commission (even confidentially) that information. I imagine the commission won’t like that.
• Yet another transmitter being converted from AM to FM, in Channel-Port-aux-Basques, N.L.

Verne signs off from college football one final time. pic.twitter.com/HKWeh84Pp8

— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 10, 2016

TV

• Verne Lundquist called his last college football game for CBS after 17 years there, and more than 40 in broadcasting.
• CTV Montreal now has a new segment on the 11:30pm newscast called The Last Word, in which the anchor reads viewer tweets and Facebook comments about some issue of the day. (It’s not actually the last word, it comes just after sports and before the last commercial break before the wrap-up.)
• Videotron finally added some long-awaited HD channels, including CTV News Channel and The Comedy Network. But they’re only available in areas that have modernized networks and on next-generation receivers capable of decoding MPEG-4.
• A bunch of TV channels are on free preview over the holidays on most major providers. The below are available on Videotron, Bell, Cogeco and Shaw until Jan. 16 unless otherwise indicated.
  • Animal Planet (to Jan. 10)
  • Bloomberg TV Canada (to Feb. 28 on Videotron)
  • Canal D
  • Canal Vie
  • CASA
  • CHRGD (to Jan. 31 on Videotron)
  • Cooking Channel (formerly W Movies, to Jan. 31)
  • Euronews (Videotron)
  • Évasion
  • Fight Network (to Jan. 2 on Bell, Shaw and Cogeco)
  • Food Network (to Jan. 4)
  • HIFI (to Jan. 1 on Bell and Shaw)
  • History (to Jan. 4)
  • Hollywood Suite (to Jan. 7 on Bell and Shaw)
  • Gusto (to Jan. 10)
  • ICI Artv
  • ICI Explora
  • Investigation (fr)
  • Love Nature (to Jan. 1)
  • MAX (formerly Musimax)
  • Mezzo Live HD (to Dec. 31 on Bell)
  • MusiquePlus
  • Planète+ (Videotron)
  • RDS
  • RDS2
  • RDS Info
  • Rewind (Videotron)
  • Seasons (to Jan. 27 on Bell, Jan. 3 on Cogeco)
  • Silver Screen Classics (Videotron)
  • Smithsonian Channel (to Jan. 1 on Bell and Shaw)
  • TSN (to Jan. 7 on Shaw)
  • Vrak
  • Z
  • Zeste
• The MLS Cup final attracted 1.5 million viewers to TSN/RDS on Saturday, setting yet another new record for viewership to an MLS game. Since Toronto was in the final and Montreal wasn’t, less than 100,000 of that viewership was on RDS.
• Global launched its Durham region local news operation. Global News was there.
• The Bell Media drama Cardinal has a debut date: Jan. 24 on Crave TV, Jan. 25 on CTV and Jan. 26 on Super Écran. CTV thinks it’s significant that this show is taking over the Designated Survivor timeslot for the winter.

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Radio

• 98.5fm has inaugurated what it calls the Espace Jean-Lapierre, in honour of their former political columnist. It’s a communal meeting space/waiting room for guests.
• CBC’s The Vinyl Café is going on hiatus as host Stuart McLean undergoes cancer treatment again.

Dernier deadline au 2050 de Bleury. Vague impression de chaos. pic.twitter.com/SU2SBfwueI

— Brian Myles (@brianmyles) December 10, 2016

Print

• Two newspapers moved last weekend: The Globe and Mail to its new building in Toronto, and Le Devoir to new offices on Berri St. Naturally both wrote sappy stories about their histories.
• More departures at the Montreal Gazette newsroom this week: lifestyle journalist Susan Semenak, universities reporter Karen Seidman, editor Evangeline Sadler and photographer John Kenney.
• La Presse is eliminating some positions, reassigning people and choosing not to fill some vacant jobs. No one is getting a pink slip, though.
• Metro Ottawa’s office is being moved to Nepean so Torstar can save on overhead costs and foster “further collaboration” with community newspapers.
• The last issue of Sportsnet magazine as a print product.
• Good news! The Washington Post is profitable!

Online

• Amazon Prime Video launched in Canada and around the world today.
• Breaking News, the Twitter account and mobile app that focused purely on breaking news from around the world, is being shut down by owner NBC News.
• Being unable to regulate Netflix, YouTube and other video streaming services on its own, Canada is looking to gang up with other countries to rope them into a more regulated system with more contributions to Canadian programming.
• Songwriters have reached a deal with YouTube over royalties.

News about people

• More Postmedia depatures include Kathryn May of the Ottawa Citizen
• Rogers has made Maureen Holloway’s hiring as morning host on Toronto’s CHFI official. She starts Jan. 9.

Good reads

• The Washington Post on how a paranoid conspiracy theory about a Hillary Clinton child prostitution ring ended up with an armed man terrorizing a D.C. pizzeria.
• J-Source on the “death knock” — having to contact relatives, neighbours or friends of a person who has just died unexpectedly in a newsworthy story.

Obituaries

• Jennifer McClintock, aka Jennifer Foxx, radio host at Star 92.9 in Burlington, from pancreatic cancer. She chronicled her battle with the disease in an online diary.

Jobs

• Digital content editors at CTV Montreal (1-year contract; deadline: Dec. 14)
• Métro is looking for temporary fill-ins on the desk
• Ontario Bureau Chief for The Canadian Press
• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)

News about news

• Journal de Montréal columnist Richard Martineau is suing left-wing media website Ricochet for a mean-spirited but satirical article that said he died. The website is using this as a fundraising opportunity, and brought in more than $28,000 in less than a day.
• WPTZ chief meterologist Tom Messner has been inducted into the Vermont Broadcasters Hall of Fame. What surprises me is not only that such a thing exists, but that Tom Messner was not already in it. (I mean, WPTZ is technically a Plattsburgh station, but come on.) His counterpart at WCAX, Sharon Meyer, was also inducted.
• Though he called it “one of the most irresponsible pieces of journalism … I have seen in over 15 years working in the business,” the National Observer’s Michael De Souza failed to convince the National NewsMedia Council (the press council that covers Ontario and some other provinces) to agree with his condemnation of a Financial Post article about pipelines. The decision noted that De Souza did not give concrete examples of any factual inaccuracies or journalistic malfeasance on the part of the piece in question.

At the CRTC

• I tried to get some clarification from the CRTC about the status of CFNV 940 AM, whose deadline to launch passed on Nov. 21. A spokesperson tells me: “As per staff information and on the Commission’s record, 7954689 Canada Inc. has informed the Commission that it was ready to commence operations. A licence will be issued once the Commission will have received a copy of all the documents from the Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada Ministry.” Further clarification later: “The applicant has advised the Commission before its deadline and the deadline was met.” So the station can launch legally without requesting a further extension. We’re still waiting on a decision from the commission on an extension request for the English-language station at 600 AM, whose deadline passed Nov. 9.
• The commission is cutting staff at its regional offices as it restructures to work more virtually. The offices will remain open, but will have reduced services for the public. It used to be to read applications at the CRTC you had to go to a regional office and look through files. Now, everything is available online, and about the only time you hear about regional offices are when talking about individual commissioners or when someone appears at a hearing via teleconference.
• Now that a new francophone commissioner has been named (albeit temporarily), the CRTC has restarted the process of reviewing the French-language music quota for French-language commercial radio stations. A hearing date has not been set.
• The commission has approved (with no public process) transfers of ownership of two independent TV specialty channels:
  • GameTV, from Kilmer Enterprises (owned mainly by Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment chairman and minority owner Lawrence Tanenbaum) to Leonard Asper’s Anthem Sports & Entertainment (which also owns Fight Network and FNTSY Sports Network) for $4 million. GameTV is one of the few specialty services to not charge a wholesale fee to TV providers. It’s unclear if this will continue under its new owner. The acquisition was announced in August. Asper tells the commission the channel is unprofitable, but synergies might help the group turn toward profitability.
  • OUTtv, from James Shavick to Ronald N. Stern (via several holding companies), for $850,000. Stern is a major entrepreneur, and owns FP Newspapers, which owns the Winnipeg Free Press.

Shaw has withdrawn its application to renew the licence of CJBN-TV in Kenora, Ont., plans to shut station down https://t.co/B6Y2Vh24nv #CRTC pic.twitter.com/LC99oT9xgl

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) November 30, 2016

TV

• Shaw has informed the CRTC it will shut down CJBN-TV in Kenora, Ont., Canada’s smallest television station, both in terms of power (178W) and audience. What little local programming it has (including the weekly Good Morning Sunset Country) will be taken over by the Shaw TV community channel after it closes on Jan. 27. Shaw owned CJBN before it bought Global TV, and chose never to bring CJBN fully into the Global family. When Shaw Media was sold to Corus, Shaw kept the station. This summer, as Shaw was seeking renewal of its TV licences, the CRTC said it must either increase its local programming from 30 minutes to seven hours a week, or seek an exception to the policy. Shaw decided in mid-November it would pull the plug. Three jobs are being cut, and two others are moving to Shaw TV.
• Blue Ant Media is converting its radX channel into a Canadian version of BBC Earth, with natural history programming including Planet Earth. The change happens Jan. 24 with a free preview of the new channel.
• The National Football League has asked the federal government to require the CRTC to reverse its Super Bowl ad substitution decision. The first Super Bowl without simultaneous substitution is less than two months away.
• CBC has released details of its programming plans for 2017, Canada’s 150th anniversary. It starts with a New Year’s Eve special with musical performances across the country.
• RDS is starting a new long-form interview show, Zone Langlois with Geneviève Langlois, next week.
• Les Appendices, one of my favourite Quebec TV shows, is on the cancellation fence.
• Better news for Mensonges, the addikTV drama, which will get a fourth season.

Radio

• Numeris released its diary market radio ratings last week. In Quebec City, the big winner is Radio X … or Radio X and FM93 … or Radio-Canada. It’s enough to have prompted arguments among the stations, anyway. The overall central market ratings show Radio-Canada has the highest share, beating out FM93 slightly, followed by Radio X. But it’s very easy to manipulate the dials to give you whatever you want. The Journal de Québec lists the most popular shows in the market, and Quebec-wide roundups (Rouge FM leads in Gatineau, Énergie in other measured markets) are available from ActusMédias and InfoPresse. L’Avantage also has a look at the Rimouski market. Quarterly data for metered markets, including Montreal, come out this week.
• Just about every radio station puts video clips on YouTube or streams using Facebook Live these days, but CKOI is experimenting with something more formal in terms of video streaming. Once they work the kinks out, it could spread to Cogeco’s other radio stations.
• There’s pressure from both sides of a controversial issue at the FCC in the United States: Whether to weaken protections of Class A AM stations (so-called clear channel stations) so that smaller stations don’t have to drastically reduce (or even eliminate) their signals at night. The big clear-channel stations are on one side, while smaller Class D stations are on the other. These protections are why stations from far-away markets like Chicago, New York and Boston can be heard here at night, and conversely why Montreal Class A stations — TSN 690, CKAC Circulation 730 and the upcoming 940 AM station — can be heard from as far away and even farther.
• National CBC radio shows are posting full transcripts online in a way that allows people to read as they’re listening. This is being billed as a way to help Canadians with hearing difficulties or who have trouble with English, but I can imagine other technological uses as well.

Oups! L'ADQ ressuscité… @LeDevoir @gravelmatin pic.twitter.com/sFwgVSTjvO

— Karima Brikh (@KarimaBrikh) December 6, 2016

Saying goodbye to our office this week. Duct tape cake. A nice nod to the grimy carpet that has seen… a lot. pic.twitter.com/voDlz4faB9

— Jacqueline Nelson (@j2nelson) December 5, 2016

Print

• The Globe and Mail is moving into its new home on King St. E. in Toronto.
• Le Devoir is also moving, on Friday, from its long-time home on Bleury St. to new offices on St-Laurent Blvd.
• Le Devoir launched a new smartphone application. It’s simple, with a continuous stream of stories in several sections (starting with À la une) and limited ability to customize. But it’s pretty, allows some flexibility in notifications, and allows favouriting of articles. Best of all, it’s well integrated with the website, so sharing stories between the app and desktop or social media users is seamless. The app is free until March 1, after which it will be available only to subscribers.
• Rogers hasn’t announced a buyer for L’actualité magazine yet, but Alexandre Taillefer basically confirmed it’s him. That will be good news for employees.
• A restructuring of management at Rogers’s English-language magazines means Maclean’s editor-in-chief Mark Stevenson is out, while other staff take on different roles.
• Transcontinental has acquired “all B2B financial brands” from Rogers for an undisclosed sum. Included in the deal are Advisor’s Edge, Advisor’s Edge Report, Conseiller, Le journal du Conseiller, Benefits Canada, Avantages, Canadian Insurance Top Broker, Canadian Investment Review and Canadian Institutional Investment Network.
• Three jobs were cut and some restructuring is in the works for the Métro newspaper in Montreal.
• Transcontinental says its media division is no longer a core part of its business. This is usually a hint that such a division would be for sale, but more likely in this case it’s just an acknowledgment that Transcontinental’s printing division is by far its bigger money-maker. Transcontinental Media (now TC Media) has radically transformed through acquisitions and sales in recent years. It owns Métro in Montreal and most community newspapers in Quebec.

Online

• The Canadian Media Guild union is complaining about stall tactics by Vice Canada.
• Writer Colin Horgan has started something called Article Magazine. It’s a magazine. With articles.

News about people

• Barry Morgan, who was let go by CJAD, had a conversation with Mike Cohen. His door is open to future opportunities.
• Craig Silverman is the new media editor for BuzzFeed. In addition to leading the BuzzFeed Canada team in Toronto, he’ll be continuing his lifelong mission of chronicling media screwups (he was the guy who started the sadly now defunct Regret the Error corrections website).
• Jonathan Crowe, anchor of Here and Now at CBC Newfoundland and Labrador, is retiring to go into teaching. He made the announcement on the air on Tuesday.
• Cam Cole, Postmedia’s best sports columnist who doesn’t work at the Montreal Gazette, is retiring from the Vancouver Sun.
• Malcolm McNeil is retiring from The Canadian Press.
• Theresa Tedesco is leaving the Financial Post.
• James Bradshaw, who took over the media beat at the Globe and Mail from Steve Ladurantaye, is switching to covering banking in January. The Globe will find someone else to cover media, but an announcement on who will fill that job hasn’t been made yet.
• Dave Morissette has returned to CKOI, where he will be a regular contributor to the afternoon show. His day job remains as one of the main personalities at TVA Sports.
• Tanya Lapointe, who was an arts reporter with Radio-Canada but took a leave of absence a year ago, has decided not to return. She began a relationship with director Denis Villeneuve, who has been very busy of late with Hollywood movies, and she’s been helping him with them.
• Leslie Roberts, the new guy at CJAD, stopped by CTV for an interview.

Good reads

• La Presse on how Quebec celebrities manage their social media, and how everything they post there can end up being reported on as news.
• The New York Times on Bana Al-Abed, the Twitter girl from Syria whose authenticity is under question but hasn’t been debunked.

Obituaries

• Robert Gibbens, who I mentioned last week, has been given a proper obituary in the Montreal Gazette by two former colleagues who worked with him closely.
• Greg O’Neill, Globe and Mail copy editor

Jobs

• Journalist (temporary), 98.5 FM (deadline: Dec. 9)
• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)

Upcoming events

• Dec. 11: CBC Montreal Christmas Sing-In