News about news

• VICE News explains how the RCMP is manipulating the news media to support its campaign to get more legal powers for online surveillance.
• Doc Mailloux bragged about the huge settlement he got from La Presse in a libel case. Now La Presse is threatening to sue for violating a gag order on that settlement.
• The Associated Press has clarified how it makes use of the term “alt-right”.
• The stories of Yellowknife reporter John MacFadden’s dealings with authorities are getting more numerous. CBC reports on a 2013 incident where he was manhandled by a member of the courthouse staff.

At the CRTC

• Aboriginal Voices Radio, the organization that ran radio stations in major cities that were to target indigenous Canadians in urban communities, has lost its case at the Federal Court of Appeal to have it reverse a CRTC decision revoking its licences for blatant violation of its conditions of licence. This clears the way for the commission to order the stations off the air and proceed with applications from other groups to launch new indigenous stations on those frequencies in those cities. The decision says the CRTC has received 12 applications from five groups for new stations in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Ottawa.
• The CRTC has approved two new ethnic radio stations in Vancouver/Surrey (one AM, one FM) and an FM retransmitter in Surrey of an existing Vancouver ethnic station.
• The commission has published an application by Sirius XM Canada Inc. for change of ownership. Sirius XM (U.S.), John Bitove (via Obelysk Media) and Slaight Communications remain the main shareholders, but the CBC’s stake would be bought out. The total cost of the transaction is $236.4 million.
• CHIN 1540 AM in Toronto has applied to convert its FM retransmitter at 91.9 FM into its own separate station, with 42 hours of simulcast programming but 84 hours of local programming.
• The CRTC has approved a minor relocation of the FM retransmitter for Montreal ethnic station CHOU (Radio Moyen-Orient) on 104.5 FM.
• The CRTC is giving itself an extra year (so until August 2018) to deal with licence renewals for several independent television services, including Super Channel, Family Channel, Évasion, Silver Screen Classics, Explora, Télémagino, Rewind, Wild TV, Playmen, NTV in St. John’s, CFTV-DT in Leamington, Ont., and some ethnic channels. This will bring their licences in line with other CBC and independent services so that new conditions of licence can be implemented for all of them at the same time.

The CBC

• The CBC board has approved a bid by the group Broccolini to build a new Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal. The new building, to be built by 2020, would sit at the René-Lévesque Blvd./Papineau Ave. corner of its current lot, across the street from the Bell Media radio and CTV/RDS buildings. The 43-year-old tower would be kept but repurposed, and remaining land (mostly the giant parking lot) developed into housing.
• The CBC has heard everyone say it should stop competing with private broadcasters, and says it’s willing to go ad-free. But only if it gets an extra $400 million or so from the government to compensate for revenue losses and fill in the extra programming. More details of the CBC’s proposals are posted here. TVA has already come out and called the proposal “bewildering”.
• The CBC has published its quarterly financial report (PDF). It shows increases in both revenues and expenses mainly related to broadcasting the 2016 Olympics. There was also a $1 million drop in revenue from subscriptions to specialty channels (CBC News, RDI, ARTV, Explora and Documentary).

TV

• Corus’s W Network has greenlit a new The Bachelor Canada, based on the success of The Bachelorette Canada. No mention is made of the previous The Bachelor Canada, which produced two unsuccessful relationships over two seasons on City TV.
• The Cooking Channel, which launches Dec. 12 (as a rebrand of W Movies), has announced programming highlights. The channel will be available on most providers.
• The first leg of the Montreal-Toronto MLS Eastern Conference final set a record as the most-watched MLS game in TSN history, almost doubling the previous record, which was the Montreal-Toronto playoff game last year.
• Videotron looks to finally add The Comedy Network and CTV News Channel in high definition (though only for subscribers with next-generation Illico boxes), according to illicotech.com. Others are MTV Canada, E!, Gusto, Nickelodeon Canada, Treehouse and Haiti HD. There are still some more it could upgrade, like TVO, BNN and MSNBC, but Comedy and CTV News, both owned by Bell Media, were probably the most in demand.

Radio

• A man has been arrested in connection with the arson at CPAM Radio Union (CJWI 1410 AM) in Montreal.

Print

• Rogers has let its staff — and the public — know what’s happening to its French consumer magazines. It’s keeping Châtelaine, though like its English counterpart it will go down to only six issues a year. L’actualité is in the midst of a sale process. And it couldn’t find a buyer for LouLou, so that magazine is shutting down in both languages. About 60 employees will lose their jobs, though some of those could be rehired if L’actualité is sold. Rogers is meeting with staff at English magazines today (including Maclean’s) to detail staff cuts on that side.
• The National Post is reducing unsigned editorials to once a week. Several staff are leaving the paper as part of larger Postmedia cuts. They include Damon van der Linde, the Financial Post reporter based in Montreal.
• Sean Craig points out how Postmedia’s parliamentary bureau has about 1/10 the staff it had at the turn of the millennium. (And that’s not including the former Sun Media staff now part of Postmedia.)
• With serious cuts at Postmedia bringing down morale, people were not amused at news that executives got hundreds of thousands of dollars of retention bonuses. Two unions representing Postmedia employees said they should give those bonuses back.

Movies

• This critique of movie accents is really good and worth watching.

Online

• The Internet Archive, the folks behind the WayBack machine, want to mirror their library in Canada now that Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States.
• Média Boutique, which works on a business model started at Voir in which businesses buy ads through gift cards that media then sell to consumers at discounted rates, is growing its client base. It has signed with V and RNC Media.
• The Globe and Mail is moving to peer moderation of website comments in a bid to keep them civil. Peer moderation can be useful in reducing spam and hateful comments, but it also risks imposing the bias of the majority and encouraging group-think.
• Huffington Post Canada has effectively shut down its B.C. bureau.
• Narcity, the group behind MTL Blog and its spinoffs, has opened a new one in Boston.
• Netflix is making some of its content available for offline download.

After 23 years, I'm saying farewell Nov. 30 to my second family. What a privilege it has been to work @OttawaCitizen. pic.twitter.com/gwOmHVrEr7

— Janet Wilson (@JanetDWilson) November 29, 2016

News about people

• Tom Clark, host of Global’s The West Block, is leaving journalism Jan. 1. The press release seems careful not to call it a retirement, and Clark says there will be an announcement about his future in January.
• Pierre-Elliott Levasseur has been named the new president of La Presse. Guy Crevier remains publisher, but will take a step back from day-to-day management. François Pouliot examines the state of La Presse amid this transition.
• Susan Schwartz has ended her lifestyle column in the Montreal Gazette with a final goodbye. She’s still with the paper, writing news and features. There’s no formal list of columns cut by the paper, but Doug Camilli, The Watchers, Applause, Monday Calendar and Tip Sheet are among those that will no longer appear.
• J-Source is compiling a list of people at the Globe and Mail who took buyouts.
• Hugo Meunier has left La Presse to become head of digital content at the Journal de Montréal. This reverses a trend of pre-lockout JdeM staff eventually finding jobs at La Presse.
• Maureen Holloway, a former Montreal radio host who still contributes to CHOM FM in the morning, has left Corus’s Q107 to join Rogers’s CHFI-FM. Unusual for someone quitting for a competitor, she was permitted to say goodbye to her listeners on Q107.
• Dave Rogers, a former Ottawa Citizen reporter, was found dead with his wife. Their son has been charged with murder.
• More news about specific people cut at Postmedia should come this week as the deadline for responses to buyout applications passes. Some Citizen staff like Ian MacLeod, Janet Wilson and Jason Fekete announced their departures already on Twitter.
• Jane Lytvynenko, formerly of Canadaland, will now join the ranks of BuzzFeed.

Good reads

• BuzzFeed on how single moms in Britain have found a business model selling their stories about making money out of the social safety net.

Obituaries

• Robert Gibbens, journalist including a contributor to the Montreal Gazette’s business section and Financial Post up until the age of 89. No formal obituary, but a nice tribute from his granddaughter, Tina Gibbens-Tenneriello.

Jobs

• Communications officer, CBC Montreal (deadline: Dec. 4)
• Journalist (temporary), 98.5 FM (deadline: Dec. 9)
• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)

Upcoming events

• Dec. 3: CTV Montreal/TSN 690 charity hockey game in Dorval
• Dec. 11: CBC Montreal Christmas Sing-In

FPJQ

• The Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec held its conference this weekend and elected its board (all positions but those of regular administrators were acclaimed):
  • President: Stéphane Giroux (CTV Montreal)
  • Vice-president: Jean-Thomas Léveillé (La Presse)
  • Secretary-treasurer: Valérie Gaudreau (Le Soleil)
  • Administrators:
    • Michaël Nguyen (Journal de Montréal)
    • Naël Shiab (L’actualité)
    • Azeb Wolde-Giorghis (Radio-Canada)
    • Pierre St-Arnaud (Presse Canadienne)
  • Administrator from regions outside Montreal: Simon Dominé (Le Courant in Mont-Laurier)
• There were also journalists appointed to the Quebec Press Council.
• The FPJQ conference also included many discussions about issues facing the journalism industry. The best one-liners can be found by searching through the hashtag on Twitter.
• The FPJQ’s Judith Jasmin (journalism) and Antoine Désilets (photojournalism) awards were also given out.

News about news

• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has published a post explaining the measures his company will take to combat fake news. The task is a delicate one, both because fake news is hard to identify in a way everyone will agree with, and because Facebook doesn’t want to put itself in a position of having to censor the Internet.
• La Presse has suspended columnist Suzanne Colpron after discovering her stories had repeatedly plagiarized quotes from other publications, including Le Devoir. The suspension is indefinite, and surprisingly not permanent. La Clique du Plateau notes that one of Colpron’s recent columns denounced Melania Trump for plagiarizing Michelle Obama in her speech at the Republican National Convention.
• CBC remains a punching bag at Canadian Heritage committee hearings. Here’s the Globe and Mail. This week at the CRTC, TVA and V piled on, and today Maxime Bernier, candidate for the Conservative leadership, pledged to reduce the CBC’s budget. They all seem to agree on one point: The CBC should not have government subsidies to compete with private broadcasters and news outlets. CBC’s Hubert Lacroix finally had enough and wrote an open letter to the committee defending its existence.
• Donald Trump met with the New York Times, after the meeting was originally called off over a difference about what was on and off the record. The transcript is here.
• Access to information requests are often used by journalists to get things like emails between government officials that were never meant to be public. Some have even used the law to get access to emails that talk about how a government agency will respond to a journalist’s request. But Winnipeg police made use of the law for an inventive purpose: Looking into a journalist. The journalist had inquired about a police officer accused of drug trafficking, and the police queried the justice department for records about communications with the journalist. Needless to say, the media is very concerned about this.

At the CRTC

• The commission is currently holding a hearing in Laval into TV licence renewals for French-language private broadcasting groups — TVA, V, Bell Media and Corus. I’m covering the hearing for Cartt.ca, and subscribers can find the recap of Tuesday’s session here. All four companies are calling for flexibility and resisting new rules related to local news and spending on Canadian content. But TVA and V are not seeking to reduce the amount of local programming they do outside Montreal. A transcript of the hearing is here, all 63,477 words of it. And La Presse’s Vincent Brousseau-Pouliot also gives his highlights.
• The CRTC gave one-year licence renewals to major cable companies after reviewing how they’re handling their obligations to provide pick-and-pay channels (even though they only come into effect fully next week). The decision establishes “best practices” to not screw over customers, but doesn’t establish any new conditions of licence. It won’t regulate set-top box prices (which aren’t included in the $25/month skinny basic), or the price of individual channels (which are high enough to make it more expensive than buying packages) or prohibit IPTV providers from requiring Internet service be purchased first to get TV, but it suggests that providers who don’t follow these “best practices” might have conditions imposed on them next year. The one-year licence renewal isn’t punishment, but rather because many other issues related to their licences haven’t been explored yet, including community television programming, which has several outstanding complaints for major providers.

TV

• Videotron has launched its new TV packaging strategy online in advance of next week’s implementation of the new CRTC pick-and-pay regulations (though Videotron was already largely compliant and had been for years). The focus is still on custom packages, with sports channels being available at a higher tier. Most channels cost $5 à la carte, while TSN 1-5, Sportsnet regional channels, RDS 1/2 and TVA Sports 1/2 cost $15 each, the same as premium channels like TMN/HBO. In most cases it’s easier to take a pick-your-own package than build one à la carte, but there isn’t a very good option for people who want a lot of the cheaper channels.
• The Montreal Gazette’s Brendan Kelly has a story about 21 Thunder, a soccer-themed drama series for CBC that was shot in Montreal.
• Speaking of English TV series being shot in Montreal, Bill Brioux notes for Canadian Press that this seems to be an upward trend, despite 19-2 winding down and Quantico moving production to New York.
• VMedia, a new TV distribution company based in Ontario, has lost a court case against Bell Media after it launched a new service that distributed television signals over the Internet to Roku devices. VMedia interpreted its system as being part of its licensed distribution service, while Bell argued successfully that it was actually an online over-the-top service that requires Bell’s permission to rebroadcast CTV and CTV Two. The judge said ultimately it should be the CRTC resolving this issue. Allowing licensed distributors to offer channels over-the-top would allow them to compete nationwide without setting up expensive wired networks or leasing space from cable and phone companies.
• VRAK has cancelled its year-end sketch show Meilleur avant le 31, bon pareil le 1er, but it won’t get out of year-end specials entirely. It announced its new comedic news analysis show ALT will have a year-in-review special on New Year’s Eve.
• TVA is working on a dance reality show and Julie Snyder is appearing more often on Radio-Canada shows these days.
• Le clan, a Radio-Canada drama series about a man living in rural Quebec under a witness protection program, that the network buried on Saturday nights during its first season, has been picked up for a U.S. pilot in English. Maybe this, along with its popularity here, will convince the broadcaster that the show is more than just a way of fulfilling its obligations to have some dramatic television produced outside of Montreal.
• 30 vies, the English version of 19-2 and CBC’s Interrupt This Program were all nominated for the International Emmy Awards. They all came back emptyhanded.
• Sphère Média Plus, which developed 19-2 and Nouvelle adresse into English-language Canadian versions, wants to do the same with its latest hit, L’imposteur, which just wrapped up its first season on TVA. Bell Media is attached to the project.
• Canadiens behind-the-scenes docu-infomercial 24CH is back for a fifth season on Canal D, RDS, CTV Montreal and TSN. The first episode aired in French last Saturday and will air in English tonight at midnight on TSN5 and Saturday at 1:30pm on CTV Montreal. French episodes air Saturdays 6pm on Canal D and 6:30pm on RDS.
• Vice has launched Viceland in France. In Quebec, V told the CRTC on Tuesday that Vice shows will begin airing on V and MusiquePlus in February. A Quebec Viceland channel is also planned some time in 2017.

RIP CIAJ-FM Prince Rupert https://t.co/sEjwjxFcsQ #CRTC pic.twitter.com/RV5n9uUuou

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) November 17, 2016

Radio

• CFNV 940 AM had a deadline of Monday, Nov. 21, to launch. It’s broadcasting music with recorded messages asking people to report reception/interference issues, which suggests it’s still in the on-air testing phase. I’ve asked the CRTC for clarification on its status. In the meantime, it has a Twitter account, which notes in a reply that regular programming should begin at the beginning of 2017. Still no website, or even really a brand beyond its frequency. And a video posted last month and then deleted, in which partner Nicolas Tétrault shows off the transmitter site, has been reposted to YouTube.
• A Winnipeg Free Press profile of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network notes that it plans a U.S. expansion, but also that it has made a proposal to re-establish a network of urban indigenous radio stations that was once Aboriginal Voices Radio. AVR lost its licences for stations in Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver last year after the CRTC decided its repeated violations of licence conditions were too much. It has called for new applications for those frequencies, with indigenous stations given priority, but that process is on hold while AVR appeals the CRTC’s decision.
• Bell Media has re-assembled a 24-station network that will broadcast the Grey Cup on Sunday. It includes TSN Radio stations, naturally, but also many others. It’s much heavier out west than east, with only two stations east of Ottawa: Montreal’s TSN 690 and Halifax’s News 95.7.

Print

• The Montreal Gazette made several minor changes on Monday, moving local business, arts and life stories into the A section so that the Financial Post section can be the same throughout the chain. The (still local) editorial page moves to the back of the National Post section, and starting next week the space for sports statistics will be reduced. And a change to the font used in the Sudoku puzzle has been reverted. Unannounced are some cuts to freelance content. They include the Monday Calendar, which I had compiled every week (except those without a Monday paper) since it started in 2008, and gossip columnist Doug Camilli. His last column was Friday.
• Alexandre Taillefer, the entrepreneur who launched Téo Taxi and bought Voir, says he’s in discussions about buying Rogers’s French-language magazines including L’actualité. That doesn’t mean it’ll happen, or that he’s the only potential buyer, but it’s an encouraging prospect.
• Canadaland criticized a Globe and Mail story about a diamond mine that resulted from a journalist being given a free trip. This was disclosed in the story, but its failure to speak to critics of the mine caused it to lack balance and caused problems, the public editor agreed.
• The Regina Leader-Post is closing its mailroom facilities, outsourcing inserts to Saskatoon.
• Charlie Hebdo is launching a German version.

Movies

• The Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal has publicly apologized for screening the film Of the North at last year’s festival. The documentary, which is a collection of video the (white) creator found on YouTube, was condemned by indigenous groups of being racist, presenting a caricatured vision of what life is like in the arctic.

Online/other

• The CBC podcast Someone Knows Something, aka Canadian Serial, is back for a second season.
• Gilbert Rozon has apologized after an ad for Montreal’s 375th anniversary showed only white Quebec artists. Rozon is rightfully accepting the blame, but it’s as much an indication of the whiteness of the artistic community (particularly its biggest stars) as it is the cluelessness of the organizing committee.
• Wind Mobile, now owned by Shaw, has been renamed as Freedom Mobile. The Globe and Mail suggests they didn’t just go with Shaw Mobile mainly because they need to improve the network before attaching that brand to it.

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News about people

• Andray Domise, a columnist for Maclean’s and former co-host of the Canadaland Commons podcast, has been charged with domestic violence. He says he was actually the one being abused in the relationship.
• Geoffré Samson, a journalist with Charlevoix radio station CIHO-FM, got into trouble with his boss when he complained during the FPJQ conference about the local MNA getting mad if he didn’t follow the spin of her press releases. She immediately took charge and arranged for the station to apologize. The journalist says he was misinterpreted.
• The New York Times profiles Dylan Ratigan, who left a hosting job at MSNBC and is now using technology to try to change the world.
• Glenn Beck, a former Fox News blowhard, has undergone a transformation and is now a major Donald Trump critic. The New York Times interviews him.
• James Mirtle has left the Globe and Mail to be editor-in-chief of The Athletic, a sports news start-up. He joins fellow former newspaper columnist Sean Fitz-Gerald.

Good reads

• The New York Times on how a single tweet based on an incorrect assumption led to partisan news coverage and eventually a tweet by Donald Trump.
• A fake news writer speaks to the Washington Post about how right-wing people don’t fact-check his stories and he feels bad that Donald Trump, who he hates, has ended up in the White House because of people like him and conspiracy theories and false information like what he peddles that people eat up.

Obituaries

• Israel Switzer, Canadian cable TV pioneer

Jobs

• National Observer investigative reporter in Ontario (deadline: Nov. 30)
• Communications officer, CBC Montreal (deadline: Dec. 4)
• Journalist (temporary), 98.5 FM (deadline: Dec. 9)
• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)

Upcoming events

• Nov. 22-24: CRTC hearing on French-language TV licence renewals in Laval
• Dec. 11: CBC Montreal Christmas Sing-In

News about news

• A Ryerson University research project looked at local news coverage in eight communities. Unfortunately that’s far too small a sample size to come to any real conclusions.
• The federal heritage parliamentary committee continues hearing complaints from people about the CBC. The Globe and Mail was the latest one.
• The Quebec government is giving a new commission of inquiry into the protection of journalists’ sources until 2018 to file its report.
• There are plenty of stories about journalists and minorities being the targets of online verbal abuse. This one from a Washington Post fact-checker is interesting, if only because the subject started asking questions of her abusers and found many of them backed down quickly when they realized they were shouting at a real person.
• Blacklock’s Reporter, the paywalled news service covering the federal government, has lost a court case against the people they’re reporting on after they found out that one of the publication’s articles was shared among staff at the Finance Department who didn’t subscribe to the publication. The judge found the sharing over email clearly fell under the fair dealing protection.
• A bizarre situation in Alberta where a judge refrained in a court decision from naming the man he had convicted of Internet luring of an 11-year-old. He did so because he apparently wanted to protect the man from vigilantes who might seek alternative justice. But while the victim’s name is subject to a publication ban, the offender’s is not (none was requested), so CBC is naming him anyway.

At the CRTC

• Days before a hearing on TV licence renewals, a temporary fill-in CRTC commissioner has been named: civil servant Judith LaRocque. She has a six-month term, enough to serve as a francophone commissioner studying the renewals of TVA and V.
• CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais gave a keynote speech to the Canadian chapter of the International Institute of Communications today. The speech goes over the past four years of the commission’s work (what a coincidence, that happens to be the amount of time he’s been there) and is mainly self-congratulatory. He also criticizes Canada’s television creative community for overstating the effect of a reduction in Canadian content requirements, he criticizes the “news media” for “spilled ink and exhaled air”, he criticizes online media for not having the training to replace traditional media reporters, he criticizes Shomi for pulling the plug too early and being lazy, and he criticizes “naysayers” in general for making “false and misleading statements.”

TV

• An interesting featurette from Mohawk Girls on how the series incorporates the Mohawk language into its show.
• Corus has launched History Vault, a subscription video-on-demand service of History’s archival collection, for $5.50 a month.

Radio

• Last week the deadline passed for the launch of the TTP Media station at 600 AM in Montreal. The commission confirmed to me that an application for an extension to that deadline has been filed, but no decision has been reached yet. The last extension said it would be the final one, but the CRTC said the same two years ago about 940 and gave another extension anyway. They have until Nov. 21 to inform the commission that they are ready to launch the 940 station, which has been doing some on-air testing.
• There was an on-air occupation by staff of Radio Centre-Ville (CINQ-FM 102.3) on the weekend. Contributors to the community-run ethnic radio station are complaining about management decisions to rent out airtime to stem a financial crisis. They’ve called for a special general assembly so they can discuss and vote on what to do about the situation.
• West Island Gazette columnist Victor Schukov writes that the West Island needs its own radio station. He dismissed The Jewel 106.7 in Hudson (with comments that pissed off staff at that station), and noted that CFOX, the former West Island AM radio station, shut down because it wouldn’t work financially. Setting aside the lack of available FM frequencies, there doesn’t seem to be much of a case that West Islanders are not properly served by CJAD or other stations that broadcast from downtown.

No Gazette employee I worked with was ever finer than office manager June Thompson who leaves the newspaper today after 38 years. pic.twitter.com/q8bVcXuBcb

— Terry Mosher (@TerryMosher1) November 11, 2016

Print

• Friday was the last day for two managers at the Montreal Gazette whose jobs are being eliminated as part of the latest major staff cut at Postmedia: Photo editor Marcos Townsend and newsroom administrator June Thompson. The latter, who has been holding the newsroom together for decades, got a special drawing from the local cartoonist.
• There’s been a major reorganization of newsroom management jobs at the Toronto Star. This memo gives the details.
• The New York Observer has ended its print edition.

Online

• Radio-Canada has launched a new website for francophone aboriginals and started an internship program. Here’s a note from its new editor-in-chief.
• Urbania is the latest partner that will get some content tacked on to La Presse+ for free.
• The CBC issued a press release defending its legal threats against podcast app developers who use ads to get revenue from those apps. Because the apps can be used to download CBC podcasts, it’s considered a commercial use of those podcasts, and the CBC says they need permission. The broadcaster is interpreting someone downloading a podcast using a podcast app as the podcast developer making “use” of CBC content.
• AMC Networks has bought a minority stake in Funny or Die, which will likely mean the website working more closely with TV channel IFC.
• Google has decided to make fake news sites ineligible for its Google AdSense platform, and Facebook is working to cut down on people being fooled by false news, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg writing a note to users.

Movies

• The CBC has launched a new fund to assist underrepresented Candian filmmakers creating fictional works. “Eligible projects will be judged solely on creative merit.”

News about people

• Sean Fitz-Gerald has a new job at a Toronto-based sports journalism startup.
• Mike Bullard is in more legal trouble related to how he’s allegedly treating his ex-girlfriend.

Obituaries

• Gwen Ifill, PBS news anchor
• Janet Wright, actress (Corner Gas)
• Cella Irvine, digital media manager and former About.com leader

Jobs

• California bureau, Globe and Mail
• Communications officer, CBC Montreal
• Journalist (temporary), 98.5 FM (deadline: Dec. 9)
• Bourse AJIQ-Rogers (deadline: Feb. 13)

Upcoming events

• Nov. 18-20: FPJQ conference in Mont-Saint-Sauveur
• Nov. 22-24: CRTC hearing on French-language TV licence renewals in Laval
• Dec. 11: CBC Montreal Christmas Sing-In

And a bunch of other stuff that has nothing to do with what happened in the midwest U.S. yesterday.

News about news

• A contempt of court charge against Andew Douglas of Halifax’s Frank magazine has been dropped. Douglas had been accused of violating a publication ban, but argued the information had been gathered independently and didn’t come from the court.
• People are angry that Global BC ran video of a teen being killed. They’ve started a petition demanding resignations, because that’s always the proper remedy to a disagreement. CBC News published an editor’s note on why it chose not to publish the video.
• The Canadian Press is looking to update its stylebook to take into account changing vocabulary related to marginalized communities. Or, for you red-state folks, to make it more politically correct.
• CTV reporter Stéphane Giroux will be the new president of the FPJQ, Quebec’s journalist association. No other candidate submitted before the deadline. The other executive positions were also elected by acclamation, but there are 10 candidates for the four administrator positions available.
• Rolling Stone magazine and reporter Sabrina Erdely have been ordered to pay $3 million after losing a defamation lawsuit over the since debunked story of a rape on a university campus.

At the CRTC

• The commission has released what it calls a policy about blocking of nuisance phone calls. It addresses the main points of the policy (What is a nuisance call? Do you block or just redirect? Do you implement network-wide or allow subscribers to choose?), but mainly kicks the can down the road hoping for more solutions from the industry. One thing it is concretely moving toward, however, is blocking of calls with blatantly illegitimate caller IDs (000-0000, your number, or a local number when it’s a long-distance call).
• The CBC has filed an “as-built” application with the CRTC for CBMT-DT Montreal (CBC Television) so that the commission’s records match what is actually being used. The location, height and signal range are identical, but the transmitter power is actually 363,000 watts ERP instead of 436,340W.

Well, we knew this day would come. The old #CornerGas station set has to finally come down. But, GOOD NEWS… >> https://t.co/dmDiNvjICT pic.twitter.com/NfPK2nCsPn

— Brent Butt (@BrentButt) November 4, 2016

TV

• The Corner Gas set in Rouleau, Sask., was torn down, having deteriorated beyond the point of being safe.
• TVA has decided not to renew Le Banquier, the game show based on Deal or No Deal. This cuts TVA’s last ties with Julie Snyder, who was once the biggest name at the network.
• A documentary on PK Subban produced by PK fan Louis Morissette will air on RDS and Canal D in French on Nov. 16, and on HBO Canada on Nov. 18.
• CHCH Television in Hamilton, Ont., has sold its historic home as it downsizes.
• Former Canadien Francis Bouillon hosts a new reality series on Z.
• Bell TV now has an app for Apple TV allowing subscribers to use an Apple TV box as a second set-top box. It gives access to most but not all channels, and doesn’t have all features.

Radio

• Montreal’s 91.9 Sports (CKLX-FM) has signed a five-year deal to broadcast games of the Laval Rocket American Hockey League team, starting next season when they move from St. John’s. This is the Canadiens’ farm team, though interest in its games won’t be nearly as much as those of the Canadiens themselves. Cogeco recently announced that its rights to Canadiens games on 98.5 FM and other stations has been extended to 2023.
• The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council forced CHOI-FM in Quebec City to acknowledge on air that it failed to provide accurate information during a broadcast of André Arthur’s show in February, during which he accused an animal shelter of mistreating animals, and despite the shelter showing it didn’t, repeated that accusation four days later.
• Radio-Canada has updated its ICI Première app, which now gives users access to the Première Plus platform of on-demand content.
• South Asian Broadcasting has agreed to buy Toronto’s CIRV-FM. The deal requires CRTC approval.
• The CRTC has received applications for new radio stations in several markets, and the first step is a public consultation where it asks for opinions on whether the market can sustain another station (and whether there’s other interest in a new application). This week it published notices for:
  • Brampton, Ont. (two ethnic stations at 1190 AM)
  • St. John’s, N.L. (commercial station at 98.3 FM)
  • Ottawa-Gatineau (ethnic station at 1630 AM)

Print

• Rogers has begun selling off the magazines it put for sale. Marketing will go to Brunico Communications, owner of Strategy Magazine, Media in Canada and others. Canadian Grocer, Pharmacy Practice+, Profession Santé and The Medical Post go to American company EnsembleIQ. No word yet on the French consumer magazines.
• The Wall Street Journal is cutting dozens of jobs.
• Le Devoir wants to shut down a company whose purpose was to allow people to invest in the newspaper in the 1990s. The company owes about as much to Le Devoir as it’s worth, so those investors won’t see any money.
• The Halifax Chronicle Herald, whose staff has been on strike for almost a year now, has published another open letter from its CEO. The union (which didn’t appreciate that) is arguing the company is refusing to negotiate.
• Fort McMurray Today is no longer a daily newspaper. It’s dropping from six editions a week to two.
• Postmedia has given employees until Friday to apply for its buyout offer.
• Members of the Ottawa Citizen’s union have a clause in their contract that protects them from layoffs so long as the paper uses freelancers. So the paper is going to stop using freelancers.
• For the Chicago Cubs, a World Series championship comes once in 108 years. The Chicago Tribune is profiting from the occasion with merchandising.

Online

• CBC has launched its controversial opinion page. At the same time, it announced that Neil MacDonald, whose analyses has riled many that don’t agree with him, is being reassigned to the opinion section and will opine full-time, which means no more reporting for him. The new project will require changes to the CBC’s journalistic standards and practices.
• CBC has also begun threatening legal action against developers of podcast apps supported by advertising. Why? Because you can download CBC podcasts with them and then the ads in the app constitute commercial use. Cory Doctorow is not amused, and neither is Michael Geist, unsurprisingly.
• Bell says CraveTV has passed the million subscriber mark. Usual grains of salt to be applied because many people get Crave bundled as part of TV packages so don’t pay full price for it.

@seanrcampbell @TSN690 Ready to go with My play by play man for tonight. pic.twitter.com/u3Drx9LRIX

— Sergio Momesso (@SergioMomesso36) November 9, 2016

News about people

• TSN 690’s Sean Campbell got his first taste of Canadiens play-by-play filling in for Dan Robertson during Tuesday’s Canadiens game.
• Sam Zniber, former program director at 92.5 The Beat, has been hired as “Vice President and Strategic Consultant” at Radio Intelligence, a consulting firm.
• Mutsumi Takahashi marked 30 years as anchor at CTV Montreal.
• Erin Davis is retiring as morning host at Toronto’s CHFI 98.1.
• Lauren Pelley is the latest Toronto Star journalist to announce her departure on Twitter. She joins Sean Fitz-Gerald and others.
• Jennifer Tryon, who used to be based in Montreal, has left Global News. She has her crafting work to keep her busy.
• Jessica A. Dionne has been promoted to assistant promotions manager at Bell Media radio stations in Montreal. She works under Linda Fraraccio, just like she did when they were both at The Beat.

Jobs

• News editor, Canadaland
• California bureau, Globe and Mail
• Communications officer, CBC Montreal

Upcoming events

• Nov. 10: “L’Affaire Lagacé: A Free Press in the Surveillance State”, panel discussion at McGill
• Nov. 18-20: FPJQ conference in Mont-Saint-Sauveur
• Nov. 22-24: CRTC hearing on French-language TV licence renewals in Laval
• Dec. 11: CBC Montreal Christmas Sing-In

Because apparently things happened in the media universe this week that didn’t involve Patrick Lagacé…

News about news

• In case you haven’t seen Lagacé’s face everywhere, the New York Times can summarize the story for you.
• The Boston Globe is trying something new: Getting a consortium of non-profit interests to financially support them maintaining a classical music critic. The paper says it will pay close attention to any conflicts, but if this becomes a trend, future media outlets may not be as scrutinizing.
• Radio-Canada has a story about a freelance photographer on the South Shore working for the local newspaper but also the city government it covers. The paper knew about the arrangement and is OK with it because he’s a freelancer. He says he has the ability to switch hats — even when covering the same event for both parties — and he’s a photographer, not a reporter. Expect this kind of thing to become more common as news media reduce their workforce and rely more on poorly paid freelancers who need other jobs to pay the bills.
• The Rebel will get to go to that climate conference as journalists after all.

At the CRTC

• Groupe V Média, which owns V, MusiquePlus and Max (formerly Musimax) has filed a complaint against Bell Canada over the latter’s decision to repackage those two specialty channels. Bell has three packages, Good, Better and Best (Bon, Mieux and Meilleur in Quebec) and is moving them from the Good/Bon ($35/month) to Best/Meilleur ($98/month) in addition to having them available à la carte as the CRTC requires. V looked at the numbers and concluded that this would cost them a lot of subscribers. The exact numbers are redacted, but apparently the vast majority of Bell subscribers who have one of these three packages (many others are on grandfathered packages) have the lowest level. And not like slightly more than half, more like about 95%. This could cost them hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The CRTC has ordered Bell to keep MP and Max in their lowest-tier package until this is resolved. (You can download the complaint letter here. The CRTC has expedited the process and the deadline to comment is tonight at 8pm ET.)
• The commission is holding off on imposing accuracy rules for closed captioning after broadcasters formed a working group that will propose an alternative method. They have two years to do so.
• The CRTC has set new standard conditions of licence for TV services. Among the changes, pay TV channels like The Movie Network, Super Channel and Family can now broadcast ads, there is no limit on the broadcast of music videos (since MuchMusic, MusiquePlus et al no longer have genre protection), and pay-per-view and video-on-demand services no longer have to give 100% of revenues from distribution of Canadian feature films to their creators. Other changes could come as a result of a hearing later this month looking at licence renewals for the major broadcasters and a review of local and community programming.
• The commission has released a working document in advance of the hearing on big companies’ TV licence renewals, which outlines some key issues to be discussed. Besides the usual discussions of Canadian programming expenditure requirements, issues include:
  • OMNI’s application for mandatory distribution
  • Bell’s proposal to shut down 40 rebroadcasting transmitters
  • Corus’s requests for exceptions to local programming quotas (though most of those requests have been dropped)
  • Local programming requirements for TVA and V stations in Quebec
  • A proposal by the CRTC to simplify the process of TV stations changing frequency as a result of the upcoming reallocation of 600 MHz to mobile. The new process would require approval of technical changes by Industry Canada but not by the CRTC so that “tight” deadlines could be met.
• Bell has won the right to appeal the CRTC decision on Super Bowl simultaneous substitution, but the court has turned down a request to suspend the decision until the outcome of the case. This means that Super Bowl LI will likely be available with American ads on Fox.

TV

• Quebecor Media is cutting 220 jobs, including 125 at subsidiary TVA Group, representing about 8% of its workforce. There are few details, other than centralization of advertising sales and the shutdown of two small magazines.
• The New York Times did a profile on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, which plans to expand to the United States next year.
• Radio-Canada has a new strategy for broadcasting Quebec movies, with a weekly window on Tou.tv Extra (Sundays 8pm), ARTV (Sundays 9pm and Thursdays 10pm) and Radio-Canada Télé (Fridays 11pm) showing a movie of the week without commercials. It begins this Sunday with Henri, Henri.
• The final cuts at CBC/Radio-Canada out of those announced in 2014 will be final when production of the drama Auberge du chien noir ends and those involved laid off. It’s the last of these series that is produced in-house.
• Bell Media is producing a documentary on the Tragically Hip’s Man Machine Poem tour.
• Hulu has reached a major deal with Disney (ABC) and Fox to add live streaming of their channels to its service, taking it one step closer to being able to offer a skinny-cable-like over-the-top package.
• Northwest Cable News, a 24-hour regional news channel serving the U.S. Pacific Northwest, is shutting down, which will kill 20 jobs. This could be a bad omen for Global’s BC News 1, another regional news channel that’s still losing millions of dollars a year.

Today CBC celebrates its 80th birthday! From 1967, here's a short history of CBC Radio: https://t.co/PxRicbZ35F @cbcradio pic.twitter.com/Xdx0VDfimr

— CBC Archives (@cbc_archives) November 2, 2016

Radio

• Some updates since the news that TTP Media purchased the AM broadcasting transmitter in Kahnawake from Cogeco Media. Testing has begun for the 940 AM station, which was transmitting a high-pitched tone (likely to tune the antenna and confirm signal strength at short distances) during the day last week. Industry Canada confirms its status as “on-air testing” and lists a callsign: CFNV. The Kahnawake council also sent out a note confirming the testing at 940. Reception reports have been coming in from eastern Ontario and the northern U.S. Because 940 is a clear channel, its reach should be much farther when it begins testing at night. Still no public statement from the owners, or any news about studios, talent or a launch date. There’s also no news about 600 AM, which has a week until its next deadline to launch (expect a request for an extension).
• CKUT has launched a new show for and by the Inuit community that’s at least partly in Inuktitut.
• Charles Adler is coming back to radio, with a new radio show syndicated on Corus’s AM talk stations, including his former home base of CJOB Winnipeg. He’ll host a U.S. election special next week.

Print

• Business magazine Les Affaires is going from about weekly to about biweekly (42 to 28 issues a year). Les Affaires is owned by TC Media, which among other things plans to centralize page layout at the same place it does layout for all its community newspapers. No word yet on how many jobs will be cut.
• La Presse dug into Groupe TVA’s financial report, and found that its magazine division TVA Publications is not doing well.
• Incidentally, Monday was apparently the deadline to express interest in buying Rogers’s French magazines, according to TVA Nouvelles.
• As part of Quebecor’s triple-digit job cut, TVA Publications will be shutting down two magazines: Chez Soi (home decor, 10x a year, 410,000 average print readers) and Tellement Bon (recipes, 6x a year). TVA Publications has plenty of other magazines whose content overlaps.
• The Toronto Star released its financial results, and while the bottom line is good, just about all the details are bad. Star Touch, the La Presse-like tablet app, has about a third of the expected readers, but the Star is staying committed to it.
• An 18.5% drop in print advertising revenue and a 21.4% increase in digital ad revenue means a third of the New York Times’ ad revenue comes from digital.
• La Presse is cutting eight jobs in photo and video production.
• A major U.S. newspaper takeover, Gannett buying Tronc, looks like it won’t happen after all.

Online

• Goodbye Vine.
• CBC’s Heather Conway defends the broadcaster’s move to put more opinion online in a “get the facts” statement.
• Those “around the web” or “you might also like” or “promoted stories” ads that link to sometimes legitimate and sometimes really sketchy stories elsewhere on the web are getting so bad that publishers are rethinking whether to have them despite the revenue they bring in.
• Gawker has settled with Hulk Hogan, whose lawsuit against it ended up killing the website. Hogan gets $31 million plus a cut of the sale of Gawker to Univision.
• Concordia University journalism students are planning a live webcast news special covering the U.S. presidential election results on Tuesday.

Hey – look what just happened here! Congrats @robynlisaflynn #superstar pic.twitter.com/i6ht7V64CP

— Mitch Melnick (@HunterZThompson) November 1, 2016

News about people

• Michel Bissonnette has been hired to replace the retiring Louis Lalande as head of Radio-Canada. Bissonnette leaves production company Zone 3 (which produces a whole bunch of Quebec TV series, including Infoman, Les Francs-Tireurs, Code F. and Marina Orsini), where he was president. Richard Therrien summarizes his career.
• Robyn Flynn is the employee of the month at Bell Media Radio in Montreal
• Michel Boyer, a former Bell Media reporter in Montreal whose career took him out to Edmonton, is taking on a new job at CTV’s national bureau in Ottawa.
• Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey has had his contract extended to 2020.
• Serena Thadani-Anthony, a former HR director at CBC, who took over on an interim basis after the Ghomeshi affair, is suing the corporation because she believes it conspired to fire her.

Good reads

• The Columbia Journalism Review on the power and risk of calling someone a liar in a news story.

Jobs

• Montreal Gazette reporting and editing summer internships (deadline Nov. 4)
• News editor, Canadaland

Upcoming events

• Nov. 18-20: FPJQ conference in Mont-Saint-Sauveur
• Dec. 11: CBC Christmas Sing-In

Obituaries

• Dave Broadfoot, comedian
• Jean Thivierge, Radio-Canada parliamentary correspondent

News about news

• Finalists for the FPJQ’s Judith Jasmin awards have been announced. The awards honour the best in Quebec journalism. Since you’re looking for the penis-measuring stuff, here’s how it breaks down by organization:
  • La Presse: 9 (including a sweep of the opinion category)
  • Radio-Canada: 5
  • Le Devoir: 2
  • Montreal Gazette (Postmedia): 2
  • Journal de Montréal (Quebecor): 2
  • Le Droit (Capitales Médias): 1
  • Le Guide de Montréal-Nord (TC Media): 1
  • Canal D (Bell Media): 1
• Speaking of the FPJQ, the organization also does its elections during its annual conference. The candidate for president is a familiar name to anglo Montrealers: CTV’s Stéphane Giroux, who has been on the board for three years.
• CBC executives appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage on Tuesday. We didn’t learn much that’s new (mainly politicians questioning their competition for ad dollars and dealing with pet gripes), but I wrote a story about it anyway for Cartt.ca.
• Val d’Or police officers are suing Radio-Canada because of an Enquête program that broadcast allegations of abuse and assault of local aboriginal people.

At the CRTC

• The commission has released its annual Communications Monitoring Report. Look at all the statistics! There’s enough of them to push whatever agenda you want. But generally, traditional broadcasting is in slow decline, TV subscriptions are flat (as the population grows), and specialty TV channels generally still make a lot of money. One concerning statistic though, young people (ages 12-24) listen to half the traditional radio that other age groups do (partly because of technological changes, but party I’m thinking because that group doesn’t have cars).
• The commission issued a series of mandatory orders against broadcasters who were using licences for tourist information stations in Surrey, B.C., to broadcast general programming.

Went to see the progress of our new CBC station in Iqaluit.The studio is looking amazing! Move in date: Nov. 25th. pic.twitter.com/yc0Wu741aj

— Mad (@Allakariallak) October 19, 2016

TV

• TVA has finally joined the 21st century, launching a new website and a TV anywhere app. You can watch TVA live (most of the time) online, and see episodes of its series for seven days after they air, without having to authenticate with a TV provider.
• Corus is replacing W Movies with Cooking Channel as of Dec. 12. Corus says this channel will be “complementary” to its own Food Network, and both channels are Canadian versions of U.S. channels owned by Scripps Networks. Both will compete with Gusto, the channel recently acquired by Bell.
• Showtime programming is going to be made available on Bell’s Crave TV the same time it airs on regular TV in the U.S.
• For those who wonder why the Maple Leafs always get CBC on Saturday nights, consider this: On opening weekend (albeit a big ceremonial home opener for Toronto), the Leafs-Bruins game had an audience of 1.5 million, while the Canadiens-Senators had half a million on City.
• Mohawk Girls, the TV comedic drama series set in Kahnawake, debuted its fourth season Tuesday night. You can watch the repeat on Sunday night on APTN or watch episodes on its website. La Presse was among the media to write about the series.
• Cord cutting, while definitely a thing, hasn’t done to the TV industry what online advertising has done to the newspaper industry yet. A U.S. consulting firm says it’s overblown. And the CRTC numbers (see above) show that TV distribution is about flat, though as the population increases, the penetration rate drops. It’s now below 80% of households, but that’s still the vast majority.
• The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council says a Musique Plus program discussing dildos should have had viewer advisories, though it wasn’t so bad as to avoid being broadcast in the afternoon.
• Éric Salvail made a bad joke on his talk show about indigenous reserves, which was posted to Twitter and then deleted.
• Comedian Marc Labrèche was a guest editor of La Presse’s arts section a couple of weeks ago. A lot of silly stuff, but he also brought together the heads of Quebec’s four conventional TV networks, and they discussed some interesting things.
• Historia has begun production on a biographical drama series about the life of Jean Béliveau. The cast includes Pierre-Yves Cardinal as Béliveau, and Stéphane Crête as broadcaster René Lecavalier.

Radio

• Sharon Hyland marked 20 years at CHOM on Oct. 21. In this unforgiving industry, where stations hire and drop talent often, it’s rare to see someone stay at the same station for so long, especially when they’re not the biggest name there.
• Tom Power officially took over the reins of CBC Radio’s Q this week. The Globe and Mail gives the blow-by-blow.
• Corus’s news-talk radio station in Vancouver will save some money by just rebroadcasting the audio of the Global News evening newscast.
• Corus’s Toronto news-talker AM 640 has a new lineup that includes a morning show hosted by Matt Gurney (poached from the National Post) and Supriya Dwivedi (a freelancer who co-hosted the Canadaland Commons podcast), with Global Toronto’s Jeff McArthur as a contributor.

Print

• Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper company, is cutting hundreds more jobs.
• The Wall Street Journal has a depressing take on the state of the newspaper industry, mentioning that even the mighty WSJ has to make some cuts. The company is offering buyouts.
• The Yorkton News Review, a Glacier Community Media publication, is being shut down.
• On the plus side, Le Droit in Ottawa/Gatineau has launched a new monthly print business magazine.
• Parents went ballistic after the editorial board at a student newspaper in Colorado Springs endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, some even going so far as to insist the school board punish them in some way.

Online

• A new Conservative subscription video network has been launched in the U.S. Its personalities include Canadian Mark Steyn. $99 a year or $12 a month.
• I read (most of) this Lainey Lui gossip blog profile so you don’t have to.

https://twitter.com/caroleaoun/status/788864355441926144

News about people

• Pierre Bruneau’s 40 years at TVA got him a classy shout-out during the competition’s newscast.
• Paul Woods is retiring as executive editor at the Toronto Star.
• Canadian Press national reporter Bruce Cheadle is also retiring.
• It’s paywalled, unfortunately, but the Globe and Mail has a really good take on why Rogers changed its chief executive.

Jobs

• Globe and Mail summer internship (deadline Oct. 28)
• Montreal Gazette reporting and editing summer internships (deadline Nov. 4)

Upcoming events

• Nov. 18-20: FPJQ conference in Mont-Saint-Sauveur
• Dec. 11: CBC Christmas Sing-In

News about news

• Ezra Levant is appealing to his favourite shiny pony, Justin Trudeau, after The Rebel was barred from covering a UN climate change conference because it’s an “advocacy media”. Canadian journalism organizations are supporting The Rebel, and an organization like the UN should be as open as possible within reason, though no one could really argue that The Rebel isn’t more about advocacy than journalism.

At the CRTC

• The CRTC has determined that Sudbury, Ont., does not have the capacity for another commercial radio station. Larche Communications wanted to add a second station, to better compete with Rogers and Newcap, who have two each.
• The commission has approved the acquisition by Attraction Radio of CFLM-FM in La Tuque, which was announced in April. The purchase price is $640,000. This gives Attraction 14 radio stations throughout Quebec, almost all in small towns.
• After a lot of talk in the media about changes to the points system used to determine whether a television series is Canadian enough to get access to funding by certified independent production funds, the CRTC has posted a new page to its website explaining the change, but more clearly downplaying the negative effect this would have on the Canadian-ness of Canadian television.

Print

• The Toronto Star has come to an agreement with its union to have a third party review its newsroom culture. This is all in the wake of the death of reporter Raveena Aulakh, which exposed a love triangle that caused a lot of problems. One of the people involved in that, former managing editor Jane Davenport (a former colleague of mine at the Gazette), was removed from the newsroom, but is now no longer with the company.
• The Montreal Gazette’s Hockey Inside/Out show has begun a new season, with a new look, a new producer and a new host: comedian Adam Susser.
• Dr. Charles Kowalski, the guy who took out a full-page ad in the Gazette to express anger at the P.K. Subban trade, prompting people to complain that he did that instead of donating to the Montreal Children’s Hospital, only to find out he donated $50,000 to the hospital? He has upped his donation to $250,000.
• Cult MTL has a new hockey column, Puck Drop.
• Finalists for the Antoine-Desilets prize for Quebec photojournalism have been announced.

#TheBeaverton? premieres November 9 at 10:30ep. Here’s your first look with your hosts Miguel and Emma in the newsroom. @TheBeaverton pic.twitter.com/NnsfwJ9CNG

— CTV Comedy Channel (@CTVComedy) October 18, 2016

TV

• The Beaverton, the Canadian fake news show, has a premiere date: Nov. 9 (Wednesday). And a teaser.
• The day before, Nov. 8, is the U.S. election, and Stephen Colbert has a special that night on Showtime in the U.S. and The Movie Network in Canada.
• CBC has ordered a new 13-episode half-hour comedy series called Crawford, from the people behind Trailer Park Boys, and partnered with Comedy Central, who will air it in the U.S.
• CTV is casting for a fifth season of The Amazing Race Canada. Deadline is Dec. 1.
• Weeks after bringing Corus TV stations CHEX-DT Peterborough and CKWS-DT Kingston into the Global News fold, they’re doing the same with CHEX-TV-2 (branded Channel 12 Durham), which will air both a local newscast and rebroadcast Global Toronto’s news at 5:30 and 6. The three stations, which Corus owned before it bought Global from Shaw, will remain CTV affiliates in primetime, but this change means dropping CTV National News from the schedule at 11pm.
• Much has posted some old celebrity interviews and other content in support of a book about MuchMusic’s history.
• TFO has signed an international distribution agreement with PBS.
• Stingray has a new distribution agreement with Shaw that is bringing the music video channels it purchased from Bell to Shaw’s cable and satellite customers.
• The Canadian Football League has fined the Edmonton Eskimos and head coach Jason Maas for refusing to wear microphones during a game against the Alouettes, and has threatened suspensions if they do it again. The game was supposed to be one of three “live mic” games that weekend, during which the quarterback and head coach of each team would wear microphones and what they say broadcast on TSN.

Radio

• Joey Elias’s comedy show is now being syndicated to NewsTalk 1010 CFRB in Toronto.
• Tom Power officially begins his new job as host of Q (sorry, q) on CBC Radio on Oct. 24. CBC has an interview with him.
• CKNW in Vancouver has apparently fired host Ian Power, after he got into an unnecessarily confrontational exchange with a journalist during an interview.

News about people

• Rogers has said goodbye to CEO Guy Laurence and announced it’s hiring former Telus boss Joe Natale — even though Natale’s non-compete contract with Telus prevents him from accepting this job until next summer. Rogers people are spinning this as more being in favour of Natale than against Laurence.
• The Windsor Star has a new editor-in-chief, Ellen van Wageningen, its first female EIC in history.
• Julian McKenzie seems to be pretty good at winning awards during his barely-started sports broadcasting career.
• Zane Schwartz is the latest recipient of the Michelle Lang fellowship at Postmedia, named after the journalist killed in action in Afghanistan. He’ll be investigating the influence of money in Canadian politics.
• CBC foreign correspondent Nahlah Ayed is getting an honorary doctorate from Concordia University.
• Ali Velshi, the Toronto-raised journalist who was at CNN and then Al Jazeera America, has been hired by MSNBC.
• Vicky Mochama, who recently left a job at Canadaland, is now a national columnist with Metro.
• Pierre Bruneau celebrates 40 years at TVA. The Journal de Montréal spent a day with him.
• Brian Bailey is the new programming manager for Corus’s radio stations in Kingston, Ont.
• Ken Pagan, the guy who allegedly threw a beer can onto the field during a Blue Jays game, “has left Postmedia.”

Good reads

• Le Soleil talks to Pierre Houde and Marc Denis of RDS.
• An opinion in Le Devoir about the declining quality of the French language in broadcasting.

Jobs

• Associate producer of digital media at CBC (in Toronto) (deadline Oct. 21)
• Globe and Mail summer internship (deadline Oct. 28)
• Montreal Gazette reporting and editing summer internships (deadline Nov. 4)

Upcoming events

• FPJQ conference: Nov. 18-20 in Mont-Saint-Sauveur

News about news

• Mike De Souza, a former Postmedia reporter now working for the National Observer, where he broke a story about members of the National Energy Board meeting secretly with Jean Charest while he was a lobbyist, is lashing out at a Financial Post opinion piece that questions the Observer’s connections to the Tides Foundation. De Souza lays it on thick, calling it “one of the most irresponsible attacks I’ve ever seen in over 15 years of journalism” and writing a very long, passionate piece defending himself. The Observer has gone so far as to ask the National Newsmedia Council to investigate “deceptive, defamatory and misleading” information, but doesn’t point out any facts it got wrong. (De Souza was also on a recent episode of Canadaland to talk about his work and the Observer.)
• Mike Ward has been given permission to appeal the human rights tribunal ruling against him in the Jérémy Gabriel case.
• The International New York Times is now the New York Times International Edition. So yeah.

At the CRTC

• CHOC-FM 104.9 in St-Rémi, south of Montreal, has gotten approval for a power increase and transmitter relocation. It will go from a 250 watt non-directional signal to a 1,714 watt directional one, with a higher antenna.
• CJMD-FM, the community radio station in Lévis, has been approved for a power increase from 110 to 509 watts, to allow it to cover the city more completely.

TV

• TSN was supposed to present a game between the Montreal Alouettes and Edmonton Eskimos on Monday in which the quarterbacks and head coaches on both teams had live microphones on them. But the Edmonton QB and coach reneged at the last minute. They could face discipline from the league. More from the Edmonton Journal and Montreal Gazette.
• In addition to putting Ron MacLean back in the big chair, Hockey Night in Canada is bringing back After Hours, the late post-game show hosted by Scott Oake.
• People got pretty angry online about the lack of availability of National League Division Series games on Sportsnet. Unfortunately, it’s not Sportsnet’s fault. The NLDS games that air on MLB Network are exclusive to that channel on both sides of the border. And if your provider is among the many in Canada that doesn’t carry MLB Network, I’m afraid it’s tough luck for you.
• An interesting opportunity coming on Friday night, when the Oilers play the Flames. Sportsnet has the game nationally, but is producing it regionally for each team, and will separate broadcasts with separate play-by-play announcers on separate channels: Flames on Sportsnet One, and Oilers on Sportsnet 360. The other all-Canadian national broadcasts this week won’t be doing that.
• The Disappearance, a new series being developed for CTV and Super Écran, has begun filming in Montreal, and announced its cast, which includes local stars Micheline Lanctôt and Kevin Parent.
• John Doyle wants to know why The Bachelorette Canada is eligible for tax credits. Meanwhile, the federal government has relaxed rules governing access to those same tax credits after outcry over the cancellation of Bazzo.TV.
• Another FHRITP incident, this time to a Radio-Canada journalist in Quebec City. It didn’t take them long to be identified and have a chat with their employer. What happened out of that, the employer won’t say.
• New TV provider VMedia is seeking donations to help its legal fight with Bell over online streaming of Bell’s channels.
• Brendan Kelly chats with Matt Holubowski, the former contestant of La Voix who is doing the rounds promoting a new album. He talks about participating in the singing competition, and what I found interesting is that producers of the show actually contacted him first asking him to audition. And at first he declined, until his (francophone) friends encouraged him to go for it.
• The Toronto Blue Jays’ latest playoff run has unsurprisingly led to great ratings for Sportsnet. Sunday’s ALDS-clinching Game 3 had 4.73 million viewers on average, making it the third-most viewed broadcast in Sportsnet’s history, behind two Blue Jays playoff games from last year. And that number doesn’t include viewers watching in French on TVA Sports. The wild-card game against the Baltimore Orioles had 4.02 million, which had been #5 on that list before the ALDS.
• Le Devoir reports on staff at Radio-Canada’s La Facture being upset with a recent ombudsman report against the show.

Radio

• Corus’s news-talk radio stations are the first in Canada to be made available on Apple Music.
• TSN 690 is being more creative with its Instagram account, posting more videos and behind-the-scenes shots.

Online/other

• Sportsnet has a new ad (that you’ve probably seen 100 times if you watch Jays games) selling Sportsnet Now as a legal alternative to unreliable pirated streams. It’s interesting that this ad acknowledges the existence of such methods, which suggests they’ve become very popular.
• TSN’s Bob McKenzie has a podcast.

News about people

• Métro has added Maïtée Labrecque-Saganash as a weekly columnist.
• Robyn Flynn is the new producer on the Aaron Rand Show on CJAD.
• By now we all know who Ken Pagan is, right?
• Peter Cheney is retiring from the Globe and Mail, among 24 editorial staff taking buyouts
• Guillaume St-Hilaire has been hired as a digital copy editor at Le Devoir.
• Global News journalist (and former Gazette colleague) Monique Muise got married over the weekend to Trudeau photographer Adam Scotti. I’m heartbroken that I can no longer call her “MoMu”. Not that I actually did that.
• CBC’s Sonali Karnick also got married.

Good reads

• Radheyan Simonpillai in NOW about the gender gap in Canadian film creation, and taking particular aim at Telefilm Canada for how it doles out the cash.
• Monique Dumont at the FPJQ on the recent report on the status of access to information in Quebec.
• The New York Times has a good graphic about when Republican Party leaders dropped their support for Donald Trump. This is one of those things that is very useful as a reference and tells a story visually very well. People in journalism should consider doing more reporting in this style where appropriate.

Jobs

• Associate producer of digital media at CBC (in Toronto)
• Journalist at TC Media (deadline Oct. 14)
• Globe and Mail summer internship (deadline Oct. 28)
• Montreal Gazette reporting and editing summer internships (deadline Nov. 4)

At the CRTC

• Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly is keeping her hands off the CRTC, claiming it’s independent. (And yet she just removed one of its commissioners.) Those looking for her to overturn unpopular decisions may find themselves disappointed.
• The CRTC’s discussion on Reddit about zero-rating and differential pricing of Internet service has begun. The thread is just about unanimous against the idea of charging different rates for different types of Internet traffic. Many want data caps eliminated entirely, which would make the issue moot, but I don’t think that’s a reasonable outcome of this, especially as Internet providers offer faster and faster speeds to end users.
• The commission is holding a hearing this week into applications for new radio stations serving Edmonton, mainly ethnic stations. The panel hearing the applications does not notably include the commissioner for Alberta, Linda Vennard, possibly because she accepted flowers and chocolates from a party in the hearing and got rapped on the knuckles by the ethics commissioner for it.
• The CRTC has effectively eliminated the difference between specialty and pay TV channels from a regulatory perspective by standardizing their regulations. Most cable channels are specialty, and only a few are pay: The Movie Network/TMN Encore, Super Écran, Cinépop, Super Channel, Family and Vivid TV. The two big differences after the change are that these channels can now air advertising and they can produce their own programming.
• The CRTC has released a map of radio and TV stations that broadcast emergency alerts. Unfortunately there are a lot of practical issues with this map. They’re listed by callsign and licensee company name, which most people are unfamiliar with. Radio stations list frequencies but TV stations don’t list channels. And stations sharing an antenna tower can’t be distinguished from each other no matter how far you zoom in.
• The CBC Radio One transmitter in Rouyn-Noranda has had technical changes approved so it can move the transmitter to colocate with others owned by the CBC. The biggest change from a listener perspective is a change in frequency from 99.9 to 91.9.

News about news

• The Journal de Montréal was the subject of a police search warrant, with reporter Michael Nguyen’s computer being seized. The invesigation relates to a story by Nguyen about a judge who went on a tantrum when she couldn’t get out of the courthouse parking garage. The police want to know how the journalist allegedly got access to confidential documents. Unsurprisingly, groups such as the FPJQ and the CAJ are up in arms, as is Gazette columnist Basem Boshra.
• Newspaper publishers Le Devoir, Groupe Capitales Médias (Le Soleil et al), TC Media and Hebdos Québec have joined a coalition to demand more support from the provincial government, including more newspaper advertising. They also want tax credits, and exemptions from recycling taxes and sales taxes. The Montreal Gazette, La Presse and the Journal de Montréal/Québec are not part of this coalition. The idea that newspapers want to not help pay for recycling is pretty ballsy. If you exempt newspapers, might as well not have a recycling tax at all.
• As if we didn’t need enough reasons to be skeptical of polls, the New York Times took raw data and gave it over to four pollsters, and found they came back with different results.
• There were plenty of live fact-checks and other live coverage of the U.S. presidential debates, but NPR impressively posted live transcription of the debates (based on closed captioning), adding in annotated comments. The comments focused on context, rather than playing the true-or-false game. It must have taken a lot of resources, but it was worth it for an event like this. NiemanLab has a story on how this was done, funneling the transcript into a Google Doc and editing it from there.
• CBC’s This is That website has begun adding [SATIRE] to the end of headlines after noticing that a lot of people aren’t getting that when they share stories on social media. This clunky solution fixes a problem we’ve known about for at least five years. The biggest issue is that previews on Facebook and Twitter show the URL beginning with cbc.ca and it’s not immediately clear that the story is satirical, particularly for people unfamiliar with the show This is That. A similar issue happens with the New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz, whose fake news stories appear under the domain name of a respected news outlet. Giving each of these their own separate domain name would go a much longer way toward helping people distinguish real news from fake.
• The Hamilton Spectator is celebrating its 170th anniversary (which is apparently significant). Among the stories it’s looking back on is one about CHCH television.
• The CBC held its annual public meeting in Moncton on Tuesday. President Hubert Lacroix’s speech notes how well it is serving the region, but doesn’t announce anything major.
• More details about the Blacklock’s Reporter copyright case, plus a discussion about it with Michael Geist on Canadaland.
• The Rainy River Record in northwestern Ontario is no more.
• Black Press, which closed several newspapers on Vancouver Island including the Nanaimo Daily News, is launching a new island-wide publication called the Vancouver Island Free Daily.
• The city of Lloydminster (you know, the one that straddles the Saskatchewan-Alberta border) is apparently so frustrated with news coverage it doesn’t agree with that it’s started its own publication to set the record straight.

TV

• Shomi is a lame duck. The joint venture between Rogers and Shaw has announced it’s shutting down on Nov. 30. I chatted about what this means with CBC News Network’s On The Money. Bill Brioux notes that new Amazon shows aren’t available yet here, and suggests it might be because Amazon will launch its video service in Canada. The Globe reports shomi’s shutdown will “affect” 74 full-time and 33 part-time or contract staff.
• Meanwhile, Videotron unveiled its programming plans for Club Illico this season: A second season of Blue Moon, a new original police drama, and French translations of series like Designated Survivor.
• Apparently moms really hate Caillou, the Canadian children’s series that airs on PBS in the United States.
• The fourth and final season of the English version of 19-2 has begun filming in Montreal.
• The CBC has greenlit a new drama called 21 Thunder, set and filmed in Montreal, about an under-21 soccer academy.
• CBC’s This Life, which is also a Montreal-set drama (and, like 19-2, is an English remake of a French Radio-Canada series produced by Sphere Media Plus’s Jocelyn Deschenes), returns for Season 2 on Sunday. TV Junkies talks to its showrunner about what to expect. Mike Cohen chats with actresses Lauren Lee Smith and Stephanie Janusauskas (warning: lots of Season 1 spoilers).
• TSN and Sportsnet have finally announced their Maple Leafs regional broadcast schedules, a month after announcements were made for the other teams. The fact that the Leafs are the only team to split their regional rights is probably why. The schedules are similar to last year, but there will be a couple more national Canadiens games. Here’s how it breaks down for the regular season (note that RDS and TVA Sports include their companion channels RDS2, RDS Info and TVA Sports 2):
  • Canadiens: 44 national games and 38 regional games on Rogers channels; 22 national games on TVA Sports, 60 regional games on RDS
  • Senators: 27 national games on Rogers channels, 55 regional games on TSN5; 60 regional games on RDS and up to 22 national games on TVA Sports
  • Maple Leafs: 40 national games on Rogers channels, 16 regional games on Sportsnet Ontario, 26 regional games on TSN4; 23 national games on TVA Sports
  • Jets: 22 national games on Rogers channels, 60 regional games on TSN3; 8 national games on TVA Sports
  • Oilers: 37 national games and 45 regional games on Rogers channels; 5 national games on TVA Sports
  • Flames: 37 national games and 45 regional games on Rogers channels; 6 national games on TVA Sports
  • Canucks: 36 national games and 46 regional games on Rogers channels; 2 national games on TVA Sports
• Three Canadian TV series are nominated for International Emmy Awards: CBC’s Interrupt This Program, Bravo’s 19-2 and Radio-Canada’s 30 vies.
• The U.S. presidential debate had 84 million viewers in the U.S. according to Nielsen, plus many millions more who watched online, making it the most-watched presidential debate ever. RDI also rated it the most-watched presidential debate ever. Numbers in Canada will be further complicated by the fact that Numeris doesn’t count Canadians watching on CNN or the American networks.

Radio

• Major radio players in Canada that aren’t Bell Media, including Rogers, Corus, Cogeco, Newcap, RNC Media, Pattison, Golden West, Rawlco, Harvard and Vista, have signed on to the RadioPlayer streaming app. Bell Media is going a different route with the iHeartRadio app. Both are similar to TuneIn in function. RadioPlayer is also promising access to on demand and podcast audio.
• During an interview last week on Télé-Québec’s Deux hommes en or, Pauline Marois suggested that Richard Bain, the man who tried to assassinate her on election night in 2012, may have been influenced by some (unnamed) anglophone radio hosts who made “malicious” interpretations of what the PQ stands for. Bain listened to both CBC Radio and CJAD, it was determined through the trial, but I’m guessing it’s the latter that she has more in mind.
• Virgin Radio has a new nationally syndicated top 20 music show airing on weekends, under the iHeartRadio brand, and hosted by former Virgin Radio Montreal host Andrea Collins. In Montreal, it airs Sundays at 10am. A similar show was developed for Bell Media’s French stations (Énergie, Rouge FM and Boom FM, depending on the market), airing 9-10am on Sundays and hosted by Patrick Langlois.
• RNC Média has pulled the plug on whatever it did with CFTX-FM in Gatineau. It was Capitale Rock and then started simulcasting sports shows out of Montreal. Now it’s gone in a completely different direction, as a 70s-80s-90s pop music station called Pop 96.5. Its Facebook page is more active than its website. The Abitibi Capitale Rock station is staying with that brand, at least for now. The move makes a bit of sense when you consider that Bell Media swapped an adult hits station to country. Though there’s still Boom 99.7 and Jack FM out of Smiths Falls to compete with, plus all the adult contemporary and hit music stations.
• Rogers is acquiring Tillsonburg Broadcasting, which owns two radio stations in the town southeast of London, Ont. The price was not disclosed, and the transaction requires CRTC approval.
• Étienne Boulay got his legs waxed live on air on Énergie 94.3. Video was posted to Facebook.

Online and other

• A man who makes T-shirts for tourists with an image of the Olympic Stadium has been threatened with legal action because he did not get authorization to use it. This isn’t about copyright on a photo, but rather copyright on an architectural structure. (For what it’s worth, Big O architect Roger Taillibert seems willing to help resolve the issue.)
• The Concordian, one of the student newspapers at Concordia University, is calling on everyone to boycott MTL Blog after the latter posted a creepy ranking of students’ hotness based on Instagram photos (and without asking them first). The post has been removed, but nothing is likely to change anything at the controversial website.
• The way Facebook has been counting video views was inflating its numbers, the company announced.
• A judge has ruled a bylaw in Montreal’s Plateau-Mont-Royal borough banning outdoor advertising is unconstitutional.

Montreal Gazette editor-in-chief @lchodan gets her hair shaved off for Leucan fundraiser, appears to enjoy it a bit too much. pic.twitter.com/DG0MUJcqwX

— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) September 22, 2016

News about people

• Montreal Gazette editor-in-chief Lucinda Chodan had her head shaved in a fundraiser for Leucan last week. She explains why in a column.
• CJAD has lost both hosts of The Exchange: Dave Kaufman is moving to London and Dan Delmar is leaving to focus on his PR company (Delmar says he plans to remain a CJAD contributor though). The departures open up a chance for the station to come up with a new format or hire one permanent host for the whole week. The last show is Friday.
• Matthew Ross is the new host weekend mornings at TSN 690.
• Daniel Viola has announced he’s leaving as editor-in-chief of Montreal-based Maisonneuve Magazine. In a series of Twitter posts, he explains that the $13,800 a year salary isn’t enough for him, and he’s moving back to Toronto.
• CBC completed the game of musical chairs in radio that started with taking Shad out of the host hair at Q. Raina Douris takes over from Tom Power on CBC Radio 2 mornings (Power is the new host of Q). Angeline Tetteh-Wayoe will host weekend mornings, taking over from Talia Schlanger, who’s leaving for NPR.
• Mark Iype is taking over as editor-in-chief of the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun.
• A couple of high-profile Canadian journalists abruptly left Twitter: Paul Wells of the Toronto Star left after Twitter gave an apparently equivocal response to the Turkish government’s request to block a journalist’s tweets. CBC’s Steve Ladurantaye (a former Twitter employee), meanwhile, apparently just shut his account off to take a break, noting that he has 12 months to change his mind. Both of these acts remind me of Andrew Coyne, who disappeared from Twitter in 2014 only to come back a few months later.
• Secularist and former PQ candidate Djemila Benhabib is in the middle of a slander lawsuit after claiming a Muslim school was creating extremists. The Journal de Montréal covered what happened yesterday.
• Gazette columnist James Mennie, who has been seen almost exclusively online lately, is back in print with a new regular feature interviewing newsmakers and people in the business community.
• The Toronto Star’s Joe Fiorito is retiring.
• George Stroumboulopoulos had to make an unplanned trip to Los Angeles after a friend, actor Richard Hong, was killed in an apparent robbery attempt at Strombo’s L.A. home.
• Tasso went to the doctor.

Good reads

• The Globe and Mail’s Kate Taylor on what Tatiana Maslany’s Emmy win means in the debate over Canadian content regulations
• The Montreal Gazette’s Marian Scott looks back at 1799 after someone sent a copy of a newspaper from that year to the Gazette.
• Joe Lemire at Vocativ on sportswriters’ love of Marriott hotels (mainly because of the company’s loyalty program)

Obituaries

• Dean Stock, brother of hockey analyst P.J. Stock, has lost his battle with ALS.

Upcoming events

• Oct. 1: The Bill Lee biopic Spaceman is being screened in town.
• Oct. 2: Journées de la culture. Radio-Canada has an open house. As does MAtv.
• Oct. 5-16: Festival du nouveau cinéma
• Oct. 28: Deadline to apply for Globe and Mail summer internship program

Every day I come across lots of news stories about the media, and tidbits of information that don’t justify their own separate blog post here. Most of these I’ve been sharing on Twitter (which can be seen on the sidebar), but not everyone will catch stuff there, and sometimes it helps to have just a bit more than 140 characters to give context.

So I’m going to try something new: Once a week (I’m trying Wednesdays at noon for now), I’ll round up all the stuff I’ve seen in one post. That way you can be relatively sure you didn’t miss anything unless I did too.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of every media story out there, but it’s most of what I’ve seen and found interesting. Let me know what you think, and of course if you see anything, let me know by email or on Twitter.

At the CRTC

• The Globe and Mail has a good feature story on Jean-Pierre Blais, the chair of the CRTC (for subscribers only). It interviews him and discusses his controversial leadership style, which has rubbed many the wrong way (and resulted in one fellow commissioner being fired and filing lawsuits) but also earned him praise as someone willing to stand up for consumers and ensure the commission’s integrity and relevance.
• Meanwhile, the Raj Shoan saga continues. The dismissed CRTC commissioner, who won a legal case challenging a biased report that accuses him of harassing a member of the CRTC staff, has lost a bid at an injunction to force him back to work. (The judge said there is not enough evidence of irreparable harm if Shoan has to wait until the case is decided.) Meanwhile, the Urban Alliance on Race Relations and Community Media Advocacy Centre have written an open letter to Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly to demand she rescind her decision to unappoint Shoan.
• In other suing-the-CRTC news, Bell has lost a case appealing the commission’s decision over ad substitution during the Super Bowl. But only because the policy had not been official yet and so the court ruled the case was premature. The official policy change is now official, so Bell will file another case.
• And CRTC commissioner Linda Vennard got her knuckles rapped for accepting flowers and chocolate from a group that’s part of a competitive process for a new radio station licence in Edmonton.
• MuchRetro, the only channel that needed CRTC approval for its sale to Stingray because it had enough subscribers to require a licence, now no longer needs that approval. It dropped below 200,000 subscribers (mainly, I believe, because it was dropped by Videotron) and can now be exempt from licensing and sold at will. The CRTC has consequently revoked its licence. Stingray has already acquired MuchLoud, MuchVibe and Juicebox, which it has rebranded. M3, formerly MuchMoreMusic, has been shut down and its place on TV systems replaced with Gusto, the food channel brand that Bell Media recently acquired. (See below.)
• The CRTC has officially changed its policy to say that CTV Two Atlantic, which is a satellite-to-cable station and not a conventional television station, can be carried on basic cable under its new “skinny basic” regime.

News about news

• Le Devoir has some announcements for the fall, including some new responsibilities for managers and several new columnists: Pierre Trudel, Denis Ferland and Cathy Wong and Fabrice Vil.
• The Toronto Star is getting into the coffee delivery business, charging $20 a month for “Headline Coffee” — about a cup a day. There’s an FAQ page if you’re interested, but they only deliver to Ontario.
• The RCMP is trying to get recordings of interviews conducted by Enquête as part of a corruption case involving the Canada Revenue Agency. Radio-Canada has appealed an order to turn over the recordings.
• The Toronto Star is auctioning off its abandoned presses, now that it has outsourced printing to Transcontinental.
• The Associated Press has published a policy on how it deals with erroneous tweets: It deletes them but posts a statement on why.
• The Journal de Montréal tried to get the journaldemourreal.com domain taken away from a parody site it’s trying to get shut down. It lost in its complaint to the WIPO committee responsible for resolving domain name disputes. Droit Inc. has an interview with an intellectual property lawyer to explain the context and results of this decision.
• La Presse has changed its official address from St-Jacques St. to St-Laurent Blvd. It’s still the same building, though.
• Postmedia’s shareholders and debtholders have approved a debt restructuring plan that will keep the print media chain in business past 2017. It also has court approval, which is the last hurdle it needed to clear.
• The Montreal Gazette had an editorial cartoon on its front page this morning, which is pretty rare for that paper.

News about people

• François Cardinal has been named the new editorialiste-en-chef at La Presse. He replaces André Pratte, who has been named a Canadian senator. La Presse doesn’t have unsigned editorials, so this job is as close as it comes to being the voice of the newspaper. Meanwhile, Jean-François Bégin will head sports, Frederic Murphy arts, and Pascale Breton the weekly sections.
• Peter Coade, CBC meteorologist for the Maritimes based in Halifax, is retiring after 50 years of telling the weather.
• Camille Ross, who left Global Montreal this summer to move back to southern Ontario, has launched a media coaching business.
• The Star let go of Sean Fitz-Gerald. Someone should pick him up.

TV and radio

• VRAK TV, which can best be described to anglos as a French version of YTV, is skewing older, targeting older teens and kids in their 20s. This opens up the younger demographic for a channel targetting them. Yoopa is a bit young, so we’re left with channels like Télétoon and Chaîne Disney. And Télétoon is about to launch a daily show featuring Mike Ward.
• RDS has published its NHL broadcast schedule for 2016-17. Unsurprisingly, it will broadcast all Canadiens preseason games and 60 regular-season games (all the ones TVA Sports doesn’t have rights to). It will also broadcast all 52 Senators regular-season regional games, but no preseason games except the two against the Habs. Sportsnet’s Canadiens schedule is here — all regional games are now on Sportsnet East (no more City as backup) and there are more national games on Sportsnet 360. Saturday night channel assignments are still picked week by week.
• Rogers has released the Hometown Hockey schedule for this year. The only stop in Quebec is right here in Montreal on Nov. 12-13, where it will be at the Place des Festivals. The Habs play the Blackhawks on Nov. 13.
• CHCH TV in Hamilton is bringing back weekend newscasts at 6 and 11 after drastic cuts to local programming last December.
• Bell has announced a slew of new productions for Gusto, the brand it acquired and used to replace M3. It’s clearly taking direct aim at Corus’s Food Network Canada.
• It’s premiere week in Quebec/French Canadian television with a bunch of new drama and comedy series. Le Soleil’s Richard Therrien explains it’ll be tough choosing between them.
• The Beaverton, a new show on Comedy that is a TV extension of the Onion-like news parody website, has a trailer out. The quality of the humour and acting is not that great, but hopefully they can improve on it.
• Jonathan Goldstein has a new podcast.
• Saguenay Mayor Jean Tremblay will be a regular contributor to a Quebec City radio station. And he can’t talk about anything to do with Saguenay.
• Sportsnet NOW is now available on Xbox One.

Good reads

• Ken Doctor has a series on the business of podcasting at NiemanLab. I’m so far unconvinced that this isn’t yet another fad that’s collecting a lot of speculation money but whose business model success is exaggerated.

Upcoming events

• CBC is hosting an event Sept. 21 in Kahnawake during which indigenous people read from books by and about indigenous Canadians.
• CBC’s Andie Bennett wants to get you exercising.

Obituaries

• Former CBC Montreal sportscaster Bob McDevitt, 85, who went on to teach journalism at Concordia University. The Gazette’s Pat Hickey has a column in appreciation of McDevitt’s life.
• La Presse news reporter Marie-Claude Girard has died of cancer. She was 44.

Finally, I was on Canadaland Short Cuts last week. You can listen to me talk about Peter Mansbridge, CanCon and the CRTC here. And the edited-out clip where I make fun of his sponsor’s ad here. During that show, I note this Huffington Post story about Sophie Grégoire Trudeau “recycling” an outfit.