Tag Archives: The Gazette

| Slow News Day, West Island

Pointe Claire Village IS the West Island

The Gazette released the results of their West Island icon poll today. The story attached to the results online mentions concerns some people had about the northern half being completely left out, and reporter Max Harrold, to his credit, takes full responsibility. (Of course, had nominations been open to the public this might have been avoided, and the story that made the paper doesn’t talk about this.)

Old Pointe Claire (or the Pointe Claire Village) won with about 1/4 of the vote, narrowly beating Hudson Village (which, as I and Kate McDonnell pointed out, isn’t even on the West Island).

| Uncategorized

Damn kids

In a display of cojones even I couldn’t match, The Gazette today says the reason we have less crime in this country is because we have fewer black people, because even though most black people don’t commit crimes, most crimes are committed by black people. Cut out the black menace, and we have fewer crimes.

It’s an outrageous claim that will no doubt lead to someone’s immediate firing and numerous complaints with the Quebec human rights tribunal.

Oh, wait… it’s not black people. It’s young people. They’re the cause of all this crime.

Well then, that kind of discrimination and blatant offensive generalization is perfectly acceptable.

Say it with me now folks: Correlation is not causation.

| Uncategorized

The Gazette: a tabloid?

The Gazette is asking its readers about moving toward more tabloid sections.

There’s precedent for this. Lots of serious papers are considering the move to tabloid format, mostly because of the perception that tabloids are easier to manage on public transit (where you can’t get the Internet cheaply) and due to the success of other papers like the free dailies which are in the tabloid format.

In a survey given to select readers, Montreal’s only English daily asked about theoretically changing its daily Arts & Life section from the current broadsheet to a tabloid format, and about whether people would prefer shorter, “easier to read” articles. It doesn’t look like they’re going to become another Journal de Montréal, but it still got readers riled up. Most of the responses fell into one of the following:

  • Tabloids are easier to read on the move.
  • Tabloids are junk, yellow journalism and I’ll cancel my subscription if you switch
  • I don’t care about the format, as long as the quality doesn’t suffer (all of these responses recall the Gazette’s “words matter” motto)
  • I hate the Sunday paper, lumping three sections into one and putting classifieds in the middle of a two-page feature story in sports.
  • Put the staples back into my TV Times!

Currently, only three sections during the week are tabloids at the Gazette: Sunday Sports, Books (Saturday) and West Island (Thursday), and the first two of these date only from the February 2006 redesign.

We’ll see what they’ll do. What do you think? Should the paper be of a smaller format? Should the stories be shorter?

| Montreal, Public transit, Video, West Island

Da train! Da train!

The Gazette’s Linda Gyulai has an article about some railway buffs criticizing Montreal’s plan for commuter rail service, specifically the route of the Train de l’Est (stupidly running from Terrebonne east to Repentigny instead of running west through Laval, using existing tracks, to the de la Concorde metro station) and the apparent abandoning of the plan to use the Doney Spur, which splits from the Deux-Montagnes train line near Highway 13 and runs between Hymus and the 40 west to Stillview.

One important correction to the story: It mentions the building of a Home Depot west of St. John’s Blvd on top of old Doney Spur right-of-way. In fact, it’s east of St. John’s, which mean any rail link to Fairview (which would still have to cross Highway 40 somehow) would have to run through, under or around this new hardware store.

Here’s a bonus for you: A YouTube video of rail buff Avrom Shtern asking Pierrefonds/Roxboro mayor Monique Worth about the Doney Spur in March, and having her give the kind of non-answer that you’d expect to find in a first-chapter exercise of Politics For Dummies.

| Uncategorized

Bad driving, meet bad ad placement

Dangerous driving is the topic du jour in today’s letters section. One picks up on something I completely missed in Friday’s paper:

Fast driving

This article (whose deck says “Panel blames ‘fast car’ ads”) is paired with this ad, which says in absolutely atrocious grammar: “Action speaks louder than words” and “1-100km in 4.7 sec top speed: 240km over 1G of lateral force. Toyota powertrain.” I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but I think it’s talking about how fast the car goes (or more accurately, how fast it accelerates).

The letter shoots the letter by blaming The Gazette for running it. In fact, it’s the car companies who should be shot for encouraging dangerous driving.

And whoever wrote that ad should be fired.

| Navel-gazing, TV

It’s not just sports, Jack

Jack Todd has a column in the Sunday Sports section about how our national sports networks, while covering the U20 World Cup, baseball, NHL free agency, Wimbledon tennis, PGA golf, CFL football, auto racing, and all the other major sports going on this summer, are missing something important: Water polo in Montreal.

It’s not just water polo, he continues. The networks aren’t covering amateur sports at all, really, preferring to sign up to simulcast an American feed rather than spend money sending their own reporters and camera crew to events happening here.

While I agree with the sentiment (and more on that below), I should probably add that frankly, I’ve always found it odd how few television channels are devoted to sports. Here, we have TSN, Rogers Sportsnet (with its four regional channels) and The Score showing general sports for 24 hours a day. Considering how many sports they should be covering, that doesn’t seem like enough. It’s not even enough to show all the baseball games that play on a given regular season night. So why don’t we have more channels? They could be owned by the same network, just show different sports.

Money, of course, is the answer, which is sad. And unfortunately it’s also the reason we’re not going to have major networks covering unpopular amateur sport until a fundamental shift happens in the sports media industry.

Of course, this problem, of Canadian cable channels repackaging American content instead of producing their own, is hardly new. Unlike broadcast channels, which have more stringent CRTC guidelines about locally-produced and Canadian-produced content, cable specialty channels don’t have to produce much of their own, and depending on how they’re licensed, don’t have to carry much Canadian content.

I would suggest regulation as a potential solution to that problem, but digital TV regulations in Canada are already far too complicated. Besides, many channels are meeting their CanCon requirements by playing reruns of 80s CBC shows or crappy CTV ripoffs of popular U.S. programs. And they’re meeting their original programming requirements (assuming there are any) with “news” shows, produced on a shoestring budget, effectively giving up on that timeslot and waiting until they can throw up another CSI rerun and soak up the ad money.

We have to vote ourselves, with our wallets. Channels that regurgitate crap and expect us to take it will see themselves disappear from my channel lineup. Spike TV is already on the chopping block. Star Trek was the only thing on there I watched, and they’ve removed DS9 from their lineup. Global-owned Mystery Channel is also going once I’ve caught up on my weekend House reruns. SUN TV (holy crap what an awful excuse for a channel) is going, since the only thing I’ve ever watched on there was Scrubs. G4TechTV Canada is headed out the door, Beat The Geeks notwithstanding.

This is the YouTube age. Making original television should be much easier than it was four decades ago. Television series make it to DVD within months. Why don’t we have more original programming?

Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out what to replace these channels with. Those same regulations prevent my cable company from treating all channels equally, and prevent me from selecting what I want à la carte.

Shame.

| West Island

Northern West Island gets no respect

I come from Pierrefonds, a long, multicultural former city (now the borough of Pierrefonds Roxboro), which is so boring that two of its logo’s three elements come from the fact that it’s long and narrow and that it’s next to a river. (The third is borrowed from Pierrefonds, France, the town it was named after.)

Hello?

But as boring as it is, there are thousands of people who live there, and the population is increasing rapidly. I just noticed this week, for example, that service on the 68 Pierrefonds bus route has been doubled from two buses an hour to four during the day.

So why is it this city, along with its northern West Island neighbours Dollard-Des-Ormeaux, Roxboro, Sainte-Geneviève, Ile Bizard and Kirkland, always get treated like they don’t exist when it comes to the anglophone media talking about the West Island?

Case in point: The Gazette’s West Island section this week asks people to vote for its top icons of our little stretch of land. The choices (10, and you can’t add any of your own) don’t include a single landmark in any of these towns. Three are in Pointe-Claire, two in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, two span the southern towns, and one isn’t even on the island at all.

Specifically:

  • Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport: This is the great barrier (along with the Taschereau train yard) separating Montreal from the West Island, and it’s located in a West Island city, but I still don’t really think of it as part of the West Island. It’s more a part of the city as a whole. The people who go there come from all over the city, and there’s nothing about it that captures the identity of the place.

  • Fairview Shopping Centre: Certainly a must-have on any such list. It’s a big mall, and the bus terminal brings a lot of teenage traffic here along with commuters. But making this the West Island’s greatest icon would be a sad statement about life there, no?

  • Hudson Village & ferry: I fail to see how Hudson can be considered part of the West Island. It’s not on the island. It’s not that complicated. A case can be made for Ile Bizard because it’s part of the city. Hudson most definitely is not.

  • 211 bus: Certainly the West Island’s most important bus, and the second public transit related item on the list. Perhaps that’s what exemplifies the area: an express bus to downtown.

  • John Abbott College/MacDonald Campus & Weather Station: I’m assuming this includes the Morgan Arboretum, which is a very noble candidate. Nothing bad to say here.

  • Old Pointe Claire: Narrow roads, cute little shops and insufficient parking. OK.

  • Lachine Canal/Lakeshore Rd.: Lachine is barely West Island, and the canal ends just as Lachine starts. The canal is more an icon of the southwest borough or LaSalle. Lakeshore, meanwhile, is a good candidate, but shouldn’t that be grouped together with the 211?

  • Ste-Anne de Bellevue Village & locks: Yeah, another obvious choice.

  • Montreal/Dorion-Rigaud commuter train: See the snub? Where’s Montreal/Deux-Montagnes? Ours runs more often, is more comfortable and faster (and isn’t made redundant with an express bus service).

  • Pointe Claire Aquatic Centre: Pointe-Claire must have paid a lot of money to the Gazette to get it on this list so many times. Maybe we should add Pointe-Claire city hall? The Pointe-Claire library? The Pointe-Claire water tower?

So how about it? Does the northern West Island offer nothing of cultural significance?

Here’s some suggestions from me. Feel free to add yours below:

  • Cap St-Jacques (Pierrefonds)
  • Centennial Park (DDO)
  • Sainte-Geneviève (in its entirety)
  • The Ile-Bizard-Laval-sur-le-lac ferry
| Montreal

Monument to a scandal

Mike Boone suggests in today’s Gazette that part of the plans for using new space at Park and Pine should include a statue of Robert Bourassa, because he thinks the man still needs to be honoured in this city:

I know. Our revered mayor doesn’t deserve a consolation prize for the ham-handed and ultimately aborted plan to rename Park Ave. But the controversy shouldn’t obscure the fact that Bourassa was a brilliant politician and visionary premier who deserves some substantial form of commemoration.

This is true, but in a rare moment of stupidity on the part of the Boonester, his suggestion would do nothing but guarantee that the controversy obscures the commemoration. People won’t remember the statue without thinking about why it’s there, and this is a controversy that Bourassa never asked for and doesn’t deserve. Let’s find somewhere else on the island, not on Park Avenue, to honour this man.

Either that, or at least wait a while so the two aren’t so closely connected.

| Montreal

Go escarp yourself

Andy Riga has an article in Friday’s Gazette about the St. Jacques escarpment, that tree-lined cliff between St. Jacques in NDG and Turcot Yards along Highway 20. It includes a link to his new blog about that piece of land.

Concrete blocks stop cars from driving down the now-closed Pullman; a Transport Quebec sign warns passers-by not to proceed. Police warn those who wander around the Turcot yards they risk $142 fines.

Yes, you read that right. ANDY RIGA BROKE THE LAW. ANDY RIGA ADVOCATES TRESPASSING.

OK, it’s not as outrageous as advocating MURDER, but the slippery slope has to start from somewhere, DOESN’T IT, RIGA?

You heard it here first folks. Riga’s descent into a life of crime won’t be pretty.

UPDATE: Karma strikes!

| Blogosphere, Media

Newspapers still need to learn how to use blogs

The Gazette today launched a Jazz Festival blog called “Offbeat” (better than “beatoff” I guess) written by saxophonist Adam Kinner and freelance writer Natasha Aimée Hall.

The blog reads like a diary, which got me thinking about mainstream media outlets and their use of these curious creatures they still don’t quite understand. Some blogs make sense, like The Gazette’s wildly successful and very high-quality Habs Inside/Out blog, which gives the paper’s experienced hockey writers a place where they can share late-breaking behind-the-scenes rumours and other news directly with a niche audience.

Others, however, read more like personal blogs which catalog the hourly events of its authors but doesn’t provide anything interesting to anyone outside the immediate family of the blogger.

It’s not the fault of the bloggers, most of whom (including Hall) are very talented writers. The problem is a lack of direction from the media outlets that create them. They give them this platform, tell them to “go and blog” and don’t give them much else to work with. The bloggers are left with nothing else to write about than their own personal stories, as mundane as they may be.

Blogs by beat writers is one thing. It’s pretty clear what the blog is going to be about. But for anything beyond that, the media have to answer the question “what information would I go to this blog to learn?”

If the answer is “what someone did for a couple of weeks”, then I think it needs some rethinking.