Tag Archives: The Gazette

| Media, Navel-gazing, Technology

Welcome to the new Gazette

Notice a difference?

Before After

Tuesday

Thursday

Wednesday

Friday

If not, the designers have done their jobs right.

The Gazette is in the middle of major technological transition behind the scenes, from Macs using QuarkXPress (version 3.32, circa 1996) and other specialized programs to PCs using Adobe InDesign under a system called Saxotech. Tech business reporter Jason Magder has been describing a bit of the process, particularly from a reporter’s point of view.

The changeover has been happening in stages, as staff in various sections get training on the new system (while other staff, including additional hired help such as myself continue to put out the paper every day). The features sections went first, then business. This week was the go-live for the A section. The pages on the left (Tuesday and Wednesday) were created in QuarkXPress. Those on the right (Thursday and Friday) were done in InDesign.

Because the transition is being done in phases and not all at once, the designers had to create templates and stylesheets in InDesign that matched the old Quark pages. Some minor changes were made to clear up inconsistencies or make things easier for editors, but as you can see most of it basically looks the same.

To be clear, readers should not notice any major changes to the design, and no changes at all to content. (Although a bug in a process that is supposed to make it easier to copy articles from print to web causes random words to appear in the middle of sentences, which has peeved a few web readers.)

The next – and last – section to be moved over is sports, which has the latest deadlines. That’s next week.

I wish I could say more about how the system works, but I’m in the very last group getting training (in a group that incidentally includes the editor-in-chief, so I guess I should be on my best behaviour). This puts me in the odd position of knowing less than almost all my colleagues when it comes to a computer system. You can’t imagine how frustrating that can be for a guy with a computer science degree. But I’ll muddle through these last couple of weeks.

| Media

Did The Gazette call Ian Halperin a hero?

So Ian Halperin trying to make headlines again. You know, the “Ian Undercover” guy who puts “IUC WORLD EXCLUSIVE” in front of his blog posts, dresses like a douche and is always threatening to sue people for outrageous amounts?

This time, he’s threatening to sue Guy Laliberté for $500,000, because the Cirque du Soleil founder said Halperin was full of shit in his biography.

But what got me about this story isn’t that a man desperate for attention is throwing out another disingenuous idle threat and got some journalist to fall for it, but his mention – in his own defence – that The Gazette called him a “local hero.”

I found this odd, of course, because I thought Halperin hated The Gazette even though he briefly worked there more than 20 years ago. The paper certainly hasn’t been showering praise on him lately, so where does he get this idea that he’s been called a hero?

Well, I looked it up, and sure enough, he’s right. In a “local hero” column published on Dec. 12, 1993, Bill Brownstein described him thus:

The Montreal singer/saxophonist ekes out a living as a busker, usually at the Place des Arts and Beaudry Metro stations from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. daily. In the evenings, Halperin and his Afro-Latin rhythm band, State of Emergency, play for pocket money at city bistros and jazz joints.

There’s brief mention of his journalistic work a decade previous, while at Concordia University’s The Link. But the article calls him a hero because he was organizing a benefit concert for homeless people.

I feel like I need one of those fact-checking meters here, but let’s rate this one “mostly true”. He’s technically correct, but misleading in that the article is 17 years old and has nothing to do with the current controversy.

| Canadiens, Media, Montreal

In the words of the enemy

If you pick up the print version of The Gazette (or at least the sports section), you might have noticed that there’s a lot of articles and columns from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and before that the Washington Post, commenting on their hockey teams.

A column from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Gene Collier in today's (Montreal) Gazette

Since you may not have picked up the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently, you probably haven’t seen the Montreal Gazette columns that have appeared in those pages:

Dave Stubbs column in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Even though, in an ideal world, no sports journalist is biased toward the home team, the reality is that Gazette sports columnists know more about the Canadiens and talk more about the Canadiens than the opposition. There’s an unavoidable Montreal-centric perspective. So it’s useful to get an idea of the other side.

Sharing copy like this isn’t new. Both the Gazette and Post-Gazette have done it before, their editors tell me. The Gazette did it two years ago with the Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Basically, the idea is to give Gazette readers an in-depth look at the visiting team from reporters who cover that team on a regular basis and know that team as well as our guys know the Canadiens,” says Gazette sports editor Stu Cowan. “Also a chance to read some different opinions and styles of hockey writers from other cities.”

When the Canadiens faced the Washington Capitals in the first round, Cowan contacted the Washington Post to see if they’d be interested in sharing copy. The Post jumped on board, and columns from Thomas Boswell, Tracee Hamilton and Mike Wise appeared in the Gazette.

(There’s a bit of irony here, in that until recently the Gazette was a subscriber to the Washington Post’s wire service. The Post cut Canwest off after Canwest filed for creditor protection.)

Washington’s not a hockey town

In Washington, though, there wasn’t much reciprocation. Even though the Capitals finished the season as the National Hockey League’s best team, there was little space in the sports section of a paper known for political stories to fit what are essentially wire stories from Montreal. In fact, I couldn’t find a single Gazette piece that was used in the print version.

The imbalance is particularly striking simply because hockey in the U.S. capital isn’t as important as here. They have an NFL team (the Redskins), a baseball team (the *spit*Nationals*spit*), an NBA team (the Wizards), plus college and other sports. Even during the hockey playoffs, they have to devote pages to these.

“When I contacted the Post hockey editor on the weekend of the NFL draft to ask which one of their columnists would be writing on the Caps, the answer was none: they were all writing on the NFL draft, even though the Redskins are brutal,” Cowan wrote to me by email. “The Redskins are to D.C. what the Canadiens are to Montreal.”

But the Post did use the Gazette pieces online, and it looks like they got some interest there.

“The Gazette columns were a big hit on the Post website throughout the series and on some days recorded higher traffic numbers than our own stories. They enriched and broadened our coverage to a considerable degree,” says Matthew Vita, Washington Post sports editor, somewhat press-release-like. “All in all the content-sharing was a great success that we envision using in the future.”

Then, in Pittsburgh

After the Canadiens epically came back from a 3-1 series deficit and advanced to the Eastern Conference semifinal, Cowan was himself contacted by two Pittsburgh papers – the Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review – looking to setup a similar agreement. “I had to make a choice and went with the Post-Gazette,” Cowan said.

In Pittsburgh, this kind of sharing has gotten routine.

“Every playoff series, we try to hook up with a newspaper to run at least a column a day from ‘the other side’,” says Post-Gazette Assistant Managing Editor/Sports Jerry Micco. “We do it for other sports, too. Particularly for the Steelers. Throughout the week, we’ll do RSS feeds from the opposing newspaper’s site as well as trading copy. We rarely have space for copy throughout the week from the opponent, but on the Monday after a game a ‘view from XXX’ is a mandatory run in our section.”

Micco says the agreement has been a win-win for the two papers. He listed two major advantages for him: “1. It frees our writers up to cover the Pens. Even if they write an opponent’s story, it’s not going to be a column. 2. I allows our readers to get another viewpoint on the series.”

Still, the Post-Gazette isn’t using nearly as much copy as the Gazette is, even though their sports editor said the Gazette has “excellent hockey writers” and “our fans here want as much hockey as they can get this time of year.” They have the Steelers (and its quarterback in the news recently) and Pirates, while Montreal can focus on the Canadiens (with the occasional mention of the Impact), running two or even three pieces a day from the Post-Gazette.

“Basically, the popularity of the Habs in this city goes through the roof during the playoffs, with people who don’t normally follow hockey jumping on the bandwagon,” Cowan writes. “The copy-sharing agreement allows us to provide additional hockey coverage during the playoffs, with a closer focus on the visiting team.”

What do you think?

None of the editors mentioned much about direct response to the enemy copy, so I’ll leave that to you: Do you think the new perspective is a valuable contribution, or a waste of space?

For analysis, you can read these columns yesterday and today from Ron Cook and Gene Collier, and these columns from Tracee Hamilton and Mike Wise of the Washington Post.

| Media, Navel-gazing

You feel shame, you know

An error above the fold on Page 1

There are some things I’d been told keep copy editors up at night. Did I make sure all the page numbers matched up? Did I make sure all the stories that were supposed to get in the paper got in? Did I make sure to spell everything correctly? Did I make sure to add online and other external pointers where needed?

When that copy editor’s job is doing Page A1, those fears are heightened.

I’d heard from fellow (young) editors about the anxiety they would feel after the end of their shifts, how they would go home and just assume they got something horribly wrong but didn’t know what it was.

That never really happened to me. Not because I didn’t think I’d ever get anything wrong (though I like to think of myself as pretty good at my job) but because there isn’t much I can do about it.

Continue reading →

| Media

O, I C

A Cmore tag on A2 of Tuesday's Gazette

Gazette publisher and editor-in-chief Alan Allnutt introduced a new feature in today’s paper: articles are being outfitted with little boxes containing keywords, which when texted to a special short code sends an email with a link to the article (and any online extras attached to it).

It’s a three-month pilot project being tested by The Gazette and the Calgary Herald. The technology side is handled by Montreal-based Cmore Media (not to be confused with C-More Systems, which makes gun sights).

The idea is similar to the one that has led to 2D barcodes appearing in newspapers such as the National Post: It’s a way to bridge the gap between the non-electronic physical newspaper and the endless possibilities of Internet communication. People who want to get online-only extras related to a story or who want to share the URL with friends online have to go to the newspaper’s website and search for the story. This is inconvenient, so these tags are designed to make it automatic, taking advantage of the fact that people carry cellphones with them wherever they go.

But while Scanlife, the system used by the Post, requires a mobile device to have a camera and a special application, the Cmore system requires only the ability to send a text message (and the patience to do so).

Here’s how it works:

Continue reading →

| Media

Good news for freelancers

Frozen freelance cheque arrives ... now I can retire!

While many people are up in arms that Canwest asked for – and received – retention payments for top executives while it’s under creditor protection, some good news is also coming for those at the other end of the scale.

Freelancers for The Gazette were resigned to the fact that invoices for work published before Jan. 8 would either not be paid at full price or might never be paid, because as independent contractors the freelancers were considered unsecured creditors after the creditor protection filing (all work done after that is covered under a separate agreement and is being paid as normal).

But recently, I’m told, the court-appointed monitor for Canwest LP has authorized the payment in full of outstanding invoices for freelancers. Many of those freelancers have already reported receiving cheques, and the photo above is one I got last week, covering a tiny bit of work that was frozen from the last invoice.

Meanwhile, on an unrelated note, Le Devoir’s Stéphane Baillargeon talks about the agreement signed between Gesca (which owns La Presse) and the Association des journalistes indépendants du Québec, which covers freelance work done for Gesca.

| Media

Gazette loses Uncle Hughie

Hugh Anderson, who was most recently The Gazette’s seniors columnist, died Wednesday from retroperitoneal sarcoma, a rare form of cancer.

There’s an obituary in Thursday’s paper, but the more interesting pieces are the ones written by Anderson himself, who explored the issue of death in his columns recently.

Anderson disappeared from the paper briefly in 2007, and returned to write a series of articles about the death of his wife and the process of grieving the loss of a loved one. He disappeared again last fall, returning in January with a piece about his own cancer diagnosis, knowing his life was very likely coming to an end.

With that piece, the column was transformed into The Next Chapter, expanding to include baby boomers (who don’t like to think of themselves as seniors yet) and including pieces from other writers.

Anderson’s last column, about euthanasia, was published on Feb. 15.

UPDATE: Gazette Arts & Life editor Michael Shenker uses the space once occupied by Anderson’s column to write about him and about death.

| Navel-gazing

The new boss, same as the old boss

So, funny story:

A little under two weeks ago, my record of employment came in the mail, along with the pay stubs for my last two paycheques at the Gazette. It was about then that it hit me that I didn’t work there anymore. Now I was unemployed, and I needed to figure out what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

As I figured out what that would mean, a week ago Sunday I went on the government of Canada’s website and filed for unemployment insurance benefits. At least it would seem like I was still getting a salary while I looked for a new job.

That’s when Murphy’s Law (or a corollary thereof) took effect. Shortly after I woke up on Monday afternoon, I got emails, Facebook messages and telephone calls from my former colleagues, telling me about a job opening at The Gazette for a part-time copy editor on contract.

The paper is in the process of switching to a new content management system for both print an online, which will notably include a change of page layout software from QuarkXPress (version 3.32, released in 1996) to Adobe InDesign. This will mean a lot of training for existing copy editors, so they decided to hire a few more to help put out the paper. My name, apparently, was one of the first to come up.

Yeah, she’s dumped me a few times, but I keep going back. Funny what love does to you.

The interview was pretty short. It’s not like I needed to provide references. “Can you start Monday?” I was asked over the phone. And just like that, I had my old job back.

There was a bit of paperwork to deal with (actually none of it on paper, it was all getting electronic accounts setup and a security pass reactivated), but at 4pm Monday, exactly one month after leaving for what I thought could easily have been forever, I entered the office and went to work as if I’d never left, stopping occasionally to hear a “welcome back” and a joke from a colleague.

I felt a bit weird. I mean, there was some drama exactly four weeks ago. I sent a going-away email, had a going-away party. Everyone knew I’d be back, even though they didn’t know how or when. It seems they were right.

Instead of venturing into the unknown and beginning on a new path, my unemployment turned into little more than an unpaid month-long vacation, ending the day after the closing ceremonies of the Olympics.

This will be my fifth contract at The Gazette, my fourth as a copy editor. And the length is unknown, even to my bosses. It could be measured in weeks or months. It could last forever, or I could be back on EI benefits before you know it. I’ve gotten accustomed over the past five years to not knowing what’s in store for the future beyond the two or three-week notice that’s given on the posted schedule. Living a contract life is a sacrifice I’ve made in exchange for being able to work at my favourite job in my favourite city, and without a wife and kids to support it’s hardly a burden to be occasionally unemployed or underemployed for short periods.

So like I have for the past few years, I’ll enjoy it while I can. Particularly the awful, awful puns.

I’m a hypocrite again. All hail The Gazette.

| Media, West Island

Bill Tierney replaces Huntley Addie as West Island Gazette columnist

Out: Huntley Addie

Those expecting to see the weekly column of Huntley Addie in the West Island Gazette last Thursday (you know, all four of you) might have been surprised to see someone else in that place: former Ste. Anne de Bellevue mayor Bill Tierney.

Tierney, who had been mayor of the city since 1994 (excluding the time it was a merged part of Montreal), lost the November election, apparently because citizens didn’t like his idea of having parking meters.

With all this free time on his hands now (tell me about it), he’s been invited to write a weekly column about West Island issues in the section of the Gazette distributed to subscribers in West Island and western off-island areas.

In: Bill Tierney

When asked what happened, Addie, a teacher at John Rennie High School in Pointe Claire, told me it sort of goes back to the Canwest creditor protection filing, which screwed him as much as it did every other freelancer. It made him realize that he’s doing far too much work for far too little pay (West Island Gazette columnists are paid $50 per 700-word piece, or about seven cents a word). So he kind of resigned, reluctantly. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that he gave up.

You can read Tierney’s first column here. His second column, published today, is about apathy in local politics.

| Media

Ted Bird joins Gazette as a blogger

Speaking of unemployed people in local media, Ted Bird (you know, the guy who left CHOM at the beginning of the year) is now blogging for The Gazette.

Bird wouldn’t say how much (if anything) he’s being paid for the gig, but he’s “happy with the exposure and the chance to establish myself in print.”

He’s continuing to blog on his own as well. So those who miss his opinions won’t be left wanting.

| Navel-gazing

Another unemployed journalist

Farewell, dual-display Mac G5

As of 1:30am today, I am no longer an employee of The Gazette (a division of Canwest Publishing Inc.)

It happened so long ago that most of this blog’s readers probably don’t remember, but I was hired as a temporary, part-time worker at The Gazette in January 2008. Back in 2005 I was picked as an intern, and stayed on for an extra year on contract before I was let go the first time. When a vacancy came up a year later because of two parental leaves, I got an email from my old boss asking me if I wanted to come back. I didn’t hesitate.

The contract was supposed to last nine weeks. But it got extended, and extended again, and again. Finally, with the person I was replacing returning to the payroll, my contract wasn’t renewed past Jan. 31. The nine-week contract ended Sunday night at 105 weeks plus a day.

All this to say that the split is amicable (sad for both sides, but amicable). It’s not in any way related to Canwest’s creditor protection filing, nor anything I did. That said, it isn’t completely disconnected from the crisis facing media, and copy editing in particular (the Miami Herald yesterday looked at how many grammatical mistakes make it into a newspaper on a daily basis because of the reduced number of copy editors).

Though I’m obviously not happy about getting dropped out of my dream job, I’m grateful for the opportunity I got to live it for those two years. I want to publicly thank my colleagues, whose help, guidance and awful puns are what I will truly miss most about working there, and what I will most look forward to if I’m ever given the opportunity to work there again. I especially want to thank Assistant Managing Editor Katherine Sedgwick, who was my boss for most of my time there, and who emailed me out of the blue two years ago asking me if I wanted to come back. Her ability to judge character is obviously well above par.

As for my future, it’s up to me to write it now. I have no plans to leave the city unless some irresistible opportunity shows up. And my goal is to stay in the field of journalism. But that’s a tall order with everything that’s happening to the news media.

But I’m not thinking too much about that yet. I didn’t take a single day off while I worked at the Gazette, and so my immediate plans are to make up for that by taking it easy for a bit. My last paycheque doesn’t come for a week and a half, and it’ll include all the banked overtime I never ended up using. That, plus all the money I’ve saved up means I’m not desperate for a job right now, and I can take my time figuring out my next move. And spend more time with my family, I guess. That’s what the politicians do, right?

In the meantime, my loss will probably be your gain. I’ll have more time to blog about stuff. My browser is just about ready to burst with all the tabs it’s got open. I hope to clear some of that out and post some of the ideas that have been circulating in my head this week.

My relationship with The Gazette also hasn’t been completely severed. I plan to continue freelancing for them (notably compiling the Monday Calendar), and am exploring other opportunities, as they say.

Some people have asked if I would consider blogging full-time, monetizing this little experiment I’m running. I’d do it in a second if I thought it could be profitable, but I don’t think that’s feasible yet. I may change my mind on that depending on how desperate I get for cash, or how desperate people are to advertise here.

I certainly won’t be holding my breath for that.

Unless I can turn holding my breath into a job.

UPDATE: I’m really feeling the love, in the comments below and on Twitter. Unfortunately, I can’t trade that in for a career just yet.

| Business, Media

Congratulations, you’re an unsecured Canwest creditor

FTI Consulting, one of the groups of lawyers handling Canwest Limited Partnership’s creditor protection filing, has a section on its website devoted to the proceedings. There you can find, among other things, a list of creditors (PDF).

They include, of interest to Montrealers and Gazette followers (in alphabetical order):

  • $253,808.16 to 1001 Dominion Square Management Inc., The Gazette’s landlord
  • $12,726.14 to Agence France-Presse, a newswire
  • $406,505.42 to Amex for corporate credit cards
  • $6,556.34 to the Audit Bureau of Circulations
  • $47,497.80 to Bleu Blanc Rouge, which handles The Gazette’s marketing campaigns
  • $5,213.38 to Bloomberg, another newswire
  • $114,700.77 to the Calgary Flames
  • $74,763.18 to Canada Post
  • $44,237.47 to Canadian Press (even though Canwest no longer uses CP) – listed separately as Canadian Press and The Canadian Press
  • $5,179.91 to CNW for press releases
  • $38,892.90 to Garda for security services
  • $24,035.10 to Getty Images
  • $1 million exactly to GWL Realty Advisors of Edmonton, the largest single non-bank creditor
  • $24,419.64 to Henry’s photo shop
  • $44,100.00 to Ipsos Reid for surveys
  • $21,380.91 to La Presse
  • $22,575.00 to Kleintel, a Montreal-based phone survey company
  • $28,041.92 to Legacy.com, a partner for paid obituaries online
  • $10,450.00 to Loblaws
  • $12,167.94 to the Los Angeles Times – Washington Post, another news service
  • $16,558.62 to Messageries Dynamiques, a Quebecor-owned distribution company
  • $52,783.50 to Microsoft Canada
  • $145,026.49 to the Ministère du revenu du Québec
  • $8,475.66 to the National Newspaper Awards
  • $17,931.06 to Nestle Canada
  • $5,065.31 to New York Times Digital
  • $9,946.29 to the Ontario Press Council
  • $50,400.00 to Orsyp Logiciels, a Montreal-based job schedule software company
  • $90,000.00 to the Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux
  • $72,930.38 to Rexall Sports Corporation, which owns the Edmonton Oilers
  • $37,153.20 to Rogers Media
  • $34,755.00 to Rogers Publishing
  • $11,841.84 to Saxotech Integrated Mediaware, which is providing a new desktop publishing system for Canwest papers
  • $331,160.57 to Service-Now.com, which … well, it’s anyone’s guess what they actually do.
  • $70,987.96 to Sun Media
  • $15,813.11 to Montreal’s Teleze Inc., a telemarketing company selling Gazette subscriptions
  • $87,499.65 to the Globe and Mail
  • $8,065.02 to New York Times Syndication, yet another news wire
  • $54,485.00 to the Salvation Army in Saskatoon
  • $145,341.3 to Toronto Star Syndication Services and Torstar Syndication Services
  • $10,773.90 to (Chicago) Tribune Media Services
  • $27,151.49 to United Way in Edmonton
  • $6,124.99 to the Winnipeg Free Press
  • $112,481.44 to the Workers’ Compensation Board of British Columbia
  • $15,491.17 to World Entertainment News Network for celebrity gossip
  • $45,986.85 to three radio stations
  • $45,437.84 to four union locals

The list is very long, but two items stand out like a sore thumb because of the extra digits, and those are the ones that really matter in all this:

  • $78,382,191.78 to the syndicate of banks under the senior subordinate credit agreement
  • $449,411,375.34 to senior subordinated notes

That’s (some of) the money Canwest LP owes the banks, and the reason it’s in financial trouble.

What the list doesn’t include, though, are freelancers, those independent contractors who provide stories and photos to newspapers in exchange for a negotiated fee. Most freelancers who did work between mid December and the Jan. 8 filing (and some who did work much earlier than that but weren’t paid or didn’t cash their cheques before the filing) are now grouped in with the paper suppliers, wire services, distributors and anyone else who provides goods and services to the newspapers and websites.

I counted two freelance columnists in The Gazette on the list through their companies:

  • $5,418.00 to L. Ian MacDonald’s Lian Public Affairs Ltd.
  • $9,673.79 to Phil Reimer’s Phil Reimer Communications. He’s Canwest’s travel cruise columnist

Other freelancers, including fine dining columnist Lesley Chesterman, are also out thousands of dollars as a result of this filing. Smaller freelancers (which may include myself, I’m still not sure yet) are out mere hundreds of dollars.

Whether they’ll see any of that money owed depends on how much money is left to give to all the other creditors, and that will depend mostly on the sale price of Canwest LP. The banks have set a floor bid of $950 million, the amount they’re owed for their loans (which means they wouldn’t be paying for the chain but rather exchanging their debt for equity and ownership), but they’re hoping someone will put in a higher bid. The higher the sale price, the more money can go to creditors. But there’s little hope that the price will be high enough to pay 100 cents on the dollar.

That’s very disappointing. The banks won’t fold if they’re out a few hundred million. The wire services aren’t a few thousand dollars from bankruptcy. But some freelancers rely on it as their only source of income, and a few hundred dollars can be the difference between making a rent payment and having an angry landlord.

After Canwest LP filed for creditor protection (not to be confused with bankruptcy, which eliminates debt), it secured so-called debtor-in-posession financing, which allowed it to continue its business. This means that people who did freelance work after Jan. 8 will still get paid (along with other post-filing creditors), as publisher Alan Allnutt explained. That also puts many in a strange position of getting screwed out of payment but still continuing to do business with a company.

If only I understood business, it would all make sense to me.