Michel Vézina, the former ICI columnist who quit in January when he wouldn’t sign a contract that would allow his work to be republished freely in other Quebecor publications (including the Journal de Montréal), has resurfaced at Transcontinental, where he will be writing about the arts for MontrealExpress.ca and the various Transcontinental-owned community weeklies.
I’ll note the irony that he will now be writing what is essentially a syndicated column after having objected to syndication.
The fallout from the cuts at Transcontinental are starting to trickle down. The Courrier Laval has lost two of its four reporters, leaving two people to write all the news from across the island.
One of the reporters losing her job is Nathalie Villeneuve. You might remember her as the person whose story TVA picked up without attribution. Now what will TV news report on?
Meanwhile, the union representing employees at Transcon’s community weeklies is bemoaning the situation at papers in the centre of the island of Montreal (Villeray, Rosemont, Ville-Marie, etc.) who have even fewer journalists and can’t do much journalism of their own.
I can attest to that. There’s plenty of syndicated content (mostly about cars), but very little of local interest comes out of those papers.
UPDATE: Voir’s Steve Boudrias calls this cut “absurd”, with some thoughts on the state of community journalism.
The union representing workers at Transcontinental’s community weeklies has launched a website, which details its positions in contract negotiations.
The workers have been without a contract since August.
The link of the day comes from this morning’s Le Devoir, in which media reporter Paul Cauchon does an analysis of the Journal situation, the freelance columnist problem and the role of unions in media. It’s a bit opinionative (and, since it’s in Le Devoir, that opinion is left-of-centre), but worth a look.
Patrick Lagacé and Bernard Landry were on Tout le monde en parle last night, and both answered questions about the Journal. Landry recently quit his column (with a lame excuse) and Lagacé had to answer for his boyfriend Richard Martineau, who just won’t quit. Rue Frontenac was watching and has the play-by-play. As does Richard Therrien.
On the other channel (with twice the audience), TVA had the premiere of Star Académie, and Journal workers were picketing outside giving out flyers to audience members. (The Clique du Plateau wonders if Rue Frontenac’s critique of the show would have been as critical if it had appeared in the Journal)
Meanwhile, a journalist at Transcontinental in Quebec City has gotten her job back after she was fired last year, coincidentally (or not) as she was organizing a union for their community weeklies in the area.
The final issue of the NDG Monitor went out today. It includes a column from editor Toula Foscolos on the print shutdown, one from Noah Sidel and another from Bram Eisenthal, plus a message from the publisher. Foscolos says many readers accused Transcontinental of not caring about them, which she counters with the fact that the paper has been running with a deficit for years now.
Frankly, I’m surprised they’re keeping the editorial staff and trying to do this online. Transcontinental’s cookie-cutter community websites are awful, and most of the content you find on them links to or is copied from other community newspaper sites.
Though I don’t want to see any local journalists lose their jobs, I can’t help but think that the online Monitor experiment will eventually fail, and those remaining will either have to move to other papers (the Westmount Examiner and West Island Chronicle are also owned by Transcon) or find another career.
Hour also covers the NDG Monitor shutdown, and CTV News had a story about it on today’s newscast, but its website won’t let me link to a specific video, so you’ll have to find it yourself.
Less than a year after it relaunched itself, the NDG Monitor newspaper will stop printing as of next week and focus exclusively on its website. The decision results in the layoff of two salespeople and a newspaper manager, but not the editor, reporter or freelance columnists.
The newspaper dates back to 1926, though its downfall began in 1996 when it was acquired by Transcontinental. In an effort to save costs, the community newspaper chain (which owns just about all of the community weeklies in the Montreal area, except The Suburban) cut staff and increased “efficiencies” by having the newspapers share content and design. It even went so far as to rename the Monitor the West End Chronicle, essentially making it a zoned edition of another newspaper (and confusing plenty of readers).
Transcon brought the name Monitor back last year, but by then it was too late. The paper had lost all its personality, and people stopped reading it.
I’d wish it luck online, but the website is so crappy (Transcon cookie-cutter messiness that’s more interested in pushing other Transcon products than featuring local content) that without a significant redesign I’m pretty sure it’s on its way to failure as well.
The Monitor’s final print issue will be Thursday, Feb. 5.
The news was announced this morning, with some Daily News employees hearing about it from other media (how classy). Transcontinental, the publisher of the Daily News, as well as free daily Metro newspapers in major cities (including Montreal), and community weeklies including the West Island Chronicle and Westmount Examiner, is going to replace a small daily newspaper with a free one that relies mostly on wire copy mixed with advertising.
The paper will go from 92 employees to 20. And journalism in Halifax suffers.
The Chronicle Herald, the other (and much larger) Halifax daily, naturally has the story.
Some other coverage:
UPDATE: The King’s Journalism Review has an entire section on the Daily News and its history, including interviews with now-unemployed staff. Meanwhile the Canadian Association of Journalists calls the paper’s demise a “dangerous trend” towards “news lite”
Transcontinental, which owns 61 community weeklies in Quebec (22 of them on the island of Montreal), has decided to reverse its position banning brown people from its papers.
At least, that’s the best I could figure out from this editorial, which is running in all of Transcontinental’s newspapers this week. In it, the general manager of Transcontinental Newspaper Group, Serge Lemieux, has finally clued in to the idea that covering community issues involves covering cultural communities as well. Apparently it took the Bouchard-Taylor Commission into reasonable accommodation for him to figure this out.
The article doesn’t mention exactly what they’re going to do, only that they’ll be “celebrating cultural diversity.” In fact, it goes into more detail about what they’re not going to do, specifically that they won’t be publishing articles in “all the world’s languages” because they find it “undesirable” to do so. Instead, they’ll publish articles “exclusively in French or English (as the case may be)” (French versions of this editorial don’t mention articles in English).
We’ll see what they have in mind.
Speaking of nonsensical Serge Lemieux columns, this one, which in the same breath blames the media for oversensationalizing the issue of reasonable accommodation and says the commission looking into the issue has been a good idea, is also appearing in Transcontinental papers this week.
Ironically, both these articles serve to remind us, in case we didn’t know already, how little local journalism actually comes out of Transcontinental weeklies. A large amount of content is syndicated across many papers, their websites are identical and even most of their logos have the same design elements. All that’s left are some fluff stories about aging grandmothers, rewritten press releases about local events, and a couple of local issue stories written by overworked, underpaid journalists.
But I guess “celebrating cultural communities” will fix that.