CTV News Montreal has flashy new titles super-imposed at the bottom of news reports. In addition to the standard text-over-blue-bar, there’s now clip art or stock photos that are relevant to the story. A map of Iraq for a story about the war. The logo of the city for a municipal affairs story. Flames for a story about a fire.

What gets me is that there are people paid to do this. People spend time during their day finding stock photos and photoshopping them into graphics. People who could otherwise be performing acts of real journalism.

Sadly, it appears CTV is more interested in flashy gimmicks like uninformative graphics and pointless live standups to introduce pre-packaged news reports than it is in hiring more journalists to tell us what’s happening in our city.