New Prez in this space

I thought I should introduce myself ... the new President in this space. My name is Carmel Smyth and I was elected national president of the Canadian Media Guild last December. I was a long-time reporter in various cities across the country and am now a television producer at CBC in Toronto. For the next three years, my day job will be leading the union through these interesting times.

I'm a little late getting started on this blog because I spent the first six weeks of the year at Harvard's trade union program. It was an eye-opener, depressing and inspiring at the same time. More on that in later posts.

I'd love to hear from you ... your thoughts, ideas and questions about this turbulent industry, about how the union is working for you, and any topics you might have. Feel free to leave a comment, anonymous or not.

Cutting his way to being "digital first"

Funny how the media doesn't report on how it's decimating itself.

Both CBC and CTV reported today on how 42 Ottawa Citizen staffers are taking the buyout offered by new Postmedia owner Paul Godfrey last month. The Citizen itself was strangely silent about it. Ever wonder why big general buyouts are the staff-cut method of choice? So there's no noise. No "L" word, as in layoffs. But the positions are still lost; the expertise gone and there's no added value to anyone.

Trouble is, this is only the tip of the iceberg at Postmedia. The numbers of positions being lost across the whole former Southam/Canwest (Montreal Gazette, Regina Leader-Post, Vancouver Sun and Province, Victoria Times Colonist and others) chain are at least triple that number of 42 and there are plans to centralize the business and advertising operations in a single city. If you read one of these papers, your local newspaper will be local in name only. Godfrey talks about being "hyper local" in news content but beware. Unless there's evidence of hiring people to do local news...those are just cute words. The strategy appears to be to cut an already lean newspaper empire to its very core, go public next summer and sell it all for profit.

Forget the demographic deficit. We have an information deficit.

Working 9 to 5: how quaint

The news industry is at once shrinking yet expanding...but in the expansion, there's a catch. The expansion is in online news...where everything is about speed, hits and the need to constantly update -- not necessarily inform. This piece in the New York Times is an excellent warning about the effect this is having on media workers -- early burnout.

Reporters are being measured by simple output -- which is assessed by "most viewed" lists on home pages. Pay is based on how many readers click on your article. What kind of world is this? One that burns out its young, apparently.

When digital technology turned our work into "multi-platform" and the distinctions between online, TV and radio were erased....most of our jobs morphed dramatically. We are expected to do it all, on many services and media, twitter/blog about it and do it five minutes faster than the competition. Workload has become the main issue for employees, far outpacing compensation. Looks like the treadmill will only move faster -- before anyone has time to think about the effects on our industry -- and those of us who work in it -- as a whole.

What's happened to all the G20 video, pictures?

Amy Miller, one of the arrested independent journalists at the G20 summit last month (see previous blog post), tells me that all the journalists and others she knows who recorded police arrests/abuse/beatings etc. had their cameras wiped or "gone missing" while they were in the detention centre.

That video would obviously be useful for the public record about those fateful two days. It may be evidence for someone's defence. It could be damning evidence about the actions of the police. Or it could support the actions police took. In any case, it's all gone, and we should all be demanding whether police kept copies of the material confiscated, and whether and how it will be used.

Here's an example of some of what these independent journalists tell me:
Scott Weinstein says he was arrested July 1 at the Montreal G20 solidarity demo. He says he was told "that the group of agent provocateurs/undercover police who tried to infiltrate the demo previously" were at the demo, and he started filming them. "I was on the street and they then left the sidewalk and surrounded me, grabbed me and tried to take the camera. I want to state clearly that I at no time touched them or tried to fight back. I simply held onto the camera as long as I could (about a few minutes). I lay on the ground, trying to get into a fetal position as they were kneeing me and hit me with a few punches. It seemed about 4 or 6 of these guys were on top of me, and for a while, I had the illusion that I could actually keep them from taking the camera away... I was arrested, charged with assaulting the police with my bicycle, and they got the camera....I was held till about 5:30 p.m., and to my surprise, I was released. My camera and digital card were returned to me, but the file containing the film of the agent provocateurs was erased, along with photos I took of some of the speakers at the demo, and some of the vans carrying riot police."

Lisa Walter, the Our Times journalist, says she got her still camera and video camera back from police after her detention, but the memory card was taken from her still camera, and they erased the data on the video camera's hard drive.

Jesse Freeston, a video-journalist with The Real News Network, says he was attacked and had his mic temporarily taken away from him on Friday June 25th while covering the "Justice for our Communities" march. He thinks it was in order to stop him from filming what appeared as excessive force by police in order to clear an area after they made "a very suspicious and violent arrest of a deaf man named Emomotimi Azorbo". His video is here.

Some find it easy to dismiss the complaints of the G20 independent journalists because...well....they're independent and they have a point of view. They happen to be young, in most cases, and consider themselves activists. So what? Those are not good enough reasons for police to steal their private property and rob them and the public of the valuable images that was contained on all those hard drives and memory cards.

Community TV should be supported - now more than ever

I love the headline of the piece in support of community TV in rabble.ca -- titled "Community TV blamed for cable cash crunch". The story is a great read -- the story of Big Cable maximizing profits at the expense of their own stations, and of course, dodging any kind of criticism along the way.

Today's the deadline for submission of comments for an important set of CRTC hearings on community TV.

The hearings aren't getting alot of attention, but people in the industry know what's at stake. Once a place of dynamic innovation and divergent points of view, community TV stations are not what they should be. They could and should be a place for real local news. They could and should be a more effective training ground, especially if the stations were linked in some way, with any of the provincial public broadcasters or the CBC.

A group named CACTUS, which stands for the Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations, is trying to improve regulations, funding and bandwidth for these stations. We at the Canadian Media Guild are supporting their efforts. The hearings begin April 26 in Gatineau.

New buyers who actually want to talk about content!

For the first time in a long time, some good news about the fate of Canwest. The Toronto Star and others are reporting that a group of investors led by former Senator Jerry Grafstein is preparing to make an offer for three of the Canwest newspapers -- the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post.

What's so encouraging about this news is that not only does the group have background in the business (Grafstein was a founder of Citytv in Toronto, Ray Heard used to be an editor at the Montreal Star then he was an executive at Global TV and Beryl Wajsman is editor of a weekly newspaper in Quebec), they are actually talking about content!

The three are not talking about "synergies", not making this about bottom-line cost-effective delivery of news on all sorts of platforms. That's the kind of talk that led to Canwest's troubles.

Instead this group is talking about how newspapers would benefit from local involvement that would produce timely, informative, well-written stories and grassroots journalism reflecting the priorities of Canada's diverse communities.

Wow! No matter what happens with Canwest up for sale, the injection of this kind of interest -- interest for all the right reasons -- can only be good news for the news business.

Petty media games in the hallways of power

There’s a lot going on in the broadcast industry these days: a crisis in local news, fights between broadcasters and cable and satellite providers about who’s going to pay to make sure local programming survives, the 800 job losses at the CBC and hundreds of other job losses at other media organizations.

So you have to wonder why the Quebecor-owned SunMedia chain ran a piece yesterday rehashing a month-old story. On March 25, CBC president Hubert Lacroix said Corporation managers are going to get their performance bonuses slashed by 20% to 50%, for a saving of $4 million, as part of his speech to staff about the 800 layoffs. All the information in the top three paragraphs of the SunMedia article was in Lacroix’s speech to staff that day; a speech that was heavily covered in the media.

The only new element is that two Conservative MPs, (Shelley Glover and Rod Bruinooge) used their time in a parliamentary committee meeting on the crisis in local television on Monday to grill Lacroix about the bonuses. And though nothing new was revealed by Lacroix that wasn’t known a month ago, the story ran today with a prominent headline (“CBC to give perks and pink slips” ) in the Edmonton Sun and under a variety of other headlines throughout the chain.

It goes without saying that I’m not a fan of every executive decision made at the CBC in the past few years. And I know that reading about money spent on hotels and dinners has a deflating effect on Guild members. But it’s no coincidence the story about expenses just happened to be filed days before Lacroix’s scheduled appearance before the committee and just as the government is weighing whether any program to help the broadcasters cope with the crisis in the industry will include the public broadcaster.

One thing is for sure: rehashing old bonus news, and celebrating expenses filed three years ago just doesn’t seem too relevant when people are talking about the very survival of the news business and the future of conventional television.

You’d think Glover and Bruinooge would be concerned about the bigger-picture stuff. Both happen to come from the Winnipeg area, home of Canwest, which is spending these days teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and in desperate need of government help.

The CBC cuts and the $1.1B: one has real impact and the other is meaningless

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly two weeks since the first word of the cut at the CBC…and my last post. Most days I felt so overwhelmed and saddened by the news it was hard to know where to start … so I stopped (for a while).

The more we learn, the more about this CBC cut is just wrong. The degree of impact on communities across the country is so much greater than the relatively small amount of money it would cost to prevent the cut. Take Sudbury as an example, where hundreds of people turned up at a rally Sunday. It’s about to lose half its radio staff. Less than half a million dollars would save these jobs. But without them, places such as North Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Timmins -- not to mention the entire James Bay coast won’t get covered.

The sheer value of information and culture the CBC provides in places like Sudbury are impossible to measure and track and that applying dollar signs to this type of public service is simply impossible and meaningless.

That’s what irks me so much about the way the Harper government, through Heritage Minister James Moore, has responded to this cut. His approach has been all about placing a distorted value on a single dollar figure by suggesting the $1.1B that has been budgeted for the CBC is some crazy amount of money, that’s it’s even a mark of generosity, a financial line in the sand. It's even unprecedented, according to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The truth is the CBC got $1.1B as far back as 1992. The figure dipped down in the late 90s, and was up over $1B every year since 2002. The CBC’s budget has had no increase for inflation in all that time. Put another way, if the CBC was granted the budget it got in 1992 in real dollars today…that would be $1.5B (and it would mean none of these cuts would be necessary and CBC radio could move into under-served areas such as Hamilton, Red Deer and Kelowna).

To further put the $1.1B figure in context, take a look at Canwest Global’s operating budget for 2008. It’s $1.7B. That pays for newspapers, television and the Canada.com web site --in one language. Compare that to CBC’s radio, TV and internet programming of nearly all Canadian original material in both languages, the Northern radio service in 8 Aboriginal languages and the international service. Does $1.1B for all that seem as “substantial” as Moore would have you believe?

Another layoff day at CBC: so sad and so inconclusive

It all seems so familiar. Waiting for the CBC job cut announcement that’s been looming for weeks, and then hearing it, for yet another time, another year. But this year's version somehow seems so ... hollow.

We know that taking 800 jobs out of the CBC will have immense consequences, yet we have no faces or programs to attach to those job losses. In most cases, people are going home tonight not knowing how or if their own show or their own workplace will be affected. At Radio-Canada, we did learn that weekend news shows are being scrapped except for the one in Ottawa, the TV noon shows in Ottawa, Quebec and Moncton are gone, and the morning radio show in Windsor is being cancelled. But the details are coming out painfully, one piece at a time.

We don’t who will leave or even whether it will be by their choice or by layoff. Will the CBC be permitted to offer voluntary incentive packages to people who have the so-called 85 formula (years of service plus the years of age equaling 85 or more)? It’s up to the Heritage Minister to grant permission for that, according to CBC CEO Hubert Lacroix. And we don’t know when that permission may or may not come.

It was a day all about numbers; the $171 million needed to balance the budget, the $125 million that may come from a sale of assets, TV’s share of the cut (83%), radio’s share of the cut (17%). A lot of numbers, dissected many ways.

Yet at the end of the day, we know very little except the CBC is once again not being supported by the government, for no reason other than straight politics being played by Harper’s PMO. Stephen Harper mused about privatizing English TV as far back as 2004 and we all know about last year’s culture cuts. He’s been able to defend not providing the bridge financing by calling the base $1.1B allocation “record financing”, when even his Heritage Minister James Moore has acknowledged it’s not actually the most ever. On Friday, Moore more properly used the word “straight financing”. (As far back as 1990-91, the CBC was getting just under $1.1B which in today’s dollars would be $1.5B. So much for record financing.)

The numbers obfuscate so much. Tomorrow, we will learn details about program cuts. We are sad tonight, but I know we'll get mad tomorrow.

The CBC budget: a political show no one should have to watch

It’s budget time for the CBC --- and this year, it’s become so painful to watch that I’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t really have a public broadcaster. What we have is a broadcaster that is funded with taxpayer dollars in such a partisan and short-sighted way that the public aspect is missing entirely.

Every year we watch the same play. CBC executives are forced to make their case in serious meetings behind close doors, they wait, they are given vague promises. Then they wait some more. They want to be diplomatic and respectful of the process. Valuable planning time goes by. Decisions are delayed. As time goes by, more scenarios unfold in case the money is not granted and in some cases, the scenarios get worse as more time goes by. Then when the CBC seeks some conclusion to the whole thing – after all the new fiscal year begins in THREE weeks, it’s accused of “begging” or “whining “for money in public.

“The CBC cannot be insulated from all market realities,” said Kory Teneycke, a spokesperson for the prime minister, said last week. That was a cue things were not going well. This forced CBC CEO Hubert Lacroix to go to the public, make the case, and let it be known what’s at stake. Given what CBC does and where it spends its money, what’s at stake always comes down to programming. The made-in-Canada stuff – plus the news and information the CBC delivers in communities from coast to coast to coast. You know. The stuff the private sector is abandoning.

The truth is there’s not a lot of wiggle room in CBC budget setting, certainly not enough to justify all this hand-wringing.

It has been getting the same base parliamentary appropriation of just over $1B for the past 15 years or so. Sometimes there’s a discretionary $60M for programming that the government always calls “one-time” and dangles like a piece of red meat. And this year, the CBC is asking for bridge financing – a loan – to get it over this ad revenue freefall.

So why all the drama over a relatively small amount of money? The only answer is pure partisan politics. When Finance Minister Jim Flaherty tells reporters the CBC gets "substantial financing", he is inferring that $1B is overly generous. (It sounds like a lot until you learn that Canwest spent $1.7B last year.) He is doing this to play to his party’s base.

Last year, the parliamentary Heritage Committee recommended that the CBC and the government enter into a seven-year deal or “memorandum of understanding” so there would be more stability in decision-making and not so much room for political interference.

It’s time. The annual rerun of this show is destructive to the CBC and everything it stands for. It creates a nasty government-as-boss dynamic. Meanwhile, as employees, all we can do is watch…and wait.

Why let Canwest off the hook?

It’s not surprising that Canwest announced this week that it will drop its noon newscast at its Global Toronto station, on top of the cancellation of the morning newscast announced last fall. Just last week, the company announced it lost $33M in the quarter ending November 30, 2008.

In the meantime, Canwest has gone and asked the CRTC to loosen restrictions on integrating its TV and newspaper newsrooms designed to maintain diversity of editorial voices from news sources owned by a single company.

After Canwest’s purchase of the Hollinger newspaper chain in 2000, the CRTC bought the company’s argument that it needed to grow and cross media lines to be “competitive.” And Canwest didn’t stop there. Around that time, it also bought up a bunch of local TV stations to create a second TV network, now called E! And last year, Canwest got permission from the CRTC to buy 13 specialty channels from the former Alliance Atlantis with the help of U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Canwest Global juggernaut now owns: the country’s biggest chain of 13 daily newspapers (including the Vancouver Sun and Province, the Ottawa Citizen, the Montreal Gazette and the National Post) and two freebie newspapers; the Global TV and E! networks (14 local stations); CW Television (a total of 21 specialties) and the canada.com website. It has paid dearly for expanding its holdings, so dearly that the company is being crippled by debt repayments and – to come back to where we started – has cut more than 1,000 jobs in the last 12 months.

Now, as local reporting is being whittled away across the company, Canwest is seeking more deregulation from the CRTC. It wants to be able to combine its TV and newspaper newsrooms, despite the fact that all the centralization in the world is unlikely to save Canwest from its debt load.

Where does this leave the public? Ask the people of Hamilton, Ontario. Under Canwest, local TV station CHCH (now part of the E! network) lost 30 minutes of its noon-hour show and suffered a loss in newsgathering capacity. To help pay for the buying sprees.

Hamilton, a city of more than 500,000 people, has no other local TV station. The CBC has floated a plan to establish a local radio station, but that plan is stalled for lack of public funding.

Ironically, there is one area of growth for Canwest in Hamilton. Over at “Canwest Editorial Services,” they’re hiring, despite or because of the company’s financial tough times. You see, it’s all non-union. These employees don’t provide local news to Hamilton. They produce the pages for Canwest newspapers across the country. Taking jobs out of some communities, and news out of others: that’s Canwest’s latest record. Why should anyone, especially our regulator, support any more breaks for this company?

Take a cue from Obama and get organized

In honour of today’s inauguration of Barack Obama, I’d like to celebrate his past as an organizer. The new president of the United States made his mark by showing people that when they get together, they have more power and more chance to really change things.

It’s amazing to me that CNN repeatedly shows a short film, From MLK to Today, in which Obama points to the picket line as he traces the history of the civil rights movement. Images that at one time seemed almost heretical are now lauded because of Obama’s personal story.

We who work in the media should take this narrative to heart. If you’re working for a troubled company right now, your best hope is to work with your colleagues to find out what’s going on, get smart about it, and then make sure you’re part of the solution. Fast. Because – in the vast majority of cases – employees have the on-the-ground knowledge that a workable strategy needs.

And to be honest, it’s much better if you’re part of a certified union. Don’t have one? It’s not too late and you can call mine or another one. Just take it from Obama. It’s what organizing is all about.

“We employees are now the adults in the room,” Bernie Lunzer, president of The Newspaper Guild, is fond of saying. We tend to be in it for the long haul, unlike the owners. We are the ones that know what our audience or readers want. The business has been our career, not a step on the corporate ladder.

Can employees really save some of these companies? At a minimum, they can inject some new ideas that save money. But more importantly, employee interests can be completely over-run in a meltdown or bankruptcy proceeding unless there’s a union in place. Unions can ensure pensions are intact or, in the case of the Tribune Co., they can be on the creditor committee to speak up for employee assets. More on that in a future post.

In the meantime, let’s hear from you. Have you got any stories that illustrate people power on the job? Seems trite – but if you don’t have some functional group in place, you’re on your own in this troubled economic time.

Radio silence on media crisis

Question: what’s the one part of the economic crisis that’s not getting covered in the media? Answer: the crisis in the media itself.

Canwest’s announcement this week that it lost $33M in its first quarter is only the rather large tip of the iceberg. A Canwest executive even admitted the company could walk away from the E! television network that serves eight Canadian cities. Along with Canwest, Torstar, Quebecor (Sun newspaper chain) and CTVglobemedia have cut a total of about 1,300 jobs in the past three months.

Each announcement is reported in the middle section of the business pages with no elaboration on what the cuts mean, why they are necessary and what’s being lost. Over the years, reporters have told us that they are discouraged from telling the story because of the fear of butting up against the corporate interests of their bosses. What we get is the boring stuff: the quarterly loss, the revenues, the share price.

What’s not being told is that a perfect storm is battering virtually every North American media company. And bigger is not really better. Many that went on acquisition frenzies over the past decade (see Canwest, Tribune Co.) are so mired in debt they can’t deal with either the recession or the declining ad market for traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers). No one knows when and if they’ll ever be able to “monetize” the internet to make up for the massive losses in their bread-and-butter advertising.

South of the border, Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy protection in early December. Gannett, which owns USA Today and 85 other newspapers in the United States, has announced that it is forcing thousands of employees to take an unpaid week off this quarter. Detroit’s two newspapers announced they’re going to cut home delivery to only three days a week.

The only glimmer of hope on the horizon is the few people on both sides of the border who are starting to think about ways out. About 150 media union members met last weekend in Baltimore to discuss the collapsing industry. We heard from academics and analysts about why it’s happening and new ways to change the business model and finance public information.

Chris Benner, of the University of California at Davis, mentioned:
- non-profit organizations taking ownership of parts of the media -- such as the Poynter Institute, which owns the St. Petersburg Times
- public paying directly for content – such as Spot Us, where the public can pay for the stories they want to see done
- the public can also pay to get documentaries done at Reel Changes

There are also programs that provide tax incentives for no-profit and low-profit companies with socially-beneficial mandates and there are models floating around in Canada, one of them championed by none other than Paul Martin. One expert, Robert Lang [link fixed] believes such programs could be used to finance news and information organizations.

These things alone aren’t enough (a well-funded public broadcaster is still a cornerstone of a healthy media environment) but the fact that people are thinking about separating the commercial interests from the information is a good thing.

The first step in this country is to properly acknowledge the problem and to understand that it is in everyone’s interest to make sure that quality newsgathering and reporting can continue.

Please share your thoughts on what needs to be done.