Quebecor has been throwing $$ away for months foaming about the CBC's real and imagined slights, it has made an industry of rampant rivalry that rational minds try to ignore. This Monday a calm response from a CBC VP to a vexing Montreal Gazette editorial puts it in perspective.
Marvel at how much ink a jealous rival used to calling the shots can spill inventing a scandal just because he can. Quebecor's owner can afford to print whatever he likes in his newspapers (and he owns MANY). This is the dark side of letting anyone monopolize the media.
Showing posts with label media commentary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media commentary. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Friday, October 29, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Sun's idea of "news" a joke, but will the CRTC care?
I see that Quebecor/aka Sun newspaper chain isn't toning down its slanted "reporting" about CBC just because it's trying to get a license to compete with it in 24/7 news.
Check out this "news" story from Althia Raj , the Sun reporter who seems to be assigned the job of taking the Quebecor party line in these must-do anti-CBC pieces.
She writes: "CBC received almost 900 complaints from 2007 to 2010".
What Raj means is that 900 Access to Information requests were filed about the CBC in those three years. A big difference. Access to Information requests are routinely filed by reporters or citizens in order to get information from public corporations. They are not "grievances" which Raj also calls them.
Two paragraphs later, we learn that most of the requests were filed "on behalf of QMI Agency". That's Quebec Media Inc., Quebecor's own newsservice (Raj's employer), which Raj never points out.
In other words, this story is really about the fact that Quebecor filed hundreds of Access to Information requests about its competitor, the CBC. And it did so by abusing a process that's about making public corporations more transparent. The Access to Information process is NOT designed to be used by companies to get information to use as a competitive weapon.
You can count on more of this type of "news" on the 24/7 Sun TV News channel too. Wonder if the CRTC considers this type of "news" worthy of a must-carry cable designation?
Check out this "news" story from Althia Raj , the Sun reporter who seems to be assigned the job of taking the Quebecor party line in these must-do anti-CBC pieces.
She writes: "CBC received almost 900 complaints from 2007 to 2010".
What Raj means is that 900 Access to Information requests were filed about the CBC in those three years. A big difference. Access to Information requests are routinely filed by reporters or citizens in order to get information from public corporations. They are not "grievances" which Raj also calls them.
Two paragraphs later, we learn that most of the requests were filed "on behalf of QMI Agency". That's Quebec Media Inc., Quebecor's own newsservice (Raj's employer), which Raj never points out.
In other words, this story is really about the fact that Quebecor filed hundreds of Access to Information requests about its competitor, the CBC. And it did so by abusing a process that's about making public corporations more transparent. The Access to Information process is NOT designed to be used by companies to get information to use as a competitive weapon.
You can count on more of this type of "news" on the 24/7 Sun TV News channel too. Wonder if the CRTC considers this type of "news" worthy of a must-carry cable designation?
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The robot reporter: false hope or cautionary tale
[Guest post by karenatcmg.]
Could a robot do your job? A lab on the Northwestern University campus near Chicago already has a prototype artificial intelligence program that can report on baseball games and will soon develop programs to cover football and basketball.
“It’s the dream of every managing editor: a reporter who is cheap, works fast and isn’t moody,” writes Le Monde correspondent Yves Eudes, who recently visited the lab.
The “Stats Monkey,” as it is known, will also soon turn its digital brain to reporting on financial markets.
The inventors of "The Machine," which is the byline on the prototype reports, gush that the product reads the same as AP wire copy. But without typos! (The machines – no kidding – are able to reproduce the same pat sentences that every reporter rushed for time uses to express the same range of outcomes). The benevolent inventors say they are not out to replace humans with machines and put them out of work. Of course not. They say their program could relieve journalists of the boring, repetitive work to allow them time for the noble part of the calling: field reports, investigations and analysis. Besides, they add, the purpose of the program is to report on minor league and varsity games and the stock market performance of smaller companies, which don’t currently get coverage in the mainstream media.
By the way, down the hall from the Stats Monkey is “News at Seven,” an AI project that puts together an online newscast, complete with animated male and female co-anchors (Zoe and George!), based on the preferences of the viewer. It gathers and summarizes relevant reports from a series of news sites and then “voices” them.
Frankly, the AI machines seem a day late and a dollar short. What can they do that we don’t already do, compiling and relaying data within seconds on a wire desk or producing newscasts according to a formula, primarily using secondary sources?
Besides, if news organizations aren’t devoting resources to high-school leagues and small business stock performance today, why would they invest in machines to do it tomorrow?
And who is to say that, once they had them, our employers would rehumanize our work? After all, if they wanted the fulsome product of human brains – if that’s where they saw the quick buck – they could have it already,couldn’t they?
Obviously the machines will solve nothing. It’s not even clear that they will be more productive (ie. produce more at less cost) or that they will create fewer headaches than regular human journalists. I mean who has NOT worked with temperamental IT systems?
But news of them alone is perhaps enough to scare us into working that much faster, with that much more accuracy, to avoid being replaced by a reserve army of computer chips.
Could a robot do your job? A lab on the Northwestern University campus near Chicago already has a prototype artificial intelligence program that can report on baseball games and will soon develop programs to cover football and basketball.
“It’s the dream of every managing editor: a reporter who is cheap, works fast and isn’t moody,” writes Le Monde correspondent Yves Eudes, who recently visited the lab.
The “Stats Monkey,” as it is known, will also soon turn its digital brain to reporting on financial markets.
The inventors of "The Machine," which is the byline on the prototype reports, gush that the product reads the same as AP wire copy. But without typos! (The machines – no kidding – are able to reproduce the same pat sentences that every reporter rushed for time uses to express the same range of outcomes). The benevolent inventors say they are not out to replace humans with machines and put them out of work. Of course not. They say their program could relieve journalists of the boring, repetitive work to allow them time for the noble part of the calling: field reports, investigations and analysis. Besides, they add, the purpose of the program is to report on minor league and varsity games and the stock market performance of smaller companies, which don’t currently get coverage in the mainstream media.
By the way, down the hall from the Stats Monkey is “News at Seven,” an AI project that puts together an online newscast, complete with animated male and female co-anchors (Zoe and George!), based on the preferences of the viewer. It gathers and summarizes relevant reports from a series of news sites and then “voices” them.
Frankly, the AI machines seem a day late and a dollar short. What can they do that we don’t already do, compiling and relaying data within seconds on a wire desk or producing newscasts according to a formula, primarily using secondary sources?
Besides, if news organizations aren’t devoting resources to high-school leagues and small business stock performance today, why would they invest in machines to do it tomorrow?
And who is to say that, once they had them, our employers would rehumanize our work? After all, if they wanted the fulsome product of human brains – if that’s where they saw the quick buck – they could have it already,couldn’t they?
Obviously the machines will solve nothing. It’s not even clear that they will be more productive (ie. produce more at less cost) or that they will create fewer headaches than regular human journalists. I mean who has NOT worked with temperamental IT systems?
But news of them alone is perhaps enough to scare us into working that much faster, with that much more accuracy, to avoid being replaced by a reserve army of computer chips.
Monday, February 1, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Canwest just an example of the media mess
Not enough has been written about the media crisis (because most of the country's major media are too conflicted to report it). Check out this first in a series of articles by former CBC producer Nick Fillmore. His piece -- at rabble.ca -- examines the depressing state of the industry and begins to look at some ways out of the mess we find ourselves in.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
For the price of a cup of coffee
So who's covering the big picture on what's happening with local TV, including the fire sale of a series of small-market TV stations across Canada over the last six months by conglomerates Canwest and CTVglobemedia? Who suggests the shuttering of the Red Deer station, which found no bargain-basement buyer, and the resulting loss of local news in rich Alberta's third largest city, is like Sherbrooke, Quebec, suddenly losing its local news coverage?
Le Devoir. It happens to be one of the only large-city daily newspapers in Canada that is not owned by a media conglomerate.
The "local TV matters" campaign - run by the major networks who have been using their local stations, including the ill-fated one in Red Deer, as bargaining chips to get access to cable fee revenues - is only mentioned toward the end of the article.
Meanwhile, the networks' "campaign" was the story earlier this week in many of the country's major daily newspapers. The ones that are connected through their media conglomerate owners to the those same campaigning networks.
Le Devoir. It happens to be one of the only large-city daily newspapers in Canada that is not owned by a media conglomerate.
The "local TV matters" campaign - run by the major networks who have been using their local stations, including the ill-fated one in Red Deer, as bargaining chips to get access to cable fee revenues - is only mentioned toward the end of the article.
Meanwhile, the networks' "campaign" was the story earlier this week in many of the country's major daily newspapers. The ones that are connected through their media conglomerate owners to the those same campaigning networks.
Friday, July 31, 2009
CBC local news: good idea, bad time
Check out this very interesting insider blog post about the CBC-TV schedule changes that are going to affect local news, and the "logic" behind them.
In case you haven't heard, local evening TV news is growing from 60 to 90 minutes. But there's a hitch. It'll start at 5 pm and be over by 6:30 pm to make way for the blockbuster lineup of Coronation Street, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, a detail that was buried in the announcement touting the change.
Good on Howard Bernstein, a former Executive Producer of the Toronto CBC local TV news show in the 1980s, when local news was a serious commitment, for providing another forum for discussions like this.
Please feel free to submit comments or guest blogs here (anonymous or otherwise) about the changes coming to CBC and other media this fall.
In case you haven't heard, local evening TV news is growing from 60 to 90 minutes. But there's a hitch. It'll start at 5 pm and be over by 6:30 pm to make way for the blockbuster lineup of Coronation Street, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, a detail that was buried in the announcement touting the change.
Good on Howard Bernstein, a former Executive Producer of the Toronto CBC local TV news show in the 1980s, when local news was a serious commitment, for providing another forum for discussions like this.
Please feel free to submit comments or guest blogs here (anonymous or otherwise) about the changes coming to CBC and other media this fall.
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