Globe and Mail offers voluntary buyouts as it repositions for digital media

By The Canadian Press - Monday, April 22, 2013 at 8:47 PM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – The Globe and Mail is offering a new round of voluntary buyouts to staff as the newspaper moves to cut costs in the face of a slump in print advertising and to position itself for the digital era.

The newspaper did not say how many it was seeking, but CEO Phillip Crawley said in an interview he would be “happy” with 60, the same number who took packages under a similar program in 2009.

A buyout of that size would represent about eight per cent of the newspaper’s 770 employees.

Crawley said staff were informed of the offers at a meeting Monday afternoon.

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Conde Nast expands Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s role, names her company artistic director

By The Associated Press - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Conde Nast is expanding the role of Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. She has been named the company’s artistic director.

The appointment was announced Wednesday by CEO Charles H. Townsend. Wintour’s new duties include developing an overall “creative vision” for Conde Nast, which has a portfolio of 18 consumer magazines, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Allure and GQ.

Wintour, 63, will continue to run Vogue on a day-to-day basis, which she has done since 1988. She will also continue to serve as editorial director of Teen Vogue.

Townsend said the promotion comes at a time to “leverage Anna’s extraordinary vision and leadership.”

Wintour created the post-recession Fashion’s Night Out. She sits on President Barack Obama’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and as an elective trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Quebecor cutting 500 jobs at Sun Media to trim $45 million of costs

By The Canadian Press - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

MONTREAL – Quebecor Inc. is cutting some 500 jobs at its Sun Media newspaper division in a move that includes the closure of two production facilities in Ottawa and Kingston.

The downsizing, representing about a third of Sun Media’s unionized workforce, is part of the Montreal-based media group’s efforts to reduce annual costs by $45 million.

There had been earlier reports Quebecor (TSX:QBR.B) would eliminate the position of publisher at some newspapers.

Quebecor’s president and CEO, Pierre Karl Peladeau, says the restructuring is warranted by changes in the newspaper industry.

“With the recent announcement of a major strategic redesign of Sun Media’s organizational structure, the restructuring further streamlines and optimizes the organization’s operations,” he said in a release Tuesday.

“By doing so, Sun Media Corporation is proactively leading the way to ensure long term success.”

It remains committed to its publications, which include the Toronto Sun and other dailies across Canada under the Sun and other banners, Peladeau added.

A representative for Sun Media declined to provide any additional details.

Sun Media has 36 paid-circulation daily newspapers and six free daily newspapers as well as almost 200 community newspapers, shopping guides and other specialty publications. It also provides commercial printing and related services as well as distribution for newspapers, flyers and magazines.

“Clearly, this is a blow to journalism in Canada,” said Paul Morse, head of the Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild, which represents some of Sun Media’s employees.

“The erosion of these kinds of jobs is significant problem for newspapers that are going to be dealing with trying to put out quality journalism with workforces that are clearly stretched beyond the limit.

“This is a terrible day for journalism in Canada.”

Quebecor said the “innovative plan will streamline decision-making and operational structures in order to achieve greater efficiency in all activities, from the editorial to the industrial operations.”

“Sun Media Corporation is also planning to redesign its sales activities to strengthen its business strategy. At a time of negative growth in the industry, maintaining reasonable cost-effectiveness is essential,” the company said.

The Montreal-based media and telecom company, which also owns the Videotron cable and phone business and the TVA television network in Quebec, reported Tuesday it had $18.6 million or 30 cents per share of net income attributable to shareholders in the third quarter.

That’s down about 29 per cent from $26.1 million or 41 cents a year ago.

On the other hand, Quebecor’s adjusted income from continuing operations rose to $52.1 million or 83 cents per share — nine cents a share above the consensus estimated compiled by Thomson Reuters.

The adjusted income was up from $40 million or 63 cents per share in the third quarter of 2011.

Quebecor’s third-quarter revenue also improved slightly, rising about $45 million to nearly $1.06 billion — up from $1.01 billion a year earlier.

“The corporation continued its growth in the third quarter of 2012 despite a fiercely competitive business environment in most of its lines of business,” Peladeau said.

“It increased its revenues by 4.4 per cent, its operating income by 10.4 per cent and its adjusted income from continuing operations by 30.2 per cent, confirming the profitability of the major investments made in recent years.”

CBC says it is bracing for financial hit if NHL lockout cancels season

By The Canadian Press - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 7:20 PM - 0 Comments

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – CBC president Hubert Lacroix will be as disappointed as any hockey fan if the NHL lockout drags on.

An iced or delayed season would be just the latest financial hit for a public broadcaster already facing more than a $200-million shortfall over the next three years, he said Tuesday as the Crown corporation held its yearly public meeting in St. John’s, N.L.

“We have replacement programming for that, it’s not like we’re going to go to dead air,” Lacroix later told reporters.

“It’s disappointing to everybody who’s a hockey fan not to have Hockey Night in Canada.”

And for the CBC, “that’s a cash flow challenge for us,” he said.

It would be just more bad news for a public broadcaster that offers more than 30 services with a shrinking workforce that produces or handles content ranging from global, national and regional news to local music and reality shows.

The federal government cut 10 per cent or $115 million from the CBC/Radio Canada budget over three years as it reduced spending across departments to lower the deficit last spring. Government funding accounts for about 64 per cent of the public broadcaster’s budget and the corporation receives just over $1.1 billion a year from taxpayers.

Lacroix says those cuts plus increasing costs mean the CBC faces a $200-million shortfall in the next three years and must also come up with another $25 million for severance payments.

About 475 of 650 planned full-time job cuts were to take effect this fiscal year.

The corporation has already closed bureaus in Africa and South America, and slashed programs such as CBC News Network’s “Connect with Mark Kelley,” and CBC Radio’s “Dispatches.”

Then in July, Canada’s broadcast regulator announced it’s phasing out a controversial fee charged to customers by many cable and satellite companies to support local television programs. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said the $100-million Local Programming Improvement Fund, set up in 2008 to help small and mid-sized local stations weather the recession as they moved to digital systems, will end by Aug. 31, 2014.

The decision will cost the CBC, Lacroix said after Tuesday’s meeting. He said officials will raise the matter when the public broadcaster goes before the CRTC later this fall for licence renewal hearings.

“You can’t take $47 million more (from) our budget and think that there’s not going to be an impact.”

Lacroix said the CBC now generates $600 million to $700 million of its own revenues but must continue to trim costs and raise more money. It hopes to come up with $50 million by putting ads on Radio 2 and Espace Musique — a move that must be approved by the CRTC — and by leasing more than 74,000 square metres of real estate by 2017.

Lacroix said he’s also studying the root causes and solutions for high staff absentee rates. A report prepared for CBC’s board of directors, obtained by QMI Agency through Access to Information, indicates CBC workers were absent an average of 16.5 days in 2010-11 at a cost of almost $18 million.

That compares to public sector workers who missed almost 13 days for personal reasons in 2011, and private-sector workers who took eight days off, says Statistics Canada’s website.

“We think it’s a high number and we constantly are going to work on it,” Lacroix said. “It’s one way surely of trying to see how we can improve the cost piece of CBC/Radio-Canada. Clearly.”

The fourth annual public question-and-answer forum was held for the first time outside Ottawa as a nod to the importance of markets beyond Canada’s major city centres, Lacroix said. He said the meeting dovetailed with a board of directors gathering in St. John’s and was “marginally” more expensive than the usual cost of $60,000 to $80,000.

Lacroix told the meeting that diversity in Canadian media is at stake as most content is now controlled by just four companies: Bell, Rogers, Shaw and Quebecor.

Bell would control 36 per cent of conventional television revenues if its bid to buy Astral Media succeeds, he said, quoting a CRTC report.

“That’s more than twice the amount of its largest competitor.”

Canadians should care about “a level of concentration never seen before,” Lacroix said in his speech.

“Despite the almost unlimited quantity and choice of content available, very little of it is Canadian when it comes to English television, and very little of the rest is free from a small number of commercial agendas.”

Lacroix also said he envisions a media future that is “more about people’s active experience than just the passive consumption of content.”

“The public broadcaster will need to devise new ways that will allow it to be the first place that Canadians think of when it comes to the Canadian experience, Canadian culture and Canadian democratic life. Anything short of that isn’t good enough.”

For the record: Who is saying what about Wente

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 24, 2012 at 11:51 PM - 0 Comments

Twitter responds to Margaret Wente’s response

‘I’m far from perfect,’ Margaret Wente writes in Tuesday’s Globe and Mail. ‘I make mistakes. But I’m not a serial plagiarist.’ Here’s how the Twitterverse responded to the column and the latest developments in the story:

Storified by Maclean’s Magazine · Mon, Sep 24 2012 20:50:02

Updated: Globe columnist responds to concerns about column

By macleans.ca - Monday, September 24, 2012 at 9:59 PM - 0 Comments

• For the record, who is saying what about Wente.

In a memo to staff published on the Globe and Mail website, editor John Stackhouse says he has taken “appropriate action” in response to concerns about a July 2009 column written by columnist Margaret Wente.

“As in all disciplinary cases at The Globe, the details remain a private matter between employer and employee,” he writes. “I will continue to defend her right to free expression.”

Stackhouse also noted that effectively immediately Public Editor Sylvia Stead, who first investigated the complaints, will report to the paper’s publisher.

Writes Stackhouse:

“The journalism in this instance did not meet the standards of The Globe and Mail, in terms of sourcing, use of quotation marks and reasonable credit for the work of others. Even in the spirit of column writing, which allows for some latitude in attribution and expression, this work was not in accordance with our code of conduct, and is unacceptable.”

Wente addresses the controversy in a column to be published in Tuesday’s paper.  ”I’m far from perfect,” she writes. “I make mistakes. But I’m not a serial plagiarist. What I often am is a target for people who don’t like what I write.”

Wente says journalists know readers are watching. “If you appropriate other people’s work, you’re going to get nailed. Even so, sometimes we slip up. That isn’t an excuse. It’s just the way it is.”

Click here to read Globe media reporter Steve Ladurantaye on the story.

An Olympic identity crisis

By David Newland - Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 10:34 AM - 0 Comments

Emilio Morenatti/AP Photo

I hate to point this just as the show is about to begin, but the Olympic Games have an identity problem. Everyone thinks they’re an amateur athletics event. But that can’t be right.

The Olympic Games are not an amateur athletics event. They can’t be. Not for the obvious reason, though. The fact that professionals compete along with amateurs in the Games is a minor concern. This identity issue runs much deeper.

It’s a matter of definitions, expectations, contradictions. Paradoxes!

Think of it: an amateur athletics event would be ruined by perpetual cost overruns, construction delays, traffic, pollution and weather issues, ticket scandals, security boondoggles, sponsorship concerns, flag flaps and political snafus.

An amateur athletics event could never thrive, if the global media were hampered in their ability to report on it by a bewildering array of trademark-related legalities, seemingly intended to reduce your local news outlet to referring to the Games that Must Not Be Named.

How could an amateur athletics event continually survive doping, judging and sexual identity scandals?

No amateur athletics event could allow economic disparity between nations to determine the winners and the losers so predictably.

In an amateur athletics event, organizers would put fairness, first.

But the Olympic Games, despite their historic aura of sportsmanship, would be doomed by a level playing field.

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Questioning the press gallery

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 3:32 PM - 0 Comments

Samara‘s latest report looks at political news coverage and how it compares to some frequent complaints.

Firstly, for these two stories, it seems that Canadian news media are not uniformly negative … Secondly, the political media are not nearly as preoccupied with partisan wrangling as is commonly believed … While our evidence challenges two of three common allegations against the news media, it supports the charge that the news media is not very informative. Our evidence suggests that citizens must sift through many news stories to find the information they seek. We also found a direct relationship between the focus of a news story and the amount of information about politics that it provides. It should be noted that it is not impossible to find informative process or political game stories, as we actually did find some. But the important point is that information on the issues in political game or process stories is rare.

(Note: Stories from Maclean’s were not included in this survey and so I am now free to sneer and shake my head at the failings of others.)

The survey covered a three-month period last fall—a majority government situation during which neither the New Democrats nor the Liberals had permanent leaders—and, in terms of Parliament Hill, looked specifically at coverage of three pieces of legislation. Given those terms, the second count—is the media too preoccupied with partisan brinksmanship?—likely requires further investigation. What sort of results, for example, would have come from a comprehensive investigation of the minority government years? Or perhaps the year before the next election?

The first count is a bit difficult to figure. I know and understand what Samara was trying to measure and I think I understand the general complaint, but I’m not sure I can say what the significance is of what they’ve found.

The third count, I think, is most relevant. I think it gets at a legitimate complaint and something the political press had to think seriously about. To what degree is political coverage difficult to understand or simply impenetrable to the casual observer? How many readers or viewers struggle to either keep up or, if coming to a story late, get up to speed? Anecdotal evidence is dangerous, but I’ll note here that the most popular thing I’ve written so far this year (at least in terms of pageviews) was this rough guide to C-38. That was published more than a month after the bill was tabled and owes a great deal to my editor’s judgment that it needed to be written at that point. I, having published dozens of blog posts and a magazine piece already on C-38, likely wouldn’t have otherwise paused to explain what was going on. But it seems to have met a need that existed.

This is ultimately, I believe, an argument for political coverage to be more comprehensive and thorough. (And online coverage more easily enables something like a rough guide to the budget implementation act: in a daily newspaper or nightly newscast that kind of piece might be lost or discarded by the next day, but online that rough guide can linger for more and more people to read and come back to.) And there is probably useful information in this Samara report for an industry that is presently struggling to figure out how to make itself valuable to consumers.

The media hates Obama?

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 1:44 PM - 14 Comments

The Pew Research Center released a survey of which U.S. candidates have received the most positive and negative coverage during the primary season so far, with Rick Perry and now Herman Cain getting particularly positive coverage and Newt Gingrich getting a particularly tough time. But the big news from the survey is this bit of information, which has people arguing over what exactly “positive” and “negative” means in this context: Continue…

That’s a lot of gazebos

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 12 Comments

Postmedia tallies $10.5 million in spending on news conferences since the Conservatives took office.

Since 2006, more than $10.5 million of taxpayers’ money has been used for rentals, staging, lighting, audio and other production equipment for announcements and public events, according to recently released government documents. Foreign Affairs racked up the highest bill — $2.79 million since 2006 — while Veterans Affairs trailed behind closely with a $2.55 million total, records show.

And that’s the kind of life it’s been

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments

CTV; The Toronto Star; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

It was two decades ago that the media first started asking Lloyd Robertson when he was finally going to retire. We’re talking 1991, the year of Bush the elder’s Iraq war, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Brian Mulroney was prime minister and the GST came into effect. Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and that Coke can were a hot topic. A time so distant that a Kevin Costner movie won the Best Picture Oscar. Nirvana, then the world’s hottest band, is now played on “oldie” stations.

Robertson, CTV’s éminence orange, was just 57, but had already been anchoring the network’s national news for 15 years, and before that had been a CBC fixture for another 22. “I always thought I’d be out of there by now, that someone would come along and tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, you’re getting long in the tooth—get out,’ ” he told the Montreal Gazette. Absent the push, the trick, said the anchor, was to “pick a time that’s obvious to you and your audience.” He mused about the big 6-0. It’s possible that some people even believed him.

Should all go according to plan, Robertson will actually step down this Sept. 1. Now 77, and with a combined 41 years behind the anchor’s desk at CBC and CTV, he is the longest-serving national anchor in North American TV history. Not exactly a retirement, since Robertson plans to continue on in his other job co-hosting the current affairs show W5, and will appear for some special event coverage. But it brings an end to his nightly television presence, and an era in Canadian broadcasting.

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AOL struggles to reinvent itself

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

Reuters/Brendan McDermi

A decade ago, AOL was one of the most promising firms in the online world. Tens of millions of North American users relied on its dial-up Internet access services and came to know its trademark greeting, “You’ve got mail!” Today, its future appears murky as the former giant tries to claw back into the fold as a major Internet presence.

The company took a walloping on the stock market last week when its shares fell almost 26 per cent, hitting their lowest point since AOL ended its disastrous merger with Time Warner in December 2009. The sell-off occurred after it released second-quarter earnings, which showed total revenues were down eight per cent over last year. In response to the hit in share value, the company approved a scheme to buy up US$250 million of its own shares.

The market shellacking was a major blow for a company that’s been fighting for the past year to reinvent itself as a new media firm. It bought the news website the Huffington Post for US$315 million in February and the tech website TechCrunch last year. After installing Arianna Huffington as the head of its new Huffington Post Media Group, AOL opened several new websites—17 during the last quarter alone. AOL now boasts nearly 10 million unique visitors to its websites every month. That’s more than the New York Times, according to the company’s CEO, Tim Armstrong.

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REVIEW: The Fog of War: Censorship of Canada’s Media in World War Two

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, August 11, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Most Canadians are probably still unaware of how active a theatre of war this country was between 1939 and 1945. Not only were we an arsenal and breadbasket for our allies, home to the war-sustaining convoy ports of Halifax and Sydney, and privy to secrets like the development of the atomic bomb, hundreds of Canadians died in East Coast U-boat attacks, while in B.C. there was a short-lived but real fear of Japanese assault. In short, we had secrets to keep and a censorship regime designed to do so. It was effectively voluntary: the government had weapons—threats of fines, imprisonment and closure—but its formally powerless Press Censorship Branch merely pointed out which proposed stories ran risks. A bold publication could have taken its chances and possibly, Bourrie argues, caused the entire system to crash.

But that possibility was always remote. The single most striking conclusion Bourrie comes to about the wartime relationship between censors and press is this: the censors—drawn from the ranks of the pre-war working media—were more resolute in their defence of press freedom than the often meekly obsequious press itself. Then as now, competitiveness drove media activity more than any other factor. With all papers under the same restraints, most news outlets, most of the time, were happy to combine complacency with patriotism, and not rock the boat.

In one notable case of far-sighted decency, it was the censors who fought off demands, by cabinet ministers and mainstream B.C. newspapers, for the closure of the Japanese-Canadian weekly New Canadian and the jailing of its editor. Tommy Shoyama kept his paper going through the war, until he was finally allowed to join the army in 1945. Later he became one of the most prominent Canadian public servants ever, a key figure in designing Saskatchewan’s pioneering medicare system and a federal deputy minister of finance. Censors as the good guys? Only in Canada.

Turning the pages

By Chris Sorensen - Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 7 Comments

Photograph by Liz Sulivan

Marc Tellier, son of Canadian business legend Paul Tellier, was just 35 when he led Yellow Pages Group Co. (now part of Yellow Media Inc.) through a $1-billion income trust offering in 2003, then the largest deal of its kind. Eager investors were sold on the Bell Canada phone directory publisher’s reputation as a stable, cash-producing business: everyone from local plumbers to law firms bought ads in the thick books, which have been landing on doorsteps with a thud since 1908. An ambitious young CEO and perhaps eager to follow in his father’s footsteps, Tellier suggested to a reporter a few months after the IPO that running the old-media company was “almost too easy,” hinting he may soon be in the market for a bigger challenge.

He didn’t have to look very far. While Canadians continue to let their “fingers do the walking,” these days their digits are increasingly finding their way to computer keyboards and mobile phones. And that’s a big problem for Yellow Media, since 75 per cent of its directory revenue comes from selling ads on tissue-thin pieces of paper. It’s now Tellier’s job to figure out a way to drag the company, with a client base of 365,000 mostly small- and medium-sized businesses, into the digital age—a mission emphasized by last year’s redesign of the Yellow Pages logo, which no longer shows a pair of fingers walking across an open book, but instead leaves them dangling in mid-air.

Which, coincidentally, is how shareholders probably feel. Yellow Media’s stock has plummeted nearly 65 per cent to just over $2 since the beginning of the year (its trust units once traded in the $15 range). Tellier’s transformation plan, meanwhile, is being called into question as directory publishers in other countries wobble on the brink of bankruptcy. “Yellow Pages was once the gatekeeper of information to people’s homes,” says Neeraj Monga, an analyst at Veritas Investment Research, who dropped coverage of the stock two years ago. “But the Internet completely killed that business model.”

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Not powerful enough to be corrupted

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 at 11:25 AM - 13 Comments

Rest assured, the Canadian news media isn’t nearly powerful enough for anything like the News International scandal to happen here.

But if a phone-hacking scandal is unlikely in Canada, it’s not because politicians and journalists here are inherently more ethical. It’s more a reflection of the fact that Canadian politicians simply don’t need the news media in the same way they do in Britain. ”Canadian newspapers are such a niche market — so few people actually read most of them — that they just don’t have the impact in Canada that News of the World did in the U.K.,” Harper’s former chief of staff Ian Brodie, told The Canadian Press in an email.

Has the News of the World scandal changed your impression of the media?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 12, 2011 at 2:45 PM - 14 Comments