CRTC decision to call for more local news in smaller markets

Yesterday’s CRTC decisions on a wide range of issues have focused on how over the air broadcasters (CTV, Global) can access cable funding. You can read about this in the Globe and Mail (or the National Post, if it were still publishing in western Canada, but I digress.) Way down in the backgrounder though, at [...]

Christian Science Monitor to go all-online, cease print

The Monitor, generally admired for the quality of its journalism and writing, is planning to discontinue its daily publication next spring, to focus on the on-line edition. I wonder if this is the start of a trend, or just a local decision that affects only one publication.
Yahoo News, Oct. 28 2008

Associated Press faces cost and job cuts

The continuing decline of US newspaper readership, ad sales and circulation is hitting the venerable AP. About 100 members are threatening to resign. AP promises a plan of action, sometime, of some form, likely involving job loss. Things aren’t quite that severe north of the border, though CanWest pulled out of CP, to very little [...]

A solution for CanWest?

A media financial analyst from New York has an interesting solution to CanWest’s financial problems (its stock has fallen from $8 a share to less than $1): go private. Right now, CanWest is a publicly owned company (anyone can buy shares in it on the stock markets; taking it private would turn it back into [...]

Another media voice lost

Masthead magazine, which follows Canada’s magazine industry, announced yesterday it is shutting down production after its Nov/Dec issue.  Its website is also being shut down, both because the magazine has been losing money for several years, despite trying different business models to make it viable. Too bad; always a sad day when an independent media [...]

recession or not, we’re keeping our cells and internet

A small (800 respondents) survey of North Americans show that among the items they would cut back on in a recession, the internet and cell phones are among their last choices (first is big ticket events like concerts, followed by movies and DVD rentals.) The survey argues that internet and cell phones are now entrenched [...]

Media Democracy Day coming

Well, I never heard of it myself, but it’s not a bad idea. Most of Canada’s mainstream media are controlled by a few companies. It’s long been argued that media monopolism is bad for society, providing less perspective and a narrow business-oriented point of view.
princanada.com, October 22, 2008

CanWest hit with defamation suit

As if it wasn’t facing enough problems, CanWest Global and one of its columnists has been served with a defamation suit from Arthur Kent, failed Alberta provincial candidate, over a column written three weeks before Alberta’s last provincial election. Mr. Kent charges that the National Post wrote such a derogatory column that it amounted to [...]

China eases media restrictions

As promised, post-Olympic China has eased its restrictions on foreign media, allowing them to travel freely across the country and speak to whomever they wish (previously, they needed permission to do either.) Edicts from Beijing, however, aren’t always respected or enforced in the provinces.
Associated Press, October 17, 2008

Whither the National Post?

Patricia Best in today’s ROB asks a question I’ve been asking for some time: “What’s going on at the National Post, anyhow?”
There are no plans for a celebration of the Post’s 10th anniversary Oct. 27, the Aspers are extensively renovating their Toronto CanWest facility, all the while doing (another) austerity drive at the paper. And [...]