LOCAL NEWS GETS A FACELIFT
With City getting ready to launch an anchor-free evening newscast and market leader CTV in expansion mode, Steve Faguy looks at recent investments and shakeups at Montreal stations.
Do you watch the local news on TV at 6 p.m.? The ratings suggest you probably do. Numeris, which compiles ratings for television and radio in Canada, estimates that more than 100,000 Montrealers watch one of the local English-language newscasts on an average weeknight. The way society consumes information is changing, but for now, anyway, the evening news is one of the most popular draws on TV.
In an effort to better capitalize on that audience, and with the help of some extra money redirected from community TV stations, two local broadcasters are making big new investments in local evening news.
When Rogers Media expanded its City TV network to Montreal in 2013, it told the Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission it had no plans to launch evening newscasts. The reason was simple: CTV, CBC and Global all do local news at 6 p.m., and outside of Toronto there’s little benefit to directly competing with three other broadcasters for the same audience. Instead, they would meet their local programming quota through the morning show Breakfast Television, which is easier to produce and faces less competition.
But the math changed this year when, through its Let’s Talk TV consultation and subsequent renewal of major TV broadcasters’ licences, the CRTC set new quotas on local news and at the same time allowed big vertically integrated companies to redirect some money from community channels to local stations. Rogers, Shaw and Bell quickly followed suit, transferring funding to City, Global and CTV respectively.
City is launching local one-hour 6 p.m. newscasts, seven days a week, in Edmonton and Winnipeg on Monday, and in Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver in early 2018. But don’t expect it to look like the other guys. Based on what’s now running in Toronto, these new newscasts will be more fast-paced and more live in the field.
But the big change is that there won’t be any anchors. Instead, videojournalists will introduce their own stories, with quick transitions between them.
“We’ve made some pretty dramatic changes in editorial philosophy and presentation of the newscasts, and the results have been really, really positive,” explained Dave Budge, VP of news and information at Rogers Media, noting City Toronto’s newscast ratings have grown while competitors’ ratings declined. “And especially in the demographic that conventional wisdom says isn’t watching TV — triple-digit growth in the 18-34 demo. That tells us that there isn’t just a future for TV news, there’s a way to do it that’s appealing to a different audience.”
The news team will be modest — about six videojournalists in each market, plus a producer/manager and some technical support. Control rooms will be centralized in Toronto and Vancouver, similar to how Global manages its evening news, taking advantage of different time zones to run multiple newscasts with one staff.
Some content will also be centralized — sports news from Sportsnet and video from other Rogers properties like Maclean’s magazine. CityNews has also expanded its Ottawa bureau. Though Montreal is still months away from its first newscast, its first journalists have been hired. Cora MacDonald and Tina Tenneriello are already filing reports for CityNews Toronto and Breakfast Television Montreal.
Tenneriello, who previously worked as a reporter at CJAD and host at community channel MAtv, says the anchorless newscasts will change the way she reports a story.
“We need to stand out; we are the new guys on the block,” she said in an interview. “They want us to really focus on (original) enterprise reporting. That’s the kind of reporting I want to do — I don’t want to just take a story out of the Journal de Montréal.”
As videojournalists, Tenneriello and MacDonald act as their own camerapeople and editors, and will always be out in the field, carrying gear that, when you count the tripods and laptops, is almost half their weight. “You’re not going to see people in studio,” Tenneriello said. “They want us connecting with community members.”
MacDonald got her start on the street promotions team for Astral Media’s CHOM, Virgin Radio and CJAD, and then convinced her bosses to give her an internship producing at CJAD. She said she’s still learning and has great respect for more traditional news outlets. “You have to know the rules before you can break them,” she said.
“I think that traditional media needs this in Montreal. I think they’ve become comfortable. I think it’s time the news of the day got a pick-me-up.”
As it prepares for new local news, City Montreal has cancelled its first local show, Sportsnet Central Montreal. “Rogers Media is evolving its local strategy to better serve the Montreal community,” the company said in a statement. The weekly sports panel discussion show, which started in 2013 as a local sports magazine, is no longer specifically required by City Montreal’s CRTC licence as of Sept. 1. Thursday’s episode was its last.
CTV MONTREAL
CTV dominates the local news market so much, it’s kind of embarrassing. The average audience for its 6 p.m. news is almost five times that of its competitors combined.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t innovate. This week, CTV stations in Montreal, Ottawa and five other markets launched their first 5 p.m. local newscasts. Anchored by Paul Karwatsky, Montreal’s CTV News at Five is “telling stories in a dynamic and conversational way that will allow us to go in depth and expand on the issues that are most important to our viewers,” Karwatsky is quoted as saying in a Bell Media statement.
Bell Media declined a request for interviews about the new newscast, which looks similar to the 6 p.m. show but has Karwatsky anchoring standing up instead of behind a desk. Mutsumi Takahashi will anchor the 6 p.m. newscast.
Like with City, CTV’s new investment will be modest. Though there will “absolutely” be new journalists hired, said Matthew Garrow, director of news and local stations at Bell Media, he couldn’t say how many. “We remain in the process of making those decisions to best meet the needs of each market,” he said. But “nearly two dozen additional staff across the country” will be hired for the expansion. For now, CTV Montreal is making use of its existing journalists, who will need to file stories an hour earlier or do a live report at 5 p.m.
COMMUNITY TV
The increased investments in local news come at the expense of community television stations, which are generally run by television distributors as part of a CRTC-mandated quota on Canadian programming.
Once the commission allowed the redirecting of some funding to local commercial television stations, all the vertically integrated companies took advantage. Rogers shut down community TV stations in Toronto and Brampton. Shaw closed stations in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton. In Montreal, Vidéotron’s MAtv took a 25 per cent cut; Bell’s TV1 also had cuts, but wouldn’t say how many. MAtv cancelled Montreal Billboard, a show about community groups, in what MAtv head Steve Desgagné called a “purely budgetary choice.”
ICI AND OMNI
On the north side of town, in a dull-looking strip mall in Ahuntsic, there’s another investment in local television, sparked by a different CRTC decision. OMNI, the Rogers-owned network of ethnic television stations, got a lifeline when the commission agreed to allow it to force all television subscribers to pay 12 cents a month to the service in exchange for an investment in new programming, all of which started Friday. In Quebec, which does not have an OMNI station, Rogers has partnered with ICI, an independent ethnic station that launched in 2013.
ICI will provide most of the programming for the Quebec channel, which will include national newscasts from OMNI in Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian and Punjabi from 10 p.m. to midnight, seven days a week. The Italian newscast will be produced out of Toronto and Montreal, with Teresa Romano (formerly of CFMB radio) hosting from the City Montreal studio.
“It’s an exciting place to be right now,” said ICI general manager Sam Norouzi, who added that the extra funding will allow the station to “stabilize our finances.” ICI’s business model relies on selling airtime to more than a dozen independent producers, who produce local programming that fills the vast majority of ICI’s schedule.
GLOBAL MONTREAL
No big changes have been announced at Global TV, which is the only station that provides local programming in the morning, at noon, in the evening and late night every weekday (though much of it is produced out of Toronto). But a key commitment related to its morning show has just expired.
In 2010, when Shaw Communications acquired the TV assets of Canwest (which was also the former owner of the Montreal Gazette), it committed to creating local morning shows in major cities and helping finance them for seven years. That funding program, which included $5 million for Montreal, was set to end on Aug. 31, meaning $950,000 a year would either be cut from the budget or be funded through discretionary spending by Corus Entertainment (which bought Global from Shaw last year).
Corus spokesperson Rishma Govani said the plans for the morning show haven’t changed. “Our plan is to continue all our current local programming this September,” she said. “We’re proud of our morning show in Montreal, which continues to do well and is providing improved results in the market. We also produce more local news content (beyond our condition of licence) above our English-language competitors.”
The shutdown of Shaw TV stations provides $10 million a year to Global News, which will offset the loss of special funding.