CityNews Montreal aims to be different
Goal isn’t to steal CTV Montreal viewers, but to appeal to new, younger audience
Young, fast, new, different. And cheap.
That, put bluntly, is the strategy of CityNews Montreal, the local English-language TV newscast that launches on Monday.
The biggest difference from CTV, CBC and Global is that CityNews works without anchors. There’s no equivalent to a Mutsumi Takahashi or a Debra Arbec or a Jamie Orchard. Instead, it jumps directly from reporter to reporter in the field, most of them working without a separate camera operator or editor.
The broadcasts will also put less of an emphasis on weather and sports. The former will be shorter and pre-recorded locally. The latter will be produced by Sportsnet out of Toronto ( but customized for the market). And if you watch the entire show, you’ll see local news repeated in the second half.
Dave Budge, VP of news and information at Rogers Media, told the Montreal Gazette that ratings data shows “the vast majority of viewers watch a fraction of the newscast,” so they want to give stories another chance to be seen.
Though editorial control remains in Montreal, with a local person lining up the show, the control room will be in Vancouver. CityNews’s two centralized control rooms (Toronto is the other one) take advantage of different time zones to produce newscasts for six markets (Calgary and Vancouver also launch newscasts on Monday, and Toronto, Winnipeg and Edmonton already have them). A similar strategy is used by Global News for most of its markets.
If all this sounds low-budget, that’s because it is.
“We centralize the jobs that aren’t specifically related to the journalism,” Budge said. “It takes a lot of the financial emphasis off of the technical operations work and allows us to really commit as much as possible of the available budget to the journalism.”
Under its licence from the CRTC, which was renewed last year, Citytv must produce six hours a week of “locally reflective” news, and spend at least 11 per cent of its gross revenue on it.
The station has hired five journalists in Montreal, and has an open position for a sixth: Akil Alleyne, a Princeton University graduate with a law degree; Andrew Brennan, a former reporter with CJAD who also writes news for Breakfast Television; Emily Campbell, another former CJAD reporter; Giordano Cescutti, formerly of community station MAtv and Concordia’s CJLO 1690 radio; and Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed, a Montreal Gazette columnist and freelancer who will be contributing weekly stories about the city’s cultural communities.
Melanie Porco, who has been with Citytv Montreal since its launch in 2013, acts as supervising producer.
Two journalists hired a year ago when the local newscast was first announced — Tina Tenneriello and Cora MacDonald — have since left for other jobs.
Six journalists isn’t much to steal viewers from powerhouse CTV Montreal, but Budge said that’s not the goal. Instead, it wants to appeal to new, younger viewers. When Citytv’s Toronto newscast went anchor-less, it saw significant growth in adults ages 18 to 34.
“I won’t pretend that our strategy is taking CTV’s viewers away from CTV,” Budge said. “We believe there are people in Montreal who may not respond well to what they are doing and may feel better served by a different approach.”
Not only the look and format, but also the types of stories will be different, with the young journalists reporting on what interests them.
“We cannot look like CTV. If we try to look like CTV and we tell the same stories as CTV, then why would anybody bother?
“We’re not putting the fourth cola on the market; we’re bringing ginger ale to the market for people who don’t like cola.”