Hope For The Montreal Gazette?
January 19, 2010 5 Comments
When I had originally heard that there was a chance that a group of local investors were going to make an attempt to buy the Montreal Gazette, I was very happy. For far too long, Montreal’s only English daily newspaper has not been worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s filled with too many wire stories that are not relevant unless you’re the host of a weekend afternoon radio talk show and are looking for material. There isn’t enough news about Montreal itself. Currently, if you’re English and you want to know what’s going on in the city, the best option is to learn French and read a French newspaper.
So the idea of new investors buying into an arm of the Canwest empire with the idea of making the Gazette a source of Montreal based news was very exciting. That excitement died within seconds because the odds of this happening are astronomical. It’s not that the investors are unwilling; quite the contrary. The problem is the larger picture. The Gazette can’t just be pried out of the grips of Canwest even if the newspaper division is in bankruptcy protection. The creditors and the company want the entire thing to be sold as a unit rather than picked apart by potential buyers.
On a logistics side, it makes sense that buyers could not or should not dismantle the infrastructure that is already in place. It’s not that the Gazette (or the Ottawa Citizen or National Post which is also part of the bid) would suffer from their removal from Canwest. The issue is that removing these papers are too interconnected with Canwest and that the way the entire network is set up now, it would be like removing a couple of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and giving them to someone and giving the rest of the puzzle to someone else. There’s too much interconnected content that the idea of a Canwest empire would fall apart (and be wouldn’t be worth as much in terms of a perspective sale).
It would be great though if the Gazette was truly a local paper again. It would be nice for the employees (and many others that the paper would need to hire to replace some of the services that are handled centrally through Canwest). It would also be great for the readers because there would be more local content. Also, most likely, the quality would improve too.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I get the Gazette free through McGill, I wouldn’t read it at all. It’s just a jumbled mess most of the time. The Metro paper that is handed out free throughout the city has the same amount of substance. I’m not saying that the Metro is bad but when you’ve got a paid broadsheet that is on the same level of quality as a free tabloid, there are problems. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I’ve got a number of grammatical errors in this post but I’m still batting better most of the time than some of the poorer writers at the paper.
It’s not like the Gazette is written by a bunch of automatons. There is some really good talent there. In fact, some of that talent actually go beyond what they can do with the paper and branch out with their own projects. The most notable website out there if Fagstein’s blog. The stupid thing though is that Fagstein’s blog, most of the time, has more news on the city of Montreal on a regular basis than the paper itself.
Hopefully something positive happens with the Gazette but I’m not optimistic. I think what will end up happening is another media giant will end up buying Canwest as a whole. That’s definitely not going to solve the problem. In fact, if that’s happens, I’ll probably continue to snub the free paper that’s offered to me at school.
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Montreal News
The Earl Jones fiasco is not over just yet. Apparently, he’s getting divorced according to reports after there had been a publication ban on the proceedings. His soon-to-be ex-wife wants a bunch of pricey things that belonged to the couple which doesn’t thrill his victims.
Canadian News
To most of my generation, the name Kate McGarrigle may not mean much but she was the voice and lyrics behind some of Canada’s most famous folk music. She died on Sunday but she left her voice on the nation along with her sister Anne. The song most people my age might remember as The Log Driver’s Waltz was a video that YTV used to play all the time during its early days.
Entertainment News
I mentioned during my Golden Globes podcast that I thought James Cameron was missing a couple of marbles but it’s good to know I wasn’t the only one who thought that. He decided to go off on Meryl Streep backstage at the event and then boasted about how great he was. He does know that they’ve yet to announce the nominees for the Oscar, right? Ask Madonna; they don’t give Academy Awards to narcissistic jackasses who lavish over themselves at the Golden Globes.
“The most notable website out there if Fagstein’s blog. The stupid thing though is that Fagstein’s blog, most of the time, has more news on the city of Montreal on a regular basis than the paper itself.”
I’m flattered, but your suggestion is ludicrous. The Gazette has dozens of city reporters, and more local news in a day than I’ll post in a week.
You may think it’s capable of more, and I won’t argue with you. But I get my news from them far, far more than the other way around.
I think the major problem with The Gazette is that there are days when the amount of content about Montreal news is limited to a few pages and Mike Boone’s column. There are times where I’m feeling like I’m reading a national newspaper with a few Montreal stories thrown in. Another problem is that generally on a day after a Montreal Canadiens hockey game, there seems to more content about the Habs in the sports section than local general content in the main section of the paper. At one point I had subscribed to La Presse because I felt I was going to get more local content there than I would from The Gazette.
It just feels like a paper like The Gazette should be producing more local news. I know newspapers are on shaky ground but even though the Montreal Star is before my time, I wish we had both a morning and an evening paper. Actually, I’d probably prefer an evening paper since I usually watch the late night news before bed.
I’m more of a fan of skimming through newsprint than making my eyes go bad staring at a computer screen. However, I feel that I get more from your site about stories in Montreal on a given day than I will from the paper. Unless there’s a major Montreal-based news story going on, I feel that I’ll get more information about the city from your blog than I do from The Gazette. I know I’m not the only one because I do have a couple of friends who feel the same way and we can’t be the only three of your readers who feel that way.
While I think The Gazette still has its place, it just doesn’t feel as important or relevant as it did fifteen years ago. I think the way I prefer your blog to the paper is similar to the way some people prefer getting their news from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show than the major American national newscasts. It feels like you’re more informed about current events by watching Jon Stewart than you are watching Brian Williams.
Keep up the fantastic work. You’re one of the first sites I look up in the morning when I turn on the computer.
Two pages may not seem like much, but it’s still two pages of local news every day, which is far more than you’ll find out of my blog.
Tuesday’s paper, for example, has:
- an exclusive story (that required a lot of research) about the sale of a piece of land by the city
- a story by a Gazette reporter and photos by a Gazette photographer from Haiti
- two stories by different writers about composting
- a story about teenage music composers in Laval
- a story about a study on the food that will be served in Montreal’s new superhospitals
- A story about a new plan for the refit of the Turcot Interchange
- A story about a man in court on charges of sexual exploitation of a minor
- A story about events marking Black History Month in Montreal
- A story about sex education at the Commission scolaire de Montréal
- A story about a PQ petition for an inquiry into corruption
- A story about corporate donations to provincial political parties
- A story about differences between Ottawa and Quebec on vehicle emissions standards
- Two local briefs and three standalone pictures
All of the above written by Gazette journalists. And that doesn’t include the editorials, the columns by Don Macpherson and Henry Aubin (the latter making a case for gas taxes as a way to fund public transit) and the seven business stories, six sports stories (one of which is about the Alouettes and one written by a Gazette reporter at the Australian Open in Melbourne), and eight stories and columns in the Arts & Life section (including two on the funeral of folk singer Kate McGarrigle).
That’s one day.
In the past 24 hours I’ve posted one blog post of less than 200 words.
My point is it’s easy to complain that more isn’t being done, that you don’t have mountains of local news stories stretching as far as the eye can see, but to pretend that there’s so little local news in the paper is exaggeration to the point of factual error. It’s still more local news than non-local news.
When we ignore the effort being put to get local news out there, we contribute to its eradication.
And if that happens, I’ll have nothing left to blog about.
I agree with you and will concede that I perhaps am being a little over the top with my summarization of The Gazette. However, I still say that the paper is still limited as to what it provides in local content. I’m not saying that the paper never prints news about Montreal but there have been days where it has been slim pickings. It could be that I don’t read The Gazette as much as I did previously so I could reading it on slower days where there is much more to report on a national and international scale than what’s happening in Montreal and Quebec. But I would have to say that my move from The Gazette to La Presse a few years back was because I didn’t feel I was getting enough local content from The Gazette.
I’m not saying your blog is the top of the mountain in terms of Montreal news but it just feels like I get more out of it than I do reading the paper. Sure, you’re not exactly the place to go for the latest on the water meter fiasco but if there is something major happening that could change the face of Montreal media, I’d read your blog before even thinking about looking towards The Gazette.
I understand there is an effort to put out local stories and I know that being a journalist for a major metropolitan newspaper is not as simple as signing up to WordPress and seeing how many words one can write in ten minutes. It’s not easy and I think we (in this case of our conversation, me) tend to forget this and undervalue the role of the people who produce the content for the paper. It feels like it can be more thankless a task than someone who working in television or even radio.
It’s easy for me to stand on my soapbox and complain without putting as much effort in my ranting as those who work to put the paper together for mass consumption in the morning but I do so because I care. If I didn’t care about The Gazette, I wouldn’t waste my time writing about it. For example, I really don’t care about CJAD all that much except I had liked listening to Peter Anthony Holder whenever I could. But the station seems to be floundering. I’m not emotionally invested enough to complain that their product has become so watered down that it is barely recognizable from the strong radio station it was many moons ago.
I’m not saying we should give up on The Gazette. I just want stronger (or maybe consistent would be a better word) local content. I’m not saying that there isn’t any but I think that there are days where it seems a bit thin. Although yesterday’s paper shows that I don’t have much of a leg to stand on. I just think it could be better.
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