TORONTO – A coalition of professional associations, unions and media organizations, including Cartt.ca, have thrown their support behind an advertising campaign highlighting the value and benefits of professional journalism.
The campaign, known as JournalismIS, aims to rally the wider community of journalists, media workers, media corporations, and media consumers to increase awareness, recognition and support for professional journalism. Friday’s launch at the Ryerson University Rogers Communication Centre in Toronto included more than 100 journalists, media employees, and representatives from newspaper publishers and broadcasters.
"News is the lifeblood of our democracy. As the volume of information and the range of opinion available to media consumers…
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BANFF – Telling trends from fads is too often a mugs game. A peek at Amazon suggests that a book on trends seems to be written every 15 minutes and at times, here in Banff, it was frequently difficult to parse true trends from professional aspiration or wishful thinking.
But we did get some glimpses.
Canadians have over 600 television services to choose from, and one in four of us is a four screen consumer (TV, tablet, PC, phone) and the emerging bias to enhanced pick-and-pay was viewed by many as heralding more investment in programming to survive in a world…
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TORONTO – Rogers is shutting down its online real estate brokerage Zoocasa on June 22 as the communications giant refocuses on its core areas of business.
According to a Toronto Star report late Tuesday, Zoocasa began as a listing website in 2008 before a 2013 relaunch where it began connecting buyers and sellers with realtors.
The report cites a source that estimates that Zoocasa has been losing about $1 million a month for much of the last two years, carrying high administrative and technology platform costs that far outstripped the number of real estate deals
“After June 22, 2015, the brokerage will…
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TORONTO — Adding some broadcast content into the mix at the Canadian Telecom Summit last week, experts from the video content creation and distribution industries discussed the challenges and opportunities arising from the advent of over-the-top services during a special panel discussion.
OTT is about a “content revolution”, said George Burger, advisor at Internet TV provider VMedia, an upstart BDU. “ a massively disruptive event…and it’s going to make the disruption that happened to the music industry, with Napster, pale in comparison completely,” Burger said.
“It’s flourishing from the consumer point of view. Consumers have never, ever had it better,”…
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THE QUEBEC GOVERNMENT intends to interfere in commerce on the Internet, the free choice of Quebecers to choose with whom to do business, and to require ISPs to establish an architecture of censorship, all with a view to driving users willy-nilly to Quebec’s official gambling site.
These measures were announced in the Quebec budget of March 2015.
As an aside, I note there has not yet been a word of protest from any quarters, including the federal government. Why is this proposal to transgress federal jurisdiction over communications undertakings going unchallenged? Consider that the CRTC recently blasted…
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TORONTO – The top-rated broadcaster's splashy, star-driven upfront presentation to ad buyers on Thursday at the Sony Centre in Toronto, featuring stars from DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Gotham and Marvel's Agent Carter, was a tour-de-force in messaging.
Staged with big screen visuals and pyrotechnics, newly-installed Bell Media president Mary Ann Turcke talked about a push for data-driven TV commercials, and Perry Macdonald, senior vice president of CTV sales, told invited agencies and clients his network had the hit shows and ratings to earn media dollars quite possibly headed elsewhere in a fast-changing digital landscape.
"We deliver more and we deliver better,"…
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TORONTO – “Why can’t we be friends?” Wind Mobile CEO Alek Krstajic asked delegates to the Canadian Telecom Summit in a luncheon keynote on Tuesday.
The 1975 song by War actually played him off the stage at the end of his speech, but the theme hung in the air: Why can’t the industry accept what’s coming from Ottawa and just compete for the affections of Canadians on a level playing field that the Conservative government helped build?
Krstajic has been through the wars. Many of them, really. He spent years working for Rogers Cable before moving to Bell Canada and then…
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TORONTO — This year’s regulatory blockbuster panel at the Canadian Telecom Summit on Tuesday turned into a bit of a public hearing on wholesale telecom rates as the Big Three carriers’ pricing structures came under fire from TekSavvy and Wind Mobile.
Calling wholesale network access rates “crazy”, Bram Abramson, TekSavvy’s chief legal and regulatory officer, said wholesale prices can vary among telecom providers by as much as 700%. With the current pricing schemes of the large, vertically integrated incumbents, TekSavvy is unable to offer higher-speed services to its customers because it couldn’t be price competitive, Abramson said.
“TekSavvy is not the…
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TORONTO – Journalists treated to a showcase of City's 2015-16 Upfront programming Tuesday morning were shown a 45-minute video about Rogers Media's varied media platforms that climaxed with a 10 minute-plus reel of Vice Media's digital content.
The takeaway: Rogers Media wants to offer ad agencies and brand marketers dazzled by Google and Facebook an equally effective way to target ad dollars to young audiences increasingly migrating from traditional TV to new digital platforms. "The longest video was from Vice Media, which is a good exclamation mark for how the industry is changing," Rogers Media president Keith Pelley told Cartt.ca….
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OTTAWA – The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage has decided to invite representatives from Rogers Media to explain recent cutbacks made to the news programming at its multicultural OMNI TV stations.
According to the minutes of Monday’s committee meeting which were made public today, the committee will “invite representatives from OMNI to discuss their recent programming changes, specifically as they relate to local news coverage in Punjabi, Cantonese, Mandarin and Italian; and that the meeting take place prior to Thursday, June 18, 2015, and that the meeting be scheduled for 2 hours.”
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