« General meeting Sunday to vote on contract offer
Editorial, RSS reject contract offer; Advertising accepts »

Montreal covered from another city? No thanks

January 27th, 2009 | Uncategorized

We think Montrealers deserve a newspaper created by Montrealers who know and love the city.

One of the key issues in the labour dispute at The Gazette involves Canwest’s plans to continue to gut the newspaper, removing more and more of its Montreal employees and content. Canwest’s latest contract offer would allow the company to have every bit of work currently done in Montreal - writing, editing, photography, graphics, and more - shipped out and performed by Canwest employees outside Quebec. 

Canwest is already laying out some Gazette pages and writing some headlines in Hamilton, Ont. Next it would want to outsource the editing of the articles on those pages to Hamilton.

And after that? 

Would you believe having a reporter covering Montreal city politics from another part of Canada? 

That’s just the scenario that emerged when Bernard Asselin, The Gazette’s vice president of marketing and reader sales, was interviewed by Mike Finnerty on Daybreak, CBC Radio’s Montreal morning show.

Asselin was asked what types of Gazette jobs Canwest wants to ship to other parts of Canada.

Asselin: It’s not someone from outside the province going to city hall to cover Mayor Tremblay’s press conference

Finnerty: That’s not going to happen?

Asselin: Well, not at this point. This is the core product

Finnerty: Not at this point or not ever?

Asselin: Not at this point but you know what, the busines model is broken right now in the newspaper industry. … We need to look at all the options and be flexible. 

Click here to listen to the entire Jan. 27 interview, as well as an interview with Guild representative Irwin Block.

Tags:

One Response to “Montreal covered from another city? No thanks”

  1. Jeff Heinrich Says:
    January 28th, 2009 at 6:11 pm

    In the same interview, Asselin said: “Whether it’s the Financial Post or from any other paper in the world, we’ll take it. I mean, this is great content for Montreal that they want to read. I mean, getting a news story from the Middle East, we don’t send a Gazette reporter there. So that’s the same principal: the best content, wherever it is.” I’ve been twice to the Middle East for The Gazette (in 2004 and 2005). The coverage generated a lot of mail and was nominated for a Canadian Association of Journalists award. That’s value for Gazette readers they won’t get elsewhere. The paper should promote that value, not try to eliminate it. It’s a “business model” that is as old as journalism: getting the local angle on non-local news. Not just the local angle, either. The stories we gather and the photos and video we shoot outside our jurisidiction can get picked up by the entire chain. That the kind of “flexibility” we should be striving for. More, not less.