Bell Media Cuts hit YYC hard

[combustiblefuel]

Originally Posted by curves2000

Hi all,

I am not sure if this has been posted or not but it appears that the sports department at CFCN (CTV Calgary) has been gutted.

According to Wes Gilbertson on Twitter, CTV's Heath Brown, Lisa Bowes and Glen Campbell have all been laid off.

https://twitter.com/WesGilbertson/st...34076825133057

I understand the media business is under attack business model wise but when does this all stop? Newspapers, local tv, national tv, print media, magazines etc are all gutting staff.

I understand that the internet has changed things but sooner or later there isn't going to be anybody covering anything sports or news wise. Somebody has to go gather the actual content for it to be reported on.

I vividly recall watching Sports @11/11:30 on channel 7 in Calgary. We didn't think about it at the time but how good was that programming? 2-4 guys covering both local and national sports full time, on a 30 minute show daily.

Best of luck to all those involved, tough time to be looking for work in this business.

First part of bolded.

The media is not under attack. It os one form of it and they kind of brought it on themselves. Over priced , way to many commercials and having to follow a strict scheduling of when they can be on.
Well maybe they will just you know get writer or video content jobs on the internet.

2nd part of bolded.

C'mon it is not like they don't report sports or news on the internet. Dramatic much?

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by polak

So you want to go back before the internet?

The internet really killed the flow of information...

Well it's a two way street as the internet has also been the biggest source of misinformation as well.

All I want to know is how talented people have been let go and hacks like David Staples still remain employed. I get the feeling that guys like Staples have portions of their salaries covered by the Oilers.

[Hack&Lube]

I understand the media business is under attack business model wise but when does this all stop? Newspapers, local tv, national tv, print media, magazines etc are all gutting staff.

I understand that the internet has changed things but sooner or later there isn't going to be anybody covering anything sports or news wise. Somebody has to go gather the actual content for it to be reported on.

I vividly recall watching Sports @11/11:30 on channel 7 in Calgary. We didn't think about it at the time but how good was that programming? 2-4 guys covering both local and national sports full time, on a 30 minute show daily.

My routine has gone from watching full games every night, then binging on Channel 21 & 27 (TSN & Sportscentre) for a few hours waiting for them to finally air that replay I wanted to see...

To going home, logging into the NHL app on the PS4 (which streams amazing HD quality better than my mobile devices or PC without ads) and watching exactly what extended highlights I want to see.

If I care about any more depth coverage or unique stories, I turn to CP or Flames TV. Flames TV does a great job of filming nice segments and interviews and putting it on the Flames site. I have no need for daily sports columnists or broadcasters to regurgitate all this over again or listen to an interview with an athlete spouting sports cliches. I don't think I have watched the nightly news in over 15 years.

This sort of daily, low-value content is not really what I want or care about in sports journalism and if it goes the way of the dinosaur, so be it. Lately, the only stories I really recall being engrossed in are the ones from The Player's Tribune which was founded by Derek Jeter and has a lot of athlete support. I wonder how they are doing financially.

[Boreal]

Originally Posted by curves2000

Thanks for this! I have looked into the Athletic and I am familiar with James Mirtle's work. Currently that site is too Toronto focused for me at the moment but I will agree that for the sports world, the subscription model may work out better.

It's a tough business that is killing the traditional media and very very few people are doing the investigative reporting for the things that matter. Sports in a lot of ways is entertainment but the more important factors such governments, taxes, budgets, important trials, product recalls and so forth.

I have always been a media news junkie myself and was always amazed at the lack of knowledge about lot of day to day stuff of life for a lot of my friends.

Friends buying new homes in area's that have documented chronic school shortages, taxes at all level of governments going up, what is happening with local and national politics etc. It's almost as if most people are clueless until it actually hits them in the face.

Anyhow I got a little off topic but I am sad to see some good people and hopefully the coverage of the Flames and other local sports stays strong in some capacity.

You are correct. It was the same when I worked in municipal government. Issues that actually matter and affect people, but no one is covering it, or communicating the complexity of the matter effectively. Corporate media needs to die and a revival of connected highly organized grass roots talent that is not limited to saying whatever they want needs to fulfill the role of the press. This is true in sports as well, the only caveat being access to games and personnel. Bettman's emails and the Oilers previous actions to stifle dissent demonstrate how these organizations are not fans of criticism, despite it being a necessary reflection to drive improvements.

Overall it's about establishing a new economic model that provides value to the customer by dissecting and effectively communicating relevant information. Easier said then done.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by curves2000

I understand the media business is under attack business model wise but when does this all stop? Newspapers, local tv, national tv, print media, magazines etc are all gutting staff.

It doesn't. The traditional media relies on a non-viable business model. It'll all be over soon.

Originally Posted by Jay Random

Meanwhile, there are more news sources now than ever before, and they are not spending most of their time just reprinting AP and Reuters stories, or following the one idiotic nonevent that the ‘24-hour news cycle’ has decided to shove down the whole world's throats that day. Losing these things does not make the public dumber; it merely takes away the illusion that they are informed about current events. They never were informed.

These 'news' sources are mostly people at home in their bathrobes copying stories put out by the remaining traditional media outlets. Very, very little genuine investigation and reporting is done by alternative media.

Originally Posted by Itse

Besides, most sports news are so formulaic it's ridiculous. In Finland one paper already has an AI who writes the game stories, and really there's no difference to what the "reporters" do. Which means: equally useless. I know how to read the box score, I watch the games myself or if I don't I can see the highlights. All I need on top of that is a place where I can talk with other fans. The reporters add nothing.

Yes, most sports reporting is pretty worthless. But we're not just going to lose the bad stuff, we're going to lose the Eric Duhatschek's. And not just Duhatschek himself, but today's 26 year potential Duhatscheck. Nobody with brains, ambition, and the aspirations of a middle-class lifestyle is going into journalism today.

Originally Posted by polak

So you want to go back before the internet?

The internet really killed the flow of information...

We've been living in the best of both worlds for the last 10 years. The professionally-sourced and produced media of the traditional model, delivered free on the internet. That's about to end. Soon there won't be any more professional content. It's be all amateur, all the time, and 99.9 per cent of it worth what you paid.

Which isn't that much of a tragedy when it comes to sports. The real issue is how it will affect politics and civic affairs when the only sources of information about public policy, finances, etc. will be PR hacks and people at home in their bathrobes ranting about their pet theories and partisan feuds. That'll be fantastic. Because no sensible person is going to volunteer to read city council minutes, legislature hansards, and 400 page budget documents.

[tvp2003]

Lots of discussion about print and tv media -- what about radio? I appreciate there are podcasts and satellite radio, but as long as people are driving in their cars and working at their jobs, I would imagine there is still a market for local radio?

Or, once workers are replaced by robots and cars are self driving (allowing you to surf the web while "driving"), will that also die off?

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by nobles_point

Issues that actually matter and affect people, but no one is covering it, or communicating the complexity of the matter effectively. Corporate media needs to die and a revival of connected highly organized grass roots talent that is not limited to saying whatever they want needs to fulfill the role of the press.

Explain why anyone would volunteer to do such arduous and complex work for free? Any 'grass-roots' groups doing that kind of reporting are going to be highly partisan and biased, much more so than even today's corporate media. You'll get agenda-driven witch-hunts, not anything resembling balanced and judicious news stories.

[Hot_Flatus]

Originally Posted by Nage Waza

I literally watch a hockey game, and then may leave the sports channel on briefly after the game. Otherwise, I use the internet to check stats, and may on occasion watch a sports channel for the hockey highlights (more and more rare).

I can see why the model simply does not work anymore.

The internet coverage is great for diving deep into advanced stats or meat and potatoes type content/articles on demand. I find it often lacks readily available material of greater substance or the ability connect on a more personal level.

What terrifies me about losing all the local media is that we end up with a hot mess of shallow twitter news and the same articles spread out across TSN/Sportsnet/CBC etc. Soon there will not be any original, investigative material for people to consume if this trend continues.

[CaptainCrunch]

I watch the CTV news channel in the morning (because Marcia is dreamy) and they've just piggy backed on the TSN for a quick highlights package.

At the end of the day what's going to happen is that local sports is going to come from local bloggers who are specific to that team or that league. You'll get these out of work sports reporters setting up their own blogs or podcasts and retaining their credentials while they try to generate click bait, and if the story is big enough they'll get exposure by getting a call from a TSN or Sportsnet to cover that story for them for a few hundred bucks.

At some point they'll be a ton of unemployed reporters out there and not enough stories to blog about and the government will have to have a humanitarian thinning of the heard. We'll be able to buy hunting licenses with a bag limit.

Some "reporters" not used to having to haul their own equipment or write their own copy will die while filing a pun filled report about the Alberta Golden Bears losing and how that loss was unbearable. Others will sadly give up after covering their 1000th public interest story on a spunky young hockey player with t speech impediment.

The land will be littered with the corpses of former well know great reporters.

And then CNN will send a crew to cover the news of Sally Struther's getting involved in this humanitarian crisis of too many blogging independent reporters and not enough stories and for pennies a day they can help.

[Incogneto]

As someone that works in Internet Marketing, its amazing to see how poorly some of these entities have adapted to the online world. To see a companies like ESPN and TSN have two of the worst websites on the net (on a UI basis), and no ability to watch on services like Apple TV for a subscription basis is beyond me. They have tried to adapt their sites to online monetization in poor ways (see: ESPN Insider).

ESPN is losing over 500K subscribers a MONTH, and don't know what to do about it.

Here's a good long-form piece on the ESPN issue:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...really-into-it

I feel like media outlets are the same as the newspaper industry of 10 years ago: We don't need to change! People will just come back and watch us! They have to!

Adapt to the new generation. Adapt to cord cutters. Or die.
Bell is doing their best to die.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by InCoGnEtO

Adapt to the new generation. Adapt to cord cutters. Or die.
Bell is doing their best to die.

They've tried to adapt. But the problem is the new models don't generate any money. Getting 30K people to watch a video clip doesn't do much good if you can't monetize it. People vastly over-estimate how much money online ad revenue generates.

[TheScorpion]

I'm going into a Communications and Journalism program next year and I'm genuinely concerned now for my future after school. I already have some connections within the industry but even still, this climate is making me want to reconsider my path more and more. It's a shame, because my dream has always been to inform the public about big events, but every day it seems like more of the public is content to just go without the news. At some point, doesn't somebody need to cover the news?

[lazypucker]

I am sorry but a reduction of merely 3 staff members in a Calgary office should not be garnering this much attention where there are hundreds of jobs being cut all the time in other industries around the city.

I am just feeling jaded and am insensitive about these things nowadays.....

[TheScorpion]

Originally Posted by lazypucker

I am sorry but a reduction of merely 3 staff members in a Calgary office should not be garnering this much attention where there are hundreds of jobs being cut all the time in other industries around the city.

I am just feeling jaded and am insensitive about these things nowadays.....

It's the media; they're going to cover their own losses.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by TheScorpion

It's the media; they're going to cover their own losses.

Actually, the media rarely reports on the media. Most people in this city don't even know that the Sun and Herald are now both owned by the same company, or that the combined staff work in a Herald building that is 80 per cent empty.

[sempuki]

Originally Posted by Badgers Nose

No one wants to pay for news, so the choices become fewer and quality gets worse and the public get dumber.

Pick your favorite source and pay for a subscription. Ad supported journalism is dead. I subscribe to The NY Times and The Economist. No clear winner for Calgary Flames coverage (besides CP)...

[PeteMoss]

The problem the sports media faces is that people are willing to do their work for next to nothing. There are probably more people covering the Flames now than they've ever had in their history.

But for the traditional media person, they are now competing with the people from Flames Nation and the SB Nation site who are willing to get paid either very little or nothing. Those sites also catering to the diehard fans much better than the TV or Newspaper. And for the more casual fan - Sportsnet, TSN, the Flames website and the NHL website offer better coverage than the local media does.

[sempuki]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Which isn't that much of a tragedy when it comes to sports. The real issue is how it will affect politics and civic affairs when the only sources of information about public policy, finances, etc. will be PR hacks and people at home in their bathrobes ranting about their pet theories and partisan feuds. That'll be fantastic. Because no sensible person is going to volunteer to read city council minutes, legislature hansards, and 400 page budget documents.

Living in the US this is the lesson of this past election: the quality of your source *matters*; paying for quality is really an investment in understanding.

[PeteMoss]

These traditional media sources need to figure out a way to bring value to what they do. You are paying someone for work, ask yourself what adds the most value? Transcribing quotes and asking post game questions or doing some research and presenting angles/stories that haven't been covered elsewhere.

I can watch all the press conferences and post game interviews on the Flames website, recapping a game I've already watched and read all about online hours later isn't going to drive anyone to subscribe. Get unique voices and viewpoints and maybe you'll find an audience.

[TheScorpion]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Actually, the media rarely reports on the media. Most people in this city don't even know that the Sun and Herald are now both owned by the same company, or that the combined staff work in a Herald building that is 80 per cent empty.

I remember the day that the Sun and Herald merged newsrooms, it was second-page news on both papers.