CTV Montreal GM Louis Douville swept out in next wave of Bell Media purge
A dramatic top-down purge at Bell Media, that swept out top executives Phil King (programming), Chris Gordon (radio and local TV), Adam Ashton and Charles Benoit (top man in Quebec) in August, then...
View ArticleBell Media cutting hundreds of jobs, including 110 in Montreal
Updated Nov. 23: Here are the cuts we know so far, broken down by region: Victoria CTV2 assignment editor Dave Biro Vancouver CTV News Vancouver sports director and anchor Perry Solkowski CTV News...
View ArticleTSN 690’s Elliott Price, Abe Hefter laid off as part of Bell Media cuts in...
The wave of job cuts sweeping Canada finally hit Montreal today, with the first big names on the list of those getting the axe: Elliott Price, co-host of the morning show on TSN Radio 690, and Abe...
View ArticleBell Media rehires Louis Douville as regional sales manager
Two months after he lost his job as general manager of CTV Montreal, Louis Douville is back at Bell Media. It was just announced internally that he is taking on the new job of regional sales manager...
View ArticleBell Let’s Talk: Are all of Bell Media’s newsrooms independently choosing to...
On Monday, CTV News President Wendy Freeman appeared at a CRTC hearing in Gatineau looking into the future of local television, and she was asked about the editorial independence of Bell Media’s...
View ArticleRadio host Jeff Fillion fired for insensitive use of sarcasm, emoji
Today, we learned that even Quebec City’s trash-talk radio has its limit. Or, well, we learned that again. Because it’s happened several times before, including with the man at the centre of the issue...
View ArticleBell Media proposes shutdown of 40 CTV and CTV Two retransmitters
It’s not quite as bad as the massacre of hundreds of analog over-the-air transmitters by public broadcasters in 2012, but Bell Media has proposed a major cull of its transmitters, removing a third of...
View ArticleThe ridiculous assumption underlying iHeartRadio Canada
Today was launch day for iHeartRadio Canada, a new mobile app, platform and brand licensed by Bell Media. Aside from a weekly top 20 countdown show, and the rebranding of the Much Music Video Awards,...
View ArticleCorus agrees to sell Séries+ and Historia to Bell Media for $200 million
Bell Media, Canada’s largest television broadcaster, is getting even bigger by acquiring two French-language services from its closest English-language competitor. Bell and Corus Entertainment...
View ArticleCorus abandons plan to sell Séries+ and Historia to Bell after Competition...
Updated with Corus calling off the deal. Corus and Bell have dropped their plans for Bell to acquire Corus’s ownership of French-language specialty channels Séries+ and Historia days after Corus...
View ArticleDispute over Crave is a frustrating step backwards for relations between Bell...
UPDATE (Dec. 14): A deal has been reached. See below. I regret to inform you that Bell and Quebecor are at it again. On Nov. 1, Bell announced that Crave TV and The Movie Network have effectively...
View ArticleBell lays out its plans for $20-million purchase of V network
Bell Media is proposing to bring V’s local news broadcasts in-house, but otherwise isn’t putting much substantive on the table to convince the CRTC it should be allowed to acquire the V network of...
View ArticleCRTC approves Bell’s purchase of V
In a decision released Friday afternoon, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced it has approved the acquisition of the V television network by Bell Media, filling one...
View ArticlePower failure knocks CTV channels off the air for two hours
It happens. There’s a major technical at the most inconvenient time, in the middle of the local news broadcast, causing the local CTV station to cut to dead air. Master Control in Toronto cuts to a...
View ArticleCJAD guts newsroom, CTV Montreal cuts Quebec City job as Bell Media cuts hit...
CJAD has laid off virtually all its reporting staff as recent cuts at Bell Media, starting at the very top with the departure of president Randy Lennox, filtered down to the local station level on...
View ArticleNew Bounce brand continues Bell Media’s consolidation of music radio stations
Bell Media took another step toward putting its 109 radio stations into neat little brand packages this week with the announcement of a new brand: Bounce, which has been applied to 25 of those...
View ArticleWhat we know (and don’t) about the Lisa LaFlamme story
In case you’ve been in a coma since Monday, you know that CTV News has ended its contract with Lisa LaFlamme, the chief anchor and senior editor of CTV National News. Since then, every day has brought...
View ArticleBell Media managing the decline of AM radio
Last week, while I was on vacation, Bell Media announced it was shutting down six AM radio stations, selling three others, laying off foreign correspondents and together with the rest of BCE laying off...
View ArticleBell Media asks CRTC to eliminate all local news requirements for CTV, CTV2...
Saying it can’t wait until the coming review of television policy and group licence renewals completes its long process, Bell Media has filed applications with the CRTC to eliminate all regulatory...
View ArticleBell’s MTV2 becomes latest casualty of specialty channel decline
If you’re a subscriber of Bell Media’s MTV2 channel, you may have already received a notice that the channel is being shut down at the end of March. The shutdown is not too surprising. It was on my...
View Article
