Dear Members: The Guild has ratified the new four year collective agreement after meetings were held at 12 p.m. and 5 p.m. today.
Unifor, which represents our Compositors and Pressmen, and CWA-SCA Mailers also ratified the new contract
last week.
Thank you for the great turnout by our members.
Regards,
Deb England
Bill Cleverley
Grant Wittkamp
Deborah Service-Brewster
Chris Carolan
Source: cwa-scacanada.ca
President acknowledges for first time that CBC’s very existence at risk due to funding cuts
Eight years into overseeing a massive and unprecedented downsizing of the CBC — the most ruthless in the public broadcaster’s 80-year history, with more than 2,000 or 25 per cent of staff laid off in five years and no end in sight — President Hubert Lacroix now says he should have sounded the alarm earlier.
Lacroix’s sudden admission and defence of the public broadcaster he has made a career of shredding comes not in his own backyard, where CBC supporters have been sounding the alarm for years, but at an international conference on public broadcasting in Germany.
In a prepared speech, Lacroix admitted that public broadcasters “are at fault for not speaking loudly enough about the threats we face” and “like the proverbial frog put in cold water that is slowly heated, we’ve resisted telling people that we risk being boiled to death.”
CBC employees would certainly agree, says Carmel Smyth, president of the Canadian Media Guild (CMG), the largest union at the public broadcaster.
“While we welcome his sudden candour, the temperature is still rising and the boiling continues,” says Smyth. “Instead of lamenting his years silently wielding the knife, why isn’t Mr. Lacroix speaking out in Canada, rather than trying to stop CMG members from publicly seeking stable funding for the CBC? Lacroix could himself be speaking out in support of a public dialogue on this issue.”
“The timing is perfect, during an election campaign when Canadians need to know that an institution they cherish is being vapourized,” says Smyth. “Sharing more details now could possibly move voters and ensure the next government will see improved CBC funding as a priority.”
However, “over the past weeks, many of our members have experienced resistance from CBC management to their participation in our campaign to defend public broadcasting during this election,” says Smyth. “To protect the privacy of our members, we will not go into specific cases. Suffice it to say that we have made it clear to management that we support our members’ ability to express their views and participate in a debate about the very existence of our public broadcaster.”
The NDP and Liberals have already vowed to reverse the Conservatives’ $115-million budget cut and restore the independence of the largest news organization in the country. It was undermined two years ago when the Harper government exerted control over collective bargaining, salaries and other budgetary issues at the Crown corporation.
Isabelle Montpetit, president of Syndicat des communications de Radio-Canada, wonders whether Lacroix’s silence in Canada is a reflection of his “careful” relationship with the Prime Minister’s Office since, much like senators, the “CBC president is hand-picked by the prime minister for the coveted job.”
Smyth says that, while both unions welcome Lacroix’s sudden candour and hearing him speak on behalf of the country’s largest news organization, “we ask for more honest talk.”
“Given that three out of four federal political parties are pledging to reverse recent budget cuts to the CBC, if that happens will Lacroix commit now to use the money to restore jobs and a proud tradition of producing award-winning documentaries and original programming? Without such a commitment, we must assume he will continue down his current path, which will reduce the public broadcaster to a glorified distributor of purchased commercial (much of it non-Canadian) content,” says Smyth.
(This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on the CMG website.)
– See more at: http://www.cwa-scacanada.ca/EN/news/2015/150921_cbc_boil.shtml#sthash.BigRRmZW.dpuf
Source: nytimes.com
LOS ANGELES — In January, Jack Griffin, the chief executive of Tribune Publishing Company, took his senior management team to visit The Los Angeles Times, the jewel in his company’s portfolio of newspapers.
At a reception at the newspaper, and a dinner downtown, there was one notable absentee — The Times’s new publisher, Austin Beutner. At meetings the next day, he showed up for just an hour, to make a presentation on his strategy for the paper — one squarely at odds with that of its corporate parent.
Tribune has long pushed to centralize virtually all operations and direct them from headquarters in Chicago, running its newspapers as a group.
In the days before the Internet, news stories didn’t have much more shelf life than the newspaper they were printed in. Other than microfilm, your mother’s scrapbook or the occasional restaurant wall, most content in the paper died as the pages hit the trash can, replaced by the offerings printed in the next day’s edition.
Today, we have the Internet to archive, reserve and promote our content 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It seems we’re only a Facebook share or a Google search away from finding an endless stream of new readers to consume our content. So assuming your story isn’t overtaken by current events, how long is it actually remaining relevant in the etherworld of the Web.
In 2013, the app Pocket found that it wasn’t all that uncommon for an article to enjoy a life span of 37 days. But in the two years since that study, the constant publishing and pushing of content seems to have only gotten more prolific, and 37 days seems way too long a timeframe for readers to still be engaged with your content. So how long do articles really remain relevant online? The team over at Parse.ly, which supplies an analytics platform to top media companies such as The Atlantic and Reuters, was curious as well. So they embarked on a study focusing on page views, visitors, engaged time and social sharing metrics from a couple of hundred premium media publishers. So how long does a story “last” online? The short answer is about two days. The long answer is it’s complicated. “Writers can assume that after the first day, traffic to their story is going to drop,” said Andrew Montalenti, co-founder and chief technology officer at Parse.ly. “But in some cases, editors have opportunities to continue to drive traffic to posts they would otherwise abandon.” Examining the top 5,000 posts from each of Parse.ly’s publishers over a two month period, the team calculated the median life span of articles was 2.6 days. To put it another way, half of the articles that were studied reached 90 percent of its page views in less than 2.6 days, while the other half lasted longer than 2.6 days. Obviously, there will always be outliers. Take “In The Crosshairs,” Nicholas Schmidel’s 13,000-word investigation into the murder of famed ex-Navy SEAL Chris Kyle for The New Yorker. The piece was published in 2013, but started to gain traction a year later thanks to two factors: being featured in Google’s In-Depth Articles feature (where it was the top result for several keywords) and the theatrical release of “American Sniper,” which created newfound interest (and search queries) about Kyle and his life. Based on Parse.ly data from their Google traffic surge, The New Yorker re-featured Schmidel’s story on their homepage, where it was shared more than 5,000 times on Facebook and more than 900 times on Twitter. “All of this new activity happened without writing a single new word of content,” said Montalenti. “It was simply recognizing an opportunity emerging out of the archive and acting on it.” Extending the life of your story It’s both obvious and true—social media can help extend the life of your story. Parse.ly found stories that do well on social media extend their life to a third day, but not all social media is created equal. Facebook is the key to longevity—stories that did well there enjoyed a median life span of 3.2 days, compared to the quick attention spans on Twitter. In fact, in a study of 12 major news organization researchers from the University of Arizona found that news article life spans on Twitter dissipate fairly quickly, lasting between 10-72 hours. “Forty Portraits in Forty Years,” a New York Times photo essay featuring photographs showcasing the aging of a group of four sisters, was originally published in October 2014. A couple months later, editors wanted to bring the essay back, so they made the decision to purchase Facebook traffic against keywords that would likely garner the interest of Times’ subscribers. Months later, the essay was once again a traffic hit, thanks to keywords chosen by media start-up Keywee, which analyzed the story and determined related keywords like “empowering women” and the movie “Boyhood” would have the more success on Facebook than more obvious choices. “It’s a little like a Facebook hack,” Mat Yurow, the director of audience development at the Times, told Digiday. “But I think it’s a smart marketing play. It’s unlocking those audiences nobody else is thinking about.” Purchasing Facebook traffic isn’t the only way of extending your reach on the social network. Something as simple as a headline tweak can have huge ramifications in terms of traffic. Over at The Atlantic, editors going over story analytics noticed that political stories using the word “Republican” in the headline far outperformed similar stories that used the term “GOP.” Once they began only using “Republican” in the headlines, stories had better click-through rates, search traffic and increased relevance, leading to a complete change in their editorial guidelines. “My suspicion is ‘GOP’ is more of a provincial term used by beltway insiders, whereas ‘Republican’ is something even non-political readers understand and look for,” said Montalenti. Another way to increase the relevance of a story is to piggy back off a success. Take Ars Technica, where a story about the embattled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter getting creamed in a test dogfight with an 1990s-era F-16D went viral. As editors saw the post continuing to draw in significant traffic over several days, they set about writing breakout stories, including reaching out to the F-35 team to tell their side of the story. Editors added timely links to the new stories onto the still-popular original, which enabled Ars Technica to seed traffic through the site and generate more search traffic to the overall package. Through it all, analytics are the key to figuring out how to maximize the lifespan and popularity of a writer’s story. While newspapers have a reputation of dragging their feet out of fear of being forced to write lighter, “clickier” stories, Montalenti sees things changing in the newsrooms Parse.ly partners with. “Maybe a couple of years ago, pushback to this type of data was much more frequent,” he said. “Now, it seems reporters, as well as editors, are actually driven to the data a lot more by curiosity, which can only help benefit their newsrooms and storytelling.” Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher. Reach him at robtornoe@gmail.com.
Dear fellow CWA Canada members,
We’re less than a month away from the federal election – an election that will be pivotal to us and to our families as working people and as Canadians. It is vital that we all understand the issues in this campaign so that we can make informed choices.
Do we want a government that supports workers, decent pay, good pensions, fair working conditions, and public broadcasting? Or do we want legislation and policies that drive down wages, delay old-age pension, hurt workers, and threaten the very existence of the CBC?
Do we want a Canada where we work for the common good, build each other up, and respect democracy?
As a leader who represents thousands of journalists, I cannot support one political party over another. But that doesn’t mean I must sit idly back when a government, political party or any group threatens journalism, the democratic process, or the economic interest of our members.
Please take a minute to look at the four key issues below of special interest to us all.
Please also take a minute to share with your friends, through social media or otherwise, the importance of electing a government that will strengthen Canada by supporting decent wages, stronger pensions, fair working conditions – and public broadcasting.
All the best,
Martin
Martin O’Hanlon
President, CWA/SCA Canada
ELECTION ISSUES
1) Save the CBC
We have lost 2,000 jobs at the CBC in the last five years. Unless we get a government that will provide adequate funding, the survival of our public broadcaster is in doubt.
That unthinkable prospect would be a huge blow to Canadian culture and it would mean the loss of CBC News, with far fewer journalists to keep an eye on government, politicians and corporate power brokers, and to tell the stories of Canadians. Does anyone think that’s good for democracy? For society? For the economy?
Even the president of the CBC is finally admitting that he should have sounded the alarm earlier. In a speech last week, Hubert Lacroix admitted that “like the proverbial frog put in cold water that is slowly heated, we’ve resisted telling people that we risk being boiled to death.”
Each of the three opposition parties has promised to reverse the $115 million the Conservative government cut from the CBC budget. The Conservatives have not responded to our request for their position.
Here is a link listing each party’s commitment on the CBC:
http://www.cmg.ca/en/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Final-2-Federal-Parties-Commitments-Funding-an-independent-CBC-2014-2015-CMG_jdu.pdf
And here is a link to our Save the CBC campaign webpage:
http://www.cmg.ca/en/champion-public-broadcasting/
2) Anti-union Bill C-377
It took two years for the Conservative government to force this fundamentally flawed bill through Parliament. It’s so bad that it was originally defeated in the Senate last year – with the help of some Conservative senators.
The Harper PMO was finally able to ram it through this year, but only after having Tory senators overrule longtime Senate rules.
The Conservatives say Bill C-377, which is a copy of anti-union Republican legislation in the U.S., is about making union finances more transparent. That is a lie. Union finances are already transparent. Our books are audited and any member can see them. But union financial information is for members – not for the public. It’s telling that the bill does not apply to any other member organizations like lawyers and doctors groups.
The bill’s real intent is to tie up unions with red tape and make suck out financial and other information for right-wing propaganda.
It is an intrusive, unfair, unnecessary and ideologically motivated piece of rubbish that will cost taxpayers millions of dollars a year to administer and yield no benefit to society. It is unconstitutional and we will challenge it in court if the Conservatives are re-elected.
The opposition parties have said they will repeal the bill.
For more information:
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/11/04/an_open_pmo_door_for_a_private_antiunion_bill_tim_harper.html
3) Secret police Bill C-51
Bill C-51 gives the government unprecedented and intrusive new powers, which, in the words of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) “presents disturbing implications for free speech, privacy, the powers of government, including CSIS, and the protection of civil liberties in Canada.”
We strongly support a Charter challenge against Bill C-51 which has been launched by CJFE and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA).
The NDP has said they will repeal the bill; the Liberals have said they will change it.
For more information:
http://cjfe.org/resources/media_releases/ccla-and-cjfe-mount-charter-challenge-against-bill-c-51
4) Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
The TPP is a huge international trade deal being negotiated by the federal government – in secret – with plenty of input from multinational corporations, but nothing from labour leaders, environmentalists and other experts. Even our MPs don’t know what’s in it.
It’s actually far more than a trade deal. It’s a corporate rights deal that would give multinational corporations the power to override Canadian sovereignty by suing governments under secretive trade tribunals — rather than through the courts — if they feel our labour, environmental, health or other standards contravene the TPP and could lead to a loss of profits.
Canada would lose thousands more jobs under the TPP as companies move manufacturing and other jobs to low-wage countries such as Vietnam.
The TPP would have a major impact on Canada, yet almost no one is talking about it. How can there be so little debate – and information – in a democracy about such a huge deal?
Please educate yourself. For more information:
On Facebook, check out: Trade Justice Network
On Twitter, follow: @TradeJusticeNet
The joint Council of Newspapers has reached a tentative agreement with the company. Membership meeting with details will be posted in the next few Days