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Toronto Media Landscape and Personalities

Sort of similar to the case of George Smitherman's husband. What was the verdict on that one; suicide?
 
Armour said:
Sort of similar to the case of George Smitherman's husband. What was the verdict on that one; suicide?
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Smitherman's husband's death is well documented as a suicide. He had suffered from severe depression for years.

Chris Hyndman's family is communicating that his death could have been an accidental result from sleepwalking, of which they say he had a history back to his childhood. He literally sleep-walked off the balcony without any conscious knowledge of what was about to happen.
 
Hundreds of layoffs at CTV/Bell Media today. Most likely some well known on-air talent will be gone tonight.
 
Jonny5 said:
Hundreds of layoffs at CTV/Bell Media today. Most likely some well known on-air talent will be gone tonight.
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Turns out it was only behind the scenes staff. It's puzzling how you can lay off hundreds of producers, editors, marketing, and admin people while keeping everything else running smoothly.

That being said CTV's local news broadcast is garbage (not implying the others are any better). It's a one hour show of which; 20 minutes is commercials; 10 minutes are sports reel highlights with Lance Brown notably providing a nearly Rosie DiManno dumb level of coverage; 10 minutes for the weather where the same forecast is repeated four times; 10 minutes on totally worthless 'entertainment' junk; leaving 10 minutes for 'news' most of which is 'car crash on the DvP', and 'top stories' which are repeated twice in the show.

They should have cut the bloated, useless, on air talent instead of the back end.
 
All the skyline shots they use on CTV are outdated. One, frequent shot they use during the weather is at least a decade old. Also, they're incredibly slow to update current sports logos during the sports broadcast.
 
Jonny5 said:
Turns out it was only behind the scenes staff. It's puzzling how you can lay off hundreds of producers, editors, marketing, and admin people while keeping everything else running smoothly.

That being said CTV's local news broadcast is garbage (not implying the others are any better). It's a one hour show of which; 20 minutes is commercials; 10 minutes are sports reel highlights with Lance Brown notably providing a nearly Rosie DiManno dumb level of coverage; 10 minutes for the weather where the same forecast is repeated four times; 10 minutes on totally worthless 'entertainment' junk; leaving 10 minutes for 'news' most of which is 'car crash on the DvP', and 'top stories' which are repeated twice in the show.

They should have cut the bloated, useless, on air talent instead of the back end.
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Not just that, but their consumer reports are very much common sense as well, such as not leaving small children and pets inside a parked car during a summer day or not texting and driving. The same can be said about tech news.
 
Torstar goes all in on tablets as print revenue plunges

The bottom line at Torstar continues to suffer as print’s profitability erodes. Print ad revenue at the Toronto Star plunged 13.5 per cent in the third quarter, compared with a year earlier, and dropped 8.8 per cent at Metroland Media Group, which publishes The Hamilton Spectator and The Guelph Mercury, among other newspapers.

Now, the focus shifts to Star Touch, the free tablet edition the Star launched on Sept. 15., on which the paper is pinning its digital hopes despite uncertainty about the long-term popularity of tablets. On a conference call with analysts, Torstar president and chief executive officer David Holland deflected questions about the new edition’s performance so far, saying it will “take time to build our audience.”

“We’re just seven weeks into the launch. It is still early days,” Mr. Holland said.

Instead, he set a target: To attract 180,000 daily readers to Star Touch by the end of 2016.
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I didn't even know Star Touch existed. In the past 10 years the Torstar stock price has fallen 85% from $22.50 to $3.40, though that comes with a 26 cent annual dividend, which is a healthy 7.5% at current share price, at least until they run out of cash to pay it.
 
Suneel Joshi laid off from CTV. A long time personality, but his entire role has been made redundant.

Narrated sports highlights isn't something that people wait for 24 hours anymore. By the time he is on the air well after 6:00PM to talk about yesterday's games the viewers actually interested in what he is showing have already seen it, read a dozen different angles on it, many much more elaborate, knowledgeable and interesting.

I expect CTV to cut their Toronto local news broadcast to 30 minutes soon and to do that by cutting sports, entertainment, and weather. They simply can't add value in those areas when 1000 websites available 24/7 offer faster and better information than anything they can.
 
Johnny Au said:
Looks like Hamilton no longer has its own localized television news.
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I have heard they will be coming back next week, but with a greatly reduced staff. According to relatives living in Hamilton the local news component of CHCH was terrible, and they always ended up watching CBC or CTV Toronto instead. There basically isn't enough 'news' in Hamilton for an hourly broadcast every day. The broadcast ended up spending enormous amounts of time on "Entertainment", sports highlights, and weather. Even my 70 year old father now knows how to check the weather app on his Android phone and so he doesn't care to watch a 5 minute weather report.
 
Jonny5 said:
I have heard they will be coming back next week, but with a greatly reduced staff. According to relatives living in Hamilton the local news component of CHCH was terrible, and they always ended up watching CBC or CTV Toronto instead. There basically isn't enough 'news' in Hamilton for an hourly broadcast every day. The broadcast ended up spending enormous amounts of time on "Entertainment", sports highlights, and weather. Even my 70 year old father now knows how to check the weather app on his Android phone and so he doesn't care to watch a 5 minute weather report.
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CityTv is another one that has terrible news coverage. Why does a stolen inflatable snoopy decoration in Brampton, need to be one of the top news stories on the 11 pm news? Last week the big story was a set of stairs at some park that was closed off for the winter, and the poor residence had to walk down a small hill to enter the park. Oh and at least once a week, CityTV has to run a NIMBY of the week story. Is the world running out of news?

I can hardly wait for breaking news coverage of Toronto's first snow fall of the season!! :D

The news is broken!!

 
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