“The news is too depressing,” Marjorie Lemieux told the commissioners responsible for regulating Canadian television today. “I watch poker and other game shows.” Reruns of Fraggle Rock, too — which is why Marjorie and five other concerned citizens turned up in Gatineau to back the cable industry’s effort to Stop the TV Tax. “This is not an epic battle,” mused CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein on Monday, “this is not something will turn the world upside down.” But after the executives driving the Local TV Matters campaign got their hearing last month, threatening to pull the plug on regional newscasts, this was the turn for everyday people to speak their mind. “I don’t have any trust in local news broadcasters anymore,” said TV tax opponent Ruben Boiardi. “They’re no longer relevant on my dial.” So, does this whole thing go down in history as a colossal joke? At least, as tweeted by CARTT.ca editor Greg O’Brien, the commissioners were enjoying the dialogue more than listening to the lawyers. Are the people still willing to pay for more channels than they watch? “I don’t mind,” said Lydia Luckevich. “It’s the Canadian way!” Yet executives arguing that Chris Anderson’s premise of The Long Tail is realized by making customers pay for television they don’t watch seems like a stretch — a decade of digital cable, and no low-budget show gained an audience by accident. Then there’s Ms. Lemieux, who just wants to watch game shows, while admitting her fiancé can’t stand them. “Sorry Marjorie,” tweeted Alan Sawyer, “it will never last.”

PREVIOUSLY: Trial of the last century: inheriting the windbags at the CRTC

In these times, when no media company would favourably report on a rival without a strategic reason, there was a competitive agenda embedded in the Financial Post’s front-page story last weekend, “Torstar loves Harlequin.” What started as a puff piece, about how the romance publisher boosts Torstar’s bottom-line, veered into a review of Torstar’s stock market misfortune. David Holland, interim CEO for Torstar for the past half year, was officially named to the position this week: “We’re at such an interesting time, in terms of media,” he told one of his employees at the Toronto Star. “There’s no question that media consumption is evolving at a rapid rate. But I do believe the assets that we have, both in print and online, will prove to be valuable to marketers. Nobody’s figured this out yet.” While patting himself on the back, though, Harlequin was having to blow out a firestorm after the Romance Writers of America — along with organizations representing professional sci-fi and mystery fiction scribes — lashed back at the announcement of a new vanity press, Harlequin Horizons. The idea of asking amateur bodice-ripper-writers to pay between $599 and $1,599 to create their own Harlequin-branded romance rankled the RWA so much, they announced the company would no longer be given complimentary tickets to their annual convention, and their authors no longer eligible for their awards. So, the company backtracked on impact, and will instead relaunch the program — without exploiting the “H”-word. “Putting lipstick on a con job doesn’t make it any less of a con job,” reacted blogging author John Scalzi, “doesn’t make it any less of a con job.”

PREVIOUSLY: Big red pen taken to ‘Toronto Star’ publisher’s apocalyptic memo

Konrad von Finckenstein, chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, has a demeanor that lives up to the shadow cast by his name. “I am very frustrated by this confrontational approach,” he slowly sighed, during first day of hearings about whether cable and satellite companies should be paying for the right to carry over-the-air signals. What they’re really fighting about is the diminished value of American prime-time hits — originating locally via Buffalo stations that signed on years before the simulcasting Toronto ones. Would the same CRTC that takes flack each year for substituting imported Super Bowl commercials with domestic spots win favour by approving a fee for shows available via rabbit ears? Maybe, given how viewers of local news have been hypnotized into believing their friendly neighbourhood anchorman will be decomposing even faster than that newspaper on the doorstep. But the hearings that started this week in Gatineau should generally be regarded the twilight of a generation of media elites. Continue Reading

A nine per cent boost at the snack bar — averaging $4.15 in concession sales from every captive ticket buyer —  helped produce record profits for Cineplex Entertainment, whose 1338 screens in 130 locations generated more revenue than ever this summer, while its co-founder Garth Drabinsky was being sentenced to seven years in jail. Those newfangled 3D and IMAX films are credited for their contribution to a $20.4 million 3Q profit. The path to this take was full of twists: Ellis Jacob, ousted from his office at Cineplex in 1998 when it was sold to U.S.-based Loews after Drabinsky lost his grip, used his severance to start multiplex mini-chain Galaxy Entertainment in smaller markets starved for entertainment ever since the local bijou closed down. “I asked some of the kids what it meant to them,” Jacob told Playback after watching the lineup to see Spider-Man in Cornwall in 2002. “They said, ‘Hey dude, this is bigger than Wal-Mart.’” Cineplex, meanwhile, couldn’t sell enough popcorn in the early-2000s — all those shopping mall cinemas were showing their age — so help was needed from equity investment firm Onex, which invested heavily in the Galaxy gambit, leading to a reunion merger in 2003. A couple years later, Jacob snapped up the old-school Famous Players chain, and its gaudy archipelagos developed by over-leveraged owner Viacom. The evolution also involved shuttering the postage stamp screening rooms at the Eaton Centre, while handing over the bargain-basement neon of multiplexes like Market Square to Edmonton-based Rainbow Cinemas. Remaining an urban curiosity are sleepier first-generation Cineplexes you can only assume aren’t kept running for sentimental reasons alone: perennial art house the Carlton, and the retiree-friendly Canada Square at Yonge and Eglinton — which, if by accident of this corporate poker game, has the last marquee in town branded by Famous Players.