Expo Fans will not soon forget this weekend

It was quite a weekend for Montreal baseball fans - a veritable Expos love-in. It seemed like a big reunion that had been put off for years. Make no mistake about it, this was the kind of event that cannot be repeated, even if there are more exhibition games played here next year. The reason for that is simple: This was the first time that Expo fans were able to outwardly express their feelings about losing the team. When it happened in 2004, the atmosphere had been so poisoned that many saw it as the realization of an inevitable process.

Since the Expos became the Nationals, you could feel the sentiments of loss building over the successive years - a little more and a little more. The amazing thing is that despite the passage of nearly 10 years, some things like the routine of the baseball season remain timeless. It has always been at this time of year, when MLB prepares for Opening Day, that I always feel the loss the most.

How amazing was it for nearly 100,000 Montreal baseball fans to respond to the call for a pair of exhibition games? Pretty amazing considering the 2004 Expos drew a total of 749,550 for an entire home season - minus a bunch of Puerto Rico “home” games. But few showed up to cheer on the Jays or Mets… What they came for was to attempt to re-create the atmosphere of old. And they succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest optimistic predictions.

Emotions were the story of this past weekend, beginning with the tribute to the late Gary Carter and ending with the reunion of many members of the ill-fated 1994 team. The events of the past few days which will go down in local sports history as the turning point in efforts to bring baseball back to town, should they eventually succeed. And you have to hand it to the people at Montreal Baseball Project, led by Warren Cromartie. When they began their efforts, many snickered, especially within the media. These same people are not laughing anymore.

Why not also pay a special tribute to the media on both sides of the border who, for over a decade beginning in 1990, took almost non-stop shots at Montreal as a baseball town. They would continuously prognosticate about how the team would eventually relocate until the day it became fact and they could all claim “sadly” that they knew it was inevitable. Yes, many of these same people have now jumped on the baseball belongs in Montreal bandwagon…

Kudos to Montreal’s new mayor, Denis Coderre. He was at the Big Owe publicly expressing his support for bringing MLB back to town. You may very well remember that while the Expos were dying a slow and painful death, then mayor Gerald Tremblay displayed complete disinterest.

But the one thing that boosters of Montreal baseball have today that they didn’t have back in 2004 is social media. In fact, the one thing you can’t help noticing from the two games at the Owe and the events surrounding them are the pictures and videos shot by people who were there, as well as their first-hand accounts. These did not exist during the Expos’ time in Montreal.

Still, that did not mean that the Expos did not already have a huge Internet following back in the pre-Facebook/Twitter days. Back in the late 90s, a fan forum called Baseballboards, later to be renamed Fanhome made it’s debut. It offered message boards for fans of every MLB franchise to post about their teams. Incredibly, the busiest board by far on Fanhome was the one dedicated to the Montreal Expos. Even then, it was clear that the franchise was loved by people far beyond Montreal‘s city limits. I was fortunate to be one of the moderators of that board back in the day, along with Jonah Keri, who has gone on to bigger and better things, most notably being the author of the recently released book about the Expos called “Up, Up, & Away” that you have most certainly heard about and should definitely read. The Fanhome Expos board (Scout.com) today

So what happens now? Has MLB really taken note of what happened here over the past few days? Maybe… But above all else, baseball is a business and as long as there is no individual or group that expresses its desire and/or an ability to spend what will amount to around a billion dollars to reincarnate the Expos in Montreal, then all fans can do is hang on to their memories.

It will be a shame if baseball doesn’t eventually return, because considering our current political climate, how many opportunities do you have to unite over 50,000 people of different linguistic, religious, cultural and even ideological affiliations into the same building bound together by anything in this province?

Merging the resources of Radio and TV is not a new concept in Montreal

It’s strange how things seem to come full-circle sometimes. It hasn’t taken long for effects of Bell’s acquisition of Astral Media to become evident to radio listeners. Aside from the unfortunate recent job cuts, the one thing most listeners will notice is the convergence of the resources of what had been outlets that were independent of each other.

What this essentially means is that you will now hear people from TSN 690 on CJAD and vice-versa, as well as having CTV Montreal people appear on the airwaves of the local Bell-owned radio stations. In essence, they are supposedly now one big happy family. It's therefore easy to figure out that the sharing of resources will lead to the redundancy of some jobs.

It is ironic that CTV Montreal is now once again intimately connected with radio entities. As the 80s drew to a close, CFCF Inc. was still a local media giant. And for the longest time, housed in that now forgotten impressive complex on Ogilvy Avenue was both CFCF TV, CFCF 600 AM and eventually CFQR 92.5 FM. Through the 1980s, it was commonplace to hear CFCF TV people appear on the radio, especially on 600. Pulse sport anchors like Dick Irvin and Ron Reusch would frequently deliver sportscasts on the radio.

As the 1990s arrived, CFCF wanted out of the radio business and sold both CFCF Radio and CFQR. As part of the deal CFCF 600 was forced to change its call letters to avoid any confusion. It became CIQC, which it remained until becoming CINW nearly a decade later. Ironically, CIQC for a time, would broadcast the audio of Pulse News at 6 PM. CFRA in Ottawa, also owned by Bell, now broadcasts the CTV Ottawa (CJOH) 6 PM newscast on their airwaves. Can we expect a similar simulcast to start up in Montreal any time soon? We’re hearing more and more audio feeds of TV shows on CJAD, so maybe that prospect isn’t so inconceivable.

This game epitomizes what it meant to be a fan of the Montreal Expos

Painful for us at the end, but what an amazing game it was!

Yes, this used to be a blog

I have not had enough time since last summer to continue posting here on a regular basis. Instead, it has been easier to redirect my thoughts directly toward my radio program.

I’ve now spent over four years at Radio Centre-Ville. English programming can be heard on CINQ from 10:30 PM on Fridays through to 4 PM Saturdays. The English team is comprised of a small, but dedicated group of station members and volunteers. The only reason people devote so much time and effort to the station is because they love what they do and still believe in the relevance of radio.

I’ve found that one of, if not the biggest problem facing the English team is lack of exposure. Seven languages are heard on CINQ, and all of them, except for English and French do not really have to “compete” with commercial radio for listeners. For instance, it is easier to build an audience for a specific linguistic community than it is with say, English programming which is more general and less associated with a specific ethnic group.



In other words, we need to get the word out that we exist in a market with many big-budget English-language outlets. Considering we broadcast only once a week, that only adds to the challenge. In recent months, we have been increasing our efforts to get the word out about our programs. A new Facebook fan page has been launched, as has a Twitter feed. Several of our programs also have a web presence like Tracey's Cuisine, Jazz Boulevard, Scottish Voice, Arts Notebook and of course, Yesterday‘s News. All of our latest shows are available via podcast at radiocentreville.com and some of our shows have online archives and are available on iTunes.

One other way we have been using to get the word out about our shows is an occasional overnight replay of some of our programs. We’ve done it twice already and hope that it may have introduced some new listeners to some of what they may have been missing. The next installment of “Best of” Radio Centre-Ville’s English-language programming will air on Saturday, June 1st from 2:30 AM through to 7:30 AM. If you happen to be up during the early morning hours, please give it a listen on 102.3 FM in Montreal, or online with the station's live audio feed.

Retro Montreal ad from 1987: AM 60 Storm Watch

The Evolution of Cable

Once upon a time, some people lived with a handful of over-the-air analog channels. There were even such things as black-and-white receivers. Hard to imagine the way thing have evolved since then!

Back in the 1980s, just having cable was a big deal. Even though you’ve got far more choice today, it seemed you were getting far more bang for your buck back then. Specialty channels were scarce, but all you really wanted was to pick up the border channels anyway. That, and the way the image appeared to be crystal clear with cable. Today, we scoff at anything that isn’t HD, but at that time, it was standard analog cable that was the step up from the old rabbit ears.

There is one thing that is similar now to the early days of cable TV, and that is the necessity for a set-top box. Back in the 1970s and a part of the 1980s, you needed a set-top cable converter. Some rented it from their cable provider, others bought their own. The rented ones tended to be corded models, like the one shown below. It only had the capacity for about 30 channels and you couldn’t control the volume with it, or even turn the set on for that matter. The store-bought models, made by manufacturers like Jerrold and Philips did provide those features, were wireless and looked impressive sitting on top of the TV.

As the 80s drew to a close, most new TV sets had built-in converters, and thus all you needed to do was plug the cable directly into the unit. If you subscribed to pay-TV, it was still necessary to route it though a decoder box provided by the cable company. Keep in mind, unless you had one of those gigantic C-Band dishes or an antenna, you quickly realized that cable companies were monopolies.

The 90s arrived with new decoder technology. In Quebec, Videotron introduced the “Videoway” box with much fanfare. This set-top box introduced us to interactivity several years before the Internet. I’ve mentioned Videoway here before, but it is worth bringing up again, if only to point out how it was a technological sign of things to come. Interactive TV was a new feature of the system, including the ability to chose camera angles during live events and outcomes on pre-recorded TV programs. It never really became as widely used as it could have been, however. There were also interactive program guides, games, news and weather services and so on. But Videoway was still an analog decoder and although it hung around for some up until a few years ago, the technology had become dated by the end of the 90s.

Around the year 2000, digital TV began to appear in earnest. The picture appeared far superior to analog and it became far more customizable. As was the case with early cable, it once again became necessary to hook up an exterior box to benefit from this new technology. At around the same time, Satellite television began to appear in Canada after Grey market dishes began to take business away from the cable companies.

It is ironic that Bell fought against competition in phone services and cable companies against competition for television distribution. Today, they all offer the same services, meaning they all ended up better off and a lot richer by opening up the field. One thing that has significantly changed is the way content distributors are now also content producers.

The final change in cable offerings has been HD programming.
Again, with the necessity of buying or renting a set-top box. The HD set-top box is in all actuality a computer system, complete with a large solid-state drive for its PVR. It will be interesting to see whether in the near future a standard will be developed to allow TV receivers to be designed with set-top box capabilities. If that happens, like in the 80s, all that will be needed from the cable company is the cable.

There is no respect for Montreal's radio history

It hasn’t been a fun time for fans of Montreal radio in recent years. If one thing has become apparent, it is that history means nothing when it comes to the preservation of Montreal’s “heritage” stations. It began two decades ago when the CFCF call sign disappeared in favour of CIQC. Yes, I know, they were forced to change their letters, but still! At the very least the station continued to exist on 600 under its new name for nearly a decade. The 600 frequency would go silent, but theoretically, the station lived on down the dial at 940. A few years ago, the plug was pulled on the old CFCF's decades and decades of history - good and bad. My car radio’s still programmed to stop on 940 during scans, even though I never listened to it much in its “declining” years. All I hear now is static. Too bad, because supposedly it is a great frequency to have. But the radio “carnage’ didn’t stop there!

CKAC was also hugely significant when it came to Montreal’s radio history. It spent its final years as an all-sports station. I was under the impression they were doing reasonably well with the Habs and all. Their ownership however, hit the jackpot when the Quebec government decided for reasons only they understand, that public money should be handed over to help fund an all-traffic radio station. If it were such a great idea, then it is likely that a private broadcaster would have taken that initiative on their own. Of course, it’s a lot easier when the government is paying your way. So it was bye bye CKAC. Let us not forget that back when CKAC was a hugely popular talk station in the early 90s, their main competitor, the original CJMS was put out of its misery in another odd business merger. At the time, CJMS was actually doing pretty well too.

Now the same folks who turned CKAC in to an all-traffic waste of a frequency wanted to do the same thing in English on the old 940 spot - with the province’s money that is. The CRTC said no.

Which brings us to one of the last classic Anglo radio remnants that is left: CKGM, aka Team/TSN 990. They went through format change after format change right through to 2001 when they went to the all-sports format. It seemed unlikely they could succeed, but amazingly they have held on for more than a decade. Their luck, however, is about to run out. We’ve seen a lot of manoeuvring over the years, but this most recent one by 990’s owner Bell takes things to a new level. This time, they don’t just want to change a format or a place on the dial, they want to change the language of the station itself. 990 was set to shortly move to a new stronger frequency on 690 AM. The reasoning given to the CRTC was that somehow that will allow it to reach a wider English-speaking audience on the western tip of the island and beyond. With them now being the Habs’ rights holders, it might have been a convincing argument. The CRTC bought it. So under the pretext of increasing the reach of the Anglo market, Bell now says they want to use that new frequency as a French-language all-sports station, to complement RDS.

This most recent move seems to have taken the radio world, and more particularly 990 employees totally off-guard. Since the news broke, there has been an emotional campaign launched by the station’s listeners to save it. They are not a huge group by any means, but they have been persistent in their petitions to the CRTC, obligatory Facebook campaign and in their planned rallies.

Will the effort make a difference? You would hope so, but probably not. Canadian media is now owned not by a handful, but by a few fingers worth of massive corporations. All they care about is the bottom line. And if you are able to easily swallow up your competition, you are under far less pressure to respond to the demands of listeners of viewers. Why?  Because you pretty much own everything. If people abandon Station A for Station B and you own them both, so what?

So to summarize, what is clear from the above is that history be damned when it comes to deciding on the fate of long-time institutions. And oh yes, English-speaking radio listeners in Montreal are being screwed.