The Toronto Star looks at the decline of Montreal’s English-language media.
Updates from July, 2012 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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A New York Times review of SAT’s Foodlab (via the Pittsbugh paper) calls the Main “slowly gentrifying but still seedy.”
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Ian
Since the endless construction debacle the Main never really recovered, but seedy? By Pittsburgh standards? Hardly.
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Bill Binns
I saw a squeegee punk working at St Laurent and St Catherine last week. The first one I have seen in years. I had thought (and hoped) they had been hunted to extinction.
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Michel
@BB, really? You advocate killing the less fortunate?
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Ian
The species is still alive and well, I see them down around Fattall Lofts regularly.
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Nice list for bibliophiles takes in many of the city’s libraries and bookshops, although she leaves out S.W. Welch, The Word and Librairie Henri-Julien. But she never promised it was to be exhaustive.
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Ian
It’s hard to imagine even the most perfunctory list of used bookstores leaving out the Word and S.W. Welch – but then again this is in a French paper. She also left out Odyssey & Cheap Thrills…
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walkerp
Wait, I need more info! The Word? Cheap Thrills? Do I know these bookstores? Are they used bookstores?
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walkerp
Okay, Google reminds me that I do know The Word. Meh. Cheap Thrills, I really have not heard of. How are their paperback mystery and sci-fi sections?
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Kate
The Word tends to have soberer offerings with an academic tone, being close to McGill. I haven’t been in Cheap Thrills for a very long time so I’m not sure what it’s like now.
There are used bookshops in NDG and in the West Island, I think. I know someone who works in one in Lasalle. You might find more English genre books out in that direction, but I’m pretty vague on their locations, especially since I’m trying to reduce the number of books I own, rather than the opposite.
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Ian
It kind of depends on your tastes. I find mystery in Montreal pretty weak in most used stores. SF is a bit better but it depends on the place. Cheap Thrills is an excellent bookstore of 30-ish years that has mostly Concordia and McGill students as its clientele, so the book quality is high. They are also very, very good for music – as long as you like current non-top-40 stuff. Think hipster music. The SF is better than the mystery, though they are better at “literature”. Encore in NDG (Sherbrooke near Oxford) has a much better selection for both. It was also not on the list. Truth be told if you’re hunting for anything even remotely obscure in used SF & mystery your best bet is to buy used through Amazon. You may need to find a US friend as many of the Amazon used stores won’t ship to Canada.
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Charles
Port de tête on Mont-Royal is also great. They have a lot of comic books too (looks like they took over for Fichtre).
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david m
obviously different shops have different specialties and foci, but man, for the english, the word is hard to beat. a carefully curated collection the only fault of which lies in the orientation toward mcgill students’ tastes. so you’ll get your monographs on the films of satyajit ray or your norbert elias opus or whatever, but also your noam chomsky and road to serfdom and that. still, a tradeoff well made. when that guy dies and that shop closes, it’ll hit really hard, like tears-worthy.
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Ian
I was under the impression that his kids work there, I would be surprised if mere death ends such a fabled bookstore. The Word not only has an excellent albeit academically inclined selection, but also VERY reasonable prices. It’s also the best poetry selection of any used bookstore in Montreal. Except the Beats. Encore has a better selection in that area.
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walkerp
Last I checked, The Word did not have a science fiction section, so it is basically dead to me.
Ian, I’ll check out Encore
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Kate
walkerp, a couple years ago I was in Middlebury, VT – of all places – little road trip – and there was a used bookstore there, somewhere below street level in their tiny downtown, that had a science fiction section way better than anything I’ve seen here.
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A bit of journalistic sociological inquiry into why Quebecers love their back yard swimming pools digs up some amazing factoids: Quebec City had more pools installed than Toronto last year. But a coda notes that the next generation, being poorer, won’t be following suit.
qatzelok 19:48 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
Actually, the article is about the decline of “print” Anglo Quebec media, which has been crap for the last 40 years anyways.
Kate 19:49 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
Not only. They talk about the loss of TSN 990 radio.
qatzelok 19:51 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
Commercial radio is unbelievably shitty and advertisement-saturated. If I was a lab-rat, and my scientists made me listen to commercial radio, I’d try to scratch my way out of the maze. Why do so many people volunteer to listen to it?
Kate 19:52 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
Because they want the nuggets of information or entertainment embedded in the matrix of commercials, I guess. I’m not a listener myself.
Ian 20:05 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
“Henry Aubin, a prizewinning longtime urban affairs columnist at The Gazette, says older readers “are not digitally oriented” and the loss of the two free weeklies and the cutbacks and staff shrinkage at the Gazette “are blows to the Anglo community’s ability to inform itself.”” Yeah, because so many older readers were into the Mirror and the Hour. Bullschnitt! In any case, Montreal’s English news media has been a bad joke for ages, no real news here.
Kate 20:24 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
I worked in the Gazette newsroom for awhile in the 90s. The bulk of the work was done by page editors whose names you don’t hear but who were, all of them, sharp people, really on the ball. But the paper’s culture was so devoted to dumbing things down for the “older, less digitally oriented” reader – the little old lady in Côte St. Luc, basically – that the paper was already dooming itself not to expand its readership. Then the internet came along.
Ian 20:49 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
If I’ve learned nothing else from User Interface/ User Experience design, (UI/UX) I’ve learned this: If you make a product that will appeal to the least savvy target audience, it won’t appeal to anyone else. It’s true now, and it was true then.
qatzelok 20:58 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
“Henry Aubin is a journalist at the Montreal Gazette and the author of The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance between Hebrews and Africans in 701 BC. ” http://www.henryaubin.com/
Although he’s a mediocre writer who knows and cares nothing about Quebec, his resume provides some useful tips on how to get a lucrative job in mass media.
Ian 08:57 on 2012/07/22 Permalink
Always looking for a chance to remind us of your racist conspiracy theories, eh qatzelok? Aubin may be a hack that “knows nothing” of Quebec, but apparently you know nothing of the world -beyond xenophobia, that is.
qatzelok 10:11 on 2012/07/22 Permalink
You’re right, Ian. I’ll never get a well-paid media job with this attitude.
Hamza 11:21 on 2012/07/22 Permalink
‘then the internet came along.’ hah
david m 20:57 on 2012/07/22 Permalink
it’s a continuation of the conversation we had a couple days ago, about the inevitable march toward a full francisation of quebec, but with an interesting twist. one imagines that had napoleon ordered his troops differently, his forces might well have won the day at waterloo. and in the same vein, one imagines that if the anglophone media had been more interesting, if the gazette had gone about producing a devoir level of quality, standing alone as the paper or record in either language, they’d have developed a healthy francophone readership. it’s just such a shame it’s come to this. the anglophone plutocrats in this town used to stand for something! well, hopefully, without the feedback loop of aubin-style darkest doubts affirmation, we’ll be a more interesting gang.
Kevin 13:14 on 2012/07/23 Permalink
If the Gazette was written like Le Devoir it would already have vanished.
Le Devoir distributes 30,000 copies a week. The Gazette hits 550,000 people.
Jack 13:43 on 2012/07/23 Permalink
Le Devoir can be read between two Metro stops, its reporters and editors hold exactly the same political line and their is pathetically little diversity of opinion.Frankly, except for the weekend edition, its boring. I still think of a bad bunch La Presse is a better model of what Quebec is.
Kate 13:44 on 2012/07/23 Permalink
Le Devoir has to share its potential audience with the populist Journal and the wide-ranging La Presse. The Gazette tries to be folky like the Journal (badly and embarrassingly, often), generalist like La Presse, but it doesn’t aspire to the kind of razor-sharp critical thinking Le Devoir does at its best and its attempts at any kind of wit are feeble.
But the Gazette doesn’t want excellent content because it’s come to believe that it will scare off the West Island commuters that it feels to be its target audience. They try for beige, and they get beige – and now they don’t even have to compete with the Mirror. (I excuse from this critique the investigative work of Linda Gyulai and a few others – it’s the cultural stuff and the editorial tone that get me down.)
willie granger 22:41 on 2012/07/23 Permalink
I don’t want to fling mud too much but yeah, um.. Henry “Two doors down from Jean Charest” + “Can’t stand noise and must wear earplugs when he takes the bus to work” Aubin has very much had his day. I am thinking he’s not helping matters out much at the Gazette.
Kevin 07:29 on 2012/07/24 Permalink
The Gazette is a mass market newspaper that has to appeal to beauticians/guys on the warehouse floor/clerks/office workers/dentists/accountants.
That said, my main critique of the Gazoo is that it’s often a day behind the news cycle, and tends to react to events and scoops rather than lead it.