Steve Ladurantaye

Fresh off its decision to kill a multibillion-dollar merger between two of Canada’s largest broadcasters, Canada’s television regulator is preparing to take on a far more formidable opponent – Oprah Winfrey.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and Corus Entertainment are set to do battle over the fate of the specialty channel that bears her name, in another example of the commission’s new appetite for confrontation with broadcasters.

The problem is with the Oprah Winfrey Network’s Canadian licence, which demands the channel must broadcast educational content. That worked when the channel operated as Canadian Learning Television, but when Corus replaced it last year with OWN, the commission took notice of the shift in content.

Now the CRTC is warning “all options are on the table” – including pulling Corus’ licence for the channel – unless the Toronto-based broadcaster can convince commissioners that it will provide more educational programming and fewer guilty pleasures such as Are You Normal, America? and Lovetown, USA.

“The commission found that while OWN’s programming was focused on ‘enhancement programming,’ it did not provide basic adult education, job development skills or professional development as reflected in its nature of service definition,” the regulator said in a statement.

To keep both its licence and the legions of female viewers that come along with all things Oprah, Corus said it is willing to introduce four weekly educational shows to the channel’s lineup to bolster its homegrown educational content – E-Commerce Done Right, The Job Seekers Guide to Career Happiness, Finance for Everyone and The History of Canadian Art.

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The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. is looking for a public-relations company to help it get its news programs and in-house celebrities in front of more viewers and “break through the cluttered media environment.”

The CBC filed a tender for a two-year contract, with an option for a third, to provide it with public relations and marketing assistance. The CBC wouldn’t say how much it plans to spend on the services, which it has used in the past to help draw attention to its people and programs. Veritas Communications is under contract, but the broadcaster must return to the market whenever a term expires.

“The purpose of this request for proposals is to identify and secure a long-term agreement with a best-in-class publicity service provider,” the broadcaster wrote. “The successful agency will have the experience, expertise and creative talent to produce events and outreach that break through the cluttered media environment to message and position all of our content within the CBC and CBC News brand.”

The CBC said this applies to all genres including news, unscripted, scripted, CBC Music, documentary and sports.

“This may include publicity services for red carpet events, event flow, event planning and execution, public engagement promotion, event list management, drafting remarks (speakers notes or presentation content, expertise in planning and ideation, strategic business innovation and other support for the CBC publicity team,” the RFP’s summary states (the full version is not available to the public).

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The Globe and Mail is moving to charge readers for its online content, following a trend established by the New York Times and other major publications.

Publisher and chief executive officer Phillip Crawley told an all-staff meeting Thursday that the paper will implement a metered paywall system this fall, asking readers to pay if they read more than a certain number of articles each month.

The number of free articles per month hasn’t yet been announced, nor has pricing.

“We have chosen to go for the big move rather than do it a step at a time,” Mr. Crawley said. “Based on what we see going on in the advertising market, we’ve decided to go for it now. We had already made the decision, it was a case of how quickly we would do it.”

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BCE Inc.  could spend at least $21-million on severance pay for five Astral Media  executives if the company’s deal for the broadcaster closes.

The two companies announced details of the $3.2-billion deal last week. BCE gets dozens of radio and television stations as part of the agreement, and strengthens its hand considerably in Quebec.

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Astral’s management circular outlines who gets paid what in the event of a takeover, and it indicates five of the company’s executives are in line for $21-million in payouts. The total dollar amount is a combination of severance pay, stock options and other share plans.

Founder Ian Greenberg, for example, would receive $5.8-million in severance on top of $5.1-million in stock-related compensation for a total of $10.9-million. The final amount is likely to be higher, because the vesting options section of the circular assumes a takeover price $34.35 for the company’s Class A shares. BCE has offered $50 for these shares.

Mr. Greenberg won’t vanish quietly into retirement, however. He’ll be joining BCE’s board.

“I don’t want people to miss this, one of the absolute critical parts of this acquisition is we now have access to the leading media content team in the province of Quebec … and their CEO is joining our board,” BCE chief executive officer George Cope said in a conference call about the deal. “ It doesn’t get any better than that in terms of an acquisition going forward.”

Other employees receiving payouts include chief operating officer Jacques Parisien ($3.7-million), Chaînes Télé Astral president Pierre Roy ($3-million), Astral Television Network president John Riley ($2.8-million) and vice-president of finance Robert Fortier ($737,389).

Other employees eligible for payouts include Astral’s chief operating officer Jacques Parisien ($3.7-million), Chaînes Télé Astral president Pierre Roy ($3-million), Astral Television Network president John Riley ($2.8-million), and vice-president of finance Robert Fortier ($737,389).

Mr. Greenberg’s payment is triggered the minute the deal is done, other executives would receive the payment if replaced within 18 months.

BCE may need to consider severance for employees as well. UBS analyst Phillip Huang said head office jobs are likely to be eliminated when the companies merge, due to overlap. He didn’t quantify how many positions could be cut.

“We believe there is significant function overlap between Bell Media and Astral’s head offices, and expect substantial synergies,” Mr. Huang wrote in a note to clients.

The deal has been criticized by some because it doesn’t treat all shareholders equally. While it is common for media and communications companies in Canada to have two classes of shares, Astral has three.

BCE is paying $50 a share for the class A non-voting shares and $54.83 for the class B voting shares, the majority of which are controlled by the Greenberg family holding company. But they also control a third class of shares, which have extra votes and are called “special shares” and of which there are only 65,000. BCE is paying $50-million for those – or $769.23 each.

Emboldened by the success of its digital paywall that has seen some 455,000 users pay for online news, The New York Times is tightening access to its website in a move that paves the way for more aggressive pay models at publications across North America.

For the past year, the publisher allowed access to 20 free stories a month from any single computer. It has lowered that number to 10 to encourage more people to pay for the news – although it said readers who were directed to a story via social media or a search engine would have unrestricted access to it.

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View a slideshow of Canadian online paywall efforts 

The newspaper group’s efforts to have readers pay for online content have been closely watched by publishers around the world since it launched its paywall last year. As it officially announced subscriber numbers for the first time Tuesday, publishers began scrubbing the release for insight into how to enhance their own fledgling paywalls.

The Times’ metered system is rapidly becoming the preferred method of newspaper publishers charging for online content, and is being adopted by a number of Canadian outlets.

Following experiments in Montreal and Victoria, Postmedia Network Canada Corp. will restrict access to several of its metropolitan daily newspapers in the spring. The Globe and Mail is expected to launch a metered version of the business content on its website in the second half of the year, and Torstar Corp. continues to test a metered model at its Hamilton Spectator.

Magazine publishers are also considering how to charge for their content online, with Rogers Media Inc. considering enhanced paid-access models for its consumer magazines such as Maclean’s and Chatelaine.

“We are really all in this together as an industry as we try to figure out what works,” said Wayne Parrish, chief operating officer at Postmedia. “I don’t think anyone has an idea of what will work in two, three or five years.”

Some analysts took the Times’ move as an encouraging signal.

“Today’s positive announcement is the first good news from the company in some time,” said Douglas Arthur, a media analyst at Evercore Partners. “[It] also announced a new restrictive access policy … this would seem to underscore the company’s confidence in the pay wall model.”

The confidence has been infectious, largely because the Times is expected to reap an $85-million haul from its online subscribers in 2012.Gannett Co. Inc., the largest publisher in the United States, recently announced plans to restrict content at 80 of its newspapers (excluding its flagship USA Today).

Other organizations such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have also adopted online pay schemes that include metered systems, as well as subscription-only models.

All of the companies are trying to figure out how to wring money out of readers, regardless of how they access news. Websites are still the most popular method of online access, but smartphones and tablets are becoming increasingly popular.

Companies initially believed that selling apps would be a good way to monetize news, but a Nielsen study finds that has had mixed results in the United States, where the top 25 news apps in the country are all free to download and only two require a paid subscription.

Most publishers still depend on selling advertising, however, and a recent study suggested American newspapers are earning $1 in digital advertising revenue for every $7 they lose in their print products. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism studied 38 newspapers in the United States, and cited “cultural inertia” for the papers’ inability to seize new revenue opportunities.

“The shift to replace losses in print ad revenue with new digital revenue is taking longer and proving more difficult than executives want and at the current rate most newspapers continue to contract with alarming speed,” the report stated, adding the executives they interviewed considered replacing print revenue an “existential” issue.