Month: September 2012

From the Star today…one hour cash advance

I am delighted to announce the following appointments:
Tanya Talaga moves from Queens Park to the new Global Economics beat. Tanya, who joined the Star in 1995, enjoys a singular reputation for her work as a health, education and, most recently, a politics reporter. Her achievements include two nominations for the prestigious Michener Award — for Medical Secrets (2007) in which she and Rob Cribb changed the province’s policies to improve transparency and accountability in patient care and, in 1997, for 1,000 Voices, Lives on Hold, in which she, Jonathan Ferguson and Vinay Menon chronicled the stories of young people who were poor, in debt and without much hope. She was also part of the Star team that was nominated for an NNA in Special Projects for coverage of poverty in the GTA.

Raveena Aulakh is the new Environment reporter. Raveena, who joined the Star in 2008, is known for her attention to craft and her determination to get her story. Her many accomplishments include an NNA nomination for international reporting in 2010 for her stories detailing the exodus of young men from Punjab villages to the West; her aggressive, never-say-never coverage of the Tori Stafford case from when the story broke to the trial earlier this year and her remarkable story of love and obsession about a Japanese mother’s search for her daughter’s remains following the catastrophic tsunami of 2011. She was part of the team that won the 2010 Breaking News NNA for G20 coverage.
Jenny Yang becomes the Global Health reporter. Since joining the paper as an intern in 2009, Jenny has distinguished herself with smart, compelling and thorough stories. She won the NNA for explanatory journalism for her fascinating account of the rescue of the Chilean miners, a story that gripped the world in 2010. She has also dominated the competition with her incomparable coverage of the G20 — both as the story broke (Jenny was also a member of the award-winning breaking news team) and in the aftermath as the scope of civil rights violations made this one of the most important stories in GTA.
Kate Allen is the new Science and Technology reporter. Kate, who joined the Star as an intern in 2010, has emerged as a talent in reporting complex and elaborate subjects and turning them into clear and clever prose. Among her most memorable work has been the recent May You Be Forever Yonge project and its strong social and multi media components, Wild Laws in which she teamed with Wendy Gillis for stories on private zoos in Ontario and A Year of Living Dangerously, how La Nina caused the water wars in Texas. Kate has been nominated for a Canadian Online Publishing Award for a feature on immigration and was a member of the UBC team that produced a documentary for PBS’s Frontline.

Please join me in congratulating them on their new positions.
Lynn McAuley

Rogers said today that Bell is going to stick it to everyone when it comes to mobile television, a charge that has Bell executives spitting mad. Here’s what Bell had to say at the CRTC about allowing its content to be used by other companies to launch mobile services.

MR. COPE: Yes. I think if we back up all the way to the first principle, but I want to talk about the Bell Mobile TV, as again, we’re in the business of selling our content to every BDU on all the screens. That is absolutely core to what we’re trying to do and it’s our belief that across four screens Canadians are going to end up with world-leading and are now world-leading services from all of our competitors too at the BDU level.

But yes, Mobile TV — there’s no doubt Bell Wireless has been a leader in the world in this. We came up with the concept. We launched it in Canada. But our vision has been really simple. For the consumer it’s an incredible service because it’s $5 a month for 10 hours of viewing and it’s outside of any of your data bucket.

So it’s totally affordable and 500,000 Canadians are now subscribing to the service. We could not be more excited than to sell our service to TELUS and Rogers and the other wireless carriers to put it on their handsets.

Just to give you a perspective, Bell Mobility today pays $8 million — and that number is growing — on an annualized basis to Bell Media. We have offered these services, all of our content, to our other wireless companies for $3 million a year and if you do the model, after that it becomes a per subscriber fee. If you do a model on a $5 bill for a Canadian consumer and you take all the Canadian content that we expect to be on handsets, these dollars are so small.

We believe people aren’t carrying the wireless product to create a perception of vertical integration being a problem because at $3 million if Bell Media’s content is not worth that much in an exploding wireless business, then we actually don’t have a Mobile TV business.

And so we’re very relaxed about the economics. We’re excited to sell it. We want to buy — we have, and if you look at Bell Mobile’s product you will see we have lots of other content other than Bell Media’s content on it and we look forward obviously to carry everyone’s content on it as soon as we can arrange it.

And more importantly, Kevin’s job is to sell that content to our other wireless companies to get everyone in Canada to have available these types of services. That’s our fundamental belief.

THE CHAIRPERSON: Well, your position is clear. We’ll see through the intervention phase how others react to that.

MR. COPE: We will but I do think it’s absolutely critical to understand that TELUS and Rogers are upset about $3 million a year for access to this and that it’s created headlines in the media about us having exclusive wireless. We don’t. We have actually created a world-leading technology that Canada can be proud of, not worry about $3 million bills for these companies. Thank you.