TVA obtained the green light from the CRTC on Monday to delete its two regional bulletins broadcast on weekends in the Quebec region.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has required for several years that the TVA station in Quebec, CFCM-DT, produce a local news bulletin on Saturdays and Sundays. This requirement did not apply to the network’s other regional branches, which only broadcast local news on weekdays.
Last June, TVA announced that it was putting an end to the two local weekend news bulletins in Quebec, without having first received authorization from the CRTC. At the time, Quebecor argued that the situation was serious, as the company had just announced initial cutbacks, which had led to around a hundred job cuts within its TVA Group subsidiary.
Three weeks later, TVA was forced to suspend its decision while the CRTC looked into its request. The weekend news broadcast therefore remained on the air.
It took almost a year for the CRTC to side with TVA’s arguments. In its decision rendered Monday, the CRTC said it had taken note of the difficult financial situation in which the TV network finds itself, which announced in November further substantial job cuts. The Commission also noted that TVA’s main competitors, namely Radio-Canada and Noovo, do not have to produce a local news bulletin in Quebec every weekend.
Thus, CFCM-DT will no longer have to produce two news bulletins on Saturdays and Sundays. The regional TVA station will have to devote 16 hours to local programming each week, rather than 18, as was the case before this decision.
The CRTC still requires the broadcast of “3 hours and 30 minutes of news offering a local reflection during each week”. Regional bulletins during the week in Quebec should therefore not be affected.
Rationalization
Please note that the regional bulletins for Saguenay, Rimouski, Sherbrooke and Trois-Rivières will be produced from Quebec as of May 21. They will also be presented by journalist Andrée Martin, who until then hosted the two television news programs in Quebec which risk disappearing at the weekend.
There will therefore no longer be a different news reader assigned to each regional weekday bulletin. Several technical positions are also abolished in the four local stations. This was part of the measures announced in November as part of the vast restructuring plan put in place by TVA, which then announced the elimination of 547 positions, or nearly a third of its workforce.
These cuts were also expected to result in layoffs of journalists in the regions. But under the latest collective agreements, the losses will be less significant than expected. Some stations will even hire new journalists to cover news on the ground.