Toronto Mike'd: The Official Toronto Mike Podcast - 12:36: Toronto Mike'd #196

Episode Date: October 6, 2016

Mike chats with Marc Weisblott of 12:36 about the current state of the media in Canada.

Welcome to episode 196 of Toronto Mic'd, a weekly podcast about anything and everything. Proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, a local independent brewery producing fresh craft beer. I'm Mike from torontomic.com and joining me this week is 1236 author Mark Weisblatt. And what time did I get here? 141? Yeah, 11 minutes past your expected time of arrival, which is really good for you. Not bad, given the fact that you live in a whole different universe

from the one that I inhabit. And yesterday I also had some responsibilities after I finished my daily newsletter, and I was just so disoriented. I need that time after I send it out at 12.36 to just ruminate, contemplate, reflect, have a nap, something to that effect. I'm learning this week how incompatible what I'm doing is in tandem with a regular adult life. But it's a good experience to have. So tell us. So, yeah, Toronto's a big city, and I'm, like, nestled in the southwest corner here.

And how long does it take you taking public transit, like, from the time you leave your home-slash-office to the time you arrive? What are we talking here? I left at 12.36. I sent out the newsletter, and I'm in the time you arrive. What are we talking here? I left at 1236. I sent out the newsletter. You don't schedule that? You click send at 1236? Or is that scheduled? I could hand it off, but I like to do it myself.

It's a ceremonial thing. It means if anything goes wrong, it's entirely my fault. It's on you. Hey, no, great. Can I ask you, is it too late for me to say to you Shana Tova? Is it too late? No, it's not too late. It's never too late.

There's always a good reason to think of it as a new year, whether it's in September, October, January. So any time of year I can say to you Shana Tova and it's appropriate. Well, yeah, the year is currently going on. But the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, that was this past Monday and Tuesday.

I had McScoop, the news dog, handle 1236 duties on Tuesday. He hacked the newsletter. McScoop, pretty well known on Twitter for his patriotic Canadian opinions. I was going to ask you who McScoop is. I have to plead ignorance. I didn't know about McScoop until I saw your newsletter come out and that he had hacked it, as you say. So is this somebody I should be following? I should be following McScoop the News Dog.

McScoop the News Dog. So I got three email complaints, one Facebook note from someone upset with the typos, and an actual phone call to the office of St. Joseph Media wondering what went wrong. That person must have been over the age of 65. I don't know. I have to be welcoming to everyone. I'm still just getting this 1236 thing started. I picture somebody like Grandpa Simpson.

That's what I've got in my head. And he's typing away in his type letter, mailing a letter and phoning you and complaining. Everybody is entitled to their opinion, but McScoop is well-known enough on Twitter that the people who follow what goes on there were aware of his existence. And it was great to have McScoop take over. Give me a day off for this New Year thing.

We have a full slate here. This is an episode I recommend to anyone who needs to know what's happening in Toronto. What's Toronto talking about? Especially with a digital slant, I'd say. But we have like topics of radio and television and print and Twitter and just the general Toronto zeitgeist. But we got to start. I got to start with what happened in the wildcard game,

Toronto Blue Jays versus Baltimore Orioles on Tuesday night. So there's two sides I need to talk. First, I'm going to talk the baseball side really briefly. Correct me if I'm wrong. I know you follow the Jays, of course, but did you watch the wild card? I watched it online. I could follow what was happening on Twitter, Facebook, whatever comment was happening while the game was going on, I had a pretty good idea about it.

I wasn't watching it on a TV broadcast. And you can't, I'm going to guess, and I always wonder at those moments, like, you can't avoid it online. Like, you can go offline, of course, but if you're going to stay online, you're essentially forced to follow the game. Because you must follow many people who are tweeting about the wildcard game. You can't avoid this. Yeah, and of course we've got all the bandwagoners who take an interest in baseball,

something like a wildcard game, big deal. And what did they have, the biggest audience in the history of Sportsnet? In 2016, I think. It's the biggest audience so far in 2016. Because there were more people who watched that Batista bat flip than watched the wildcard game. Okay, well, I mean, the ratings are only going to increase from here. So yeah, they even postponed a CBC sitcom. Right, Mr. Kim. Kim's Convenience. And there's a whole story out there about how they had to arrive at this important decision.

Nonetheless, I was appalled to see that this hour has 22 minutes and Rick Mercer were on as scheduled. And that even though the wildcard game was going on, they still had over half a million people watching these horrible CBC fake news shows. People who would actually rather watch that than what was happening on Sportsnet. That's funny. That's funny. Every time I see a commercial and there's lots of them, every time

I see an ad for the Kim's Convenience, I think of you and Retro Ontario and our discussions about Train 48. He's the guy from Train 48, the star of Kim's Convenience. Yeah, that's right. And he did Kim's Convenience as a stage play. So he was a natural to bring it to TV. Absolutely.

Okay. And speaking of Kim, Kim is the last name, the surname of the South Korean outfielder. So in the seventh inning of this wildcard game, which we won, by the way, and the game won against Texas is in a couple of hours, and I'm just freaking psyched. I can't wait.

But in the seventh inning, a deep fly ball by Melvin Upton Jr., formerly known as BJ Upton. He hit a ball deep, and somebody threw a can of Bud Light on the field. Obviously, I think the attempt was to hit the ball, maybe. I think this was, I'm not trying to think of what his thought process, because I've never seen that before.

I don't think they were trying to hit Kim, the outfielder. I think they might have been trying to interfere the ball. Like when you throw your glove at a ball, it's way over your head or whatever. But this is, so there's been a lot of chatter about Edwin's walk-off, Homer, which was extremely exciting and put us into the ALDS against Texas. But there's been an awful lot of like sleuthing and I don't want to call it a witch hunt,

but a manhunt, if you will, for the individual who threw the can of beer. This has been a big like consuming activity in Toronto the last 24 hours. Yeah, and as the caper has continued, it's raised a lot of questions about where society's priorities lie. The fact

that there is all sorts of wrongdoing that goes on in the society. How is it that a beer can becomes the focus of everybody's attention, catching the culprit, the police getting involved to the degree that they do? Aren't there more important crimes to solve? And juxtaposing, at the same time as we're all hunting the beer can thrower, there was a picture released of somebody who is accused of

sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl on the subway, I think it was, or a bus or so. A TTC. And it's just interesting that the Toronto Sun ended up putting a $10,000 reward out for who can... Oh no, not $10,000. $1,000. Was it $1,000? Yeah, they don't have that much money there.

It was only $1,000. I'm disappointed. I guess I should have carried the money. Just to rat somebody out? To send an email through Yahoo or something? I think Warmington's got 10K walking around money. Come on. Nonetheless, they found the guy, and the phone call was coming from inside the house.

That's right. So Post Media owns the son, for those who don't know. And Post Media employs the gentleman who the police wanted to speak to. Here's the thing, man. You've seen these Zapruder films, these Skydome Zapruder films, right? So the first one was like, oh, it's a blonde woman. And it was the fuzziest, I'm sorry, but most inconclusive video I've ever seen. This is a blonde woman we're looking for.

But then it got a little clear. This guy, his last name I think is Pagan. I can't remember the first name. Yeah, Ken Pagan. Who works in Hamilton for a post-media spectator. I don't know. They have like a central plant there where they lay out all the newspapers. They do all the behind-the-scenes work.

He's like an editor, right? All the newspapers in Canada are centralized in this office somewhere in Hamilton. The entire company disparages the employees of this office because they don't have a relationship directly with the newspapers. because they don't have a relationship directly with the newspapers. You write something, you send it off to Hamilton, and it comes back wrapped in a bow in the form of a daily newspaper. So the Hamilton office has a lot of notoriety within Post Media, and the reporters at the newspaper would not necessarily have a relationship with the people

working there. Now, this video that sort of points the finger at this guy, again, though, I've watched this video now, I think, 12, 13 times. I keep watching it because it looks like it's probably that guy, and then everybody looks at him. But again, maybe because I'm

used to watching this season, you could challenge calls on the field and they would, if it was conclusive that the umpires were wrong, they would reverse it. So the, this whole idea of conclusive evidence, you can overturn it, but versus inconclusive, we have to keep the, the play on the field as valid. I have to say, like, if I, I'm, I'm, I think it's inconclusive. Like, I don't, I don't think it's clear that this guy chucks the beer can. I don't know about you, but what if we have the wrong guy? This guy's face is everywhere. The cops

put his picture out there. We all know his name, where he works. We all want our pound of flesh. We should go to Young and Dundas and hang this guy by his scrotum? What is the appropriate punishment? Well, someone knows something. And as the headline in the free 24-hours newspaper read today, I can't saying anything.

So how's that for irony? The copy editor is a suspect, and look what happens. They mangle his quote in the newspaper that he might have been looking at if he was allowed to come to work rather than consulting with his lawyer. So someone knows something. And the fact that it turned out not to be a female suspect was maybe a bit of a disappointment. As somebody on Twitter remarked, there was an opportunity for all kinds of think pieces. Can a woman be a bro?

What does this say about the toxic masculinity of sports, that it becomes contagious to the point that even women are throwing beer cans at the field? So we missed out on that. Because I would have bet the house Because I would have bet the house. I would have bet the house. I would have bet everything I have that this was a guy who threw that beer can. I would have bet it all.

I would have loved to have found out it was a woman. That would have been great. Okay, so in your theorizing here, do you think you're maybe risking some sort of legal action? Did you get enough alleged leaves in there when you were describing what happened? Well, I actually don't. I said he's inconclusive. I don't even know if this is the right guy. So, yeah, the cops.

I don't even know if the cops have said it's that guy. So everything seems so murky to me. I actually just, I didn't even need to know who this person was. I just banned him from Toronto professional sporting events because what a dick move that is. As a baseball fan, I couldn't believe it when I saw it. I was just so upset that somebody would actually do that and try to interfere with such a key play in a wild card game.

But I think we've taken this a little far off the main line. Well, they've humiliated him to the point where now the move is to testify against somebody else, right? Right. They've ruined his life. How's he going to get out of this? It's to actually reveal who it was that he saw doing it if he's covering up for somebody else sitting in that section. You frequent Reddit occasionally. Now, do you remember the Boston bombings? Right away,

they had this thread in Reddit. And I remember they were zooming in, and they had presented all this evidence, and they had named the culprit. They had identified somebody in the pictures. It's this guy. This is why. And there was a whole mob mentality on Reddit that, hey, look, we did it. We solved the crime. We have our guy. We know who is responsible. Reddit ended up being wrong. And this feels a bit like I'm not sold that this guy did it. I don't want to dwell

any further, just to say I can't believe that I think maybe the beer can throw got more press and chatter than Edwin's walk-off. Our first playoff walk-off since Joe Carter touched them all in 1993. Seems like

this is overshadowing that. There are enough sports journalists out there in this city. We only have one Joe Warmington, and he seems to have dedicated himself to the pursuit of the right answer here. Heard him on the radio this morning giving interviews about what he learned, and even though he wrote the story that made the front page of The Sun a big scoop for the Night Scrawler, who earlier this week was on Twitter

completely baffled about how do you use Google on Firefox? I saw that. Keeping in tradition with his Twitter style, right, where he uses it kind of as a stream of consciousness thing, and he was confused. He didn't know how the Firefox browser worked. So he had to redeem himself with a big scoop, a real story,

and I think he pulled it off. What a week for Joe Warmington. Did I tell you, and everybody listening, did I share the story that I once invited Joe on this show, and we once had an exchange, a DM exchange. He follows me. Occasionally, he retweets my tweets. We're Twitter-friendly, as I say.

Sort of like John Derringer and me, we're Twitter-friendly, and he'll retweet my things. But Joe politely declined the invitation to. But nobody uses Twitter like Joe Warmington, right? You get like all sorts of personal messages in there, things that he presumes are direct messages that aren't getting through. He retweets all of his friends and foes and everybody angry at him. He gets all excited. Earlier this year, I got swept into the Warmington sphere.

I was engaged in a discussion with him involving the drama at the Toronto Star. And I got a sense of why Warmington is so manic when he uses this thing, because he's got his legion of followers and they respond to everything he has to say. So his phone is buzzing all the time. And I think it puts him in a different headspace that he doesn't really know how to cope with. that he doesn't really know how to cope with. And no other journalist seems to be as bewildered as Warmington is by how all of this thing works. But I think that's been a recurring theme

in a lot of what I've been covering. This older generation, people who were part of traditional media trying to cope with the tools out there, trying to show that they understand, know how it works. And Warmington is really, really trying. Yeah, like Steve Simmons, who is up to his game. He had some struggles, I remember. And, you know, Damien Cox, I think he's still on lockdown.

Damien Cox is still protected. But it wouldn't make any sense for Warmington to figure it out. Just to remind people, he famously camped out. He was at the Starbucks. And my wife works in this building, so I know the Starbucks very well. He was at the One Young Street Starbucks, right across from where the Captain Johns used to be. And he was there to talk to any Toronto Star journalists

who wanted to discuss the Ravina situation with him. Yeah, and he either didn't get very far or his bosses told him. Or Rosie said she would kill him. Yeah, that happened as well. Rosie D'Amano. Back in May, June. Seems like decades ago.

When you do your top ten tweets of 2016, that Rosie D'Amananno tweet is a clear favorite to be in the top 10. One Rosie DiManno tweet and nine Joe Warmington tweets. I think that's the current standing right now. It's your fourth visit

to Toronto, Mike. All of these visits happened during the Great Lakes brewery era. Well, not only that, they all happened during this endless summer of 2016, right? I thought I wouldn't get back here when temperatures were at their peak, and today's as warm as any day in July

or August. Humid X is 29 or 30 today. I think you're visiting, I gotta tell you, I think you might be dropping by for the beer. Like, just one of my thoughts is that you're, maybe you're, you know every time you come by, you leave with a six-pack of Great Lakes beer. Like, just one of my thoughts is that you're, maybe you're, you know, every time you come by, you leave with a six pack of Great Lakes beer. How have you, so this is, let me do the math on that, okay? Six times four, carry the one. That's like 24 beers you've now got camped out. So good for you.

Okay, thanks. What happened to the Norm Kelly beer? I was hoping maybe we would get in on that. Did Norm's beer get masked? I didn't, It's never arrived. My buddy has never dropped it off. But there's a pumpkin spice. And this bottle, this mysterious, they call it Project X or something.

Everything's very mysterious. But you have a large bottle of beer with five cans. And at least one of those cans is the pumpkin that you got to drink in October, the pumpkin spice and whatnot. enjoy the great lakes beer please i know you uh aren't a heavy drinker but i think i've got you drinking more than you're used to yeah i think uh the toronto mic podcast has turned me into a beer drinker that's my objective i want everyone in this city to become an alcoholic as long as it's great lakes beer Bud Light, because you'll just throw that. That's what people do if they're Bud Light. Well, that's just extortion, right? How much do those beer cans cost at the Sky Dome?

I'm going to guess. I don't know. You know what? I would never buy a beer at the Dome. I was thinking that. People are talking about how much it costs to drink beer at the Dome. I go to a couple of games a year, three or four games. I don't think I've ever purchased a beer. I just don't need the beer during the game. It's really out of character for the province of Ontario to make it so permissive, right?

To be allowed to drink in a relatively public place. It took five years before you could buy beer at Blue Jay Games, right? It was 1982, I think, when they... Yeah, I remember that. And I was too young to understand how anachronistic that was. But could you imagine, right?

I mean, the whole concept of sitting there through a ball game is to drink beer. It's like the Simpsons again. And here in Ontario, Exhibition Stadium, they didn't even think it was necessary or worth fighting for. It's like the Simpsons again. that it maybe could never happen. So the fact that we're at the point now where they're having to reconsider selling beer cans, and they did this, what? Didn't they ban it? Like, isn't, like, for Game 3, which will be in Toronto on Sunday, I'm going to say?

So Sunday night will be Game 3 in Toronto. As far as I know, they're not going to sell cans, I think. But wasn't it just a tactic to make more money? You give people a beer can, you don't have to pour? Of course. It's faster distribution. They spend less and they can drink it and come back for more quicker. I'm sure it's all for money.

Blue Jays, I believe the name was like a Labatt's ploy to get Labatt's Blue into the name. The whole thing is, yeah. But no cans anymore because this one idiot who makes us look terrible. And it's just don't interfere with a game, let alone. Don't interfere with an exhibition game, let alone the key moment in the wild card game. Don't do that. Stop throwing things, please.

Patreon.com. I know soon we're going to talk about Jesse Brown. He's got a successful. Oh, are we going to be talking about Jesse Brown? He's got a successful Patreon campaign, are we going to be talking about Jesse Brown? He's got a successful Patreon campaign going. Did you know that? Well, yeah.

It peaked last year. It's been going in the opposite direction. Well, those guys who have withdrawn their funds might be looking for a podcast where they could park those funds. You're right.

I'm not doing a lot of journalism per se, but if you need to know what's up with Anne Romer or Anne Murkowski or any of these other Ann's, I'm your guy. So please, give what you can to help fund this project. Patreon.com

slash Toronto Mike, or just go to TorontoMike.com and click the orange button to become a patron. I don't care. Two bucks a month. Just give what you can and help me pay for the overhead and help break even with these super expensive mics that I got Mark talking on here. Are we done with the sponsor segment?

You're done, yeah. I was going to move on to the newspapers in this city. That's cool. And I know that we're going to touch. You did a lot of Joe Warmington to warm us up, so to speak. But maybe we could start with the Toronto Star and some of the happenings right now in Canada's largest newspaper, if it still holds that title. I think it does. Is it? Where did we leave off when I was last here? I mean, we were talking about a lot of the drama that went on in the newsroom going back to last May, the death of a reporter.

And two of the senior editors there were relieved of their duties, as well as a publisher of the Toronto Star, John Cruikshank, sort of ducking out of there as soon as the StarTouch app didn't seem to be happening. I think he took that as a cue to get the hell out. David Holland, the CEO of Torstar, also announced that he'll be leaving before the end of 2016. So a lot of vacancies there, important roles that need to be filled, and they've got to figure out if this institution has a future. Am I right in these numbers? I read somewhere, I think it was in The Star, that 10 years ago, in 2006, they had 470 journalists? Yeah, newsroom employees. Okay, 470.

And that would include people doing layout, a lot of things that have been contracted out in the decade since. So that 470, by the end of the year, I believe they said it would be 170. Do I have my numbers right? Yeah, something. 450 to 170, 470 to 150. Anyway, you see it's one-third of what it was back then. So you had the big, bustling, metropolitan newsroom.

They could do no wrong. Everything was invincible, even though by that point in time, most people would have had Internet service at home. I think the idea that print would be a casualty of the whole thing, that it would no longer be a part of most people's media diet, that it would leave the whole information ecosystem, it was still considered to be far off into the future. People would throw out a year like 2035, the last newspaper will roll off the presses in America. All these publishers responsible for news-oriented publications are ready to go all digital all the time, but they still need to hang on to the revenue that comes through putting out a newspaper every day. So StarTouch, can you shed some light?

All the numbers seem kind of lousy for the StarTouch. Is this a disaster? It ain't happening. They laid off most of the employees who were on contract jobs, responsible, different functions in laying out this app and making it work. They had a whole separate newsroom just for StarTouch. A year ago, they were promising that they would transform the way that the news was written. The style of stories would be modified tablet first. The newspaper, even the website, would be an afterthought.

It was all about the tablet. Here we are toward the end of the year, and as far as I know, most people there who are working on the tablet team, their days are numbered, and they're coming in to do whatever they were doing, but they're modifying things to the point where they won't need this staff there anymore. I'm not sure what happens. They needed all these people before. They're not going to need them in there anymore. I'm not sure what happens. They needed all these people before. They're not going to need them in the future. Will there be a stripped-down element to what the app is? You download it, and it doesn't have all those rich features that they were promising.

I'm not too clear on how all this works because, like most of the people in journalism, I've never actually used the thing. So here we are talking like experts about why this StarTouch failed. I've never accessed it. Well, we're the target audience for this thing. Because Ed Keenan was on the show fairly recently, and I told him I wanted desperately to try StarTouch. I was into it. I got a big Android phone, which I live and die by, and I got a laptop that I'm on all the time

when I'm working and whatnot, and neither device will actually take StarTouch. You have to have a tablet. I don't actually own a tablet. Yeah, but what you would never do because of the way that you consume media is spend 20 or 30 minutes looking at one source, one app, one walled garden.

Right. You're used to being in and out of web pages, social media apps in 10 seconds. And the proposition with the Toronto Star was they would cultivate a captive audience, maybe one that was a little bit older than you would associate with the Toronto Star was they would cultivate a captive audience, maybe one that was a little bit older than you would associate with the internet, and they would lean back with Star Touch and take it all in as if they were watching a TV show. The model has shown some success in Montreal, La Presse across Quebec. They created the template that the star bought into, $35 million and counting.

Whoa. But the presumption is Quebec is more of an island, a unique media market, and so you can get that captive audience because they're not so easily distracted by other sources that are also in French catering to that crowd that seems to like the app there. But I'm not sure about that either. I mean, all this stuff just might be an illusion, entirely mythological, right? Because they also dropped doing print newspapers Monday to Friday at La Presse. They only do a weekend edition. And I don't know, maybe they annoyed a lot of people.

Maybe the people that were subscribing to the print newspaper don't care about the app. What's this headline coffee promotion? Oh, well, that was a subject of some ridicule, although maybe a little too harsh under the circumstance. Toronto Star marshalling its forces to figure out a revenue stream, and the one that they put front and center for the fall was a subscription to coffee.

So for 20 bucks a month, like a coffee of the month club, you can get a certain blend delivered to your door and drink it in tandem with reading the newspaper. Interesting. Does this excite you in any way whatsoever? No, man, not me, but... Okay, but you know what? This is just old-fashioned marketing, and you can't see drilling down with ridicule of an institution like the Toronto Star, right?

At some point, it gets a little ridiculous because there has always been marketing. There have always been freebies thrown in with the newspaper. You've always seen a newspaper setting up shop at a trade show, giving out toaster ovens if you subscribe to the newspaper. So I think that they're being looked at with some cynicism, which is unnecessary. which is unnecessary. It presumes that we have a city of millions of people and they're all plugged into Facebook and Twitter as news sources and would have no interest in getting a newspaper delivered to their door.

That's not true. There's still a lot of people out there, all ages, all generations, who still want to read things in print. There's still a viable audience. These newspapers are still making some money. It might not be helping the bottom line with all the overhead involved, but there's a future for print media. It's a matter of publications figuring out how to do it properly.

Can selling a subscription to Ko-fi move the needle and change how these things work? Probably not, but it's a way to announce that they have money coming in and tell the shareholders of Torstar that they've created a new viable product. Have you read, hey there, have you read the Gian Gomeshi book yet? No, have you? I know. I'm waiting on my copy of Kevin Donovan's Big Exposé. A couple of reviews indicate that it's nothing special. It doesn't tell you anything you don't already know,

that the writing style is a little too bland, kind of newspaper reporting, not a lot of literary flourish to it. Nonetheless, the book has done its job of regurgitating the Jian Gomeshi story. Once again, you thought you'd seen the end of him, and now he's all over the place with book excerpts and reviews and hot takes about what this all meant. In your professional opinion here,

will Jian Gomeshi ever have a mainstream media job in this country again? Like, is that door completely shut? Well, there's the notion that he can write a memoir about his experience, and the fact that he went through the trial and everything that went along with it gives him a compelling tale to tell

in one format or another. So that would be the starting point for him getting something out of the situation that he put himself into. Nonetheless, maybe this book from Kevin Donovan will give us an indication about what the market is for more Jean Gomeshi-related content. I don't know. Everybody has tried to move on from

the association, but the radio show Q is relaunching next week. New host Tom Power after Shad and his disastrous experiment. He wasn't entirely terrible. I don't know how much you listen to him.

I'm with you. I listen to quite a bit, and I felt the same way. But he wasn't good. He wasn't terrible. You're right. He wasn't good. I felt like he seemed to stick to the script more than asking an obvious follow-up question. He never felt comfortable.

I wasn't sure he was ever right for that gig. There were a lot of producers involved in that kind of program, so I think being able to figure out where his strengths were, sometimes that came through. A lot of times it didn't. Nonetheless, they've got this albatross. didn't. Nonetheless, they've got this albatross. The name of the show, Q, is still attached to the program. Right, but it's lowercase, if you notice that. Yeah, lowercase Q. Now, my theory about this, never quite confirmed or corroborated, is the fact that with Gomeshi at the helm, they

lined up all these American public radio deals. And as far as I can tell, there were still a lot of major NPR-affiliated public radio stations that run the show. They were not too happy with Shad. And that's where a lot of the backlash came from that they had to take seriously. Because these stations in the U.S. are providing a revenue stream back to the CBC, right? They do fundraising drives. There was a whole scheme that was concocted there about how to monetize CBC Radio, and they figured it out with Q. So as far as I can tell, they're not changing the name of the show because they've got all these affiliates who have come to recognize it as one thing. And if they change the name now, then they're going to sabotage whatever they've got going on there.

Maybe they'll use it as an excuse to give up on airing it. airing it. So I think that's where Gian Gomeschi is still lurking in the name of this cursed show that he was synonymous with. It's going to be back next week, and it's still going to have the same name that it always did. Now, we're still in the newspaper segment here, but save for the radio segment, the other side of that coin. So Tom Power takes over Q.

He was the morning show host for CBC Radio 2. There's a Toronto Radio update that ducktails nicely with that news. So we'll save that for the radio section because I know it's probably on the tip of your tongue. So we'll just save that. So that's Toronto Star. You talked a lot about Joe Warmington at the Sun. So that's Toronto Star. Let's just talk.

You talked a lot about Joe Warmington at the Sun. But there's news from Ottawa that a Toronto, sorry, a Sun institution is gone from the Ottawa. That was earlier in the summer. And you know what? I was really disappointed because they promised to turn this into an ongoing national conversation about the future of the Sunshine Girl. about the future of the Sunshine Girl. And Michelle Richardson took over as editor of Ottawa Sun and Ottawa Citizen. They now run the two newspapers with the same reporters, dumbed down their reporting to put it in the Sun. One of her first orders of business was to remove the pinup from from the back pages of the newspaper that had been there ever since the Ottawa Sun started carried over from Toronto.

And the move garnered some attention, maybe for a couple of hours. But like everything else in this media climate that we're in, everybody kind of forgot about it. And somewhere in there was her promise that they would deliberate whether or not to also take it off the website. And I thought, okay, this will snowball, and the Toronto Sun will finally also figure out maybe it's time to move on from the

Sunshine Girl. It never got to that point. Maybe everybody lost interest. Maybe they didn't get the feedback they were looking for. It's mainly older guys like us nostalgically looking back at going to school and knowing that on page three you had a girl in a bikini.

It was something exciting about flip to page three and let's look at the Sunshine Girl. This is all like that wonderful nostalgia of being kind of young and innocent. I think also when they put more effort into the feature, there was the whole idea that the women that were featured on the page were using it as a springboard to become famous.

So you would be intrigued about who the sunshine girl was. You would read the little bio about how she likes to ride horses, and maybe if you were paying enough attention, you would notice her show up in other places later on, TV commercials. Right, she's an Argonauts cheerleader. And the best was, as you get older and you're in high school, there are girls you know who become Sunshine Girls. Like, I still remember, like, that girl in grade 12 is the Sunshine Girl today.

Like, mind-blowing, wonderful stuff like that. I can't say that ever happened to me. But it turned out to be a Sunshine boy who went on to be the most famous actor in America. Dwayne Johnson, The Rock. Whose dad was like a CFL player or something. It was a Canadian, right? His dad's Canadian?

Well, The Rock was in Calgary. He was trying out for the Stampeders or he was warming the bench or whatever. It didn't work out and uh he he posed as a sunshine boy in calgary under the name rocky wow in in 1997 wearing a fanny pack i mean this is uh fantastic with the fade haircut and the the turtleneck uh some sort of uh relaxed fit jeans. And this photo went on to be immortal. I mean, they were making fun of it with him on the Graham Norton show on the BBC a few months ago.

So it turned out that The Rock is the greatest living legacy of the Sunshine Girl concept. living legacy of the Sunshine Girl concept. I think, I don't know. Do you think that the Toronto Sun should ditch Sunshine Girl? Do you think anybody cares? I honestly, I so don't care. I can't tell you the last time I had a physical copy of the sun in my hands.

Maybe I was waiting for my car to get repaired at a mechanic shop or something, or maybe I was grabbing a coffee at a McDonald's or something. But it's been a long time, my friend. I just don't care. And either way, I don't know where these photos come from, but they use the same ones in all the Sun newspapers across the country. So there isn't that same association where you're seeing this picture

and it's somebody that wants to be famous. Or that girl in grade 12, that good-looking blonde girl in grade 12. And we also lost the chin bikini contest this past summer. So a whole sort of D-list celebrity circuit that we grew up with disappearing before our eyes. Maybe it's unfortunate that this is associated with wearing as few articles of clothing as possible, but that's the world that we grew up in, and I think people are ready for a different world. Nonetheless, we've got this archaic reminder of a different time and a different place when people opened up a tabloid. They got this from Britain.

Because they could be naked in Britain, right? You could see boobs in Britain. You had to be in a bikini in the Toronto Sun. Yeah, and that was Rupert Murdoch in his role as a tabloid proprietor that really popularized the whole idea. So the Toronto Sun created their own version. I think if they finally put it to rest, and it could happen, it might be a big news story, but over the summer, yeah, it was a bit of a drag, because I was looking forward to the entertainment value that would be created by having a national conversation

about the future of the Sunshine Girl. Never quite bubbled up like I thought it would. And before we leave the Sun updates, we have to talk about Sue Ann Levy, and how's her book doing? I'm not sure. She has a whole bunch of book events that

are aimed at meeting and greeting her fan base. And that's like where she'd go to like, I don't know, an Indigo or whatever, and she'd have like the table at an Indigo, and she'd sign books, that kind of a thing? Yeah, and a bunch of pizzerias that she's appearing at, movie theater at the Promenade Mall

in Thornhill. She's making the rounds. All her appearances are on this page. I did a review of the book for the website J Source, which is like a journalism school thing, readers with a professional interest in journalism. So not really so much for the masses. But I tried to give her book a fair and balanced reflection about what worked about it and what didn't. I think mostly I bewildered her because I am not so outraged by her politics. Outraged by her politics, the fact that she makes these strident comments about socialist silly hall and just different conservative tropes. Those aren't things that I object to so much. I was just sort of bored with the book because I think it was written in a style that wasn't what I liked about Sue Ann over the years. She tried to be more serious about it. And I think I also got the sense

that not only was she trying to be more serious in her approach, but also the editors figured, okay, this is what people want to read. This is what a book should be. It didn't have that tabloid crackle that it could have. I thought she was going for a different type of voice than the one that's her own. Because on Twitter, all she does is attack people. Did she reach out to you after she read your review? Did she reach out to you? Yeah. And she mentioned on Twitter that she thought I was confused. Maybe I was. That was the whole point, right? That I was, why was I being critical of her, trying to sell books? I don't know. I was just investigating what was involved in trying to turn a book by her into a marketable product.

At some point, I know you saw this, but I had a brief Twitter interaction with her, and I invited her on the show, and she said yes. And I never felt compelled to follow up. I think it's on me. She said she'd come on, and then we both sort of mutually decided not to touch it again. Meanwhile, she's tweeted like a thousand times about Matt Galloway and how he's conspiring against her by not inviting her on the CBC to promote her book. She was also wondering about the Indigo Bookstore, right? Her and Warmington were teaming up, the Wonder Twins,

looking for where they were putting Sue Ann's book in the store. Like there was something calculated and symbolic about the fact that they put her book near the Donald Trump section, that there was someone was out to get her there. And so just look, these people have to somehow justify their jobs and contextualize their work in this new media age. So that's where you get Joe Warmington always being scatterbrained all over the place. That's where you get Sue Ann, who seems to log on to Twitter for hours at a time for the sole purpose of fighting with people.

And they're doing what they can. I don't know that this is very sustainable. At the same time, I'm entertained by it all in measured doses. So they found Sue Ann's book. It was very prominently displayed at one Indigo store, I think at the Young Eglinton Center, like huge pile, stacks, like up to the ceiling.

And I thought, is she now going to complain that the stacks are too high? I think she did acknowledge as much that it was a little over the top. But what does she want exactly? I'm not sure. So here we've got the Toronto Sun, I think, in its heyday, an amazing institution. I wrote my review of Sue Ann's book. I used to read it every day. It was my guide to navigating the universe. I don't know if you had that kind of relationship with the paper, but at its peak, it was just packed with stuff that I wasn't going to be able to find out about any other way. I liked that it had this sort of sense of anarchy involved in the columns. Yeah, they were

all pretty right-wing and had that conservative editorial bent, which I think also inspired me. I'm not sure where I have to position myself on the political spectrum to be properly understood. I might have to figure out a new definition of where I stand, right? Because conservatives are now associated with being whack jobs, right? Tea party effect here. Yeah, in Toronto, right? If you walk around, present yourself as a conservative journalist, you're either working for Ezra Levant. Right, the rebel media. Or you're asking for trouble. Right. So I sort of position myself on this wishy-washy libertarian line. But I don't think that's good enough either. I don't know, Mike, what do you think? I mean, how should I identify politically?

The problem is, first of all, you don't have to. I hate these labels. Everybody calls me a lefty, I think, because I bike and I didn't like Rob Ford and I get this label, I'm a lefty. But I would say that with regards to conservatism, that the social aspects have kind of painted like a negative connotation on the term.

So what I've noticed, someone can say I'm a conservative, it seems to be now like, oh, I don't think, I don't think we should allow same-sex marriage. I think, you know, we need to criminalize marijuana and all these various, you know, abortion. We should re-look at the abortion law. All this nonsense that I think where we progress well beyond gets drudged up when you invoke the word conservatism. So I believe the social aspects in this country have made it sort of a dirty word almost. I think that's the big issue now. That's how I see it now.

So would you identify with the NDP? I mean, do they have something to say that you relate to? I've had periods in my life where I have a lot. I felt that the NDP was speaking to me, and I have voted NDP. I've had periods in my life where I have voted Liberal. And today, I'm mainly a strategic voter, I would say, like for the recent Trudeau election. It was important to me to oust the Conservative candidate, and our best bet for that was to vote Liberal. And I cast my vote Liberal to oust the Conservative party member who had best bet for that was to vote liberal. And I cast my vote liberal

to oust the conservative party member who had the seat where you're sitting now. And so that's sort of where I'm at politically. I don't like the idea of like, I'm a lefty, I'm a righty. I'm very progressive socially. If that makes me a lefty, then I guess I'm a lefty and I do bike.

I don't know why we politicize biking. But yeah, this whole notion of, hey, you're on the right side, you're the left. I think't know why we politicize biking. But yeah, this whole notion of, hey, you're on the right side, you're the left, I think it's a really negative thing that we sort of align ourselves with these terms. So here we are with Justin Trudeau in charge, the natural ruling party, the liberals back in place, right? The default, right? Yeah, we remember the heyday of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, sort of this idea that your leaders, the people who are guiding the country, that they should be as ambiguous as possible and populist, and they love everybody and everybody loves them. So the opportunity created by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was the idea that

the right and the left would hate this guy in equal measure. And I don't know that either side has been very successful in making a case against him. I mean, it's early days. I feel it's still early days and we got to give him a chance and see how this goes. But I think, generally speaking, I feel the country is more open to the values of a Justin Trudeau government than a Stephen Harper government, maybe because I'm in Toronto, which we rarely gave a seat to Harper. The fact that this seat went to Harper was a rarity in Toronto. It was pretty red with a little orange spattered here. We'll see. If I don't move us on, we're going to be a four-hour podcast. I know.

People don't want to hear the political talk. I don't think. I think they want to hear, real quick, to wrap up newspaper. Then I want to get to radio. Then there's some television and some print stuff I want to get to. But the Globe and Mail, they're moving offices, but they've also announced

some significant layoffs. And this has happened at the Toronto Star as well. What you have is a situation largely driven by the union where they want to cut back on staff, and if the oldest employees don't go for the buyout, then they start cutting in the other direction and shedding the younger reporters. So the Toronto

Star, as part of their StarTouch expansion, hired a whole bunch of younger reporters, of younger reporters, and a number of them aren't there anymore. Just a year later, to essentially spare the jobs of older employees, speaking of things from a political angle, I mean, how unprogressive is that, right? You bring in new blood, you want different voices, a more diverse newsroom. And yet those younger people are the first to go when the sky starts falling. So some of that has happened at the Star. The Globe is trying to avoid that by dangling these carrots, buyout packages to older staffers who might want to take leave a year or two early. So basically, if they can, if let's say it's 40, let's say they're going to cut 40 jobs.

I can't remember what the number was, but something like that. And then if they can get you to buy, to voluntarily like take the buyout package and they can get 40 that way, that's the route they're going. If they cannot get enough people to raise their hand and say, I'll take that deal, then they'll start to basically, it'll be non-voluntary. And that union thing is, like you said there, I noticed this, some journalists I like at the Star were recruited from the competition and just were pretty green, but were like less than a year on the job who got axed during this recent wave. And it's basically because it's a, what do you call it? It's last in, first out. This is a LIFO method with these union chops. Yeah, a real raw deal, I think, for everybody involved. This is the problem when you have a legacy institution and they're still extremely dependent on print

media to keep the money flowing in. And we'll see what the future brings for both the star and the globe and Post Media, which just had a whole debt restructuring. One of the things that they have planned for the Globe and Mail and their new building on King Street East, right next door to where the sun was for all those years. So they've got the new Globe and Mail Center, and that will give them a chance to move into this new era, much like the New York Times has,

where you can have different events, conferences, content-related enterprises that can go on around the newspaper. So that's part of their agenda at the new place. Let's move over to radio here. So the Toronto radio scene, I'll just run down a list of changes, if you will. So you mentioned that Q has, they didn't fire Shad, they just removed him from Q. So he's going to have other projects at the CBC. I think so. I don't know if anybody's holding their breath. Right. So Shad is no longer hosting Q. It's Tom Power.

Tom Power was the CBC Radio 2 morning show guy. That left an open spot there. And I was surprised but happy for friend of the show, I guess we can call her, former guest Raina Duras, who prefers to go by the one name I noticed. So Raina, from popular morning show host on Indie 88 has left Indie 88 and is now already on CBC Radio 2. This is interesting. I'll let you speak in a moment, but it's interesting because in radio, when you leave to go to another station that they don't own, you never get to say goodbye. You never see this, but they let Raina do like a last show,

and she got to tell her listeners, I'll miss you, I'm leaving, I'm missing. And I don't know if she got to say where she's going, probably not where she's going, but she got to say she's leaving and she'll be somewhere else. If she had fans on Indie 88, they would know to follow her. The CBC Radio 2 has been a bit of a non-starter. They even tried to bring commercials to the airwaves for CBC Radio.

On the music side, it didn't work out as they expected, and the CRTC ended up telling them that they weren't allowed to do it anymore. So that plan came to a crashing halt. But now that Trudeau's in office, it's going to be cutting big checks to the CBC. We can restore those funds that Harper stripped away. No worries. If you listen to the CBC2 morning show, I got to a little bit this week,

what you hear is a lot more produced than commercial radio. I mean, all radio stations have the music planned out in advance, but there seems to be a very rigid format. Highly scripted, really. Even Galloway, when he was on, and that's a different show because it's news-based and everything,

but a lot of people highly scripted the Metro Morning Show on Radio 1. Radio 2 does play the music, but I'm sure it's very similar. I'm also not sure if the sound that Radio 2 has would be the best one to stick with going forward. They went for this whole adult alternative thing, so singer-songwriter-oriented stuff. Is that like Lumineers-type? Is that what we're talking about, kind of the folk pop rock stuff, that indie stuff that you hear?

Well, yeah. This is Canada, right? There's a folk singer on every corner who's waiting to get their tunes played on the radio. So they focused on that. It could possibly be a lot wider than it is. But at the same time, they—I mean, it's almost 10 years ago now, they started to make changes with Radio 2. It was largely a classical music station. And the fact that they brought in more of a pop sound was pretty radical and really annoyed

the older audience that associated it with classical music and some jazz. So they tried to hip it up. They didn't find a huge audience. It seems like CBC radio is still very much synonymous with talk. But at the same time, they've got a whole music department there trying to do a website, trying to make all these parts start to move and click with one another. But there might be a ceiling in terms of how many people are interested in how CBC music works.

So I think talking about it here out loud may be still a work in progress. We don't want to write it off four days into this new regime? How many Torontonians can tell you where on the dial they can find CBC Radio 2? So the notion is to go after the audience that isn't tuning in via FM, right? Yeah, working on an app and a website and different ways of reaching people that are into terrestrial radio. of reaching people that are into terrestrial radio. So I think it's going to have to evolve a lot from where it was, because for the most part,

they've managed to bore a lot of people senseless who happen to tune in, and at the same time, they haven't reached 98% of the listening audience yet. Let me hit you with a couple of Toronto Mike exclusives. We'll be brief with these. One that I reported a while ago, but I think they've only gone public with it now. There was a show on 92.5 Kiss FM called Blake and Wild, I believe they branded it as,

which was Adam Wild, whose mom is up for a big award. I was reading Marilyn Dennis. Is that a secret that it's his mom? No, it can't be a secret. Every episode I mention it, so it's no longer a secret. So Adam Wilde had a show with Blake Carter. Blake Carter mysteriously vanished from the show,

and they rebranded it, I think, the Adam Wilde Show. And I learned that Blake Carter was going to be on The Move and will be a co-host for JJ on Mornings on the Move, which a station my wife quite likes because she likes to hear the old Fugees tracks and the old TLC and those kind of throwbacks, as they call them. But things have changed a lot in the last 10 years

as far as the recognition factor that goes along with having a drive time show on a major FM music station. I'm somebody that listens to every station a little bit. I know who all these people are. It's not easy to break through and make it in the Toronto market. It seems that once you get here, you're here for life if you play your cards right and make the right friends and don't say anything that gets you in trouble. But when you throw out these names at the same time, it makes me think of the fact that you would hear about these people all the time, right? You would read articles about them. There would be vigorous message board arguments about what they were doing

and where the ratings were. It's become a much smaller world. Subset of the subset. Compared to the one that we grew up in. And we're the only ones who are going to be talking about this. You search Google, go nuts. You're never going to hear about the Blake Carter move to the, the move, no pun intended, to the move from Kiss 92.5.

But I find it interesting. And I don't even listen to morning radio except in my shower where I have Matt Galloway's Metro Morning tuned in. That's it. I think it's appropriate that the son of Marilyn Dennis has turned out to be one of the big top 40 hit radio DJs in Canada because he grew up around

it. He's also, yeah, he's, I don't know if you watch any breakfast television, but he's got a spot on the couch, as they say, with Kevin Frankish and Dina Pugliese. So there you go. He was born on third base.

He thinks he hit a triple. And yeah, he was able to leverage that into something all his own. And look, he's got a following, and people don't even know who his mother is. So Blake Carter is on the move, and Mike Bullard, Mike Bullard, who, you know, I know, I remember Mike Bullard from his talk show he had

that was at the Masonic Temple, I guess. He broadcast his, I thought it was fairly popular. It was on Global First, right? Was it really popular? He worked for the Comedy Network. That was a deal. The first iteration of the Bullard show, at least it seemed to be popular.

And then when it was recruited to, I don't know, CTV maybe? It started on the Comedy Network when that was a new thing. All right. CTV owned part of the Comedy Network at the time. Okay, yeah. Subsequently, they own all of it. So they picked up the Bullard Show. They gave it a bit wider exposure.

Yeah, a lot of promotion on that move. Comedy Network was a new thing. Because it was so unique for one of these late-night talk shows to be produced in Toronto, and this is still the late 90s, right? There was still a glow around the David Letterman late show. We were in the first era of Jay Leno, a smaller media universe than the one we live in today. Simply the fact that they put any effort in whatsoever, I think, gave them a bit of a free pass as far as being recognized as an important thing, culturally

speaking, bringing the late night talk show to Toronto, to Canada, making it work for the first time. So out of that momentum, they moved to the Masonic Temple. CTV bought the whole building. That's it. Gotcha. And they ran the Bullard show out of there for a few years. Still a lot of D-listers.

Darcy Tucker. If you need Darcy Tucker to be your primary guest, I think that was the Bullard show. And so maybe some inertia started to sink in, right? All they had to do was show up and deliver this thing, and they had a certain following audience for it. Global came along and waved a whole bunch of money in Mike Bullard's face, and he jumped ship to the competition.

The kind of thing that has never happened before or since in Canadian media, that they took an entertainment show and moved it from one TV network to another. Right. What happened was CTV then turned around and bought the rights to the John Stewart Daily show. Right. And they put that in the Bullard time slot. Conan O'Brien, remember?

He came to Toronto. Yeah, 2003. I was there. 2004. For the Adam Sandler episode. I remember it as 03, but I have to go back. I have the ticket stub somewhere. It could have been 04.

03 is in my head for some reason, but I'm not going to say you're wrong. I don't know. I do remember Adam Sandler was the top guest. The show I went to was the famous, I want to call it the Ed the Sock copy. What was the puppet called again? Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. He went at Quebecers, and it caused quite the controversy. So the Mike Bullard enterprise was like completely demoralized by all this activity that was going on.

And Global ended up canceling the show, even though he might have had an ironclad contract that kept him getting paid for a while. had an ironclad contract that kept him getting paid for a while. So it was a bit of an ignominious end for the era of Mike Bullard on television. And now it's the end of another era of Mike Bullard. So Bullard resurfaced at News Talk 1010. I think he had a lunchtime show, like a noon to one, I think. Yeah, and this goes back a while, six or seven years at this point that he's been on every day. So this, and I want to actually ask you

about this rebranding of these Bell Media radio stations in a second. But so 1010 has said goodbye to Mike Bullard. He's gone. You won't find him on the website. He's not in the lineup. He's no longer on the airwaves. I came all this way and that's all you've got?

There's nothing more to the story than that? Good news for listeners of Toronto Mike. Popular return guest, Jay Mad Dog Michaels. And it's a little old for you, but some people might not know. He is now on the air at 1010 every weekday. He's co-hosting with Ryan Doyle on a show they call The Rush. Mad Dog's a likable chap and he wanted to get back in the game, and I'm happy that he's on the air four to seven every weekday.

And do you think that he bumped Bullard off the payroll? Well, possibly. You can't afford both. You've got to make some tough choices. Mike Ben Dixon had some tough choices to make at 10-10, and there's no more Bullard. Okay, well, Bullard was on for the noon hour every day, and now he's not there anymore,

and good for you to notice. Ray, there you go. You have people on Twitter that are telling you about it. Well, yeah. So, yeah, that's fresh news. I only learned that today. When I went to the 1010 website to see, like, are they still got Bullard on there,

and I went to check it out, it's no longer like Newstalk1010.com or whatnot. It's got a, it's a subdirectory of an iHeartRadio, sorry. Yeah, iHeartRadio.com. Do you want, can you enlighten us on what's going on with these Bell-owned radio stations and iHeartMedia? Okay. iHeartMedia used to be known as Clear Channel. So even if you weren't big into the radio business, you probably heard about this evil conglomerate in the United States that was buying up every single radio station and getting rid of all the local employees,

pumping in Rush Limbaugh and Ryan Seacrest to essentially run all these radio stations on as little money as possible. So as far as notorious media companies of the 21st century are concerned, Clear Channel would rank way up there. So much so that they had to change the name of their radio division to something that would be a little more lovable. And that's how you end up with iHeartMedia. And that's the name that they go by now. They're this organization that's carrying so much debt. They were overleveraged.

I don't want to get the terminology all wrong, but essentially they're living on borrowed time. But somewhere in there, they managed to get the right kind of creative team going, including Bob Pittman, the guy that started MTV, and figure out a way to leverage everything that they had in their stable and turn it into something. So they landed on iHeartRadio, essentially as a name that they could use for all the stations, a banner brand that people would start to recognize. Because they own so many radio stations, they've got this recognition factor just by virtue of being in everybody's face across America. So Bell Media, with its new leadership, they saw some opportunity to bring some of that into Canada, starting with, right now, this new app that they've introduced.

So you have the iHeartRadio app, which is full of all these Bell media stations. And on top of that, you'll get the iHeartRadio Awards and the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball. And just a way of consolidating everything, but maybe making it look a little less evil. Yeah, as a listener, so I'm thinking in my head, what are these Bell stations? I know Chum FM is a Bell station. 1050 TSN Radio is a Bell station.

1010, that's CFRB, which now is News Talk 1010. And of course, Virgin Radio. These are the four, I guess, we have in Toronto. The four Bell Media-owned stations. Yeah, and a lot in Quebec. And like like 105 i think radio stations across canada are part of i understand the app which to me personally like why would i want an app when i can only listen to bell media stations like i have a great app called tune in uh if i want and it's got all the bell media all the rogers it's got you know chorus it's got everything but Bell Media, all the Rogers. It's got, you know, Chorus. It's got everything.

Apparently, they went around to all the other radio stations and invited them to be a part of this thing, that you could have your radio station be part of the app. digital dial so that when terrestrial radio is no longer the primary way that people hear radio, that you'll be recognized as living in this future. So other than the app, which personally, I think I would never want that app because I want to listen to stations. I don't want to have to only listen to Bell Media stations. So I want to hear some Fan 590. It happens to be owned by Rogers. Or I want to hear some 102.1 that's owned by Chorus. They won't be on this app. So I don't want that app. The websites, obviously all those websites now have this subdirectory of iHeartMedia.

I noticed that today. Fine. Websites, radio websites, whatever. It serves its purpose, whatever. But when you listen to these stations, are you going to hear anything different? We already have 99.9 Virgin branded. It's all this Virgin branding.

Is there an iHeartMedia branding overlaid on top of the Virgin? Is there any audible difference now with these Bell Media stations? Well, they own Much Music, and they got rid of a bunch of secondary Much Music channels. They had Much Vibe, Much Loud,

Much Retro, Juicebox. They sold all of those off. They got rid of the Much More Music channel. That also no longer exists in any form. So iHeartRadio is also replacing Much Music, which Bell bought. Yeah, because their award show. That's where I first noticed this. The award show was rebranded.

They were working on you there. I don't know. Is any of this important to anybody? Every time I think radio, which I still like radio, and I still talk about radio, and lots of places don't even

speak about radio or write about radio. Radio seems to be an industry that seems to be disappearing. I still like radio. When I think about what I like the most about radio, it always comes down to one thing, the fact it's local. My favorite part of radio is that it's local, that I hear the local traffic, the local weather, the local sports team is being discussed, chatter about this beer can thing that happened at the dome, whatever. I like the local aspect.

So I always get bothered when I see big companies trying to paint them all with the same brush. It might save you a few bucks, but it seems to be making it less local and more general and vague and more uniform, I suppose, across the nation.

And you know this already happened in the United States, right? This is what the whole Clear Channel thing was all about. In the process, they managed to put a lot of people out of work and demoralize a lot of the people that were still working in the business. I mean, this Clear Channel became like a dirty word. Why would you want to bring that to Canada? And the answer is Bell BCE has shareholders. They bought all these media properties from Astral, from Chum. They have to be able to make all these pieces fit. They have to

find a way to make it work and get the biggest audience share that they can. So trying to get ahead of the technology, even though it's years old technology at this point, by having a radio app out there, that's a big part of it. But it's a Canadian app, so you don't get the American iHeartRadio stations on there. You're getting this sort of, there's that air of CRTC control, even though it's not regulated by the CRTC, right? You're getting a walled garden of Canada-only radio within this app, and a lot of the radio websites and streams are blocked, geo-blocked in Canada.

On the other hand, I was excited. The iHeartRadio app, it has Casey Kasem shows from the 70s and 80s. Okay. A 24-7 stream, if you're into that. Someone probably is. I don't know. I was into it. I was listening.

I like his meltdowns that Howard Stern often plays. Those are what I like his meltdowns that Howard Stern often plays. Those are what I like about Casey Kasem. There's a stream on there. Delilah. Remember Delilah? She used to be on the radio in Toronto. Vaguely, yeah.

She was catering to a trailer park kind of audience where people would call in with their romantic confessions, their tales of heartbreak. And Delilah would counsel and console them. So you've got Delilah. You've got Sean Hannity running... Who Donald Trump wants you to call. All day and night on this app. You can hear what he's got to say. Ryan Seacrest, of course.

He's their big star. A few other radio personalities on there that happen to be American. So there is some content on the iHeartRadio Canada app from the States. It just seems to be all the crap that they shoveled on there without anything that a lot of people would want to listen to. As a consumer who has no skin in the game and has no preference, Rogers, Bell, Coors, CBC, maybe a little bit of CBC, but all the rest, like them all the same.

I got to say, I can't imagine why anybody would choose the iHeartRadio app over TuneIn. That's all I'm saying as a guy who uses TuneIn all the time. All the other radio companies then got on board with this one from the UK called Radio Player. So what you're going to see is a rollout of a whole other thing like iHeartRadio, except it will involve Rogers and Chorus and NuCap and all those other companies. They say that's going to start sometime next year. So it's Bell versus the world or whatever. Bell versus the rest of Canada.

It's Beta versus VHS, right? I mean, it's Show Me versus Crave TV, right? I mean, only one tends to survive when you end up with a situation like this. You said the S word there, Show Me. So let's talk about a couple of Rogers media cuts that we learned about recently. So one is, okay, so i get show me for free so it comes with my internet i get this like yeah for for six more weeks right so uh and you know because it's on there what i like the most thing i like the most about it is that i don't

need to use the internet to access show me because it's on channel 300 which i like because um for a variety of reasons um primarily doesn't use up my bandwidth in the house or whatever. So I watch Transparent there, for example, and there's some other shows that I watched on Show Me, Fargo and some other ones. So I kind of liked having Show Me. I don't know if I would have paid extra for it because it was bundled up with my internet, but after...

How long did we have Show Me? When was that launched? Was that two years? Two years. Okay. So two years after they launched, to much fanfare, Show Me, When was that launched? Was that two years? Two years. Okay. So two years after they launched to much fanfare, Show Me, which I guess was the Netflix killer from Rogers, and Shaw was the partner, right?

Was it Shaw? Yeah. Shaw? Yeah. Yeah, Shaw. And then Shaw got out of the media business, even though it's the same family ownership. Oh, because Chorus bought it.

And they didn't transfer their deal under the new structure. I've got to whiteboard this. They'd already dropped out of the whole thing. So it was up to Rogers to save this thing, and they didn't want it anymore. They killed it, and it's dead. And like you said, I think we've got six more weeks of Show Me and then

gone. Yeah, six, seven, eight. End of November. But Amazon has a whole video service, and the presumption is that this is the way that they will enter into Canada. There was a report that they might merge somehow, that there might have been some kind of deal, but no, it turns out they're just going to shutter show me. And if Amazon comes in with this thing,

they've got their own original programs and movies. Transparent is a Transparency on Amazon original. And they've also got a different way of marketing it. You get the service video streaming as part of your Amazon Prime subscription. Right. presuming that a lot of people will either subscribe to Amazon Prime because they want the video offerings, or they'll happen to be subscribed to Prime, and they'll discover that they also have access to all this programming. So talking about evil empires, I mean, Amazon at this point is feared and loathed and disparaged as much as Clear Channel is, and yet at the same time, it's an unavoidable behemoth.

Absolutely. While Rogers had the scissors out for Show Me, they went at some of the magazines that they own. What are the most significant? So some magazines have been terminated completely, like the Sportsnet one and Report on Business. A Canadian business magazine. magazines have been terminated completely like the sports net one and report on business is that a canadian canadian business magazine so this is rogers they use the term doubling down on

digital and they'll turn their magazines into content brands um this is a a tricky one to have an opinion about because uh at the same time that it's logical to move away from producing as much print media as they used to, a lot of the infrastructure of these places, that is all the writers and editors and designers and people behind the publications, were presuming that they'd continue to be working in print. And that was essentially the hoarding that held the whole operation up. And even if people weren't figuring out what to do, making all that much money with websites and apps and digital magazines, they have a thing, Texture. You've probably heard of that.

I remember, it's like the bookshelf in the app. Yeah, they're still trying to make that work, and they claim to have 100,000 subscribers, but psychologically, there was still the idea that they had to put out a magazine every week or every month, and that has been taken away from beneath them. Some of these magazines will not be in print anymore. Maclean's will go from being weekly most weeks to only being monthly. Chatelaine, that used to come out every month.

As of 2017, it will come out every other month. So you talk about disruption in the media industry, this would be a case of a company forcing it upon an entire division and telling them, now you've got to sink or swim. We're not going to prop this thing up anymore. The question is whether Rogers even cared all that much about having a magazine division. They inherited it from McLean Hunter, the company that they bought the cable TV. That was the big asset. And they inherited these other magazines and tried to make them work

maybe as a bit of a vanity project for Ted Rogers and the other executives there. Some of the magazines were doing great work. And a lot of what constitutes the Canadian magazine industry was happening there in the Rogers Castle at Bloor and Jarvis. It will continue to some degree. It's a little disruptive. I don't like that word, but what other word do you want to use? It's a very popular buzzword right now.

Figure out how to make it sustainable. Writers don't get paid on a freelance basis for digital work, the same as they do in print. They would offer a dollar a word. That was the standard for a print magazine article in Canada. The rate didn't go up for like 40 years.

As things become more digital, there'll be fewer opportunities to get paid even that much. Will the caliber of output be diminishing without the whole idea of doing something for print. What do you think, Mike? I think that we're fighting this revolution, which is like swimming upstream. I watched these salmons trying to run up the weirs by the Humber River. I saw it today. You're fighting against progress. Everything has to move digital at some point. I think these are just tough decisions that have to be made. I think the physical print is dying. I don't consume it anymore at all. And yet they were still reaching millions of people through these magazines,

through subscriptions. Lots of dentist offices, I suppose. Exactly. But a brand recognition that you can't replicate in the climate that we're in right now. So this is where things start to get a little more dramatic, and maybe if it doesn't affect you directly, a lot more interesting. They said they'll make it to the end of the year with the status quo, keeping the publications going in the format that they have. I guess we're looking toward what happens in January into next year. How do these things survive? What's it going to take for them to be recognized when everybody gets their news from Facebook. At St. Joseph Media with 1236, I work with people that are also in the magazine publishing industry,

and there has been a lot of disruption over there, shake-ups and trying to figure out different ways of doing things. I'm pretty privileged to have one of those opportunities to do something that's different. Well, let me say this. Okay, so I just said everything's moving digital and part of that is,

and I hope everybody listening has already done so, but if you get yourself to 1236.ca, there's an effortless signup. It's as easy as that simplistic Google search that we all know and love,

but you basically get every day at 12.36 p.m. You'll have an email that you put together, your chief editor of 12.36, the newsletter. And I read it after my bike ride. I read that every day because I need to know what's happening in the Toronto zeitgeist. What has Norm tweeted this time? What's happening with Sue Ann Levy and Warmington and whatnot in Toronto? And I read it every day. And every time somebody seems interested in these things I'm interested in,

these Ann Romer, Ann Roszkowski, Gord Martineau nonsense stuff, I always say, you need to subscribe to 1236. Well, thank you, Mike. And so, yeah, we're continuing through this fall trying to create a different kind of media brand and seeing how far it can fly. If I started something like this

up on my own, I don't think I could have the faith that I do being associated with this publisher, knowing that there's a much larger structure involved and having these people back me up. I recently had Ann Roszkowski on this show,

and she revealed some fascinating details about her relationship with Gord Martineau and how Gord didn't talk to her for three years. And basically, she said she wanted to tell it like it is instead of the smoke and mirrors that we're used to seeing. And she just let it out. I was surprised when I opened my 1236 newsletter the next day that that didn't make the cut.

It just seemed like the type of information that would make the 1236 newsletter. Can you shed any light on how that ends up on the cutting room floor? First and foremost, based on what Anne had to say on your podcast, I didn't think I could get away with publishing it without getting Gord's side of the story. Because to me, the most interesting things that Anne had to talk about were comments that, as far as a standard that I have to live up to, would have required at least trying to contact Gord for comment.

So if this was an independent project without any connection with... You mean like a blog, right? If it was an independent Mark Wise blog production, possibly you could have published that basically by saying, this is what Ann Ruskowski said on Toronto Mic'd. Quote Ann. That sounds to me like fair game, and I understand

wanting Gord. I've reached out to Gord. I'm trying to get Gord on to give his side of the story as well. It is fair game to a certain degree, but I am having to answer to a higher authority with the people who publish...

That's not God, is it? Okay, no, this is not God. Toronto Life Magazine, legal department, fact checkers. That's what I was looking for, because you mentioned the benefits of having their support, and I noticed that it was conspicuous by its absence, the reference to the animus game. Yeah, but look, it's been an amazing experience

to understand that you can't just write anything that runs through your head and get away with it when you're working with a bigger publisher. So I hope it's clear. I've learned to work within the structure, the strictures that they've given me. So I think that's where my own internal editor canceled out writing about Anne and her comments about Gord. When we get to hear Gord's response

to what Anne had to say, I think that will be safer ground to cover within the context of 1236. for ground to cover within the context of 1236. Understood. I will accept this reality and embrace it. I'm working on Gord Martineau coming on this show, and I will get his response. I'm working on it. I'm going to start talking.

I know you listen to these podcasts at triple speed, right? I shared a screenshot with you at a point where it was coming through at triple speed. I think you had a lot of pauses. I use the Overcast podcast app. So one of the things I have is the ability to listen at double speed, although the Apple app also has that. But baked in is something called smart speed, where it eliminates the silences ahead of time. The awkward pauses. At one point, you had enough

pauses that it was showing a triple speed. I wanted to show off the velocity at which I was listening to Toronto Mike. Because I'm going to go in double speed in real time here. I need to go really fast here because I realize looking at the clock here as we hit 90

minutes, I got a number of other items I need to talk about. Okay, let's go. So let's go real fast. So Overcast podcast app. I highly recommend it. You can follow 500 podcasts and they'll all be available when you need them. By the way, only

recently Google added a podcast to the Google Play Music. I think they call it Google Play Music, which is a weird name. But they added podcasts. This is a recent phenomenon, I think in the spring or something. So there's not a lot out there. What I've noticed, though, I'm on episode 196. So I've had 195 available via my XML file,

which means if you go to Google Play Music, there's 195 episodes, except there's 194 in Google Play Music because Google Play Music will not index my Maestro Fresh Wes episode. So I see this, it's on iTunes, it's everywhere else that reads the XML. So I go through the XML character by character, and it is perfect, okay? So this is a well-formed piece of XML. So I'm Googling it, like, what's it, you know, trying to learn? Is there something I did wrong with Google? What's going on?

Every episode since then has appeared. Not Maestro's. I think maybe I played too much of a copyrighted song, maybe. Something like that. Like, I Know Your Mom. I played a lot of I Know Your Mom. And I think something in the Google algorithm won't play it there because it's a copyrighted piece. This is my hypothesis

because I can't figure it out. So you're dealing with the same robots that control YouTube and send all sorts of takedown notices to people telling them even if they own the copyright that they're not allowed to post that video. So there I am

saying I've got to speed up and I went on a tangent there, but I find that interesting as a podcaster and other pod other podcasters it'd be good if we can talk about this because uh that it's weird xml's proper files there everything is good it's every other aggregator has it google play music skips the maestro fresh west episode luckily not many people actually use it so it probably didn't make a dent, but that's okay. Alright, and we passed by radio and I just need to go back to radio really quickly because, you know, Q107 Forever has been like our

rock station. They were classic rock for a while. Now they've kind of reformatted, but they seem to be changing their format in response to recent success by boom 97.3. And along with that, a consolidation at chorus radio stations,

where they've got a lot of them across the country that, as far as I've been able to tell, are running the same format, the same playlist. So this is a very researched idea about which songs people are interested in hearing. You can't dispute the data. Anything they're playing on there has been run through so many different test audiences.

Nothing is showing up on the air by accident. So Joanne Wilder is coming in in the next couple of weeks. So I will talk to her about this, but she doesn't choose the playlist. But the band that has recently appeared on the Q107 playlist. So I was helping my brother move and we rented a U-Haul

and I had my AM FM and I had my presets ready. And I'm like, hey. And I remember I said to my brother, I swear to you, I said this to him, I said, let's put on Q. I bet they're playing Duran Duran right now

because I noticed this new phenomenon. And I swear, I go to Q107 in the U-Haul and Andy Frost introduces, I think it was Rio. Duran Duran's Rio. And the fact that Duran Duran is now playing, sorry, did I say that? The fact that Q107 is now playing Duran Duran outside of an 80s lunch or something is quite a new phenomenon and quite interesting when you look where they came from. Yeah, the typical Q107 listener in 1982, 83,

who was into Ozzy and Judas Priest and Metallica. They came later. But they would not be too favorable about hearing Duran Duran on their radio station. They didn't even want to hear U2. You wouldn't even hear U2. I believe they had a derogatory term for what they would call U2 back then. So Duran Duran, forget it. Yeah, you would never hear Duran Duran on Q107.

And yet when Q107 first started, it was a much more eclectic kind of radio station. started. It was a much more eclectic kind of radio station. This whole classic rock image and Led Zeppelin, that came in over time, over the decades that followed. And they went through a different, a whole bunch of formats and

permutations. They used to play synth pop back in the early 80s, more on the air there. Yeah, but the image got into this harder rock thing. Lots of Guns N' Roses in the late 80s. I remember their Top 10 at 10, which was like appointment listening for me,

where I got a lot of my new music. It was dominated by Appetite for Destruction tunes and such. But what can you do? I mean, if somebody wants to listen to music, we hear this refrain over and over again. You've got every song ever at your fingertips on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, whatever platform you're using. What role can the music radio station fill? And so here we are at the point where the best that they can do is play the stuff that the audience has told them that they want to hear.

So nothing is showing up there by accident. Before we get into some television notes here, Mark, you know you come for the beer, but did you know you're actually going to get a free meal out of this? Did you know that? No, Mike. What's behind door number two? Yes, that's right, Monty Hall, who's still living, by the way.

I think he's 125 years old or something, but he's still kicking. Monty Hall. Okay, so let's make a deal. If you want to eat healthy without having to worry about meal planning, and that's the worst part of eating is planning the freaking meal and buying everything. So you have a company called Chef's Plate. It's Canada's leading meal kit delivery service, and Chef's Plate will deliver you

pre-portioned locally sourced farm fresh ingredients and easy to follow recipes and refrigerated kits directly to your door. It's honestly, it's so easy. Even I did it. You can ask Monica on your way out. It happened. I took a photo. If people go to chefsplate.com and use the promo code Toronto Mike, you get your first two plates for free. That's $22 in savings. And Mark, I will send you a link, DM you a link. You pick the two meals you like the best and Chef's Plate and give me a shipping address

and Chef's Plate will deliver it. The refrigerated box, it comes, it stays fresh all day. Then like I said, there's one sheet, like steps of what you do will deliver it. The refrigerated box, it stays fresh all day. Then, like I said, there's one sheet, like steps of what you do to prepare it. I was able to follow it, and I'm not very handy in the kitchen. So this is happening, my friend. I guess I have to buy some utensils now.

That's right. Actually, you don't have to. I know, they come in plastic, right? That's right. So Chef's Plate, and what I like the most about Chef's Plate is it's a company that actually is willing to back an independent podcast like this. You know, the hardest go here, I was recently on Mark Hebbshire and Liz West's show, and we were, which they keep renaming it, but it's now called No Fun Intended. I don't even need you to tell me.

I remembered. No fun intended. I don't even need you to tell me. I remembered. But, I mean, mainstream media people are kind of coming into this space, and guys like me who are trying to get the word out on Duran Duran being played on Q107 and important items like this, a company like Great Lakes Beer or Chef's Plate actually will help keep these projects going.

So please support them and use the promo code TorontoMike. You almost have as many ads as Jesse Brown, Canada land. Hey, let's skip ahead then to Jesse Brown since you've said the J word there. So Jesse Brown, I mentioned his Patreon campaign earlier because he's got like 10,000 bucks a month.

Is that what comes in through his Patreon? At one point, he was up to $15,000 a month, if you could believe that. But he's still at it with the whole podcast empire. Yeah, it's more than just his, right? He's got other podcasts under the umbrella. A political show, an arts show, and he's involved in a Toronto podcast festival,

which is happening in mid-November. And is my invitation in the mail? Don't ask me. I'm just watching on the sidelines. Are you friendly with Jesse Brown? No, not really. But you listen to all of his shows or just the Canada Land? I follow them.

I told you, I have 500 podcasts in my app. Uh, I mean, I obviously, uh, anything that involves antagonizing, uh, the, the mass mainstream media is, is, uh, natural for me to pay attention to. So I think that side of what he's doing, uh, is what resonates most of all, but then he'll have a guest like Paul Wells, the Toronto star columnist who, who just quit Twitter and made a whole spectacle out of it. So I think that at the same time, Canada Land and Jesse Brown enjoy being part of the establishment.

I got a question about Paul Wells, but first if Jesse Brown says, Mark Weisblot from 1236, I need you to come on to Canada Land. Will you accept that invitation? Let's see what happens. And will you return the beer when you do so?

Because there goes our exclusivity agreement. I'll be very jealous. I should bring the beer over to him, right? Is he going to give you a free meal? If this podcasting business picks up, you should get to the point where people come on as guests and bring their own sponsors. So I should go on someone else's podcast and do a pitch for a Great Lakes brewery.

If we're all going to be our own personal brands, you have to come in like a Formula One racer with your own costume, your own identity, and explain who's made it possible for you to be here. This podcasting festival at the Bloor Cinema, though, that Jesse Brown is involved in, I'm very intrigued. Is it a number of podcasters are speaking at this? What do you know from here? Doing live shows. One's from the United States, from Gimlet Media, a podcasting company, and a few other producers that are going to be involved doing live shows. But are there Canadian podcasters present? I'm just curious. Jesse Brown, did it reach out? CBC.

It's a great area. I know CBC. Suk-Yin Lee, Sleepover. Yep. Do you know that show? I know of it. I have not heard it. They tried that over the summer.

Yeah. And I don't know. I'm happy to be here because this is not Canada land. Why should one guy, one operation monopolize an entire medium in a city? But there's no disputing. He's done a terrific job of being synonymous with podcasting for a certain subset of Toronto and Canadian audience out there. For sure. And did we ever learn how many millions of dollars

have entered his bank account thanks to his Bitstrips investment? Did we ever learn? Or is his Bitstrips? That's his, right? Yeah, Bitstrips, which they we ever learn? Or is his Bitstrips? That's his, right? Yeah, Bitstrips, which they sold to Snapchat. I don't know. He made a ton of money. By journalism standards, astronomical amounts would have been thrown around.

But yeah, he's not revealed a dollar figure. It's never quite come out. And the way these deals are structured, there's certain time frames and windows and points at which shares get vested. aspiring journalists who've worked as interns and maybe still doing their time, feeling like indentured servants of an industry that's never going to respect them. So I think it's fun that there's a guy hanging around who has many millions of dollars that he made somewhere else who is somehow pretending like he's, he's one of the tribe, uh, when in fact everybody's talking behind his back, uh, whispering about the fact that he made all this money off of Snapchat. You mentioned Paul Wells, uh, who quit Twitter and who else quit

Twitter recently? Steve Latterante, who was the main Twitter Canada news and government head. How do you describe these positions? So he got a job with CBC News. So he's got bigger fish to fry, more important things on his agenda. Nevertheless, the fact that he was all across Canada making media appearances as Twitter's main evangelist as far as anything concerning the media or politics, but yeah, he gave up. Paul Wells also left for ideological reasons related to censorship of a journalist in Turkey,

and Wells is very proud of himself for no longer using Twitter all day and night. But at the same time, he's got his job with the Toronto Star, and they're not going to yank that away from him if he doesn't tweet enough. away from him if he doesn't tweet enough. His insinuations that it was a waste of his time, or it wasn't necessary to do his job, or how much more refreshing his life has become in the eight days that he's lived without Twitter. This is all very entertaining hyperbole, This is all very entertaining hyperbole, and I don't believe any of it. He was right there on the forefront with blogging and doing stuff online, and I think he enjoyed every minute of it. It served his ego.

He basked in the attention. So if it's not Twitter he's using for ideological reasons, I think we'll see him turn up on another platform soon. Maybe he'll be the one guy that uses Google Plus to amplify what he has to say. But yeah, he was doing like interviews about quitting Twitter, I think ultimately like a one-man band as far as deciding that he could live without it as a journalist, a guy covering politics in Ottawa. Good luck to him. Much like Twitter as a company, which might be sold any minute now, all sorts of drama surrounding its future. And everybody that uses it, I mean, the hip thing to do is to be on Twitter and ruminate about the fact that you would rather be doing anything else with your life besides using Twitter. But it provides a lot of oxygen to a lot of people out there. And naturally, a lot of them are more obnoxious than others.

But hey, you can follow anybody you want, right? There's millions of people who I'm ignoring on Twitter each and every day. And I'll continue to use it for whatever I want. I quite enjoy Twitter during live sporting events. The game is on in a couple hours, this first game of the ALDS, and I'll be on Twitter, and I'll periodically share something,

and I'll be absorbing what Zeitgeist thinks of certain plays or moments, and to me, it's enhanced the experience. Yeah, I think something like it will be here to stay. Issues on Twitter with harassment and hacking and all sorts of other troubles that they've had to deal with there. It's a bit of a sideshow. I don't really give it a whole lot of thought.

My own interest in currency and obsession, it just relates to news and information, knowing what's up, and I don't think anybody has invented anything better yet. In rapid-fire time, so you get to one sentence on each of these topics. Okay. Peter Mansbridge is retiring. What is there to say? You've got to spend an entire year standing on ceremony for Peter Mansbridge, taking his exit from the National. I hope everybody who cares has fun.

The BBC News is launching in Canada. a video about Londoners react to Tim Hortons. So the Tim Hortons journalism concept came in handy on the first day of that BBC. A few, what would you call them, trend pieces, think pieces about Canada's relationship to Britain and vice versa. The New York Times moving into this turf is a little more compelling

because they're marshalling more forces, I think, to try and enter the Canadian market in a major way. And because they have the paywall, it's about selling subscriptions. So the quality of what the New York Times is going to do here will be a lot higher. BBC is for people that are interested in the BBC. Ann Romer sightings are way down. I'm wondering if people got back from summer vacations and Ann went back to retirement. You're getting a lot of backlash for talking about Ann Romer on every podcast, aren't you? Every time you have a person here in the news industry. I thought it was an amazing event this summer, right? To be able to look up on Twitter if Ann Romer had turned up on CP24

that night, because there was always somebody out there who thought they were seeing a ghost. I thought she retired. I heard that she had a party with cake. And despite the backlash, you're right, this backlash, which you're right, exists. Notice I keep plowing on. I am not dismayed. I'm going to keep going.

I'm an Ann Romer truther. This is my movement. And yet I don't think she's been on lately. Have you heard about Ann? Sightings are way down. I haven't heard. I don't think since. Not this month?

I don't think. I would be very disappointed if we've seen the last of her. Oh, me too. Facebook, are they lying about video views? Well, yeah, are they? A few weeks ago, it came out that the numbers were inflated by 60%, up to 80% of the numbers that were being shown to media companies, advertisers, marketers were kind of a lie. They had to apologize. of a lie. They had to apologize. But at the same time, I think there's a call for some standards here to figure out exactly how many people are watching these videos on Facebook. All these news companies invested in video. They were given the impression that there were more people that were

going to watch an autoplay video on Facebook than read an article. I don't know how they came to that conclusion. I guess they were looking at the data, and it said this is the way to go. Why watch a video that takes like 10 times longer than reading an article to make the same point, to say something? Here we had, this is the same thing with the thinking behind StarTouch. There would be a captive audience, and they would go to Facebook, and they would watch everything all the time, and hear that bubble is being burst,

and now they'll have to be a little more accountable. How was that for one sentence? That's a run-on sentence. It's fine. As long as you use your commas correctly, you can do that. I have many great items here that we're saving for your fifth appearance whenever we schedule that. This is my last. I have many great items here that we're saving for your fifth appearance whenever we schedule that. I'm going to close by asking you about Corey Haim.

Rumors. There's a rumor out there that you knew Corey. Is that true? Well, yeah. I mentioned that to you. So you're the source of this rumor. That ruins it. Just pretend there's a rumor out there. Describing why I was personally interested in the story that was circulating a week or two ago. It was Corey Feldman who was claiming for a number of years, ever since Corey Haim died in 2010, that in fact he suffered sexual abuse at the hands of an A-list actor.

A-list? A-list Hollywood star. Wow. And that this has never been revealed. Radar Online was claiming that they had a recording where he mentioned the name. Corey's mother was all upset, as you would expect her to be. Like, why is Corey Feldman talking endlessly about this abuse that my son suffered? Corey Feldman was trying to make some kind of musical comeback.

He was on the Today Show, right? He sent Twitter, Facebook into high gear, hating on him for his lousy music. 23 years after he tried it on Electric Circus, he said he went into hiding. Anyway, I knew of Corey Haim going back to mid-'80s. going back to mid-80s, we took drama classes in the basement of the same drama teacher in Thornhill. Okay. So Corey and his sister also used to go to this drama teacher.

Is this before Lucas or after Lucas? This is right before. So he was auditioning for things and working his way through the Canadian child star celebrity circuit, whatever that was. The Edison Twins, that was a big show back then with child actors. Okay, yeah, of course. At least once. And then somehow ended up in Hollywood. So we're around the same age. I'd always been intrigued by his career.

He, in tandem with the other Corey, right, became a big star. Here you heard this guy was getting a couple of parts. Before you know it, he's in The Lost Boys and License to Drive. It's a great movie, by the way, that License to Drive. It's a very watchable flick. So because I had this association with Corey,

I guess I was paying a little more attention to him. Sure, you were in the same drama class, absolutely. I was in the class with his sister, but Corey was also there in this same teacher. So did I identify with him? Did I relate to him? Did I relate to him? Did I think that could have been me? Of course not.

But as he disappeared from view, right, he had a lot of... Yeah, he had great success, and then there seemed like a very steep decline. Well, the career of any teen star is not going to be very long. Except for Leonardo DiCaprio, you're right. And then, you know, he had a lot of struggles.

I know through the 90s, a lot of these straight-to-video movies and addiction issues. He tried to make a comeback, struggling. He was in Toronto for a time. People would see him around, young in Eglinton, just not doing very well at all. And then one day he died. And it was a shock, and at the same time, it wasn't much of a surprise at all. So here we were waiting for a big reveal about Corey Haim,

which would be really sad and tragic and unfortunate, but it never came. So we'll see by the time I'm here next time whether the Corey Haim story moves forward or whether people are willing to let him rest in peace. And we'll hear the debates when the name is revealed. People debating, that's not an A-lister. How could you call X an A-lister? Where's your bar for A-list? A-list is right up there. So let's wrap this up on the saddest note possible, Mike. Hey, listen, you know what?

You're coming back. That's not sad. You're coming back because there's so much. And this is like an evergreen type thing. There's always something to talk about when it comes to Canada, whether it's the quitting Twitter or Facebook line or the television, the radio, the print, there's always something to talk to you about. And I like, you know what I love about you?

That you remind me who owns what and who sold from where. I lose track, but you seem to always nail it. So thank you. And thank you, Joe Warmington, for making it so exciting to be a part of journalism and the media this week. Come on, Toronto Mike. Joe, you're always welcome here. And that brings us to the end of our 196th show. You can follow me on Twitter.

I'm at Toronto Mike. And Mark Weisblot is at 1236. Remember, 1236.ca is where you sign up for his newsletter. And our friends at Great Lakes Brewery is at Great Lakes Beer, and Chef's Plate is at Chef's Plate CA. See you all next week. You've been under my skin for more than eight years. It's been eight years of laughter and eight years of tears

And I don't know what the future can hold or do For me and you But I'm a much better man for having known you Oh, you know that's true because Everything is coming up Rosy and green Yeah, the wind is cold with the smell of snow Everything is coming up rosy and gray. Yeah, the wind is cold but the smell of snow won't stay today.

And your smile is fine and it's just...