Twitter is ramping up its video content, announcing 14 new, renewed or expanded deals for live sports, concerts, news and entertainment content with Major League Baseball, the NFL, Viacom, the WNBA, BuzzFeed, The Verge, Bloomberg Media, Live Nation, the PGA, Ben Silverman’s Propagate, and IMG Fashion, among others. Twitter’s collaboration with Bloomberg will see the creation of a 24-hour rolling news channel for the platform. The live video stream, set to debut this fall, will be made up of original programming and feeds from Bloomberg bureaus.
Torstar Corp. says it will continue to wind down investment in its tablet app Toronto Star Touch after releasing its Q1 2017 numbers. Launched in late 2015, Star Touch has failed to meet readership expectations, hitting just 60,000 weekly users. Torstar, which owns the Toronto Star, Metro commuter papers and the Hamilton Spectator, among others, lost $24.4 million, or 30 cents per share. Revenue fell $18.1 million or 10 per cent year-over-year to $156.7 million, impacted by a 19 per cent decline in print ad revenue and a 9.5 per cent drop in subscriber revenue. Digital revenues took a four per cent dip in the three months ended Mar. 31. 110 job losses have been announced related to closure of a Metroland printing plant and a mail room.
Facebook announced Wednesday it will hire another 3,000 people to monitor videos for violence. The new community operations team hires are aimed at improving response times to address recent violence either streamed via Facebook Live or uploaded after being recorded. In the past month, a man in Thailand livestreamed the murder of his infant daughter, an Alabama man livestreamed his suicide, and an Ohio man uploaded a video of a murder he had committed.
Rick Campanelli, co-host of ET Canada, is among the judges featured in a new reality TV-style, three-episode web series funded by the Movember Foundation. Think You can Shrink? is aimed at helping remove the stigma associated with mental health issues among men. Contestants with everyday jobs who think they are good at giving advice (a bartender, a hairdresser and a strip club owner) test their skills – both successfully and unsuccessfully.
Canadian Media Guild (CMG) members at VICE Canada have ratified their first collective agreement after nine months of negotiations. VICE employees unionized within CMG just under a year ago. Employees will see immediate salary increases ranging from two per cent to 52.5 per cent based on the new negotiated salary grid, with an average salary increase of nine per cent. Other gains include increased vacation, improved parental leave benefits, equity provisions, and the protection of editorial independence.
CBC/Radio-Canada is giving Canadians digital space to share personal stories and memories (text, video, or photos) to be used in the creation of a special, bilingual project to mark Canada’s 150th anniversary. What’s Your Story? – A Canada 2017 Yearbook, a collection of short stories from Canadians across the country, will be published in both official languages as a single edition this fall. CBC/Radio-Canada will select stories to be included in the yearbook by July 15, and feature many of the submissions online at cbc.ca/2017 until Nov. 30.
