The journalists locked out by French-language daily the Journal de Montréal will start publishing a free weekly tabloid at the end of October.

The website run by locked-out Journal de Montréal employees, Rue Frontenac, announces it will start producing a weekly paper this fall.The website run by locked-out Journal de Montréal employees, Rue Frontenac, announces it will start producing a weekly paper this fall. (ruefrontenac.com)About 50,000 copies of the paper will be distributed in the Montreal region every Thursday.

The paper will be 48 pages and will cover daily news, sports, business and culture. There will also be special investigations, analysis and columns.

About 100 locked-out journalists, photographers and editors already post articles daily on an independent website called Rue Frontenac.

The website will continue to run, and more locked-out employees will join the team to help produce the weekly.

Rue Frontenac is financed entirely by ads, and the union for the locked-out workers said the weekly will work likewise.

A total of 253 journalists from the Journal de Montréal, which for years was North America's highest-circulation French-language newspaper, have been locked out by the paper's parent company, Quebecor, since Jan. 24, 2009.

The mediator appointed by the Quebec government in August to try to end the dispute has started meeting with the union and Quebecor management.