Researching Journalism

How Canadians Communicate IV: Media and Politics, edited by David Taras and Christopher Waddell, assembles essays focused on the various forms of political communication in Canada.  In this interview with Lisa Lynch, Waddell explains the book’s conclusions about the state of political reporting in Canada.

Spring is here, and so are Canada’s journalism conferences.  Here is a roundup of some of the more promising conferences for journalism researchers.

Marc Raboy and Jeremy Shtern’s collection Media Divides: Communication Rights and the Right to Communicate in Canada is a series of essays by Canadian media and communications scholars on the past, present and future of Canadian communication rights. Expanding the notion of ‘the right to communicate’ beyond a conversation about freedom of expression, the authors in this book tackle topics as various as copyright, privacy, Internet infrastructure and access, and the political economy of media.  The book’s overarching goal is both to assess and propose remediation for some of the serious problems plaguing the Canadian communications landscape.  Because good journalism is fundamental to Canadian communication rights, Researching Journalism editor Lisa Lynch interviewed Jeremy Shtern about the process of editing Media Divides and what the book suggests about the role of journalists in ensuring communication rights for Canadians.

In Second Wounds, media scholar Carrie Rentschler traces the emergence of victim advocacy in the U.S. from the sixties until the present.  Rentschler also explores the relationship the victim’s rights movement and the media, describing how U.S. reporting on crime has been influenced by the movement’s idea of the “secondary victim” as well as theories of post-traumatic stress.  In the first of a series of interviews with scholars about journalism research, Researching Journalism page editor Lisa Lynch spoke to Rentschler about her research process and her findings.