The Ontario city of Thunder Bay is in the headlines these days for all the wrong reasons. Canada’s highest rates of murder and violent crime. The highest number of hate crimes per capita. Systemic racism embedded in shoddy police investigations. The deaths — many unexplained — of Indigenous students who come to the city for…
In the wake of a series of coordinated attacks that claimed more than 250 lives on April 21, the government of Sri Lanka shut off its residents’ access to social media and online messaging systems, including Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Snapchat and Viber. The official government concern was that “false news reports were spreading through social…
Coverage of mass violence against women still leaves out the basics Continue Reading The pedestrian misogyny behind the van attack
By Kathy Kiely, University of Missouri-Columbia and Laurel Leff, Northeastern University These days, anybody with an internet connection can be a publisher. That doesn’t make everybody a journalist. This distinction has become more important than ever in light of two recent events. One was the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The other was a…
Despite an endless cycle of missteps, call-outs and apologies, Canadian journalism has a terrible track record holding far-right groups to account – whether they’re in the streets or public office. Until there’s a much deeper reckoning, it’s unlikely to get any better Continue Reading Can a news media that doesn’t really oppose fascism ever cover it well?
Justin Brake, a former reporter for the Newfoundland news site The Independent, wasn’t the only winner when the Newfoundland and Labrador Court of Appeal cleared him of a civil charge of contempt last week. The ruling — an encouraging one for a news media that has undergone a spate of legal battles in recent years…
We shouldn’t need a Super Bowl commercial costing around $10 million to remind us that information is supposed to matter in a democracy. Yet the Washington Post thought we did, so it told 111 million Americans watching the Super Bowl that “knowing empowers us, knowing helps us decide, knowing keeps us free.” It was another…
Besides everything else I do, I am first of all a business owner. I started Halifax Examiner Inc. in 2014 with all my life savings, $10,000. By the time the first post went live, I had something like $2,000 in the company bank account. Since then, I’ve operated the company very conservatively, and I think…
The government capitulated to the demands of traditional publishers with its financial package of “support for Canadian journalism.” If you missed the news, it’s probably because after months—make that years—of lobbying, public awareness campaigns and many, many editorials written in the country’s newspapers, there’s been almost no coverage of the media (don’t call it a…
We’re not looking for a handout. But we didn’t expect the government to distort the playing field so dramatically Continue Reading Liberals’ journalism funding makes it harder to launch news startups