By Jasmine Bala for the Ryerson Journalism Research Centre Building audience engagement has long been a newsroom preoccupation, only today it involves Instagram and Facebook, while in the past publishers seduced readers with paper cut-out toys and thrilling accounts of reporters on around-the-world races against time. New research on the history of Sunday newspapers by…
By H.G. Watson, Associate Editor When David Topping set out to take the pulse of Canadian journalism, he was hoping it might help him shape something new—a project, or a product. In early January, Topping, the digital strategy and product manager for Toronto Life, 12:36 and Torontoist, started promoting a survey of his own creation…
By Anna Augusto Rodrigues and Phil Raby What does reconciliation mean to me? This is a question we have reflected on since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action were announced in 2015. As professors who teach media courses at Durham College, we felt an urgency and responsibility to address the calls, especially number…
By The Canadian Press A Vice Media reporter must give the RCMP the background materials he used for stories on an accused terrorist, Ontario’s top court affirmed Wednesday. In a case that pitted freedom of the press against the ability of police and prosecutors to do their work, the Ontario Court of Appeal said it…
By Sylvia Stead for the Globe and Mail In these times of political spin, contradictions, obfuscation and, at times, outright lies, readers expect to see not only the articles, but also the headlines, reflect the truth as best they can. A British Columbia reader wrote to me this week calling on The Globe to pay…
By Esther Enkin, CBC Ombudsman The complainant, William Heavenor, was concerned about the qualifying phrase “even so” in a paragraph about the makeup of the federal firearms advisory committee. Its placement made him suspicious that the writer was implying that the presence of white people on the committee was somehow wrong. In fact, the context…
By H.G. Watson, Associate Editor Journalists are always hardest on themselves. A new survey of over 1,550 North American journalists has found that over 90 per cent believe the media is “somewhat or much less” trusted by the public compared to three years ago. The State of the Media report, completed by Cision, a Canadian…
By Sylvia Stead for the Globe and Mail Words matter, accuracy matters, fairness matters, independence matters. With journalism under attack these days south of the border, journalists need to focus on the basics of the craft and not become defensive to the swirling charges from Donald Trump that they produce “fake news” and are the…
By Megan Fraser for The Signal In the last three years, administrative clerk Jennifer Gibson has answered more than 5,000 phone calls. She sits in a cubicle on the sixth floor of a downtown Halifax office building, facing two computer screens. And she faces a daily challenge – she is hard of hearing. Gibson took…
By Pat Reddick for Media Are Plural Enter panic mode, it’s time to seriously worry about things. Or, better yet, get your thinking cap on and come up with some ideas for how to save an industry. For the past few months, we’ve seen an outpouring of ideas in Canada about how to save the…