Nicholas Keung’s shirt was soaked in sweat. His phone intermittently buzzed with emails from his editors—but nothing from the woman he was waiting to interview about her brother’s mysterious death six days earlier at a Peterborough, Ontario, hospital while in the custody of immigration authorities. The Toronto Star reporter had been outside the woman’s high-rise apartment building on that hot mid-June morning since their scheduled interview time at 9:30. He called once, twice, half a dozen times. No one answered. He left voice messages. “I’m still downstairs.” At 10:45 a.m., she called. “We still need more time,” she said. “I’ll call you again when we’re ready.” Her mother had forbidden any contact with journalists because she was concerned about the stigma the family might face if someone reported that her son lived with bipolar disorder and diabetes. “We’re very private,” said the sister.

Two hours passed as Keung waited in the parking lot with his car windows down. He contacted the lawyer who had tipped him off about the family. At 11:30 a.m., the woman cancelled. “We can’t talk to you.”

Back at his office, Keung kept trying to convince her to go on the record. Perhaps, the detainee’s sister suggested, her mother—who didn’t speak English—didn’t have to know?

Six hours after their original appointment, she spoke with Keung for an hour. As an immigration reporter for the Star, he is familiar with this will-they-or-won’t-they-give-an-interview scenario. It makes producing nuanced coverage harder for journalists who must overcome language and cultural differences, as well as systemic restrictions.

Keung identifies as Canada’s longest-serving immigration reporter in an industry struggling to cover the 20 percent of the national population that is often overlooked in the news—at least in terms of immigration-specific issues and policies. He’s working against a legacy of stories that merely hint at the layers of complexities in the lives of Canadian immigrants and refugees.

Keung, who’s originally from Hong Kong, has been holding the lonely mantle of “immigration reporter” since 2003, when the Star made it an official beat. Before that, immigration coverage mostly meant stories about cultural festivals or personal success stories of integration and adaptation. But these individual narratives lacked context. In the 1990s, much of the reporting was shallow (the Star’s “Immigrant loses in marriage quiz,” for example, describes an immigrant couple’s ordeal with “a scary version of The Newlywed Game”) or simple, such as Q & A stories with titles like “Immigrant uneasy about parents must still wait in line for passport.” These stories merely scratched the surface. “Parades and costumes,” says John Ferri, a former Star reporter and editor. “The coverage in the ’90s was blinded by this filter that was well-intentioned, but not enough.”

Journalists celebrated diversity without deeply covering the nuances of multiculturalism. Haroon Siddiqui, former editorial page editor at the Star, recalls how budget-day coverage was always about how the changes would affect a white family. He also remembers an article about how Markham, a city in Toronto’s suburbs, didn’t look like Markham anymore due to its growing population of visible minorities, at 72.3 percent in 2011.

Both Siddiqui and Ferri were part of an internal Star committee that produced a 1995 report recommending changes to the editorial process to include more cross-cultural journalism. “There was a realization that we needed to cover the city the way it is,” says Siddiqui. “Those of us who don’t understand should stand in front of Union Station at eight in the morning and five in the evening and just see the human tide that wasn’t being reflected in the paper.”

Over the course of the ’90s, coverage increased as more people immigrated to Canada. “People didn’t realize this was an extraordinary beat,” says Siddiqui. Now, the reporting is more likely to be based on statistics or policy: how many new applications will be accepted, how many people are still stuck in the backlog, how many foreign workers will be deported and, lately, how many refugees the country can and will accommodate.

But there is no one universal immigrant experience. Stories about immigration provide a human-level window into everything from wars to gender inequality. “In many ways, diverse voices are being heard louder than before,” says Judy Trinh, a CBC reporter who came to Canada as a refugee from Vietnam. She says this shift is thanks to social media. “The concern is, are we covering those voices well?”

It’s not just “parades and costumes” anymore, but there are great challenges in reporting on a system riddled with complexities, nuances and a diversity of languages, cultures and experiences. “In an ideal world where all these issues were important enough, we would have more reporters,” says Andrew Griffith, author of the book Multiculturalism in Canada. General assignment reporters continue to handle most of the coverage, writing one-off stories on policy changes or profiles of cases they learned about in press releases.

When Jason Kenney, former immigration minister, said refugees get “gold-plated” health care, reporters “became his handmaiden” and repeated the phrase without analysis, says Peter Showler, a former chair of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. The “subliminal consequence” of such reporting is that coverage becomes unwittingly negative, says George Abraham, founder of New Canadian Media, a website dedicated to presenting an immigrant point of view for all Canadians. Journalists should instead be reporting the lived experiences that give context to the official narrative of immigration policy.

Last year ended with two big stories: by-the-numbers coverage of the federal Liberal government’s refugee plan and triumphant stories about an Ottawa couple winning a three-year struggle to bring their four-year-old son to Canada from India. Journalists cover immigration in two extremes: “It’ll all be hearts and flowers and violins on individual coverage,” says Showler, or mundane, meaningless facts and numbers in policy coverage.

Douglas Todd, a migration, diversity and spirituality writer for the Vancouver Sun, says reporters and editors are afraid to go deeper because of cultural sensitivities. “They don’t want to touch it, they don’t want to make a mistake and they don’t want to offend anyone,” he says. Yet 44 percent of Vancouverites are foreign-born, and the news isn’t covering their stories. “So how can that not be a gigantic issue?” says Todd. Three-fifths of his interview subjects are from minority groups, whereas he thinks the proportion is much smaller for other journalists.

Last June, Todd wrote a three-part series about Richmond, the fourth-largest city in British Columbia, where 60 percent of the residents are immigrants. This has physically changed the city—according to Todd’s article, there are more than 50 Asian malls and outlets in an area where, 30 years ago, there was a cluster of forgotten one-storey commercial buildings and parking lots. “Get beyond clichés,” says Todd. “Go for depth, context, background, census data, fairness, polling data, balance, realism and in-depth profiles.”

Yet, part of the problem is that readers don’t have the same level of shared knowledge about immigration as crime, education or public transit. Sometimes, by the time Keung has explained how the system works, he has used up 200 words, leaving little space for the actual story.

Four words in a press release about a dead detainee made Keung wait in that parking lot for over two hours: “On June 11, 2015, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) was notified by the Peterborough Regional Health Centre that an adult male detainee who was receiving care, passed away in hospital.”

The four words: Canada Border Services Agency.

A flow chart of questions appeared in Keung’s head. If a regular inmate had died, it wouldn’t have been a CBSA press release. That meant the detainee must have violated immigration law. Why was he receiving medical care, though? Was there a confrontation? What caused his death? What was his name? Keung knew this was a serious and complex case. He picked up the phone.

From an earlier press release from the Special Investigation Unit (SIU)—an agency that investigates incidents involving police where there has been death, serious injury or allegations of sexual assault—he knew the “adult male detainee” was 39 years old. Keung says the CBSA declined to give him any more information: “The man’s identity will not be released at this time.” He learned that there were two officers on the detainee’s detail, and that the man had become agitated and had to be restrained by officers and health professionals. No name.

In the ’90s, any hard news about immigration was often about floodgates and fraud: there were too many coming in, and they were coming in illegally. “This was always a false issue to a very, very large degree,” says Showler. “The media was very complicit in that and quick to buy into it.” As time passed, “bogus refugee” became a common term for people claiming asylum upon arrival without proper paperwork. This perpetuated a fear-inducing narrative that all refugees were fraudulent, as did restrictive refugee health care laws passed by the Harper government in 2012. Op-eds by doctors, students, professors and lawyers specializing in refugee issues—rarely by journalists—countered this narrative. And, of course, after 9/11, the focus of immigration coverage had also changed, from multiculturalism to national security.

The arrival of Syrian refugees in 2015 is, according to Showler, “a tale of two stories.” The photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying dead on the beach is the first; the ISIS attacks on Paris is the second. “The two opposing stories appear alongside one another every day in the media and across dinner tables,” wrote Showler in an op-ed for the Star. In the first, Canadians are sympathetic and eager to help desperate refugees. In the second, sympathy becomes suspicion, and people believe extreme caution should be exercised in vetting the 25,000 Syrian refugees the Liberal government vowed to bring to Canada by this spring. The same two narratives existed in the news about “bogus refugees.” Showler says that pattern started to change when Syrian refugees began to arrive last December.

To move past these two extremes, Joe Friesen, demographics reporter at The Globe and Mail, suggests immigration should be covered in the business pages, in court coverage and in local politics news, not just by immigration reporters. “Immigrant issues are part of a lens through which a journalist sees every story, to look at everything in the way it affects different demographics,” he says. Changes to citizenship laws, for example, affect immigrants especially, but also citizens with dual nationalities. So do you let them be covered by an immigration reporter or a national affairs reporter? “I think when the day comes when we don’t even need this beat, it will be the ideal,” says Keung. He believes there will always be a need for someone to cover policy, but newsrooms shouldn’t need a special reporter for other aspects of immigrants’ lives. When that distinction no longer exists, he says, that’s when immigrant issues will become everyone’s issues.

“This is the dead man whose name nobody wanted you to know,” reads the lead of Keung’s story, published exactly a week after the official announcement of Hassan’s death. The same day, another of Keung’s articles came out, about a University of Toronto study that called the immigration detention system “a legal black hole.” According to the research, Canada was in breach of international human rights for routinely, and sometimes indefinitely, holding migrants with mental health issues in maximum-security jails.

In 2013, several news outlets reported that Lucia Vega Jimenez, an immigrant from Mexico, took his own life while imprisoned in Vancouver. Almost a month after his story on Hassan, Keung wrote about a United Nations report that condemned the indefinite length of immigration-related sentences in Canada. Eighty- eight inmates at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario, where Hassan had been held, also signed an open letter demanding a public inquest into his death. “We still don’t know what happened on that day,” says Keung about Hassan’s death.

According to some of the inmates, events moved quickly, and it was all over in 24 hours—something Keung could not verify.

Anonymous sources, he says, are the biggest challenge facing anyone writing about immigration. Vancouver Sun reporter Tara Carman, who often writes about immigrants and refugees, says her subjects’ wishes to remain anonymous have prevented her from reporting a lot of their stories. “Some people have a lack of status,” she says, “or a lack of media knowledge or just a fear of speaking out.”

“The stakes are very high,” says David P. Ball, a reporter with The Tyee who covers several social issue beats including immigration. “If you screw it up, you could get someone deported.” In 2014, he wrote a story about undocumented immigrants in British Columbia. It was one of the first times the issue had been covered in that province, though Keung had previously written about it in the Star. Ball found a father of two from Mexico who was working illegally in Vancouver’s construction industry. He lived in a building that was about to be demolished and taught his kids English when he wasn’t at work—the children were denied access to school after their parents could not provide proof of citizenship. “It was really powerful to meet him,” says Ball, “and really challenging to verify any part of the story.”

As Keung says, sometimes finding and talking to someone on the record who can illustrate specific immigration issues can feel like searching for “a one-eyed, lesbian, Muslim, hijab-wearing, immigrant woman”—seemingly impossible.

Reporting on refugees and immigrants means facing complex legal and systemic roadblocks. Lawyers have to get approval from their clients before they can talk. And the lawyers must factor in the sway that news coverage may have on the case and how it may result in deportation. That’s only in the cases that lawyers choose to take to the press. The authorities overseeing refugee cases, for instance, are opaque institutions, hiding behind a veil of vague press releases. In these cases, everything is confidential, but most of it is also accessible by those willing to go through onerous application processes. Some cases go on to federal court, where the information becomes public, for those journalists inclined to go beyond press releases.

Under Stephen Harper’s government, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) made it more difficult to find useful information. Statistics, like where immigrants are coming from, that used to be presented by country became vast regional break-downs—not much help when the three biggest countries that B.C. immigrants come from all fall under “Asia.” Getting more useful data required an Access to Information request, which meant more red tape. “These are not exactly state secrets,” Carman wrote in an op-ed. “It’s hard to see how having that information in the public domain, as it has been for years, compromises security or privacy.” Under the new government, Carman got the information at no cost. But under Harper, the CIC informed her that the cost to access the information would have been $1,600 per hour of research time.

In the days after Hassan’s story ran, Keung kept following up on the investigation into the case. These were weekly conversations. Then every two weeks. “It was a fishing mission,” he says. To illustrate a systemic failure, you have to show a trend. To show a trend, you need to have concrete examples of people affected. To get names that haven’t been in the news before, you have to cut through a lot of red tape.

Starting in July, Keung spent five to six weeks looking for immigration detention cases involving a former or current detainee that exposed systemic issues. A lawyer came forward with two cases, both with clients who struggled with mental health. One had a guardian who wouldn’t provide consent and couldn’t be written about. Another lawyer, from Ottawa, had been trying for a long time to help a family and called Keung as a last resort. A different case about an immigrant detainee being held in a solitary cell came through the friend of yet another lawyer.

After Keung submitted one of the stories in the series, his main source—who faced a 62-month detention—withdrew consent. While Keung could have still used the story, he chose to shift the focus, looking at the efforts of his source’s lawyer instead. Eventually, the man relented.

Between August and the end of 2015, the immigration detention series and six more Keung stories sat on file, unpublished. The six pieces ranged from articles about temporary foreign workers to a profile of a Colombian immigrant painter who works out of his basement (which ran on January 14). But it was a busy time for news: a federal election was underway, Rob Ford started chemotherapy and the Blue Jays were in the playoffs. So, Keung’s immigration stories stayed put. “It’s frustrating because I have to keep updating the stories,” says Keung. He has to answer phone calls from sources asking when pieces will run or providing new information that he needs to add.

One of the featured images for the immigration detention series was a photo of advocates from the End Immigration Detention Network protesting outside the Lindsay prison where Hassan had been held. It’s a summer day in the picture. But summer turned into fall, and winter was coming.

The series, titled “Prisoners in Purgatory” online, finally appeared in print on December 4, 2015, in the GTA section of the Star. “Immigration detention is a world shrouded in secrecy, where people Canada doesn’t want are locked away, sometimes for years,” read the subhead of one story.

There’s an old, slightly blurry picture of a smiling Hassan. “His lengthy detention—and death—has sparked a debate over Canada’s immigration detention system, which involves a myriad of government jurisdictions in what critics call ‘a legal black hole,’ with little transparency and accountability,” wrote Keung. When it appeared, the series was one of the most read on the website. And less than two weeks later, a Somali man was ordered released after 67 months in immigrant detention “in an extraordinary and significant decision,” according to Keung’s story on him. “Media attention possibly helped,” the reporter said later. “It makes them nervous.”

On December 9, 2015, Keung received the Mary Deanne Shears Award for Outstanding Reporting at the Star. “In one of the worst refugee years in modern history, Nicholas has relentlessly kept on top of the challenges for refugees and immigrants to Canada,” wrote managing editor Jane Davenport in an email to staff, “and the government bungles (or deliberate misrepresentations) that have resulted in deportation and discrimination for too many.”

A testament to Keung’s relentless coverage of immigration issues is the number of stories he files. One article, published in November 2015, was about eight foreign workers stuck in an application backlog for permanent residency. Some were forced to return to their home countries after their visas expired because of the wait. The headline Keung used in his draft, bolded in big, black type, read, “We feel we’ve been forgotten.”

March 28, 2016: A previous version of this story failed to give David P. Ball’s full name and place of employment. The Review regrets the error.

Politics is about perception (and always has been). Official messages are carefully constructed to paint a specific type of picture. It’s the journalist’s job, theoretically at least, to find the flaws and the hidden distortions in that image.

But what if the picture is perfect and makes everyone happy? A hot prime minister meets a cool president, and they become instant BFFs. Their wives become new-found “soulmates.” It’s all jokes and smiles, glitz and glamour, flowers and champagne.

I get it–such coverage is the charm of a state dinner. It’s a story journalists have to write because it’s a change of pace from all the phobias and deaths front pages are too often filled with. And readers love it, as proven by the most popular lists on Canadian news outlets yesterday and today. It makes them happy. It makes me happy, for a little while at least.

The problem, though, is that such clickbait political coverage always gets taken too far. Newsrooms forget that even state dinners have foreign policy implications, which, if not obvious, need to be deciphered. While some of that was talked about, it was brief. Something about methane and the environment. A rumor about border control policies. Some announcement about Arctic goals.

Instead, in true BuzzFeed fashion, the Toronto Star gave us a play-by-play of how Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau saved new “soulmate” Michelle Obama from a nasty tumble off of the stage, seconds-apart pictures included. “Who needs the Secret Service with friends like this?” read the opening line of the article that would have worked better with GIFs. 

Maclean’s decided a special photo gallery was needed to document the youngest Trudeau child’s visit. “Hadrien goes to Washington,” it was called in Hollywood-movie fashion.  In fact, only 30 percent of the articles posted under a special heading on the Maclean’s website actually talked about policy discussion. The rest were photo galleries, fashion and decor coverage and transcribed speeches (see screenshot below), similar categories as coverage be the Star and others.

The problem isn’t new. This is what news dictated by clicks looks like, for the most part. It doesn’t have to be, and has been proven not to be, but it’s the easiest method of coverage, and difficult not to do when words like “bromance” are involved.

Having said that, caution needs to be advised and heeded. Pictures can be perfect, but politics isn’t. Canadian journalists need to get over how hot their new prime minister and his family are. Trudeau hugging pandas doesn’t warrant asking “Are the Trudeaus the cuddliest Canadian family of all time?” And do we really need additional widespread coverage of his attendance at the pride parade five months before it’s due to take place, when it was already announced at the end of last year? Maclean’s 60-second interviews were fun to watch, but where are the investigations on fiscal policy, or follow-ups on MMIW and other campaign announcements?

At some point the celebration of our picture-perfect prime minister and his government needs to end, and journalists have to go back to basics. Make us happy, but keep us informed.

“Is it Fateeema?” asked two editors interviewing me in a boardroom much too big for a three-person meeting. I tried to impress them with three story ideas: something about transit, something about local politics and something about immigration. They asked follow-up questions about the third one—How did I think of the story? What are the main issues? How would the story come together?—even though I thought the second was better developed and delivered.

To read more, please visit our online special.

Follow the conversation #whydiversity. 

A StatsCan report released on February 15, 2016 shows how different age groups in Canada consume news and current affairs, and I don’t believe it’s fully accurate.

If it is to be believed, then the most popular medium to consume news by those over 35 years is television, who are also leading in newspaper and magazine consumption, as shown in the graph below. The main source of news, according to the data collected in 2013, for young Canadians is the internet and, surprisingly, television. 

Yes, apparently, reality television hosted by the Peter Mansbridges of the country is still something we all watch, including those of us who have grown up with a phone in our hands and a computer screen not too far away. Also, who listens to news radio outside of a car? And if the approximately 45 percent of young Canadians who listen to radio news have cars, where can I get one?

The statistics don’t make sense.

Other reports claim that television news is dying, while this one says it’s thriving. Part of the problem is that we’re not aware of the way the questions were framed in this survey. Does television include video news found on social media? Are podcasts part of the radio category of this survey? Does it count if you’re reading the “newspapers” online? (Because, seriously, who gets newspapers? I saw one in the Review office a week ago. It was weird.)

The survey also found that 21 percent of young Canadians “rarely or never followed the news,” up from 11 percent in 2003. The reality this statement doesn’t capture is that the act of “following the news” has changed significantly from reading one paper or watching one broadcast channel to reading news in bits and pieces via shared links and trends. It might not “feel” like news, but “21 percent” doesn’t seem to capture this activity. Just look at the statistics for Buzzfeed, which were released a few days after the survey. Video traffic is high, content traffic is high, and it can’t all be easily explained.

We’re so busy trying to track progress and change in the Canadian journalism industry that we forget the value of numbers is only as good as our observations of where they are fluctuating. The government has decided it will start to look into exactly that: media concentration, its impact on local news reporting and how digital media fits into the whole picture. We should be doing it ourselves.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the survey—and, arguably, the most worrying—is that only 40 percent of Canadians surveyed said they have confidence in the media. Maybe, it’s time to turn our focus on this number and let the others fall into place automatically.Good journalism, after all, does well regardless of medium, publisher or byline. When we improve our audience’s confidence in us, we’ll increase in viewers, readers and shares. It’s a domino effect waiting to happen, as long we focus on the right number.

“Should the government get involved?”

It’s a question that’s been floating around ever since Canadian journalism decided to spiral down into a black hole of unemployment and goodbye columns. The argument: the loss of print media will create a void where important stories will go, along with the very basis of democracy—accessible information and accountability. And while the Paul Godfreys of the industry don’t seem to care, government and journalism have always been implicitly tied together in an “it’s complicated” relationship—they need us to inform voters; we need them to make news.

The government should get involved, say many, or at least start an investigation to inquire into the ethical nature of this black hole. “The crisis in journalism is too important to be left to a laissez-faire approach,” says Lawrence Martin in a column for The Globe and Mail. “What good is a new voting system if the voters don’t have the information on which to make an informed decision?”

Yet, at the same time, “the Internet has blown away whatever feeble ideological reeds underpinned the leftist view of corporate control of newspapers as contraptions of power,” writes Terence Corcoran in a column for the National Post. To all the calls for government subsidies, Corcoran writes,”No thanks.”

Both sides of the argument are much too dramatic—cries of panic in moments of despair that have yet to end. First, there is no proof that government subsides can help a dying print news industry. Second, journalists are watchdogs, not lapdogs. Third, while the massive job cuts in newsrooms are nightmare-inducing, entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well, as can be seen in the work done by Buzzfeed Canada, Vice Canada and their friends south of the border. Lastly, when news has branched out to multiple formats and mediums, subsidies would only be hindering innovation and progress in an industry begging for it.

I’m not suggesting that the option for government subsidy be taken off the table completely. It’s just that there is an opportunity here for change—change that no one is considering. The industry is looking outward at a moment when it should be looking inward. What should be a light bulb for innovation is instead a dying fire signalling help from the government.

The RRJ is pleased to announce we will now capitalize “Black” and “Indigenous” in all of our stories, online and in print.

More details about how and why we made this choice will be featured in our upcoming print issue, which will be out in March 2016.

Dear readers,

After more than a year of questions and discussion about the future of the Ryerson Review of Journalism, our plan’s building blocks are in place. It will be an audience-focused, audience-driven, audience-supported multiplatform magazine brand that continues to include an annual print edition, plus much more.

By audience, we mean you. But first, some background.

More than a year ago, I began asking colleagues what the magazine of the future would be like, how this should affect the Review, and how the magazine could become more sustainable given the flight of advertising dollars from print. These private questions quickly fuelled passionate public discussions, which hearteningly affirmed the Review’s importance to readers.

As I podcast, our engaging weekly newsletter, steady engagement on Twitter and the edgy blog you’re reading now. And it’s now clear that the mix should continue to include an annual print edition.

But the most central insight threaded through all the recent discussions and developments is that a successful magazine today is a multidimensional brand that enjoys a dynamic relationship with its audience community. It is neither print-first nor digital-first: it is audience-first.

Our most important goal for the Review’s future is, therefore, a more intimate understanding of our audience community and its information needs. Starting this September, audience contact and analysis will be built in to each year’s masthead activities—so don’t be surprised if you get a call from a journalism student asking for your story ideas and suggestions for the magazine’s form and content.

To serve that audience well, the Review’s various manifestations will express complementary aspects of the magazine’s unified brand.  Our digital and print offerings need to grow more interrelated and interactive. They should be supplemented by other branded activity (such as events and merchandise), and electronic publication should eventually replace newsstand distribution for single-copy sales.

To make all this possible without diminishing the very brand we’re trying to expand, we need to support an equally high standard of reporting, writing and editing on every platform, and to increase the number of students bringing diverse skills and interests to both editorial and publishing activities.

All of this will cost more money, not less. Even in a period of austerity in funding for post-secondary education, Ryerson will continue to invest heavily in instruction, technology and support for the Review, primarily because it’s a serious asset for students’ career preparedness. And the vigorous support expressed for the Review, on this blog and elsewhere, suggests that its audience members stand ready to add their support.

If that includes you, you can prove it now by subscribing to the print edition, whose cover price will be increased to reflect its costs, and pledging a gift that expresses the level of your support.

Students, too, will play a part in the sustainability plan. Each future masthead will be given a set publishing budget and will make its own decisions on how to grow and spend that resource, replicating the kind of entrepreneurial sensibility that drives a successful niche magazine today.

I will spare you the many details involved in implementing the above ideas, but be assured that our eyes are firmly on the prize of a growing presence for the Review as a keen eye on the dynamic landscape of Canadian journalism, in partnership with J-Source, which is now housed in the RRJ editorial suite.

As always, my colleagues and I welcome your suggestions and questions on any of the above. You’re our core audience, so please consider yourself promoted to Editorial Director and Co-Publisher, effective immediately.

Ivor Shapiro

Chair: Ryerson School of Journalism

Publisher: Ryerson Review of Journalism

Offleash, the Review’s podcast created by senior editor Viviane Fairbank and multimedia editors Allison Baker and Eternity Martis, is now on iTunes.

In honour of this, we made a list of some of our favourite podcasts:

1. all songs considered by NPR
2. Stuff Mom Never Told You by How Stuff Works
3. The Backline – An Improve Podcast
4. Unreserved by CBC
5. Mystery Show by Gimlet Media
6. How my mind came back to life – and no one knew by TEDTalks audio
7. Rantin’ and Ravin’ with Yamaneika and Friends
8. 99% Invisible
9. The Next Chapter by CBC

Subscribe to Offleash on iTunes today to keep up with our analysis of the issues affecting the Canadian journalism industry. New episodes come out every other Wednesday at 3.33 p.m.

Dear Canadian journalists,

It’s time we have a serious talk. Yes, you are in trouble.

It’s not you, it’s the Paul Godfreys of the world. They have pushed a noble profession closer and closer to falling into a black void of unemployment and no value, the Mount Doom for our seemingly cursed pens (or keyboards, if you want to be accurate). One overpaid CEO to rule them all. One overpaid CEO to save them. One overpaid CEO to take them all out and in the darkness fire them.

At some point, the epic saga about the survival of journalism became overburdened by the weight of our empty wallets. We stopped fighting back, or, at least, we became complacent in accepting the ruling iron fist of money. We mourn our lost brothers and sisters in arms. We write about it, we rant about it, we scream it from the depths of the Twitterverse. We just haven’t done anything about it.

Journalism is not dead, because news can never die. It has been shared long before ill-fated financial aims merged with the informative superpowers of the newsroom. We’ve forgotten that we still hold the pens (I mean, keyboards), and with that we can figure out a way to survive, and thrive.

We can only do that if there’s belief and hope–idealistic terms for the most part, but a lot has been built and done on these two abstract concepts. We’ve spent over a decade trying to retain these ideals, desperately navigating the murky waters to try and figure out why journalism is in trouble, what led it there and what to do to fix it.

I’m writing this from a journalism school among future journalists who believe that there is something invaluable journalism has to offer–stories, information, truth, analysis, depth, understanding. We wouldn’t be paying thousands of dollars of tuition (and student debt) if we didn’t believe that.

Over the past year, every class has started with a professor emphasizing the changing landscape of journalism. This isn’t done as a negative portrayal of the profession, but as a reality we need to accept and learn to navigate. It’s certainly a bleak reality, but, as a friend and fellow journalism student pointed out yesterday, “All industries shift and downsize and change and sometimes grow.” Where there are ups, there are also downs; fluctuations, after all, are a natural economic occurrence, one the journalism industry is not immune to.

There is a future of journalism. More importantly, there is a present of journalism. Instead of crying wolf on the death of our professional identities, let’s figure out a way to rebuild. It’s time to stop talking about our woes, buy some bandages and a pair of crutches, and fight harder to tell the news.

With the warmest of regards,

Paul Godfrey’s next target

The former hierarchies of the journalism industry have crumbled by the weight of the digital realm, to be replaced by blurry parallel relations between journalists and readers.

The result is evident in the record 10,600 readers who participated in the Toronto Star‘s annual “You be the editor” survey. Administered by the Star’s public editor, Kathy English, the “highly unscientific, overly simplistic survey” served to provide insight into readers’ perspectives on the judgments made on to-publish-or-not-to-publish over the past year.

For example, 60 percent of readers voted that a cartoon presenting Toronto Mayor John Tory in bare-butt pants should have been published, which English now also agrees with. Fifty-five percent of the readers would have also made the decision to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed. English disagrees: “it would be offensive and hurtful to Muslims in this community.”

Online journalism, in its many forms, has created a system of interaction that enables and encourages collaboration between reader and editor to discover, distribute and discuss the elements that create the best possible version of a news story. Today, the function of readers has surpassed that of being an audience, with technology fuelling their willingness to be heard and their capacity to be listened to, even on core matters of journalism ethics that the industry continues to debate.

These include the examples English collated in her survey, especially those about issues relating to mental health stories, as shown in the image below.

“Neither of th[e]se references is in line with media best practices for writing about mental health,” writes English, “and, to my mind, neither should have been published in the Star.” I agree.

In fairness, English does recognize that “newsroom debate about what to publish is always deeper and more wide-ranging than what this light exercise in journalistic decision-making can depict.”

Yet in the digital age of journalism, what is considered good, thorough and balanced journalistic practice is often at odds with reader perceptions and expectations. That’s okay if journalists are aware that, while the hierarchy may have crumbled, they still make the final call on how to best tell the story to the reader, who can only play the role of editor. Survey results show that readers were aligned with the newsroom’s judgments in 12 of the 18 matters in question. I’m unsure what to conclude from that.

A day before the survey results were published, Mitch Potter, the Star’s foreign affairs writer, wrote how the decision to publish certain images of Syrian kids in conflict zones is important in defining whether the reader will perceive them with empathy or as furthering propaganda. “You, friends, are now the filter, every bit—if not more so—than those of us who used to be,” concludes Potter.

That’s a scary thought. The power of the reader is strong. The force of journalism needs to find a way to stay in line with, if not above, that.