Katrina Eschner – Ryerson Review of Journalism :: The Ryerson School of Journalism http://rrj.ca Canada's Watchdog on the watchdogs Sat, 30 Apr 2016 14:26:17 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Don’t Stop the Presses http://rrj.ca/dont-stop-the-presses/ http://rrj.ca/dont-stop-the-presses/#respond Thu, 21 Apr 2016 13:54:31 +0000 http://rrj.ca/?p=8845 Don’t Stop the Presses This could have been the Review’s last print issue.]]> Don’t Stop the Presses

This could have been the Review’s last print issue.

In the fall, our publisher, Ivor Shapiro, asked the new masthead to research what the School of Journalism should do with the magazine. Going online-only was a definite possibility.

From a financial perspective, what many readers love about magazines—holding the paper, turning the pages—are liabilities. It’s not just about content: sitting down with a magazine is its own experience. Certainly that was the attitude of many Review supporters when rumblings about spiking the print edition surfaced last spring.

We advised Shapiro to keep the print magazine, but as the centrepiece of a broader strategy that also emphasized digital. He listened.

To show him this was more than just talk, we invested significant time in producing digital content and improving the website.

Now, rrj.ca extends our ability to cover Canadian journalism. This year’s masthead produced podcasts, a news and commentary blog, short online features and a weekly newsletter. While working on the diversity package that appears in this magazine, we realized there was much more to say. So we created a special web page devoted to extending the conversation. And if you read this issue’s stories online, you’ll find they include interactive elements that let you go deeper.

Challenging as it is to predict the future, it’s safe to say the Review is changing. Being on the internet doesn’t cheapen our work—it strengthens it. Being in print doesn’t make our product old-fashioned—it makes it authoritative. Magazines are about thoughtful, well-researched features that give context beyond what a same-day post can do. They’re the long take on events. That’s where the analog experience still has a place.

As we learned this year, it’s hard to describe what a magazine is today. The Ryerson Review of Journalism is the book you hold in your hands, the website you visit, the social media you engage with. It doesn’t exist in a single medium, and it doesn’t need to.

That’s an intimidating prospect and a challenge to execute. We’ve given it our best. And we hope you’ll like what you see.

]]> http://rrj.ca/dont-stop-the-presses/feed/ 0 Out of Touch http://rrj.ca/out-of-touch/ http://rrj.ca/out-of-touch/#respond Thu, 24 Mar 2016 13:26:05 +0000 http://rrj.ca/?p=8481 Out of Touch The Toronto Star is delivering the newspaper on tablet, but its audience may be on a different screen]]> Out of Touch

Turn on your newspaper—and be prepared for a surprise. According to a November 2015 Toronto Star article by publisher John Cruickshank, the Star Touch tablet app is “the most dynamic, immersive and interactive approach to screen-based storytelling in the English-speaking world.”

But just what does that mean? Say a story on a recent Toronto Blue Jays win catches your eye: tap on the glass of your screen, and it appears before you, as if by magic. No more page numbers; no more flipping pulp like a chump. And unlike flimsy newsprint, your Android or iOS tablet is bright and, yes, dynamic. The article you select might even have a video with sources telling you their stories in their own words. This is the newspaper of today and tomorrow, if the Star has its way.

After 124 years in the business of print, the Star has finally shifted its focus to be screen-first. Its new flagship product, Star Touch, hit the App Store on September 15, 2015, followed by an Android edition at the end of November. Earlier that month, Cruickshank assembled the newsroom to announce the iPad edition had reached 100,000 downloads. In a radio interview, editor Michael Cooke said the Star is “doing for newspapers what Cirque du Soleil did for the circus.” With more than $14 million invested before the app even launched—in software, new hires, training for existing employees, market research—hype is inevitable.

“We are entering a period of fabulous life-changing non-stop revolution,” Cooke wrote in a January 2015 memo, promising the tablet app would be “successful both journalistically and financially.” The newsroom at 1 Yonge Street does look much different than it did a year ago, but the target of Cooke’s rampant adjectivalism isn’t so different from what his organization has been turning out for over a century. It might be made using technology from La Presse, rather than on a printing press, but Star Touch is a lot like a newspaper. And the Star’s newstablet may not be different enough from its print product to provoke the financial and cultural changes Cooke promised his employees.

 

Star Touch might be the most immersive, revolutionary circus in the English-speaking world, but that doesn’t mean the Star has completely abandoned its roots. “We maintain our commitment to print, because it’s got a strong base,” says Ali Rahnema, who was the product lead for Star Touch from the idea’s inception in early 2014 until November 2015. But print will continue its decline, he says, and the newsroom’s focus has changed to respond to that financial shift. Print will no longer be the default medium for reporters and editors. Reporters now write with the tablet in mind, which means approaching stories on the app’s terms.

Perhaps the biggest departure from tradition is the layout of stories. Take a feature from last December, when Star Touch revisited readers’ 2014 proposals for improving Toronto. The story uses the “dossier,” one of the seven storytelling methods that both Star Touch and La Presse+ apps rely on. It starts with a splash page, a magazine-style opening screen that illustrates the three ideas discussed on day one of the week-long feature. There’s a headline and a subhead, but no other text: a total of 31 words, not counting the navigation tabs along the top.

Tapping the next tab reveals a scrollable column of text, a photograph and a grade for the city’s progress on the idea. Access to affordable daycare earned a “B,” for example. Beside the grade is a grey-and-white dot, a pop-up for more information. The third tab’s layout is a mirror image of the second, but with a gallery in place of the static photo.

The app’s seven storytelling methods—single screen, dossier, vertical dossier, pop-up, gallery, anchored scroll and clothesline— give journalists the tools to report in ways that take advantage of the digital format. But their combined effect is patchy: there’s no way to get a comprehensive visual sense of how to read a story and, unlike many digital reading experiences, no indication of how long a piece might take to read. To parse a whole issue, readers navigate a bewildering array of videos, galleries, maps and scrollable text elements. But if they manage that, they can go deep on a story. For patient readers, the Star claims the app contains about 15 percent more content than the newspaper.

Unlike many touch screen products, the number of ways to manipulate the tablet edition is limited. You can scroll, swipe and tap, but you can’t zoom in, which would be an improvement over paper. Instead, to isolate a storytelling element, you use finger and thumb in a pinch-and-flick motion that causes it to pop out. In the case of a text column, it fills the screen in a jarringly contextless window. Star Touch is brightly coloured and image-heavy, but not all images necessarily add to the stories. Some of the markers of print are missing, too. A byline, for instance, often appears with just “Star Touch” under the name. It is not immediately clear whether the writer is, say, a movie critic or an education reporter.

Although the app is free to anyone with a tablet that supports the software, the failure or success of Star Touch depends on gaining enough users to attract the advertisers that the platform needs to fund its operation. Before the current version came out in January, 1,424 people had reviewed Touch in Apple’s App Store. “Too slick for its own good,” reads a one-star review (there were 117 of those), but over 1,000 reviewers gave it five stars. Over in the Google Play store, 114 reviewers gave it an average rating of 3.8 out of 5. Main complaints? Tough to navigate and not enough content.

 

It’s hard to replicate the simplicity of print in a digital form,” says Roger Fidler, a renowned expert in tablet innovation. Speaking over Skype from his Missouri home, the recently retired news designer says the tablet is a natural successor to print. But he doesn’t think Star Touch or La Presse+ have succeeded as the pulp-killing “portable, flat-screen display” he first imagined in 1981 as the future of newspapers.

Fidler’s more-developed 1994 idea of what a tablet would look like formed part of Samsung’s defence in 2011, when Apple unsuccessfully sued the company for alleged patent infringement related to the iPad. The 2010 iPad launch made legacy news organizations take notice. A tablet news app is aesthetically satisfying and more attractive to advertising than the open web.

But such apps have fared poorly in English-speaking Canada. Postmedia’s “four-platform strategy,” intended to bring news to its audience on different devices throughout the day, launched in May 2014 at the Ottawa Citizen. The evening newsmagazine that formed the integral tablet part of the strategy lasted only until October 2015. The Globe and Mail shied away from the La Presse tablet-first model, instead rolling out a suite of tablet and phone apps as part of a broader digital strategy reliant on multiple platforms. It also didn’t try the evening newsmagazine that failed for Postmedia.

Brian Gorman, author of Crash to Paywall: Canadian Newspapers and the Great Disruption, thinks he knows what the missing piece was for tablet editions like Postmedia’s. He imagines that people can’t see themselves represented in tablet editions. Interaction between the audience and the publication is something that hasn’t been mastered yet. If tablet editions can’t bring their print and web readers along with them, they’re no good to news organizations, because advertisers go where the audience is, and the revenue goes with them.

After launching its tablet app in 2013, La Presse had the success that has eluded English-language Canadian news organizations. It seemed to find the silver bullet that others had been seeking: a $40-million investment led to the launch of an app that succeeded both financially and demographically, leading to a growing, younger readership and a digital platform that actually pays for newsroom staff. Star Touch is another milestone for the Quebec paper: licencing its software to an English-language news outlet. La Presse intends to continue marketing its software to other newsrooms. The Star did market research through the same firm as the Montreal company, but the potential audience La Presse+ caters to is different from the Star’s—it’s isolated by language, for one.

La Presse’s transformation from print product to tech company hasn’t been without internal friction, though. La Presse laid off 158 people last September. Publisher Guy Crevier told employees that 100 of those were directly related to the decision to stop printing weekday editions.

And ample evidence shows that English-speaking adults are moving away from tablets. ComScore’s 2015 mobile app report notes that in the U.S., smartphones “account for the vast majority of total mobile and mobile app time spent.” Mario García, an American newspaper and magazine designer who worked on the Citizen for iPad, now believes the immediacy of smartphones trumps the interactivity of tablets. In an October 2015 blog post for Poynter, he argued that tablet editions are “not for every market.” They need to include a mix of news and features that are also accessible on a smartphone.


Listen: Editor Kat Eschner and senior editor Viviane Fairbank discuss the intricacies of writing about technology

 

For a newspaper that prides itself on getting the story first, it’s strange that Cooke declared 2015—five years after the iPad debuted—the “year of the tablet.” With Star Touch, the Star hopes to bring many of its print readers to tablet—in 2014, it had an average weekday circulation of 134,266—while attracting younger readers who never formed a daily print-reading habit. More than that, Star Touch was about deliberately choosing a digital strategy for the news organization. Cooke declined to speak with the Review. Rahnema became the Star’s chief operating officer for digital in July 2014 and drove the tablet project along with Cooke and Cruickshank. About a month after Star Touch premiered, Rahnema said it would take 18 months to know for sure if it would be a success. He maintained that the tablet edition is really about encouraging reporters and editors to adopt a screen-first mentality. “The payoff of that,” he said, “is beyond the revenue this project will generate.”

If you’re wondering why many years of website ownership hasn’t disposed the Star to think about screens first, you aren’t alone. Former reporter Joel Eastwood tweeted a critique of Star Touch last October. The future of journalism, he declared, lies in “delivering accurate news wherever it happens, to whatever device the reader wants it on.” Before accepting a job at The Wall Street Journal, Eastwood was part of the Star’s “data viz” team, one example of the paper investing in its website. The designers built interactive maps and graphics and special websites to host big projects like Michelle Shephard’s interview with Omar Khadr in May 2015. As Eastwood noted with some pride, the web components he and his colleagues designed could be viewed on “every possible device you could display things on.”

Except Star Touch isn’t web-based. Its stories don’t change throughout the day, much like a traditional newspaper. Breaking news stories aren’t fully integrated into the app, but can be read on a pull-out tab, as long as you have web access.

The Star has put vast resources into the platform. With such a strong focus placed on the tablet, web clearly isn’t a priority. The paper’s site hasn’t managed to gain a new audience, but the Star has never given the site the resources it gave to the tablet app. Management took down the website’s paywall in April 2015 when new, younger subscribers didn’t bite. With Star Touch, the Star is choosing to focus on screen-based storytelling geared for a product that more strongly parallels its traditional strength—print news— than it does the web. Eastwood believes this is a lost opportunity.

But Rahnema thinks the payoff of a digital product that can bring in big money is worth the risk of committing to Star Touch. That’s over the potential rewards of focusing on a more flexible platform like the web. Where print’s ad dollars turn into dimes on the desktop, he says, “we’re now trading those dimes for pennies, or maybe nickels, going into the smartphone.” Star Touch is an attempt to reverse that trend. The Star hopes its ads will produce results like La Presse+, which is funded entirely by advertising.

Rahnema also maintains the experience reporters gain with Star Touch will prepare them to “build a bridge to whatever’s next” as part of a longer-term digital transition. But it’s hard to say if a product that is so similar to print in terms of its static content can do enough to make its newsroom screen-first.

 

Star Touch could have looked a lot different, and happened a lot sooner, if a newsroom project from six years ago had been approved. A committee including reporter-photographer Jim Rankin tried to create a response to the iPad. What they developed shared many traits with La Presse+, says Rankin, currently assigned to the features team. Kate Collins, who was the project head but no longer works for the company, says that “it was a fairly extensive effort with over a year of work,” referring to the five- to 10-person team who worked on the project. Collins describes a process that initially spanned Torstar properties and became a Star-specific idea with storytelling models that exploited the tablet’s difference from print. At its heart, that version was meant to be a newsmagazine, like Star Touch.

The committee named it the Star Bulldog, an old newspaper term for an early edition. But the idea never made it off the newsroom floor—too expensive and too risky, according to Rankin. He thinks the paper probably made the right decision. But it was a significant investment of time and money for something that never happened, further illustrating the Star’s allergic reaction to digital innovation.

Five years later, Rankin and his colleagues are now coming to terms with the Star Bulldog 2.0. Or, more accurately, L’Étoile Bouledogue 2.0. Putting La Presse+ side by side with Star Touch demonstrates how they’re nearly identical, language aside. The Star’s approach to adopting La Presse’s software was to follow the French-language company’s workflow closely. But those conventions haven’t all sat well at the Star, and its pursuit of a good way to use Star Touch has left the newsroom playing Whack-A-Mole.

Traditionally, information in one storytelling element shouldn’t  be duplicated in others. That standard has proved challenging for the Star. It means that a story contained in a video shouldn’t be mentioned anywhere in the text, but it’s a rule the newsroom is learning how to break.

A related convention the Star struggled with at the start was “one-touch editing.” That’s the practice of editing a story one time for all platforms, prioritizing the needs of the tablet. Star Touch favours text in short chunks and visual elements, including photo galleries, short videos and pop-up explainers. Other platforms can’t accommodate all of those elements. If it sounds like readers in print and online might have been missing something, that’s because it’s possible they were.

The Star team has begun re-editing some pieces for print and web. It’s a lot of work for journalists and editors. For instance, last September, the investigative team “player-coach” Kevin Donovan and reporters Jayme Poisson and Jesse McLean ignored La Presse’s norm by writing and editing separate versions of “Breaking Badge,” the first investigative series to debut on tablet. Speaking in October, Donovan said they weren’t going to try to do that again: too complicated and too many opportunities to introduce errors.

These conventions make sense for La Presse, since it wanted all of its readers to adopt the tablet edition. But the Star maintains a commitment to its print product, and these La Presse conventions may not allow enough flexibility to report well on both mediums, according to one Canadian newsroom leader. He says if the Star was smart, it would commit fully to Star Touch and devote resources to funnelling its print readers into the product. He is skeptical that the organization has the resources to continue working indefinitely on so many platforms.

And despite the millions of dollars that the Star spent on storytelling devices, when Star Touch launched, one thing you couldn’t do was tell a simple narrative. Rankin says the paper has now developed “simple screens” that have a picture as a background with straight text on top. Like everything else in the app, getting through these stories requires a lot of scrolling.

Some long stories, including the investigative team’s series on police misconduct, lend themselves well to the Star Touch treatment. After all, it’s easier to tell a long story with many different elements in small pieces, including text, images and case histories. And Donovan says his team was able to fit in more examples of crooked cops: eight on Star Touch, instead of a maximum of four in print.

Still, Donovan acknowledges, the story contains images that don’t relate directly to the specific officers in the story. Less than a month after the launch, he said he was spending a lot of time negotiating with designers and planning the story in its design phase. That’s gotten easier over time.

 

When it started working on Star Touch, the Star hired 70-odd new employees. They share the fifth-floor newsroom with existing staff. Although their number has dropped, the largely youthful tablet hires work in a dedicated area, separated from reception by a glass wall. The designers face the low cubicles where traditional reporters toil, but their embankment of shiny iMacs is conceptual worlds away.

The labour practices that brought those new people onto the payroll are also a departure from traditional methods. The details of these new contracts were negotiated with the union in 2014 following friction between management and Unifor Local 87-M. Back then, the newspaper was looking to hire eight digital journalists, with the intent of paying them wages lower than entry-level Star journalists.

The union negotiated those and subsequent hires for the tablet at a lower rate. Local 87-M understood that the company was making a bet on Star Touch that could benefit its members. But when the contracts end this December, the union hopes to negotiate permanent positions for the new people that the paper wants to keep.

In an unpopular memo, Cooke and managing editor Jane Davenport informed the newsroom that the lower rate was competitive with the pay for similar positions at Rogers, The Huffington Post or Facebook. “Personally, I thought that was not a great comparison,” says Rankin, who is also one of five union stewards, “because at the Toronto Star, we compare ourselves to The New York Times or The Globe and Mail or CBC.”

“Our journalists are craftspeople,” says Liz Marzari, former unit chair for the Star local. She still works at Unifor but previously worked in the paper’s ad department, which disappeared when the Star moved its advertising to Metroland. The Star Touch hires deserve the same respect as cub reporters, she says, even though their role is new. The company and the union are both hoping more people can become permanent without incident. But if Star Touch doesn’t do as well as hoped, some or all of those people could lose their jobs, as 10 contract employees working on the tablet did in January.

 

 

Published each day at 5:30 a.m., Star Touch offers a curated selection of stories. Each edition takes a whole day to produce, in part because the process mimics print: journalists feed information to designers, and the whole thing is packaged and shipped to the consumer via tablet. It’s a process that brings comfort to anyone who thinks about news in column inches, but it represents a different kind of risk. If tablet storytelling is a dead end, the Star will be a few years behind other legacy news organizations in digital development. Meanwhile, the outlets the Star considers its competition are taking a more elastic approach to going digital. In the tech world, failure is not only tolerated, but encouraged. The goal is to experiment, build, measure, test and learn.

That’s how La Presse created its soft are in the first place: behaving like a start-up. It talked to readers and changed the app based on their feedback. What La Presse created was both a marketable software product and a tablet newspaper that has been successful where others have failed.

While still working out the digital kinks, the Star has mastered one tried-and-true start-up tactic: bluster and hyperbole. Most dynamic. Transforming the circus. Fabulous revolution. The best storyteller on planet Earth.

The Star better hope it masters the other skills of successful start-ups soon. Because, whatever is next, what it has right now doesn’t solve its problems.

 

Epilogue: No Silver Bullet

When I started working on this story, Star Touch was still an idea, at least outside the Toronto Star’s offices. The advertisements full of multi-coloured arrows that seemingly papered the Toronto transit system after September 15 had not yet appeared.

Star Touch’s advertising has changed since then. And two of this story’s central characters from the Star—Ali Rahnema and, soon, John Cruickshank—have left or have announced they are leaving. When Rahnema left, he told me over Facebook that his parting from the Star was “very amicable … based on strategic differences.” He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t press. When Cruickshank announced that he was leaving, he told Canadian Press that the Star’s next publisher needed to be “a digital native,” describing himself as “a digital visitor.”

Cruickshank’s news broke on the Star’s website on March 16, the day before we received print issues of our magazine at the Review office. My story was outdated by the time it ran, but I always knew that was going to happen. Two weeks previously, Torstar Corporation posted lacklustre fourth quarter results, and David Holland, Torstar’s president and chief executive officer (who is now also slated to replace Cruickshank as interim publisher), told investors that the newspaper and its parent company were shooting to break even on Touch in 2017, noting that the tablet app’s audience pickup was slower than they’d expected, given the example set by La Presse+.

I am a digital native, at least generationally. Touch never made sense to me, although in some ways I understood its appeal. I like editions. I like curated, finishable products. And I think I’m not the only Millennial who feels that way. But I just never saw Touch having the same mass appeal as print or the web, for reasons I discussed in this piece. I still don’t.

Still, it’s only been around for six months, some time from the year-and-a-half that Rahnema suggested would be required for the app to prove out. I have no real idea what the digital news world will look like in 2017, never mind the Torstar Corporation. But I question if the Star will think Touch was worth all they paid for it.

]]> http://rrj.ca/out-of-touch/feed/ 0 Why did this Toronto Sun columnist single out a Review editor? http://rrj.ca/why-did-this-toronto-sun-columnist-single-out-a-review-editor/ http://rrj.ca/why-did-this-toronto-sun-columnist-single-out-a-review-editor/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2015 16:55:44 +0000 http://rrj.ca/?p=7244 Ryerson Review of Journalism graphic It’s always nice to get a little press—but not if it means one of our staff is singled out for groundless abuse. The Review’s blog this year has taken on controversial issues. Under the skillful handling of blog editors Fatima Syed and Davide Mastracci, we’ve critiqued coverage of tragedies in Beirut and Paris, questioned journalists’ [...]]]> Ryerson Review of Journalism graphic

It’s always nice to get a little press—but not if it means one of our staff is singled out for groundless abuse.

The Review’s blog this year has taken on controversial issues. Under the skillful handling of blog editors Fatima Syed and Davide Mastracci, we’ve critiqued coverage of tragedies in Beirut and Paris, questioned journalists’ varied accounts of #WelcomeRefugees and supported Vice when it was persecuted by the RCMP. And that’s just last month.

There’s plenty of grist for the mill. Alas, it was Mastracci’s online feature story that attracted the ire of Toronto Sun columnist Lorrie Goldstein:

Goldstein’s assertion in this tweet is wrong. The GIF that Batra, Fatah and Hassan appear in was intended to illustrate our point that many Canadian columnists, though not all, are middle-aged white men. The story is online here.

Mastracci’s fellow blog editor, Syed, neither wrote nor edited this story. Online feature stories are handled differently from blog posts.

But Goldstein’s colleague Tarek Fatah launched a personal attack against Syed in response to Goldstein’s tweet:

Fatah’s attempt to bully her by calling her “fake”—something we still don’t understand—is nonsensical. Doing so while in a position of authority as a columnist is deplorable.

The irony of Fatah’s tweet is that by singling out one of the visibly non-white people on the masthead, he is demonstrating the importance of the subjects we write about. If this incident has taught us anything, it’s that we need to keep writing.

 

]]> http://rrj.ca/why-did-this-toronto-sun-columnist-single-out-a-review-editor/feed/ 1 Chatelaine Rejoins the Fray http://rrj.ca/chatelaine-rejoins-the-fray/ http://rrj.ca/chatelaine-rejoins-the-fray/#respond Wed, 11 Nov 2015 23:43:44 +0000 http://rrj.ca/?p=6849 Chatelaine appears on a newsstand alongside women's magazines Heather McIntosh was cleaning out her grandmother’s house when she found some pages from an old issue of Chatelaine that had been used to seal a painting into its frame. The University of Ottawa master’s student was captivated. McIntosh says while it’s easy to label the magazine as exclusively recipes and cosmetics, these pages from [...]]]> Chatelaine appears on a newsstand alongside women's magazines

Heather McIntosh was cleaning out her grandmother’s house when she found some pages from an old issue of Chatelaine that had been used to seal a painting into its frame. The University of Ottawa master’s student was captivated. McIntosh says while it’s easy to label the magazine as exclusively recipes and cosmetics, these pages from the late 1920s or early ʽ30s seemed radical for their time. McIntosh studied Chatelaine for her thesis and spent months in the National Archives poring over issues from 1928 to 2010. In past issues, advertisements for beauty and homecare products sat companionably beside recipes and how-to articles, in addition to lengthy features about serious issues. “The contradictions,” she says, “were just absolutely crazy.”

Those contradictions persist because Canadian women haven’t stopped wanting serious journalism in the mix. And that’s what Lianne George, Chatelaine’s sixth editor since 2004, wants to give them. A decade of high turnover has left observers wondering if the venerable title is still relevant, but George’s appointment comes at an ideal time: conversations about feminism are flourishing online, and she wants the magazine to join the fray.

Chatelaine is one of the most widely read Canadian magazines, with a paid circulation of almost 540,000 and a readership of 3.1 million. In the 1960s and ʽ70s, widely regarded as the magazine’s feminist heyday, editor Doris Anderson ran articles about controversial issues such as child abuse and still maintained the wide circulation, which meant the publisher Maclean-Hunter seldom questioned the magazine’s content. “As long as the magazine was selling, she could do whatever she wanted,” says Rona Maynard, who was editor from 1994 to 2004. “Those days are long gone.”

Maynard should know. She was editor through the magazine’s sale to Rogers Publishing, a notable revamp and the launch of Chatelaine’s first website. After she left, Rogers wasn’t sure what the magazine should be, and that uncertainty was reflected in the short tenures of a parade of editors. At the same time, thin margins meant there was little tolerance for anything less than magic and new editors, some of them with no editor-in-chief experience, were subject to Rogers’s shifting standards. The longest serving editor since Maynard was Jane Francisco, at just four years, who left for Good Housekeeping at the end of 2013. “Very beautiful service is Jane’s strong suit,” says Maynard, and her Chatelaine was beautiful and light. Her successor, Karine Ewart, stayed only 17 months before George succeeded her in June 2015.

Choosing George signals that Rogers finally has a clear vision for Chatelaine. With a career that includes Maclean’s, Canadian Business and most recently Toronto alt-weekly The Grid, she is a strong choice for editor. Although she hasn’t finalized her plans yet, they clearly don’t centre around “beautiful service.” The magazine will continue with its blend of content, but George says it’s a living thing and readers can expect it to evolve: “Chatelaine has been around for almost 90 years, and it’s served a lot of purposes over the decades—domestic bible, community hub and under Doris Anderson it led the charge on a lot of women’s rights issues.”

Now George wants it to join today’s conversation about women’s issues. One of her recent moves was hiring Sarah Boesveld from the National Post, where she was known for her sharp takes on the issues of the day across platforms, as well as her thoughtful features in the paper. George wanted her newsy approach for the online site, but Boesveld is also looking forward to doing longer pieces for the print magazine.

Although George is clearly working on a politically engaged Chatelaine, some readers may not be ready. Carol Toller’s 2,500-word profile of Justin Trudeau in October 2014, for example, generated a lot of criticism. Post columnist Robyn Urback called the profile, which took readers inside Trudeau’s domestic life, “proof positive” that the Liberal leader doesn’t take women voters seriously. After all, he granted exclusive access to “a women’s lifestyle magazine” (emphasis not added) that wasn’t going to ask the serious questions but would zero in on “the family, the photos, the charm.” Now-defunct Sun News called it a “puff piece.” George says the pushback to Toller’s “smart, critical piece” reflects old perceptions of the magazine. And Trudeau’s win, and the part his family played in the last weeks of the campaign, suggests the profile had merit. “But at the time,” she says, “there was a perception that Chatelaine doesn’t cover politics in this way.”

And there was nothing puffy about the Q&As that ran in September with Trudeau, Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair and Elizabeth May. The magazine asked the federal leaders controversial questions on issues ranging from ISIS to abortion. And when Canadians woke up on the morning after this year’s federal election, Boesveld had published a smart, snappy online roundup of election news that included how many women were elected and a snapshot of the magazine’s July 1972 cover, which featured Margaret Trudeau in white, holding the now-PM. More recently, Chatelaine marked the one-year anniversary of the day the Jian Ghomeshi scandal broke by interviewing seven women in journalism, law and activism.

Vanessa Milne, associate managing editor from 2007 to 2012, says the ability to curate feminism, cookery or beauty into a package is still one of the things that helps keep the magazine’s diverse readership.

George wants Chatelaine to be part of current political and cultural conversations about women’s rights. “At the same time,” she says, “we care about great, doable weeknight dinner recipes. It all lives together.” That combination kept the magazine alive in the past, and with George at the helm, Chatelaine just might be a “radical” read for historians 90 years from now.

]]> http://rrj.ca/chatelaine-rejoins-the-fray/feed/ 0 Much ado about endorsements http://rrj.ca/much-ado-about-endorsements/ http://rrj.ca/much-ado-about-endorsements/#respond Mon, 19 Oct 2015 13:00:50 +0000 http://rrj.ca/?p=6418 Globe and Mail editorial endorsement headline Election day is finally, finally upon us, but the longest campaign in Canadian history since 1872 didn’t end quietly for the country’s print newspapers. If anything, it ended nonsensically. Questions of who controls newspapers’ editorial voice haunted the final week of #elxn42 as print media outlets published their editorial board’s federal election choices. Some internet [...]]]> Globe and Mail editorial endorsement headline

Election day is finally, finally upon us, but the longest campaign in Canadian history since 1872 didn’t end quietly for the country’s print newspapers. If anything, it ended nonsensically.

Questions of who controls newspapers’ editorial voice haunted the final week of #elxn42 as print media outlets published their editorial board’s federal election choices. Some internet media, including the RRJ, questioned whether such endorsements are a practice worth keeping.

“For us, it seems a bit outdated,” said BuzzFeed Canada’s Emma Loop, while speaking to The Current on October 9. Although BuzzFeed does weigh in on particular issues, Loop said, the organization will “stay away from the partisan element” of politics by not endorsing a candidate.

Kathy English, public editor of the Toronto Star, was on The Current with Loop. She maintained that newspaper endorsements still have a place. “The Star is an institution that dates back over three centuries. Every day, it takes stands on issues that matter to the community,” said English. “It would be a cop-out not to do so in an election campaign.”

That morning, the Star published an editorial endorsing the Liberal Party of Canada. Two other Torstar papers, the Hamilton Spectator and the Waterloo Region Record, also endorsed the Liberals on October 15 and 17 respectively.

But it was the Postmedia endorsements on October 16 that made noise on Twitter as paper after paper in the national chain published an editorial endorsing the Conservative Party of Canada. The endorsement wasn’t by the editorial staff, however, as Edmonton Journal writer Paula Simons said in a tweet:

On Saturday, the National Post itself followed suit. Its editorial board’s pronouncement was also at odds with the opinions of columnists at the Post and other Postmedia holdings whose columns appeared on Friday and Saturday. Even Conrad Black himself weighed in, favouring a Liberal minority and referring to Stephen Harper as a “sadistic Victorian schoolmaster” who doesn’t know when to leave office. And one column was notable in its absence from the Saturday edition: that of Andrew Coyne, head of the Post’s editorial board.

According to Canadaland, Coyne’s column would have endorsed somebody other than the Conservatives, unlike the editorial endorsement he signed off on for the Post.  He has not spoken out on why his column did not appear, and his usually voluble Twitter feed has fallen silent — though Ricochet’s Ethan Cox noted that Coyne has disappeared in similar circumstances before.

UPDATE: Coyne has resigned from his post as editor

Numerous Postmedia properties were also notable for their front pages in the last days of the election campaign: full-page, bright yellow wrap ads from the Conservatives bashing the competition. The ads appeared on the covers of the Penticton Herald, Vancouver Sun, Calgary Sun, The Province, The London Free Press, Ottawa Citizen, and 24 Hours Toronto. Most were aimed at the Liberals, but the Penticton Herald ad targeted both the Liberals and NDP. Curiously, the Friday edition of 24 Hours Vancouver, also a Postmedia property, featured an NDP wrap ad. While it isn’t a new practice, one reporter noted that these ads were a step up from the norm.

Meanwhile, back at The Globe and Mail‘s offices, editor David Walmsley spent an hour fielding questions on Facebook about the paper’s unconventional endorsement of the Conservatives without endorsing party leader Stephen Harper. 

“The half-heartedness is a sign of the weakness of the political candidates,” Walmsley said in response to one questioner. “It would be great to find a clear, obvious winner the country could unite behind, but we don’t have that at the moment.”

In response to the Globe’s ambivalence, some Twitter users channeled their inner political humourist with the hashtag #MoreGlobeEndorsements.

Here at the RRJ, we endorse newspapers, but we’re on the fence about newspaper endorsements.

 

 

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