In the age of tiny attention spans and touch-screen mobile devices, news apps have deeply influenced the way we read and check the news. Aggregation apps like Flipboard and Zite, and ones from publications like the Toronto Star, La Presse or The Globe and Mail, are much more accessible and adaptable than print and broadcast news.

With the ability to modify our home feeds to deliver information whenever we want, these apps are fundamentally changing the way news is produced and what headlines and stories we see. Yet it seems that the more journalistic, newspaper-based news apps have a long way to go—their ratings on Apple’s App Store range from two to three stars out of five, with the aggregated, customizable apps rated much higher. Currently, the top news app in Canada is Flipboard, a “personal magazine” where you can keep up on the news, follow topics of interest and share stories, videos and photos. Flipboard has also recently acquired Zite, originally owned by CNN.

Although Flipboard is easy to navigate, the trending stories are sometimes filled with news about the Kardashians or “How to Look Better Naked.” The design and entertainment value is put first, and it filters out the most highly read stories while also taking into account your preferred topics. When hard journalism is put first, the design and reader experience seems to falter. Reviews on the CBC News and Globe apps say they crash easily or just simply don’t work well.

So what would the perfect news app look and feel like, from the perspective of a journalist?

Customizable and Smart
Most news aggregation apps have the ability to customize what news topics show up in your feed. However, it can get confusing scrolling through the jumble of headlines, where an article about puppies could precede a major technological or medical breakthrough. Plus, you have to constantly add new topics manually. The perfect news app would learn based off your social media interactions and every news article you read in the app. It would take note of which stories you read quickly or took your time with and adapt based on the number of views as well as whether a story was shared recently.

A Focus on Journalism
Journalists would have a say in the design, creation and management of the app. This would ensure a good mix of top stories going out every day, and there would be the option to follow any stories from newspapers, magazines and blogs. Although most apps use software and code to determine what stories you see, news organizations’ headlines would show up first, and link back to their original sites so it wouldn’t steal traffic away. There would be the ability to vote stories and topics down, so you could have the option to not see celebrity gossip even though it’s trending. Short videos and documentaries would be embedded into posts that connect directly with their related stories. Plus, there would be the option to save and watch them later.

Timelines
Like the app Timeline, which puts news into its historical context with original content displayed in a scrollable timeline, this news app would allow you to see all the related posts and stories from the past—weaving together stories for a greater understanding of the issue at hand. You could follow a news topic from when it was first written about and, through a well-designed timeline function, scroll through a collection of articles arranged by their publication dates. Journalists would write original content for the app, working on summaries and historical context for these news timelines, providing a better perspective of why the news is important or significant.

However, we must consider that app designers—like news organizations—have the power to make decisions that affect what their consumers see. Balancing news and clicks is an important ethical decision as well as a business one. Stories claiming they’ll make you sexier may appeal to a wider audience, but a strong news-driven app with friendly user experience may hit a currently untapped group of users. Journalism needs to function under specific ethical standards. If apps are the future, we need to focus on constructing mobile technologies that aim to positively enhance the way we read and watch the news — not sacrificing the journalism for accessibility and design.

Image courtesy of Yutaka Tsutano. 

Toronto Star photojournalist Richard Lautens shares the moment he photographed famous singer Rihanna, his most terrifying picture to capture, his famous Toronto G20 picture and even shares some wisdom to aspiring photojournalists.

Megan Matsuda asks these two CBC reporters when they knew they would be a journalist.

By Megan Matsuda

Jane Armstrong got chills when she heard Rita Daly’s idea for a new investigative series. The two Toronto Star reporters were at a party, chatting in the backyard. Why, Daly asked, did so few domestic abuse cases result in a conviction? Together with Caroline Mallan, they began an intense, nearly year-long effort to scrutinize 133 abuse cases from court records. Their work revealed that many victims failed to show up to court or retracted their statements. The three journalists kept each other sane through pages and pages of spreadsheets and many hostile couples. “We got told to fuck off so many times,” says Armstrong.

The series “Hitting Home” won the 1996 Michener Award and a National Newspaper Award, and led police to introduce better protocols for dealing with domestic violence. The work also helped establish specialized courts and counselling programs. “It just showed what you could do with journalism,” Armstrong says. “Everyone who read it said it was completely 100 percent accurate. It was foolproof.”

The 54-year-old does her best work when she is passionate about a subject, when she can work with strong characters or a moral dilemma and highlight environmental, political and social issues. That makes her a natural fit for the Tyee, a Vancouver-based online magazine where she became the new editor-in-chief in October. After working in newspapers for over 20 years, Armstrong is eager to learn how the independent online magazine operates. But she also faces the challenge of following David Beers, the only editor the Tyee has ever had, and building on his success.

Armstrong was a “star hire” at The Globe and Mail back in 1998, according to Rod Mickleburgh, who worked at the paper for 22 years until leaving last year to go freelance (for publications including the Tyee). She covered the murders of Downtown Eastside women by the serial killer Robert Pickton, and she was one of the first to cover crystal meth use in Vancouver. But it was not all grief and gore; in 2006, she wrote about Tatiana and Krista Hogan, the conjoined twins from Vernon, B.C. To get a complete understanding of their story, Armstrong lived in the town for six weeks and followed the family day and night, from early morning feedings to trips to Costco.

In 2007, she became the Globe’s Moscow correspondent and went to Afghanistan several times. When she returned to her position as B.C. correspondent, she became disillusioned about foreign news in print. “I don’t want to read what happened yesterday,” she said. “That’s like getting a history book landing on your doorstep.”

Leaving the paper in 2010 was a hard decision. She thought she was going to be a “Globe person” until she was 65. “I was 49 at the time, and I thought if I don’t quit now I never will,” says Armstrong. After working for two years at hyperlocal site OpenFile in Toronto, she decided to pursue a master of entrepreneurial journalism at the University of King’s College, where she specialized in the “new ventures” stream and realized she needed to find a new home for her love of in-depth journalistic storytelling.

Last year, it took just three weeks for the Tyee to raise over $100,000 from individual Tyee Builders, readers who chose to pay for a subscription at levels between $5 to $100 a month. Still, the magazine is not profitable right now. So in his new position as executive editor, Beers will work on finding donors, advertising and sponsorships.

As editor-in-chief, Armstrong will develop the website, manage staff and work with freelancers and try to increase funding and readership. The magazine’s strength is its long-form, analytical journalism, and while Armstrong will not make a lot of changes initially, she believes writers can make their point more quickly. She also wants to give stories greater impact by adding interactive graphics, maps and videos. And although the Tyee is focused on Vancouver issues, she wants to cover more from the B.C. interior and the northern part of the province and do more national stories. To start, she’s encouraging her four full-time reporters to always be looking at the world differently and to leave the newsroom. “Go out and interview people, that’s how you find out about things,” she says. “I want to drag them away from their computers.”

But she says her biggest challenge is staying true to Beers’s vision. “The thing about the Tyee is that you’re putting boots to power, you’re calling people in power on what they are doing,” she says. “And if there aren’t enough people doing that, if journalism doesn’t continue to happen, then you’re not going to have much of a democracy left.”

Both Beers and Armstrong agree that the Tyee writers’ distinctive voices should come through in their work. Beers says the magazine’s staffers and freelancers are almost like an artists’ guild, full of artisans who feed off each other’s creative talents. The Tyee, he says, is just “a window for them to put their pots in.” It’s different than being in a newsroom where everyone is anxious and competitive. “It’s dynamic,” Armstrong says. “It’s a highly collaborative mindset.”

Still, the Tyee is competing with bigger, mainstream organizations and it is a constant battle to capture and keep its readers’ attentions. But Armstrong is determined to push the publication further. She knows that no matter what the medium, it’s all about what journalism can do for people, how it can influence thought and keep people informed. In the Chinook language, tyee means “chief” or “king.” And it will take just that to maintain the standard of excellent reporting and feature writing, a standard that will allow The Tyee to thrive.

Vice Media Inc. has teamed up with Rogers Communications Inc. to create a Canadian studio and TV channel. The $100 million joint venture will include a Vice Canada studio based in Toronto, producing a news channel that will sync with mobile and online content.

Vice has been working its way into young adults’ minds since its inception in Montreal in 1994. Starting out as a monthly magazine, it has expanded internationally, now operating in over 30 countries and valued at $2.5 billion. Rogers has made a smart move buying into an organization with the main purpose of engaging the 18- to 34-year-old demographic—one that will grow to half of the Canadian population in less than a decade, according to Rogers CEO Guy Laurence.

Vice CEO Shane Smith has said that he wants to “build the next CNN, the next ESPN.” To some, this may seem a little confusing coming from a news organization that still talks “half the time about rare denim and sneakers.” Last year, Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan called Vice out on selling their counterculture manifesto to the world’s mainstream corporations, all from the starting place of “a humble magazine about doing heroin and having sex (on heroin).” With moves like this partnership with Rogers, it seems they are far-gone from their humble beginnings as an indie magazine made to combat conventional news.

It’s true, Vice’s content is sleazy at times. From their food offshoot Munchies featuring weed edibles as a new culinary art, to news pieces on drugs, sex, violence and random viral videos—it’s easy to castoff Vice as a news source fringing on the line between journalism and sensationalism. Their audience is often divided from those who love video series like “People Who Just Had Sex” (where they interview couples before and after they’ve had sex) to those who would rather get the harder-hitting journalistic pieces like their recent critique on rehab clinics in Southern California.

Yet we can look at the success of BuzzFeed as a prime example of this kind of journalism working and thriving online. Sure the site may attract young audiences with snappy, easy-to-read quizzes, listicles and photo series, but readers can also find well-written investigative features.

Vice’s online description states the magazine is an “ever-expanding galaxy of immersive, investigative, uncomfortable and occasionally uncouth journalism.” The organization is a threat to more traditional news outlets by throwing out the idea that the journalist isn’t a character in the story. Vice’s voice is loud and clear in its content, particularly in the seedier pieces. But for every survey about how often men fake orgasms, there’s a piece of tenacious reporting, such as the documentaries on North Korea and bridal kidnappings in Kyrgyzstan and And it’s not like these journalistic pieces are being ignored—both videos have a combined total of more than six million views.

This partnership with Rogers reflects the changing landscape of Canadian media, where Canadians are actively seeking innovative media outlets, even if they have to pay a membership fee. We wrote about an example of this last month with Ricochet, the new independent bilingual news site that got its start from crowdfunding and aims to offer a counter to the large, all-encompassing news groups like CBC or the Globe and Mail.

Vice got its start as being the cool new kid on the block, the one to take news in a direction that is engaging for youth wanting their news to reflect who they are and what they are passionate about. But when these independent sites gain traction, it’s inevitable that some day they may become mainstream. It’s the same with music, there is always a fight to avoid selling out, keeping the original fans happy but at the same time continuing to grow and prosper. As the journalism world keeps changing, we must remember to keep the focus on quality over capital, and this all stems from leadership. Vice already has an audience, now it is up Smith and management to keep their audience engaged with stories of high journalistic quality. Gen Y likes to learn too, you know.

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Thanks to The Stream Team for the featured image.