Offleash is the Ryerson Review of Journalism‘s first-ever regular podcast, published on RRJ.ca every second Wednesday at 3:33 p.m.

In this week’s episode of RRJ’s Offleash, Viviane and Allison speak to Alex Gillis, who recently made news in the journalism industry after his story was killed then used by The Walrus. We also interview Derek Finkle from the Canadian Writer’s Group about the different kinds of kill fees, and RRJ alumna and freelancer Carly Lewis about her experiences with kill fees and story theft.

Music courtesy of Paul Nathan Harper, also known as A F L O A T. Find his music here: @a-f-l-o-a-t

Welcome to the Alumni Essentials, or, as it shall be known for the next week: the Carly Lewis show! This is Lewis’s second time featured in this series and she’s the first person ever to fully take it over. Cue applause.

She really left us no choice, because whether it’s about Girls, the year’s best albums or Jian Ghomeshi (all topics in the following stories), her writing provokes you. It makes you want to join the essential dialogue she’s creating. Help yourself enter it by reading along:

1. The year’s best albums are full of women’s anger—and it’s glorious

2. The Year of Complicity: on Jian Ghomeshi, Bill Cosby, and their enablers

3. Single White Females: is Girls solving a representation problem or spoon-feeding its target audience?

That’s it for this week. Got a piece that should be featured here? Email the blog editor. We know you’re following the Review on Twitter. But how about its masthead? 

When a story like the Jian Ghomeshi saga gets as big as it has, it presents a challenge for media organizations: how to differentiate themselves. The Toronto Star is breaking the coverage, and everybody else is picking it up and often just repeating it. This week’s Alumni Essentials shows how important intelligent, contextual analysis is as a story unfolds like this.

Summer 2012 production editor Scaachi Koul’s “How Predator’s Get Away With It” uses her personal experiences as a student and working journalist as a call for the media to start speaking out against abusers. This is a reminder that this story is much bigger than Ghomeshi himself, as Koul details harassment from professors and her list of male media employees to avoid.

Focusing back on Ghomeshi, winter 2012 departments editor Carly Lewis analyzes the former Q host’s Facebook letter and the tactics he used in it to rally fans and admirers around him. Lewis—with the help of some experts—examines the careful crafting of each line in the letter and the science behind it to show how Ghomeshi set himself up as a victim.

As the story continues to unravel, journalists will need to find different ways to tell it—ways that add value to readers trying to make sense of this case.

It’s about to get bigger.

Do you have a post by an alumnus that should be showcased? Email the blog editor. And don’t forget to follow the Review and its masthead on Twitter.