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

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.