Pull Quotes

Podcast art by Katelyn Curtis

In the season opener of Pull Quotes, the Toronto Star feature writer Richard Warnica spoke with Gabe Oatley, the podcast’s editor and co-host, about his recent feature Rothko at the Inauguration. 

This season’s podcast takes you behind the scenes of Canada’s top long-form stories. In this episode, Warnica talks about his near half-decade long journey to bring this feature, published by Hazlitt in December to light. 

“I knew I wanted to write about it, but I had no idea what I was going to write.”

In the podcast, Warnica talks about what drew him into this story—a near transcendent moment at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., during the inauguration of Donald Trump, staring at a room full of Mark Rothko paintings. 

“I sort of sat there by myself, because the gallery was deserted, and I ended up crying and walking out,” says Warnica. “I knew I wanted to write about it, but I had no idea what I was going to write.”

In the interview, Warnica talks about the story’s unusual structure—nut-graf-free and broken into dozens of fragments; his method for writing great scenes and vivid descriptions; and how anxiety has affected his writing. 

Credits: 

Gabe Oatley, editor and co-host

Rahaf Farawi, producer and co-host

Andrew Oliphant, guest producer

Annika Forman, guest producer

Geena Mortfield, fact checker

Sonya Fatah, executive producer

The post Richard Warnica on art fraud, fragments and anxiety first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

Tuesday, May 11 marks the day the 2021 edition of the [   ] Review of Journalism is officially available in print, and a year’s work of love and obsession comes to a close.

The publishing of the Review is an annual tradition at the Ryerson School of Journalism, a rite of passage open to final-year undergrad and graduate students. The first edition of the magazine came out in 1984, and in recent years, the publication built up a digital archive, hosted events and conferences, as well as this podcast. But this year we have pulled off a first:we’ve produced everything in the Review entirely remotely.

With the onset of the pandemic, the Review – like the multitudes of other media organizations around the world – was forced to vacate its offices to embrace a working-from-home culture. Editorial meetings, including more tangible work like visual and production, were all completed through video chat and direct messaging.

As journalists, communication is our bread and butter. How our messages are perceived is incredibly important to us – otherwise, why would we be in this program? For this reason, once we came to terms with the fact that our roles would be entirely virtual this year, how we would communicate with each other became an incredibly important challenge.

“I thought there was a lot more labour in making sure that my messages that were written and going out to anyone in the team conveyed, at the very least, a neutral tone, if not overly excited and happy,” says Danielle Neri, the Managing Editor, Online for the [ ]RJ.

On this episode of the podcast, the print team spoke of being concerned that the tone of their messages would be misunderstood, communicating an urgency that wasn’t yet there. Consistently checking in on colleagues has a different ring to it when it comes across as a Slack message with perfect grammar or a scheduled phone call, versus a friendly “how are you?” while casually passing by in the production room. The result was extra time spent crafting messages that perfectly described the intent of the communiqué.

In hindsight, the exercise of ensuring that our communications were well thought out might have the benefit of improving our daily communication skills.

“University started feeling more and more like a community when we realized our struggles are collective and we can help each other through them by amplifying our voices,” says Saniya Rashid, the Review’s Chief of Research. “Even with professors, I had a new found appreciation for their continued investment in their students at this time. I experienced university in a more intimate way as ironic as it sounds.”

“I think everyone’s put a lot more care into how they approach one another, and I think that was a pretty big benefit that I hope is carried through this pandemic,” explains Neri.

Digital content continues its march forwards

This year, because many of the bookstores and shops that would carry the Review are closed due to the pandemic, the team decided to print fewer copies than in a “typical” year, forcing the business team to get creative and putting more pressure on the digital content to reach audiences.

“It was hard to kind of figure out how to do this,” says Leen Blaibleh, our Manager Editor, Business on determining a production run and magazine launch. Solutions included a virtual launch event with Brandi Morin and young journalists that directed attendees to the [ ]RJ website where they could read the content as well as subscribe to receive the magazine in person.

All told, however, this was a banner year for advertising and sponsorships. Blaibleh credits the space social distancing guidelines gave her to be able to reflect on the grassroots journalism community the Review is a part of, allowing her to find ways to nourish these relationships. Since it wasn’t as easy as sending copies of the published magazine to the offices of our sponsors (many media outlets across Canada are still closed due to COVID restrictions), she evaluated other options like digital and podcast ads.

The shift to an almost completely virtual campus meant that the pressure was on the digital team to manage the Review website like a well-oiled machine, pushing our current set-up to its limits and prompting conversations of expanding the Review team to include a webmaster or complete a digital re-design. These changes may or may not take hold in the future.

Only time will tell how this pandemic will impact the print versus online media landscape. Rashid sees the potential of a hybrid in-person/remote Review, and indeed for many other newsrooms as well, to increase collaboration on a level not seen before.

“…[T]his opens the door for collaborations earlier deemed impossible due to distance,” she explains. “I personally envision and hope for more collaborations with Canadian newsrooms from here in Pakistan. I see room for mutual growth and problem solving in today’s increasing digital age.”

No matter what happens, however, the charm and the nostalgia of the print magazine will endure.

“The fact that we still kept going and we came up with a physical publication really made a lot of people happy.“ says Blaibleh.

Thank you all so much for being a part of the fourth season of Pull Quotes. I hope you have enjoyed this series as much as we enjoyed creating it. A special thank you to all the guests who took time out of their busy schedules to speak to us, and to all the coaches and mentors who pointed us in the right direction. Finally, a very special thank you to our executive producer, Sonya Fatah, for putting in the extra work on an already busy production schedule to guide the Pull Quotes process.

We would also like to thank the sponsors of this week’s podcast, the Canadian Association of Black Journalists.

Anyone interested in buying a copy of the Review can do so here. Feature stories will be released individually throughout the summer, so keep checking our website or follow us on Twitter to read incredible stories of journalists around the world.

Credits:

Emma Jones, Podcast Editor & this week’s host
Joe Fish, Podcast Producer
Saniya Rashid, Chief of Research
Alex Ramsay, Fact Checker
Sonya Fatah, Executive Producer
Lindsay Hanna, Digital Content & Web Design Specialist

The post Pull Quotes Season 4, Episode 6: End of a run first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

This week on PullQuotes, we’re talking about global approaches to crime coverage and their implications for their application in Canada. 

I recently wrote a story about how the Canadian judiciary’s shift to remote trials is affecting the ability of journalists to cover the courts. While writing the piece, I never thought twice about naming defendants in trials, or printing the details of their alleged crimes. It’s established practice in North American trial coverage to print all the information that we legally can; any Canadian reporter who outside of an official publication ban, omits the name of the accused or the prurient details of a case can expect a stern talking to from their editor.

Overseas, attitudes may differ. 

On April 30, 2009, a man drove a car through a crowd at a parade in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, killing seven people, and himself. The targets of the attack were members of the Dutch royal family, including Queen Beatrix, the country’s reigning monarch. In the West, the press would have been flooded with the assailant’s name, likeness, and the intimate details of his life, but many Dutch legacy media outlets decided to omit his name from coverage entirely. 

The episode is what originally sparked the interest of Duquesne University journalism professor Maggie Jones Patterson, in regional differences in crime coverage. Maggie and her Canadian colleague, Romayne Smith Fullerton, an associate professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Western Ontario, recently co-authored a book called Murder in our Midst: Comparing Crime Coverage Ethics in an Age of Globalized News. 

The authors and professors joined us to talk about the underlying societal factors that may contribute to different approaches to crime reporting, and how these approaches are being challenged in the age of mass communication. They also weigh in on a recent sentencing decision in the high-profile trial of van-attacker Alek Minassian, that caused a bit of a stir among Canadian journalists. 

“Just focusing on this man’s name, does not equip the citizenry to make decisions, and help influence the people they elect to create policy.” – Romayne Smith Fullerton. 

Credits:

Joe Fish, Podcast Producer & this week’s host
Emma Jones, Podcast Editor 
Saniya Rashid, Chief of Research
Alex Ramsay, Fact Checker
Tyler Griffin, Copy Chief
Sonya Fatah, Executive Producer
Lindsay Hanna, Digital Content & Web Design Specialist

The post Pull Quotes Season 4, Episode 5: Should Canadian crime reporters start thinking beyond what they can print, to what they should? first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

This week on Pull Quotes, we’re discussing photojournalism and how it contributes to the public record of the impact of extractive economic industries on human life. 

In written stories about rising sea levels or melting glaciers, the serious implications of environmental degradation are too often obscured by numbers and jargon. Some photographers are trying to cut through that noise by using pictures to illustrate the ecological and human toll of ill-advised, or short sighted environmental policies.

In 2010 Ian Willms, a documentary photographer, took a trip to a small, predominantly Indigenous community in northern Alberta called Fort Chipewyan. The town sits on the edge of the Athabasca river delta, downstream from the oil sands. For years, its residents and doctors had been crying foul over higher than normal rates of cancer, birth defects and other maladies. The trip was just the beginning of a ten year period during which Ian returned several times to Fort Chipewyan, and another downstream Indigenous community called Fort Mckay, to document the effects of industrial pollution on the land and its inhabitants. 

He called the project, As Long as the Sun Shines.

Pull Quotes asked Ian to select one photo out of his expansive portfolio that he found particularly poignant or powerful. He chose a picture from his oil sands project that showed Warren Simpson, a resident of Fort Chipewyan, lying in bed surrounded by relatives mere hours before his death. Warren had suffered for years with a rare form of bile duct cancer called cholangiocarcinoma that occurs at an abnormally high rate in the community.

Ian spoke to us about what it was like to photograph the final moments of a human life, and told the story of how he ended up in a position to document a family in the depths of grief. 

After speaking to Ian, we realized that the content of our conversation was eerily reminiscent of a Pull Quotes segment from a previous episode. Back in 2017, former Review journalist, Emily Pardo, sat down with photojournalist Ed Ou to talk about a series of photographs he’d taken in Kazakhstan. Ou was visiting a region of the country known as “The Polygon”: an expanse of barren steppe that for forty years served as a nuclear test site for the Soviet Union. For three generations, inhabitants of adjacent towns and villages have suffered from health issues like abnormally high rates of cancer, birth defects and premature aging, among others. 

We felt there was obvious value in revisiting the conversation with Ed, who provided incredible insight into his process for gaining the trust of his subjects before he photographs them. He also discussed grappling with the inherent ethical implications of photographing human misery. 

Credits:

Joe Fish, Podcast Producer & this week’s host
Emma Jones, Podcast Editor 
Saniya Rashid, Chief of Research
Alex Ramsay, Fact Checker
Tyler Griffin, Copy Chief
Madigan Cotterill, Review Journalist
Sonya Fatah, Executive Producer
Lindsay Hanna, Digital Content & Web Design Specialist

The post Pull Quotes Season 4, Episode 4: Photojournalists create a visual record of the human impact of industrial pollution first appeared on The Review of Journalism.