Pull Quotes

On this episode of Pull Quotes, in honour of International Women’s Day, host Emma Jones talks to Tracee Herbaugh about balancing a career as writer with being a mom.

Newsrooms continue to be dominated by men, however, the presence of women is slowly increasing. In 2018, 41.7 percent of newsroom employees were female, compared to 39.1 percent in 2017, according to a 2018 survey by the American Society of News Editors.

But while representation of women is increasing, the experience of men and women in the newsroom may not always be equal. In 2015, a survey by the University of Kansas found that female journalists were more likely to experience burnout than their male counterparts. The survey of 1600 working journalists, including 500 women, also found that a majority of women surveyed (67 percent) were planning to leave the field entirely compared to 55 percent of male respondents. This result was higher than the previous survey conducted in 2009, which found that 62 percent of female respondents intended to leave the field.

While not the only concern facing women in the newsroom, motherhood no doubt contributes to a part of the burnout.

“The industry is bound to the nature of news, which is unpredictable, 24/7, and happens everywhere,” writes Julianna Goldman in an article for the Atlantic. “…Moms are expected to do their job like it’s their only responsibility, even though they’re also working the mom shift.

“If you decline an assignment, you may be labeled a problem or deemed not to be a team player.”

Concerningly, many of the women interviewed for the Atlantic article asked to remain anonymous out of concern for potential backlash by their employers. It seems that even as the world of journalism confronts gender inequality, women remain concerned that speaking up will be a detriment to their career.

Sharon and Tracee Herbaugh

Tracee Herbaugh is a freelance writer, having written for the Washington Post, the New York Times and Salon, among other publications. Currently focusing on supporting her family through the pandemic, Tracee has previously written about how her mother, Sharon Herbaugh’s, decision to focus on her career rather than motherhood, impacted her own choices as a journalist and mother.

Sharon Herbaugh was a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press in the late 80s and early 90s. Her first foreign posting was as the news editor in New Delhi, India in 1988. She was then promoted to bureau chief in Islamabad, Pakistan. In 1993, Sharon was covering a story about efforts to remove landmines in the area when the helicopter she was traveling in is thought to have experienced engine failure near Pul-i-Khumri, Afghanistan. Sharon was killed in the crash along with 14 other people. She was the first woman to be killed on assignment for the Associated Press.

After her death, the world of journalism found out a surprising revelation. Sharon had a daughter who was being raised by Sharon’s parents in a small town in Colorado.

Tracee Herbaugh was born when Sharon was 25 and was sent to live with her grandparents while Sharon focused on her career. Although Sharon did not divulge the identity of Tracy’s father, she would find out his identity through an Ancestry DNA test when Tracy was 38. He was also a reporter at the Associated Press and 20 years older than Sharon. He was married at the time and had known about Tracy but chose not to be involved.

Tracee later chose to become a journalist herself and has written at length about her anger and hurt at her parents’ choices. She also reflects on how her parents actions have impacted her own decisions as a mother and as a modern career woman.

Credits:

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

The post Pull Quotes, Season 4, Episode 3: Balancing Motherhood and Journalism first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

This week on Pull Quotes, podcast editor Emma Jones interviewed Nora Loreto, editor of the Canadian Association of Labour Media and co-host of Sandy and Nora Talk Politics with Sandy Hudson. We reached out to Nora because of her work compiling data on COVID-19 deaths in long-term care homes across Canada, and to ask about coverage of this issue before and throughout the pandemic.

A link to Nora’s data on deaths in residential care is available here. 

In Canada, the COVID-19 pandemic has not hit all communities equally.

Approximately 69 percent of deaths due to the pandemic have occurred in long-term care homes and retirement residences, according to data from the National Institute of Aging at Ryerson University. In May 2020, a report released by the Canadian armed forces detailed cockroaches, rotting food, lack of personal protective equipment and lapses in sanitation protocol in various long-term care homes in Ontario and Quebec.

Nora Loreto, an activist, writer, and podcaster based in Quebec city, noticed a gap in how public health units and journalists were recording the skyrocketing death tolls in long-term care institutions.

“There was no central location…where they had a list of these deaths and I knew that if we weren’t keeping track of them, they would just fall into the ether,” says Loreto. “Some of them collect the information of how many people have died [in] long term care, but that’s usually like a lump sum. Then you have to know all of the facilities within a Health District to know who may be connected to those figures”

Each night, Nora sorts through news reports and releases from public health agencies to compile data on COVID-related deaths in residential facilities . She consistently finds that while the numbers of deaths are reported, the facilities in which these deaths occur are rarely included, making it difficult to see important patterns in the data.

“What I find very frustrating is oftentimes I’ll go through the nightly news and find out, you know, two people have died in Ottawa. Every single news outlet in Ottawa…have all said two people have died [in] long term care, and no one has named what long term care facilities,” says Loreto. “…They just didn’t add that – they just didn’t name the facilities. That’s a huge problem, right?”

 By far, the hardest hit long term-care homes residences were run by for-profit corporations, increasing public scrutiny on the role profit motivations play in these homes. In Canada, there are 2,039 long-term care homes. Of these, 23 percent are private, for-profit entities, according to data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

Ontario has the most private for-profit homes in the country. A study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal analyzed the health outcomes of all 623 long-term care homes located in Ontario between March 29 and May 20, 2020. While the study did not find an increase in the likelihood of outbreaks between for-profit and not-for profit homes when all other competing data was controlled, when outbreaks did occur, for-profit homes correlated with both a higher number of infected residents and a higher death rate.

An investigation released by CBC Marketplace indicates that for-profit care homes lag behind public and not-for-profit homes in updating facilities to meet modern safety standards—including mandating that there should only be a maximum of two beds per room. This may have played a role in the high death toll in Ontario’s long-term care facilities. According to the report, a third of beds in long-term care homes do not meet modern safety standards, and these cases make up 57 percent of the deaths in long-term care homes.

Loreto’s data shows the raw experiences of one of Canada’s most vulnerable populations. She sits down with us this week to talk about the importance of attributing data, the history of reporting on long-term care homes in Canada and a potential way forward from this tragedy.

Credits:

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

The post Pull Quotes, Season 4, Episode 3: In conversation with Nora Loreto on how Long-Term Care Homes were affected by COVID first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

This season of Pull Quotes we’re doing something a bit different. Readers of our publication know that every year the student journalists at the Ryerson Review of Journalism produce feature articles about some of the most important issues in Canadian news. While working on a long-form piece, you invariably encounter so many people, each with their own unique point of view. Word counts in magazine writing tend to be rigid, and as a result, many of these perspectives do not make it into the finished piece. Instead of allowing these stories to wither on the editing room floor, we at Pull Quotes decided to scoop them up and tell them ourselves. 

This episode, you’ll hear from Emily Morantz, one of the journalists at The Review, who spoke to our guest, Brian Daly, as part of her research for a profile she wrote for the magazine’s upcoming annual print edition. She felt Brian had a lot of important things to say about the underrepresentation of Black people and people of colour in Canadian media. We agreed.  

This episode is being released a little over a year to the day that the CABJ and the Canadian Journalists of Colour (CJOC) put out their calls to action. The document pointed to racism among Canadian news outlets and outlined seven concrete steps that media organizations should take to redress the lack of diversity in their newsrooms. After their release, the calls to action elicited little response. Then, on May 25, 2020, officers of the Minneapolis police department murdered George Floyd.

In the resultant global outcry against police brutality and racism, Canada’s biggest media organizations have been forced to reckon with their own histories of biased news coverage and hiring practices. What began with criticism of the CBC for unbalanced reporting on Black Lives Matter protests eventually snowballed into a more general indictment of Canadian media, which is predominantly white, and has moved at a glacial pace to increase representation. 

Brian Daly got his start as an editorial assistant at CBC and spent the first half of his career as a print journalist covering major Canadian events like the Montreal biker wars and the sponsorship scandal that would sink Prime Minister Paul Martin’s government. He ultimately left print to work behind the scenes as a television news producer where he has spent time working for several major news networks across the country. In addition to his current position as producer at CBC News in Halifax, Brian serves as the Atlantic director of the CABJ. 

Having experienced such a representative cross-section of Canadian media, we wanted to get Brian’s take on why the industry seems to be lagging so far behind in terms of diversity. We also spoke about his own storied career and the actions the CABJ are taking to foster interest in journalism among Black youth across Canada.

The post Pull Quotes, Season 4, Episode 1: In conversation with Brian Daly, the Atlantic director of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

To our Pull Quotes listeners: 

As we launch our final episode of season three of Pull Quotes and as we prepare to launch the print issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism, we would like to say an enormous thank you to all of you. Working as the Review’s podcast chief editor and producer has allowed us to meet so many talented journalists and explore, in depth, so many issues within the Canadian media industry. 

We wanted to wrap up our season by chatting with a few members of our masthead. This week would have been our launch party, but in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, like many of you, we are staying home. In this podcast, you will hear from our managing business and audience engagement editors, Sean Young and Saura Haggart-Smith, about how they have worked tirelessly on a new way to launch the magazine. 

For the rest of the podcast, we speak with Katrya Bolger, editor-in-chief of the RRJ, Urbi Khan, print managing editor, and Mitchell Consky, print production editor. They share more about putting together this magazine remotely. There are also a few surprises from some of our editors who share some details about their individual features in the magazine, including our exciting cover story. Have a listen! And thank you: It’s been a pleasure!

Ashley Fraser and Tanja Saric

Our Pull Quotes podcast team @ashleymfraser @tanjasaric3 have been busy producing season three’s final episode launching this Friday!
Be sure to subscribe and listen to hear a sneak peek of the stories inside our 2020 issue. pic.twitter.com/NThmY3OVyU

Episode 11 of Pull Quotes was produced and edited by Ashley Fraser and Tanja Saric. Pull Quotes’ executive producer is Sonya Fatah. 

This podcast episode is sponsored by:

Business Wire, the leader in global news distribution.

Subscribe to our new Spring 2020 issue here.  

The post The Out-of-Office Finale: Pull Quotes Season 3, Episode 11 first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

As COVID-19 continues to spread throughout the globe, disinformation is a threat as dangerous as the pandemic itself. That is according to the World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who suggested at the Munich Security conference, back on February 15, that we are also facing an “infodemic.”

The Ryerson Review of Journalism maintains that qualified reporting, with a heavy approach to verification, is imperative for keeping people accurately informed. Unverified news stories that mislead the public can cause a chain reaction of inaccurate claims. With advancements in media technology, however, some misinformation might not be authored by humans. 

Last February, OpenAI announced it would be delaying the release of an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) text generator, called GPT-2, capable of producing prose without programmed templates or task-specific training. (It can write without human control.)

The non-profit AI research organization feared the “malicious applications” of this new technology, not yet understanding the potential dangers that could emerge.

The AI tech was initially designed to predict the next word in a paragraph based on the previous words in a given text, similar to Google’s Smart Compose. The biggest difference is the 40 gigabytes of training data the model uses to make sense of written language: 8 million web pages of upvoted Reddit content, approximating 6.5 billion words of text — substantially more than the combined word count of every novel by Dickens, every play by Shakespeare, the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R Tolkien, and the Harry Potter series by J.K Rowling — with billions of words left over. 

On their site, OpenAI says the company has “trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization.”

What does that mean? GPT-2 analyzes thousands of word configurations before a sentence is determined. It also assesses the probability of certain words being used in interpreted contexts, meaning the model can carry out extended “train of thought” writing without disruption. It also means that the model, despite only drawing from a vocabulary of approximately 50,000 words,can write in a way that emulates numerous levels of writing ability — from an amateur to a professional, and every skill level in between.  

On its site, OpenAI lists several malicious applications of this tech. On top of that list is “Generate misleading news articles.”

But does the technology really have the capacity to produce prose indistinguishable from verified news stories? Can AI really mimic the writing voice of a journalist, completely void of programmed templates and curated data feeds? The RRJ decided to find out. 

We fed the GPT-2 model 60 RRJ articles, each averaging 3,000 words, to see if it could mirror the collective voice of our magazine. By downloading the base code for the full-sized model, which OpenAI made publically available in November 2019, we modified it to run on a standard operating system and adapt to stories we’ve gathered. The articles we selected to train the model were from previous magazine issues between 2010 and 2019 — many of which were award recipients for accolades such as Best Student Writer, Best New Magazine Writer, and Honourable Mentions for Best Feature (through the National Magazine Awards and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication). This was our way of ensuring the model was trained on the best of our work over the last decade. We modified the software to emulate the structure, paragraph flow, and narrative style of these stories. 

The results were troubling. From using real names and attributing fake quotes, to generating nut graphs that mention real organizations with fabricated statements, the model seems to have opened a new doorway into defamation and misinformation. (To review a gallery of our produced samples, click here.)

“I would think of it as a massive wake up call about what’s possible and what’s in existence and, more, what’s coming,” says Andrew Cochran, AI media researcher and former head of news strategy for CBC, in this week’s Pull Quotes episode. Cochran believes this wake up call pertains to “how we as journalists and informed members of the public need to be aware of the issues, and need to be that much more literate about how these things are working.” 

Also on Pull Quotes, Lisa Gibbs, director of news partnerships at Associated Press, phoned in from New York to discuss the implications of our experiment. AP has been using automated text technology since July 2014, when they went from writing 300 financial stories per earnings quarter, to automating 3,700. Their templated automation coverage extends to sports, business, elections, and local news reporting. 

“There is no question — this is true of this technology and it’s been true of most technologies overtime — that it could be used for a bad intent, or it could be used for a good intent,” Gibbs told us after hearing some of our produced samples read out loud. 

Below is a complete article that the model produced. This particular sample includes the use of real names (which we removed) with falsified accusations of sexual assault and unfounded statistics presented as verified facts. (To listen to this week’s Pull Quotes episode, which unpacks the details of our experiment, listen below.)

By Mitchell Consky 

AN ARTICLE BY GPT-2:

The following text is completely computer generated and is not based on any process of verification; the excerpts do not represent the RRJ’s practice of journalistic integrity. Grammatical errors were not corrected. Paragraph breaks were implemented for readability, and names were removed. Numerous claims, presented as facts and statistics, are completely inaccurate. 

BELOW IS A SLIDE SHOW OF OTHER GPT-2 GENERATED ARTICLES: 

Read more about the rise of automated text generation in our Spring 2020 issue — coming soon. 

Episode 10 of Pull Quotes was edited by Ashley Fraser and produced by guest producer Mitchell Consky and Pull Quotes producer, Tanja Saric. Technical production help from Angela Glover and Lindsay Hanna. Pull Quotes’ executive producer is Sonya Fatah. 

The post The Threat of “Deep Fake” Text Generation: Pull Quotes Series 3, Episode 10 first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

This week, Pull Quotes hosts Ashley Fraser and Tanja Saric sit down with Ryerson University professor Adrian Ma, and Ryerson School of Journalism Alumni, Adam Chen, to discuss how innovative storytelling methods are making their way into journalism practice. Ma introduced the use of virtual reality and 360-degree video into his international reporting course in 2018, which included a trip to Hong Kong. The following year, Ma led another group of Ryerson students to produce four 360-degree videos covering the disappearing cultural and historical traditions in Hong Kong (which both Ashley Fraser and Adam Chen participated in 2018 and 2019). This year, he is introducing virtual reality and 360-degree video storytelling into his advanced multimedia course. He explains what the future holds for 360-degree video and virtual reality within the journalism landscape. 

Chen, the founder of Talk Media, a media start-up company currently hosted in the Social Ventures Zone and Transmedia Zone at Ryerson, about the future of journalism. His startup will host in-person experiences and events developed through journalistic practice. Chen says this form of storytelling, known as live journalism can enhance journalistic integrity.

Episode nine of Pull Quotes was edited by Tanja Saric and produced by Ashley Fraser. Technical production help from Daniela Olariu. Pull Quotes’ executive producer for this week is Janice Neil as Sonya Fatah is the editorial director for Talk Media. 

The post Exploring Innovative Journalism Practices: Pull Quotes, Series 3, Episode 9 first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

North America’s first female Black publisher, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, fearlessly printed her paper, the Provincial Freeman, from a downtown Toronto office.

Cary’s life story is currently featured in Toronto’s Mackenzie House for Black History Month. She published her first newspaper on March 25, 1853. Cary was “in spite of everything against her — for being a woman, for being Black— was able to overcome these and open up her own newspaper,” says Chris Theofilogiannakos, program officer for Mackenzie House. The paper allowed Cary to advocate for the Black community and promote Canada as a safe haven, says Theofilogiannakos. Black residents were permitted to open businesses, unlike in the United States.

“She felt that Canada was the safest place for refugees to come to start a new life,” Theofilogiannakos says. Canadian society was deeply racist, but during the period of time Cary published her newspaper and worked as an educator, it was a more practical alternative to the States. While living in Canada, she advocated heavily for the abolition of slavery in the United States. “So what’s important about her newspaper is that it did give the community a voice,” says Theofilogiannakos

Fast-forward to 2020 and Canadian journalists of colour are still fighting for racial equality in  media dominated by largely white upper management and editorial teams, in stark contrast to a diverse readership. The lack of racial diversity in Canadian newsrooms and media coverage prompted the Canadian Association of Black Journalists (CABJ) and Canadian Journalists of Colour (CJOC) to publish the Canadian Media Diversity: Calls to Action on January 28.

There are seven Calls to Action, including asking media outlets to begin self-reporting of newsroom demographics on a regular basis, to increasing coverage of racialized communities, and promoting and retaining journalists of colour in newsrooms.

 At the start of her career in 2010, the lack of diversity in Canadian newsrooms prompted Nadia Stewart, now the CABJ executive director, to seek support. “I can’t be the only black journalist who’ve gone through this where you’re the only one in the newsroom,” Stewart says.

Over the last couple of years, a series of news events have inspired a closer examination of Canadian newsroom culture. Among these was the Blackface scandal, in which it was revealed that the PM Justin Trudeau, Blackface pictures had not been exposed despite his many years in office. Then, journalist Sunny Dhillon wrote about the discrimination he faced working at the Globe and Mail in a Medium article. In September, the Vancouver Sun published an opinion piece stating ethnic diversity is harmful to Canada.

“These things that just kept on happening that really pointed to the need for this dialogue,” Stewart says. But rather than just talk about change, the CABJ and CJOC wanted to create actionable steps, she adds. 

Since releasing the Calls to Action, some Canadian media outlets have taken note, says Anita Li, co-founder of the CJOC. “There was a really strong response online, from our industry, from both establishment and start-up media, which was really heartening, as well as even people like journalism educators, who are really high profile and well respected both, largely in Canada, but in the US and abroad,” Li says. 

 Moving forward, Li hopes to collaborate with media outlets and hold workshops in journalism schools and media. Working with media leaders to create a diversity survey of newsrooms is one idea. “If you’re co-creating something, then you’re far more likely to actually take action on it,” Li says.

Now is the time for action, she says. “I think we’ve talked about it enough. I feel like generally speaking, the information is out there for people to understand why diversity inclusion is important across all institutions, including and especially media. So now’s the time to start walking the walk.”  

By Karen Longwell 

Episode eight of Pull Quotes was edited by Ashley Fraser and produced by Tanja Saric, and guest produced by Karen Longwell. Technical production help from Angela Glover. Pull Quotes’ executive producer is Sonya Fatah.

The post Putting Calls for Racial Diversity in Canadian Media into Action: Pull Quotes Season 3, Episode 8 first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

On January 17, CBC viewers watched as 121 km/h winds blew Chris Murphy off his feet into a snowbank.

The reporter was broadcasting during a massive blizzard in St. John’s, Newfoundland. That day, the provincial government declared a state of emergency for the first time since 1984. Military personnel were called in to dig people out of their homeswhile cars were banned from the roads.

Luckily, after his slip, Murphy wasn’t injured and was even laughing at the scene. He says enduring these conditions goes beyond reporting how serious the situation is.  

“It becomes more about how are people coping with it … how do they prepare for it and the aftermath,” he says.  

.@MurphTWN gets hit by a gust of wind in St.John’s, as a raging blizzard brings eastern Newfoundland to a standstill (He's OK). Read the lastest about the storm here: https://t.co/TzvbyqyXOJ pic.twitter.com/NV1MFHfws7

— Power & Politics (@PnPCBC) January 17, 2020

Daina Goldfinger, an online journalist at Global News, discovered during her research into emergency reporting for the Ryerson Review of Journalism in 2017 that stories about the aftermath of natural disasters are exactly what’s missing from current reporting. She believes they are important to tell because injuries and damages don’t disappear right away. 

“These effects can go on for months, if not years, depending on the magnitude of the disaster,” she says. Her multimedia feature called Covering Disasters also looks into the ethics of emergency reporting, whether newsrooms are prepared to send reporters out into an emergency and how the industry can improve moving forward.

Goldfinger continues to report on natural disasters, including the record-setting floods in Muskoka in 2019.  A feature she wrote about the aftermath of the flooding describes people who were still in the hospital and whose homes were still destroyed. Experts also weigh in on the long-term mental health risks faced by survivors, and the financial devastation despite provincial finance assistance.

David Thurton, a national reporter in CBC’s Parliamentary Bureau, agrees that covering the aftermath is vital for the whole story. In 2016, he reported on the wildfires in Fort McMurray. He was surprised that residents were still eager to speak with him when they returned to their homes after the evacuation. “This story did not finish when the flames were out,” he says. The story follows how the city struggled to rebuild and how families were unable to go home, months later. Thurton’s reporting on the aftermath went well into 2019.

Ultimately, he believes that reporters need to be on the ground. “We need newsrooms that have the courage to just let reporters go out without a plan, without the story half-written,” he says. He also wants to see more constant coverage in remote communities, which means setting up permanent newsrooms where journalists spend significant time. He believes that important stories, like those of a disaster aftermath, cannot be told if community members don’t trust reporters; if they feel like they just fly in and out. “I think this is a model that maybe the public broadcaster needs to think about.”  

By Grace Wells-Smith 

Episode seven of Pull Quotes was edited by Tanja Saric and produced by Ashley Fraser, and guest produced by Grace Wells-Smith. Technical production help from Angela Glover. Pull Quotes’ executive producer is Sonya Fatah. 

The post Covering disasters beyond the eye of the storm: Pull Quotes Season 3, Episode 7 first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

The last decade has seen Canada’s image change drastically, both internally and internationally. Long gone are the days of drolly referring to the Great White North as America’s Hat. There have been major strides in the worlds of music and sports in Canada. But during this period of major accomplishments, a series of groundbreaking stories have also exposed significant issues: the widening wealth inequality between the rich and working class, environmental disasters, and the continuing subjugation of Indigenous peoples.  

2020 is right around the corner, but before we see what’s in store for us, let’s take a look back at the stories that caught our attention over the last decade. The following list is a nod to the last ten years of remarkable reporting on matters of public interest.

Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics were mired in controversy from the outset—from the cover-up of dangers to athletes, to the rapid gentrification that went into preparing the city for a major international branding exercise. Before the Games began, the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) questioned the safety of a particular luge track. Emails obtained by the CBC outlined CEO John Furlong’s concern that the track was “too fast and someone could get badly hurt,” nearly a year ahead of the event. Fears became a reality during a training run on February 12, 2010, when Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili was thrown from his luge, while speeding through the final curve. Kumaritashvili struck an unpadded steel pole and later died in hospital. 

While Kumaritashvili’s death was the most visible tragedy of the games, it was not the only one. Before the opening ceremony even began, British Columbia residents felt the impact of development for the games. As construction mounted in Eagleridge Bluffs, B.C, protesters blockaded the Sea-to-Sky highway, decrying the environmental damage that would occur with its expansion. A court injunction forced protesters away but an Indigenous elder, Harriet Nahanee, remained, leading to her arrest and subsequent sentencing to two weeks in jail. Nahanee died shortly after her release. Protests continued as the Games approached. In October 2009 as the Olympic torch was relayed into Vancouver, torchbearers took an unexpected detour as hundreds of protestors disrupted the route.

A familiar debate emerged following Keystone 1 pipeline, the first phase of the Keystone XL pipeline project, leak in October. Environmental activists and Indigenous groups argued that new pipelines would pose environmental risks, while TC Energy, the Calgary-based corporation that owns the pipeline, focused on cleanup, through PR and on the ground in North Dakota. TC Energy, formerly TransCanada, have been defending the 1,897-km pipeline since they took full ownership of it in 2009, but it was in late 2011 that the cross-border pipeline became a site for one of the decade’s most defining traits: climate protests. Co-opted by Indigenous activists, climate protests became increasingly frequent this decade.

In September 2011, CBC News reported that 117 protesters were arrested on Parliament Hill. South of the border, thousands of people showed up at the White House lawn. Now, protests are near-daily occurrences in climate action. September 2019 saw the launch of the Global Climate Strike, where over 6,000 demonstrations were staged around the world. For journalists covering climate change, the decision to attend isn’t so clear. In October, the Review published a piece addressing the challenges journalists face in remaining non-partisan when it comes to reporting on the climate crisis.

Québécois students are no strangers to protesting. In 2012, students mobilized against tuition hikes in what is now known as the “Maple Spring.” Student unions demonstrated against tuition fee increases from February to September. When the Québécois legislature wanted to increase tuition by 75 percent, various student coalitions launched the largest student protest in Canadian history. The strike culminated in May 2012 with the introduction of Bill 78. The law, which prohibited protests on school property, was quickly decried by human rights groups and legal experts for limiting student’s free speech. Former Premier Jean Charest was ousted in favour of the Parti Québécois’s Pauline Marois, who promised to reverse the tuition hikes immediately in the same year as the protests. 

The media response left much to be desired. Global News questioned whether the protests were worth it at all. The questionable legality of some of the student occupations led to distrust of reporters in Montreal. A reporter for Concordia University’s student paper said, in an interview with J-Source, “There was an anti-journalist sentiment generally.” 

Perhaps some of the ire toward legacy outlets is earned: As the protests were ramping up in April, the Globe and Mail debated whether striking students were just “self-absorbed brats” while the National Post referred to the demonstrations as “nothing but a parody,” going on to imply that they were not as important as the concurrent uprising in Syria (the protests known as the Arab Spring). Speaking as a student and a journalist: I promise you, journalism powers that be, we can focus on two things at once.

Part of Canada’s story this decade is about how we became internationally-recognized for more than hockey and perceived politeness. One man who broke the mold in more ways than one was Rob Ford. Toronto’s municipal affairs became international news when the Toronto Star investigations team broke the story that they had seen footage of then-mayor of Toronto Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine. Outlets from The Wall Street Journal to the Guardian reported on the scandal. Gawker, the blog that attempted to buy the video before Toronto Police acquired it, notably began their story revealing the existence of Ford’s crack-smoking video by calling him a “wild lunatic given to making bizarre racist pronouncements.”

Ford became a particular target for American late night hosts like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Scandalous reports of public intoxication and day-drinking led to Ford’s tense responses to the media in regards to his substance abuse issues. Media fallout included wondering how having a mayor who used crack cocaine in Canada’s largest city would impact our international image. CTV News reported that Ford’s admission “clashes with the image many foreigners have of Canadians.” Closer to home, tensions between Ford and the media only grew. Daniel Dale served the former mayor with a defamation suit after Ford insinuated that he was a pedophile, saying “Dale is in my backyard taking pictures. I have little kids. He’s taking pictures of little kids. I don’t want to say that word but you start thinking what this guy is all about.” Dale dropped the lawsuit after Ford apologized and retracted his statement. 

Highly publicized cases of alleged sexual assault dominated headlines this decade, such as film mogul Harvey Weinstein, comedian Bill Cosby, and U.S. president Donald Trump. Few hit closer to home than the ousting of Jian Ghomeshi, formerly the founding host of CBC’s q. A report, broken by Jesse Brown and Kevin Donovan, and published in the Star, detailed the allegations from three women. The court notes and testimonies served as a precursor for what would become a near-daily occurrence after Hollywood’s #MeToo revolution. 

In 2018, Ian Buruma, an editor at the New York Review of Books, felt comfortable enough to give Ghomeshi a platform. The responding outcry led Buruma to step down from his position, showing that media is less tolerant of the enabling of abusers. Other grassroots organizations like femifesto are working to change how Canadian newsrooms report on sexual violence by creating tools and checklists to ensure non-traumatic interaction with sexual assault survivors.

One line in Desmond Cole’s landmark piece for Toronto Life “The Skin I’m In: I’ve been interrogated by police more than 50 times–all because I’m black,” gives reason for his hyper-awareness and anxiety around guns and badges. “It has become a matter of survival in a city where, despite all the talk of harmonious multiculturalism, I continue to stand out.” Canada has always had a shaky relationship with race. Hushed tones around Japanese-Canadian internment and the horrific legacy of residential schools for Indigenous children have allowed Canada to earn the title of most reputable country in 2017. However Cole gave voice to the experience of Black people in GTA, which was rarely acknowledged in mainstream media.

The cover story provided a distinctly Canadian perspective of the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement. The piece came not a moment too soon, as less than 3 months later Andrew Loku would die at the hands of Toronto Police. This galvanized a 15-day occupation, organized by Black Lives Matter Toronto, in front of Toronto Police Services headquarters. The Toronto Life piece expanded into the CBC documentary “The Skin We’re In” in 2017 and represented a distinctly Canadian model of the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement. 

In his reporting for the Toronto Star, Cole attracted the ire of Star editors, who were concerned he was conflating his journalism with activism. In 2017, Cole gave up his column at the Star, saying: “If I must choose between a newspaper column and the actions I must take to liberate myself and my community, I choose activism in the service of Black liberation.” Today, Desmond is still reporting on police-involved injustices through his blog and is currently working on his forthcoming book. 

Remember when the global wealthy elite were caught hoarding their masses in offshore bank accounts? Celebrities, sports stars, and business leaders across all industries were implicated in an international leak of insider information. The investigation was a joint project between the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and over 100 media outlets worldwide. The CBC and the Star represented Canada in this operation, revealing more than 214,000 shell companies in 21 jurisdictions including the British Virgin Islands, Hong Kong, and Panama. 

Major international collaborations like these used to be rare, but as independent newsrooms have increasingly limited funding, international collaboration is increasingly imperative in breaking big stories like this. 350 Canadians were among the individuals named in the report, according to the Star, leading to tax losses between $6 billion  and $7.8 billion per year. As of December 2018, no charges have resulted from the Panama Papers leak in Canada, but there has been increased attention to tax evasion in Canada. Canada’s Revenue Agency revealed that audits following the leak should recoup up to $11 million, according to the ICIJ. While tax avoidance is legal according to Canadian law, the secrecy behind stocking up cash in offshore accounts lends itself to laundering and terrorist financing. Advocacy groups like Canadians for Tax Fairness campaign for the closing of tax loopholes. 

Robyn Doolittle had already earned some notoriety for her reportage of Rob Ford’s crack scandal, but her first major project as a Globe and Mail reporter found her grappling with a new set of parameters. A 20-month investigation resulted in “Unfounded,” a 2017 analysis of police data that revealed 1-in-5 sexual assault reports to be dismissed as baseless. The reception of women’s self-advocacy became an increasingly important topic this year, as seemingly in tandem with Doolittle’s reporting, another landslide was happening in Hollywood. Months after the Unfounded series launched, the New Yorker began reporting on the allegations against Harvey Weinstein. From there, leagues of survivors came forth, speaking out against celebrities and the prevalence of sexual assault in Hollywood. Today, both investigations have left lasting impressions on the world of media. Similarly, pressure created in response to Doolittle’s reporting led law enforcement agencies to review cases of sexual assault. As of December 2017, 37,272 cases were or would be re-reviewed across at least 100 police services. 

Of the confirmed eight of Bruce McArthur’s victims, three were immigrants: Selim Esen,  Abdulbasir Faizi and Majeed Kayhan; two were refugees: Soroush Mahmudi and Skandaraj Navaratnam; and one was asylum-seeker Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam. All of them were active community members in Toronto’s LGBTQ+ circles. In Canada, coverage of the LGBTQ+community has historically been sensationalized.

The trailer for CBC’s Uncover: The Village features old news excerpts, of voices saying “the people are sick, they need treatment.” One voice calls for the shooting or hanging of “a few of these people.” Furthermore, Toronto has a history of anti-LGBTQ+ behaviour, through its law enforcement and its dissemination in the media. 

Consider the bathhouse raids, in which patrons were outed, mocked, and humiliated by police. Consider the editor-in-chief of the Toronto Sun, Peter Worthington, threatening to publish the names of people found in the raids. Nearly 40 years later, it’s unclear whether outlets have absorbed the lessons learned about reporting on the LGBTQ+ community. Anthony Oliviera, writing for Hazlitt about McArthur’s victim says, “they will probably give him a name. The Mall Santa thing, probably, or something about the gardening.”  It seems that for the most part, outlets have learned their lesson: only Vanity Fair referred to him as the “landscape killer” in a headline. 

The history of residential schooling in Canada is a grim reminder of our nation’s colonial roots. When the first residential school opened in 1831, the government ripped Indigenous children away from their families and cultures and forced them to live in and attend schools where they were taught English and Christianity. The goal was to assimilate the children into settler European society. Testimonies within the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) detail the cultural abuse faced by young children—forced to cut their hair, havee their cultural clothing confiscated, and hide their emotions. According to the report, Nick Sibbeston recalls the residential schools being a place where “you quickly learn that you should not cry. If you cry you’re teased, you’re shamed out, you’re even punished.” Victoria McIntosh says she learned not to trust anyone from a Manitoba school. “You learn not to cry anymore. You just get harder. And yeah, you learn to shut down.”

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was intended to inform Canadians of the true impact of residential schooling. When the final report was released in 2015, 94 calls to action were recommended for remedying the legacy of residential schooling and promoting reconciliation between Indigenous and settler communities in Canada. This includes recommendations for the federal government to increase funding for the CBC, and for the national broadcaster to increase Aboriginal-language speaking in their programming. Addressing journalism education, the report calls for journalism programs and media schools to require the teaching of the history of Aboriginal people, and the legacy of residential schools. In an address from Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said “I give you my word that we will renew and respect that relationship.”

It’s hard to accept messages like this at face value, especially when four years later, only 10 recommendations have been completed. The progress of implementation of the TRC report is being tracked by CBC’s Beyond 94 and still, even symbolic gestures toward reconciliation are hotly contested, debated, and flat-out denied. In March 2018, Pope Francis refused to meet one of the reconciliatory efforts: to come to Canada and apologize to residential school survivors. According to a letter published by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops the pope “felt that he could not personally respond,” but did not rule out the potential of a future visit. 

Challenging the failings of political leaders like the Pope and Trudeau, the function that journalism is meant to perform, presents an entirely new failure in and of itself. After the release of the final report in the National Inquiry of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Canadian outlets glossed over more than 2000 testimonials making up the report, instead choosing to focus on, and deny, one word: genocide. Rather than acknowledge the calls for justice, a Globe and Mail editorial smugly decided “the charge of a continuing genocide in Canada is absurd.” The Star etched a similar editorial, preciously debating the charge of genocide, rather than the fact that Indigenous women are six times more likely to be murdered than non-Indigenous women. That a cultural conversation about race, especially as it pertains to Indigenous women, is reduced to debates of wordplay in several of Canada’s largest newspapers reveals a stark divide between the communities who inhabit Canada and the gatekeepers who report on it.

A recent report written by Sonya Fatah and Aasma Malik in the Conversation, revealed that the whiteness that makes up the newsrooms of Canadian legacy outlets does not accurately reflect the diversity of Canada’s national statistics. Most newsrooms refuse to self-report on their own staffing. Soraya Roberts, a Canadian columnist at the American outlet, Longreads, critiques the issue, writing that our media has a hard time “not overrepresenting whiteness to the point of implying its supremacy.” Roberts isn’t the only columnist who’s opted for writing at American outlets on account of lack of diversity in Canadian media. Toronto-based film writer Lydia Ogwang tweets, “THIS is why all those women (both POC + white) have been telling me to write for US pubs for years + moving to NYC in droves.” In September, writer Shailee Koranne questioned how racialized Canadians can trust the media to report on racism “if Canadian media has so frequently shown itself unable, and unwilling, to represent racialized Canadians.”

Reviewing of some defining events of the last decade brings to mind a tenet that all of Canadian media outlets should remember going into 2020 and beyond: Canada is an amalgamation of hundreds of vast political, racial, and social identities that are being misrepresented in our media. In order to retain local talent, and properly report on communities in Canada, our media must: grow, adapt, and diversify, at every level of newsroom-decision making, or risk losing it all. 

Pull Quotes podcast hosts Ashley Fraser and Tanja Saric speak with Daniel McIntosh to discuss the impact of these influential stories on the Canadian journalism landscape. 

Episode six of Pull Quotes was edited and produced by Tanja Saric and Ashley Fraser. Pull Quotes’ executive producer is Sonya Fatah. 

The post The Decade in Review: Stories that Caught our Attention in the 2010s + Pull Quotes: Season 3, Episode 6 first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

This week, Pull Quotes hosts Ashley Fraser and Tanja Saric sit down with Ryerson Review of Journalism web editor Hannah Alberga to discuss the recent StarMetro cuts, in which 121 employees were laid off in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Halifax and Toronto. Alberga was quick to report this story for the Review. She spoke with former StarMetro reporters Vicky Mochama and Emma McIntosh, as well as current employee Taryn Grant. We also hear from Sabrina Wilkinson who called in from France to discuss how digital-first news organizations are providing new jobs in the journalism landscape. Wilkinson is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, researching internet regulation policies in Canada.

For more, be sure to check out Alberga’s piece here. 

Episode five of Pull Quotes was edited and produced by Tanja Saric and Ashley Fraser. Technical production help from Angela Glover and Lindsay Hanna. Pull Quotes’ executive producer is Sonya Fatah. 

The post How The StarMetro Cuts Exemplify The Precarious Nature Of Journalism: Pull Quotes Season 3, Episode 5 first appeared on The Review of Journalism.