Pull Quotes

In the latest installment of the Ryerson Review of Journalism’s Unpublished conversation series, Pull Quotes host Ashley Fraser sat down with journalist and activist Desmond Cole. They explored the nature of journalism and activism and attempted to unpack “objectivity.”

Before this conversation, Pull Quotes spoke with Cole and Vicky Mochama, journalist and co-founder of Vocal Fry studios, to discuss Twitter’s role within journalism. Both Mochama and Cole are freelancers that have built substantial Twitter followings for themselves: Cole has nearly 85,000 Twitter followers, and Mochama has close to 16,300.

But with great Twitter following comes great responsibility, and journalists have to navigate sharing their personal lives while using the site to find sources, story ideas and even jobs. 

“I maintain that Twitter is not my job, but it helps. It facilitates my job,” says Mochama on the podcast. However, she also recognizes her Twitter account is a “distilled” version of her personality. 

Folker Hanusch, a professor of journalism from the University of Vienna, wrote in a 2017 paper that social media allows journalists to “perform on-stage personae but simultaneously allow their audiences a glimpse into their backstage, or personal identities.”

Although Twitter can help journalists professionally, it can be a place for them to also display a more personal side of themselves. Journalists have been reprimanded by their employers for doing just that.

After Don Cherry’s remarks about immigrants not wearing poppies during a Coach’s Corner broadcast on November 10, Ahmar Khan, a reporter for CBC Manitoba, tweeted, “It [is] long due time for Don Cherry’s Coach’s Corner to be cancelled. His xenophobic comments being aired weekly are deplorable.” 

On November 14, Canadaland reported CBC forced Khan to delete his tweet. CBC claimed the tweet was in violation of their code of conduct through “‘the expression of personal opinions on controversial subjects, including politics.’”

Cole discusses Khan’s tweet in conversation with Fraser and producer Tanja Saric on the Pull Quotes podcast, and talks about the dissonance that can emerge when freelancers with distinct Twitter personalities end up trying to work within legacy media’s social media codes. 

It’s not uncommon for journalism outlets to have social media policies for their reporters. Manisha Krishnan, senior editor for Vice Canada, says she has to look up Vice’s social media policy. “That should tell you something, the fact that I don’t actually know offhand,” says Krishnan.

According to Krishnan, Vice Canada’s code makes reference to reporters exercising “best judgment” and avoiding “any association with political groups.”

Krishnan says the value of objectivity was a large part of her journalism education at Langara College in Vancouver. This objectivity continued when she worked at legacy media publications like the Toronto Star and the Calgary Herald, where she felt she “toed the line” when it came to Twitter. “I didn’t really take risks with my social media presence at all,” says Krishnan.

That changed when she started working for Vice Canada, a publication known for its looser tone and more leniency with reporters’ opinions. “I think I just had to lose that fear that I had about maintaining the sense of always having this rigid sense of objectivity,” says Krishnan.

But she also acknowledges social media can be a “double-edged sword” when it comes to journalists’ careers.  A journalist’s Twitter brand (although she hates the term, brand) can help them get more opportunities, whether it be a job or a source, she says. At the same time, being seen as “too opinionated” can hurt a journalists’ chance at employment with some outlets.

In his 2017 report, researcher Folker Hanusch acknowledged the value of social media branding for journalists, writing social media “offers an opportunity to differentiate themselves from others and to become an online celebrity which may in turn raise the level of brand recognition for their employer.”

For Cole and Mochama, this “brand recognition” is the key to taking their ideas from the Twittersphere, and launching them into publication or broadcast.

“You can never compare what exposure you’re getting in legacy media to Twitter,” says Cole in this week’s podcast. Mochama says she often wonders, “Is there a way to get ideas or viewpoints or stories into the traditional and mainstream media?” 

“I think I am still trying to ensure that we’re breaking into those spaces, because frankly, that’s where the larger portion of the cultural and political conversation is still happening,” says Mochama.

By Sean Young 

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

The post Walking the Fine Line of Objectivity in the Age of Twitter – A Conversation With Desmond Cole and Vicky Mochama: Pull Quotes Season 3, Episode 4 first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

In the past year, almost 11 million Canadian adults listened to podcasts. This data, from the Canadian Podcast Listener, shows the number of people who listen to podcasts has grown since 2017. As the consumption grows and new shows emerge, the podcast space is fast evolving.

Jeff Ulster, co-creator of the Canadian Podcast Listener Survey, and Chief Content and Technology Officer of The Podcast Exchange, a podcast advertising company speaks to Pull Quotes host Ashley Fraser about the rise of podcasts in today’s media sphere. Ulster says daily news podcasts provide the opportunity to dig a little deeper into certain issues within Canadian news because while radio shows provide listeners with short, quick clips such as traffic updates, podcasts allow listeners to focus on what is being said.

“The way to take advantage of [news podcast] medium, is you imagine someone with headphones on. You’re just speaking to one person and their focus is really on what you’re saying,” Ulster says. “I think that’s the opportunity. And I think different organizations are getting very smart about thinking, ‘How do we put out something every day?’ that isn’t just a replica of what we do on the radio or online. I think there is an opportunity for more formats and more exploration of all of those things.” 

One news podcast frequently topping Canada’s podcast charts is CBC’s Front Burner, hosted by Jayme Poisson. Pull Quotes chats with Poisson following the one year anniversary of Front Burner’s launch to discuss the show’s coverage choices, the challenges of producing a daily news podcast, and how she went from working at a newspaper to hosting a podcast. The following is an excerpt from season three, episode three of Pull Quotes:

Ashley Fraser: What’s it been like to enter the audio space and host a daily news podcast?

Jayme Poisson: It’s been a real learning curve for me because I came from a print background.  I moved from interviews being a relatively exploratory process. As a print reporter, I could just call someone up and talk to them for an hour and just kind of wade my way through and take what I wanted. It’s a little bit different, as you know, in audio, a lot of the prep work comes in the front end, you have to know what you want to get before the interview starts. Also, reading scripts, and working in a different medium. And having to listen to your own voice, which is rough.

AF: Listening to your show last week, you had this great two part series on Western alienation in Alberta and Saskatchewan, which was a really great use of archival sound. As someone who has until the last year spent most of their career in the written word, how does it feel to work with audio to convey your storytelling?

JP: It’s kind of freeing actually. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love writing. And I love digging into a big long read, I think that you can do a lot with the written word. But to actually hear people say these things can be a very powerful way to experience a story. The Western alienation episode, I think is a great example–there was another clip of an Albertan that was so angry during the National Energy Program years that he was talking about picking up a gun. And when you listen to that clip, you can hear his voice trembling. It’s really hard to get that across in writing. Radio and podcasting feels like a more intimate experience because this is the only thing that you’ve got. And particularly with podcasting, I think most people are listening to podcasts with earphones, so it becomes this really intimate experience.

AF: On the note of format, you choose a news topic each day, and often it’s a reporter from the field. But unlike The Daily, they’re not all CBC journalists. And I know we’re in a landscape where we’re operating with a very shrinking staff. What is the idea behind that format?

JP: It’s great talking to the CBC journalists in part because they’re also invested in the show being from the CBC as well, we are all colleagues. So they’ll spend a lot of time working with us to try and make these great arcs. When we go to other people, they’re also fantastic, sometimes they don’t have as much time because they have other jobs. We’re not stuck just to CBC journalists, in part because the mandate is just great stories and also great Canadian culture. I think it’s also the CBC’s role as a public broadcaster to be promoting Canadian media as well because that is also part of our culture, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, other Canadian podcasts. Even Vice Canada, BuzzFeed Canada. These are also institutions helping shape Canadian culture. So we want to make sure that we have tons of voices.

AF: What has it been like for you to switch from the Toronto Star to now working for a public broadcaster in terms of how much Canadian content you have to have on the show?

JP: I think there is a sense here in Canada that people are overwhelmed by American news. When we have too many stories that aren’t Canadian in a row, we actually get complaints. And so I think Canadians care about what is happening outside their borders, that is why we want to go to Syria, we want to do a show about Venezuela, and we want to do a show about the impeachment hearings in the United States. But I do think that there is also a desire for us to stay in our country as well and report on important Canadian stories because there’s all of these other places, particularly in the podcasting landscape, where there’s tons of American news.

AF: I’m wondering what are some of the challenges in maintaining journalistic standards when you’re creating this podcast?

JP: We certainly plan out these conversations. I would say we tried very hard to keep them conversational and spontaneous but no, I don’t want people to mistake that for a lack of effort. So we try to make these spontaneous moments happen. If they happen, lean into them. This is great. But we also want to do lots of research in the beginning to make sure that we are structuring this conversation in a way that makes sense, that people are able to follow and also that we are hitting all the important notes that we want in a story. If you’re going to sit here and listen for 25 minutes to a podcast about Don Cherry, we want to make sure that we did enough research, that we get the big highlights when we’re going through his career. These big moments of controversy, we want to sort of lean into the tape. Before that interview, when we did the Don Cherry podcast, our producers were pulling tape we knew we had – the clip of him in 1990 talking to the Fifth Estate and talking about the foreigners coming into this country and making a lot of dough, which was another controversial comment and so we know we want to hit those things in the conversation.

AF: Where does Front Burner lie in the future?

JP:  I think we want to continue to push the limits. We launched this show last year and we have an incredible team. We had to put a bunch of stuff in place just to make a show and we had a lot of talks about voice and how to do these interviews. There’s learning curves for me. And now we’re thinking about what might we like to do next. We’d like to get on the road, we’d like to do live shows, we’d like to do more ambitious pieces.

This piece was condensed for content and clarity.

Written by Tanja Saric

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

To purchase tickets for the Review’s conversation with Desmond Cole, click here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/journalism-x-activism-in-conversation-with-desmond-cole-tickets-80389955521?fbclid=IwAR3a_HJngeF-E0-Yx_CwBB7PO3WviZV9-5ObGDpJeHCqmtcg8hQ7Qi5x12Y

The post SPECIAL: A Podcast About Podcasts Plus: A Q&A with Jayme Poisson – Pull Quotes Season 3, Episode 3 first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

Since September 2016, Daniel Dale, former Toronto Star Washington bureau chief and current CNN reporter, has been fact-checking US President Donald Trump’s statements. As of May 5, when Dale was still with the Star, he had documented 5,276 false statements by Trump. 

These fact-checking segments have been a part of journalists’ efforts to ensure that they are reporting facts to the public and holding power to account. Dale, for instance, used the same platform as Trump – Twitter – to ensure that those receiving news through that online medium could find corrections to it in the same space. In a wider sense, the growth of fact-checking efforts at news publications, as well as the establishment of organizations devoted to researching and responding to the spread of fake news and misinformation (International Fact Checking Network at Poynter, for instance) point to a growing concern: How should we, as journalists, respond to the culture of fake news and misinformation?

Anthony Burton, a researcher at the Digital Citizenship Cultures initiative with Ryerson University’s Infoscape Research Lab, tells Pull Quotes podcast host Tanja Saric the problem lies beyond the journalist. “I think that journalism has done a very good job the last few years with the tools available to it in addressing this problem, but the problem is that those who are contributing to this ecosystem are not really playing the same game as journalists anymore,” says Burton. 

“If you see Daniel Dale doing a presidential fact check on CNN the problem is that the proverbial choir that a person preaches to, Daniel is the preacher and the choir [are] those who are already watching CNN.”

Burton is studying the impact of digital media on the 2019 Federal Election in Canada. His research includes examining media outlets such as Rebel Media and The Post Millennial that make up what he terms as “Canada’s new right media sphere.” His research finds websites such as Rebel Media, largely modelled off of Breitbart News in the US, have used social media to “set the agenda in terms of how to hook into the ways that we do politics online and the ways that we get involved in political discussions online,” he says.

Matthew Johnson, director of education at MediaSmarts, a not-for-profit organization focused on media literacy, says the way to counterbalance this problem is educating children as early as kindergarten about misinformation online. 

“There are an increasing number of propaganda outlets like Sputnik or RT (both funded by the Russian government) that present themselves as news outlets and unfortunately many aggregators and even social networks treat them as news,” says Johnson. 

Last year, MediaSmarts launched the Break the Fake public awareness campaign, bringing back the famous “house hippo” commercial to educate both children and adults about debunking misleading information. 

Johnson warns “media and journalism can sometimes fall prey to false balance,” despite reputable news organizations’ efforts to stay objective and balanced.

The Conversation, a not-for-profit media outlet, defines false balance as: “the process of providing a platform for people whose views do not accord with established or dominant positions simply for the sake of seeming ‘balanced.’”

Johnson relates this false balance to the initial reporting of the anti-vaccination movement. Despite the fact that the study that linked vaccines to autism has since been retracted by the Lancet Commission, he says journalists gave voice to “fringe” anti-vaccination groups as a counter to an “iron-clad scientific consensus,” making it seem that there was less of a consensus about vaccinations.

The Conversation sought to address the anti-vaccination movement this year. The platform allows academics to write articles with the help of journalists as editors to produce research for the public in their area of expertise. Scott White, its editor-in-chief told Pull Quotes his team in Canada has produced articles about anti-vaccines and climate change in the last year “to address some of the falsehoods.” 

The Conversation’s model, which uses a creative commons license, allows for other media outlets to publish their information and encourages the spread of research-driven content to combat misinformation.

White says this type of reporting is beneficial to mainstream media because “it is providing material for both new and traditional media who just don’t have that depth of coverage that they’ve once had.”   

For Burton, the battle of fake news is far from over. “It’s a much bigger problem than just correcting the record or pointing out that someone wasn’t telling the truth.”  

By Ashley Fraser

The post Pull Quotes Season 3, Episode 2: How Media Professionals Adapt to Challenging Misinformation first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

You may have heard the news—Justin Trudeau was re-elected as prime minister in the Canadian federal election, forming a Liberal minority government. What you may not have heard is how the election played out on the local level. 

As a local reporter for Collingwood Today, Erika Engel says she definitely saw less of a focus on local candidates in the news landscape this election period. As a result, she worked hard to ensure she was covering the candidates in her riding, Simcoe-Grey. 

“The week before and after the writ dropped, I met with all of the candidates that were selected at that time for about an hour and used that interview to write a profile story and some of the basics of what they thought was important for residents of Simcoe-Grey and Canada in general,” Engel says. She made sure to dive deeper into what each candidate thought about important local issues, she told host of Pull Quotes, Ashley Fraser.

“I did four issue-based stories,” she says.“I took something that was sort of a national issue that we had some specific experience with locally.” One of Engel’s stories focused on the opioid crisis and what each candidate proposes to do about it, as there are “significant overdose numbers in Simcoe County,” she says. 

Engel also worked with a journalism student at Humber College who crafted youth-based questions for local candidates. Engel says this not only provided the student with the opportunity to improve their journalism skills, but also helped Engel cover issues she may not have had the time or resources to otherwise. 

The decline in local journalism is an issue many communities have been grappling with, perhaps because newsrooms are closing at twice the rate they are opening, according to the principal investigator of the Local News Research Project, April Lindgren.

“In the early 1990s there were close to 200 editors, reporters, and photographers in the newsroom of the Ottawa Citizen and today there are 50,” Lindgren says. “If you think that those newsrooms are providing the same amount of coverage for their communities that they did in the past with fewer reporters, well you need a reality check and I think these numbers provide a reality check.” 

This lack of resources, including the limited amount of reporters in newsrooms, is something Lindgren reiterated.

While Lindgren prefers not to idealize the way journalism was done in the past—when newsrooms had more journalists—

she says even the people news organizations used to report on, such as municipal politicians, are “raising questions about the lack of verified, timely, independently produced news in their own communities.” 

As a result of the lack of local news, Lindgren says these municipal politicians may start their own website that “parades as perhaps a news website but is really pushing a particular cause.” 

In regards to the election, Lindgren says she was most concerned about the amount of information citizens received. 

“Who people vote for is not necessarily the issue. It’s whether they have the information they need to actually make an informed decision so it’s not just based, say, on name recognition,” Lindgren says. 

 However, Lindgren agreed collaborations like Engel’s can help journalists fix this problem.

“There is a growing recognition that instead of trying to eat each other’s lunch, as we have in the past, news organizations competing with each other, how about if we pool all our limited resources to produce something that is greater than the whole,” Lindgren says. 

Written by Tanja Saric

Episode 1 of Pull Quotes was edited by Ashley Fraser and produced by Tanja Saric with technical production help from Angela Glover and Lindsay Hanna. Pull Quotes executive producer is Sonya Fatah. 

The post Pull Quotes Season 3, Episode 1: How Has the Loss of Local Media Impacted Coverage of the Federal Election? first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

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For the final episode of season 2 of Pull Quotes, we bring in Jordana Goldman, Jordan Currie, Hannah Ziegler and Rhianna Jackson-Kelso to talk about their stories from the upcoming print issue from the Ryerson Review of Journalism. From access to the internet, to coverage of race, music criticism, and the increasingly fraught relationship between Doug Ford’s government and journalists, this year’s issue takes a wide look at the problems journalists are facing, and the solutions they’re coming up with to address them.

We’re launching the spring issue on April 17 at Oakham House — buy your tickets now!

The stories in today’s episode will be coming online in the next few months… keep your eyes out for:

Left Behind: The online news world is out of reach for far too many Canadians

Framing the Story: Who gets to report on race?

Yesterday’s Heroes: Inside the dwindling profession of the music critic

When They Push, We Push Back: How journalists are adapting to the age of Trump, Twitter, and fake news

CONTRIBUTORS

Pull Quotes is produced by Lidia Abraha and Michal Stein. Thanks to Angela Glover and Lindsay Hanna for technical help. Sonya Fatah is our Executive Producer.

Doug Ford attacks media for ‘mocking us’ over his opposition to federal carbon pricing

The post Pull Quotes Season 2, Episode 18: Notes from the Spring Issue first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

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In 2017, then-Minister of Canadian Heritage, Melanie Joly, announced that Netflix would be spending $500 million over five years on films produced in Canada. It sounds like a lot of money—but where is that money actually going? Do we know how it’s being spent?

This past February, Netflix announced that they’re leasing office and studio space in Cinespace and Pinewood studios.

While there has been some coverage of Netflix’s recent moves into Canada, a lot of big questions remain unanswered. Today on Pull Quotes, we try to unpack some of these questions.

CONTRIBUTORS

Alex LaLonde is the VP of Business Development and Operations at New Metric Media.

Chandler Levack is a freelance film critic and an independent filmmaker.

Pull Quotes is produced by Lidia Abraha and Michal Stein. Thanks to Katherine Singh for co-hosting this week. Thanks to Angela Glover and Lindsay Hanna for technical help. Sonya Fatah is the executive producer of Pull Quotes.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s story in Cottage Life

David Skok’s Letter from the Editor

The post Pull Quotes Season 2, Episode 16: What do we need to be asking about Netflix? first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

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As soon-to-be journalism school graduates about to enter the industry, we’re well aware of the doom and gloom facing journalism in 2019. It’s increasingly clear that the old models won’t be around for much longer. Advertising revenue hasn’t been able to sustain print or digital publications for a long time, and readers have gotten used to getting their news—for free—on the Internet. But we’re tired of talking about what’s not working. So, we brought in six people to talk about what they’re doing to cut through the noise.

On March 19, Elamin Abdelmahmoud of Buzzfeed, San Grewal of The Pointer, Hannah Hoag of The Conversation, William Wolfe Wylie of CBC, and Jesse Brown of Canadaland joined the RRJ and a packed audience at Ryerson for RRJ Unpublished: Journalism, All Shook Up! On Pull Quotes this week, you’ll hear from Elamin, Hannah, and William.

Pull Quotes is produced by Lidia Abraha and Michal Stein. We had technical help this week from Rhianna Jackson-Kelso. Adam Chen is the Conference Editor. Sonya Fatah is the Executive Producer of Pull Quotes. Thanks to Angela Glover and Lindsay Hanna for technical support.

The post Pull Quotes, Season 2, Episode 15: Journalism, All Shook Up! first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

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This week on Pull Quotes, we’re joined by three RRJ colleagues: Jordan Currie, copy editor; Linsey Raschkowan, chief of research; and Aurora Zboch, on the sales and sponsorship team, to talk about stories they wanted to bring to our attention. Linsey brought up some context for a story she wrote with Maddie Cornacchia about objectivity while writing about protests. Jordan Currie talked about an article about the impact of ‘Leaving Neverland’ and how these documentaries can change the way we talk about old allegations.  Aurora gave us some context about what’s going on in the world of MMA journalism. Lidia cited a tweet from Global News journalist Travis Dhanraj that called out MPP Lisa MacLeod for not speaking to journalists, and Michal brought in a tweet from Lindsay Robertson, a freelance writer in New York, that shed some light on the journalism angle of the college admissions scam that’s been all over the news this week.  

Pull Quotes is produced by Lidia Abraha and Michal Stein. Thanks to Angela Glover and Lindsay Hanna for technical help. Sonya Fatah is the executive producer of Pull Quotes.

Join us on Tuesday, March 19 in the Venn at the Rogers Communication Centre for our second RRJ Unpublished event—Journalism: All Shook Up!

The post Pull Quotes Season 2, Episode 14: A Midseason Pull Quotes Roundup first appeared on The Review of Journalism.

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The alt-right movement has been in and out of the centre of media attention in the last few years. After the Charlottesville protest in Virginia, the world finally got a glimpse of the extreme hateful rhetoric that is at the centre of these groups. However, when we talk about the “alt-right,” we’re not actually talking about one, monolithic movement—it has become a catch-all term to describe many kinds of far right groups with different goals. While coverage in the United States have increased, that’s not the case in Canada. Here, those who closely cover this beat find an absence of coverage in mainstream media.

For this week’s episode, we discuss how media can either trivialize or sensationalize the alt-right movement. We also look at why there is a lack of people of colour reporters on the front lines of the protests, and explore those implications.

Former RRJ reporter Dagmawit Dejene and RSJ student Kosalan Kathiramalanathan join Michal for a panel discussion on Canadian media covering the alt-right. Freelance writer Bashir Mohamed also joins.

Pull Quotes is produced by Lidia Abraha and Michal Stein. Thanks to Angela Glover and Lindsay Hanna for technical help. Sonya Fatah is the executive producer of Pull Quotes.

Scaachi Koul’s reporting on The Rebel

Sarah Hagi’s reporting on The Rebel

Tickets for RRJ Unpublished: All Shook Up!

Did Doug Ford consult any students in his “For the Students” plan?

Jeffrey Dvorkin on SNC Lavalin Coverage

Michael Bueckert’s letter on his GoFundMe page

The post Pull Quotes Season 2, Episode 13: Is Coverage of the Alt-Right Alright? first appeared on The Review of Journalism.