Thomas (TL) – The short answer is because they are no longer the gatekeepers to the news. The 20th century model of the mass media speaking to a mass audience has fragmented and broken down. Accelerated by the Internet, there are now opportunities for everyone to become part of the news. The Internet has changed the model from one-way communication into a two-way discussion. That has massive implications for journalism as it means members of the public can become agenda-setters and producers of news; they can perform acts of journalism. When Sohaid Athar tweeted about the raid on the Bin Laden compound in Abbotabad was it an act of journalism? Of course. Does that make him a journalist? I would argue, in this moment, of bearing witnessing he is. Of course, it also took mainstream media to draw attention to him and his tweet. As the media terrain is changing, I think this empowerment of citizens to have independent, public involvement in the journalistic process will be at the core of the networked journalism of the future.

Valérie (VGB) – Le rôle du journalisme dans la démocratie et la participation citoyenne dans le processus journalistique sont effectivement des enjeux importants. Cependant, bien que cette dernière ait été plus importante dans les dernières années, on constate un retour du balancier. Récemment, en Angleterre, Sky News a interdit ses journalistes de re-poster des tweets ne provenant pas des membres de son organisation. Par ailleurs, Sky a demandé à ses journalistes de confirmer avec leur chef de pupitre s’il était approprié de tweeter les dernières nouvelles. La BBC en a fait de même – sa politique en est de prioriser déposer une copie avant de la tweeter. Assiste-t-on à la réaffirmation du rôle du journaliste comme ‘gatekeeper’?

TL – Given the torrents of information available, I think finding ways to verify the accuracy of Tweets or video posts or comments is of the utmost importance. Indeed, as communication becomes a two-way street accuracy and authenticity are more important now than ever. I still fall short of qualifying this form of fact-checking and analysis as ‘gatekeeping’ in the traditional sense of the term. I think it’s part of a more dynamic process that includes members of the public and the mainstream media. Yes, a lot of the chatter constitutes speculation, rumours, and even lies, but others have used the one-percent rule to suggest that even if only a tiny fraction of that chatter turns up a story or a journalistic lead, that is still an enormous amount of collaboration. Even if the mainstream media doesn’t follow those leads, those discussions will continue online. There is journalistic merit in those discussions.

I think blogs are one area that really blurs the line. For example, if we look at the importance of Arabic bloggers in the Egyptian Revolution, the boundary between what is and is not real journalism is more and more fuzzy. The Huffington Post is still considered a blog, but at the same time is considered part of the mainstream media. The recent Pulitzer Prize awarded to one of its journalists validates that point. It’s still hard to say how influential a blog has to become to be considered such validation, but it is most often those blogs – big and small – that focus on accuracy and getting it right that win attention.

VBG -  Je suis d’accord. La participation citoyenne est importante en tant que telle et ajoute également de la valeur au journalisme. Il n’en demeure pas moins que maintes études récentes ont prouvé que les organisations alternatives comme Indymedia et Global Voice reproduisent un modèle journaliste traditionel, jusqu’à un certain niveau. Bien que l’équipe éditoriale de Indymedia se retrouve face à des enjeux et processus similaires aux organisations médiatiques traditionnelles, peut-être que la gestion de problèmes diffère en raison d’une interprétation idéologique du journalisme différent. Est-ce que le danger de devenir un géant médiatique est associé à la possibilité de reproduire un média plus traditionnel?

TL – I agree there is always that danger of recreating models and concentration of various media are happening at many levels, journalism included. There are many who fear this will be a plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. I remain optimistic the Internet will allow for the creation of new forums that will be doing things differently or taking different approaches. We can point to OpenFile and its “community-powered news” model as one such example. Yes, it does have many things in common with larger, traditional media companies, but the focus is different and it embraces collective journalism. The size of a media company isn’t necessarily the most important factor here, but the company’s mindset and its willingness to embrace and work within this new environment.

VBG – Quel rôle, et à quel niveau, les citoyens devraient créer et informer le journalisme? Kai Nagata propose à la CBC/Radio-Canada de commencer par ceux que les médias servent, soit les citoyens. Poussé à l’extrême, cet argument pourrait éroder le concept même du journalisme, mais répondrait au besoin d’agir  en tant que service publique, un média à l’image de sa démocratie. Dans quelle mesure est-ce possible?

TL – That is still the burning question – What role and to what level of importance should citizens be able to create and inform journalism? That is ongoing discussion Journalism Strategies will contribute to. Kai’s video postcard to CBC/Radio-Canada is one example of the kind of discussion we should be having. It doesn’t matter if everyone agrees. In fact, disagreement is better as it forces people to come up with a clearer vision. The beauty of the Internet is that it will continue to provide a forum for different views and different models in any case. I would venture we will see more and more creative and innovative forums for collective journalism – the meshing of professionals and amateurs – in the years ahead. In spite of the sometimes-difficult transition, I’m quite optimistic that will lead to better journalism.

On Monday, April 16^th the CRTC will begin hearings to evaluate the progress and impact of the Local Programming Improvement Fund (LPIF), implemented in 2008/2009 to stem the evacuation of local programming amongst Canada’s “non-metropolitan” television stations. It is fortuitous timing then that the Journal Strategies Conference should parallel the LPIF hearings, since both are concerned with the future of news and information in our country. Indeed, while Journalism Strategies seeks to address the “role of professional journalism in our democratic lives,” the primary goal of the LPIF is to “ensure that viewers in smaller Canadian markets continue to receive a diversity of local programming, particularly local news programming” (CRTC 2008-100, par.359) With this in mind, we thought that a primer on LPIF would be of benefit to those interested in the regulatory approaches to the “crisis” of western journalism, particularly at the local level.

Much of the following information is taken from the CRTC’s Broadcasting Notice of Consultation 2011-788, supplementary information can also be found in the following CRTC notices and rulings: 2008-100; 2009-406; the CRTC’s primer on LPIF; and the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage’s 2009 report, Issues and Challenges Related to Local Television.

Origins

In brief, the LPIF is a resource available to non-metropolitan television stations (non-metropolitan defined as a population of under one-million) to fund local programming initiatives, particularly local news and information. This includes both public and private stations, but it was decided in 2010 that community television stations would not be eligible. The fund is sustained by a levy on cable and satellite distributors (“Broadcast Distribution Undertakings” or “BDUs”) and is now in its third year of operation.

The LPIF was created by the CRTC in 2008, during the Commission’s review of BDUs. It was further revised in 2009, and scheduled to commence meting out funds during the 2009-2010 broadcast year. LPIF came about in the midst of an economic downtown in conventional television resulting in a number of station closures and cancellation of local newscasts, particularly within small and medium market stations.  This also anticipated the battle for “fee-for-carriage,” (now called “value for signal”) which saw broadcasters challenge BDUs for the right to charge for their signal. Broadcasters argued that the local broadcasting model was “broken” due to the economic downturn and the ongoing audience transition to digital media. As such they sought a ruling from the CRTC to be allowed to charge BDUs for their signal, thus deriving a stable source of revenue beyond that of advertising. While value for signal remains unresolved, this concern for local broadcasting, and in particular, local news and information got to the point where a 2009 Standing Committee Report noted that there was a “crisis of local television” in Canada. The CRTC was thus in search for new regulatory mechanisms to ensure the survival of local programming (in particular, news and information), which several reports and rulings noted was important to viewers, to an informed citizenry, and to Canadian democracy. The LPIF, can be read as a temporary solution to this perceived “crisis,” with three primary objectives:

1)    to ensure that viewers in smaller Canadian markets continue to receive a diversity of local programming – particularly local news programming

2)    to improve the quality and diversity of local programming broadcast in these markets; and

3)    to ensure that viewers in French-language markets are not disadvantaged by the smaller size of those markets.  (2008-100, par. 359)

Structure

The initial 2008 document established the LPIF as financial assistance to stations in non-metropolitan markets to improve and increase local programming (re: local news and information). It also established that BDUs would contribute 1% of their gross revenues (from broadcasting activities) to sustain the fund (which also ups overall contributions of BDUs to Canadian programming from 5% to 6% of these revenues). To equalize the disparities amongst French and English broadcasters it was decided that a full third of the fund would go to stations in French-language markets and the remainder to those in English-language markets. The fund, pegged at around $68 million, was to be distributed by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) and was initially meant to be contingent upon stations increasing their local programming expenditures.

In a 2009 ruling, the CRTC enacted guidelines for eligibility to the LPIF, and drafted markers of success for the program. In recognizing the strength and profitability of the BDU operators, the CRTC also increased the levy from 1% to 1.5% thus increasing the fund from approximately $68 million to approximately $100 million.  The CRTC also eliminated the requirement that stations increase expenditures to local programming. The allocation formula was also amended, such that now:

• One third of the overall LPIF would be allocated equally to eligible stations across both Francophone and Anglophone markets
• The remaining two thirds…would be divided such that 30% would be directed to Francophone markets and 70% to Anglophone markets
• These amounts would be allocated on the basis of three-year historical average spending on local programming, with an allocation proportionate to the percentage of LPIF funding to all eligible stations within a linguistic market. (2011-788, par. 43)

To access the fund, non-metropolitan conventional television stations must be able to prove that they provide original local news, and broadcast a minimum of 7-hours per week of local programming for English language stations, and 5-hours per week for French language stations. The CRTC also considered factors such as “local presence” of television stations as important contributions to Canadian programming.

A list of eligible stations can be found here.

Markers of success were also established and will form the backbone of the Commission’s hearings next week:

• evidence of audience success and viewer satisfaction
• increases in local advertising revenues
• increases in local news stories
• the number of local stories that are picked up nationally
• expansion of news bureaus; and
• increases in the quantity of local programming broadcast (2011-788, par. 29)

Hearings

By the CRTC’s initial assessments, it seems that the LPIF has performed satisfactorily, with levels of expenditures for local news programming on the rise. The LPIF even garnered high praise from Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, which wrote in its intervention: “Friends congratulates the Commission on the outstanding success of the LPIF in stabilizing and maintaining local programming in many Canadian communities, where its demise was widely expected, and much feared.” The intervention of Channel Zero, owner of CHCH Hamilton, also testifies to the success of the program:

In an era of constant change and significant competition, the LPIF is the stable

foundation, from which CHCH can operate, innovate and be successful in the most  challenging of environments. (p.3)

The hearings are designed to evaluate the performance of the LPIF after its first three years of operation through the lens of the aforementioned “indicators of success.” The Commission will also evaluate such factors as whether stations should commit to “incremental expenditures on local programming;” the allocation formula; the level of contribution from BDUs and whether the LPIF should continue.

One of the more interesting questions asked by the CRTC is the impact of vertical integration on local broadcast markets. Implicitly referencing the recent takeovers of CanWest and CTV by Shaw and BCE respectively, the CRTC observed that “large media companies are now both contributors to and recipients of the LPIF.” As such, the Commission asked: “to what extent, if any, should the nature of a station’s ownership structure within a vertically integrated entity be considered in terms of LPIF eligibility?” Vertical integration has certainly been a contested topic within Canadian media policy studies, and has recently been ruled upon by the CRTC itself. Given that so many eligible stations are owned by BDUs, this is indeed a pertinent issue on the table.

A second issue is whether community broadcasters should be able to access the fund. This is the centerpiece of the intervention filed on behalf of the group, Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations (CACTUS). An interesting parallel is also that of the CBC’s eligibility to the fund. While in 2008 the CRTC permitted non-metropolitan CBC stations to access the fund, some have contested this permission (see Shaw and Bell Canada’s interventions). As such, “eligibility criteria” will certainly be an interesting component of these hearings.

LPIF and Journalism Strategies

While campaigns over the “TV Tax,” “Local TV Matters,” and “value-for-signal” have quieted in recent years, the underlying concerns for local television, and in particular, local news and information on Canadian television screens remains a seminal issue. The LPIF represents one way in which Canadians living outside the major centres of Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa can continue to hear their stories and voices reflected back to them on television. Importantly, however, it can still be read as a stopgap as we wait and see how the coming years will impact the local television industry, and how the Supreme Court will rule on the value for signal debacle. Nonetheless, with local news and information the topic of several presentations at Journalism Strategies, the debate over LPIF is an important contribution to the question of how to best provide local news and information to Canadian communities in a digital age.

Christopher Ali is a Doctoral Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

This translated post originally appeared on the site J-Source on March 20, 2012. Translated by Rhiannon Russell.

The turmoil of the student movement, which started this spring, upsets the relative tranquility of our campus. It seems, in any case, to have boosted student media that, with front row seats to the events, have covered them intensively and often ingeniously using the means at hand – today, the Internet and social media.

For craftsmen of newspapers, radio, and other campus media, the labyrinth of student association acronyms and procedural jargon isn’t a secret. Specialists in student life, they’re also members of this community, so it’s not always easy for them to handle heated situations at a healthy distance. (photo, Boite Rouge)

Baptiste Barbe, production director at the weekly school newspaper L’Exemplaire (in my department), says that the professional rule concerning conflicts of interests applies: journalists assigned to cover strike votes and protests aren’t allowed to be directly associated with the groups involved.

It’s the same at biweekly paper Montréal Campus de l’UQAM, which has nonetheless taken a pro-strike editorial position. As editor-in-chief Émilie Clavel-Forget explains, “We try to reflect our position as little as possible in journalistic work. We’re an independent newspaper, not a mouthpiece for student associations.”

Impact Campus, a student weekly published by Laval University, has taken a neutral stance. Even volunteering journalists like those at Montréal Campus (the paper has just a small core of paid reporters), aren’t allowed to publicly display their convictions; wearing a red square and disseminating opinions on one’s Facebook page are especially prohibited.

According to David Rémillard, student news editor, you want to counteract the perception that “the student media would be extremely left-wing” and show both sides of the coin, “even though it’s mostly opponents of the hike that are protesting.”

An opportunity to innovate

Budding journalists exploit digital tools modestly, yet efficiently: live Twitter coverage of the general assemblies and protests and dissemination of text and pictures on Facebook are particularly popular.

“We decided very quickly to use the web for its speed and flexibility,” emphasizes Émilie Clavel-Forget of Montréal Campus.The strike is clearly a priority for this student paper: “two or three journalists are there more regularly, but the whole team may be asked to bring in photos and stories from the field.”

As for student newspapers at Laval, the Internet and social media allow for continuous coverage, so that commentary, summaries, and analysis can run in the print edition, which has longer production times. David Rémillard of the Impact Campus notes that the space devoted to the strike is actually quite limited, and that there are few journalists available to cover it.

Otherwise, the decentralized structure of student associations at Laval makes it almost impossible to attend all the general meetings, so it’s necessary to rely on contacts within the associations to find out the voting results.

Also, at L’Exemplaire, contacting sources by phone and email allows for a tracking of events, even though the paper prefers to send a reporter to the scene whenever possible.

The movement against increasing tuition fees has also given way to many spontaneous activist initiatives on the web – for example, Grève2012, Équipe de surveillances des interventions policières, and Boîte rouge – all driven by students at UQAM.CADEUL has made a series of videos that provide financial alternatives to raising tuition. Émilie Clavel-Forget considers these sites potential sources of information, but discourages her journalists from getting involved, given the sites’ “biased and politicized” tone. There’s no question that, if content from the sites is to be used, it must be independently verified.

Student media to professional media

Budding journalists complain that professional media – including those for which they one day hope to work – are interested in the student movement almost exclusively during the protests, and that they focus heavily on violent incidents. These young journalists are proud to see, however, that their work is a valuable source of information for the mainstream media.

A season of strikes and student protests is, therefore, a sort of professional laboratory, a chance to experiment with new forms of coverage and refine skills. “The newspaper, it’s a school. We receive a lot of feedback, we give ourselves the right to make mistakes, but we correct quickly,” says Émilie Clavel-Forget of UQAM. For David Rémillard of Laval, it’s a demanding but exciting experience, “a bit like an election campaign for a political journalist.”

At the end of March, academics, consultants, journalists, and architects of public policy gathered in London to attend the fourth annual POLIS Journalism Conference: Reporting the World.

Panel discussions tackled issues such as: How journalism should respond to the rise of the demonstrators around the world who are becoming more experienced with different media platforms? How social media is transforming the world news is covered? How can data journalism further and reveal information the authorities keep secret? Has the European media, in light of the Euro crisis and the collapse of the European dream, been unsuccessful in covering the failure of the democratic system?

During the panel on media coverage of revolutions – led by Richard Sambrook from Cardiff University – which discussed the Arab Spring as the prime example, reporter Tom Coghlan from The Times suggested that new forms of journalism have introduced a greater interdependence between the traditional media and amateurs, such as citizen journalists. News agencies are increasingly becoming specialized in managing content generated by citizen journalists, which is leading to the formation of a hybrid medium that has elements of both professional and citizen journalism. However, according to Lindsey Hilsum, the international news editor at Channel 4 News, the obsession of the mainstream media to cover Syria is showing the of coverage in the wake of the Arab Spring is poor. Representing the tradition of public service media, BBC journalist Lyse Doucet supported Hilsum, saying it remains important for traditional media to continue to follow these stories.

The questions we pose at the Journalism Strategies conference, from April 19 to 21 in Montreal, are not so different from those that arise from our colleagues across the Atlantic. In a context of hybrid media, what is the role of public policy in Canadian journalism to preserve democracy? How do we account for recent technological changes in the development of public policy? What are their implications for models of funding and organizational structures of traditional journalism? What kind of journalism do we want? These are big questions that deserve a great deal of introspection.

There is a big problem that has troubled journalists since its ascension to a place of great importance in the late 18th century: that of preserving democracy and developing the role of journalism (fact-based, impartial, objective, balanced and reliable). The citizen has not often been at the heart of this debate. Today, in a context where models of ‘hybrid’ journalism are emerging, something halfway between a citizen and professional journalism, how is it possible to produce public policies in the image of our democracy?

As Journalism Strategies coordinator Christine Crowther has suggested: “the policy will not happen by accident but by a chain of decisions.” Which decisions shall we take?

- Cathy Edwards - 

Spokesperson, Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations

On March 5, the NGO Invisible Children uploaded a video to Youtube campaigning for the capture and arrest of Joseph Kony, a Ugandan warlord charged with conscripting tens of thousands of child soldiers for his Lord’s Resistance Army.  Promoted by celebrities including Angelina Jolie and Oprah Winfrey, KONY2012 was watched over 70 million times over the course of a single week, a record-breaking number of views for an advocacy video.¹ During the same time period, over 500,000 viewers purchased Invisible Children’s “action kits” (a packet containing a bracelet, t-shirt, brochures and posters), raising $15 million for the organization. U.S. President Barack Obama and ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo praised Invisible Children’s efforts and expressed their support of efforts to bring Kony to justice.

But while it has been hailed by supporters as an example of the power of social media to raise global awareness, the KONY2012 video has also been the focus of a wide-ranging backlash in the blogosphere. Critics have raised significant questions about Invisible Children’s spending priorities, pointing out the group spends more money on “raising awareness” than on actual work in Africa.  African observers have accused Invisible Children of paternalism, noting that there are no Africans on the group’s board.  Area scholars have pointed out that the video’s focus on Ugandan victims obscures the fact that Kony is no longer in the country.  Even those who embrace the use of social media for political change have expressed concern about KONY2012’s oversimplification of a complex political reality in Central Africa, worrying that the video might do more harm than good by telling only part of the story.  Responding to critiques of its practices and goals, Invisible Children has produced a forceful defense and posted it to its website, including a data visualization of their budget, detailed description of their work in Uganda, and a policy paper supporting their plan of action.

For journalists, the KONY2012 campaign and its backlash reflect what has become an increasingly prevalent reality: a social media campaign emerges out of nowhere and captures broad public interest, leaving legacy media scrambling to find the ‘story’ among the scattered bits.   But KONY2012 seemed to step things up a notch: both the campaign and its blogosphere backlash were well underway by the time reporters became aware of the existence of Invisible Children’s viral video.  Indeed, some of the critiques had already become social media milestones in their own right, including the blog posts of Canadian college student Grant Oyston (the first to post a critique, and now the auhor of a Tumblr blog with over 2 million hits in the past week), and the tweets of Nigerian author Teju Cole (whose widely circulated mini-essay on KONY2012 was posted on his @tejucole account in 140-character installments).

Trying to cover a story like the KONY2012 campaign can thus leave journalists feeling at once rushed to the table and late for dinner.  Given the ever-abbreviating news cycle prompted by social media, and the logistical difficulty of reporting complex international stories, the default approach to KONY2012 has been curation of the pre-existing debate.  Though such curation can be quite illuminating, a thorny ethical and political conundrum such as KONY2012 reveals the limits of curatorial journalism.  Curation accretes: it does not take a position, and its taxonomic approach to controversy leaves the reader stranded in a morass of ever-proliferating perspectives.

If KONY2012 usurped journalism’s interpretive function, it likewise preempted journalism’s role in shaping policy debate.  The power shift between new media and old becomes achingly clear when a 29-minute video manages to attract more public interest in a week’s time than the life’s work of some foreign correspondents.  One can argue  — like David Lamb of CBC News — that KONY2012 is successful precisely because it is not journalism, but advocacy work not burdened by journalist’s commitment to truth.  But given the impact of KONY2012, one is left wondering what this might suggest about the future success of journalism as a force in shaping foreign or domestic policy.  Whether or not one believes that the CNN effect was ever as influential as some have argued, it seems we may be observing its moment of decline. As Noam Cohen of the New York Times argues, social media campaigns, not televised images, may increasingly shape our policy debates.

For a Canadian example of this trend, one need only think back to November of 2011, when MP Charlie Angus brought a camera to Attawapiskat and posted a video to YouTube depicting substandard housing in that First Nations Community.  That video, and Angus’ accompanying blog post in the Huffington Post, quickly led to national media interest in Attawapiskat’s housing crisis, despite the fact that this ‘crisis’ (like Joseph Kony and the LRA) was a longstanding problem that the media had largely ignored.  And as with KONY2012, some of the best discussion of the complex financial and political causes of the Attawapiskat housing crisis took place in the blogosphere.  Most notably, a Montreal Metis blogger named Chelsea Vowel wrote a post that became the touchstone of many conversations about Attawapiskat finances; it was widely reposted and Vowel was interviewed by the CBC.

Five months after Angus posted his video to YouTube, Attawapiskat has new modular housing: there has even been a promise of a new school for the community, something that Attawapiskat residents have lobbied for unsuccessfully for twelve years.  Though this is promising news, the situation in Attawapiskat is far from resolved. Against their wishes (and despite a legal challenge), the community has been placed under third party management by the Harper Government.  What happens next in Attawapiskat — whether the housing provided by the Federal Government stands the test of the harsh northern climate, whether the promised school is actually built on schedule, whether the band is allowed to self-govern again in the near future — will ultimately be of far more consequence than what has happened thus far. And as the story continues, the legacy media needs to become more proactive than reactive, keeping Attawapiskat in the public eye without the outside prompt of a viral social media campaign and an emotional public response.  As well, they need to build on the insights gleaned from the blogosphere, without simply cataloging a conversation that is taking place elsewhere.

Obviously, there are many substantive differences between Angus’ campaign for the Attawapiskat and Invisible Children’s KONY2012, and to enumerate those would be the subject of an entirely different post. Here, I am interested in suggesting what both examples have to suggest about sustainable journalism: namely, that journalists need to think about their place in a media ecosystem in which new forms of mediation increasingly shape the actions of both states and citizens. Thus far, a preoccupation with the novelty of social media has resulting in reporting that is reactive, curatorial, or defensive.  None of these approaches are ultimately sustainable, for, as the above examples suggest, they result in a sort of second-fiddle journalism that capitalizes on the popularity of a social phenomenon while adding little to the debate.  If journalism is to thrive in this new milieu, journalists will need to redefine their own professional practice. This means considering how they might both accommodate and challenge social media phenomena — not only as a means of professional survival, but as a necessary service to a public similarly challenged by new forms of communication.

1. The most watched video on Youtube remains Justin Bieber’s Baby Baby, with over 700 million views.

Dr. Lisa Lynch is an assistant professor at Concordia University, working at the intersection between culture, technology, and political change. She is a co-organizer of the Journalism Strategies Conference.

At this time a year ago, the Egyptian people were considering their country’s future after a popular revolution that toppled the autocratic regime that had governed the country for decades. Though it was just one chapter in the story of the Arab Spring, Egypt’s Tahrir Square became the focal point of media coverage of events happening across the Arab World. The world watched. It watched on television. It watched on YouTube. And tweets from the ground complemented traditional newspaper articles.

Even as news editors were deciding whether to dispatch correspondents, the events on the ground in Egypt were being coordinated via Facebook and images of violent repression of protests were tweeted to audiences around the world. It wasn’t the first time social media was used to coordinate mass protests — social media had been used extensively in the Iranian election protests in 2009, for instance. Still, the unfolding of the Arab Spring has not only demonstrated the political power people can wield using these new media tools but demonstrated as well how such tools accelerate the shifting sands of journalistic authority. These lessons can help give form to the next phase of journalism and help inform the rules of the changing journalistic game.

 What is today’s journalism?

As a journalist, this question has both intrigued and tormented me. I have debated definitions with colleagues and defended journalism against harsh critics. For my own academic research, I investigated the collision of old and new media through the eyes of foreign correspondents who covered the Egyptian Revolution. While universally heralding new media tools as a “game-changer” for journalism, many correspondents resist the changes these new media tools are imposing on them. For generations, newsroom editors held the keys to the tools of mass communication, but that is no longer the case.

To be sure, grainy cell phone videos and a few tweets do not journalism make. Still, everyday people are increasingly witnessing, capturing, and sharing important moments in time. Intentionally or not, some of these moments constitute acts of journalism, if only because they reveal a kernel of truth about the happenings of the world. Mainstream media companies are increasingly seeking out these videos and reports, verifying them, and wrapping them into their own reports. So-called user-generated content has been a significant part of some of the most important stories in recent years, from the video of a young woman being killed by Iranian security forces during the 2009 protests (graphic) to images from the ground during the Japanese earthquake to the multitude of videos and pictures that were posted online during the London riots. This is particularly important for telling foreign stories. As the number of foreign correspondents dwindles, everyday people are now stationed on journalism’s frontline, cell phones in hand. But most journalism institutions still maintain what they produce isn’t journalism until refracted through the prism of mainstream journalists.

It is fair that journalists often resist these emerging definitions of just what constitutes journalism today. Many charge that objectivity is the dividing line between information and news, that objective reporting trumps ordinary witnessing by people in the thick of the story. The acts of journalism on behalf of the public at large are often about perspective. They don’t meet the journalistic standards of objectivity and therefore aren’t considered journalism. However, this definition is proving itself to be more and more out-of-touch. The images from Tahrir Square that were broadcast by mainstream media may have lacked objectivity, yet they fueled the journalistic telling of the story. In many cases, the greatest strength of these grainy, poorly shot videos was their first person perspective. In this new media environment, it is the true story behind these acts of witnessing that matter. The perspective of real people embroiled in such struggles is undermining the often distant and disconnected objective journalism of old.

For a new public journalism

American cultural theorist Henry Jenkins describes this new world order as convergence culture, “both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer driven process”. The transition from an analogue past to a digital future – from mass media to media for the masses – is a bumpy one. Corporate media and public service broadcasters are trying to do more with less. More and more, mainstream media are relying on tweets and cell phone images posted by members of the public to drive their own news agendas. Journalism itself has become broader and harder to define. It has become more networked. In a time when trust in media has been on the wane for years, it is all the more important to recognize the power of this networked journalism. Acknowledging the public’s role in the journalistic process, enshrining it, and celebrating it could help restore the public trust in journalism. It would also properly reflect the face of these new journalistic forms.

The lesson of Egypt is that the public can harness the networking power of these new media tools to topple a repressive government. The Mubarak regime recognized the power of these tools during the protests. For a few days, the Internet was shutdown in an effort to disrupt and silence the protestors. While foreign correspondents were flocking to Cairo with their cameras and notepads in hand, the government saw the sharing of videos, images, and ideas on the Internet as its greatest threat. Much of the world may have heard of Mubarak’s resignation via traditional media, however it is fair to ask whether this moment would have arrived without the legions of Egyptians telling the story from the front lines.

Thomas Ledwell worked as a journalist for ten years. He is now a writer and media strategist with a number of companies in Montréal. 

I find “crisis” is a big, overused word. I think it’s the right word though to use to talk about the point of the Journalism Strategies conference, “Deliberation, Diversity, and Dollars: Public Strategies for Journalism in the Canadian Media Ecology.” I can hear my friend Michel saying dryly at this point (while looking over the rim of his pint), “Define crisis.” In everyday language a “crisis” tends to be an enormous problem that’s arrived and needs to be dealt with immediately. As in the “economic crisis” or the “crisis in journalism” – two crises that have been closely linked in the past few years. To me this suggests an element of accident: the problem has dropped on us, out of nowhere and now we need to scramble to fix it.  “Oh no, our readers aren’t subscribing to us anymore.“ “Oh no, we’re losing advertisers.” “Oh no, the Web is wreaking havoc with our business model.” “Oh no, we can’t afford to spend money on public broadcasting anymore.” The Merriam-Webster’s dictionary describes a crisis as “an unstable or crucial time…in which a decisive change is impending; especially : one with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome.” Cultural and political theorists go a step further – seeing crisis as the product of structural contradictions that have been revealed. I think the two definitions go nicely together.

I believe this is a critical moment for journalism in Canada. It is a moment when problems that many of us have known about and talked about in journalistic, activist, and academic circles for decades have become part of common conversations – thanks in very large part to economic and technological shocks. Are we surprised that if our audiences don’t feel particularly well served by traditional journalism organizations they start exploring new alternatives the moment they become available? It is true of course that on a personal scale, this moment has brought some very real pain. Good people are losing their jobs through no fault of their own. I think that tragedy would be compounded though if we wasted the opportunities this moment presents. This conference is a way to try to make the most of those opportunities.

I think we’ve gotten to this moment through systemic failures – in journalism organizations themselves and in the governments that help create the environment in which they operate. While there are any numbers of lenses through which we can examine these failures, I do so through the lens of journalism and democracy. I think a big part of the problem facing professional journalism is credibility. I argue that at least part of the reason traditional journalism (in Canada and around the world) has lost credibility is that it has lost sight of its civic function. The freedoms journalism is given in Canada are not there to protect journalists or journalism organizations; they are there to protect the rights of citizens to share information. Journalism is a democratic means – not an end in itself.

It was ever thus – or was it?

I was at a presentation a not long ago by media historian Lisa Gitelman. The content of her talk wasn’t at all related to journalism but I find a theme that runs through her work helps put this conference in perspective. Gitelman reminds us that many of the problems and challenges we think are new are not; they have simply taken on the hues of the times in which we live. Gitelman ‘s talk focused on the possibilities and challenges reproduction presents for scholarly publication – using the mechanical technologies that were new in the early 20^th century to help us reflect on the digital technologies of the early 21^st. In a similar vein, this conference is a way to help those of us who are interested in journalism and democracy in Canada consider how much of this crisis in journalism is in fact related to questions we have been wrestling with for some time.

Example? How about highly commercial content flowing unimpeded into Canada from the U.S.? Dealt with by the Aird Commission set up in 1928 to investigate the then new radio broadcasting industry and recommend appropriate policies. How about the relationship between Canadian broadcasting and culture since then? Tackled by The Task Force on Broadcasting Policy (also known as the Caplan-Sauvageau Committee) in 1986, and more recently by the Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (2003) Concentration of ownership and its implications for democracy? A string of commissions and committees, including:  Davey (1970), Kent (1981), and the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications (2006).

This is not meant to suggest these reports have not had discrete concerns to address. Each of these committees was addressing particular issues brought about by changing economic and technological conditions. What I am suggesting is that perhaps we can use this moment to consider how many of their concerns and how much of their work remains relevant for us. I argue it is possible to see in their recommendations an evolving conception of Canadian democracy and the role of news media. When Marc Raboy wrote his history of Canada’s Broadcasting Policy twenty years ago, he chose “Missed Opportunities” as the title. I think this historical moment offers us not only the opportunity to democratize news media in this country, but also the tools to make it happen. A great deal has been made of the democratizing power of social media and the web. It has been credited with the election of Barak Obama, the leaking of hidden truths, and of course the Arab Spring. I think there are some serious dangers in giving technology more credit than it’s due. I also think though that the rapid sharing of information makes it possible to seize the moment in ways that haven’t been possible before.

Why a conference?

I know a number of my journalistic friends roll their eyes when they think about another conference on the future of journalism. “Blah blah blah…you academics can go talk about journalism while we actually do it.” Yes, my colleagues and I on the organizing team are academics but we don’t live and work in ivory towers. We’ve been journalists, and we are citizens. We research the real world because we think it is possible to make it a better place to live. My particular area of research is journalism norms – in other words, the ideals we aspire to as journalists. I focus on the role journalism plays in democracy because I believe that role is fundamental. I also believe though that all norms – including journalism norms – evolve.

One of the luxuries of doing graduate work in middle age is being forced to revisit ideas I take for granted. I’ve recently had to go back and re-read Kant  – whose work I haven’t looked at since Phillip Hansen’s intro to political theory class at the University of Regina 25 years ago. Kant suggests that dogma is dangerous because it stops knowledge from evolving. I think one of the biggest problems with traditional journalism organizations (and education) is that we’ve allowed ourselves to become dogmatic in many ways. We’ve turned some ideas that emerged in the late 19^th and early 20^th century (like “objectivity”) into fetishes. That’s a problem because that historical moment is very different from the one we are now in. As a result, some of our thinking about how journalism should be practiced has become stagnant – putting professional journalism in danger of becoming irrelevant.

What I’m saying here isn’t particularly earth shattering. Again, it’s something that’s been discussed in some academic and journalistic circles for decades. I highly recommend academic work done in this area by people like Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch, Clifford Christians, Robert Hackett, Margaret Scammell, and Stephen Ward. Journalists and the organizations they work for are of course trying to adapt – experimenting with formats, genres, and even what counts as journalism. My question though is – to what end? Why is professional journalism worth trying to save? This conference is meant for those of us who believe journalism has an important role to play in helping Canadians be effective citizens. By coming together in April we can identify and start to figure out how to use public policies to protect both existing and emerging practices that meet that goal.

Why public policies?

Plain and simple: market failure. The private and public sectors have different motivations. I am not suggesting there isn’t a role for private organizations. I simply think we need to ensure there are spaces in the Canadian media system for journalism driven by citizen – rather than consumer – priorities. Again, there is a lot of academic work related to this. A few of the folks whose work I like: Jay Blumler and James Curran (both of whom wrote in a special edition of Journalism Studies  in 2010), Stephen Coleman, Marc Raboy, Jay Rosen, and of course Jürgen Habermas. A key point is diversity. A healthy democracy needs diverse ideas. A healthy media system can ensure the wide circulation of these ideas. Professional journalism can still be part of that circulation, but it needs to be reimagined in order to be effective. This conference is part of a process to help us identify what we as citizens need from journalism, and what we need to do to get it. Just as journalism isn’t just for journalists, policy-making isn’t just for wonks.

That’s why we are reaching out to you. I wrote above that the moment we live in presents us with opportunities to seize the moment in ways that we haven’t had before. OpenMedia has shown over the past year that citizens can work together to change the way our digital policy is created here in Canada. Again, policy is not an accident. It is a chain of decisions. We’re asking you to be a part of one of those chains. Help redesign a key piece of our media system: the policies we put in place to support journalism. We need people with different professional backgrounds, from different parts of the country, from different age groups, from different ethnic backgrounds, from different economic backgrounds, and who speak different languages.

Face time … Registration now open

We have been working from the outset with the idea that we need to build a network of networks. What started out as an idea being bounced off people I knew personally, began expanding in the fall of 2010 – as early drafts of the conference concept started circulating to journalists, academics, and activists; as people started suggesting names of others they thought might be interested in taking part; and as more members joined the organizing team. The call for papers went out across Canada and internationally last winter. At the same time the organizing team invited more than a dozen academics, journalists (citizen and professional), and others who had shown an interest in journalism and policy to review the papers that were submitted. We’ve started online discussions – through projet-j and j-source through our website, and through Facebook and Twitter. The time has come though to add face-to-face discussions. We need people to be in the same room together – to talk and, yes, to disagree. We’re trying to assemble a group of people who believe we should use public policies to support journalism that supports citizenship, but there is still a lot of room for debate. What exactly is journalism that supports citizenship? What policies can help ensure it is sustainable? Tax breaks? Subsidies? Regulation?

The conference will take place in Montreal April 19^th through 21^st. We realize not everyone can or even wants to spend two days thinking about these questions. We’ve organized the program  in a way we hope will make it possible for different people to engage in different ways. Registered participants will have one day of presentations and discussions, and one day of focused workshops – the result of which will be concrete policy ideas. There will also be two events that are open to the general public – one Thursday evening and one Friday evening. Finally, we’ll be live streaming for those of you who just can’t join us in person.

Then what:

What’s the goal? The first concrete outcome will be a policy document that contains the recommendations registered participants come up with on the second day of the conference. We’re also planning a book. What happens from there is up to you. If you want to take advantage of this moment of crisis to make journalism in Canada stronger, you can take these recommendations and these discussions and make sure they’re more than words on a page.

Christine Crowther worked as a broadcast journalist for 15 years. She is a doctoral student in Communication Studies at McGill University and a sessional lecturer in Journalism at Concordia University.