In the news
Investigating what’s going right
January 8, 2016
By: Emma Jones
Excerpt from The Signal
[…]
When Vancouver’s transit system faced a referendum on new funding measures in July 2015, most media organizations reported on the “for” or “against” sides of the debate. A hole gaped in the public conversation, says Erin Millar, co-founder of Discourse Media, a journalism organization dedicated to long-term, solutions-focused projects.
Cue the “Moving Forward” project. Millar and her small team conducted the independent investigation to provide Vancouverites with the information they needed to cast informed votes. The six-week project broke down the referendum questions and included infographic visualizations of costs and impacts.
“Most of us have no background in transportation planning,” the project brief said. “But we’re stuck with this responsibility, so we better do our best to understand the issues.”
Before she founded Discourse in 2013, Millar wrote for Maclean’s and freelanced internationally. “It was a wonderful life,” she says, though she felt blocked from “contributing to change.”
Creating Discourse Media allowed Millar and co-founder Christine McLaren to make a difference by generating public engagement: “What (journalists) really can do,” she says, “is think about providing access to sophisticated information that people need … to understand an issue.”
[…]
