In April, Discourse Media co-founder and CEO Erin Millar took our newsroom to a global stage at the 2016 International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. She made connections and traded ideas with newfound like minds in collaborative, solutions-focused journalism.
Millar hosted a panel with Anne-Lise Bouyer of Journalism++ and Andrew DeVigal of the University of Oregon’s Agora Journalism Centre discussing the case for collaborative media partnerships rather than competitive relationships.
Discourse Media shared the stage with heavy hitters like The Guardian, NPR, The Economist and ProPublica for a panel on the development of new products in the newsroom, from tech tools to innovative forms of content.
“There’s promise in asking how we can work together to do something more ambitious,” said Discourse Media co-founder and CEO Erin Millar in a new piece from Journalism.co.uk by Madalina Ciobanu which highlights Discourse Media’s most recent collaborative project, Power Struggle. Millar spoke to Ciobanu about the “solutions-oriented, systemic angle” Discourse Media brings to our work and how we track the “slow burn of change” with long-tail coverage after stories break.
Discourse Media has been covered in a number of of recent publications in addition to the Journalism.co.uk story.
As a counter to critiques of Canada’s lack of a “vibrant media culture,” Discourse Media was profiled in industry publication J-Source as one prime example of a successful Canadian journalism startup.
On the heels of the “mega-collaboration of investigative reporters” that leaked the Panama Papers, Discourse Media took part in a Vancouver Press Club panel on the future of journalism. The Tyee’s David P. Ball covered the free public event, where panelists discussed possibilities for innovative partnership in Canadian media. Millar asked, “How can we collaborate to bring expertise and resources to the table to do work [with] impact?”
In April, Millar attended the 2016 International Journalism Festival (IJF) in Perugia, Italy, where she spoke on a panel alongside major players like ProPublica, The Guardian, NPR and The Economist. Check out the panel below, and get more coverage of our time at the IJF here.
VANCOUVER, BC – This week, Discourse Media launched Power Struggle, a collaborative journalism project that asks how energy poverty impacts communities around the world. It investigates emerging solutions that consider climate change. And it demonstrates what’s possible when journalists, media outlets and non-profits work together to critically investigate complex global challenges through a solutions lens.
Discourse Media collaborated with nine international reporting fellows to investigate how energy poverty affects people – from Cameroon to island nations such as Kiribati to northern Canada and beyond. These investigations form the heart of our Power Struggle website and are complemented by exploratory data interactives, first-person perspectives from people affected by energy poverty, reporters’ retrospectives, and nuanced viewpoints on the promising solutions. We envision Power Struggle as a growing hub for information and ideas about energy access.
Power Struggle is a collaboration between Discourse Media and nine news outlets, including Al Jazeera, Thomson Reuters Foundation, TVOntario, Inter Press Service, SciDev, the Zimbabwean, the Independent (Bangladesh) and Republica English Daily (Nepal). An experiment in collaborative journalism, the project was inspired by emerging models such as the Panama Papers, a collaboration of 370 journalists in 37 countries who worked together for over a year on the largest leak in history.
Power Struggle reporting fellows Fabiola Ortiz, Andrew Mambondiyani, and Deepak Adhikari.
“In a time when the traditional business models of journalism are in trouble, collaborative journalism is demonstrating that we can achieve more ambitious reporting together than any single media outlet could do alone,” says Erin Millar, CEO and co-founder of Discourse Media. “What impact can we have by pooling our resources, platforms, expertise and data?”
Now we’re working to deepen the conversation through continued engagement. We’re inviting people (through our website, social media and targeted emails) to share their energy stories with us – stories about access, barriers, solutions and impacts. We’re inviting new collaborations with other reporters, media outlets, researchers and funders looking to support energy-focused solutions journalism. And we’re presenting what we’ve learned so far at community events.
On April 24-27, Discourse Media will join a small and diverse team of energy experts from around the world at the OpenAccess Energy Summit in Waterloo. Hosted by our Power Struggle partner, the Waterloo Global Science Initiative (WGSI), the summit aims “to develop an actionable framework for addressing electricity provision for energy isolated communities.” Discourse Media journalists will mine the summit for stories and report back.
If you have ideas for how we might collaborate or improve our work, we would love to hear from you: [email protected]. And if you see the value in this kind of reporting, kindly help us spread the word. We created a few draft posts for Facebook and Twitter you are welcome to make your own:
TWEETS
Energy experts argue providing basic level of energy access has negligible effects on #climatechange, reporting from http://powerstruggle.discoursemedia.org
Dispatches from around the world explore solutions for energy access #soljourno collaboration from @discourse_media http://powerstruggle.discoursemedia.org/investigation/introduction/
FACEBOOK POSTS
Journalists around the world ask: can we provide energy to all without hastening climate change? #PowerStruggle http://powerstruggle.discoursemedia.org
Meeting basic energy needs would have negligible climate change impacts, even if we were to accomplish this by using the dirtiest technologies from a climate perspective, argues a growing subset of experts. #PowerStruggle journalists report: http://powerstruggle.discoursemedia.org
About WGSI
The Waterloo Global Science Initiative (WGSI) is a non-profit partnership between the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the University of Waterloo. WGSI works to promote dialogue around complex global issues and to catalyze the long-range thinking necessary to advance ideas, opportunities and strategies for a secure and sustainable future through series of conferences, expert panels, workshops, and publications.
Recognition from CJF highlights the rise of collaborative data reporting
VANCOUVER, BC—We’re excited to announce that Discourse Media’s project Moving Forward has been shortlisted for the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s 2016 CJF Innovation Award for advancing the quality of journalism at a time of unprecedented challenges and demands for change. Discourse Media is nominated alongside finalists CBC North and The Globe and Mail.
Moving Forward is a crowdfunded, collaborative journalism project that produced issue-based, data-driven reporting on Metro Vancouver’s spring 2015 transportation funding referendum.
We created Moving Forward to respond to a need for nuanced reporting about the issue of transportation in the region. The majority of media coverage was largely conflict-driven and politicized because journalists struggled to access data and information about the transportation system, leaving voters under-informed.
Our newsroom did the heavy lifting of scraping and painstakingly pulling data from the transportation authority’s annual reports and partnered with academics to produce original datasets and interactives, making information about Metro Vancouver’s transportation more accessible to journalists and the public.
We asked voters what information they wanted, and their responses informed the angles for our reporters’ investigations.
We invited media outlets to republish our content with a Creative Commons license and in response, 13 news outlets across the region republished our work or reported original stories using our data.
“Moving Forward served as a proof of concept that collaborative models could enable us to do deep, ambitious journalism as a small team,” explains Erin Millar, Discourse Media’s co-founder and CEO. “We overcame conflict between the value systems of our academic and media partners and found that the journalism was better as a result of this productive tension. While we anticipated reluctance . . . we found a profound openness to new solutions.”
Jon Woodward, a reporter at CTV News Vancouver, offered this praise for Moving Forward: “In a debate characterized by at best noise and at worst outright lies about our transit system, Moving Forward shone out as an honest, data-driven look at the real challenges of moving people in this region – and the people of Metro Vancouver are better off for it.”
Multi-newsroom, data-driven collaborations like Moving Forward are gaining more attention, following projects like the Panama Papers, where the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists brought reporters from over 100 media organizations together to make an immense set of leaked data accessible to the public.
Last week, Millar spoke about the newsroom collaboration trend at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy alongside data journalist Anne-Lise Bouyer from Journalism++ and Andrew DeVigal, Endowed Chair in Journalism Innovation and Civic Engagement at the University of Oregon.
We’re honoured that Moving Forward was nominated for the CJF Innovation Award and we are more motivated than ever to continue producing innovative, impact-driven journalism.
Our other collaborative projects include Possible Canadas, where we supported 10 student journalists from across western Canada to report on what their peers hope for Canada’s future.
On April 20, we are launching Power Struggle, an international collaboration with nine journalists from outlets like Al Jazeera, SciDev and Thomson Reuters Foundation reporting on energy poverty and energy access solutions in their regions.
Roundhouse Radio interview tackles decolonizing media, creating new narratives in journalism
VANCOUVER, BC —What are the options for journalists in a changing media landscape? While traditional business models supporting public interest journalism are in decline, there is a growing need for better reporting on complex issues. On March 11, 2016, Minelle Mahtani, host of Sense of Place on Vancouver’s Roundhouse Radio, spoke with Discourse Media’s co-founder and CEO Erin Millar about how Discourse Media is providing a space to address these challenges.
As a professor of human geography and journalism at the University of Toronto, Mahtani brought a valuable perspective to this conversation. I am a recent human geography graduate myself, and I’ve often questioned how I’d be able to really “use my degree” in my work. Since joining the Discourse Media team, I’ve been so heartened by the projects we’re working on, and the ways they’ve connected with my original research passions. While listening to Mahtani and Millar, the connection between geography and the kind of journalism we produce at Discourse Media was made even more clear.
Broadly (sometimes maddeningly so), human geography involves place and space, and the way we interact with them as people in terms of culture, environment and more. How do we interact with space legally and socially? How do we regulate movement and action? How does this impact our identity? Place and space are an important part of our reconciliation journalism work at Discourse Media, from land rights and resource development in the north to how Indigenous people are policed in public spaces. We’re also launching a platform in mid-April for journalists and others to tell stories of energy poverty and access around the world.
Minelle Mahtani and Erin Millar at the Roundhouse Radio station.
Mahtani teaches her journalism students about decolonizing media and changing the way we think and talk about indigeneity in Canada, so our long-term reconciliation project was particularly close to her heart. Millar shared how through our reconciliation work we hope to change the narrative around this profound topic — or create it in the first place. We, in collaboration with our media partners, are producing sustained coverage on the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s calls to action. We want to represent the shift in power to grassroots voices, emphasizing the words of people from affected communities.
We were grateful to connect with Roundhouse Radio, a fellow media outlet committed to decolonizing journalism and representing community voices. Sense of Place is starting a new series called Reporting on Race, which will focus on journalists’ successes and challenges in covering race and indigeneity in new ways. Mahtani wants to continue this important conversation with Discourse Media, and we look forward to doing so.
Focusing on strength and solutions translates to more nuanced coverage and challenges negative stereotypes
VANCOUVER, B.C. – “DEAR MEDIA, I AM MORE THAN JUST VIOLENCE,” writes Billy-Ray Belcourt on his personal blog.
Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation, a student at the University of Alberta and President of the Aboriginal Student Council. He calls for journalists to do a better job at representing Indigenous people, following a damaging experience he had with a local paper.
The article, meant to highlight Belcourt’s university accomplishments, led by describing him as an Indigenous person who faced family violence. But Belcourt was actually referring to his grandfather’s experience as a residential school survivor when speaking to the reporter. The article’s language implied otherwise and Belcourt was flooded with phone calls from family members, concerned that the paper reported a false history of family abuse.
“Violence should not be your lede. Indigenous suffering should not be your angle,” Belcourt wrote in his post. “I did not succeed in spite of my Indigenousness; I succeeded because of my Indigenousness.”
Coverage of Indigenous communities in Canada often focuses on social problems like violence, addiction and poverty. But as journalists, if we dwell only on the negative we miss crucial trends happening in Canada concerning both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.
We live in a time when Canadian institutions are being held accountable to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s wide-reaching recommendations, when Indigenous leaders are holding positions of power in Canadian government, and when precedent-setting legal decisions about resource development are fundamentally changing the power balances over our economy.
So how can we journalists adapt our reporting approaches to accurately represent the evolution of our country and communities?
These were questions I struggled with myself with while reporting this fall in the Prairies alongside Nancy Macdonald, associate editor of Maclean’s magazine, as part of a system-wide investigation into the disproportionate number of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system. (Discourse Media’s work was supported by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression Bob Carty Free Expression Fellowship).
Ten years ago Maclean’s published an article labelling North Central Regina Canada’s worst neighbourhood. People there haven’t forgotten. Betty Krohn, a long-time resident of North Central, told us that the article’s author missed a huge part of the story. Despite crime statistics, there is also a profound community of support, she claimed.
Krohn also stressed the need to focus on solutions when asked about negative perceptions of police in her neighbourhood. She explained that some police officers go out of their way to build relationships in North Central, helping with local events like chili cook-offs and local bike programs. “They’re known faces in the community,” Ms. Krohn told us. “I think that’s really important and beneficial.”
We also spoke with Margaret Poitras, CEO of the All Nations Hope Network. Poitras also didn’t want to dwell on her negative experiences. “We need to look at the strength of the Indigenous people. We need to talk about getting to the deeper rooted issues of what’s going on in our communities.”
As reporters on difficult issues, we tend to think that we’re doing our job when the issues (usually framed as problems) receive widespread coverage, as if increased quantity of stories is an antidote for underrepresentation. But the reality is that more representation isn’t always better representation. Too often these stories serve only to reinforce negative stereotypes and don’t advance solutions. This means we have to find ways to include the voices of people that are neither villains nor victims in the issues we cover, the people who are impacted but often overcoming their challenges.
Margaret Poitras, CEO of the All Nations Hope Network: “We need to look at the strength of the Indigenous people.”
The Globe and Mail’s Folio story from January 29, 2016 offers a lesson on how to produce serious reporting that acknowledges resilience. Journalists Wendy Stueck, Carrie Tait and Kathryn Blaze Baum found a story of resilience amongst the tragic shootings in La Loche, Sask. Their piece, “A familiar pain, a persistent hope,” begins, “La Loche rarely makes provincial or national headlines, but when it does, there tends to be violence, fires or suicide attached to the story.”
But read further down and a more nuanced picture emerges: “There are social problems in La Loche . . . but there is also optimism and resilience.” Dozens of locals told the authors their hometown is unfairly portrayed as a hopeless place. The crime rate is dropping, and a local youth centre is being built. A Facebook post from local teachers read, “We will be back. We will rebuild. We will get better together.”
The article places these anecdotes in the backdrop of Trudeau’s promises to honour a “nation-to-nation” relationship based on collaboration, respect and a national inquiry into Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women. Times may be changing, the article suggests. Showing both the tragedy and the resilience is an important part of leaving room in our narratives for the possibility that communities facing hardship can move forward.
Indigenous people are reclaiming power and influence, argues John Ralston Saul, award-winning philosopher, novelist and essayist, in his recent book The Comeback. He calls for Canadians to rethink the national narrative of sympathy towards Indigenous people. Writes Saul, “The flow of history is reinforcing the position of Aboriginal peoples. To attempt to deny or to turn back such a moment of creativity would be self-destructive for Canada.” Saul’s point is that our dialogue about Indigenous issues is dominated by sympathy only, and we aren’t addressing the very real inequities and solutions. As journalists, we’re also simply missing a side of the story and presenting a less accurate version of these issues than we could be.
What is the best way to measure the impact of our collaboration with Maclean’s that probed high rates of Indigenous incarceration?
VANCOUVER, B.C. – As a journalist, when I start digging into a complex story, I’m bolstered by the idea of impact. When this thing breaks, how will people react? Whose perspective will be broadened? What policies might change?
I hope for a ripple and fantasize about a tidal wave. But how do you measure the impact of a story? And what can you do to extend that impact – without being branded an advocate in disguise as an upstanding objective journalist?
Tweets and Facebook comments are one way to gauge the impact of a story. As the name “Discourse Media” would suggest, we aim to get people talking about important issues. And so we’re developing an efficient and meaningful way to track (both quantity and quality) and engage with social media conversations. But how do you track the broader impact – beyond the surface Facebook feeds and other online forums?
We want to know how the story (dubbed “Justice is not blind” in print and “Canada’s prisons are the new ‘residential schools’” online) is being received by those with significant power to drive social change – government and community leaders.
Working in tandem with Macdonald, we’ve been following up. We reached out to provincial and territorial justice ministers, leaders of Indigenous organizations, and Robert-Falcon Ouellette, the Liberal MP for Winnipeg Centre. We asked: What did they make of the story? What do they feel was missing? And what actions are they taking relevant to the issues raised?
Ouellette, an academic, advocate and now politician, is well-versed in our justice system’s inequities. And still he was “struck” to learn how many Indigenous people caught up in the justice system “plead guilty in order just to get it over and done with so they can get home to their family, get back to work and just get on with their lives.”
He would have liked to see more in the article about the failure of the legal system to consistently interpret and apply Gladue, a set of principles established by the Supreme Court that courts must abide by when assessing cases against Aboriginal people.
“Essentially judges are breaking the law. That’s something actually very easy to change. The training can become something mandated by a province. It’s hard to change judges, but you can appoint different types of judges,” Ouellette offered.
He said he was going to meet with women at a prison in his riding this week. We’ll be following up to hear how it went.
NDP Fort Rouge, Manitoba candidate Wab Kinew responded to the story via a series of tweets. He offered critical feedback on the title Maclean’s chose to give the story online.
I also reached out to Assembly of First Nations BC Chief Shane Gottfriedson. Over the phone from Winnipeg, where he was attending the National Roundtable on missing and murdered Indigenous women, he told us what he’s doing to address the systemic injustices outlined in the article.
“We’re calling for adequate and substantial funding that supports many of our First Nations policing services – including specific federal budget commitments. We need to look at improved relationships with both our provincial and federal police systems – addressing racism.”
We received long lists of actions from (some of the) provincial ministries we reached out to. We heard from Ontario, Alberta and Manitoba. They told us about Aboriginal Justice Advisory Groups advising attorney generals, restorative justice initiatives, national roundtables addressing missing and murdered Indigenous women, youth justice committees and school curriculum development.
Of course, simply keeping a log of comments and promises isn’t enough. We need to know whether these approaches to addressing inequities in our justice system are impactful and scalable. Are policymakers following through on their pledges to make change? What do these changes actually mean at the community level? Over the next few months, we will be sticking with the story and asking these questions. At Discourse Media, we call this part of our process The Long Tail; in short, when we hit publish on a story, we don’t walk away. We follow the story of who is doing what. We track change.
The TRC called on public institutions involved in journalism, including universities, the CBC and APTN, to make change. And while every media outlet in Canada covered the release of the TRC report and recommendations, there has been little sustained coverage of how Canada is responding.
In the spirit of extending the impact of this story – and others like it, we are developing a digital platform where reconciliation-focused promises like these can be consolidated and closely monitored. We envision a website where people can go to see who has promised to do what, a place where journalists can go for story ideas. At the same time, we plan to produce journalism that investigates and explains examples of people working toward solutions. We will work closely with community partners to engage people in storytelling, and with permission, share their first person perspectives. The TRC has given us an opportunity to have a profound conversation about the role of Indigenous people and nations in the future of the country. We’re taking that opportunity.
These are some of our ideas for creating an impactful and collaborative space for reconciliation-focused journalism. We’d love to hear yours (email: [email protected]).
Survey of students about police checks builds case for more transparent policing data
VANCOUVER, B.C. – Indigenous students are more likely to be stopped by police than non-Indigenous students, and staying away from illegal activity does not shield them from unwanted police attention, indicates a survey of over 850 students in Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg conducted by Discourse Media and Maclean’s.
The survey, conducted with financial support from the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), found that among those surveyed, the odds of an Indigenous student being stopped by police were 1.6 times higher than a non-Indigenous student, holding all other explanatory variables (like gender and age) fixed. These results provide quantitative evidence, where very little data exists, that isolated reports of racial profiling may be a common systemic issue.
Discourse Media worked with Nancy Macdonald, Maclean’s associate editor, as part of a whole-system investigation into disproportionate Indigenous incarceration rates.
The investigation probed why incarceration rates of Indigenous people continue to rise while Canada’s crime rate falls. Multiple Indigenous people have reported complaints about police brutality and racial profiling in the Prairies, but these claims are often dismissed as isolated incidents by police departments.
The Discourse Media/Maclean’s survey explored whether or not the experiences of Indigenous university students could shed light on whether racial profiling is a systemic issue.
“We sought data from police forces and federal agencies and were told again and again that racial data about policing is not collected or is inaccessible,” says Erin Millar, Discourse Media co-founder and CEO and CJFE Bob Carty Fellow. “Our research fills a gaping hole in data available to the public about racial profiling. These results make a strong case for more transparency.”
After consulting social scientists who have studied racial profiling and filing Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for racial policing data in Winnipeg, Edmonton, Regina, Vancouver and Saskatoon, Discourse Media was unable to obtain any relevant data.
“An incredible amount of information and knowledge in the public interest of all Canadians is going unreported today because of a lack of access,” said CJFE Executive Director Tom Henheffer. “This work represents an important step to changing the status quo and helping to amplify the voice of people too often left out of mainstream public discourse.”
This investigation is part of a bigger project at Discourse Media exploring how journalism can support reconciliation. The project aims to contribute to a fundamental shift in how Canadians think about and discuss difficult issues such as reconciliation, colonial history and land rights in order to move our country towards solutions.
In the Fall of 2015, we put out a global call for applications for the Access to Energy Journalism Fellowship, a collaborative journalism project with the Waterloo Global Science Initiative that investigates the drivers of energy poverty around the world and potential solutions.
We were looking for journalists eager to report on how different countries are grappling with energy poverty and the ability to produce stories deeply rooted in people’s lived experiences. Our aim is to contribute nuanced reporting to the discourse on energy poverty and provide a marquee hub for connecting related systemic issues like climate change and global development.
After pouring over applications from all corners of the planet, we’re very excited to announce our final selection of fellows. Stay tuned for their stories, coming in April 2016. For more information, get in touch at [email protected].
Fabíola Ortiz dos Santos, Mexico, Inter Press Service
Fabíola Ortiz dos Santo is a Brazilian freelance independent journalist reporting in Portuguese, Spanish and English about human rights, international affairs and sustainable development. She has contributed to the Inter Press Service, IDN InDepthNews.info, SciDev.Net, Portuguese news agency LUSA, and the Brazilian environmental website O ECO. Ms Ortiz was a contributor to the 2014 book “Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements” edited by Marcy Rein and Clifton Ross (Ross (2014, PM Press).
Mike Ives, Kiribati, SciDev
Mike Ives is a Vietnam-based journalist and a frequent contributor to The Economist and The New York Times. He also covers science and the environment for SciDev.Net, Yale Environment 360 and other websites and magazines.
Andrew Mambondiyani, Zimbabwe, The Zimbabwean
Andrew Mambondiyani is an award winning journalist based in Zimbabwe. Between 2010 and 2011 he served as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts institute of Technology (USA) and in 2008 he was a Middlebury Environment Journalism Fellow in USA. His journalism work has appeared in various media organizations including Thomson Reuters Foundation (UK), BBC (UK), Yale E360 (USA), Think Africa Press (UK), SciDev.net (UK),Centrepoint Now (USA) and Opendemocracy.net (UK), The Zimbabwean (Zimbabwe) among others. He has a special interest in climate change, agriculture, sustainable development and the environment in general.
Faisal Mahmud, Bangladesh, The Independent
Faisal Mahmud has over five years of reporting experience for two national English dailies in Bangladesh. He works for The Independent, one of the oldest and most respected national English daily of Bangladesh. He specializes in reporting on energy and power, especially issues related with renewable energy. He also writes for energynewsbd.com, a specialized news website on energy and power news. Felix Gaedtke, Romania, Al Jazeera
Felix Gaedtke is a multimedia journalist interested in under-reported regions and untold stories – focusing on environment, conflict, human rights, political and social issues. He contributes to Al Jazeera English, Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherlands Worldwide and other international outlets. He has reported from over 25 countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Americas. He is an Erasmus Mundus scholar with a specialism in war and conflict reporting.
Elias Ntungwe Ngalame, Cameroon, Thompson Reuters Foundation
Elias Ntungwe Ngalame is a multiple award-winning Cameroon-based freelance writer for the Thomson Reuters Foundation with an interest in climate change, the environment and development and governance issues. He heads the Yaounde office of Eden Media, which runs a bi-weekly publication, Eden Newspaper, a quarterly magazine, Edenxtra, and a community radio FM 98.1. He is also PAMACC (Pan African Media Alliance for Climate Change) coordinator for Central African region. PAMACC is the network of African journalists reporting on climate change and related development issues.
Deepak Adhikari, Nepal, Republica English Daily
Deepak Adhikari is a Kathmandu-based freelance journalist. In a career spanning over a decade and half, he has covered socio-political issues of Nepal including human rights, environment, hydropower, tourism, and trafficking and geopolitics. His work has appeared in Time magazine, The Caravan magazine, Himal Southasian magazine, Al Jazeera English, Nikkei Asian Review magazine, among others. From November 2010 to February 2014, he served as Nepal correspondent for Agence France-Presse (AFP), the global news agency. Prior to joining AFP, he worked for Kantipur, Nepal’s largest-selling newspaper as a reporter and editor.
Christopher Pollon, Canada, The Tyee
Christopher Pollon is an established Vancouver-based independent journalist covering business and the politics of natural resources, with a focus on energy, mines and oceans. Christopher‘s writing has appeared in The Walrus, Reader’s Digest, The Globe and Mail, National Geographic Books, and many more. His stories and reporting have been picked up by the LA Times, CBC Marketplace, CBC Radio, Alternet and National Public Radio. Chris has been a feature writer and Contributing Editor at The Tyee since 2007.
Eric Bombicino, Canada, TVO
Eric Bombicino has been producing at TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin since 2011. His work appears weekly on the broadcast and he has produced interviews with guests such as Jeremy Rifkin, Richard Dawkins and Ben Bernanke. Eric has also been published numerous times at tvo.org, covering topics such as Finland’s renowned education system and Canada’s complicated history with refugees.
*Republished from: The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression
Credit: AJ Batac, Flickr
Earlier this Fall, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) announced Erin Millar, co-founder of Discourse Media, as the inaugural recipient of the new Bob Carty Free Expression Fellowship.
CJFE’s support gives our team at Discourse Media the resources to pursue an important project we’re calling the Diversity Source Network and Methodology. Our aim? To help break down barriers between journalists and underrepresented communities who don’t typically participate in dialogue with the news media, and to enable the collection and publication of data currently unavailable to Canadians.
The inspiration for our project sprung from Nancy Macdonald’s January 2015 article in Maclean’s—Welcome to Winnipeg: Where Canada’s racism problem is at its worst—following 15-year-old Tina Fontaine’s murder. Macdonald’s reporting revealed the deep-rooted racism that Aboriginal people in Canada deal with daily at the systemic and individual levels.
The article had an immediate impact. Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman created a task force to address the problem. 1000 high school students rallied outside the provincial legislature to signal they wouldn’t tolerate systemic discrimination. Rosanna Deerchild organized a series of intercultural events to break down racial barriers. And, most importantly, Aboriginal people in Winnipeg now report being treated differently by their neighbours.
There were many “Winnipeg-after-Tina-Fontaine” stories published in the months preceding Macdonald’s coverage. So what caused her reporting to have the impact it did?
We believe the distinction was how Macdonald reported the lived experiences of individual Aboriginal people and revealed new information that isn’t usually part of the national dialogue., which often lacks Aboriginal voices.
Her follow-up piece, titled It Could Have Been Me, shared first-hand accounts of resilience from 13 women who narrowly escaped being on the missing and murdered list. It was a powerful piece challenging the common media narrative that reduces these women to victims and reinforces negatives stereotypes about Aboriginal communities.
We were inspired by Macdonald’s reporting: it addressed a larger problem in journalism about representing community voices from the ground up. We journalists tend to reach out to sources who are accessible to us, those who are in leadership positions or participate in online forums like Twitter. As a result, the lived experiences of Canadians who are less likely to communicate through these channels are not expressed in the national discourse.
Our project with CJFE aims to make it easier for journalists to express these perspectives in their reporting. Through the Bob Carty Fellowship, we are developing an online platform to seed a network of sources who are willing to share their experiences and engage in a two-way dialogue with journalists. We believe that collaborations like this provide an important mechanism for achieving deeper reporting in a time of scarcity in journalism. We are also piloting the approach through a collaboration with Macdonald related to her ongoing investigation into systemic discrimination against Aboriginal peoples in Canada.
Stay tuned for a resource that describes ethics and best practices to support other journalists in applying our methods.
Mike Ives, Kiribati, SciDev
Faisal Mahmud, Bangladesh, The Independent
Felix Gaedtke, Romania, Al Jazeera
Elias Ntungwe Ngalame, Cameroon, Thompson Reuters Foundation
Christopher Pollon, Canada, The Tyee
Eric Bombicino, Canada, TVO
