The G20 is less than two weeks away, and there’s a lot going on. You could just turn to the usual media suspects to get your news about the G20, but when it comes to the street-level collision of neoconservative colonialist plutocrats and anti-globalization activists (among many other blocs of interests), it pays to look off the beaten path for your news consumption. If previous G20 meetings and the demonstrations that accompanied them is any indication, you can’t trust big media to get beyond the usual hackneyed portrayals of anarchists in balaclavas and be-suited politicians doing photo-ops.

(We’ll be doing our very small part during the next two weeks by clipping and aggregating the best material we find on our G20 microblog — g20.this.org — and we welcome you to send us your photos, videos, blog posts, and links for sharing. Simply email g20@this.org and we’ll take care of the rest.)

Here are the indie news sources we’ll be following in the next few weeks. Respond in the comments section if you have further sites that people should visit!

rabble.ca

Our friends at Rabble have put together one of their “issues” pages that collects all of their G20 news and commentary in one easy-to-scan package. At a glance you can see any G20 related video on RabbleTV, submissions to the G20 Flickr group, what they’re tweeting and retweeting, and what their lively commentariat is saying on their message boards, Babble.

Toronto Media Co-op

The Media Co-op is a grassroots network of independent news reporting collectives based in different cities coast to coast. Together, the co-op publishes The Dominion. The Toronto branch of the Media Co-op has set up a spartan but information-rich aggregation page for collecting photos, videos, tweets, news reports, and their own original reporting.

G20 Breakdown

Darren Puscas started G20 Breakdown a few months ago and for a one-man operation, it features a lot of coverage. Puscas’ main areas of interest are economic and environmental issues, but he’s going to be on the ground in Toronto reporting directly on the People’s Summit this coming weekend, and the G20 itself the week after.

Toronto Community Mobilization

The Toronto Community Mobilization Network is the coalition of activist groups that is coordinating and publicizing the flood of social justice-themed events — demonstrations, concerts, panel discussions, parties, and more — in response to the G20. Their website won’t be so much a source of reporting as a place to keep on top of an ever-shifting schedule of stuff to do.

G20 Research Group

The G20 Research Group is an academic flying squad at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, a largely student-run group that collects and sifts through the massive piles of information that the G20 produces. The emphasis here is on data, though there is some academic commentary (from across the political spectrum). The research group also sends students to the summit proper to report on individual meetings and press conferences. The academic analysis doesn’t always make for the most exciting reading, but when you’re the kind of reader who wants footnotes, this is your place.

As the large networks close small affiliate stations, is there hope for the future of local television news?

The sky is falling on news, said Mike Katrycz, but this isn’t the first time.

The veteran news director joined a panel discussion called “Local TV News Under Siege” at Ryerson Journalism School on Wednesday night. With him were CTV managing editor Adrian Bateman, CBC managing editor Sophia Hadzipetros, and CITY Toronto reporter Farah Nasser.

Katrycz used the rise of the Toronto Sun from the ashes of the Toronto Telegram as an example of news organizations adapting to changing times. When the Telegram closed in October 1971, a group of the newsroom staff started the Sun immediately. The new tabloid sized paper was radically different from its broadsheet predecessor, and is still in print.

CHCH’s story is similar. Katrycz and his team were told the station was up for sale, and slated to close at the end of August if no buyer emerged. The newsroom managers changed the format to all-day news to try something different. The station sold a few weeks ago, but Katrycz and his staff will have to wait to see the numbers before they know if their gamble paid off, or hiring any new staff.

The panel members seemed eager to share the innovations they’d made at their stations to “save the news.” CHCH adopted a news wheel format, like CP24, repeating pre-packaged burst of news which are periodically updated. CBC stations nation wide switched to a new 90 minute supper hour newscast, similar to what CITY was already doing. Both Hadzipetros and Nasser said their long-format local news offers them the chance to tell each story from different angles.

While this all sounded very hopeful, it doesn’t really match up with what we’re seeing. Slashed budgets, and stations and newspapers folding across the country are high on my radar, being a recent J-school grad with looming student loan payments. Longer local newscasts are just that: longer. The same number of staff, and in some newsrooms fewer staff, are filing an extra half hour of news.

Near the end of the question period, a recent journalism grad stepped up to the mic. Her story echoed my thoughts. After graduation, she moved from Toronto to Brandon, MB to work for a small TV station. On her second day of work, the station manager announced they would close by the end of the summer. Now she’s back in Toronto looking for another job.

The road may be paved with technological advancement in Toronto, but the GTA is double the population of the four Maritime provinces combined. Smaller centres, the ones who rely on TV news, are in trouble. The networks need to realize that the small local stations are the roots that feed the big network stations, Adrian Bateman said to loud applause last night. It was a nice sentiment, but he was preaching to the choir in a room full of journalists and current journalism students—who will soon be out looking for their own jobs.

RTNDA Canada plans to podcast a video of the discussion on their website in the future.

UPDATE: The podcast is now online.

[Original creative-commons photo by lawgeek]

• Véronique Marino (INIS)
• Geraldine Cahill (The Real News Network)
• David Beers (The Tyee)
• Laurent Mauriac (Rue 89)

The second panel of speakers, above, featured three speakers presenting case studies of some groundbreaking media projects:

• Paulina Abarca-Cantin & Stéphanie Lagueux : Studio XX
• Wayne MacPhail : Rabble.ca
• Reisa Levine & Véronique Maléfant  : CitizenShift/ Parole citoyenne