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Journalism students across Canada are learning to share stories that are rooted in reciprocity with Indigenous communities in new ways.

Created by Indigenous faculty and designed in partnership with local communities, students in journalism programs at Carleton University, the University of King’s College and others are taking experiential learning courses that involve spending time with Indigenous people and reporting stories that are important to them.

At Carleton, the Reporting in Indigenous Communities course, created by Anishinaabe journalist and professor Duncan McCue, was offered for the first time in winter 2024. While new to Carleton, McCue is building on his work at the University of British Columbia, where he launched his course in 2011 in collaboration with the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, the Tsawwassen First Nation, the Squamish First Nation, and others. The goal was to teach students about the unique cultures that are thriving in each First Nation today, and how to respect and prioritize them in their reporting.

In McCue’s course at Carleton, students worked with the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation, the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne, and the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, learning about the stories that matter most to these communities. The theme for stories this year was Adaawe: Stories of Indigenous Economy, with students learning about the spirit of Indigenous entrepreneurship and business innovation.

McCue says the course was also an opportunity for students to learn more about the diversity within and between First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities. “Indigenous people are not homogenous…A Dene is not a Cree is not a Mi’kmaw, and they certainly have very different lived experiences if they grew up in the city versus growing up on the reserve versus growing up in a hamlet. It’s really important for students to understand that.”

At King’s, the Reporting in Mi’kma’ki course, co-created and taught by Miʹkmaw professor Trina Roache, introduces journalism students to the depth and diversity within local Miʹkmaq communities. Miʹkma’ki is the ancestral and unceded land of the Mi’kmaq, colonially known as most of Atlantic Canada and parts of Quebec.

Launched in 2021, the course aims to encourage students to go from reporting stories about the trauma experienced by Mi’kmaq communities to sharing stories that reflect their resilience instead. “Stories are a way of building that relationship and focusing on things that the community wants to celebrate and wants to put out there about how they see themselves,” Roache says of this approach. “It doesn’t mean you don’t do other stories. But you have to do all the stories—you can’t just do the negative ones.”

McCue says these courses are especially important for non-Indigenous students, who continue to be a majority within both programs. “I think it’s important that non-Indigenous journalism students learn and have a baseline of cultural competency when it comes to reporting in Indigenous communities [because] if you are a journalist in Canada, you are going to, at some point in your career, be reporting on Indigenous issues,” McCue says. “I think it is important that non-Indigenous students are exposed to this in a safe setting of a classroom where they can get feedback, and not under the pressure of a deadline in a massive newsroom.”

However, McCue and Roache also acknowledged other barriers, such as funding support, that make their reporting courses—and, in a larger sense, journalism programs—inaccessible to young Indigenous people. “The challenge is that Miʹkmaq, and I think other Indigenous young people, don’t see themselves in journalism [and] that’s something we’re working hard to change,” Roache says. “It’s going to take time and we have to play the long game.”

For both McCue and Roache, an important next step is ensuring the journalism programs they are part of actively recruit and train the next generation of Indigenous journalists. At Carleton, McCue says the work looks like hosting a video and audio course for Indigenous storytellers over the summer in partnership with local First Nations colleges and institutes. At King’s, Roache says the journalism program has created three fully funded scholarships for Miʹkmaq students, the first cohort of which will begin their studies this fall. It was created in partnership with Ann Sylliboy of the Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey, the educational authority for 12 of Nova Scotia’s 13 Mi’kmaq First Nations. The university also pledged a $600,000 investment to support Indigenous students.

According to Roache, the increased funding and scholarships are but one step in King’s University’s approach to holding space at the urging of journalism students, who have been demanding diversity in faculty, staff and curriculum in the journalism program since 2015.

For Catriona Koenig, a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation who grew up in Ottawa and a former Carleton student who took McCue’s course, it’s important to make courses on responsibly reporting about Indigenous communities mandatory for journalism students. Taking experiential learning courses created and taught by Indigenous faculty, she says, is an opportunity to learn how to be a “storyteller and not a story-taker.”

“For so long, journalists would go into Indigenous communities and tell their story, and then just leave and burn bridges and not continue relationships and not strengthen partnerships,” she says. “[It’s important] to make sure to continue these partnerships with communities, keep in touch, and maintain the relationship.”

Photo by Gilaxia

One brisk November 1938 afternoon in Basel, Switzerland, chemist Albert Hofmann successfully synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide for the first time. The compound was set aside and forgotten for five years until Hofmann resynthesized it, accidentally absorbed some, and took the world’s first acid trip.

The discovery of acid, or LSD, changed the course of social history. Hofmann’s employer, Sandoz Laboratories, began selling it as a psychiatric panacea in 1947, hailing it as a cure for everything from alcoholism to schizophrenia to criminal behaviours and “sexual perversions.” Curious journalists warmly welcomed the new drug in their reporting.

The ’50s welcomed a new era of psychedelic research for a variety of ailments. Newspaper and magazine headlines were positive, mirroring the science world’s excitement around the newfound LSD. “Can This Drug Enlarge Man’s Mind?,” asked Gerald Heard in Horizon magazine in May 1963. He decided that it could. In November, Cosmopolitan ran a piece calling it “Hollywood’s Status Symbol Drug.”

This pro-psychedelic narrative didn’t last long, however, with some states banning sale and possession and concerned parents and citizens getting involved. It is here that we begin to see the media changing their perspectives on LSD and other psychedelic drugs, reporting on both the changing legal landscape and on shifting public opinion. “Stronger Curbs on LSD Proposed: Medical Society Committee Says Hallucination Drug is ‘Most Dangerous,’” read a headline in The New York Times on March 30, 1966. “Is the Trip Over for LSD?” asked Business Week on April 22. It was close: the psychedelic ’60s were entering the beginning of their end.

*

Mass media and the public are deeply, closely intertwined, with the media taking on the role of distillers, taking information straight from the source and providing it to the public in an easily digestible way. Beginning in the 1950s, mass media including newspapers and TV were the primary source of information to the public, and thus, the most important catalyst for moulding public opinion. On one hand, in the ’60s, the media was simply reporting on what some people already seemed to want to believe – that LSD and other psychedelic drugs could be dangerous. On the other, the media also played a role in shaping public opinion around these drugs and their potential dangers, and in creating the worries, often false, around them to begin with.

In 1968, possession of LSD became illegal in the U.S. After a June 17, 1971 press conference with then-U.S. president Richard Nixon, the term “war on drugs” became popularized with the media’s help. Editors quickly pivoted to publishing fear-mongering stories of addicts roaming the streets, exaggerated drug abuse statistics, and polarizing, racist takes. Usually, it was Black and other racialized people accused of being drug addicts and criminals and who made up the majority of American prison populations. By 1996, Black men were sent to prison for minor drug offences 13 times more often than white men.

Following this legal shift, drug reporting between the ’70s and ’90s skewed negative. “A New Generation Discovers LSD, and Its Dangers,” said The New York Times in December 1991. Between that headline and today, The New York Times has changed its tune. This same publication now shares dozens of stories on the so-called psychedelic renaissance. In the last few years, they’ve published pieces with a more curious tone: “What Does Good Psychedelic Therapy Look Like?” Dana G. Smith wondered this year.

In many ways, the media is responsible for shepherding the new era of acceptance we’re entering now. I think the modern-day psychedelic renaissance started around 2010 when The New York Times published “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again,” a dive into cancer patients’ experiments with psilocybin to face terminal diagnoses. Although certainly not the first (Wired published a piece on tech boys loving acid in in 2006, “LSD: The Geek’s Wonder Drug?”), a legacy publication sharing something so different from the public’s traditional understanding of medicine and healing, and from their previous stance, was radical. Since then, we’ve seen a noticeable increase in the media promotion of psychedelics.

But while journalists’ work functions as a cultural mirror, sometimes reflecting current public opinion back to the public, journalists, as the frontline workers in the information economy, need to look past existing trends and popular thought to report a more complete, and sometimes critical or unpleasant, truth.

*

Today, psychedelics are celebrated as a new healing cure, a way to get multiple years of therapy in one trip, and a way to treat anything and everything from depression to eating disorders to migraines. Media coverage is, for the most part, overwhelmingly positive. It seems the miracles of psychedelics don’t ever end. Celebrities are coming out as psychedelic supporters, donating millions to the cause of psychedelic therapy, and sharing their stories, whether healing or hilarious. Aaron Rodgers credits psychedelics with making him a better football player. Jaden Smith claims they made him more empathetic. Both were speakers at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’s (MAPS) June 2023 Psychedelic Science conference in Denver, which drew over 11,000 attendees. Contrary to the headlines of the ’70s and ’80s, headlines today don’t often mention that psychedelics may not work as intended and that there are plenty of harms and risks involved.

“[T]here’s so much misinformation being peddled, it’s leading people to not get the help that they need. And a big part of that misinformation is this notion that psychedelics are somehow a magic bullet, where you can go and have an experience and it’s going to fix things in you,” says author and psychedelic therapy advocate Shannon Duncan, who believes that the media needs to be more transparent in psychedelic reporting.

The top few results for a search on psilocybin therapy are articles preaching the power of magic mushrooms: “How psilocybin, the psychedelic in mushrooms, may rewire the brain to ease depression, anxiety and more,” reports CNN. Almost no articles show up discussing the risks involved and how to figure out if they’re a good fit.

The dangers of talking about psychedelics through a majorly positive, healing lens lie in what’s being omitted. In this regard, the responsibility of psychedelic reporters is huge, says Amanda Siebert, psychedelic and cannabis journalist and author. The main problem, she says, lies in exaggerated media and lack of media literacy. “People are not reading the entire thing. They’re skimming. They’re seeing ‘oh, this person did psychedelics and it cured their depression.’ I think the problem with that is it perpetuates this idea that psychedelics are a panacea.”

“I do ultimately think the onus is on the user,” says Dr. Erica Zelfand, a physician specializing in psychedelics and lead instructor at Oregon’s InnerTrek psychedelic facilitator training school. “It’s your body, it’s your consciousness, that’s your call.” The media’s job in this, she says, is to help people decide the right choice for them. She says journalists could be doing a better job of delivering accurate, nuanced data.

Dr. Dave Rabin, co-founder of Apollo Neuroscience, thinks media professionals aren’t doing enough work to find the right sources. He says many articles about psychedelic medicine cite experts who don’t practice it, or who aren’t involved in clinical research, which can sometimes lead to articles overstating the risks, backed up by people who don’t know enough to make those claims. He adds that too often, the therapy part of psychedelic therapy is pushed aside and not talked about nearly as much as the psychedelic part, which leaves an incomplete picture of how treatment works.

Acupuncturist, primary care provider, and psychedelic therapy advocate Dr. Jonathan Fields also says the media is missing out on key parts of the psychedelic therapy journey. “[The media is] kind of talking about everything except the most important thing, which is actually the fact that it works because it’s allowing you to change your mindset,” he says. A key to the therapy is integration: psilocybin can help people integrate useful tools learned through therapy, or help people stick to regular exercise. “Rather than just like, ‘I took mushrooms. I feel great.’”

Dr. Evan Lewis, vice president of psychedelic neurology at Numinus, a Canadian company with a series of clinics focusing on psychedelic therapy, says that the media and, by default, readers and other people, just “don’t understand the importance of having a really good therapist.” He says that what remains underreported is the whole framework around good preparation, guidance and integration.

On the note of media literacy, Siebert says, the issue is that “a lot of people don’t understand the relationship that PR plays.” This puts the publications at fault, too: Paid content isn’t being clearly disclosed in the psychedelic space, and neither is the “press release regurgitation” that Siebert says sometimes happens, automatically pivoting the “article” toward positive coverage. These things are not inherently bad—they just aren’t transparent.

Promoting almost exclusively positive news and information about psychedelics can be dangerous. Today’s news cycle is more than 24 hours—it’s deeper. The internet creates echo chambers and vacuums. Two people could have differing thoughts and both, after a Google search, could come back with apparent facts to back themselves up. Gen Z gets more of their information from TikTok rather than Google, and TikTok is full of diluted, or even totally wrong, information.

While we as reporters can’t control what someone is consuming on social media, we can control the messaging that we share and propagate on our own platforms and in our articles. We are not just writing about psychedelics for the sake of writing about psychedelics.

Story after story broke with revelations about so-called trusted names in news accused of sexual misconduct in the workplace. I began reconsidering my new career in media.

Some, like Mark Halperin of MSNBC, were accused of propositioning employees and engaging in unwanted sexual touching. A Vox investigation alleged that Glenn Thrush of the New York Times placed several young female reporters in uncomfortable romantic situations before spreading disparaging rumours about them in the workplace when his advances were rejected. Ryan Lizza was dismissed from the New Yorker for what the magazine cited as “improper sexual conduct.”

I began to think that being a woman in media meant condemnation to a lifetime of small injustices: mentorship conditional on acquiescence, fear that collegiality will be interpreted as romantic interest, weathering vengefulness after rebuffed advances.

While an individual incident might not have lasting repercussions, experiencing a pattern of harassment over years has likely prompted many women to reconsider their careers, if not abandon the industry entirely. Was a life in media worth it? I wondered if there were other aspiring journalists who shared my anxieties. Had these scandals made them reconsider their career plans?

Ann Rauhala, an associate professor at Toronto’s Ryerson School of Journalism, is a 29-year veteran of news media in Canada, having worked at the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the CBC. She’s seen this problem play out throughout her career. “This is an old story that is finally getting the light of day,” Rauhala says. But now, the public appears to have reached a “critical mass” moment with survivors of sexual harassment coming forward. “The whole #MeToo response, I think, is serious and important,” she says. “It is based on decades of outrageous behaviour that women in workplaces have endured. It’s pretty gratifying, to tell you the truth, to see it emerge.”

While many stories of misconduct have revolved around American outlets and reporters, Rauhala suspects that similar allegations may soon emerge in Canadian institutions as well. “I do hope that there are some sexual predators and sexual harassers who are not sleeping well these days,” says Rauhala. “Good. I’m happy that they’re not sleeping well.”

Days after I spoke to Rauhala, CTV News broke the story that two women had accused Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown of sexual misconduct, stemming from separate instances. Within hours, Brown resigned. In response to coverage of the Brown story, former broadcaster Bridget Brown described in a blog post an incident in which an unnamed CTV reporter is alleged to have forcibly kissed and exposed himself to her. Soon after, the outlet suspended Queen’s Park correspondent Paul Bliss.

Like me, Moira Wyton was disheartened by the plethora of allegations against prominent media men, those we trusted as reliable sources of information or held as sources of professional inspiration. Wyton, features editor at the University of British Columbia’s student newspaper, tells me that she was saddened by the implications of these numerous allegations. “I think about all the women who weren’t able to fully participate in the industry and who weren’t able to fully practice their craft,” she notes, “or were practicing it with fear and intimidation.”

At the Varsity, I spoke to Josie Kao, one of our associate news editors, who plans to pursue journalism after graduation. While media scandals haven’t altered her career plans significantly, Kao says, it has forced her to acknowledge the many barriers between her and a secure job in the journalism industry with “respect and decent pay.”

Still, she was hopeful that this public outcry would set a precedent for herself and other young female reporters. “I’d like to hope that if anything like this happens [to me],” Kao says, “I’d feel more confident speaking out against this, now that I know people in the media have done this before… and not been harassed out of existence.”

Both Wyton and Kao cited journalism’s strict hierarchies and competitiveness as potential reasons these incidents may occur more frequently. “You eat what you kill,” says Wyton, adding that by virtue of the job, journalists relinquish responsibility of their work to a hierarchy that decides its final form.

One’s desire to speak up may also be outweighed by the instinct to protect a professional reputation. “Women are incentivized to stay silent, because you just want to prove that you can do it, and that you can function in the industry,” says Wyton.

Student journalism is often where many begin to seriously consider careers in media, says Sierra Bein, editor-in-chief of Ryerson’s student newspaper, the Eyeopener. The platform enjoys a certain power to serve as a staging ground for implementing changes to workplace culture. “It’s definitely given us, and myself, a reason to look back at our newsroom,” says Bein.

The news presents an opportunity to examine why these issues may occur, and what steps can be taken to ensure a positive and valuable newsroom experience. As student journalists, “we’re not in the mainstream yet,” Bein says. But, she adds, “we’re going to be there very soon. So it’s something for us to be watching and whispering about on our own.”

At the University of King’s College in Halifax, assistant journalism professor Terra Tailleur runs a newsroom of more than 20 journalism school students. Aspiring reporters need to know their options when encountering workplace harassment, she tells me, including finding allies or mentors in the office.

While her newsroom’s previous discussions about harassment in journalism had focused on external concerns, Tailleur says my query about misconduct had prompted her class to discuss how to hold her accountable in creating a safe work environment. “I’m not just a classroom, I’m a newsroom,” Tailleur says. “I have to create an environment where they can learn and they can thrive and they can do their jobs, which means that I can’t have anyone harassing these students.”

Hearing that, I felt satisfied—at least for now, hoping that I had helped fellow student journalists feel secure in their job. The burden of improving this industry sits on all of our shoulders. Future journalists, I believe, are doing their share—it’s time for our elders to step up, too.

UPDATE (04/13/2018): A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Terra Tailleur is an associate, not assistant, journalism professor at King’s. This regrets the error.

Facebook has killed news.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced early last month that the network’s algorithm was changing to show “less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media” in users’ news feeds, instead highlighting personal posts that “encourage meaningful interactions between people.” The announcement cost him more than $3 billion of his own personal funds after Facebook’s stocks plunged, of which he owns more than 400 million shares.

The algorithm update indicates a dramatic change in the way users will consume their news—one that, ideally, is meant to curb the proliferation of fake news—but also in the way publications will have to promote their digital content. Facebook is no longer the audience gatherer it once was—and it hasn’t been for a while now.

Independent publications know this best. Created with the purpose of telling stories that may not be explored by mainstream media, Canada’s indie outlets know how to operate on a smaller audience and budget. And, in the ephemeral digital landscape, indie media has become accustomed to creating a community within the noise of the internet.

“Facebook has always been flawed. I think it feels less like a major change and a continuation of the fact that [digital media] just doesn’t seem like a priority to them,” says Haley Cullingham, senior editor of online magazine Hazlitt. She says Hazlitt’s Facebook strategy will not be changing after the announcement because its traffic mainly comes from people sharing its content organically, and from other social networks, like Twitter. “We’ve been very clear on the fact that we’re not going to change the fundamental tone and personality of the site just to accommodate the specific way the internet has provided [to best reach the audience],” Cullingham says. This is a strategy that other Canadian indie outlets, like Now magazine and the Tyee, share. For smaller publications, the focus has always been on the stories not told by mainstream media—not the likes and digital targets.

News outlets have long been warned against following algorithm changes too closely—as seen in Facebook’s push toward branded content, then image-heavy content, then video content, then its experimental (and largely ineffective) foray into live video. Companies that have dedicated resources chasing these trends have never seen the return on investment that they were promised.

“The danger of putting all your eggs in one basket is that someday, someone can just fuck up the basket,” says David Topping, senior manager of product at St. Joseph Communications. “Relying entirely on a social network that you have no control over, insight into or power to affect change with is always going to be a risky strategy. It’s not one that I would recommend.”

Topping says he hopes the new algorithm will encourage more originality and stronger dedication to meaningful content among publications. He warns that the recent trend of favouring clickbait and viral content may end up hurting outlets in the end. As publications inevitably move away from receiving funding from advertisers and shift toward asking their readership for money, he says “they will have spent so long reducing that value to that audience that, when the time comes … no one will care enough to do so.”

Michelle da Silva, online and social media manager for Now magazine, says her staff have been preparing for an announcement like this. Over the past two years, the publication has been devoting more resources into its digital platform. “Of course, we still have our print publication and that’s an important part of what we do and an important part of our legacy. But the only way forward is by making sure that you have a good digital strategy,” da Silva says. She says Now isn’t as affected by the algorithm change because Facebook clicks only account for about 10 percent of its total online traffic. Although it is still the “highest amount of traffic in terms of social channels,” the majority of its online hits come from Google searches, or people looking up the site directly—showing that, at least for indie mags, the concept of the “dead homepage” remains a myth for now.

This sentiment is shared by other indie publications, like Vancouver’s the Tyee. Bryan Carney, director of web production, says Facebook makes up around six to 10 percent of the publication’s total amount of online traffic in any given month. Although longer-term effects of the algorithm change are still yet to be seen, Carney’s first reaction isn’t to do a complete rehaul of his digital strategy. “You can watch the landscape and not necessarily throw money into promotion,” he says. “I think the winning way to do it is slowly build an audience rather than getting too excited about platforms.”

Carney mentions how Tumblr, the blogging site, was once touted as “the biggest thing that was going to take over Facebook.” Those rumours never came to fruition. He says, “We didn’t go and hire a Tumblr intern… and we’re probably pretty glad we didn’t.”

He also says that Facebook’s popularity, especially with advertisers, has devalued advertising on the Tyee’s site. “We’re not so tied to the fortunes of Facebook, nor do we feel any sort of loyalty to them,” he says. “It’s not likely there’s any love lost when it turns out Facebook will be less and less important for news. I hope this can be a positive development, that it’ll cause people to rethink the way we consume news and aggregate it and curate it… I think there’s a potential for this to be a positive in the industry for people to do something about it.”

The algorithm change could help slow down the breakneck speed of the news cycle. Misinformation and clickbait posts often come from the need to publish the most content faster than anyone else. If publications are phased out of readers’ news feeds, they’d need to find a new business model—one that, hopefully, relies more on publishing content that is more meaningful and nuanced than one-dimensional takes designed to go viral. However, it also does mean that people who have been using Facebook as a news aggregator may need to find an alternative. That includes more active support for digital content—like publicly supporting and sharing meaningful pieces, or subsidizing publications that commit to publishing them.

Ultimately, Facebook is putting the onus on the reader to go out of their way to find content that speaks to them—as it should be. Reading the news critically and evaluating different viewpoints should always be a conscious, active process instead of something done passively. And while the algorithm change represents a shift in the way news will be promoted and consumed, Canadian indie publications will survive using the same techniques that have kept them going in previous trying times: by creating meaningful niche content that personally speaks to its readers—and by not investing all their resources on a Tumblr intern.

How did Femifesto and the idea for the Use the Right Words guide come about?

We’re a Toronto-based collective that was formed in order to work on shifting the culture to consent culture. So our first project was the Use the Right Words guide. It began because we were seeing more conversations about sexual assault in the media during a time of really high-profile cases. We were inspired by similar work in the U.S.—media guides that helped journalists report on issues like sexual violence or domestic violence against women in a way that’s supportive and that won’t be seen as blaming survivors of violence. We started the Use the Right Words project to create something that was applicable to the Canadian context.

Who worked on the guide and decided what to include?

We first started crowdsourcing feedback in 2013. We tried to get as many people involved as possible and were really surprised at the number of journalists who were willing to speak with us. The version that we have now is the finalized version. We wanted to make it as inclusive and all-encompassing as we could. It started out as being about language, but became a lot more comprehensive. It was the advisory committee that really informed this guide, particularly lawyers, journalists, journalism professors, students, abuse survivors, sexual violence advocates, and activists. They all had really diverse experiences and knowledge that helped in terms of figuring out what journalists are able to say, the culture of newsrooms, and what survivors would prefer.

What kind of response has the guide got from the public?

It’s been really positive. When we published the guide we also simultaneously launched the Use the Right Words campaign on social media. We encouraged people to share when they saw any type of news article that is using harmful language in terms of survivor shaming or survivor blaming and to fix the headline. If you take a look at the hashtag you’ll see lots of people calling out different instances of this—when using different language would be just as accurate, but much less harmful. It’s really amazing to see others really taking it on.

What is your long-term goal for the guide?

Our vision would be to have this guide in every single newsroom in Canada because it is such an important resource and one that is so informed by journalists. We have often been told that it’s not necessarily that journalists are trying to be harmful towards survivors or that they are inherently promoting rape culture; it’s that they don’t necessarily always have the tools. A lot of the language that media uses is ingrained into the traditions of journalism. That’s why it’s such an important goal of ours to have journalists, editors, and key players in media organizations engage in these conversations and talk about these stories.

Can you explain what the harm can be in using the victim narrative?

People have the right to define how they want to identify. So for some people the word victim will really resonate with them because they feel that they’ve been victimized. It’s often the first word that we use when we describe those who have experienced sexual violence. At the same time, many people feel that the word victim has negative connotations. It can denote a really tragic person who is defined by the violence that they’ve experienced. In reality, people who have had violence perpetrated against them are full people with complicated lives; the violence is just one thing that happened to them. This is why many prefer the word survivor. It acknowledges they survived a violent event, but it does not define who they are. It’s important to let each person decide for themselves.

In January 2016, just weeks before the Chronicle Herald would begin its still-unresolved strike, management at the paper offered Nathan Clarke a job. Clarke covers sports, and the Herald, Nova Scotia’s newspaper of record, wanted him to be its sports reporter, stepping in to fill the shoes of a striking worker—what’s called being a strikebreaker or, depending on whom you ask, a “scab.”

Clarke wrestled with the decision. (His name has been changed to protect his identity.) Steady, full-time work in journalism was—and still is—hard to come by. He had another freelance gig that kept him at the local hockey rink enough that he didn’t think it would make him look suspicious to other journalists if he took the job. But it was one of the Herald’s striking workers who recommended Clarke for the freelance job when he was an intern at the paper in 2012.

“The people who are on strike have actively helped me get work,” he says. “Here I am with the option to take a job that will give me money that, quite frankly, I really need. But at the same time I would be screwing over people that I work alongside and who have also helped me get to the point where I’m at.”

Clarke knew the risks. Kelly Toughill, now the former director of the journalism school at the University of King’s College in Halifax where Clarke studied, warned students and alumni against doing the jobs of the Herald’s striking workers. Toughill has spoken publicly about how the school doesn’t support students breaking the picket line. One-onone, when asked directly for advice on whether to take a job as a replacement worker, she’s told young alumni that the implications of working a “scab” job could follow them around for the rest of their careers, thwarting future job opportunities. That wasn’t a risk worth taking for Clarke, and eventually, he declined the offer. “I just can’t put a dollar value on that sort of thing,” he says.

But now more than ever, the dollar value bottom line dominates the newspaper industry. Papers across the country are hurting. Fewer resources, outdated business models, a public unwillingness to pay for news, and shrinking newsrooms plague print media. Unions such as the Halifax Typographical Union (HTU), which represents the striking workers of the Chronicle Herald, protect the people who propel newspapers forward and safeguard the editorial content from the market forces that newspapers’ management can’t seem to beat.

At the same time, millennials like Clarke are graduating from journalism school with thousands of dollars of debt and throwing themselves headlong into a contracting and competitive job market, where unpaid internships and years of unstable work are standard. Getting a full-time job out of school, let alone a job with a pension, benefits, and job security, is unlikely for most. Journalists are entering the workforce at a time when the five-day work week and eight-hour work day are taken for granted.

When the Herald’s unionized staff did strike weeks after Clarke’s job offer, management hired temporary replacement reporters in place of striking workers as cheap labour. Many of these reporters were young journalists and recent graduates, like Clarke, with little newsroom experience. The HTU has been ruthless in calling out these replacement journalists on social media, engaging in shaming tactics to ensure their names remain known after their stints at the Herald. Whether these shaming tactics are effective and conducive to dialogue is up for debate. Certainly, unions are in a tough position of balancing priorities: taking a stand against strikebreakers while also doing more to reach out to millennial freelancers—some of Canadian journalism’s most precarious workers.

***

The Chronicle Herald’s management locked its employees out of their offices and banished their bylines from its pages on January 23, 2016. Sixty-one members of the HTU—unionized reporters, editors, and photographers—voted almost unanimously to strike after contract negotiations fell through. As this story went to press, the strike at the Herald had been ongoing for 250 days. As the strike persists, the largest independently owned newspaper in Canada continues to operate with a skeleton newsroom of five full-time replacement reporters between the ages of 25–30. Meanwhile, its unionized workers have spent more than eight months walking the picket line every day through nearly four seasons.

The Herald strike is symptomatic of a broader state of crisis in the Canadian media industry. Recent years have brought a slew of bad news for newspapers. The same month the Herald went on strike, two other Canadian newspapers, the Nanaimo Daily News and the Guelph Mercury, folded. In August 2016, the Toronto Star announced 52 layoffs. Bell Media cut 380 jobs last year. CBC cut 400 jobs in numerous rounds of layoffs over the past two years. And this year, Postmedia announced 90 layoffs. Not even digital media emerged unscathed, with BuzzFeed shuttering its Canadian political bureau in Ottawa this summer. Media organizations continue to struggle to do more with less. “The whole business model of the penny press—supporting mass market journalism with advertising— is collapsing,” Toughill says.

In Halifax, this collapse has played out in ugly ways. The Herald dispute has been called a union-busting drive. David Wilson, the chief negotiator for the Communication Workers of America Canada (CWA) who represented the HTU in negotiations, says management proposed more than 1,000 changes in the collective agreement, including significant salary cuts and increased working hours, reduced benefits, and the removal of a pay equity clause (which it has since agreed to put back into the agreement). The HTU and management have, however, agreed to a five percent acrossthe-board wage cut. Wilson says the Herald’s management is asking for concessions that have never been asked for by any newspaper chain. “It’s a very scripted, one-sided negotiation where the local was expected to make all the moves, and the employer would do absolutely nothing,” he says. “That does not happen—this is not typical at all.”

The unusual circumstances surrounding negotiations didn’t stop the Herald’s striking workers from rallying as a team, says HTU vice-president Frank Campbell. For the most part, he says, the Herald’s striking workers have stuck together. Many began writing for Local XPress, an independent online newspaper the striking workers founded in January. But eight months can erode the morale of even the most dedicated picketers. Over the phone, Campbell’s voice sounds worn—it appears exhaustion has set in. And in April, photojournalist Eric Wynne suffered a stroke on the picket line. “When you’re in this thing for eight months, different people are at different places in how they deal with things emotionally,” Campbell says. “Personally, I try to stay as positive as I can. Would I rather be working and earning a steady paycheque for what I love to do? Sure.”

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On April 9, 2016, the Chronicle Herald published an article about refugee children violently abusing other students at a Halifax elementary school. The news story had no byline attached to it, because it was written by a replacement reporter—a practice that had been put into place at the beginning of the strike. The story quoted anonymous parents who alleged that refugee students had been “pushing, slapping, and verbally abusing” their fellow classmates. The Herald was blasted for the story by local and national media, including the Globe and Mail, and the story was picked up by Ezra Levant’s right-wing outlet, Rebel Media, and anti-Muslim blogs. In the days that followed, the news story was edited and amended a number of times before it was deleted entirely from the Herald’s website. An editor’s note that appeared in the paper admitted that the story “needed more work.” The story is just one example of the many dangers of relying on the paper’s skeleton staff. Campbell says the story would never have gone to print looking the way it did if professional, experienced journalists and editors had been handling it.

Lezlie Lowe is a journalism professor at King’s and was a freelance columnist with the Herald when the story was published. She’s not a member of the HTU, and when the workers went on strike, she continued to file her weekly column rather than breach her contract. She faced backlash from the HTU and the community in the form of shaming tweets and what she calls anonymous online commentary. But when the refugee story broke, she quit. “It felt like continuing with the paper in the face of that was implicitly condoning the bad journalism, and condoning the idea that it’s okay to do that, and it’s not,” she says.

It’s not just experienced writers who have condemned the paper since the story broke. David Swick, who previously taught journalism ethics at King’s and dispensed advice to journalism graduates on scabbing, says he knows of three King’s graduates from the class of 2015 who were approached by the Herald to scab and turned the opportunity down. During lunchtime conversations, Swick says he was struck by how many students spoke up against strikebreaking practices. “I don’t know if it was an appreciation of unions, or an instinct for justice,” he says. “But you’ve got young people who were heading out into a tight workforce, and who were saying they would not take a job with the newspaper of record in town because it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

But in a tough job climate, what’s stopping other young journalists from taking a much-needed job as a strikebreaker? For Toughill, it’s a matter of pragmatism: some news organizations won’t hire a journalist if they’ve “scabbed”—the media scene is small, and careers will effectively be ruined. She adds, however, that while she doesn’t think it’s a good idea, she does understand why some young journalists feel compelled to do it—it’s tough financial times for journalists and they have to pay the rent. For Nora Loreto, a freelancer and Quebec director of the Canadian Freelance Union (CFU), it’s much more clear-cut: “From the perspective of someone who has been on strike for a hundred-plus days, their kids might not have clothes bought for them because someone is scabbing.”

For this story I reached out to four young replacement reporters for the Chronicle Herald. Of the four, two agreed to speak with me and then later reneged, saying they didn’t want to put their jobs at risk, or that it was their own story to tell. Two declined outright. To say the Herald’s replacement staffers are cagey is an understatement.

The HTU uses Twitter and its Facebook page to shame replacement journalists, calling them out by name, and posting images of the stories they’ve written with their bylines and tagging them in it. In March, for instance, the HTU tweeted, “Congrats to a certain young scab who’s just signed [a] contract as multimedia CH journo! Enjoy my your job! #CHstrike.” Attached was a photo of a vulture and a dead animal carcass. While not part of the union, Lowe says she received her fair share of online hate: people would take photos of her from the internet and make memes. “I got baited a lot,” she says.

To people unfamiliar with labour politics, this culture of shaming might seem heavy-handed and counterintuitive to sparking dialogue about the negative effects of strikebreaking labour. While it might not be an effective way to stop people from scabbing, says Toughill, such shaming tactics have a long history, even if some might feel they’re “somewhat repugnant.” “In many cases, that’s what we do as journalists,” she says. “We hold people up to the light and say, ‘Look, this is what this person is doing. What do you think of what this person is doing?’” Toughill admits it’s a easier in the age of social media. “I would be very distressed if it were following someone’s children or their spouse,” she says, “but I think it’s a little bit naive if you’re going to work for a striking organization, to think you’re not going to be called out for that decision.”

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It was clear to Clarke that he wasn’t being approached by the Herald back in January for any reason other than a profit-serving one. “Looking at the quality of some of the reporting since the strike began, I don’t feel like it was ‘we’re looking for the best young journalists in Nova Scotia to help us put this paper out during the strike,’” he says. “It seemed like a ‘get whatever we can’ kind of grab.” Meanwhile, Mark Lever, the Herald’s CEO, has called freelance labour a cost-effective strategy to producing content.

The CFU is in a unique position to reach out to young journalists like Clarke who are trying to carve out a living independently. Founded 10 years ago under Unifor, the union is charting new territory, but has to be careful of stepping on the toes of other locals of full-time newsroom staff. The CFU is one of a few freelancer unions in Canada, and represents a broad cross-section of people, but each of their 250 members is a precarious communications worker. “The existence of my union is an experiment,” says Loreto. “We’re not a real union, because freelancers don’t have a common employer.” While she admits unions are human, fallible organizations, she says that when we prioritize the discussion surrounding the one or two people strikebreaking and erase the fact that there are 30 people on the picket line defending the basic tenets of journalism, it’s a move that is reducing all of these complicated social issues to the individual level. “It’s making the problem about whether or not we’re being fair to this 22-year-old guy from the University of King’s College,” she says.

Recognizing this fundamental difference of understanding of “the collective” is core to being able to talk to young workers, particularly those under 40, about the importance of unions and organizing. “If you’re a young journalist,” Loreto says, “you have to be critical of the mainstream, profit-serving narrative.” Rebecca Rose, a young freelancer who has been the CFU’s Atlantic organizer throughout the strike, says she organized trips to the picket line for King’s students, spoken on panels and wrote literature, and offered outreach for students and young freelance journalists. She says the visits by current or future freelancers to the picket line meant a lot to the striking workers. “Herald management went really hard with trying to recruit recent grads,” she says, “and to see us resisting that was really important for the strikers.”

Rose says the Herald’s striking workers are people she wants to learn from. Walking the picket line with them over the past year, she says she’s gotten valuable advice from their decades of experience. “But that’s the thing: as a freelancer, do you want it to be just you, isolated, working from home and without a community of other freelancers? Or do you want to have that camaraderie?” she asks. “I want to have that camaraderie. It’s just fighting back against this individualistic mindset we’ve been sold.”

David Skok. Illustration by Dave Donald

David Skok, the managing editor of GlobalNews.ca, checked into Harvard University in September to begin a one-year Nieman Fellowship. The 33-year-old is the first Canadian digital journalist to receive the prestigious award. He’ll be studying “how to sustain Canadian journalism’s distinct presence in a world of stateless news organizations.” He spoke with This two weeks before heading to Boston.

THIS: I’ve seen you referred to as an online journalist and a digital journalist. Which do you prefer?

SKOK: Digital journalist. Online is a little too specific to the web. What we do is beyond that. It’s mobile. It’s iPads and everything else.

THIS: Do you like being called a digital journalist?

SKOK: It’s fine for now but I look forward to the day when there’s no label that separates digital versus broadcast versus a print journalist.

THIS: Do you think the established media consider digital to be less important than traditional media?

SKOK: It depends on what we’re talking about. There are two ways to look at digital media. For me there’s the newsgathering … and then there’s digital media for publishing and distribution. I think digital media [for the latter] is becoming more accepted, if not by choice but by necessity. From a newsgathering point of view, I think there’s a long way to go.

THIS: For example?

SKOK: Look at the Arab Spring and how Andy Carvin of NPR used Twitter to verify information and facts. And he did the same thing with Syria. He was in Washington, DC. He’s being more effective at getting the accurate, fair, correct news out than the mainstream or legacy news organizations. That’s something I don’t think many news organizations have actually caught on to yet. And if they have it’s in a very tokenistic way, not as a real way of telling stories.

THIS: There’s a concern that if someone Tweets something, how do you know it’s true?

SKOK: Exactly. When I speak within my own newsrooms, I often make the point: how is a Tweet any different than a press release, or a report you’re hearing on a police scanner or anything else? Every piece of information we get needs to be verified and Twitter is no different.

THIS: Can you sum up your overriding goal for your fellowship?

SKOK: It’s probably too far-reaching but there are three parts I really want to look at. The first is the new tools of journalism, such as Twitter, open data, data journalism and even things like WikiLeaks. Second is how should Canadian newsrooms evolve in light of all these changes. This one hits me very close to home because I run a digital media organization within a legacy news organization. We created that from scratch and eventually, ultimately we have to integrate our product and our journalists into the main news organization as a whole. The third part is how can we, as Canadian news organizations, think of our role in the global sphere.

THIS: What do you mean by stateless news organizations?

SKOK: Ones that are based in a country but whose target audience is not that country. Al Jazeera, for example. Its target audience is not Qatar, where it’s based or Dubai or even the Arab world. I watched Al Jazeera and BBC World and CNN International on my iPad during the Arab Spring demonstrations. I didn’t need to be watching a Canadian news organization. Do we even need a national news organization anymore?

THIS: What else will you be studying?

SKOK: I’m noticing, as someone running the digital side of things, that we’re increasingly reliant on private enterprise to host the content. For example Facebook, Twitter, even the servers we use, Amazon, let’s say, they’re all private companies that host content in California. What interest do they have in sustaining Canadian journalism? What obligations does the CRTC place on them? There’s something about that we should be questioning. I’ll also be taking some courses at business school to understand more of the business side of things. As journalists we’ve always had this church and state mentality and I don’t know if we can still afford to do that anymore because we’re not making money anymore.

THIS: Are you excited about spending a year at Harvard?

SKOK: Absolutely. The resources at Harvard are immense. There are so many bright people. But not just that, there are programs that are thinking about all these issues we’re talking about, whether the law school, the Kennedy School, MIT. And they’re tackling these issues every day. To be immersed in that environment and be able to tackle them without the day-to-day operational running of a newsroom is incredibly exciting.

Jenny Vaughan

Jenny Vaughan is no stranger to the hybrid role of journalist, leader, and advocate. She now occupies a unique position as the Accra, Ghana-based eyes and ears of Journalists for Human Rights, a media development organization with operations throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, her job ranges from ensuring the professional and personal well-being of a team of journalists currently placed in Ghana and Malawi, to leading training programs with soldiers from various African countries on interaction with the press. Yet her fascination with the points where journalism, leadership, and international advocacy work coincide dates back much further. Born and raised into a family of journalists and politicians in Toronto, the 25-year-old has been navigating those worlds all her life.

Vaughan first worked in African media in the summer of 2009, as a reporter for the Daily Monitor, a national newspaper in Uganda. Sample stories from this time saw Vaughan on the back of a bodaboda motorbike in August 2009, weaving through traffic on Kampala’s red dirt roads to cover the story that businessman Benjamin Mukasa had been illegally detained by an army major in Kampala. “For two days,” says Vaughan, “he says he was starved, beaten, and refused access to a bathroom.”

Vaughan knew covering that story would be dangerous, because it involved exposing human-rights abuses committed by the army. But, as she puts it, “I didn’t hesitate when my colleague asked me to interview Mukasa. It’s because of stories like this that I became a journalist.” While at the Monitor, Vaughan also produced features on refugee rights, sexual harassment, and youth empowerment. “Human rights abuses often go unreported,” says Vaughan, “which is why I believe the work of Journalists for Human Rights is so important.”

Founded nine years ago, JHR—of which I am International Programs Director—works with local media in a variety of sub-Saharan African countries to shore up the power of the fourth estate. It does this by foregrounding a culture of human-rights reporting in a media environment where life is cheap, and respect for human rights is frequently the last priority.

But Vaughan’s engagement with this kind of work predates her time at JHR. Uganda, for example, made international headlines in January 2011 when gay activist David Kato was murdered. Yet Vaughan was on that issue two years prior, co-producing a television documentary about Uganda’s criminalization of homosexuality for iChannel and working closely with gay rights activists who risked their safety to expose injustice.

Her time in Uganda proved to her the power the press has to educate and empower communities in developing democracies, especially when it comes to human rights—an ethos she has refined during her time with JHR. With such a heady mix of media work, leadership, and development to her credit, I’m fascinated to see what Vaughan does next.

Jessica McDiarmid.

Born and raised in British Columbia, Jessica McDiarmid knew from a young age that she wanted to write about tough subjects in difficult places. Around age 14, McDiarmid devoured Oakland Ross’s A Fire on the Mountains, a compilation of true-life stories about the extraordinary circumstances in which people live and thrive in 17 global hotspots, including El Salvador, Cuba, and Zambia. With the work of Canada’s most renowned foreign correspondents as inspiration, McDiarmid decided to take up a career in journalism.

Fast forward a decade, and McDiarmid is now competing directly with Ross for space in the world section of the Toronto Star, writing for the paper from Abidjan, Ivory Coast, about the ongoing standoff between former president Laurent Gbagbo and aspirant Alassane Outtara. She’s also covered Liberia’s lost generation of child soldiers and interviewed current presidential candidate Prince Johnson, a notorious warlord.

McDiarmid’s path to journalism was fairly direct. She took journalism at The University of King’s College in Halifax, graduating into the usual environment of unpaid internships, short-term contracts, and other piecemeal job opportunities. Unfazed, McDiarmid worked for a variety of news organizations, including the Hamilton Spectator, before landing a job at the Canadian Press, where, among other things, she went to New Orleans to write about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

That yen to write from overseas proved too strong to ignore, however, and the summer of 2010 saw McDiarmid embarking on a six-month internship at Accra’s Daily Guide, co-ordinated by Toronto media development organization Journalists for Human Rights. With her internship over, she is now combining media development work with her own freelance journalism. And she’s not afraid of using her power as a writer to advocate for causes she believes in. “The best way to promote justice in the world is not just to take stories of Africa back to Canada, but to help empower journalists there to tell those stories to their own nations,” she says. Amen, sister.

Alison Loat. Photo courtesy Samara Canada.

Canadians are giving up on their political system. Voting participation is at historic lows; the number of people who vote for the winning party is now routinely outpaced by the number who don’t vote at all. Most young people don’t vote—63 percent of people under age 24 didn’t cast a ballot in 2008—and that bodes ill for the future of Canadian democracy.

Alison Loat, director and co-founder of Samara Canada, is determined to get to the bottom of this increasing political disengagement.

Samara, based in Toronto, was founded in 2008 and has since been dedicated to the study of how Canadian citizens engage, or don’t, with their democracy. Their most attention-grabbing project so far was a series of “exit interviews” with former members of parliament, which uncovered a wide variation in what, exactly, MPs think their jobs are. The foundation has also hosted a series of talks on the future of journalism, and the role it plays in shaping civic life.

“The hope is to create a bit of a community,” Loat says, to “tell the stories of Canada in a compelling way so that citizens will engage with them.”

Loat is currently developing Samara’s next project, the Democracy Index, a report card on the health of Canadian politics and civil society. Expect a few “Needs Improvement” marks—dismal youth voter turnout, for instance—but Loat says the purpose of the index is also to highlight the things that are working well. The point, in the end, is to get citizens talking about the democratic system of which they are a part. “Any way that I can creatively influence and help the development of this country,” Loat says she’ll do it. “Because I think it’s a great place to live.”

— Victoria Salvas