By Tamara Merritt
It could not have been a better venue — the home of the country’s oldest journalism school in the heart of the national capital — to host a discussion about how best to educate the next generation of Canadian political journalists.
The final panel of the Reimagining Political Journalism conference at Carleton University featured a conversation among six university professors exploring the challenges of teaching journalism in an era of industry disruption, political polarization and post-COVID social upheaval.
The exchange of ideas was moderated by Carleton journalism professor Duncan McCue, an award-winning CBC national broadcaster and author of the landmark textbook Decolonizing Journalism: A Guide to Reporting in Indigenous Communities.
The five panelists were former CBC and The Walrus journalist Angela Misri, an assistant professor of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University; her TMU colleague Prof. April Lindgren, a former politics and economics reporter who created the ground-breaking Local News Research Project; former CBC broadcaster Dr. Brooks DeCillia, a professor with Mount Royal University’s School of Communication Studies; former radio, television and print reporter and editor Patrick White, a journalism professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal; and Candis Callison, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous journalism, media, and public discourse at the University of British Columbia and author of Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities.
What does success look like in a classroom that focuses on political journalism? There was a consensus among the professors that it’s a place where students are encouraged to follow their passions.
Lindgren discussed her own experience encouraging her students to focus on stories that mattered to young people. She talks to students “about how their age group is actually going to be the largest voting cohort going forward,” she said. “It made politics very real and meaningful for the students.”
DeCillia echoed the idea. He said he tries to “focus on their generation, what they care about, what’s concerning them,” adding: “I find it when it’s meaningful to them and they can relate to it that often they are being more aggressive about finding data or being more aggressive about getting information for their fact checks.”
Misri highlighted the importance of creating the kind of newsroom that she would like to work in herself. This has led to a focus on covering protests and creating a space where aspiring reporters understand the importance of walking a mile in the shoes of those they cover. Story ideas, Misri added, are developed collectively.
In his teaching, White said he emphasizes the idea of immersive learning. He recently launched a summer school in which students are immersed in two Inuit communities and teach journalism basics to Indigenous participants while gaining an appreciation of local culture. The two-week program ends with the production of a bilingual French-Inuktitut podcast. “So far, it’s been a success,” he said.
While Lindgren, DeCillia, Misri and White focused on teaching the fundamentals of reporting, Callison escribed her experience in teaching media ethics. In the classroom, she spent three weeks examining the idea of objectivity in journalism and then explored the representation of Indigenous peoples in the news media.
“The history of media is sorely missing,” she said. Students and educators need “a sense of what the sedimentation of layers are that we are building on, as journalists working in the present.”
The panelists discussed how teaching political journalism comes with significant challenges given the wide spectrum of political viewpoints that saturate society and the deeply divided nature of political debate in the 2020s.
With this in mind, there was agreement that promoting civil discourse must be at the forefront when teaching how to cover politics. The recent COVID-19 pandemic, it was acknowledged, deepened political polarization and made civil discourse that much more difficult.
Misri observed that journalism students who were in high school during the pandemic did not emerge with their social skills entirely intact. “They are not sure how to confront each other or even sure how to just have a conversation without confronting each other,” she said.
When she sees emotions running high during stressful newsroom exercises, she presents a distressed student with a watering can and directs them to the plethora of plants filling her classroom. “Having a plant between you — having to a move a plant out of the way to yell at someone — I don’t know why, but it calms people down.”
White agreed that students’ social skills were affected by the pandemic. Still, he said, he sends his students into the field and compels them to pick up the phone. “The idea right now,” he said, is “to put pressure on them to get more in the field, talk to real people, make eye-contact and not only rely on answers by email.”
Callison said she creates sessions in her classroom to allow students to talk about what they disagree on. This includes writing response papers and displaying comments made during class to facilitate a live discourse analysis.
During this discussion about journalism education, McCue made a point of encouraging journalism students in the audience to pose questions or contribute their own insights to the conversation.
One recent graduate expressed frustration with the seeming incongruity that comes with writing news that students themselves want to hear. “It’s great that journalism students are doing stories that matter to them,” he said. “For the certificate program that I was in, we all had degrees. We were all university educated. I think there’s such a gap between what we want to see in journalism and what non-university educated people want to see in journalism.”
The comment echoed remarks made by conference keynote speaker Jeet Heer, columnist and podcaster with The Nation, about the present divide between society’s educated elite — including most members of the journalism profession — and the broad segments of the public who lack post-secondary education and, by and large, supported president-elect Donald Trump in the Nov. 5 U.S. election.
DeCillia admitted he “didn’t have a satisfying answer” to the issue raised by the student audience member, but said it’s a challenge that must be confronted in both newsrooms and classrooms.
“How do we do a better job of listening and hearing that perspective and trying to explain that perspective?” he said. DeCillia suggested the “solutions journalism” movement — in which a prime aim of reporting is to identify and tackle social problems in collaboration with community members — could constructively “complicate the narrative . . . But I think I begins with a lot of listening.”
Callison applauded the idea. “It is really important,” she noted, “to get outside of your journalism bubble and be in community.”
Another student raised concerns about gaps in journalism training around economic issues. He said journalism schools do a poor job of preparing their students to write about money and economic policy.
Misri joked that many journalists often get into the field because they don’t like math, drawing laughter from the audience. But Misri said she encourages journalism students to reach out to experts on complicated topics. “The truth of the matter is, we can’t be experts in everything,” she said. Confidence is needed to reach out to the experts, she added, and humility is required to admit that “you don’t know what you don’t know.”
Another student asked the professors how they are preparing students to enter into such a fraught media marketplace — where many legacy news outlets are in distress, digital upstarts are struggling to build sustainable audiences and social media have disrupted the entire information ecosystem.
“Journalism is being reinvented,” Lindgren said, emphasizing the power in numbers: “Think about models of collaboration . . . Understand how to collaborate with other news organizations so that you’re not just doing it on your own.”
Callison ended the panel discussion by expressing hope for the future of journalism.
“When I think 15 years ago what didn’t exist, and what exists now — in terms of media organizations, in terms of options, in terms of possibilities — there’s more movement that’s possible.”