 Yes, this session is called The Future of Journalism, but I want to start with a little disclaimer in that if anyone thinks they're going to get definitive answers from any of us, they'll probably be surprised or maybe disappointed. But what we've done today is we've assembled, we've got four of the School of Journalism Communications graduates here. I'll introduce them all in just a second. We're going to talk a little bit about what the nature of journalism is today and what the jobs are that they all do and what they have to do in their jobs. Talk a little bit about what some of the fundamental skills journalists need today and what we think journalists are going to need into the future. We're also going to ask them to speculate a little bit on what journalism will be like in 2042 when Carlton celebrates his 100th birthday. And then we'll probably open the floor and have some questions and have a little bit of discussion amongst everyone. So let me begin, though, by introducing our panel. Right beside me is Amanda Connolly, who's a Bachelor of Journalism graduate. Currently working at iPolitics in Ottawa, where she covers defense and security issues. She previously, for a year and a half, for two years, worked for CBC and Calgary. Amanda may be probably best known internationally for being the subject of an attack from the Chinese Foreign Minister, who I'm not sure whether I'd describe it as lectured her or yelled at her for having the temerity. I think the word that used was berated. Berated her for asking me about human rights in China, which got a lot of interest in Canada and everywhere else as well. So beside Amanda is Sherry Ask, who is a Bachelor of Journalism graduate as well, and apparently liked it so much, she came back and did a Master's of Arts and Communications Studies. Sherry works for CBC. You may know her for reading news on Saturdays, but she also does a whole bunch of other jobs for CBC and we'll hear a little bit more about that in a minute. Beside her is Emily Kennedy, who's just graduated from Master of Journalism program. Emily's most recent accomplishment, I guess, is one of the co-editors of the 2017 Commemorative Issue of Ottawa Magazine. It's gonna be out for the whole year. She has it right there to advertise to all of you, and she just spent a term at Ottawa Magazine. But in addition to that, also runs her own social media company. So she's taken some of the skills from journalism and everything else she's done and is now turning that into her own venture. At the end is Matthew Pearson, who is also a Master of Journalism graduate, has worked for the Ottawa citizen and now the Ottawa Sun as well. Matthew has been, at various points in time, the education reporter, Queens Park reporter from a distance, right? City Hall reporter, municipal politics reporter, and recently, one of the more interesting projects he has done, and I'm not sure if he's continuing to do it or not, is walking the LRT route, which was a great feature, if anyone saw, of all the things you couldn't see if you tried to walk the route and jump in and out under fences and things like that. So, with that as a bit of an introduction, let's begin and we're gonna go down the list and we'll ask each of our panelists to talk a little bit about what they do in their job and the skills they use and how that may have changed in the time they've been doing it. So, Amanda. Sure, yeah, so thank you so much for having me today. Yeah, so my job, as Chris mentioned, I'm the national security reporter at iPolitics. That means that I cover really everything from defense procurement policy to foreign affairs to terrorism, kind of radicalization. It's really kind of a huge variety of kind of stories and issues that fall under my beat and I really wouldn't have it any other way. I love it, I'm so happy to be able to do that. Since I joined up on the team about two years ago now, it's grown a lot. It's been really, really exciting to be a part of. Initially, when I started up, it was very much kind of a, there were about seven, I think seven reporters maybe, it was a fairly small staff and it was very much kind of focused around what stories can we find and can we pitch and can we really kind of get into that nobody else is talking about and that for me was what really drew me to the job in the first place was the freedom to really kind of dig into a certain area of focus and be able to build expertise around that, the sources there and the issues that are happening on that portfolio. Over the time that I've been there, I mean again, it's been about two years now, it's been a very, very busy two years as well on the foreign policy and security front with everything from attacks and issues that have come out of those to developments on the international politics stage. Of course, Donald Trump in the US is a perfect example of that and so it's really kind of forced me and forced my colleagues as well who work on the same beat to really kind of try and up our game and find ways that because these issues are being talked about so much more, not only by us but by everybody as well, it's becoming a very kind of more flashy mainstream issue of coverage. How can we use the skills and the knowledge that we have gained by being able to be focused on that area to really kind of push into issues and say what are the issues that are being talked about and how can we flip those on their heads? How can we take an opinion? Or not an opinion, take an angle or look at an issue and be a little bit more contrary and look at things and say this is a voice or this is a perspective that we haven't necessarily heard before and so I think kind of made me an example about that would be we hear a lot of talk about the possible peace operation that we're looking at going into over in Mali and how dangerous it is. It's the most deadly UN operation for peacekeepers to be sent on abroad right now and that tends to be the issue that you hear most often is that it is very dangerous, it is a risk, it should be taking that risk and is it worthwhile? And we don't often hear a lot of talk about, yes it is a risk but there also might be points in that mission that give Canada a really unique option to use the skills that we have built up via a decade almost in Afghanistan, particularly with regards to counterinsurgency and so one of the stories that I work on a lot is kind of looking at that angle of, for example with the Mali mission, are there things that we can bring that nobody else can to the table and that being able to look at issues and think through that lens of things that aren't being talked about really kind of helps to hopefully improve understanding of issues and also gain better awareness both for our politics itself as an outlet that will kind of push the agenda forward and go beyond the issues and the headlines of what can very much be kind of a packed journalism game often, especially in politics and also for myself as an individual reporter hopefully too in terms of building sources, in terms of building more knowledge and expertise and that kind of thing. So it's been very exciting as well to see kind of us growing and changing and we were hiring a lot of new people which is very exciting. And so yeah, I'm thinking it's gonna be a really exciting prospect to see where we go going forward as well. Okay, I'll come back to you with a couple of questions about that in a minute, but Sherry. So I'm Sherry Ask and my technical job is on Saturdays and Sundays. I read the local Ottawa news for CBC Ottawa. I'm up very early at 4 a.m., not this morning, thankfully, but that's what I normally do and then I have what I call a quasi-job at CBC during the week and that's, I'm what's called the casual employee. So I fill in for anyone who is sick or on vacation and there's about 30 to 40% of our staff at local CBC Ottawa that are actually like this, like me and so I work, I counted the other day, it was eight or nine different positions that I fill in for. So I'm either a reporter for radio or TV. I produce our six o'clock, separate hour local Ottawa TV news. I line up our six o'clock Ottawa, separate hour TV news some days. Sometimes I'm the show's writer. Sometimes I'm the field producer who's on location with one of our hosts, wrangling guests and booking interviews. Sometimes I'm a digital producer who's screening tape as it comes back into our shop. Another job I do is a web desk reporter. So you're chained to your desk but you're filing as many web stories as you can as news breaks during the day. I don't know if that's all eight jobs but that's the gist of it I guess. And on any given day you can be doing one or more than one of them? One or more than one depending on who's sick. And the other thing is I often don't know my schedule in advance. So other than Saturdays and Sundays sometimes I go into a week and I don't know which days I'm working. I have the pleasure of waking up and waiting for an email to find out if I'm working or not and which job I'll be doing that day. So while Amanda has a full-time job, Sherry has a job that's... Quasi job. But part of it is, part of it's contract, part of it's casual or it's all... Yes, yes, I'm guaranteed Saturdays and Sundays and the rest of it is casual. Right, right, okay. Emily. So thank you again for inviting me to come talk. I'm kind of this, I feel like sort of this odd person out because right now I'm working for myself. So I've previously up until, I guess, December was a senior editor for Autoamag. I like to bring props. And during that time, I was working on this company that I co-own with another journalist, Joanne, who's here kindly supporting me. And we have an associate who works with us who's also a journalist and all three of us graduated from the master's program. So it's an interesting time to be a journalist because really what is the journalist anymore? Like you are both saying and probably what Matthew will say too, is that we do a lot of different things. Our job is no longer just one thing. I guess considered towards the very top end of millennials, although I prefer not to be considered a millennial. But I'm old enough to remember working in 2006 in a newspaper room as an intern where I would go to the fax machine and grab a story and that's what I would write that day. So it's incredible to see how things and the skills have changed just in that timeframe, let alone to imagine how they'll change in the next 25 years. So if anything, I think I probably don't know what I'll be doing in 25 years. It's almost impossible to predict now. But what's interesting, I found working at the magazine and there's another magazine I also work for which is Taste of Travel, is that my skills as a journalist were used in so many different areas. So for example, Ottawa Mag was just developing a podcast while I was there, a newsletter. They were building out their digital presence, including social media and just their website and they started to do events. And so I was helping them, Spear had a lot of that, largely because skills as a journalist are you're good at taking photos, you're good at capturing sound, you're good at editing video and most importantly, you're good at writing and editing. And to prepare for this, tried writing down all of the jobs that I've had and then next to them I wrote down all of the skills that I needed to do those jobs. And at the top of the list for every single type of job was writing and editing. So at the very least I would say that's a skill that I can count on no matter what I'm doing in 25 years that I'll probably still be really relying on those solid skills. Okay but tell us a little bit about the company that you're running now too. The company that I'm running now is called Skunk Social and we mainly do social media for major events. We do a lot of other stuff but that's kind of the thing that we specialize in. And so those major events include Blues Fest and City Folk Fest and then most recently just yesterday was launched Canada C3 which if you don't know is a Canada 150 project where an icebreaker ship will be sailing from Toronto through the Northwest Passage and ending in Victoria. And so these events, how journalists, I says journalists got into them was because of course journalists are really good at turning things around quickly, grabbing what's going on and almost like breaking news, grabbing what's going on and sharing it with people really quickly but in a high quality way. So it's factual, the photography is usually really good or the video or the sound. So that's how it started. Was that we excelled at that and it's proven time and time again that these skills really are trumping a lot of other people who might do similar work but specifically in events they've been really, really useful. Okay, we'll come back to that in a minute as well. So Matthew. Good afternoon, thank you so much for having me. Oh, I should have also said in Matthew, sorry but in addition to everything else Matthew's done he's also taught in the journalism program as well. So he brings a little bit of a perspective of trying to teach young people some of the things he's learned over the last few years. Sorry. Thank you, Chris. So as Chris said, I'm Matthew Pierce and I write for the Ottawa Citizen. Currently I'm the City Hall reporter but I've previously covered public education and Queen's Park and I've been at the Citizen. I was hired in 2008 as a summer intern which was before most reporters were on Twitter and before most reporters thought that Facebook was anything other than something that your teenage kid did and so things have changed quite dramatically and I've also worked at the Victoria Times Colonist which is a newspaper in Victoria, BC and very briefly I was the CBC casual as well and way back in the day I worked as a reporter at a weekly newspaper in Smithers, British Columbia which is a small town about 14 hours north of Vancouver. So I have sort of this small town experience and then have worked in larger newsrooms. And how has things changed at the Citizen at the time you've been there? Well, I would say that the fundamentals are the same. You go out, you cover something and you report back but certainly we're using Twitter a lot. At City Hall I tend to live tweet from a meeting so I'm tweeting as the meeting is happening, speakers are coming up, I tweet their question, I tweet the answer and that requires more in the moment reporting and actually in the moment judgment calls. You have to try to get the context of the person's question into the tweet. You have to get the answer into the tweet but you're also sort of processing it well. You're doing that. Certainly thinking what I would say holistically about a story gone are the days where the reporter's job is just to write the story. I'm thinking about what's this gonna look like? How are we gonna visualize it? Are we gonna get a video? How are we gonna pull all of these elements together? One thing that we're doing a lot at the Citizen is what we call alternate story forms. So gone are the days where you write a 500 word story with an inverted pyramid which is the very basic sort of news element that students are taught and instead we're gonna do a Q&A with this person or we're gonna do five things you need to know about Ottawa Blues Fest or this sort of news that you can use. And I think that there's also a focus on clicks. In the past you sort of felt proud if your story was on the front page or if it was above the fold. Now you'd feel the same way if your story was shared 1,000 times on Facebook or if your story was the digital folks were getting very excited. Interestingly, Chris brought up this series that I did last summer. I spent a couple of days walking the route of the new Confederation LRT line. I started early one morning at Blair Station and walked for the entire day to Tunney's Pasture and made notes along the way and was sort of curious about like, oh, I wonder what's happening there and I wonder what someone will build there someday and I wonder whose neighborhood this is and why the train goes here. And so I wrote this, this sort of is the longest thing I've ever written. It was about 11,000 words that ran over four days and had I done that five years ago, my editors would have been excited about the letters to the editor it generated or the front page coverage. And this time they were so excited about like how many people were reading it and even things that I didn't know they could track like how long people were staying on each story like 180 seconds, 240 seconds and these were things that editors were very excited about that I was sort of okay. And so that is I think one example of how things have changed and that sort of focus on click. I think there's also a decreased focus on the print product. Your story doesn't necessarily go in the paper every day. I wrote a story yesterday that impacts a large number of people in the city who are the parents of special needs children. Woke up today and the story's not in the paper and that's not the only way to transmit the story. I write the story, I can tweet out the link, people share it on Facebook and it gets out that way. And I guess the last thing I would say is around this notion that like everyone can be a journalist now so who is a journalist? So I think that there's even more of a challenge on like maintaining your credibility in the public's eye. So you have to stick to the facts, you have to not sensationalize, you have to not sort of abandon your principles but also you have to realize that just the fact that you work for a mainstream media organization might not mean you're legitimate in some people's eyes. So you really are based on you have to sort of go back to the basics like the facts. Okay, which leads me to my question to everybody which is what are the basics that you're going to need to be able to do now and that you think you're going to be able to need to do in the future? And extrapolated from that, it's a little bit as we in the journalism program at Carleton annually struggled to figure out what are the things that are going on that our students are interested in? What are the passing fads that will be here today and gone tomorrow and what are the things that may have some lasting things that we need to ensure they know about? So picking up on Matthew's point, what are the fundamental skills that each of you think that journalists need to be able to master today and we'll be able to need the master in the future and then we'll get to the 2042 question. Amanda. You want to start with me? Okay, I think that there's obviously there's a huge range of skills that you need to have and a lot of it really tends to vary in what mediums or what media you focus on which you primarily operate in. Or if you have the luxury of being able to focus on one. Exactly, or if you have the luxury to really specialize and gain that extra knowledge of one. Generally speaking though, of course, you have to have a capacity to work really in any of them. You have to be able to work online. You have to be able to package and work with audio and high quality video as well even if you're not kind of the face behind the story that's going on in the evening news. You have to know how to work with and put together short packages of video for the web at the very least. More broadly though in terms of career skills and things like that, I think really kind of fostering creativity and a willingness to look at new ways of telling stories as Matthew was saying, the kind of inverted pyramid angle really doesn't apply much anymore when you're looking at things like long form, you're looking at things like interactive and multimedia projects that are going up for multiple platforms. The old kind of ways of telling a story don't necessarily work for the new audience. And so on our part it's kind of, it's a willingness to experiment, to take risks and see what will work and what is, you might do a great piece, great story, but it might not be the right medium and it might fail sometimes and that's a risk that I think that we have to be willing to take in order to find things that do work well and just kind of hope for the best. So creativity and I think a capacity and an appetite for risk is really important as well. I'm gonna come back to the creativity issue in a minute but Sherry. I agree that, I mean the fundamental skills don't change. You need to be able to write as a storyteller. You need to be able to, for broadcast you need to be able to edit video. You need to be able to edit audio. You need to be able to gather those things so you need to know how to think in terms of how to visually present something. How to present something for someone who's only listening. How to present something for someone online. But, oh sorry and journalism school I think the things that they, that we can do are to teach journalism ethics. To teach what we call it, CBC, JSP, Journalistic Standards and Practices. You still need to know those. When can I name a minor? When can I shoot children on, and by shoot, I mean video, film. Take pictures of. Children on a schoolyard. When is it okay to use anonymous sources? Things like that. I think we can teach Canadian history. We can teach Aboriginal issues. We can teach communication history. Coding is the other thing that I think the skill of we're planning for the future that I think is smart to teach journalists today. Data journalism and the tricky thing is of course is that professors may not necessarily be the best people to teach this. You may need specialists or experts in the field. But I think what we can fall into a danger of today is trying to put journalism in a box. So when I was in school, there was this is how you make a two minute TV pack. This is how you make a one minute and 10 second voice. Or this is how you write a print article. And I'm not sure that there's the same need today to learn those skills. If that's not the kind of material we're gonna be producing in the future. It might be smarter to teach the basic skills, sort of like the puzzle pieces, because we don't yet know what the finished puzzle is going to look like. Because as Matt was saying, they're trying these alternative formats or innovative formats, right? Where why write a footprint article when people maybe only want bullet points? Or why make a two minute TV pack if people are only consuming video on Facebook and they want text and they only want it to be 30 seconds long? And because it changes so rapidly, and as you mentioned, Chris, that there's a new app every week. So we're still trying to catch up with Facebook. At my office, we're still focusing on that. But you can talk to people who say, well, everybody's on Snapchat now and everybody's on Instagram. And packaging for those apps, in terms of news, is completely different. So yeah, I think you have to teach the skills, the individual skills and the pieces, but you can't say this is the right way to do TV news because we don't know what the right way is anymore. But you have to know how to do the traditional way before you can experiment successfully to do the others. So to use Matthew's analogy, do you have to know how to write an inverted pyramid story in order to know how to do all the other sorts of different ways you can do it? I think you have to teach everything. I think, which is impossible. But no, I would just say you can't specialize anymore. It's so rare, at least in my shop, where, you know, CBC has to feed so many beats on so many platforms. You don't get to focus on one. We do a different one. Even the people that have full-time jobs, I mean, you file for different platforms depending on your story for that day and depending on the day of the week. So you might do TV and web one day and then the next day you're doing radio and web and the next day you're doing radio and TV. And then I argue now there's a fourth platform, which is social media, because you package video differently if it's going on Facebook than you do if you're packaging video for the supper hour newscast. So you can teach basic editing skills. You can teach, this is a jump cut. You can teach, okay, when you go to a story, you're gonna need a wide shot and you're gonna need a close up and this is how you make someone and this is how you edit sound, but you need to teach more options. You put the package together different every time. Yeah, and you need to teach different, I would say teach as many different treatments as you can. Yeah. Okay, Emily. Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with the ethics and then I don't know. I might disagree with feeling like the school needs to teach so much. I mean, I started working as a journalist without going to journalism school. I went back to school to do my masters, but for me, the journalism school was an opportunity to do academic research. It wasn't an opportunity to learn how to be a journalist. Of course, I went into the program that was meant for that. It wasn't meant to do how to be a journalist because the school has, I think they still have these two different master programs. Yep, you can do more of a practical stream or more of an academic. One leads to a thesis and the other one that leads to a research project that's based, that could be video, audio, something like that, right? So, I mean, for me, because I started working in the industry without having been to school for it, I feel like you actually don't need to go to school to be a journalist. But at the same time, in today's world, and probably in the world of 25 years from now, you're gonna need definitely some of those foundational pieces that I did get when I came back to school. So that's the ethics. That's understanding morality or how to decide is this gonna, if I report on this, is it doing the greater good for the most people? Those kind of larger ideas that should exist in a university. That's where you can still teach that. The rest, a lot of it you can learn on the job. But there are other things that you get in school that you don't get on the job. So, for example, to have done the research that I did, which was around the business of print magazines, I probably could have done that research on my own without going to school because most of my time was spent online. I was just looking stuff up in databases or in Google. But it would have taken me years. So, going back to school just accelerated it through the contacts with professors who could then point me in the right direction. Through peers, I met the peers that I'm now running a company with. The resources available to you, also just having deadlines. School really helps you move forwards in your own, whether it's research or whether it's learning about the profession. And then opportunities was a really big one. Like for me, even though I had this experience working, I was able to go and do an internship in the states at a magazine. Just because you can only do that as a student, right? The laws are set up that way. So, I mean, and the same thing in Canada. And then also get bursaries or help with funding to go and travel. So, there are these other things that the university institution provides, but I'm not convinced that it needs to be practical. At the same time, obviously we, as a company, we hire journalists and it's because of the skills that they've been taught. That's a mixture though of on the job and in school. And definitely from some of the journalists that I've seen that come out of the program, they come out of it with this great skill set. They now know all of these different things. And it's on the job where they either funnel that into something more specific. Like they now become hired to do more video or to do more writing or to then go into radio. It's kind of, that's where it begins to funnel them. But at least they come out of it with an understanding of everything. But just going back to, I really think it's the ethics and the history and the theories behind it, that's really valuable. All of which is on one level and I have to come back to Matthew's point, allows people who are journalists to differentiate themselves from people who want to write a blog or want to write something on a response to someone's note on a Facebook page or something like that. Well, I think there are three things. One, good writing. Good writing is what sets everything else apart. If your radio report sounds clunky, if your television report sounds clunky, if a magazine piece isn't well written, you're gonna throw it out. There is so much competing for people's attention that if it's not good at the base, it's gonna be ignored. I think languages are a place that journalism schools and journalists really need to work on. I think the more that you can speak a person's mother tongue the more that you can understand their story. Two examples, one, the reporters who could speak Arabic covering the Quebec mosque shooting probably got much better stories because they could actually communicate, they didn't need an intermediary. And similarly, CBC's Idil Musa, as an Arabic speaker, when she covered the police-involved death of Abdi Rahman Abdi, she was able to go into that community and understand directly from the sources and then put it into English that was shared with the wider audience. So I think language is really key. But I think, you know, fundamental with good writing is good ideas. If you don't come out of journalism school with an ability to pitch a story to an editor, then that's like the key piece, that's currency in a newsroom. The story that I did about the LRT wasn't an editor telling me to go do that. That was me stumbling around thinking, I wanna tell a story about this thing that's costing $2 billion in redesigning our city. I think we all probably have examples of when something is your idea, you care about it more and you're gonna do better work. So I think when I was teaching, the one thing that I wanted my second year students to leave with was an ability to see something, to notice something, and to come up with an idea of their own and pitch it. So that's what journalism is like today. What do we think journalism is gonna be like when we, some of us, probably not me, are here to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Carlton and our talking about journalism then? Matt, do you wanna start on that one? Sure. I have a few ideas. I'm not much of a futurist, I have to admit. I don't really remember the Jetsons and I don't watch Star Wars or Star Trek so I don't, not much of a, and as a print person, I am probably sad to say I don't think that the print media will be here for much longer. No. I'm not sure if I think that the newspaper as you get it delivered, as fewer and fewer of you get it delivered to your homes every morning, will still be there. As I said, I think language will be key and I think in a more globalized world, journalists who are able to communicate with people will bring those stories back and maybe we'll see times where, no, I would love it if the Ottawa citizen had a French side and an English side where you could, you know, stories that we cover in English, we also cover in French, and the story is just click on something and that same story is reported in French. That's Google Translate, isn't it? Yes, although if you're a French speaker, Google Translate sometimes leads you. I know that too. There it is. I want these other folks to jump in. I guess one other thing that I would say is I think that, and maybe this is a response to what we're seeing out of the States, but I think that some type of codes of conduct in newsrooms or some type of agreement that newsrooms make with the public that this is how we behave as journalists. This is where our money comes from. This is how we meet sources. These are the sort of rules that we play by so that the public knows that when I report something to you, it's not fake news just because you don't like it or because the people in power don't like the way I report it. You know that I work for this organization, I'm paid a fair salary, and this is the information that I found following all of the tenets of journalism. And I think there's been this debate about does journalism need a governing body or something that says you are a journalist because you have passed. And accreditation is like an engineer or an architect or someone like that. And I'm not sure if we need that, but I think that it's important to know, for instance, that reporters for the Ottawa citizen who cover City Hall, this is the sort of expectations of our reporters and that it's also incumbent upon reporters to declare when something has happened to them that puts them in, so if I'm a reporter for City Hall, for instance, and the mayor's office takes me aside and offers me a job, maybe for transparency it's up to me to tell my editor, hey, I just want you to know I was offered this job, I didn't take it, but I want you to know that. So I think that even gets back to what Amanda and others are saying about ethics. Hey, Emily. Oh, just no, print will live, print will live. That's someone who wrote a thesis about the future of magazines. Well yeah, I mean, I know it might seem weird that my business now is so much in digital and social media, which is all part and parcel of taking down print, but I am a firm believer that print will continue to exist and yes, I did write majority of my thesis around, well it was on the business models of print magazines specifically, but why I looked into that was because you won't have that type of journalism that you're describing and journalists that do that as a profession if you don't have the business models that can support it. So I was looking at it from this, okay, if I wanna work as a journalist, I'm gonna have to figure out this problem around the business models, which was, I guess, a tall order. But then, sure enough now, I'm not really in journalism in that way anymore, so does that mean I'm contributing to the downfall of it? Well, we don't see it that way because we, as this company, hire journalists and we continue to promote those same ideas of we're not gonna put just tweets out there for the sake of it, they have to be meaningful, there has to be reason behind this communication. But part of why I believe that print, well okay, so part of my thesis was trying to scratch away at the surface of why do I believe print has this value, like what is that, you know, we all love, well, sorry, I think we all love picking up a magazine and flipping through it and there's just something about it. And so I came back to school and again, this is part of what the university allowed me to do, came back to school to really try to understand what is that, like what is that thing that makes me really love magazine and print. And some of the things that I did come out of that with was that there's, and this is very multidisciplinary research, but there's this idea that humans just understand print more immediately than they understand things in the digital world and that's partly because of evolution, but within that there's research around how when we see type, like when we see written text, we actually understand it as a part of our physical environment. And so as soon as you then really see it in your physical environment, it's a little bit easier for you to ingest. There's other things like when you're putting things up online, of course, there's all these other, like the hierarchy, how do you establish hierarchy online and how do you navigate through something online, and that interaction is a lot harder for our brains to process, so you're using up this mental energy to try to figure out where to click and what to look at and what to read. Whereas in print, of course, it's just right there, like the, there's just one layer of it, there's not multiple, not just to mention that devices have always got updates and I mean there's always something. So because it's so immediate, humans just understand it better. And then, of course, it's not as permeable, so like you can't, I mean I can open my magazine in the back if I want to, but when I go to a website to read a story, I might be reaching it through a tweet, I might be reaching it through a Facebook link, maybe I'm going there because someone emailed me something and then while I'm there, maybe somebody emails me something else or maybe I get a text message. You know, there's just something about how it's so nice that I can just sit and when I read one article, that was it. I got the whole thing. And we'll still be doing it in 2042? I think we'll still be doing it and I think it's largely because of that human, human-ness that just ingests it. It's simpler for us and in worlds that are only getting more complex, it's just so nice to have something simple. It's also nice to have options. People like having options, so I mean I would be, I don't have, I don't get the paper, but I would be up in arms if the citizen was no longer printing paper. And I just, just cause, I like the options. The problem is there's too many people like you and the citizen would like to have fewer people like you. Well, so then that- We can't print based on best intentions or that people's love, that doesn't pay the bills. That's very true. So then that dovetails into, and you were talking about this, you know, you kind of have to, as the journalist, you have to tout your skills. You have to kind of blow your own horn, you know? And you have to explain, I mean, it's more evident for other professions that you go to school to learn because this is a professional degree. Law, it's very clear to people. And medicine, of course, it's very clear, but journalism, it's not. So I think, yeah, journalists will have to kind of promote their own skills a little bit more. And again, we're trying to do that with our company to try to really show people why you want a higher journalist. But also, there's this idea of even the publications themselves need to be almost marketing themselves. And I don't mean marketing themselves as something that people should spend money on. I think the investment isn't in dollars, it's in time. That's now what people are investing in you. So to get me to sit down and read this magazine, what did the magazine have to do? They probably had to make it seem good for my health that I sit and read a magazine article for an hour, just like how apparently it's good for me to go to yoga for an hour, like how did that come about? So that's, I think, the difference that maybe people in the media aren't thinking about enough right now. And I'm gonna come back to time in a minute and a question I'm gonna ask everyone, but first Sherri and then Amanda. And then we've also got some questions on our wall and we'll open the floor for people who want to ask questions in a couple of minutes. Sherri. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know if... Physical print will be here in 2042, just as the same way. I don't know if the six o'clock auto one news will be here in 2042. I'm a firm believer writing will be, I'm a firm believer video will be, but not in the way that we're getting it now. I love this question, thinking ahead 25 years. If you look back 25 years, it was 1992. The New York Times didn't have a website yet, CBC didn't have a website yet, Globe and Mail didn't have a website yet. Most news organizations... The Globe did have an electronic news service though, which they had, InfoGlobe. I was working there for part of that. In 95, I guess, is when they launched... No, 1977. But InfoGlobe initially, so you could get stuff, you could get any story out of the Globe if you subscribed to it as a printout that would come on like... Like fax. Like fax, yes, that's right. But it's... Fax news, breaking. Yes, well, there you go. The point is, I mean, the way we're gonna be consuming news in 2042, if it's 25 years in the future, it hasn't been invented yet. If you use the past as an example. And I just wanna share, I subscribed to Neiman Labs, and one of the articles this week is from a student at the University of Southern Carolina who wrote a piece this week that said, Dear News Media, create news for people who have never read a newspaper. News in 2017 doesn't need to follow the production cycle of news in 1987. For people like us who didn't grow up with newspapers and who have used the internet since we were toddlers, a lot of the conventions of news today don't make sense. And I love this because it sort of challenges why we're doing anything the way we're doing it. Are we doing it because it's what our audience wants and it's how they want to consume news? Or are we doing it because this is how we've been doing news for 50 years? Like is that the reason we make a six o'clock supper hour TV newscast because we've always done it? Well, if nobody's watching at six o'clock anymore and nobody wants the news at six o'clock, they want it. It used to be because you could sell a lot of ads around it and make money. And make money, but if that's not the goal anymore, then we might as well. But it's still the goal, it's just not the reality. Yeah. And then I'll be the futurist, Matt. I think there's tons of exciting things we should be experimenting on and the trick is just not to put, especially for big media organizations, the trick is just not to put your eggs in one basket because things do change so fast. When I was in school, it was tablets. I remember actually in like J1000, I think Chris, you were talking about tablets and what is the potential gonna be? How much money can we make off these? Is there a future for digital advertising? And now, I mean, only the press is surviving with the tablet strategy. VR is the big thing that's coming. Virtual reality for those of you who don't know. Oh yeah, sorry, virtual reality. So you put on the headset and it takes you literally to the place where you are. CBC just did one on the highway of tears and missing and murdered Aboriginal women and it takes people right there and people are coming to that news just partly because of the technology. It's drawing them to the stories. Wearable technology is the new thing, right? So it's not enough to get somebody on their iPhone. How are we going to serve an audience that's getting news on their watches, you know, on their eye watch? How are we gonna serve a population that has a screen on their bathroom mirror and a computer in their fridge and contact lenses that will give them push notifications, right? Like how do we package content for that? That could be 2042 and then I think it's giving it to people on demand. So I mean, whether the print newspaper will be dead maybe not, but people like options. So the option may be for radio, NPR, which is the CBC equivalent in the States. They're teaming up with these personal assistants like Siri and Amazon's Alexa, right? So when your alarm rings in the morning you have an app that sets you up so you get the latest local newscast. So it doesn't matter that it's not 730. The 730 newscast has been chunked and it's gonna play your local newscast first and then you're gonna get World Report which is CBC's national newscast and of course you've all subscribed to the public broadcaster so you're getting CBC content and then you get your favorite podcast and then after that your top 20 hits that play most often on your iPod come on. So it's on demand. It's giving people what they want. Mena. Yeah, I guess just on the kind of future of Sangl, I took a couple of courses with regards to futures and when I was actually in journalism school here via the history department, oddly enough. The history of the future and kind of how we look ahead and things like that. And so for me just kind of coming from that background, I'm not necessarily a huge fan of looking at what technology in particular, what mediums are we gonna be using or how are those gonna evolve because there's no way that we can know, right? There's the way that we're broadcasting news in 2042 or sharing it is probably gonna be via some invention that we don't even know about yet. So for me I tend to look at it more through kind of issues and things that I hope to see getting kind of more priority in the future. I think number one and number two with those are diversity, first of all, and then also in terms of accreditation and professionalism. So with diversity of course, as Matthew was saying, languages are important but not just languages, also having people from a broader variety of backgrounds who are not only the people who are on camera but also who are in leadership roles within news organizations and who can make those key decisions in terms of how the news is being shaped. And part of that of course when you look at journalism schools and the way that journalism is structured, there are institutional barriers to that in terms of the need to do unpaid work to get a job in journalism. So looking ahead to kind of how do you break down those barriers to get more people who have these unique capabilities and unique abilities to speak to communities that me for example as a white woman maybe can't or someone who may have more and more skills in that regard. Also with regards to accreditation and ethics, I personally do fall into the camp and this might get me a little bit of flack from my fellow panelists, I'm not sure. I firmly believe that we do need an accrediting body for journalism. I think that we need, because of the rise of citizen journalism and things like that, we need to have a professional set of ethics and I'm not sure what those look like at this point but I do think that they need to- There's some examples around- In place the press gallery kind of might be one too. We're a self governing body that admits and kind of has sort of key operational standards for who can cover parliamentary politics in Canada here. So I don't know if that's a model but I think that we need an accrediting body and we need to be able to have standards that say things like journalists cannot work as a journalist one week while also considering an offer from a government for a PR job. You can't have somebody who's covering, for example, defense news and then at the same time that they're talking about a giant scandal in the shipbuilding industry from the government procurement angle also be evaluating a job proposal from things like that. I think that that's a big problem that hurts our credibility and that we need to be proactive in actually preventing and having regulating standards is an important way to do that. Okay, I've got one question for all of you and then we're going to go to some of our questions on the wall and see if we have some. I can read them and if I can't, Matthew's closer to the screen, he can read them. But my question for you is this. I was, I heard a speech I guess about three or four months ago by Tom Jenkins who's the head of a company called Open Text which is probably one of Canada's largest companies that most people have never heard of. And what he was talking about was he was talking about artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence coming much faster than we think it's coming to us. To the point where his argument would be that artificial intelligence has already destroyed blue collar jobs and it's now in the process of starting to destroy white collar jobs because basically anything that you can reduce to numbers you can get a machine to do. And we're seeing some of that in various places. But the one thing he said that artificial intelligence hasn't figured, oh and by the way, the question you posed everyone is what happens to our economy when you go down to the, you wanna buy a new pair of running shoes and you go down to the store and they 3D print it for you right there. And what does that do to the whole supply chains and everything else which is a really interesting question. But the one thing he said that artificial intelligence hasn't figured out to do yet is creativity and to be creative. So if we're looking at what is journalism going to be in 2042, maybe the creativity element is a question that's very important that we've mentioned on the panel up to now. But the problem with creativity is it's hard to be creative when you're doing 35 other things at the same time. So it's one of the problems that journalism faces and maybe this is a part of your rhetorical question is that news organizations and journalists are still busy trying to do so many things that the end result is they're not doing any of them well and if they're not careful they're going to put themselves out of business by because they're not spending the time to do exactly what or they're not being allowed to spend the time to do exactly what Matthew did when he did the LRT series which was sort of say, boy, that's kind of interesting. Let's go out and look at something and walk around and do things. Thoughts, anybody? And if that's true, to take it to the next level, what are the things that they're doing now that they should bail out of and forget stop doing? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's a huge concern for in terms of journalists and the viability of journalism as a career as well in the long term being able to actually build a life around you saying I want to be a journalist if you're not sure if your job's gonna be obsolete because of a machine in 10 years. In terms of creativity though and how we actually plan stories now, I think that you need that human angle. You need creativity is so fundamentally human that you can't replicate it via a machine or at least not yet. I mean, again, who knows what'll happen in the future but for now I think that it's really in terms of prioritizing how do we focus it on the things that we can see are going to get results and part of that is as we've all mentioned kind of is the constant demands that are on journalists right now and you're filing three or four stories a day and then yesterday I did three stories and all in they were probably about 2,500 words over three stories plus Twitter, plus Facebook, plus whatever else is happening in there. It's a lot to ask on people too to balance all of that as well and still be a relevant voice in the conversations that are happening in the communities and so finding ways to cut back on the things that are more superfluous and more kind of I guess trendy as opposed to style might be a way to look at it. And so what should we be cutting back on? I would argue Facebook. I think that a lot of, yes there is a revenue model in terms of putting content on Facebook and arguing for that approach. I would also say that when you're doing that because of the way that Facebook is structured with the algorithms and the way that it requires you to pay to promote work to get to audiences who already wanna see your work and who already follow you is I think a big problem and that would be one of the areas I would hope to see a bit of a fall back from and more of a focus on individual outlets and platforms that allow a more organic flow of information depending on what people want access to as opposed to an algorithm. Great. Well my master's research project actually focused on that exact point that news organizations are doing so much today, the CBC specifically too, that you end up running around like a chicken with your head cut off. I was primarily for my first year at CBC a TV reporter and a radio reporter and the joy of journalism is getting a chance to story tell and to meet really interesting people and to learn about something different every day and to talk to these people and to understand these really interesting concepts or laws or just what's going on in your own community. And I found that day to day I was so stressed with having to gather this and get a clip for this and then do a hit for at noon and then tweet live video and then tweet pictures and then come back to the shop and get it to the web team and then do my final reports for supper hour that I wasn't listening to anyone. Like I'd be out at the field and I'd be like nodding and smiling and be like, okay, we gotta get back in the van because we gotta go to the next location because we have three more places to go before two o'clock or I'm gonna miss my time to edit. And when you lose that, that's a huge problem and I don't know what the solution to that is. There was something else I was gonna say about, you were talking about, I don't know where I was going with this, but. Okay, you're thinking, Emily and Matt can talk. Just interrupt me when it comes back to your mind. So yeah, I think the answer to that though is the business model. The reason that journalists are being asked to do so much is because we no longer have the funding to have separate departments to do all these different things. At the magazine, like I said, like I remember one day I was in the same day editing and writing for the print and then I was also creating the event, bright event and then I was also tweeting and I was also putting up the podcast. Like it's just, it got out of control but that's partly cause they're trying to be on so many platforms and they don't have the staff to do it and like no media organization does anymore. And maybe don't really have any idea whether all the platforms are really of value for them right now. I don't know yet, it's a lot of testing but that's where, so for one thing in our business what we advise people is lead with one. So do one and do it really well and people will go and find you there because you're doing it well. But the other thing is, and you're totally right about Facebook, that's, it's just, it's such a business now and they're forcing you now to pay to be in front of anybody. But I'd also say about creativity that there's always been creativity in journalism because of the constraints and that's true for any creative. If you let a, I don't know, maybe not a sculptor but if you let someone who's creative just go without putting any constraints on them either in the medium that they're using or the timeframe or the theme or even just the budget they will never present you with their final project, right? So at least the constraints on creativity that's where you get creativity is because you're given a box or you're given eight and a half by 11 or you're given an app and that's it and then there's a deadline on top of that and we see creativity also in the same constraints having come out of social media. So for example, Snapchat and all the other ones actually but Snapchat comes to mind is where they gave you this constraint of you can only see this picture for so many seconds. It can only be a picture that you took then and there and sure enough, young people mainly came up with all these really creative ways to use it. So I think that there is this creativity but it exists within the constraints of the mediums and those mediums will forever change but they'll always be the constraints of them therefore there will always be creativity. Kerry, did you remember? That's what I was gonna say so thank you for bringing up Facebook again because you guys are both saying maybe we need to drop the social media or whatever 70% of our audience comes to us through side doors like Facebook, they're not coming straight to the CBC webpage, they're coming from links on Facebook. So why would we drop the and I know because we can't make money off it but why drop the way that everybody now is consuming news and reaching news? But coming to you from Facebook is different than actually deciding you're gonna spend time and effort to do Facebook live events that may actually generate 42 people watching and may as opposed to people posting your existing material on Facebook and being shared with other people that way. But they're more likely to consume our material if we've tailored it to someone who is on Facebook so they're scrolling quickly and they're looking for a 30 second video or a short like bullet point five things you need to know news you can use then they are a full long article. So I think we're at an interesting sort of tipping point when what do we drop? Drop the traditional drop maybe the print paper drop the six o'clock newscast so you can focus on meeting your audience where they actually are. And that gives you back or do what you said pick one and do it well. Matthew. Well, I think that you're the person that you mentioned is correct that we can't teach AI to come up with good ideas. And so that for me is where the creativity is and I think that it's incumbent upon journalists to push back on editors. If you're in what we talk about at the citizen is that that's the best way to get out of a bad assignment is to have a better idea. So your editor comes to you and says I need you to go cover this protest and you say to your editor, well I could do that but I also just got this access to information request back and look it has this or I have this other idea or I met a guy on the subway this morning who started his own sock company and your editor goes, okay I'll find someone else for this. And so I think that it's really incumbent on reporters. The day's a success already. Yeah, I think it's really incumbent on the reporters to push back. And then the other piece of that creativity is how we tell the things that we that are sort of sort of the traditional stories how we tell them differently so that we can get out from under their weight. At city hall it's really hard for instance we have a tradition of writing about the planning committee. So development is proposed and it's controversial and you write 400 words but that can take up like three hours of your day and really maybe only the people who live in that neighborhood or are gonna be affected by this latest condo building on Bronson care that much. So it's like how do we figure out how to do that but do it faster so that I can spend more of my time walking the LRT line or writing about a guy who started a sock company. Okay, now I haven't been to the optomister slightly so I can actually read most letters of all that but not necessarily all of them. So Matt why don't you try to pick one of the questions on the wall there and we'll have a go with it and then we'll try a couple from the audience if people want to ask them in person rather than by. Should I pick the one that gets the most votes? Okay, I'll pick the one. So the one that has five thumbs up is how can journalists ensure that people keep trusting them in times of Trump-minded people? I'm so surprised this came up. Okay, let me try to, I'm gonna answer that first. Because I find, this is a very interesting question and I'm not convinced that, well, people may have seen a publication done by the Public Policy Forum called Shattered Mirror which is a report that was done on the state of the media. One of the things that was done as part of that that I was involved in was a public opinion survey done by Alan Gregg which was 1600 people online across the country so it's not a massive one. One of the interesting things about it is that it asked a series of questions and it's all available and you can find it and it asked a series of questions about people's trust in media. And what we discovered was, and this is Canadians, although I don't think Americans are necessarily very different from Canadians. We discovered that between 65 and 70% of people that it's only one survey, I admit, had a high degree, a great deal or a high degree of trust in traditional mainstream news organizations whether it's what we would call newspapers, television, radio, those sorts of things. 65 to 70% and that also extended to their presence online. People had a similar sort of response to that. We asked people how much, who has a high degree of, the same level of trust, high degree of trust in things you read from social media and we got between 12 and 15%. So there's a massive gap and then we asked how much do you trust things that you get from your friends through email or social media? And again, it was 12 to 15%. So I'm not convinced that the public is as stupid as a lot of people are playing the public out to be in that they're falling for quote unquote fake news. I'm also not convinced that there is, that the mainstream media is, as we wanna call it, is necessarily viewed with as much a question as maybe some of the debate around fake news has generated. And as evidence for part of that at least, you look in the United States where the issue is stronger than it is here and you see significant growth in circulation for some of the news organizations that are the traditional news organizations. So I'm a little skeptical. I think, I wonder whether we aren't overblowing the degree to which, or overstating the degree to which fake news or whatever we wanna call it is actually a crisis or an issue or a problem even. And then I think people are smarter than maybe we're giving them credit for. I don't know, I think I would take the total other side of that spectrum actually. Maybe it's a little bit pessimistic to think that people maybe are not quite as critical as we might want to give them credit for. I think particularly when you look at how people are consuming media on Twitter, on Facebook, on things like that, they give them the ability to really kind of craft the world that they wanna live in. You know, they can choose what voices they wanna hear from, they can choose, and of course Facebook, they all kind of use the algorithms to amplify that as well. So if they know that you're gonna click on an article from MSNBC versus an article from Infowars, you're gonna get more of that. And it really kind of only serves to solidify the biases and the preferences that we have, but I guess going kind of broader than that too, I mean, it's the issue of why the people who don't trust the media, why don't they trust the media? And a lot of that I think has to do with feeling alienated or left out maybe of the way that we frame the news. And again, that comes down to diversity. Again, it's an issue of being able to have people who are not only those who live, within the parliamentary precinct, for example, the eight blocks where on any given week I can count the number of times on one hand that I might leave the precinct. But when I was out in Alberta, for example, working for CBC Calgary, you were always kind of, you were in Calgary, but you were heading out to Red Deer, to all of the kind of areas around there, Pinter Creek, and just kind of always meeting people who were outside that urban bubble. I think that for us as journalists, it's easy to forget that the things that we care about in the capitals, and in the cities and in the areas where we kind of all tend to be together and come to things like this, a lot of Canadians either don't have access to or don't necessarily haven't been exposed to the value in and our job is finding ways to, A, bring that to them, and B, make sure that we are reflecting views that are not just our own kind of insular approaches to things that we care about as reporters. Avis, Matt? A couple of things. One, I actually think it starts far before journalism school or it starts far before adulthood. I think it starts in education and are we teaching people to be media literate? Are we teaching, you know, I took a class in high school that was media literacy. It was a grade 12 English class as a course like that mandatory. When I was covering education sometimes, I would be struck by the things that teachers would tell, would say to me, I think, don't understand how the media works. So if this person doesn't understand how the media works and what kind of messages do they give to their students who they are very influential over. So I think that's one thing. The other thing that I was going to say is I think that one of the approaches is what you do when you are dealing with an issue that you may have a bias around, you know, asking if a woman is reporting on, you know, sexual assault trial or something that might, you know, she may have a bias there. If I'm reporting on a person who I think is particularly odious, I may kind of think in the back of my hand, I don't really trust this person. So, and when students ask, how do you report on something when you have a bias? Well, make sure that your language is plain. Make sure that you are taking extra precautions to get the other side of the story. Make sure that you are not inflaming things but rather just presenting things. And I think also if people are distrustful of the media then the media needs to say, well, this is who we work for. This is the company. This is the investments that we make. This is where the money comes from and these are how our journalists are paid. This is the job that they do. These are the connections they have. So that people, so the public knows that when I am telling them a story about the planning committee or telling them a story about the LRT, they can know that I do vote or I don't vote or I do pay taxes or I don't pay taxes or I live outside the city or I live inside the city so that they can trust, they can decide for themselves. Is this the person who's credible? I also think the hard time about, the hard thing about something that's happening right now is that credibility happens over years. I don't think that I was a very credible journalist if I'd only been a summer intern at the season. I've now been at the citizen for seven years and now have been covering city hall longer than some people have been city councillors so I actually probably know the place better than they do. So that builds up your credibility. The problem with something like what's happening in the States and I would agree with Amanda out in the world beyond the capitals, it probably happens in Canada as well where people are distrustful. It's so much, it's like a lot of work to build up that credibility. Gary or Emily? You don't have to answer if you don't want to. We can go on to our next question, but... Well, I'm with you Chris. I think this isn't really anything new. It's kind of always been there. It's just been brought up because of the election results in the States. So if it's always kind of been there, there's always been a bit of a distrust. So this idea of keep trusting, I just don't think... The thing that's changed maybe from the National Enquirer days at my supermarket is people can circulate a lot faster and not many... Lots of people did buy it when it was a National Enquirer or the Midnight Star or the Martians of the Landing. Well, the context has changed too. If you were looking at the tabloids that used to be at the checkout to love your grocer, it was things like, man eats 60 cricket balls in a day. People, I think, generally know that that's probably not true, but when you're looking at things like... But the Post-Supported Donald Trump, maybe. The Pizzagate issue where there's a secret ring of underground, what was it? Like sex slaves at a pizza shop in the States. Run by Hillary Clinton. Run by Hillary Clinton. People don't necessarily, they're not... It's not things that are... To us, it seems quite outlandish, but to people who are maybe more inclined to take that as possible truth, it's not as easy to disprove them as it maybe was. But that's why I think people are smarter than maybe you think they are. We'll go back to Emma. And there's so much of it online. That's the... Yeah, there was that one paper before the tabloids, National Enquirer and a few others, which is still around. But now, yeah, it's coming from everywhere. So I would argue more so the trustworthy media, I mean, what most people view as trustworthy, is being sought out. And this idea of it, it creates our shared reality. So this is more like theory around it, but the gatekeeper theory that we all learned in school of journalists are the ones with the information they choose what stories make the headline, what stories make the front page. That's all because they're creating this reality. There's a quote from some researchers that I didn't write down their name that was they render otherwise remote happenings observable and meaningful. Also known as they create our reality. How do we know what our reality is? So I think people go back to these, particularly in times when things are just going nuts. Think of like the shooting on the hill. What did we all do? We were watching Twitter, yes, but we were also tuned into CBZ news. So I think they still serve that role. Gary, anything to add? Yeah, well, I mean, I agree that this is not new. We had muckrakers before. I believe it does make a case to have, you know, I find myself leaning more and more and I never was before, but the case for accreditation for journalists. You know, you talk about experience, how you build trust over time. I mean, electricians, you need to do so many blocks before you're a full blown electrician. You know what I mean? And for media organizations, I mean, I think more than ever, you know, the CBC is important so that people know there's a place they can go where they can find their own stories and they can find truthful information. I'm actually more concerned about polarization in today's media landscape. So, you know, people are going to complete opposite sides. We've had so many complaints since Trump has come into power, don't cover him at all or ignore him completely. And the danger and the risk is that we, I think as journalists we'll start to block out views and start to block out opinions when really we should be about creating meaning and creating understanding. And I'm not saying agree with everything that's out there, but say, okay, why are people thinking in this way or you know, what's creating these circumstances? Okay, before we go to the next one, if we've got a question from a real human. Yes, and if you could identify yourself and if you'd like to address it to one person of the panel, then we'll see who else wants to respond. I am concerned that Canadians are consuming more international news. I do think you will always have a need to go and find out what's happening in your community. What worries me is are we not doing our job as journalists to reflect our communities? Like if you're seeing yourself more in the United in news that you can get from the States, what are we not doing? Who's stories are we not telling that we should be? And the other, just to go to your point. So the other day there was Trump giving his speech, I think it was Tuesday night and there was the conservative leadership debate. You know, the same night. So which do you cover? And you know the Trump speech is gonna get more ratings, right? But for the CBC, if you're not covering the conservative leadership debate, who is? You know, so I don't know what the answer is and it comes back to this world of do we need clicks and do we need views? And we do to a certain extent because we need ad numbers, right? Whether it's digital or television ads, you need eyes, you need eyeballs. But then what is your responsibility to your immediate community? So that doesn't answer your question, but yeah, I think it's something worth considering and worth looking internally at ourselves and how we can better serve, especially locally, like local news, I think local news is so important today because often it's the small shops that can't survive. Let me try a little bit of that and answer too though because there's another level of answer to that, I think as well. And part of that is what's happened as a result of online and as a result of everything else is we now have globalized media corporations. And the New York Times has been successful. Other people, particularly successful at converting themselves from a print publication to a digital publication. Washington Post is trying to do the same, others are trying to do. They're able to do that because they basically have a global audience of maybe a half a billion people who might be subscribers. So they have Canada at one point, and this is where I'm gonna probably get, I don't know, Sherry may throw something at me. Canada at one point was a global player in media and we bailed out of that in about 1990. And through a series of decisions made by the CBC, made by the government, we got out of being a major player in shortwave radio. We had an all news channel in the United States that we sold to Al Gore that then became, I believe, Al Jazeera US before it actually went out of business. And we basically, I mean, if you go back to, in ancient history, you go back to the 1970s, the Joe Schlesinger's, the Michael McLears, to some of those sorts of people covering Vietnam were doing as good work as the Americans and it was being viewed internationally. We're no longer, as much else we do in Canada, we're much more insular than we think we are. We no longer are international and global players. So we don't have the, as the business model has changed, we don't have the ability to source the revenue we need in order to provide the coverage that gives people the sense of being there that is still really important because the benefits that the New York Times has are the Guardian, which is not in great financial shape either, frankly, but some of the BBC, another different argument there, they've got people on the ground in lots of these places. We no longer do because we, being Canadian news organizations, have basically shut down most of our foreign bureaus. Can I add something to that? So Chris's question about how things have changed, it used to be, maybe when I started and even the people who started before me, there was some kind of ladder in journalism. You got a staff job, then maybe you got a beat. So you might've been general assignment for awhile, then you got a beat. Like farm games in sports, right? Yeah, then maybe you were sent to City Hall, then maybe you were sent to Queens Park or Parliament Hill, and then eventually you were sent to Washington or New York or LA or London. That does not exist anymore. The citizen has no international bureaus. The globe has maybe a handful. CBC have more. Does post-media have anybody internationally anymore? I think Matthew Fisher is one of all of this. Oh, Matthew travels around, that's right, yeah, yeah. Crap seen around Europe, but there is no, so even for the journalists who are starting at the bottom, there is no sort of like, what is my five-year plan? When am I going to, you know, do I become a Parliament Hill reporter next? I would love to hear what these folks have to say about that, but my feeling is that there's such a little, like it's all us driving where we want to go, as opposed to saying, great, Amanda, you've been on the Hill covering national security for five years. Now we want you to go to Washington and cover national security for us. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's definitely part of it. I think part of it as well, and the reason that you see a lot of Canadians who are expressing an interest in things like Washington Post, like The Guardian, and have more of an appetite for global news is because there's a lot more, I would argue, interest in Canadians seeing their role within the broader world as well. I think that we have, as we see the things that are happening in Europe, in the US, around the world, there's increasingly an appetite to say, okay, what is Canada's role in the world and what do we want it to be going forward? And so you see, I think, people gravitating towards outlets that can provide a little bit more of that perspective. At the same time, the issue, I think, is that you have a polarization, but it's not necessarily only a right-left polarization. It's also like an urban and rural, I guess, in a way, too. You have people who care predominantly about their predominant concerns are gonna be local news and their local issues, their local hydro, or their water supply, or things like that. Their electricity. Yeah, exactly, right? So more people whose concern is primarily local and you have people whose concern is primarily more global, I guess you could say, so people who are in academia, people who are in urban environment, and that is really kind of challenging. A lot of outlets that want to be everything to everyone, but that have to eventually choose which one they're gonna be able to do exceptionally as opposed to kind of a jack of all trades for everyone. There's also money in international. So as soon as you start covering more international news, now those are the types of people, the types of eyeballs that are like C-suite level jobs, right? So advertisers like that. So I think there's a business component as well. What would hope that would be true? Again, going back to the survey I was talking about, the evidence is not very encouraging. People have no understanding how much it costs to produce news. People have no interest in paying for it. People think it will always be there no matter what happens. And basically they don't see there being a problem at the moment, whereas other parts of the news business, whether it's local news or others certainly do. We've probably got time for one more question. So, okay, and just because it wasn't mic'd and we've got a recording, the question was, are journalists amplifying the impact of fake news and creating more of a market for alternate facts? I think journalists have a really important role in countering fake news. I think that when you're looking at it, first of all, the challenge is to define what is fake news. It's not just news that you disagree with or news that you think doesn't necessarily warrant being covered. Fake news is news that is produced that you know is intentionally false. It's produced to go out and to make a profit. There's Craig Silverman from BuzzFeed has been doing a great job of kind of looking specifically at the fake news, I guess, phenomena you could call it and what exactly is it and how do you describe it? And so that's the first kind of challenge is saying this is what we're talking about here and within that, looking at journalists as well and credible voices who are able to say, okay, this might have gotten 30,000 shares on Twitter or 30,000 likes on Facebook. How do I know that this is not true and how can we amplify the fact that we have proven it's not true? So the Turkish coup was probably maybe an example of this too and the Boston Marathon bombing where you saw a lot of information that was coming out very, very, very quickly from people who were not necessarily journalists. They were on the ground. They were listening to police scanners. They were all kinds of things like that and it took the journalists to actually sit down and say, okay, there is a report that this person and that person and this person are the suspects but that's not actually true and here is exactly how we know it's not true and then really- But in the process, some of the news organizations also reported the untrue thing. It's true because there is that race to you wanna report on a report and not necessarily and that's the- But that doesn't meet your definition of fake news because it wasn't done intentionally. No, it's true. And if you have a piece of fake news that's come out and you don't know at the time yet if it is fake, that's also a problem because you need to have the resources to disprove it rather than just saying, we're reporting that so and so is saying this. So there's a dual challenge there, absolutely. And I think the other thing worth noting is that or what I fear is that people have heard the term fake news so much since Trump took office that they've started to just shut out media in certain extents. I know for me, every time I hear fake news, even though I have to say it, you're just kinda like, oh my God, really? And that's a danger because news fatigue, because we live in a world with so much information, we have to keep people engaged and how do you do that without stuffing something down their throats? Last thoughts, Emily or Matthew? I don't know. I mean, that's again where print is a nice safe space. It's like a safe space. And those trusted sources, and even like you were saying like the six o'clock news, like I know if I turn on my radio or if I turn on my TV then, it's happening in real time. This is really what's being told to me and it's been considered, it's factual, you'd hope. And you just, you have to trust, I don't, there's no answer, there's no great answer. But that actually speaks to, I mean what you had just said about, there's the rush to get information out and in that case sometimes we circulate information that isn't true despite our best efforts. The one good thing about print and about the six o'clock news is that, that's the only time you get news that's actually been processed and been thought about, whereas everything else, we're putting it up as soon as it's ready. Whereas when we used to have- Which maybe we shouldn't be doing in some cases. Yeah, right, because we're feeding the beast as opposed to when you get the six o'clock news, someone's thought about it all day long. And when you get a printed paper, someone has increasingly fewer people in both cases but someone has fact-checked it several times. I mean one thing I think too that was just, I'll be really, really quick here is that- Okay, I'm gonna give Matthew last word. The one of the kind of the old adages I guess that I had a prof and I'm blanking on who it was. I think it might have been John Kelly there. John Kelly? I think it might have been him and who was saying that when you're looking at news, there's this tendency to want to rush to be first but is it better to be first and have information that might not necessarily be as factually sourced as it could be or to take the risk and be second and not have the traffic that comes being first but also know that your work is right. So. Matthew, last thought. For, well, you don't have to if you don't want to. I'll leave the last thought to you but what I was gonna say about fake news is I think there is among journalists and I see this a lot on Twitter. There's a derision around fake news that I think is actually part and parcel of the classist mentality that some folks who scream fake news are actually feeling. They are sick of elites telling them that we know better than them. I think that's the political class and I think in a lot of ways it's the media. So I think that we have to pay attention to what those stories are so that we can unpack them in responsible ways. So if the story is presented that Hillary Clinton should go to jail, well, these are the reasons why someone would go to jail. These are the things that Hillary Clinton has done so she does not qualify for jail. Like things like that where we actually have to like take things apart and explain it to people. Again, in language that is plain and not sensational. The other thing I was gonna say not to repeat myself but I guess to repeat myself is I really think it goes back to education. What are we teaching people in grade six about processing the world around them? What are we teaching them about news sources? There's a guy at my paper, I need to ask him about this. He shares things on Facebook that are from the phoniest websites and I don't understand it. It's like, if I see something on Facebook that is not from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the BBC, iPolitik, CBC then that's not worth my time. That's just someone who wants me to click on some garbage. Or some listicle. Something that I wanted to mention before when you mentioned education. So my business partner and I, we taught one of those mini enrichment courses that they do here at Carleton. And so it was really young kids, like grade, I don't know, seven to 11 or something like that. And the most fascinating thing happened when we were teaching this. This was before Trump took, like this was before fake news was a buzzword. They were asking us about that. We didn't have that in our syllabus but they wanted to know how can I tell what's legitimate news from what isn't. So they were already thinking about this and this is like, you know, this is kids. So definitely I'd say education, big part. Okay, we have to finish. But on behalf of the audience, I'd like to thank all the panelists. And also on behalf of the panelists, I'd like all of you to join us in March, 2042 and find out whether we're right or wrong. Thanks very much. Thank you, Klaus. Thank you. Thank you.