By Rodney Barnes

Thousands of freelancers will not be writing for any publications owned by Transcontinental Media in protest of the publishing company's new contract for freelancers.

The new contract, called the "Master Author Agreement," was sent out to writers who contribute to Transcontinental earlier this summer. The press release[pdf], sent out by the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC), stated that "in essence, the company wants to continue paying what it’s been paying for decades for basic first publication rights but now get unlimited rights to writers’ work."

Pierre Marcoux, Transcontinental Media’s senior vice president of the business and consumer solutions group, said on September 1 that "Transcontinental does not intend to make any changes to the contract at the present time," according to the press release.

The coalition of freelancers is being organized by more than a dozen writers' groups and unions, but seems to be spearheaded by Derek Finkle, of the Canadian Writers Group, and David Johnston, executive director of the Professional Writers Association of Canada.

"This has been a long time coming in Canada, if you ask me," wrote freelance journalist and Regret The Error author Craig Silverman on his blog. Silverman is also a board member of PWAC and helped draft the press release.

This is the first big fight for Derek Finkle's Canadian Writers' Group, who started up earlier this year after worries of members being blacklisted.

Now, it seems, they're the ones with the black marker.

Posted by RRJ at 07:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Ryerson Review of Journalism wants to know what you think about the publication. Surveys aren't the most exciting thing going, but your feedback will really help us become a better magazine. And you've got ten minutes, right?

Take the survey here.

Posted by RRJ at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Rodney Barnes

When the Washington Post's social media guidelines leaked last Friday, it seems their credibility leaked as well.

Paul Bradshaw at the Online Journalism Blog argued that this was the final 'nail in the coffin' for journalism's aspiration to objectivity.

"Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society," he wrote. "So when you can not only measure the lack of balance in journalistic output, but also the lack of balance in journalists' behaviour and relationships online, the game is well and truly up."

Instead, he said, we should strive for transparency - that transparency "represents the best hope for journalistic integrity."

Wait a minute - which objectivity are we talking about?

Burghess Laughlin, writing in the comments section of Paul's post, says that "Objectivity is the goal. Transparency is merely a means [of] gaining [the] confidence of readers."

This seems to be the agreed-upon definition. But what if objectivity were approached as a process - a means to an end, in other words - instead of as a result?

Writing in The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel point out that we've been fighting over our pursuit of objectivity for almost a century. What we've missed, however, is that the argument's largely been dominated by a misnomer.

"The term began to appear as part of journalism early in the last century, particularly in the 1920s, out of a growing recognition that journalists were full of bias, often unconscious," they write. "The call for journalists to adopt objectivity was an appeal for them to develop a consistent method of testing information - a transparent approach to evidence - precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.

"In the original concept, in other words, the journalist is not objective, but his method can be."

What is really dividing us, argue Kovach and Rosenstiel, are our positions over neutral voice, not our methods of gathering and verifying information. We see what Tom Wolfe called the 'beige voice of journalism' and it gets us because it feels like a lie.

And that's all it really amounts to. "The impartial voice employed by many news organizations - that familiar, supposedly neutral style of newswriting - is not a fundamental principle of journalism," they write.

Well, Washington Post staff writer Gene Weingarten summed it up nicely in this inspired tweet (thanks metafilter).

Posted by RRJ at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's September and a new year for this little blog. By the looks of it there's still a journalism to review and, as always, much to talk about. Let's start with Digital Journal's panel discussion last Thursday on "The Future of Media."

The panel apparently included "the most influential leaders in Canadian media." There was Rachel Nixon, director of digital media at CBC News and former editor at NowPublic; Richard Mcilveen, producer of the local late-night CTV News and the tech trends segment 'Webmania'; Keith McArthur, senior director of social media and digital communications for Rogers Communications; Tim Shore, founder of Toronto news site blogTO; and Chris Hogg, CEO of citizen journalism news network DigitalJournal.com.

More than anything, it was the questions from moderator David Silverberg, managing editor of DigitalJournal.com, that gave the best sense of where the Canadian news industry is at when it comes to its future. What are hyper-local blogs doing that national papers aren't? he asked at one point. What will TV watching look like in an interactive environment? What can be done to turn passersby to your site into contributors? How is citizen journalism going to get better? Be more investigative? And is it worth it if it can't?

Answers from panelists were otherwise predictable. News is a conversation, they pointed out. Citizen journalism is here to stay. We're still looking for a business model for news.

Andrew Currie, who has penned editorials for NOW magazine and who blogs regularly about technology wrote here that he was "left with more questions than answers once everything was said and done."

Erik Goldhar, an 'online marketing and brand strategist', noted that "they all missed the mark or ignored the concept of 'The Future Of Media'," he wrote. "In general, the panel had no idea and no passion as to how to succeed in the ever changing world of media."

Maybe this Friday's presentation featuring Clay Shirky, Andrew Keen, and Mathew Ingram will give us all a little more to work with.

Posted by RRJ at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)