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Projects and Public Events

Ongoing

Our SSHRC Insight Grant on “Inclusive Journalism” brings together four of our members – Dr. Andrea Hunter, Dr. Greg Nielsen, Dr. Mike Gasher, and Dr. Elyse Amend.

This research program aims to establish a new form of inclusive, dialogic journalism that demonstrates limitations with how poverty and immigration are covered in the mainstream news media. To this end we bring Concordia researchers and students to directly engage with community members who have long been excluded from journalistic narratives.

News media are among the first observers of social inequality and crises associated with poverty and immigration, and thus they are critical producers of public knowledge that frame both the horror sand the challenges people in these communities face. However, the vast majority of news articles on poverty and immigration published in mainstream news outlets do not address the subjects of the stories as part of their imagined audience.

People from these communities are on occasion spoken with, but mostly about, and almost never to. Our research goes into the communities and asks - what happens when we assume the subjects of the stories are also the audience? What stories are missed or misunderstood when the journalist does not see members of these communities as part of the audience?

How could journalism better serve the information needs of these populations? The central objective of our research program is to create journalism that directly addresses the subjects of poverty and immigration, who are copiously reported on, but who are rarely included in the "implied audience" for news reports.

Read more about coverage of our project.

This research examines how journalists are using crowdfunding to create new journalism ventures. It explores how the role of the journalist changes when journalists are both the producers and marketers of their work, including how they define and negotiate relationships with their funders. One objective of this research is to design a set of best practices that can serve as a guide to journalists and independent news organizations that wish to crowdfund to support their journalism. This research is funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2019-2022).

For further information, contact Dr. Andrea Hunter: andrea.hunter@concordia.ca

Latest publication: Andrea Hunter, Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing in Journalism (Routledge, 2021). Find it on Routledge's website.

This book offers an in-depth exploration of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing in journalism today, examines their impacts on the broader media landscape, and looks at how these practices disrupt traditional journalism models, including shifting journalistic norms, professional identity, and the ethical issues at play when journalists turn to social media and the Internet to solicit widespread support.

While there is often a lot of hype and hope invested in these practices, this book takes a critical look at the labour involved in crowdsourcing journalism practices, and the evolving relationship between audiences and journalists, including issues of civility in online spaces.

The author draws on in-depth interviews with journalists in Canada and the United States, as well as examples from the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, and Australia, to provide a comprehensive study of increasingly important journalist practices.

The book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and journalists who are interested in political economy, journalism studies, and labour studies. 

SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 2020-2022. Principal Investigator: Aphrodite Salas

This multimedia research-creation project led by Aphrodite Salas aims to use mobile journalism and an emerging form of conciliatory journalism to document clean energy solutions being offered by Canada’s First Peoples. While mainstream media outlets have consistently focused on multiple crises in Indigenous communities there is less focus on success stories (Harding, 2006; Fleras, 2014; Fast & Drouin-Gagné, 2019). This research-creation project will produce three short documentaries incorporating methods of conciliatory journalism with a core team of students in the field. The project is based on Professor Salas’ previous work with Kiashke Zaaging Anishinaabek-Gull Bay First Nation.

Through collaboration with partners at Indigenous Clean Energy, the documentaries will profile Heiltsuk First Nation in British Columbia, the historic Metis community of Île-à-la-Crosse in Saskatchewan, and the northern Quebec Inuit community of Inukjuak as each takes broad-based and long-term action towards a clean energy future. The project will explore how conciliatory journalism may be used as a potential tool in the multifaceted task of decolonizing the media and journalism in Canada. Conciliatory journalism is a “new form of socially responsible journalism” that has emerged in recent years as an alternate method of storytelling during times of social polarisation (Hautakangas & Ahva, 2018).

The project will involve hiring a core group of students as research assistants to travel with Professor Salas to each location. The students will be trained in mobile and conciliatory journalism tools and techniques, they will receive specialized training on covering Indigenous issues in an era of truth and reconciliation through workshops by Journalists for Human Rights (JHR), and they will be trained in the protocols and practises involved in the dissemination of knowledge primarily through the building of multimedia sites on CTV Montreal and by participating in academic and public documentary screenings.

The training that will be offered on covering Indigenous issues and conciliatory journalism is meant to help a new generation of journalists understand the critical nature of community involvement, co-creation and collaborative practises for particular kinds of stories. The goal is to ensure each RA gains knowledge and confidence in these areas in order to eventually produce their own journalism and research on Indigenous issues through deep collaboration and ethical engagement.

2020-2022 SSHRC Insight Development Grant. Principal investigator: Amélie Daoust-Boisvert.

D'ici 11 ans s'épuisera le budget carbone permettant aux sociétés humaines d'éviter des bouleversements dramatiques: Leur probabilité augmente au-delà de 1,5 degrés Celsius de réchauffement par rapport à l'ère préindustrielle. De plus en plus de scientifiques arguent qu'il y a objectivement urgence d'agir. 

Pendant ce temps, les enjeux climatiques peinent à se frayer un chemin jusqu'à la une des médias, même lorsque le GIEC rend public un important rapport en octobre 2018. Mais, un tournant semble s'opérer. En effet, l'initative Covering Climate Now fédère maintenant 33 médias qui promettent de couvrir mieux et davantage les enjeux climatiques.

À travers le monde, dont au Canada, la prévalence du climat dans les médias s'est accrue entre 2018 et 2019. Plus encore, le vocabulaire et les cadrages utiisés dans les médias concernant les enjeux climatiques semblent subir des mutations rapides. Ce projet se penche sur ces transformations accélérées

L'étude de l'évolution des cadrages médiatiques des enjeux climatiques s'avère aussi cruciale pour aspirer à une compréhension sociale et transversale de la question climatique. Ses enjeux, multiples - sanitaires politiques, scientifiques, culturels - trouvent un point de rencontre et de débat dans les médias. 

Pour saisir les transformations de la couverture médiatique des changements climatiques dans les médias canadiens, ce projet déploie une méthodologie en trois temps:

  • évaluation de la prévalence du climat dans un corpus médiatique canadien bilingue couvrant la période 1986-2022 grâce à des outils d'analyse de contenu automatisés permettant d'évaluer l'évolution du vocabulaire et des cadrages
  • étude d'un corpus plus étroit permettant de valider ou non les tendances relevées, centré sur la période charnière 2017-2019
  • étude de cas sur la couverture de la Conférence de Glasgow 2020 (COP26)

Finaement, ce projet de recherche explore les intersections entre les mutations médiatiques et celles qui s'opèrent dans différentes sphères communicationnelles concernant les changements climatiques, soit les publications scientifiques et celles produites par les relations publiques. 

En plus de contribuer aux connaissances en études des médias, ce projet vise à provoquer une conversation entre les journalistes, les communicateurs et les scientifiques, puisque les enjeux de communication jouent un role majeur dans la réponse aux changements climatiques.

Initiated in 2020, the Solutions Journalism Project stems from a partnership between the department of Journalism and Atelier 10, a Québec publisher.

Grâce à un partenariat entre le département de journalisme de l’Université Concordia et Atelier 10, ce projet a pour but de mener une recherche-action en journalisme de solutions sur différentes plateformes, afin de générer de données permettant de cerner la contribution de cette pratique journalistique à l’engagement des lecteurs envers un média, à leur fidélité, à l’attraction de nouveaux lecteurs ainsi qu’à l’attractivité du média en général.

La recherche-action sera réalisée sur plusieurs plateformes à la fois. Elle consistera en la production de contenu papier, de contenu électronique et de baladodiffusions par Atelier 10. L’impact de ce contenu sera testé pour recueillir des données quantitatives (temps de lecture, taux de rebond, taux de partage, etc.) et des données qualitatives (envie d’explorer davantage un sujet, envie de lire d’autres textes de la même publication, désir de s’abonner à ce média ou à augmenter sa consommation de médias, intention de discuter du contenu avec son entourage, attitude plus positive par rapport à l’avenir, désir de participer à des projets, plus grande ouverture face à des initiatives existantes, etc.).

Au-delà des retombées pour l’industrie des médias et l’enseignement du journalisme, cette recherche-action peut avoir des retombées sociétales. Dans le contexte actuel de transition économique et écologique, l’adhésion, et même la participation active, du plus grand nombre d’individus est essentielle. Or, devant l’ampleur des défis, un certain fatalisme peut s’installer. L’exposition à des contenus de journalisme de solutions pourrait contribuer à une posture plus positive chez la population.

For more information, contact Amélie Daoust-Boisvert.

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