Media

U of T Faculty of Law students delve into journalism, media law issues during Toronto Star 'externship'

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 20 May 2022 19:38:20 +0000

U of T Faculty of Law students delve into journalism, media law issues during Toronto Star 'externship'

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 05/20/2022 - 15:38

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U of T students Dan Schechner, Sabrina Macklai and Jane Fallis Cooper pictured on the last day of their eight-month externship in media law at the Toronto Star.

Nina Haikara

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Our Community

Student Experience

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty of Law

Journalism

Media

From working with in-house counsel experts to advancing social justice initiatives and providing information about access to justice services at legal aid clinics, the ��Ƶ Faculty of Law continues to offer its JD students first-hand experience through for-credit externships with outside partners, as well as paid summer fellowships.

Three U of T Law students recently had the opportunity to work with the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) – based at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health – as well as the Toronto Star and parent company Torstar’s legal counsel. The externship began in September and finished at the end of April.

“The overarching narrative of this externship was media law considerations at Toronto Star,” says law student Sabrina Macklai, who will enter her third year of study this fall.

“We worked with the IJB, doing things like filing FOIs – Freedom of Information Requests – appeals and other assistance. On the flip side, we helped Torstar’s legal counsel, Emma Carver, with various tasks from prepping court materials to trial.”

From left to right: Sabrina Macklai, Jane Fallis Cooper, Robert Cribb, Emma Carver, Dan Schechner and Iris Fischer.

The externship was co-taught and supervised by Carver, media lawyer Iris Fischer, a partner at Blake’s LLP, and investigative journalist and Investigative Journalism Bureau founder Robert Cribb.

“We created the externship to provide law students with real-world experience in the exciting and fast-paced landscape of media law and public interest journalism,” says Carver, a graduate of U of T Law.

“Dan, Sabrina and Jane infused our newsroom with fresh energy and creative thinking and provided invaluable support to the IJB’s journalists. I believe it’s important to get law students thinking early on about how freedom of expression, open courts and responsible journalism are essential to our democracy and social fabric, and about the role media lawyers play in helping journalists do their work.

“Each law student made tangible contributions in these areas, which is something we are excited to continue in the coming years.”

U of T Law student Jane Fallis Cooper, who will begin her third year of the JD program this fall, says the information sessions organized by Fischer and Carver helped ground the cases they worked on.

“They brought in interesting people who have done investigative journalism at various levels of the Star and a court justice, who gave us primers on different areas of media law, such as defamation,” Cooper says.

Fischer, meanwhile, says it was gratifying to see students interacting with guests on a range of cutting-edge media law issues.

“It’s incredibly motivating to work with such talented students,” Fischer said. “Dan, Sabrina and Jane really immersed themselves in the legal issues and the stories they worked on and brought a fresh perspective to applying what we discussed in our theory sessions.”

Among their tasks, Macklai and graduating JD student Dan Schechner helped draft a factum for an anti-SLAPP motion. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation and are also known as intimidation lawsuits.

“Anti-SLAPP is a pretty new addition to Ontario civil procedure and it's a way of trying to prevent specious or meritless litigation that takes up court resources and makes it harder to access justice for people who have real substantive claims,” explains Schechner.

“What happens a lot in the media context is the newspaper will write about someone and that person is either unhappy with how they were portrayed or, something else that doesn't amount to a real legal issue with the article. But nonetheless they’ll bring a claim for defamation or another claim that relates to the article.

“Anti-SLAPP is a new mechanism that helps prevent against that case from taking up court resources by presenting a motion to get the court to rule it’s a SLAPP case and should be thrown out.”

Both Macklai and Schechner had previously worked with student newspapers but couldn't have imagined the depth of legal considerations that go into a publication before print.

“Who should we reach out to for comment? How long is a reasonable time to give people to get back to you for comment? What are the legal implications of certain investigations? Do we need to ask for copyright clearance for this image, or can we just avail an exception? There are a lot of nuances,” says Macklai.

Fallis Cooper worked with Investigative Journalism Bureau cases related to hospitals and the health-care system, which she found particularly relevant during COVID-19. The cases allowed her to combine her legal knowledge with her previous studies in bioethics.

“Rob [Cribb] kindly allowed me to sit in on IJB meetings, where I was able to discuss both ethical and legal issues related to the students’ investigations,” Fallis Cooper says. “Additionally, as a final project, I looked into undercover journalistic principles and the law. I've done interviews with investigative journalists who have done undercover work and was able to combine that with legal research to create a legal primer on the subject.”

“Bringing law students together with journalists to work collaboratively on real-world investigations was a remarkable innovation that elevated our shared work, helped us expand our journalistic reach and impact, and produced some real moments of magic along the way,” says Cribb. “This is a novel approach that I believe holds tremendous potential.”

The U of T Law students hope the Investigative Journalism Bureau externship will be offered again in future years and encourage their law classmates to consider other externships.

“One thing that I really liked about the externship was that it was very flexible to our individual interests,” says Schechner. “The highlight for me was working with journalists one-on-one on a variety of small motions.

“Everything would be run by Emma, of course, because we’re not lawyers and can’t give legal advice – but playing the part, thinking through real problems that non-lawyers were facing when interacting with the legal system was really interesting.”

Macklai agrees.

“I love being at the law school, but going to the Toronto Star every Friday to talk to people who are not in law school and are not lawyers let me learn so much more about how the law interacts with people and influences their work,” she says.

“It’s very, very cool to see how things you read about in class are applied at the Toronto Star. “

Schechner says he was prepared to wrap-up his final year with coursework, but the externship was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.

“Media law was something I've always been interested in. In hindsight, my law school experience wouldn’t have felt complete without it.”

Alexie Tcheuyap named U of T’s head of international student experience

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 22:01:08 +0000

Alexie Tcheuyap named U of T’s head of international student experience

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 07/30/2021 - 18:01

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(Photo by Johnny Guatto)

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Faculty of Arts & Science

Alexie Tcheuyap, a professor of French whose scholarship focuses on African literary, cinema and media studies, has been appointed the ��Ƶ’s associate vice-president and vice-provost, international student experience.

Having received governance approval Thursday, Tcheuyap will serve for nearly six years beginning Sept. 1, 2021, including six months of administrative leave. He will be responsible for promoting opportunities for students to learn abroad, overseeing the tri-campus Centre for International Experience, developing global engagement opportunities for all U of T students through curricular and co-curricular initiatives and generally fostering a positive experience for international students at the university.

Tcheuyap says his own experience as an international student – he was educated in Cameroon and in the United Kingdom before moving to Kingston, Ont. for graduate studies at Queen’s University – gives him unique insight into the needs of U of T students who are new to Canada.

“All of this is very personal for me because I came here as an international student and this means I have lived through a lot of the same things as the students whom I will be working to support,” he said.

“In my career as a professor, I have always been very sensitive not only to the experience of students, but of those who are new to the country.”

He added that he arrived in Canada in 1997 carrying two suitcases – one for clothes and another full of books.

“My driver dropped me off [at Queen’s] in front of the university’s Stauffer Library and he said: ‘You brought books here. See that building over there? It’s full of books,’” Tcheuyap recalled.

He went on to earn a PhD in French literature from Queen’s, adding to a doctorate and master’s in the same field from the University of Yaoundé in Cameroon. He taught at the University of Calgary before joining the French department at U of T in 2006 and is a senior fellow of the European Institutes for Advanced Study.

An expert in African literature, cinema and media studies, Tcheuyap counts Ariane Astrid Atodji, Florence Ayisi, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Assia Djebar, Amina Abdoulaye Mamani, Jean-Marie Teno and Mansour Sora Wade among his favourite African filmmakers. He has written several books, including De l’écrit à l’écran, Postnationalist African Cinemas, Autoritarisme, presse et violence au Cameroun and Avoir peur. Insécurité et roman en Afrique francophone.

The most rewarding part of his job as an instructor, he said, is to introduce native English speakers to the original text of French language works.

Tcheuyap also brings considerable senior leadership experience to his new role.

He served as chair and associate chair of the department of French in the Faculty of Arts & Science and has been the faculty’s vice-dean, academic life and equity since 2019. As vice-dean, Tcheuyap initiated new strategies to develop a more diverse and more inclusive faculty, including the recruitment of several Black and Indigenous scholars.

Tcheuyap succeeds Professor Joseph Wong in the international student experience office; Wong was named vice-president, international earlier this year.

“Professor Tcheuyap is an extraordinary leader at the ��Ƶ, who brings with him tremendous insight into the international student experience, having been one himself in the 1990s,” Wong said.

“He is well known among colleagues for his leadership skills at all levels of the university. His academic background in the humanities will no doubt open up new opportunities in international partnership-building as well as international learning experiences for our students.”

Tcheuyap said he will continue promoting equity, diversity and inclusion in his new role.

“It’s important to ask where our students come from and to make sure that everyone feels welcome on campus, regardless of their background,” he said. “This requires special efforts to attract and retain students from underrepresented groups.”

He also plans to build on Wong’s efforts to create global scholar and global citizen designations for U of T students that are acquired through completing academic or extracurricular activities that foster a global outlook. The designations appear on a student’s co-curricular record or transcript.

“We are very fortunate to have the global scholar and citizen programs,” Tcheuyap said. “We just need to make sure that all students are aware of these possibilities to gain an international perspective.

“It’s not unusual to find a student who was born in Lethbridge or Kingston and who has never left Canada. The world is changing around us. We need to bring these international opportunities to students.

“The world is so rich. We need to encourage students to learn about the world in Toronto or go abroad and harvest international experience and then return to share their newfound knowledge back here.”

U of T students join universities around the world to address laws that suppress media, freedom of expression

Romi Levine — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 16:19:59 +0000

U of T students join universities around the world to address laws that suppress media, freedom of expression

Romi Levine Thu, 09/05/2019 - 12:19

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Edward Snowden, a whistleblower who exposed the U.S. National Security Agency's electronic surveillance practices, is currently living in Russia (photo by Barton Gellman/Getty Images)

Topic

Research & Innovation

High-profile charges against whistleblowers and leakers like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are exposing the legal consequences for publicly releasing government secrets and are shedding light on the way nations use the law to suppress media and freedom of expression.

A global network of universities, including the ��Ƶ, has begun to engage in a large-scale research project to explore how countries are using local laws to stifle journalists, media outlets and whistleblowers.

The International Human Rights Program in U of T’s Faculty of Law is leading the charge in Canada. Students participating in a clinical course, called the Media Freedom Model Laws Project, will conduct research and contribute to a report on how countries are using espionage and official secrets laws to respond to media leaks. U of T will be working alongside Irwin Cotler, former federal minister of justice and attorney general, on the project.

Other participating universities include King’s College London, Columbia Law School and Korea University. Each school will tackle a different issue or legal tactic – including blasphemy, misinformation, defamation, and anti-terrorism – and provide regional contexts for the different reports.

The initiative came out of the Global Conference for Media Freedom in July and is part of a larger media freedom campaign and legal panel led by David Neuberger, former president of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and Amal Clooney, human rights lawyer and special envoy on media freedom to the U.K. foreign secretary.

“The tax on media freedom is manifesting in a lot of different ways, and thus far there hasn't been much of a concerted effort to bring all of these threads together,” says Vincent Wong, an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law and IHRP research associate, who is teaching the media freedom course.

U of T students will have the chance to work with Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who is the legal adviser for National Security Agency whistleblower Snowden. He will serve as one of the expert reviewers for the report.

“Students will really have the opportunity to not only learn from the readings and from the theoretical angle, but will also talk to some of the key players that were involved in these kinds of ground-shaking cases that are still going on and still having ramifications all over the world,” says Wong.

Vincent Wong says the global reach of the media freedom project will give it the scope needed to make a difference (photo by Romi Levine)

U of T law student Kate Somers is looking forward to taking a deep dive into the laws affecting media freedom during the law clinic.

“I was excited to be involved further in that because it's a really great way to learn about what's happening, keep myself informed, and to equip myself with the tools and the connections so hopefully I can continue being part of the conversation about freedom of expression in the future.”

Somers says she’s interested in working as an in-house counsel for an international newspaper, so the media freedom project, “really lets me reinforce and explore the parallels between journalism and law.”

Using a legal cover to silence journalists is a relatively new activity, says Wong, with a prime example being the punishment for those involved in WikiLeaks.

Manning’s 35-year sentence (which was commuted after seven years) for leaking classified documents was an unprecedented move by the U.S. government, he says.

“In terms of severity of sentencing for media leaks, this was completely off the charts. This was multiples of years in terms of length of any sentence that had ever been issued for media leaks for national security,” says Wong. “This was really a turning point and it showed how America was using the national security and the espionage acts in a way that had never been contemplated when the espionage act was created about 100 years ago.”

Canada doesn’t shy away from these types of legal actions, either, he says.

In 2015, Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, who was then the Canadian military’s second-in-command, was accused of leaking information about a naval ship contract and charged with breach of trust. He pleaded not guilty and, while the charge was eventually stayed, Wong says the case is a reminder that the long tradition of government disclosure to media is on shaky ground.

“It is really only in the last about 10 years or so that the legal framework all over the world has really shifted against this and has targeted and prosecuted this relationship between government officials and political reporters in the press.”

The IHRP report will include a review of problematic state practices regarding espionage and national security laws, and on the flip side, legislation that could serve as positive examples of media protection. Researchers will also look at international guidance on media freedom and freedom of expression from organizations like the United Nations Human Rights Council and Human Rights Committee, and provide recommendations for how to create a legal framework that balances public interest and national security concerns.

The global media freedom project is a chance to advocate for better global protections for journalists, media organizations and leakers, using the clout of Neuberger and Clooney and the network of university researchers, says Wong.

“We have a unique opportunity and ability here to put pressure on a lot of different governments,” he says. “The ultimate point is that it makes a practical impact because if it doesn't, then why are we here? The practical function of this is on the top of the minds of everybody who was involved in this project. That's one of the ways that makes it exciting.”

Meet fake news investigator and U of T student Ian Dennis Miller

geoff.vendeville — Tue, 16 May 2017 15:19:28 +0000

Meet fake news investigator and U of T student Ian Dennis Miller

geoff.vendeville Tue, 05/16/2017 - 11:19

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Ian Dennis Miller browses the pro-Donald Trump subreddit, r/The_Donald at U of T's Gerstein Science Information Centre (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Geoffrey Vendeville

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Geoffrey Vendeville

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Subheadline

After seeing a strange and garbled story on a pro-Trump forum, Miller traced it to its original source

Ian Dennis Miller doesn't smoke a pipe or wear a deerstalker cap, but he does solve mysteries.

The ��Ƶ PhD student in the department of psychology did some Internet sleuthing last week, discovering that a story posted on a pro-Donald Trump online forum was in fact a strangely garbled version of a Los Angeles Times article.

Through some digital detective work, he was able to track down the original L.A. Times story and notify its author, Jessica Roy, who recently reported on the experience of “becom[ing] fake news.”

Miller stumbled on the fake story while browsing r/The_Donald, a corner of Reddit which says it's reserved for “serious supporters” of U.S. president Donald Trump. The article on good-kingnews.com described a new business venture by the alt-right provocateur and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, but it was written in awkward English that sounded at times like nonsense.

For example, the article referred to Vanity Fair magazine as Vanity Truthful, and renamed the activist movement Black Lives Matter to Black Lives Subject. The college campus phenomenon Free Speech Movement was instead called Cost-Free Motion.

“It's obvious that a sentient creature had authored this article, but it was all wrong,” said Miller, whose dissertation focuses on memes and the propagation of political ideas through social networks. “All the verbs were weird. It was only technically English.”

Despite the glaring mistakes in the story, few if any users on Reddit seemed to notice that the article was filled with gibberish, he said.

See U of T Libraries' tips for spotting fake news

Read the Metro Toronto story about the librarians' fake news checklist

“It's almost like Schrödinger's cat – as long as you don't observe it, it's simultaneously dead and alive. This article, nobody looked at it. Nobody clicked through to it so it's almost like it's true and false at the same time.”

Nevertheless by Monday, it had received 6,900 upvotes or positive ratings.

Miller in front of U of T's Gerstein Science and Information Centre (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

After poking around on the site, Miller found that many of the articles were outdated. He learned that the site was registered anonymously only a few months earlier. Then, he discovered another telling clue: a story about German Chancellor Angela Merkel contained a computer code that looked as if it was left there by accident.

“What this code does is it goes to another website, and it steals content,” he said.

Miller's theory is that the text of Roy's story was translated into a different language and then back into English to avoid detection.

“This was specifically designed to deceive people online.”

Instead of stopping there, Miller decided to look for the original story and tell the author. He doesn't remember exactly how he traced the story back to Roy, the L.A. Times journalist, but he thinks it may have been by searching Google News within a 24-hour time frame.

“I was really blown away,” Roy told U of T News. “I've actually written about fake news and the alt-right before so I'm familiar with it, but I have not seen an article go as laterally as this did from real news to fake news.”

She hasn't found out who was behind the site either, but she did reach the user who posted the fake article to Reddit.

“I got a surprisingly nice response from him,” she said. “I thought he'd be like, ‘You're lying L.A. slime, fake media,’ but he said, ‘I'm sorry you didn't get credit.’”

The case is far from closed.

“For me, this raises so many questions, and it will probably influence the future directions of my research,” Miller said. “We're witnessing a really astonishing phenomenon right now, and in some ways it's going to cause us to question reality.”

U of T's student weekly hires a public editor

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 17:06:20 +0000

U of T's student weekly hires a public editor

geoff.vendeville Wed, 01/25/2017 - 12:06

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Sophie Borwein, a PhD student in political science, is the first-ever public editor at "The Varsity" (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Geoffrey Vendeville

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Geoffrey Vendeville

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Subheadline

“The Varsity” says this may be the first public editor for a Canadian campus newspaper

These are challenging times for journalism as politicians peddle “alternative facts” and good reporting is eclipsed by fake news.

“If there was ever a golden era of newspaper journalism, this isn’t it,” said Sophie Borwein, the first-ever public editor of The Varsity in a column in which she introduced herself to readers.

Read Borwein's first article as public editor

Although the decision to hire a public editor was in the works for over a year and had nothing to do with recent controversies, The Varsity’s editor-in-chief says it was an opportune time.

“I feel that student newspapers like The Varsity have an important role to play in setting a high standard of accountability to readers, especially given that trust in the media is currently low,” said Alex McKeen, The Varsity's editor-in-chief.

Borwein, a third-year PhD student in political science, is in charge of hearing readers’ complaints to ensure that the student weekly – with a student audience of 87,000 across all three campuses – always meets the standards of honesty, accuracy and fairness laid out in the paper’s code of ethics.

She is believed to be the only public editor of a student paper in Canada. Even among major Canadian news outlets, there are few like her. Only The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and the Brunswick News group have public editors, while CBC and Radio-Canada have ombudsmen, J-Source reported in a story about Borwein’s new job.

Read a column by the Toronto Star’s public editor about Borwein’s appointment

U of T News met with Borwein at The Varsity’s office to hear about her plans as public editor and her thoughts on the state of journalism today.

What makes a good public editor?

Taking readers’ concerns seriously. I spoke to Kathy English about this recently, and she said it’s sort of like being a judge. You have to trust your instinct against the code you’re expected to be upholding, and then you have to make a decision. And you have to recognize that not everyone is going to be happy with it, but you have to stick to it.

Why do you think there was so much interest in your appointment?

I think it's the timing. Everybody is grappling with the question of what to do about these scary trends in journalism.

And for publications like The Varsity that have been around for a very long time that to me is its big advantage: the longevity, the consistency, the ability to show that over time you've upheld certain standards. I think this is just another piece of that.

What do you mean by “scary trends?”

The funny thing about this job is that The Varsity has been looking for a public editor for a while now so it wasn't a reaction to the most recent trends in the U.S.

But, I mean, it's scary out there for media.

If you can have a press secretary who gets up there and says we have a different set of facts for you, I don't know what you do with that.

And I don't know what you do with a candidate and now a president who has a different view of reality. It breaks every basic understanding of a journalist's role. I don't envy the media, in the U.S. in particular, which is grappling with this question of how helpful it is to keep calling Donald Trump a liar.

There’s obviously been a lot of questions about whether it’s still helpful to call him out on all his lies in a toxic environment where readers are predisposed not to trust media outlets. Politicians can use that as further fuel to say it’s partisan reporting.

U of T researcher co-authors landmark report: calls Canadian newspaper coverage of HIV criminalization cases racist

ullahnor — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 18:22:01 +0000

U of T researcher co-authors landmark report: calls Canadian newspaper coverage of HIV criminalization cases racist

ullahnor Thu, 12/01/2016 - 13:22

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Laura Bisaillon: "This coverage has negative effects on public opinion because it not only stigmatizes people living with HIV, it stereotypes black immigrant men living with HIV in particular” (photo by Ken Jones)

Don Campbell

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Don Campbell

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Black heterosexual immigrant men are disproportionately highlighted by Canadian mainstream newspapers covering HIV non-disclosure criminal cases, says a new report co-authored by a ��Ƶ researcher.

While black immigrant men only accounted for 15 per cent of defendants in these cases, they were the focus of 61 per cent of newspaper coverage, researchers found.

“We were surprised by the massive imbalance in coverage that focused on black immigrant men,” says Laura Bisaillon, an assistant professor in U of T Scarborough’s health studies program and one of five authors of the report.

“This coverage has negative effects on public opinion because it not only stigmatizes people living with HIV, it stereotypes black immigrant men living with HIV in particular.”

The report, “Callous, Cold and Deliberately Duplicitous,” is the first of its kind. Researchers analyzed 1,680 articles published in Canadian newspapers from 1989 to 2015. The articles focused on cases involving defendants facing criminal charges for not disclosing their HIV status before having sex.

One of the key findings in the report is that 68 per cent of newspaper articles focused on racialized defendants – with African, Caribbean and black men disproportionately represented in coverage.

“Our evidence shows that most people who face criminal charges in these cases are actually white, yet newspaper coverage focused mainly on black male defendants,” says Bisaillon.

Read the Toronto Star story on the report

The authors also discovered a cluster of coverage by Canadian newspapers on four specific men who faced HIV non-disclosure cases. Nearly half of all coverage focused specifically on the cases of these men, all of whom are black immigrants.

The report’s authors were also critical of the language used in the newspaper coverage, which they believe contributes to inflaming stereotypical and xenophobic ideas, particularly relating to black immigrant men with HIV.

“It’s upsetting to read myths masquerading as news and repeating the theme of how black men living with HIV are hypersexual, dangerous ‘others,’” says Erik Mykhalovskiy, a professor of sociology at York University and the study’s lead author.

The authors call for reform in media coverage, including having cases of HIV criminalization covered by health rather than crime reporters. They also insist that coverage about HIV-transmission use current scientific research, specifically about the negligible risk of transmitting HIV where the person has an undetectable viral load.

The authors took aim at the use of mug shots in stories and called for removing story descriptions that are “inherently racist or demonize the defendant.” They also urge media to rely on AIDS service organizations for their knowledge and insight in stories about HIV criminalization.

“Misinformation about HIV transmission contributes to fear and hostility towards people living with HIV,” says Bisaillon, whose research looks at the organization and production of knowledge about the Canadian immigration system. “I hope that these results will be used for transformative purposes to spark open and honest discussion about how the Canadian public is learning about cases of HIV criminalization.”

How do you spot bogus news? Ask U of T Libraries

geoff.vendeville — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 17:45:12 +0000

How do you spot bogus news? Ask U of T Libraries

geoff.vendeville Tue, 11/29/2016 - 12:45

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A fake news story that was widely read during the U.S. presidential race

Geoffrey Vendeville

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Geoffrey Vendeville

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Did the Pope endorse Donald Trump for president? Did Hillary Clinton sell weapons to ISIS? Is Justin Trudeau actually the son of Fidel Castro?

No. But that hasn't stopped these fictitious stories from spreading via fake news websites.

In recent weeks there has been an outcry over the spread of fake news and its influence in the U.S. presidential election. This month, Google and Facebook decided to put restrictions on websites peddling fake or misleading content.

Even university students can be fooled by bogus headlines. That’s why ��Ƶ librarians have made a concise online guide to verify news stories.

To help students think more critically about news stories, librarians Eveline Houtman and Heather Buchansky added a section to the library’s FAQ page with links to myth-debunking sources like Snopes.com, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. There's also information from Melissa Zimdar's site about spotting fake news. She's an assistant professor of communications and media at Merrimack College in the U.S.

U of T Librarians Eveline Houtman and Heather Buchansky are helping curtail the spread of fake news by giving students online resources to spot bogus news sites (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

“I think anybody can be fooled, to be honest,” said Houtman, a reference librarian at Robarts Library and coordinator of undergraduate instruction. “Education levels seem to help, but we deal with a lot of students barely out of high school and they need a lot of help learning to be more critical.”

The librarians suggest checking a website’s domain name and About Us page before taking what they say as fact. But that isn’t always enough to tell if a news story is genuine.

One clue is how the story makes you feel, Houtman said.

“Is it evoking outrage in you? Maybe just be careful of having your buttons pushed and being manipulated too easily,” she said.

The guide to spotting fake news was published Friday and has gotten positive reactions, said Buchansky, the university’s student engagement librarian.

Jeffrey Dvorkin, director of the journalism program at U of T Scarborough and former managing editor at CBC Radio, says that even if students are highly media literate these days, they can still make mistakes like everybody else.

In a turbulent period and with a tidal wave of information online, readers can be overwhelmed, he continued. “And when they’re overwhelmed, they retreat to the parts of the Internet that reflect their own concerns and biases.

Snopes.com disputes fake news stories that President Obama had called for the dismantling of the Statue of Liberty

He added that media and universities have "an obligation to help sort out what is reliable information and what is not. Because without that kind of awareness, there's a lot at stake.”

For example, in the final months of the presidential race, many Americans relied on non-mainstream sources of information, Dvorkin said.

One analysis by Buzzfeed showed that readers engaged with fake election news more than they did with stories from trusted outlets like The New York Times in the three months before election day.

As a rule, readers should adopt a healthy skepticism of everything, Dvorkin said.

“We need to put all ideas to a certain amount of testing and do it in a comprehensive and humane way.”

If a news story sounds too good to be true, it probably is, he advised.

Read The Varsity's op-ed on the importance of media literacy in an age of fake news

Profiles of U of T alumni: hail to the chef!

ullahnor — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 20:56:37 +0000

Profiles of U of T alumni: hail to the chef!

ullahnor Wed, 11/23/2016 - 15:56

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Developing recipes is one of Mary Berg’s favourite things to do. It’s central to her long-term ambition of building a career in catering and food media (photo courtesy of CTV)

Megan Easton

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Megan Easton

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Faculty of Information

Subheadline

A golden borscht soup helped alumna Mary Berg win the title of MasterChef Canada. She now serves up her recipes on CTV’s “Your Morning” show

She may have won out against all the other cooks on MasterChef Canada, but Mary Berg, who earned a master’s in information from U of T in 2014, has a surprising kryptonite in the kitchen.

“I am truly terrible at cooking rice,” she says. “I’m so thankful it never came up in the competition.”

Since taking the $100,000 top prize on the hit TV show’s third season this spring, Berg has gone from working at an insurance brokerage and cooking for friends and family to making a living at her longtime passion. Her winning dish? It included golden beet borscht, surf and turf with beef tenderloin, and blueberry financier.

Berg recently launched a small catering business out of her apartment, is working on menu development for some Toronto-area restaurants and has a regular gig on CTV’s “Your Morning” show demonstrating her original recipes in front of a live audience. There’s also a new television project in the works with Bell Media, but she can’t reveal the details.

“All I can say is that I’m very excited about the current trajectory of my life,” she says.

Berg was just four-years-old when she first got involved with meal preparation at home. Her father died in a car accident that year, and she wanted to help her mother.

“My mom wasn’t a big cook, so the best place for me to do that was in the kitchen,” she says. “I was mostly serving up cereal with water, because I wasn’t allowed to pour milk, but by the time I was seven I really got into cooking. And by 13 I’d taken over all the meals.”

Berg learned by reading cookbooks, watching cooking shows and experimenting. Sometimes, she’d become mildly obsessed with a certain food and make it all the time – homemade ice cream one summer, for example, then crepes next. These indulgences made people happy, she says, which fuelled her desire to keep learning.

“I cook from the heart. Food is about sharing, and I love watching people I love enjoy my food.”

Cooking has always been the way Berg de-stresses. As a graduate student at U of T, she would invite people to dinner whenever she had an exam or a big paper due.

“Sometimes I just wanted to cook a chicken,” she says, “[even though] I don’t eat chicken.”

She also doesn’t eat red meat, but includes dairy, eggs and fish in her diet. Giving up meat 15 years ago was more of a health-based decision than a moral one, she says.

“As a kid I ate bacon like it was my job, but there came a time when I felt I’d reached my quota.”

Since then, she’s relied on smell, feel and intuition to cook meat.

The science of food – how heat shrinks the muscle fibres in meat, what noodle shapes are best for certain sauces to cling to and “other things nobody thinks about” – fascinates Berg.

Developing recipes is one of her favourite things to do and central to her long-term ambition of building a career in catering and food media. She says that her degree from U of T, for which she specialized in knowledge and information management, will come in handy.

“Everything is going digital, including recipes, so I’ll be able to apply it in any of the places I end up.”

One place Berg has no plans to end up is a restaurant kitchen. The late nights and intense lifestyle just don’t appeal to her.

“Although I’ve never experienced it, I’m aware of the boys’ club in professional cooking,” she says.

As the first female winner of MasterChef Canada, she hopes to play a small part in changing that culture.

“After I won, I got letters and videos from girls and their moms saying how inspiring it was. I never expected that, and I feel the pressure now to be a role model. I welcome it with open arms, and I hope I’m a good one.”

Mary Berg’s complete winning menu:

Appetizer
Golden Beet Borscht with Horseradish Goat’s Cheese Mousse, Beet Cured Trout, and Caraway Crumb
Entrée
Surf and Turf with Beef Tenderloin, Fried Oysters, and Arugula Sea Asparagus Pesto
Dessert
Blueberry Financier with Brown Butter Crumb, Kettle Corn, Blueberry Sauce, and Buttermilk Corn Ice Cream

Plant closures and newsroom layoffs: Jeff Dvorkin on the week in Canadian media

sgupta — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 14:18:13 +0000

Plant closures and newsroom layoffs: Jeff Dvorkin on the week in Canadian media sgupta Thu, 01/21/2016 - 09:18

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“There’s a market for significant and high-quality local information, ” Jeff Dvorkin says (photo by Ken Jones)

Don Campbell

Author legacy

Don Campbell

Our Faculty & Staff

Media

UTSC

First came the announcement the Toronto Star would be shuttering its printing plant in Vaughan, cutting some editorial jobs in the process. Then Postmedia announced it was merging news rooms in Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.

Jeffrey Dvorkin, a lecturer and director of the journalism program at U of T Scarborough, has been the ombudsman for America Abroad Media and National Public Radio, a managing editor and chief journalist at CBC Radio and vice-president of news and information at NPR.

He spoke with writer Don Campbell about what these cuts mean to the health of journalism in Canada.

Along with printing staff, some editorial staff in the Star’s tablet division are being laid off. Does this indicate a tempering of expectations in terms of what digital content can bring in?
It’s difficult to tell. The Star is taking what’s going on at La Presse in Montreal as a model; La Presse has now pretty much gone full tablet and is only publishing one edition a week on Saturday. However, the markets are really quite different. La Presse has a captive linguistic market whereas the Star does not.

We’ll see how well the Star does with their plan. They’ve certainly invested heavily in terms of time and resources into the Star touch product.

Will advertising continue to be key in the transition from print to digital?
Yes, and the advertising transition is happening slowly. Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of The Guardian, wrote about something he calls Rusbridger’s Cross: essentially, as print advertising revenue declines there needs to be an increase in online advertising revenue and at some point the two will intersect.

This hasn’t happened yet, although the New York Times has been very successful and is making quite a bit of money through online revenue. A big part of the reason is that the content produced by the Times is outstanding.

That seems to be the crux of the issue; are newspapers providing readers with indispensable information that citizens need? In some instances they are, while in other instances it’s simply not the case.

Yesterday, Postmedia announced the merger of newsrooms in four Canadian cities. What does this mean for their ability to cover the news?
It certainly has a lot of symbolic value. Postmedia is the largest newspaper chain in the country, so the consequences of the layoff are pretty significant. It’s also an indication of convergence in the media, which in the past may have resulted in some savings but has not resulted in better journalism.

That’s a concern. If a newspaper had two or three reporters assigned to municipal politics or city hall they wouldn’t all just be going after Rob Ford, which is what happened when Ford was the mayor. The “Ford Follies” was over-covered because these newspapers are understaffed and only paying attention to one particular story.

Even the CBC, which has gone through its own convergence issues, ended up covering Rob Ford like a blanket when in fact there were other stories that were of great importance that were outright ignored because Ford made for such easy copy.

Newspaper reporters are far more visible now on other mediums. Will we see more of this?
It’s true. There are fewer reporters and there’s more pack journalism which is essentially reporters all chasing after the same stories. In addition to being obliged to cover a story for one medium, these reporters need to be on two, sometimes three, platforms including social media. If a reporter has more than a couple of hours to dedicate to a story that’s considered a luxury.

I don’t want to start moaning about how much better it was in the pre-digital age because that time has passed and we’re never going back, but there is a downside to the digital culture and that’s a general thinness of context. There’s a predisposition to cover the journalistic low-hanging fruit, which is weather, traffic and crime.

These three subjects are entirely sourced through the government. That’s why we’re seeing that type of journalism more often than long-form investigative reporting. Long-form is still being done, but it’s not being done in the way it could be.

Can Canadian newspapers cope with an increasingly competitive and shrinking marketplace while delivering effective journalism?
There’s a good case example where three American newspapers in mid-size markets, one in California, one in the mid-west and one in the south, decided they would invest more heavily in digital but do it in a way that was intensively local. They discovered that there’s a market for significant and high-quality local information.

These papers were not doing all the stories they once did if they could get it from a syndicated wire service, but instead focused on stories that really affected their community – and suddenly found out they were making money with a pay wall. The combination of a pay wall and important, quality information seem to be a pattern of success for those markets. Would that work everywhere? I don’t know, but it would certainly be worth considering rather than going after the low-hanging fruit.

Why is it important that these outlets adapt?
For all that’s said about them, newspapers and the reporters who work for them are the single most reliable source of information for other media platforms, at least locally. There was a study in Baltimore that found 80 per cent of news content on the Internet, blogosphere, radio and television relating to Baltimore originated from the Baltimore Sun. It was the single most important source of information for these other platforms. So if there are continued cuts to newspaper staff will the quality of journalism in these other mediums be affected? Absolutely it will.

But it also speaks to media convergence. If news media have to continue relying on smaller staff and continue to insist on entertaining their audiences rather than informing them, in the long run people will go elsewhere for their information.

If they continue to rely on so-called click-bait and other content meant to drive web traffic only instead of covering the news, I think they will be do so at their own peril.

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How to build the best U of T Cities podcast: it’s up to you

sgupta — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 08:22:47 +0000

How to build the best U of T Cities podcast: it’s up to you sgupta Wed, 12/10/2014 - 03:22

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(Illustration by Jon Horvatin)

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City councillors, community groups and readers at U of T News weigh in

It was a new way for us to talk with the city – and show a few ways the university is helping to make Toronto better:

A few weeks ago, U of T News launched a podcast miniseries featuring conversations with the university’s researchers, entrepreneurs and students whose work is advancing Toronto’s realities of traffic, transit, sustainability and the role of the city. (Learn more about the podcast series)

Reporter Brianna Goldberg spoke with researchers building artificially intelligent traffic lights, car-bike hybrid pods and optimized energy-saving green roofs. She shared stories from students, faculty and alumni whose ideas are changing the urban economy, the infrastructure around us as well as the very nature of our city and others around the world.

The goal: to join the conversation happening around Ontario municipal elections and share insights and expertise from U of T thinkers on key voting issues. (Read more about building successful cities at U of T)

Now we're looking to the community and asking: did it work?

“There was a time when universities were seen almost as distant from civic life,” says Toronto city councillor Joe Mihevc. “What you’re doing with this particular project is saying that the university does have a real contribution to make to enhance good knowledge and promote good public policy through good research, good knowledge and good, clear thinking.”

Some of Toronto’s leading city issues columnists and commentators shared the podcast on social media, including Sean Micallef, John Lorinc and Richard Florida. And local organizations got behind it, too.

“Initiatives like the U of T Cities podcast are essential in cracking open the question: What makes a good city?” says Denise Pinto, global director of Jane’s Walk – a Toronto-based organization promoting citizen-led walking tours, whose mission is inspired by urban thinker Jane Jacobs.

“As our world urbanizes, these beautiful vignettes of Toronto's local histories, idiosyncrasies and possibilities are providing Canadians with voices they might know, and voices they should get to know, in the collective conversation on where we go from here,” says Pinto.

The podcast also caught the interest of global organizations and media outlets outside of Canada.

An episode featuring Professor Patricia McCarney’s work with the World Council on City Data was tweeted by the International Standards Organization. And Kim Davis, editor-in-chief of an online smart cities magazine called UBM’s Future Cities, wrote in a blog post that the series “brings home the depth of talent among U of T faculty members and alumni when it comes to tackling the logistics, politics, and technics of the global city.” (Read the full story)

Along with anecdotal feedback, we've looked at analytics showing that certain topics – traffic, for example – attracted more listeners than others. But we’re looking for your help planning the next U of T Cities podcast series.

We’ve developed a quick online survey where we’re hoping you’ll tell us what you liked, what you wanted to hear more about and what we could have improved. Tell us how we can make the best, most interesting and most useful podcast for listeners like you. (Find the survey here)

It should take less than five minutes to complete the questionnaire, meaning that clicking a few boxes will help us learn more about what you want to hear next in this series that’s already getting international attention.

And, as if a chance to help us brainstorm the future of the U of T Cities podcast isn’t incentive enough, respondents also have an option provide their contact information for a chance to win a U of T Bookstore gift certificate or a one-month Metropass.

We appreciate your feedback as you help us plan for the future conversation of U of T Cities.

“There are so many areas where we frankly need the university,” said Councilor Mihevc. “Life at the city sometimes happens very fast. Issues come at you very fast and we don’t have the time or space or ability to do broad research, particularly looking at best practices around the world. You have the capacity – universities have the capacity – to bring to bear all kinds of expertise on an issue.”

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Plant closures and newsroom layoffs: Jeff Dvorkin on the week in Canadian media

How to build the best U of T Cities podcast: it’s up to you