News & Events

A leader in Canadian journalism for over 60 years, Ryerson’s School of Journalism is more than classroom learning and practical application of journalistic practices. The school, under the leadership of the Ryerson Journalism Research Centre (RJRC) is also a hub of research and exploration into current and future industry trends.

"New technologies, new business models and new forms of storytelling are transforming journalism,” says April Lindgren, founding director of the Ryerson Journalism Research Centre.  “Researchers at the Ryerson Journalism Research Centre are working to make sense of all these changes - to examine their implications for democratic society and for the practice of journalism."

The RJRC explores the quickly changing landscape of journalism in Canada by studying trends in journalism and what they mean for society and the news business. 2013 has been a busy year for the centre and its researchers, with research reports on the role of women in newsrooms, the “science” of fact checking and diversity in ethno-cultural newspapers.

Stemming from her earlier 2008 paper on women as newsroom leaders, Professor Ann Rauhala’s study “Women in the Field: What Do You Know?” highlights the continued underrepresentation of women in management positions, as reporters covering more influential and prolific beats such as law, crime, government and politics and as subjects in the news stories themselves, despite the fact that the majority of journalism students in the last 10 to 15 years  have been female.

Taking into account the findings of major journalism research projects such as the Global Media Monitoring Project of 2010 as well as the International Women’s Media Foundation and the work of her peers, Rauhala’s research highlights that in fact we know very little about women in journalism. Where women ‘go’ once they enter journalism, why and when they choose to leave the profession as well as what level of success is available to those who do stay the course remain as areas of concern, deserving further discussion and exploration. Rauhala’s full paper can be found on the RJRC website here.

Verification As A Strategic Ritual: How journalists retrospectively describe processes for ensuring accuracy, by School of Journalism Chair Ivor Shapiro and fellow authors Kasia Mychajlowycz, also of Ryerson University and Colette Brin and Isabelle Bédard-Brûlé, from Laval University, examines how working journalists view and practice the verification of information used for their stories.

The researchers found that, while verification is widely seen as essential and core to a journalist’s work, the methods for achieving accuracy vary widely from one journalist to the next, that no one single standard for verification exists, and not every fact is weighted equally.

According to the researchers’ findings, “Methods for ensuring accuracy varied greatly, with some factual statements relayed, with or without attribution, based on a single subject’s word, while others were rigorously triangulated.” Responses also revealed that the ease with which a fact could be verified increased the likelihood that the info was corroborated. To foster consistent and appropriate verification practices, the authors call for stronger guidance and guidelines for young and aspiring journalists. The full study, published by Journalism Practice, can be found here.

Professor April Lindgren's latest research explores how newspapers serving different ethnic and immigrant communities in the Greater Toronto Area portray other groups. In Missing and Misrepresented: Portrayals of Other Ethnic and Racialized Groups in a Greater Toronto Area Ethnocultural Newspaper, published in the latest issue of Canadian Ethnic Studies, she examines how other ethnic and racialized communities are covered in a local Chinese-language daily newspaper. With the exception of members of the White community, the study concludes that groups other than the Chinese community are represented only to a limited extent and that, particularly when it comes to crime coverage, they are in some cases misrepresented.

A second study, The Diverse City: Can you 'read all about it' in ethnic newspapers? expands the investigation to Korean-, Russian- and Punjabi-language publications. After concluding that other groups are almost invisible in the news coverage of these newspapers as well, Lindgren offers suggestions on how ethno cultural news outlets with small editorial teams and limited financial resources might introduce greater diversity into their news reporting without compromising coverage of their own communities.  Full details on the Local News Research Project can be found here.

To learn more about the Ryerson Journalism Research Centre, please visit their website.

Ryerson University is Canada's leader in innovative, career-oriented education and a university clearly on the move. With a mission to serve societal need, and a long-standing commitment to engaging its community, Ryerson offers more than 100 undergraduate and graduate programs. Distinctly urban, culturally diverse and inclusive, the university is home to more than 28,000 students, including 2,300 master's and PhD students, nearly 2,700 faculty and staff, and 140,000 alumni worldwide. Research at Ryerson is on a trajectory of success and growth: externally funded research has doubled in the past five years. The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education is Canada's leading provider of university-based adult education. For more information, visit www.ryerson.ca.

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