( Photo: Adam Dietrich )
The Charlatan’s editor-in-chief Chris Hannay, the Leveller’s publisher David Tough and CKCU’s radio host Adam Coombs debated the role of media in the community during a panel discussion last week mediated by Kristy Wright of the Carleton University Debating Society.
The Charlatan’s Mashoka Maimona covered the chatter about the rise of alternative media, the fall of readership levels and the changing landscape of journalism with twittering, Jon Stewart, and community papers.
Kristy Wright: What do you feel is the media’s role in this day and age?
Chris Hannay: The point of having media in the community is a defence – to educate people on what’s going on. The biggest reason for doing that is to get people more engaged and involved in whatever capacity that might be – if they’re getting involved with the government or just paying attention. The media help to make people understand what’s going on and why. It’s important to have lots of voices in a community that people can identify with. If we’re looking at the Carleton community, the Charlatan tries to be there for the whole community and to represent as many students here as we can. The biggest avenue for that is our opinion page. We try to facilitate as much discussion as we can.
David Tough: The role of the media is to inspire people to get people involved in the community. The Leveller obviously does that in different ways than the Charlatan does. The Leveller explicitly comes at issues from a left perspective. That does not mean we have one viewpoint. We actually spend a lot of time arguing about what that means – what exactly it means to have a paper with an explicit editorial agenda. At what point do we cross over to propaganda? At what point are we no longer a newspaper? It’s a delicate balance.
This discussion is partly a result of The Leveller’s existence. I think it’s possible to have a paper that contributes to a multiplicity of voices that isn’t itself a multiplicity of voices. I personally would be very happy to see a right-wing paper on campus, and to engage in a media war or discussion with a right-wing paper and with a paper independent of politics, such as the Charlatan.
Adam Coombs: An important role of the media from CKCU’s perspective is to allow access to everybody to have a voice. There’s no specific editorial agenda, or no agenda to have a show on the station, essentially provided you adhere to CRTC regulations. It leads to a wide perspective of political views. It can range from right to left. Radio also covers stories which don’t necessarily get attention from other more traditional media sources. It allows long-form journalism, so you can have discussions and debates on air about issues which don’t or can’t necessarily be covered by something like the Charlatan or the Leveller. For example, having debates between campus representatives of political clubs. Having a variety of views and having access to anybody – be it if they want to cover news, entertainment, sports – is a valuable service that’s provided to the community.
KW: With paper readership dwindling, do you believe more and more people will turn to alternative media like radio and television?
CH: One of the problems with distribution right now is not the issue of readership but the issue of advertising. People are getting involved with media in lots of ways and are reading the news. It’s not necessarily a problem caused by newspapers no longer being good, but a result of advertising falling through. Larger companies, less likely to advertise, have put newspapers in bad financial situations. Newspapers suffering from financial problems means the cutting of newsrooms and material. People then don’t want to read the crappier products anymore. The financial problems are not caused by the readership so much as the other way around.
DT: People are turning away from major daily papers and turning toward community papers, more locally-based papers, which speak to them on some other level than being in Ottawa or being Canadian. People are looking more to the local than something of a broader, more universal sense. There are great advantages and terrible disadvantages to that. There is a disengagement from a wider sense of identity, but there are more and more neighbourhood or independent papers popping up. There’s a shift in the way people consume media, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or blogging, with a movement towards more personal, more local, more community-based media.
AC: Radio is dying out as a traditional medium as we know it. Most of our generation recognize that with having an iPod or the Internet, there can be ways that the traditional idea of a radio station serving as a community bridge can continue to exist. Broadcast as a news form continues to be consumed. It’s just the manner in which people do so is different. Instead of a radio or an antenna, it will be through podcasts or listening to Internet radio. Broadcast media is more accessible now. Campus radio stations or some guy in his basement making podcasts will have equal ability to access the market, whereas before you needed millions of dollars to buy a transmitter.
You also have a blurring of the line between what’s traditional journalism and what’s activism. There are so many different blogs that anybody can essentially call themselves a journalist. One of best ways to cover the OC Transpo strike was the Public Transit in Ottawa blog, which provided quicker updates than traditional media outlets. While they’re not making money, they are becoming a quicker access to news.
KW: Do you think traditional and major newspapers can win back the audiences they had before?
CH: With a lot of advances in technology, it’s very easy to get information. You don’t have the monopoly of one newspaper. It’s not like The Ottawa Citizen’s our only avenue now. We have so many avenues and it’s so easy to get other expressions that the old business model is falling away. It’s not going to survive.
AC: Quality will always sell. Large-scale newspapers, like The Economist, which has retainably had high-quality editorials, will continue to have a place because people will want to have that insight – that high-quality journalism. The community newspaper scene too will have a place to report on events. The problem is that middle ground, where we’ll see the largest change. The niche previously served by mid-sized papers in smaller cities like Peterborough or Kingston disappears. On one hand, community media can cover it, and on the other hand, large-scale media can cover it. Since people can go on the Internet and pick their unique show from across the world, the niche of those middle-sized radio stations is rapidly disappearing and they won’t be able to recapture it.
KW: Given the nature of newspaper businesses today, do you think the standards of journalism could change – the issue, for example, of having a mere 100 words per story?
CH: It’s one of the disturbing things that the CBC is cutting so much of their local coverage. The fact that local coverage is one of the first things to go is definitely bad because it leads to a black hole of information. You’ve got to cover national news, but those stories are being covered somewhere else too. The Charlatan always tries to cover local stuff. We try to make our stories relevant to Carleton students – to find a Carleton angle in what we’re covering. Occasional times this year, people have asked us why the Charlatan doesn’t do more international coverage. We don’t see that as part of our mandate, because we can’t do international coverage along with the Globe and Mail or The New York Times. We tend to give preference in our editorials to ones that directly impact Carleton students.
DT: People want to read more personalized news, so we see a shift away from hard news stories and international bureaus. Ten years ago, there wouldn’t be a column like Leah McLaren’s or Russell Smith’s in the Globe and Mail – personality columns marketing to different people. It’s hard to speak to people from a depersonalized, universal viewpoint. It’s much easier to speak from an embodied, specific viewpoint.
AC: We’ve seen the rise of papers like Metro and 24 which provide news, but certainly no one’s going to argue that they provide deep, insightful journalistic content. That’s a reflection of the switch to the Internet, especially with blogging. People can put up 50-word posts immediately. There’s a huge decline in long-form journalism with informative, analytical information. That’s where something like CKCU comes in, where you can have people conduct longer interviews and look at issues at great depth. As anecdotal experience, people often ask how short do you want us to keep our answers, and we tell them to keep going if they have something interesting to say – we’ll air 20 minutes of good content. Today people want the sound bite, be it in politics or music, and that’s it. Shortening people’s attention span is definitely a problem.
KW: How do you think news outlets can get the youth interested in the news?
CH: I slightly disparage and worry about this generation of The Onion and The Daily Show, which, while a great way to engage people, if that’s your only way of finding out about the news, it’s fairly disturbing.
Community organizations like ours should work towards getting people more engaged and involved, making them feel connected to the news coverage. The old idea is that news is whatever the editor decides smoking in his room. Instead of just telling a report, journalists in this day and age should find out what the readers want to know about.
DT: The popularity of Jon Stewart’s show tells you about the weakness of the major media. It’s much more engaging to hear Stewart talk about what’s going on in the White House than to watch CNN. Not necessarily the humour or satirical element, but the outsider attitude is what the media needs to take on. Rather than having people who intimately know the members of the Bush cabinet and write lengthy stories in the Globe and Mail which presume we know who these people are, it’s important to explain why the stories matter in order to engage people. What The Onion and The Daily Show have done is point out that you can tell stories without knowing the names of people to get the general gist.
Adam Coombs
Adam is a fourth-year history major at Carleton. He currently co-hosts the Tuesday Morning Special Blend on CKCU from 7-9am. As well, he recently finished his two-year term as student representative on the CKCU Board of Directors.
David Tough
David is a third-year PhD student in history, specializing in Canadian political history. He got involved with the Leveller because he thought there was a place at Carleton and in Ottawa for a left newspaper covering local and international current events and local culture, with a generous helping of commentary and editorializing – and enough other people felt the same way to make it happen.