Innovation grants awarded to RSJ faculty

Five research development grants of up to $10,000 each from the RSJ Innovation Fund and the Ryerson Journalism Research Centre are being awarded to journalism faculty members working on innovative projects. The funding stems from the Digital News Innovation Challenge (DNIC).

Applicants had to provide a plan for their project which included a budget and timeline, and a backgrounder of where their project is at and what other sources of funding they’ve received.

They will receive the second half of their funding after providing an interim report, and must also submit a final report after 18 months since receiving the initial funds.

“Among these few projects is a real range of diversity in terms of approaches to journalism and approaches to innovation,” says Joyce Smith, adjudicator of the assessment committee.

The projects were reviewed and selected in March by Smith, RSJ instructor April Lindgren, RSJ chair Janice Neil and FCAD associate dean Charles Davis. 

“The industry is shifting so rapidly and traditional models of thinking about journalism are not what's going to take us into the next phase,” says Asmaa Malik, innovation lead for the RSJ. “Even now with what's going on with COVID-19, and how journalists have adapted and changed how they practice their craft… all of that stuff is really changing.”

Several of these projects will be using the fund to hire Ryerson students. Lisa Taylor, who has been working with journalism students headed into their third year, says that the collaboration is “fantastic.”

“It's really fun to introduce students to this kind of more academic side of journalistic research,” she says.

Read more to learn about these five projects:

Spatial audio project for immersive journalism

Recipient: Adrian Ma

Ma will be exploring the use of 360-degree audio recording equipment to expand his work in creating virtual reality storytelling experiences. In recent years Ma led the incorporation of 360-degree video into the school’s curriculum, including the Hong Kong 360 projects in 2018 and 2019, which has resulted in award-winning work.

“But we're really just scratching the surface of immersive storytelling and spatial audio is a vital aspect of that,” says Ma. “This grant will help us bolster our resources and knowledge in this area and hopefully we can take our content to new levels.”

“The money will be used to purchase spatial audio recording equipment to learn how to bring more realistic and immersive sonic experiences to our 360/VR documentary content. A major part of this research will also involve exploring whether enhanced audio has the potential to make podcasts or audio storytelling more engaging for users.” 

Ma hopes to soon hire on student research assistants to experiment and practise with the equipment, and will be collaborating with RSJ’s audio news media production specialist Angela Glover.

“We can ship them gear and get them set up with remote editing stations,” he says, in light of changes due to COVID-19. “We're also interested in running some studies that will measure listener reaction to spatial versus conventional stereo audio, which could theoretically be run without needing anyone to meet face-to-face.”

Self-reporting tool for Canadian newsrooms

Recipient: Asmaa Malik

Asmaa Malik and Sonya Fatah are developing a survey tool that can be used by newsrooms to self-report on their diversity (external link) .

Their goal is to create a way for Canadian newsrooms to become more accountable in reflecting their demographics. The money will go towards developing the tool with a partner organization and hiring research assistants to collect data from newsrooms.

Malik says that while it is obvious that newsrooms are not as diverse as the actual Canadian population, data is not clearcut. 

“Unless we have actual statistics, and unless newsrooms actually take the time to reflect upon their demographics, we're never going to move the needle if we don't really have accountability,” she says.

Their first study involved pulling data on columnists and how they described themselves in terms of race and gender while at the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and the National Post  over the past 20 years. It showed that the significant demographic shift seen between 1998 and 2018 in the Canadian population was not reflected among the columnists.

Now, they want to examine Canadian newsrooms. Voices from certain segments of the population are missing, and that will only continue as many newsrooms shrink.

“it's important because right now there is no way for Canadian newsrooms to consistently, across the board, report on their demographics,” Malik says. “To solve a problem, you have to see it. I think that’s important in order for this industry to be more diverse, to better reflect the stories that are important to a broader section of Canadian audiences.”

JeRI

Recipient: Gavin Adamson

The JeRI project (external link)  (Journalism Representation Index), was started by Gavin Adamson and Asmaa Malik three years ago. The idea of the software is to identify and categorize sources quoted in articles to determine how balanced the reporting is. 

“It would score the journalism based on the number of sources and the frequency of sources and the kinds of sources that are contained in textual journalism,” says Adamson.

The team works alongside Professor Eric Harley and research assistant Paul Tam from Ryerson’s computer science department. With the money, they will be furthering their resources in developing the project, including hiring an additional graduate computer science student and a journalism teaching assistant to set up the index.

They are working on developing the software so that they can attract a larger partner and fast-track development.

“We think that the challenge around sourcing and journalism is that we tend to rely too much on authorities like police and politicians,” says Adamson. “And we don't tend to rely as much on citizens, activists and experts.”

The software would be able to look at multiple articles related to a topic and distinguish which ones quote authoritative figures more than those who may be at the heart of the story.

Adamson brings up the example of racism and carding.

“The software would be developed in such a way that it would score articles that tend to quote… people who are affected by carding and racism, and experts who know about the effect that it can have on people, as opposed to police and politicians who really just have agendas push,” he says.

Journalist Role Performance Project

Recipient: Lisa Taylor 

Canadian researchers on the Journalist Role Performance Project Lisa Taylor, Nicole Blanchett and Colette Brin are collecting and examining data of journalistic content and comparing it to how journalists perceive their role. With the innovation fund, they have hired two journalism students to do the labour-intensive task of capturing and coding the data.

“We need to understand what journalists really do, not what they say they do, but what they really do,” says Taylor. “We can all talk about how we do our jobs, but that's not as revealing as how we actually do our jobs.”

The data, which they started collecting in January, will yield information for many study topics, including COVID-19 coverage. Once every four weeks, stories are collected from each of Canada’s major news outlets. By the end, they will have collected thousands of column inches of content.

This is the second round of data collecting for the JRP’s international team of investigators (external link) , but the first year that Canada has been involved. 

Taylor says that journalists often hold themselves to a creed.

“But when you start to compare that to the actual work journalists are doing, you may find that they are beholden to other people, especially their employers because of the precariousness of work, for example,” she says. “it's a great human question — do our values and our actions align?” 

Stitched!: Live performance journalism

Recipient: Sonya Fatah

Fatah will be continuing her research on live performance journalism through her stiched! (external link)  project.

Within FCAD’s Catalyst lab space, she hopes to find ways to incorporate this form into the journalism curriculum. Previously, she has introduced the concept within FCAD’s Global Campus Studio Supercourses. 

Live journalism involves sharing a piece of journalism with a live audience. The format varies — it could be read out loud and integrated with immersive aspects including visuals and objects. 

“We are really interested in understanding various different editorial and production practices that these new media companies have created and my goal is to come up with some kind of a tool or a handbook,” says Fatah.

The concept was brought to life in 2009 by Pop-Up Magazine (external link)  in San Francisco, and other production offshoots have formed since. According to Fatah, the journalism industry was collapsing in California at the time, leading a group of journalists to consider how they could revive the practice of journalism while taking advantage of nearby Hollywood talent.

One of Pop-Up’s past productions, Ghost Flower, is a piece about a scientist bringing an extinct flower back to life. Audience members were given a sample of the flower so that they could touch and smell it. 

Because of COVID-19, Fatah is amending her research plans. Originally she was going to travel to Italy for a production in March, but is now conducting interviews virtually. She is interested in seeing how the organizations come up with innovative new ways to present their work following distancing measures and how live journalism will affect how news is consumed in the future.

“This gives an opportunity to find new ways of engagement and look at them as opportunities to create community among people, rather than something (that is) different from journalism,” says Fatah.

Adam Chen (MJ ’19) is also working on the project. He did his master’s thesis on the topic and has started forming his own live journalism company, Talk Media, within the Social Ventures Zone and the Transmedia Zone at Ryerson.

“I think that journalism students should come to journalism school to experiment and try new models,” says Fatah. “Of course they’re to be schooled in the basics of journalism, but I think part of it is also thinking about new ideas and identifying gaps.”