There is a lot of news being produced in Edmonton. Even with continual cuts to our many newsrooms.
In an effort to push through the ongoing flow of links in your social media streams, we’ll be trying to stay on top of as much local news as we can and present you with daily (Monday-Friday) lists of stories we think are important and interesting.
There are a few reasons we think this is helpful.
There’s too much stuff!
If you follow more than a few hundred people on Twitter and have a couple hundred Facebook friends and then even occasionally head to local news websites, you know there’s too much to pay attention to. This is definitely a positive/negative of our digitally connected world. We can literally see everything being produced right now but there’s nowhere near enough time to consume it all.
If you check out our Headlines posts, you’ll see curation of some of Edmonton’s news for you. The list of stories won’t include everything produced on a given day, and we’ll probably miss a story or two you might find interesting, but we think a little human touch might help keep a few more folks on top of what’s going on in their city.
What’s news?
We also hope to bring a little bit of media literacy to our regular gathering of Edmonton stories. It’s becoming more obvious that knowing how journalism is being produced could be helpful to combat the growth of partisan media and “fake news”. Journalists are people and “showing their work” could be beneficial to the audience wondering about objectivity, partisanship and why something is news.
Folks behind Edmonton Quotient have journalism and media backgrounds and can explain why a certain story is or isn’t getting all the attention from the city’s newsrooms. In cases we’re not sure, or we really want to hear the story of how something got covered, we’ll also reach out to local reporters, editors and producers.
It’s not all good news
There’s certainly no glee in the idea that we have to call out other media organizations. But, this too, seems more important today, as media literacy is not taught to enough people and, we can admit it, there’s too much to do in a newsroom and sometimes the easiest path to churn out stories and pump social media makes for mistakes.
Everyone working in journalism also needs to do better. And break through privilege(s). We’ll always try to hold ourselves to a high standard, ready and willing for you to challenge us when we fail or stumble, and we will make sure it’s clear when we see local news is deliberately or mistakenly letting down our community, or groups of people that need their voices heard. In these instances, too, we’ll ask local reporters, editors and producers what happened.
Some of our influences for a regular look at local news include the edmontonian’s Headlines, Halifax Examiner’s Morning File and media criticism from Canadaland.
Just to give you a sense of where we’re looking, here’s a list of most of what we’re paying attention to:
Edmonton Journal/Sun/Examiner – Newspapers owned by Postmedia, shared newsrooms
CBC Edmonton – Edmonton and Northern Alberta CBC office
Metro Edmonton – Daily commuter paper owned by Toronto Star Corp.
CTV Edmonton – TV station owned by Bell Media
Global Edmonton/630 CHED/iNews880 – TV/radio owned by Corus Entertainment, some shared news
Vue Weekly – Independent alt-weekly news-magazine
The Yards – Independent quarterly magazine focused on downtown and Oliver neighbourhoods
Taproot Edmonton – Independent news website
Alberta Views – Independent monthly magazine
Alberta Venture – Independent business magazine
Avenue Edmonton – Alberta based lifestyle magazine
Alberta Native News – Independent monthly newspaper focused on Aboriginal issues
The Gateway – The University of Alberta’s student newspaper
We’ll also keep an eye on our social media streams for other Edmonton news! Please let us know if there’s a good source we didn’t mention or we don’t know about yet.