“On my Desk” by John Fraser
The administration of the new National NewsMedia Council has now been operating since last September, but officially only since mid-November when we were finally incorporated. On January 1st of this year, Pat Perkel signed on as Executive Director. In addition to Pat and myself as CEO, we have had access to some part-time assistance, especially when we get ready for council meetings, or as we try to develop communication strategies for hooking up a national network of council members (more easily said than done, as it turns out).
Essentially, however, we are a two-person operation with easy access to 15 outstanding council members stretched out between Vancouver Island and St. John’s Newfoundland. For the moment, Pat and I like to think of ourselves as a “forest and trees” team: I’m forest and she’s trees. In other words, I am focussing on presenting the NNC to as wide a community as possible, from the principal publications in the country to the smaller regional weeklies. Other aspects of the assignment include enticing non-members to join, rallying waverers in a world where newspapers are experiencing the greatest challenges in their history, and also representing the new NNC at media gatherings and symposia. On a less cosmic scale, I also have to go after members who are late paying their quarterly statements! I also answer a lot of calls about subscription woes, but more on that elsewhere in this newsletter.
Pat and I both deal with complaints as they come in over the telephone or, more often, via website. It won’t surprise anyone to learn that we get very few formal complaints by post-office mail, although that remains an option and is used still. Pat deals with the practical chores of getting legitimate complaints properly understood and notated for ultimate consideration by council members. We also regularly consult our chair, the Hon. Frances Lankin, and the vice chairs – Miller Ayre in Newfoundland and Shelley Chrest in British Columbia – as well as other council members on our emerging policy initiatives.
So we are still very much a work in progress as the first-ever national media council, and getting our policies into sensible and coherent form is crucial. This consultative process will come to an important juncture at our next council meeting on June 2nd when we will be seeking approval from council members for these working policies. The preparation for all this is almost completed and a number of key council members have been incredibly helpful, especially Shelley Chrest, Tim Shoults, George Thompson and Joanne De Laurentiis.
At the same time, we have to keep trying to expand our base into the magazine world and especially the digital universe. There are special challenges with the digitals. First of all, they expand like topsy, but they also come and go. Some of the most successful are now dealing with the sorts of challenges the “legacy media” has always had to deal with, and I will just cite Vice Media’s problems in protecting and defending their journalist from RCMP demands to turn over his confidential interview records as one example. Vice hasn’t yet signed up to the NNC but we are supporting their fight with other journalistic institutions and it is our educated hope that they will soon become members of the NNC.
As we see it, the digital news media are gradually learning the importance of using the NNC as a standard bearer for ethical journalism. Part of my job is to keep plugging away at this particular rock-face. We can point to practical help lent to digital members, as -- to cite one recent example --we are doing with a fine outfit like Queen’s Park Today which has been having trouble being accepted by the Ontario legislature press gallery. We are close to signing up quite a few of the digitals, but there remain suspicions out there that we are somehow “the enemy”. We are embracing the patience of Job in trying to explain ourselves as allies rather than adversaries.
We have also taken part in joint exercises with the Canadian Journalism Foundation, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Newspapers Canada and Canadian Journalists for Human Rights and will look to ally ourselves with other organizations that form community with the best in Canadian journalism. Shortly, I will be travelling to Edmonton to take part in Newspapers Canada’s National Conference being held there.
At the heart of our endeavours, however, is a fine council of 15 members, eight of whom are public members and seven from the industry. Our chair is the Hon. Frances Lankin, the former chair of the old Ontario Press Council. She shares supervisory and adjudication responsibility with her two vice-chairs, Shelley Chrest, the former chair of the British Columbia Press Council, and Miller Ayre, the former chair of the Atlantic Canada Press Council. Frances has just been appointed to the Senate of Canada with the small cohort of other independent senators. We are very proud of her and pleased she has agreed to stay on as our chair.
CEO John Fraser
