Over the past two months, the has NNC received more than 50 complaints, and dozens more phone calls, from people who expressed their concerns about a front-page layout of an August 26th edition of the Toronto Star. Readers were incensed over the front-page presentation of a story featuring strongly-worded tweets about people who chose not to get the COVID vaccine. The front-page tweets were, in many readers’ words, “divisive and hateful.” That day’s edition of the Toronto Star featured an …

Rachel Watts, a fourth-year undergraduate journalism student at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, has been selected as the recipient of this year’s Fraser MacDougall Prize for Best New Canadian Voice in Human Rights Reporting for her story Pandemic intensifies silent sorrow of Canada’s asylum seekers, published in Capital Current.  This year’s judges agreed Watts’ story was thorough and eloquently written. The story’s compelling focus on chronicling the challenges asylum seekers face, even after overcoming horrific challenges in their …

How many perspectives should be included in a brief news piece? When are letters considered an appropriate remedy to showing another side of an issue? These are questions that reporters and editors face every day as they exercise their editorial judgment to determine the angle of the story, the people interviewed, and the evidence used to provide an accurate account of events for readers. The National NewsMedia Council recently reviewed a reader’s concerns about accuracy and lack of opportunity to …