Every year, I speak to winners of Concordia’s journalism school awards as they’re presented at the Montreal Gazette offices. Today, the 2016 winner of the Susan Carson bursary, Emilee Gilpin.

Emilee Gilpin, shortly after receiving her award in 2016.

Emilee Gilpin’s face has been hidden inside one of my browser tabs for almost two years now, as a reminder that I should write these bloody interviews up. Concordia’s website did a brief article about the 2016 award winners, and she was one of the winners quoted.

So, one browser tab closed, 25 more to go. Anyway, how can I make this blog post more about me?

OK, fine, let’s talk about Emilee. She’s 27 (or 25 when she won the award), she’s from London, Ontario, and she has an undergrad degree in philosophy and Spanish from McMaster University. She mentions off the bat her love of travelling, including teaching English as a second language in China before doing Concordia’s journalism diploma program.

As you can see from her answers below, she’s one of those activist journalists that white guys get so riled up about, focusing particularly on Indigenous issues. Susan Carson, the Gazette journalist after whom the award she received was named, was similar in her own way, seeking out stories of injustice and shining a light on them in the hope that doing so would spark change.

Here’s what Gilpin had to say when I caught up with her by email.

Why did you decide to study journalism?

I saw a few documentaries featuring some badass investigative journalists and I saw myself in them. I have a passion for justice and a strong intolerance for injustice and I believe in doing what we can during our cycle on earth to nurture positive change. One of the important roles of a journalist is holding truth to power and I liked that. I also noticed a gap in coverage of Indigenous communities in Canada, and wanted to see what I could do to help fill it in a good way.

What does journalism mean to you?

There have always been forms of journalism — news sharing, story-telling — they are ancient practices. When settlers first arrived, communities had scouts to inform them on information, there were runners between communities and nations, stories shared in potlatches and law lodges. Western journalism was built to protect democracy, so it involves holding truth to power, but it is also an institution and a corporation, created by white men, so it is also full of space for adaptation and diversification. Journalism for me means sharing stories in a good way — fleshing out the black and white, including all voices, being accountable to those whose stories we share, building relationships to ensure trust and accountability, being on the front lives of important events, documenting history and more.

What kind of journalism would you like to do?

I work now for National Observer, leading a series ‘First Nations Forward,’ emphasizing stories of success and sovereignty of First Nations in B.C. I’d like to continue to write about stories that have been historically made invisible or misrepresented, to diversify out media coverage and tell a more wholesome and accurate picture.

I give workshops on decolonizing or indigenizing journalism, but it really involves basic anti-oppressive techniques to ensure a level of ethical behaviour and accountability in our relationships and professional duties. It involves learning about and including historical and cultural contextualization of events, fact-checking and culture-checking, being accountable and objective, addressing assumptions, stereotypes and internalized racism, and some.

What have you been up to since receiving your award?

After graduating from Concordia, I received Journalists for Human Rights’ ‘Emerging Indigenous Journalist’ internship, with the Tyee in Vancouver. After that internship, I was hired by National Observer to lead their ‘First Nations Forward’ series. I have been working full-time with National Observer since.

How can people follow your work?

You can see my work with National Observer here, work with the Tyee here, and my personal website here.

Also, feel free to follow me on Twitter and Instagram: emileeguevara

Every year, I speak to winners of Concordia’s journalism school awards as they’re presented at the Montreal Gazette offices. Today, the 2016 winner of the Lewis Harris award, Meagan Boisse.

Meagan Boisse (courtesy of Meagan Boisse)

I haven’t met Meagan (we communicated over email), and I don’t have any cool anecdotes or insights to share to open this up. So we’ll just get right into it. Boisse is 27, from Châteauguay, and studied cinema, video and communications at Dawson College before doing an undergrad in journalism at Concordia. Her bylines have appeared in Reader’s Digest Canada, Montreal Families, the National Post, and particularly Concordia’s own website.

Why did you decide to study journalism?

It seemed like a natural fit. I’m a curious person and have always loved to meeting new people, exploring new places and storytelling.

Beyond that, I was very interested in media studies. As Marshall McLuhan once stated “the medium is the message”; each new form of information technology carries its own social discourse. Studying multimedia journalism seemed like a way to delve into how different media forms work with the public and what their specific abilities are in conveying a message.

What does journalism mean to you?

For me journalism an important filter that separates fiction from truth, it is a voice for those that need to he heard and a manner for people to engage and better understand the world in which they live.

What kind of journalism would you like to do?

Narrative journalism, it’s what I like to read and what I hope to write. Well done long-form, narrative journalism has a literary quality that if done properly can be more fascinating than fiction.

What other interests do you have that you think you can apply to a career in journalism or a related field?

I enjoy design and photography. I like to fuss over details, and as visuals can be a big part of story telling an interest in aesthetics can only bolster one’s work as a journalist.

How do you see the future of journalism?

I know there’s this idea out there that journalism is dying, that it cannot sustain itself in the digital age. However, I believe robust, reliable journalism is something people will always seek out, something that has an intrinsic value that carries across borders, generations and political spheres. I think journalism will survive the death of its institutions. What will it look like in fifty years? I don’t know, but I’m certain good, honest journalism will always be around.

What have you been up to since receiving your award?

Since I received my award I’ve finished my undergraduate degree, was an editorial intern for Reader’s Digest Canada and began working for Concordia’s newsdesk on a full-time basis. Over the last year I managed X Explained, Concordia’s own how-to video series. I also wrote weekly student-advice articles for my namesake column, ‘Ask Meagan’, which appeared on the university’s official app.

This past August, I moved to Berlin. I hope to begin writing for local publications here!

How can people follow your work?

Check out my website: meaganboisse.com

Every year, I speak to winners of Concordia’s journalism school awards as they’re presented at the Montreal Gazette offices. Today, this year’s winner of the Susan Carson award, Lissa Albert.

Lissa Albert

It’s not unusual in the journalism graduate diploma program to have one student who’s noticeably older and more educated than the rest, but it’s usually someone in their 30s, not 50s.

“Everyone was out of their undergrad and I’m like the grandmother,” Lissa Albert told me before letting out a laugh. “It was a little intimidating because I was like ‘do I have to prove myself?’ I’m always aware of how I stand out in terms of not being the typical graduate diploma student, but my classmates have been really amazing, they’re a lot of fun and they’ve made me one of the gang.”

Albert has a lot of history, and she likes to talk. So our conversation after the awards ceremony in October lasted 33 minutes, or a little bit less than the four others combined. The 56-year-old Montreal native studied early childhood education and sociology, then took time off to raise her children before returning to school to get a masters in education technology.

If she was younger, she could easily be described as a keener. A more appropriate descriptor would probably be driven.

“I’m not the kind of person to just sit at home and do lunch,” she said. “I need to do something more. I went into ed tech not knowing where exactly it was going to lead, just knowing that I needed to feel productive, get that kind of intellectual stimulation, and I ended up just adoring everything that I did, coming away with a mission in life, which is cyberbullying education.”

Her path to this mission is an interesting one.

“I started in sociology, and in my last assignment, I was actually going into prison rehabilitation because I started writing to a man in prison when I was 16 years old. He was at that time, he thought, the only Jewish prisoner in the entire state of Georgia. And so my teacher had a Jewish pen pal club, I said ‘I’m in.’ This guy, I started writing to him, because I wanted to write the great Canadian novel, and I wanted it to take place in prison, and I thought I’d get some information. We became friends, I’m still in touch with him now. He’s out, he’s on parole, he’s happily married.”

The interview is edited down for clarity and length. All the above I got from just asking her for her name, age and previous degrees.

What got you into journalism?

I have been very involved in world events as a consumer of news. And I have found that the most frustrating thing — because I’m old enough to remember Dan Rather, not so much Walter Cronkite but Dan Rather — is how the news used to be the facts. And now I don’t believe we are getting straight news.

So I’ve been talking for at least five years that there’s a thesis in my head about media bias. And when I decided I was going to go back to school, I found Digital Innovation in Journalism Studies, and I said ‘okay this could lead me to writing that thesis, working on the research that it takes to not change the world but perhaps start turning news back into those five Ws. I think that it’s really been diluted, technology has diluted it, everybody has a blog and not everybody realizes that a blog is not always straight news, there are those that are, but opinion is not news.

Pew Research recently did a study where they found something like 14% of people can tell the difference between news and opinion (it was actually a bit better than that), and this is a problem because there’s so much news out there. So I started to look into the program, so when I called Mircea [Mandache, the Graduate Program Assistant at Concordia’s journalism department] to see if I could get into the program, if it was too late to apply, and he said don’t worry about it and if you’re interested you could do the graduate diploma and switch to the masters program after a year, and I thought ‘okay if I’m going to study the field it would be good to have more than a consumer-level knowledge of what the field entails,’ and this behind-the-scenes stuff is just mind-blowing. It will help me in the thesis. Realizing that there are so many different forms of journalism that I can do. I can tell a story, I can raise awareness of something. I can do features. We’ve had all these exercises.

I’m not bored anymore, that’s for sure.

So once you finish the master’s degree, what do you see yourself doing afterwards?

Whatever the world brings me. I’d love to be able to write. Visual journalism wasn’t my thing, but radio was fun, because I can talk if you haven’t gotten that yet. But I would love to write, I would love to use the words that I know how to use and touch people, just touch their lives in some way, whether that’s to inform them, or inspire them, or educate. When I talk to undergrad student teachers, and this is not hyperbole, but if you know even a fundamental knowledge to recognize when a student is being bullied, you can literally save a person’s life. It’s one of my missions. But anything that I can find, Freelancing or getting a job as a writer.

News is supposed to be hard facts, but it’s not because emotions come into it. And I can tap into that, so I hope to freelance, I hope to write, and I hope to use all of the knowledge I have on cyberbullying, how important it is that it become a topic, a water-cooler topic that we don’t talk about just when a kid kills himself, but something that we need to recognize as a problem and an epidemic in our society and possibly do something bigger, a book, a series of articles, a feature, a column, whatever I can, I just want to use my words for good.

How did the interest in cyberbullying start?

Wow. When you go back after a certain amount of years not being in school and you go back to a field you can be employed in, it’s better to do an internship than a thesis, because there’s ageism in the workplace, and if you go back into the workplace as an intern then you can get your feet wet. So I was looking for an internship and based on a project that was happening at Concordia where they were collecting life stories of victims of genocide, I hoped to make that an internship and that did not work.

One day, driving to pick up my kids at day camp, and Trudie Mason was on CJAD talking about cyberbullying and she was talking about how kids know what they’re doing when they’re cyberbullying other kids and I said, because I had just done a project in ed tech, a website about emotional abuse awareness. People don’t realize that it almost goes deeper than physical abuse. And I picked up the phone and said bullying and cyberbullying and — having been bullied from the age of five to the age of 17, same guy, lived across the street, every day on the way to school and the way back, in school — I said it’s a form of emotional abuse, so while kids know what they’re doing, they don’t know the impact is on the person on the other side of the screen. They don’t know what they’re doing, they know how they’re doing it but they don’t know what the impact is.

She debated with me, and I thought I gotta look into this. It wasn’t yet a household word, it was not yet a trend, it was something that was starting to become more prevalent. I went to the internship coordinator, and I said I can do cyberbullying, I can talk about emotional abuse of kids.

This was something that I had to do. It was a mission. It needed publicity. It needed to be a word that people talked about, and it needed to be something people took very seriously.

How do you see the future of journalism?

I hope — okay, can I do this without insulting the people I want to work for? The future of journalism to me is giving people the ability to take the facts as they are and make up their own minds rather than being told what they should be thinking or feeling. I’m hoping that the future of journalism is where the audience is given the credit to make up their own minds.

Are you optimistic about journalism as a business model?

I am, because of all of the different ways in which — you can be a journalist in Montreal and freelance for somewhere in Australia. I think that I have the ability and I have the drive to get out there and look for something that will make it meaningful for me. I really hope to be able to get my word out there, and definitely going to apply here (at the Gazette), it’s like my Mecca. I wouldn’t have come into this program if I didn’t think I could do something. I don’t get a degree to hang it on the wall.

How can people follow your work?

My journalist perspective started off when I was writing about the Habs so I have to actually change my handle — @lissahabswriter — I would rather it not say “Habs writer” because I’m a lot more than that.

(She’s now at @lissajournalism, but you can read her archived stories about the Canadiens on AllAboutTheHabs.ca)

If you’re a journalism student, this is your last chance to be like Lissa and apply for the Montreal Gazette summer internship if you haven’t already. The deadline is TODAY at 5pm.

Every year, I speak to winners of Concordia’s journalism school awards as they’re presented at the Montreal Gazette offices. Today, this year’s winner of the Philip Fisher bursary, Aviva Lessard.

Aviva Lessard

Normally at the bottom of these things I try to plug a Twitter account or website or Instagram or something so people can follow these aspiring journalists’ careers. But Aviva Lessard gave me a bit of an embarrassed shrug because she hasn’t set up an online presence for herself yet. She’s promised to get working on that. She asked what form (Twitter, Facebook, website) that should take, and I noted that the younguns these days do the Instagramming more than Twitter, but really the more the merrier as far as social platforms.

(UPDATE: She’s since fixed that. See below.)

In the meantime, you can read her articles at The Concordian, or this documentary she did about waste management in Victoria, or this project that tells the story of the Oka crisis through a series of maps.

Lessard was an anthropology student at the University of Victoria, but grew up in Montreal. While at UVic she held jobs including production coordinator at its radio station CFUV. Among her functions there was to edit this podcast for use on the radio at CFUV and other campus and community radio stations. She’s not sure if I’ve ever heard of it. It’s called “Canadaland.”

Something about media, I think.

Continue reading →

Every year, I speak to winners of Concordia’s journalism school awards as they’re presented at the Montreal Gazette offices. Today, this year’s winner of the Enn Raudsepp award, Amanda Henderson Jones.

Amanda Henderson Jones

I know what you’re thinking. She looks like her name is Amanda Jones and she’s a sorority girl who gives beauty tips on her own YouTube channel. And … okay, that’s true, BUT she also has a degree in criminology and is planning to go to law school.

The 22-year-old from Barrie (actually Midhurst, Ont., a suburb just north of it), Jones studied criminology and sociology at Western University (you know, that geographically-challenged university that used to be called the University of Western Ontario even though it’s not in western Ontario).

She’s not trying to be pretentious with the triple name, but just try Googling “Amanda Jones” and there’s a sea of them, from “America’s favorite dog photographer” to a 19th-century inventor to Miss USA 1973 to a Kansas insurance agent to a Scottish lawyer to a San Francisco writer/photographer to an actress to a different actress to a New Zealand public health researcher to a Texas painter to a Seattle medical educator to a Missouri mom of a missing girl to a British racing cyclist to a University of Waterloo PhD candidate to a Rolling Stones song (and a Lea Thompson character from an 80s movie it was used in). And that’s just a couple of pages of Google results. I could go on for a while here.

“To not be one of the million Amanda Joneses, all my work I’ve gone under Amanda Henderson Jones,” the Amanda Jones I talked to said. “It’s my mom’s maiden name.”

What got you into journalism?

I always liked writing. When I was in high school I took a journalism course, honestly because my debate coach was the teacher and you’re supposed to be doing debate work during the course, but I ended up really loving it. She gave me a lot of freedom when it came to the type of work I was doing — pure journalism but a lot of parody writing and comedic writing and things that I loved.

So I ended up applying to Carleton journalism on a whim; it was the school I wanted to go to the most in my undergrad. I got in with a very big scholarship and my father suggested I go to business school instead. So I went to business school! I went to Western, I was originally in the Ivey Business School. It was a program that you were supposed to start your third year and when it came to the third year I was like ‘I don’t want to do this.’

To backtrack a little bit, after doing economics, accounting, all numbers, I was missing a creative outlet. So at the end of first year I decided to apply for Her Campus [a website for “for the empowered college woman”], the Western chapter, where I started as just a general writer. I really, really loved it. So that year, my second year, I became a chapter adviser for Her Campus. which is where you oversee seven chapters and advise them on writing and day-to-day and sort of be their connection between Her Campus chapter and national, and at the end of the year I was elected editor in chief for their chapter. And then around the same time I had been following this blog called Total Sorority Move since I was in high school, writing all these parodies. I decided, again on a whim, I always loved this site, let’s apply for a job. I ended up getting the job and was a staff writer for two years at TSM, where I did a lot of comedic writing, which is — I mean, I love journalism, but my true love is comedic writing and being funny and different.

Not to continue to say my CV, but around the same time I left the Western chapter and moved to the national chapter of Her Campus, where I was a style and beauty writer as well as a national intern, and it sort of got to the point in my undergrad — because my undergrad is in criminology and sociology — it really got to the point that just 90% of my time was journalism. So I decided to apply to Concordia. This program seemed amazing, and I’ve put so many years into journalism and wanted to study journalism for such a long time that [I thought] I should just do it. And so that’s kind of what made me do it, was just years of all these different types of writing that I was like I should really give it a shot and if I don’t study it now, when am I gonna study it?

What kind of journalism do you see yourself doing?

So I am hoping to go to law school after this, and ideally I would like to be doing some sort of legal reporting, that feeds my major in criminology into it, which really interests me. Now I basically just work all day and then go home and watch crime shows, so if I could just merge the two that would be cool.

Where did the interest in criminology come from?

I wish I knew. I really wish I knew. I’m absolutely fascinated by it. I’m always afraid I’m going to scare people off when they enter my apartment because I just have a bookshelf full of books on serial killers and crime, and my Netflix history knows me very well, I don’t think it suggests a single thing that isn’t murder. My parents are worried about me (laughs). It’s just a real interest of mine and I’m really glad I got to study it in university.

What medium would you see yourself working in?

Definitely writing. As much as I love doing the radio, the broadcast, I love just putting pen to paper.

Do you see yourself doing stories on a daily basis or more magazine writing?

I don’t really know. I think beat reporting interests me when I’m young, but I don’t know if I’d want to carry that on when I’m 40, so I think that whatever happens happens. I’d obviously love to do bigger investigative pieces. I took a course on the wrongfully convicted and taught a seminar on it and that really interests me, the fact that journalism can play such a big part in the wrongfully convicted and helping [innocent] people get off and get out of jail where they shouldn’t be. We’ll see what happens.

How do you see the future of journalism?

That is genuinely scary. With Donald Trump and fake news in one compartment, and bloggers and companies trying to abuse bloggers and not pay people for writing. I mean, the number of times I’ve gotten emails being like ‘We’d love you to do this big job,’ and I talk back and forth about what this job would entail and 10-20 emails down the chain they go ‘Well this is all for free but this will look really good on your resume.’ Well, my resume is actually very good, thank you. You’re not really doing me any favours by asking me to relocate to a new city and start a whole branch for you completely for free.

So I think the world of journalism is really shifting, I think that we need to, as journalists, really assert ourselves and make sure that we let the world know that hey, our profession is very valid and should be valuable, should be paid, and respected, because we all go to school for this, we all put in the all-nighters for this and we’re all very passionate about this and we’re not all just bloggers sitting at home on the computer [Editor’s note: Maybe I should be transcribing this at work instead of on my couch]. We should be respected.

Considering the changing business model of the industry, how optimistic are you of journalism’s future?

I am optimistic. I did get a paying journalism job when I was 19. I think if you find your niche and you find people who value your niche that can never really be replaced.

How can people follow your work?

I am on Instagram, at @amanda_h_jones. If you just Google “Amanda Henderson Jones” everything should come up.

Amanda Henderson Jones is among many students strongly encouraged to apply for the Montreal Gazette summer internship. The deadline is 5pm on Nov. 2.