I was also very interested in attending because the discussion topic was “The Future of Media.”

As a recent journalism graduate and someone who is now working as an editor in what I’d consider to be on the way to the future of media, I’m really interested to hear what others have to say about this and how other young women (a demographic that seemed to dominate my j-skool classes, but which is sometimes scarce in traditional newsrooms) are shaping the future of media as well.

What Lauren and I found ourselves in was a room full of women who mostly work in the areas of media which are so broken that people speculate every day when the mainstream media’s metaphorical “end of days” will come (or if those days are already upon us). They are: radio, television, print and telecommunications, plus the academics who teach those subjects in our colleges and universities.

And that’s fair enough. Why wouldn’t these successful, technologically engaged, intelligent women want to be at the forefront of a huge shift in their industries?

(As an aside, from what I could see, Lauren and I were the only people who raised our hands to indicate we were both content producers and marketers. I’ll bring this up again in the later parts of this series.)

However, as led by these women, the hot topic of conversation was not “The Future of Media,” but the present of mostly social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Connect, hype, digital literacy, privacy concerns, etc. You can read the list here.

At the end of the night, I felt let down and left the dinner thinking that the women driving these debates completely missed the point: social media is not the media we should be talking about.

We should be talking about the media that we all work in; the media that people who don’t know everything turn to in order to find the information they need to know.

The only aspect of “The Future of Media” that was actually discussed was the CBC’s Angela Misri briefly explaining CBC podcasts and switching the livestreams to mp3 format.

I’m a huge fan of CBC Radio One. I listen to the station live in the mornings while I get ready for work, but some of the best shows air during working hours or later on at night, and I miss the live broadcasts.

I also don’t enjoy scheduling my life around my favourite programs, whether on radio or TV. So I think of the CBC podcasts kind of like TiVo or online streaming video – I can listen to the shows when I want to, skip the interruptions (traffic, weather, hourly news, etc.) and pause when I need to.

Yes, the CBC is doing a great job and is potentially ahead of the curve, but it can’t be the future of commercial media because it’s publicly funded. It doesn’t have to make money. There are no ads, just information. Companies and products are often mentioned, and endorsed, because the CBC thinks they’re of interest to its audience, but no money changes hands because it’s a publicly funded media outlet.

To survive and thrive, media outlets will have to become more like the CBC, but advertisers will actually pay the content producers to turn the advertising into content that is relevant to the outlet’s audience.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series on The Future of Media, in which I will discuss what exactly I mean by this statement, how it will work and why content producers won’t have as much trouble avoid corruption as we think they will.

Yet, as a journalist, it’s a constant battle. Because we consume so much information on a daily basis, we probably have opinions on many more topics than the average person does. And since we’re natural communicators, we’re prone to spewing out our thoughts (on paper or otherwise) at any given time.

It’s something that is completely in conflict with the work we do, however.

Upon doing research on the very broad topic of rodents in Toronto earlier this week, I came across some information that wasn’t secret, but it hadn’t been published yet. Like a good little intern, I jumped on it, dug some more and made a real breaking news story out of it.

Rodent infestations continue to bedevil Chinatown and Kensington Market, with health authorities ordering five recent business closures in the span of a few blocks.

I was also lucky enough to have the chance to turn it into a larger, issue-based feature story the next day.

More than a third of the city’s 56 closures in the past year have taken place in this area, with most inspection records noting rodent or insect infestations, or both.

However, as I interviewed Toronto city councillor Adam Vaughan about the issue and some of the things he’s been doing to make those neighbourhoods, which are in his ward, he raised a very complicated, loaded issue: bias in the media.

Now, he never said, “You’re a racist.” It was never that direct. But as a member of the media breaking and covering a story, I was clearly among those who he thinks approach the issue with a “tinge of racism.”

This has the tinge of racism to it and it’s unacceptable.

At first, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Am I being racist for covering this story? I thought. At first I panicked a little because, you know, I’m white. I don’t know what it’s like to be not white. I’ve never lived in a foreign culture. I’ve never been a poor immigrant struggling to make it in a new country.

But then I looked at how I drew my conclusions about this story. To start, I used real data: the City of Toronto’s DineSafe website has inspection records for every restaurant in the city.

Based on my knowledge of city street names, I could already tell many of them were in the Chinatown/Kensington Market area and the rest were scattered throughout the city.

But I wanted to be sure, so I created a Google Map which showed the location of every food premises which had been closed in the past year. My assumption was correct and clearly illustrated on the map; there was a high concentration of closures within those side-by-side neighbourhoods.

I also spoke to leaders in both of the communities, giving them the opportunity to tell their side of the story:

Barbara Kwan, vice-chair of the Chinatown BIA, said business owners in the neighbourhood are doing everything they can to combat the problem.
…
Kensington Market Action Committee chairman Chris Devita agreed but said many local residents and business owners are not doing anything to eliminate pests.

The only thing I can’t account for is widespread systemic racism.

It’s entirely possible that the city’s public health inspectors target this area more than others and hold business owners there to a higher standard than others because of their race.

And it’s definitely true that many new immigrants, people of colour and non-English speakers face extremely challenging societal barriers for a number of reasons, only one of which is racism.

While I’m aware of those issues, they’re not something I could tackle in this article — and they’re issues that, perhaps, no journalist could hope to tackle in any news article.

The easiest question I can ask myself, as a journalist, is: Would I still cover this story if one third of the city’s closures had occurred in another neighbourhood, in hoity-toity Yorkville, or the artsy-fartsy Beaches, or Little Italy, or the Church-Wellesley Village, etc.?

The answer is yes, I would.

I would cover the story if it could be found in any of those neighbourhoods, or any other community, because not only is it my responsibility as a journalist, it’s also what I would expect as a consumer who frequents restaurants in this city and doesn’t check the DineSafe inspection history of each one before I go.

Could I have done more to acknowledge my biases in this case? How do you acknowledge your own biases in your work life?

In some ways, it’s exactly what I expected, but mostly it’s not what I expected at all.

For most of the day (until it gets closer to deadline), the news room is almost as quiet as a library. Most people just mind their own business and do their own thing.

I was introduced to a dozen or so people, but I couldn’t tell you what most of their names are.

Except for the two other interns on either side of me, I have no idea what anyone else is working on. I catch snippets from other reporters’ interviews if they’re sitting near me and talking loudly, but mostly everything in the paper the next day is a complete surprise.

The majority of the people who work there are men, and almost everyone is white.

And interns are definitely not coddled. I think I’m already trying my editor’s patience with how much I communicate with him (especially near deadline).

Tomorrow, my first article — Signs of life for Hollywood North: ‘Toronto is back on the radar’ — will be published in the Toronto edition of the paper.

Although I did work really hard on the story, I was kind of surprised at how easy it was to put together. After all, I didn’t think in my first week I would be interviewing Mayor David Miller, producer Ivan Reitman or the men who financed and run Filmport, among others.

Having a large publication like the Post behind my name when I try to set up interviews has given me a greater confidence. I know my own skills are strong enough to get things done, but it feels so nice to not have to say “journalism student” or “reporter at [a publication you’ve never heard of].”

It’s not a family feeling like we had at The Ryersonian, but I can already tell I’m going to get a lot out of it — the really nice clippings are just a bonus.

Sometimes the bias is political. Sometimes it’s financial, racial or socio-economic. Other times it’s just a matter of a lack of resources and, most often, a lack of bodies to do the work. The industry is more strapped than ever before.

Journalists strive to be accurate, to include as many sides of the story as possible and to avoid bias toward one point of view or another.

But it happens every day and sometimes there is a major backlash from the public.

For example, there has been a bit of a backlash in the last day or so following coverage of the plane crash near Buffalo on Thursday night by one media outlet in particular, which has traditionally been known for its sensationalism.

Instead of simply regurgitating the few available details over and over again, the outlet took it a step or two further by providing some local context:

The Toronto-built Bombardier turboprop plane involved in Thursday night’s devastating crash in a Buffalo suburb is the same model used by Porter Airlines.

The media isn’t making this up. It’s true. In fact, the media is simply doing its job by reporting these facts, which people with connections to the aerospace or airline industries already knew. It was no secret.

Full disclosure: My boyfriend has worked for the past few years as an aircraft assembler at the Bombardier plant where the crashed Q400 was built. In fact, he probably worked on that very plane.

Aside from the fact that he’s pretty upset about the whole incident, we (and the thousands of other people with connections to Bombardier, Porter and the airplane industries in general) were already aware that Porter only flies Q400s.

But that doesn’t stop people from blaming media coverage for their problems instead of taking responsibility for their own media consumption.

Take the comments by Ryan L. over at blogTO, for example:

I now have 2 days to convince [his girlfriend] (who was already scared of flying prior) it is safe to travel on planes with otherwise impeccable safety records or we’ll be taking the greyhound and lose a full day out of our already brief trip.

…

Your constant lack of journalistic integrity has potentially ruined the vacation I’ve been saving up for and planning for 4 months.

I watched the CityNews coverage (as well as CBC) yesterday and, as a trained journalist, I think the story was reported with integrity.

Sure, it was reported in the sensational style typical of the outlet, but it was seemingly accurate and reported multiple sides of the same story, including the event itself, the story of the Canadian man who died in the crash, the story of the 9/11 widow who also died, and the local angle involving Porter and Bombardier.

What’s wrong with that?

Maybe I’m “one of them” now, but I can’t help but get my back up when relatively good examples of my profession are not only dragged through the mud, but also blamed for the ignorance and paranoia of the people who consume media.

I’m a true believer in looking critically at media, but I think people must also look at themselves and think critically about the way in which they consume media and how the media affects their day-to-day lives.

If media outlets censored themselves based on the possibility of making somebody somewhere afraid of something, nothing would ever be reported.

Governments and politicians would not be held accountable for their actions. Corporations which put public safety at risk would never be exposed. Corrupt individuals would never be identified and made an example of.

These terrifying things happen every day and are reported on every day, but without media exposure nothing is learned and nothing will change.

Before consumers turn on their television sets, open a newspaper or head to a news website, they must put their own fears, paranoia and biases in check.