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Winter 2022 final projects show how journalism faculty are teaching new forms of storytelling

By: Julia Lawrence
June 20, 2022

An example of student work from JRN 305

Contact lecturer for JRN 104 and JRN 106, Sally Goldberg Powell, uses Genial.ly as a one-stop-shop to introduce students to concepts around storytelling using different visual approaches.

“I think it’s really important in assessments to give students as much choice as possible, to really focus on what the objective of the project is, in this case, it’s not really about your news judgment, even though that’s a great thing to practice through the project. It’s really about testing out a different form of storytelling.”

Inspired by the Atkinson lecture given by Karon Liu (‘08), the Toronto Star food reporter, Powell added a new option for students to tell a story about food using Genial.ly. The resulting stories included Kyana Alvarez’s “Guess that Fruit (external link) ,” quiz, Natalie Vilkoff’s “Tea Timeline (external link) ” and Mya Rana-Nippak’s “Map of South Asian Cuisines (external link) ,” all opportunities to explore food storytelling through visual elements.

Rather than trying to appeal to your instructor’s interests, JRN 306 instructor Blake Lambert encourages students to find story topics that they relate to or are personally curious about.

Lambert enjoyed Naama Weingarten and Elizabeth Sargeant’s podcast on whether university is worth the cost, particularly because he was able to learn and hear from student voices.

After Weingarten and Sargeant realized they were soon going to be leaving university and entering a world where accessibility is even harder, they thought back on their time at Toronto Metropolitan and reflected on their and other students' experiences in a podcast episode.

They spoke with the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA), students on campus and other expert sources to find out how students were feeling and why most were unhappy with their university experience.

From day one of the class, students were introduced to the equipment they would be using throughout the course and were able to get hands-on experience practising how to set up microphones, change battery packs, and do other basic but crucial tasks.

“It was good because we applied what we learned from the first couple of weeks and then put it into practice. Angela [Glover] and Blake spent so much time showing how to make audio so clean that by the end, we were like pros,” says Sargeant.

JRN 306 student Kendra Seguin had never touched audio production before taking the course and was proud of herself and surprised at the response from classmates and her family.

She was able to put her newly learned skills into practice after working on the week-by-week group projects and newscasts. “It’s pretty intense, but also super fun.”

Seguin profiled Indigenous music company Red Music Rising for her feature and experimented with sound bites from the artists and places such as Yonge and Dundas Square.

“By doing this course, I got the opportunity to try something new, I saw it work out for me, and I had a lot of fun with it. I think audio production has a lot of opportunities to be really creative.”

Opportunity for creativity is also seen in JRN 305, instructed by Anita Li, where students learn about hyperlocal, community-driven journalism and ultimately produce content for the Instagram (external link)  and TikTok (external link)  elements of Li’s publication, The Green Line.

Li created an environment that reflected a real-life newsroom where students would pitch stories, produce stories on Canva and bring design thinking into their pieces.

“One of the early assignments was doing a TikTok, and I love how the students incorporated a lot of creative shots. They were incorporating elements of their own sensibilities around music and film, in addition to journalism.”

In JRN 800 TV Documentary, where teams plan, write, shoot and edit documentaries, students like Zehra Raza start by visually learning what qualities lead to a good documentary before starting the process in their groups.

Raza’s group focused on the nursing crisis in Ontario and the demoralization among nurses during the pandemic.

“We developed how exactly we wanted to go about showcasing the story. We wanted it to be factual, but also really to have an emotional aspect to it and really show the personal accounts of nurses in Ontario during the pandemic.”

Although each team member had assigned roles, Raza said it felt very much like a team effort to produce the documentary. “We all helped with the research process, the interviewing process, filming, editing, it was very much hands-on for everyone.”

Instructor Winston Sih for JRN 314 says this course sets students up for a real-world newsroom experience as if they were in a working studio.

The course asks students to “combine many of the foundational elements and course concepts learned in years one and two, then bridge that together when you conceptualize, pitch, produce, and edit your own stories while watching them come to life in the studio,” Sih says.

Sih shared examples (external link)  of student work from the winter 2022 semester, “These pieces show a breadth of interests and many of these channel personal interest areas. They are examples of what good pitching can do to the end quality of a piece of journalism. I think it is important to convey ideas and concepts well, and these students did so successfully, and executed in partnership with their technical teams.”

JRN 317, the school’s fact-checking course and JRN 840, the capstone course, were integrated for their final student projects.

Course instructor Carly Lewis taught the capstone course and co-instructed the fact-checking course with Rudy Lee of The New York Times Magazine.

The two courses worked together for their final project. JRN 317 students fact-checked the verified the capstone projects, which were all long-form features (written, audio or video) completed throughout the term.

“This allowed the capstone students to experience a truly start-to-finish workflow, from ideation right to the fact-checking stage. Students on both sides learned a lot through these partnerships,” Lewis said.

Wanting the students to experience a comprehensive workflow, capstone and fact-checking students were paired when the capstones were in the home stretch, allowing each side of the arrangement to put their well-earned skills to the test.

The fact-checking students checked every word of the capstone projects, contacting every source and going back and forth with their partners to discuss discrepancies and suggest changes. Lewis says it was an intense process with many moving parts.

Daphnée Lacroix’s capstone project focused on cannabis use among young adults and their experiences. Lacroix said she enjoyed the fact-checking process and that it made the coursework feel more professional.

“We had good communication too. It was nice to have that other person like an outsider double-check because it's so easy to make mistakes,” Lacroix said. 

After taking the fact-checking course, Elena de Luigi said she could see herself taking on fact-checking as a job in the future.

“I think it’s something that everybody should learn, it should be mandatory,” she said.

Lewis said that in projects as laborious as the capstones, there are bound to be arduous moments.

“Sources become unreachable or regret something they said in an interview, sometimes data that was current during the reporting phase is no longer current by the time we get to checking. In all of these cases, students calmly and confidently discussed the issue together and figured out a way forward,” she said.

For Gabrielle Cleveland, she found the progress reports and classmate check-ins to be a great part of the process when developing her capstone project on divorce.

Cleveland also received advice from the student she was paired with in the fact-checking course when it came to deciding what to include from an interview. 

“My fact-checker helped me throughout the entire process and Carly as well. She’s there for her students even outside of class or the project, she will help and stand up for you. That was the same with my fact-checker, she taught me a lot about the [journalistic] process, and taught me a lot of skills I use in the work I do now,” Cleveland said. 

Lewis said that, though some of the final-year capstone students went into the fact-checking partnerships expecting minimal changes to their drafts, everyone benefitted from going through the verification process. 

“The fact-checking course is rigorous, but students came to understand the importance of verification, on a line-by-line basis and as a way of building trust with the public,” she said.

The most common advice from course instructors when asked to relay advice to future students was to come into class with an open mind, creative thinking and to be ready to problem-solve.