Atkinson Lecturer Michelle Cyca Finds Hope in Journalism

Michelle Cyca (external link) , bureau chief, conservation and fellowships at The Narwhal and a contributing writer to The Walrus, gave the 2026 Atkinson Lecturer on March 26, 2026. She is a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Treaty 6, Saskatchewan.

Cyca’s talk focused on credibility in an era of widespread disinformation and declining trust, the role of journalism in holding public institutions accountable and why she still believes in journalism.

We sat down with Cyca before her lecture to understand her career journey, the reason behind choosing these topics for her talk and how she hopes students and the Toronto Metropolitan University community will connect to them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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To understand your expertise and interest behind the Atkinson Lecture topic, what does your career journey look like?

I didn't go to journalism school, so I always speak to Journalism students and tell them that up front.

I got my start when I was in grad school in like 2009. Some friends of mine in Vancouver started an arts magazine called Sad Mag, so it's like stories, art, and design.

It's still being published, but at the time, it was a quarterly magazine about local arts and culture. 

I started writing for the magazine as a fun thing to do while I was in school.

I got pulled further and further into the magazine, so I learned a lot of the fundamentals just by doing them and getting feedback.

And through Sad Mag, I made connections in Vancouver with people at other local publications. 

Where I felt I had a personal connection, and I could pitch something and gradually accumulate experience freelancing that way.

I mostly did freelance work on the side while working non-journalism jobs for about a decade, and gradually got more experience doing bigger stories, bigger features, working with more publications and editors. In 2022, I left a communications job and jumped into freelancing full-time and did that for just over a year and then started working at The Narwhal.

I came to The Narwhal partly because I did a journalism residency at Banff in the summer of 2022.

I met Emma Gilchrist there, who's one of the founders of The Narwhal. We really bonded because we got trapped in an elevator together on the second night of the residency for two hours.

We had a great chance to chat, and in the fall, she asked me about whether I'd be interested in interviewing for a new role they were creating, and that was that.

That's how I ended up at The Narwhal. I've been here for three years. I still do a lot of freelancing, and I work regularly with The Walrus, where I've been a contributing writer for the last three years as well.

Where did the idea for your Atkinson Lecture come from?

I think about trust a lot as a journalist.

It comes up a lot at The Narwhal, partly because the stories that I tend to report at The Narwhal and elsewhere, and the ones I edit, are usually with Indigenous communities or Indigenous sources.

There's quite a long history of Indigenous people being misrepresented and underrepresented in the media. I feel like you're working from a foundation of having to prove that people can trust you with their stories and that you'll report them accurately and fairly, with all the context that they need, which can be a big undertaking, ensuring you have your head around the cultural context and the historic context to report on a specific community.

It's something we think about a lot at The Narwhal and try to consider in our practices how we're building trust with sources, how we're checking our own process and ensuring it can be better. 

So we fact-check all our freelance stories now. We hired two assistant editors in the last year who do a lot of fact-checking in addition to some other things.

We developed an interview resource that we try to make sure everybody gets to see before we speak to them, so that they have a solid understanding of how the reporting process will work.

I found that doing things like that, I think, really pays off in the reporting, but I recognize that it takes a lot of time and effort to do those things and that they aren't really standard practice. 

When I talk to students or when we work with freelancers, it's often not something that they've been trained to think about in terms of how to enter into a relationship with a source.

At the same time, I feel like everybody in journalism can see that there's a lot of declining trust outside of the reporting relationships.

Beyond that, I think there's also a real level of obstruction from public institutions in terms of accountability and transparency. So there's pressure from all sides, on the media in terms of demonstrating value, reaching readers, ensuring that readers can trust what they're seeing, and I feel like that's the pressure cooker that we're in as an industry right now.

Also, AI, I'm going to talk about AI, which I hate so much. It feels like additional gunpowder in this pressure keg.

We have to figure out collectively as a society what to do about the obstacles and how to confront them.

I think I'm optimistic.

How have you built trust with sources over your career?

Something I think about a lot is my personal reputation and the relationships that I have. I think, because I've freelanced for so long, I feel a sense of personal responsibility in every story and a sense of my personal credibility as being on the line when I'm reaching out to people and reporting on them and their lives.

Historically, big news outlets have assumed the mantle of trust; the idea is that you have trust in the institution. Increasingly, it's really important for journalists as individuals to be recognizable figures in some ways to the people that they're interviewing, to have a personal sense of their own credibility and trustworthiness.

We're entering this era of AI-generated content and just slop constantly online, where I think people would like to understand that they're interacting with a real person with a real positionality in the world.

I try to make sure when I'm talking to people that they understand who I am too and what my relationship is to the story or the subjects, why I'm reporting on it, what my intentions are with the story, not just the subject, but why I want to tell it and what I'm trying to do with that reporting.

I spend a lot of time with sources, making sure they can talk to me before we have a formal interview, that they can ask me questions, that they know how to get in touch with me, trying to keep them in the loop about the story as it moves through different stages and letting them know what to expect. After I finish the interview, what's going to happen next? When will they hear from me? When will the story be out? Is it going to be fact-checked? And what's that process like?

A lot of that we've put in the interview resource that we made at The Narwhal, to try and remember that a lot of people don't know what happens. They talk to a reporter, and then they feel like the story is out of their hands entirely.

I feel like, as a freelancer, you can't always put your trust in the outlet that's publishing a story entirely, you don't know the decisions that they'll make, you don't know what they might run right beside your story or the art that they'll pick or the headline that they'll put on it.

You have to be the source of trust, and you have to be critical on all sides of what's happening in the reporting. That's how I think about it often.

How will you connect with Journalism students who may be worried about the industry they are going into?

I teach a graduate-level freelancing class right now at UBC, so I spend a lot of time talking with students who are on the precipice of launching into this space.

I would say that the way that my career took shape over the last 15 years is not really a path that exists in the same way for anyone anymore, and when I started freelancing, the career path that existed 15 years before didn't really exist anymore.

The industry is always changing, and the way people build their careers is always changing.

You have to respond to the conditions that you find yourself in and figure out a path that makes sense for you. But at the same time, I think for students who are not sure what to put their faith in, it's absolutely critical to be skeptical of institutions.

The lack of trust that a lot of Canadians say they have in the media reflects problems that journalists have seen in institutions. We've seen a lot of journalists who are Indigenous or people of colour or Black, talk about how they were treated in newsrooms, or the kind of scrutiny that their reporting gets that isn't experienced by white journalists.

I think with Israel and Palestine, we've seen the way reporting has happened on Gaza, and the way so many journalists have had to really fight to talk about what's happening on the ground in Gaza is also like an industry-wide failure.

People should absolutely be critical of the institutions and partly look to see if there are other models that they want to build. They're not beholden to an old way of doing things. The Narwal is one new media outlet, but there's The Local, there's The Independent, there's IndigiNews.

There are so many examples of media outlets that are doing critical, original, important reporting in a different way than it's been done in the past. 

It is about looking to the future and for these students, figuring out what kind of journalism organization they want to be a part of, how they want to work, what's important to them and their values.

That's a big thing; they don't have to accept this idea that there was a golden age and they missed it.

Make a new golden age.

What makes you hopeful for journalism?

I feel so hopeful for the future. The work I do every day at The Narwhal makes me really hopeful.

We hear from our readers directly, and we see the impacts of the reporting that we do on them as well as on the communities we report on.

That makes me really optimistic that people are willing to directly support the work that we do because they believe in it. People are hungry for reporting that reflects what they care about and what resonates with them.

Then the other thing is the work that I've been able to do elsewhere as well, so like at The Walrus, my last feature was on the resurgence of Indigenous midwifery and traditional birth practices.

Thinking about how something like maternal health care in Indigenous communities but also rural communities and really everywhere across Canada is in the state of crisis and being able to do the work to put those pieces together for readers really makes me see how valuable it is again to bring these personal narratives that are so moving, that the people I speak with have trusted me to share and helping to ground them in a context that helps people make sense of what they're seeing around them. The collapsing health system or these continuing inequities in Indigenous care, I think people really need that kind of storytelling, and every time I do a piece like that, I feel I can see that there is still so much interest that people want to understand.

That's where the hope comes from.

My students have so many great ideas and stories that they want to tell. All those stories deserve to be told, and when they find an audience, when they connect with somebody, whether that's a lot of people or a couple of readers, it really makes the work worthwhile.

Being in touch with that actual relationship aspect of the work…it's very uplifting.

The Atkinson Lecture is made possible by an Atkinson Charitable Foundation endowment in honour of former Toronto Star publisher Joseph E. Atkinson. Hosted by the Journalism Research Centre and Journalism at The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University.