This SSHRC-funded research project investigates how journalists in the Canadian Arctic are adapting professional standards, norms and practices in order to navigate changes to media technologies, audiences, and news organizations.
Geography as well as multiple languages and cultures have long posed distinct challenges for Arctic journalists. As new networked and digital media technologies enable greater reach and participation across the north, they are also expanding potential global audiences interested in news about economic, social and environmental changes taking place in the Arctic. Along with greater reach and interactions enabled via digital media, journalists must also now report and facilitate public discourse on high-impact and interconnected policy, science-related and industry decisions, and major activist campaigns dedicated to their region that often originate elsewhere.
We seek to understand these dynamics through a comparative analysis of media sources (international, national Canadian and regional news sources), and by using ethnographic methods to attend to specificities and diversity in accounts of how Arctic journalists are adapting norms and practices.
Principal Investigator
Candis Callison