News

What does journalism look like when lies trump truth, clicks control the news, and layoffs abound? After Fact (2020) is an unvarnished, observational portrait of real-life news work in Canada. A broadcast investigative journalist juggles covering an unsolved celebrity-murder story against a policy chasm that costs schoolchildren’s lives.

Dr. Nicole Blanchett has joined the CWJS team of investigators for the third wave of the Worlds of Journalism Study. A former news producer, Nicole was appointed in May 2020 as an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at Ryerson University. specializing in multiplatform journalism and production. Her current research focuses on the use […]

Data from the completed Worlds of Journalism Study phases is now available to all researchers for secondary analysis. The data includes the responses of more than 27,500journalists in 67 countries (including Canada) to a common questionnaire, administered under a common methodological framework. The questionnaire used from 2012 to 2016 elicited views of journalists on several issues […]

The Worlds of Journalism Study has entered its “third wave” (WJS3). The Study began in 2007, with teams in 21 countries conducting structured interviews until 2011 to probe journalists’ perceptions of their roles, values, ands professional identities.  In the “second wave” (2012-2016) teams in 67 countries interviewed 27,500 journalists. Planning for WJS3 has included teams […]

CWJS investigator Ivor Shapiro played a leading role in helping the global Worlds of Journalism Study team determine whom to include under the category of “journalist” in the recently launched third wave of the international project. Ivor co-convened, with Martin Oller Alonso of the University of Milan, a working group of  11 investigators  to define […]

The key Canadian findings  from the 2014-2016  Canadian World of Journalism Study, funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant, were published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science in early 2019 (online) and in September 2019 in print, as follows: Just Who Do Canadian Journalists Think They Are? Political Role Conceptions in Global and Historical Perspective. By […]

Close to two months after finance minister Bill Morneau announced $600 million in support for the Canadian journalism industry, little is known about how this funding will be allocated. Even more troubling is that, while many of Canadian journalism’s “usual suspects” have weighed in, this issue—one of vital importance to Canadian democracy—doesn’t appear to have […]

Lisa Taylor, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at Ryerson University, has taken over from Ivor Shapiro as the leader of the Worlds of Journalism’s Canadian research team. “It’s exciting, and just a little nerve-racking, to be at the helm of such an important project,” Taylor said. “But Ivor’s been an incredible mentor […]

Representatives of an estimated 60+ countries will gather in Prague at the end of May to plan for the “third wave” of the Worlds of Journalism study. Participants will discuss funding as well as the broader theoretical framework of the next WJS survey, which is expected to be deployed in 2019-20. In addition, topic-specific working […]

Canadian journalists overwhelmingly seed themselves as monitors of political and business interests, and resist an identity of supporters of government policy, according to a new research note published by the Canadian Communication Association. These findings are drawn from data collected as part of the Canadian Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS), which explores how journalists orient […]