Our feature documentary, After Fact (2020), has launched

Director Lindsay Fitzgerald’s feature film, After Fact, launched in June 2020 in a series of virtual private screenings. More screenings this fall will be announced on the film’s website, and the film is also available from dozens of university, school and public libraries across Canada.

The launch was accompanied by release of a unique series of learning units for secondary and post-secondary media and communications students, entitled Journalists at Work. The package includes extracts from the film and introduces findings of the Canadian Worlds of Journalism Study.

For information about educational licensing or screenings, please visit AfterFact.ca

For more details on the educational package, which includes extracts and cut scenes from After Fact as well as customizable slide shows, interactive learning activities and previously unpublished quotes from CWJS interviewees, please visit our Knowledge Mobilization page.

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. A small-city reporter watches colleagues’ desks empty as she fights to believe her job still matters. A tough young City Hall reporter puts a human face to decayed housing. Canada’s first crowdfunded independent journalist covers city council with no other reporters in sight. Filmed over the course of three years during a cataclysmic shift in the business of news, After Fact (2020) documents what we all stand to lose in the face of journalism’s decline.

Director Lindsay Fitzgerald was lead interviewer and project manager for the three years of Canadian Worlds of Journalism Study interviews with 352 journalists. During that time, she was studying journalism at Ryerson and went on to complete an MFA in documentary media; she also interned at CBC’s fifth estate and worked as a reporter at the Hamilton Spectator. As a student, researcher and practitioner of journalism, Lindsay became increasingly aware of “an immense sense of uncertainty – not only about job security but about the prospects for our democracy given the decline of news businesses,” she says. The Shattered Mirror report on the state of Canadian news was released in 2017 just as Lindsay’s small crew began filming within and beyond newsrooms, inspiring the film’s initial working title, “Shattered.” Crowd-funding supplemented academic and outside support and encouraged Lindsay’s hope that an immersive cinema-verité movie could “personalize the crisis in news by showing the real-life struggles and successes of Canadian journalists.” The result is After Fact (2020).