Newsroom Notes

Newsrooms attract passionate, opinionated humans who are slotted into a centuries-old hierarchy and expected to deal with issues in repetitive and negative ways. Newer, more diverse story-tellers who we need in order to continue to serve our audience are often driven out. Newsroom Notes is an attempt to confront these wicked problems and build the newsrooms of our future, bringing together journalists from the field to speak to journalism and non-journalism students at Toronto Metropolitan University. Newsroom Notes is not attached to a course, but is open to anyone on campus who wants to talk about and think through these wicked problems. This commentary discusses early results of the new program, including building a new community of news-gatherers and news-users who see each other as equal problem solvers for the newsrooms of our future. It also poses suggestions for replicating this model within other schools of journalism to empower the news community and send emerging reporters and news consumers out into the real world with the confidence and tools to make actual change.