FROM OCTOBER 2022 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

Melanie Morassutti,
Executive editor, WEP
When the Phoenix was operating out of The Gladstone Hotel, we had a beloved signature newsroom snack – Harry’s Charbroiled burgers – that we always ordered and ate together on the last night of production. Now that your teams are starting to meet in person again, I’d love to know what you’re eating as you’re putting your papers to bed.

Georgia Nicholson,
Co-head editor, The Pen & Sword at Parkdale Collegiate
We gather after school in the library, thanks to [Parkdale librarian] Ms. Rivett. And while we don’t exactly have a snack, we have a tradition at the end of the year that I think we’re going to continue, where we have a newspaper party. We have Jeopardy with newspaper questions – about all the drama that went down during the year related to the paper.

Noa Dupe,
Co-head editor, The Pen & Sword at Parkdale Collegiate
We split people into teams, and then they get to work to answer the questions. We try to mix them up – the editors and columnists. It’s really fun.

Sania Ali,
Editor in chief of IQRA Magazine at Toronto Metropolitan University
Our paper is two years old now, and our team has only met remotely. But we’re planning to meet this year in person. I’m hoping to bring Tim Hortons doughnuts, because we have a Tim Hortons on campus. But we haven’t done that yet.

Arya Bari,
Junior editor, Tigertalk at Harbord Collegiate Institute
After COVID, our newspaper just fell apart; our layout team left. So basically we had one meeting every month for the edition. There wasn’t much culture at the paper. We just sort of divided up the assignments in Google Docs. But I think we might do more this year because we aren’t remote and there’s no limit on clubs.

Melanie Morassutti
It makes a big difference to be together, right? As far as brainstorming goes, and the developing of story ideas. Meetings have such a different energy when we can do them in person. Sometimes when you’re unsure about an idea, you can just kind of throw it out there when you’re in person, and you can tell immediately from the reaction of the group whether there’s something to it.

Dave Bidini
Publisher, WEP
Especially when these two [gesturing to Janet and Melanie] start firing out ideas, it’ll be like bang, bang.

Melanie Morassutti
You get support from the group when you’re in person, and it really helps. Zoom is hard with only one person speaking at a time. You have too much time to rethink what you might have blurted out around the table. Still, it was a revelation to us that a newspaper could be put together remotely, with all of us only online. Was it the same for you?

Noa Dupe
We could not work online!

Georgia Nicholson
We only launched last year. And when we moved to online [learning] in January, for almost three weeks, we were trying to get our first edition out. It was really hard.

Arya Bari
Ours was all online, but participation took a blow because we were all new – Grade 9s and 10s. It was much less encouraging, and there was no vibe. So we started releasing articles individually, instead of layout editions, and that takes away from both the culture of a newspaper and its look. And it reduces its quality.

Noa Dupe
We also had a hard time meeting on Zoom. We just communicated through group chats on Instagram. It was overall a disaster and nothing else.

Jadine Ngan,
editor-in-chief, The Varsity at UofT
I think the one thing we noticed is that we do function fine online, but we get a lot more corrections because we do quite an intensive fact-checking process. But communication around that is really challenging when you can’t actually speak to a person. We’ve been pretty consistently in person now, since September 2021, with the exception of Omicron in January, when we were online for about six weeks. As for newsroom snacks, we do like to go for ice cream socials a lot.

Melanie Morassutti
Ice cream socials! How many people do you have on staff at The Varsity?

Jadine Ngan
I want to say 25? And that’s not even counting special staff like associate editors.

Janet Morassutti
Managing editor, WEP
Oh my god. They’d kill us in a tug of war.

Noa Dupe
We have a board of 12 people this year. Plus columnists and writers who submit their own ideas.

Melanie Morassutti
Does everyone produce a print edition of their paper?

Arya Bari
We do one a year because our budget is small.

Sania Ali
We have 20 staffers and came out with our first print issue last year – now more people know about us on campus.

Melanie Morassutti
You all come from a range of publications – some well-established, some brand new. I wondered about community-building at your papers. Do your readers rally around you?

Jadine Ngan
This is something we’ve talked about a lot. I feel like The Ubyssey over at UBC is much more well-liked by its student body. We’re still working on building that sort of connection externally with the student body. But I think among the people involved with The Varsity, which is quite a large group, we do have a really strong interest in using it as a closed space to get to know people and make friends. So I think internally, we’ve got a pretty strong community going on – a sense that these are people who have something in common with me. A lot of friendships outlast people’s time at the paper.

Melanie Morassutti
How about at The Pen & Sword?

Georgia Nicholson
We’ve had to climb the club hierarchy [laughs]. And we’ve generally succeeded. The test for seeing if we’d won the respect of the student body was if we’d have incoming freshmen joining the paper. This year we have six or seven. But definitely after launching our first edition, we heard a lot of, “Oh, I didn’t even know we had a newspaper.” And then we’d kind of, like, see it on the floor and stuff. But we’ve upped our production, and people are more excited.

Noa Dupe
Yeah, people wouldn’t take our newspaper at first. So we’d shove it into their hands. We did our best.

Georgia Nicholson
Or we’d just guilt them.

Dave Bidini
It’s still hard for people to grasp the concept of a newspaper in this age. But then you do find people who make that leap, and they’re intrigued by it.

Melanie Morassutti
That’s part of the ritual of reading the West End Phoenix. It’s a digital break. I’m interested to know if your readers, who are younger than most of ours, have any affection for print.

Sania Ali
I think they do. When I first started at IQRA, I was a writer and it was cool to read all of the work that we did in our online magazine. But then when I came into the role as an editor and we produced our first print magazine, that was just so exciting, because all of our names are in the magazine, and all of our work, and we could just hold it up and give it to others and say, “Write with us!”

And I think something that was interesting was, on campus, because our magazine primarily focuses on telling Muslim stories from the West, I think a lot of people were really excited to see this type of representation coming from Muslims themselves, instead of coming from people who are not aware of what accurate representation is. A lot of people didn’t know that we were affiliated with the school; they didn’t really know that a school could have a magazine like this. And I think that’s why I really want to continue in print. Because to see a magazine like this that is talking about a minority group is super exciting.

Jadine Ngan
On my end, The Varsity is as much of a legacy publication as you really get. We’ve been around since the 1880s. So for much of the history, we were mainly a print newspaper. To speak to the balance: I think we’ve been expanding much more into online readership in the last decade or so. We added an online editor. We’re doing TikToks now. So really just trying to strike a balance, because as you guys know, not everybody our age is going to pick up a newspaper. And that’s fair. I may be undercutting what we do a little bit, but everyone on our team is always genuinely surprised when someone comes up to us and says, “I read The Varsity. I pick up the newspaper.” We’re like, “No way.” But yeah – I got an angry email this week about somebody who was upset that we had omitted the crossword.

Georgia Nicholson
I have a theory that younger audiences turn to social media for news because it’s very, very convenient. It’s the same reason – my theory, again – why we have lower voter turnout. It’s because it’s not convenient to go and vote. So we try to make it as convenient as possible to actually take an issue of The Pen & Sword. We literally stand in the hallway, day of publication, and we just hand it out to students. And one thing we make sure of – at least while Noa and I are head editors – is that it’s never going to cost money. Because that would also limit its reach.

Noa Dupe
Also, people aren’t going to seek out our newspaper online. But if it’s given to them in print, then they might just read it.

Dave Bidini
Such a huge part of the discussion when it comes to journalism are the numbers you hear coming out, that 40 per cent of people between the ages of 13 and 15 get 80 percent of their news through TikTok, and one in five news items on TikTok is filled with disinformation. How do you feel about moving into that landscape as young journalists?

Georgia Nicholson
Well, I think it comes down to the fact that just because your news is on TikTok doesn’t necessarily mean it’s uncreditable. Like with The Varsity being on TikTok – it just comes down to your source. The Washington Post is common on my For You page. They’re always there, and I can trust that they’re generally a good news source. Obviously, you have to know how to navigate the whole algorithm bias. But just because it’s on TikTok? I feel like a lot of adults think, “Oh, you just read your news online – whatever. It’s not credible.”

Melanie Morassutti
Do you think all the same best practices of print journalism can be applied on social media?

Jadine Ngan
I have really strong opinions on this. I think that when legacy media outlets in particular have been hesitant to get on platforms like TikTok, they are missing an opportunity to get their information out there. If you want to balance out disinformation and a lot of the bad content that’s out there, you can’t be hesitant to put out what you see as good content. Because, you know, young people aren’t necessarily going to pick up the newspaper. They are going to open TikTok. And if you’re not on TikTok, you’re the one who’s missing out. We haven’t really been able to push for this as much as I’ve wanted to at The Varsity because making a newspaper every week, it turns out, is very hard work. But I do think that any outlet that is hesitant to be on these platforms needs to change its mind.

Noa Dupe
I agree with you, especially because for a lot of young people, it’s easier and more appealing to get your news from other young people, and that’s from TikTok. I think it’s just more understandable that way, than going to find some old newspaper that maybe your grandpa reads or something. It makes more sense.

Sania Ali
I think it’s also super convenient. Like I can just go on TikTok and I know exactly what’s going on. I feel very similarly about Twitter. When anything happens, I go on Twitter first. And on my page, I can see a lot of publications talking about the specifics, they have their article links, they have Twitter threads. It’s easier for me to get information super quickly because it’s so easy to watch TikTok, and I’m on an app that I normally use anyway.

Arya Bari
You can really open the lens if you bring a story onto TikTok. Like here, when you read a newspaper, the people you talk to for the newspaper, they’re from Toronto, but when you put it online, so many other people have access to it. And there are so many other perspectives you can get.

Dave Bidini
Devil’s advocate – all of the legacy media and credible, credited sources of journalism have been on Twitter and yet it didn’t prevent Donald Trump from being elected president of the United States. Okay, so here we are with a new platform like TikTok. Is the mere presence of credible organizations enough to tilt social media platforms [to becoming] a credible news source?

Georgia Nicholson
I immediately go to media literacy, because you choose what you watch. And the presence of those big, credible sources means you have the option to watch them.

Dave Bidini
Do you think it’s partly your responsibility to educate people about how they read and where they get their news and what to look for? Is that ever part of your universe?

Arya Bari
If you think about it, even with newspapers, you choose to read what appeals to you and what you relate to, right? It’s the same thing online. Sure, there are algorithms, but you actively search for what you want.

Nathan Abraha,
guest editor for WEP’s Youth issue, editor-in-chief, Convergence magazine at Humber College north campus
I think part of the problem is the fact that a lot of these legacy media outlets don’t know how to speak to young people. A lot of the language they use isn’t going to connect with a younger audience. If you’re scrolling through Twitter or TikTok, you’re not going to click on it. Obviously I would, because I’m studying to be a journalist, but an average person just wouldn’t care.

Georgia Nicholson
I think what you said about perspective was really interesting, Arya – that putting your news out on an online platform allows for a lot of perspective, because it does fall into algorithm bias. And you can see, especially with the alt-right pipeline and the alt-left pipeline, that you could completely lose perspective, because things like TikTok and YouTube are pushing you toward more polarized beliefs. With the presence of less polarized media on social media, you can probably hope to middle the ground more.

Jadine Ngan
I feel like part of the reason this question is so challenging is that social media has fundamentally reconfigured the way that our brains work and how we process information. There’s a scholar named, N. Katherine Hayles, who has talked about the difference between deep attention, which is what you cultivate through the humanities – your ability to sit down and read a book for six hours, say – and hyperattention, which is what we have on social media, where your brain just kind of enters this drive and it wants to jump from thing to thing to thing to thing, which is part of the reason that it is so much more than just media literacy, or just getting yourself out there as a legacy media outlet on the platforms. I honestly don’t know if anyone does have the answer to this and I think anyone who says they do may be pretending.

There’s so much that social media has already done to reconfigure the media world in general. So I think this is one of the big questions of our generation.

Nathan Abraha
Also, alternative media has really risen. There’s a YouTuber named Andrew Callahan who has over a million subscribers, and he goes and does this very Hunter S. Thompson-esque gonzo journalism. It’s really resonated with a lot of young people. And you have Twitch streamers as well, and they’re talking about politics. And they get a lot more attention than, like, the anchor at CNN.

Sania Ali
The point about people having shorter attention spans now is really interesting, because I think we have to ask ourselves if the way we’re producing media has to change, especially for the newer generation. As people who are learning journalism, we’re interested in finding out how to present information accurately, but the average person is going to read what they read online and share it with all their friends. So I think it comes down to this question: Is there a better way to produce media?

Jadine Ngan
I think this isn’t a problem that’s isolated to young people, because I also don’t want to de-intellectualize young people. I do know a lot of people who do want to be reading deeply and who are deeply engaged in a lot of the stuff that news outlets put out. And I also know older people who will share literally whatever’s on Facebook. So I definitely don’t want to leave this discussion in the young-people realm. I think it is a lot more universal than that.

Noa Dupe
I think a lot of it also has to do with experience. So even if your newspaper or publication is putting out mostly credible information, readers have to see a whole bunch of things so they can develop their own critical thinking skills. You can’t protect everyone from misinformation, especially not with all of the different ways you can get your information. I think it’s the readers’ job also.

Melanie Morassutti
I’m also interested in the nuts-andbolts of making your publication. What’s the hardest thing about getting it made? What would make it easier?

Sania Ali
The hardest part was definitely learning about getting it funded.

Melanie Morassutti
That never goes away.

Noa Dupe
Yeah. Budgeting is definitely our biggest issue.

Georgia Nicholson
In elementary school, there was so much parent involvement. Our parent council was very, very active. There was a lot of funding that could go to things. But now we are trying to pitch the parent council, and it’s a lot of like, “Sorry, get funding by throwing a bake sale.”

Noa Dupe
We’ve had bad experiences with bake sales.

Georgia Nicholson
And, like, student-teacher basketball games have a $1 admission, right? Which doesn’t really support the level of funding that we’re going to need.

Noa Dupe
Especially if we want to keep the paper free and to keep printing it.

Nathan Abraha
For us, the problem is the quality of the stories. Some will be really good and others will be like, “Why are you even in this program?” It’s difficult to get people up to a certain standard and not be hated by everyone.

Arya Bari
Editors can’t [exercise much] power. You don’t want to. You don’t want to completely criticize one person on their article and then have another editor just correct the grammar.

Melanie Morassutti
I had someone tell me, when I was in my first full-time journalism job at Saturday Night magazine, that editing is 90 per cent diplomacy and 10 per cent story skill. And I think there’s a lot to that. It’s about being able to collaborate to make a story stronger, and in doing so, making those changes both palatable and meaningful. And getting the writer to see the piece the way you’re seeing it, with fresh eyes.

Janet Morassutti
Sometimes it’s like being in the ER, though, eh, Mel? It’s like, oh we can save this – we just gotta go faster!

Melanie Morassutti
Totally. And that’s another tough thing about paper-making – the large number of hours that get poured into each edition.

Jadine Ngan
This is our issue. It took us about 30 hours over the weekend – over Saturday and Sunday – just to copyedit, factcheck and do layout on our TIFF issue. That’s not including all the time that our section editors pour into editing the articles over the week, not including visuals requests, and our visual editors commissioning things. So I would say we run a pretty intense operation. Given that we do this on top of studies, on top of sometimes other jobs and every single weekend.

We added a new management staff member this year, which was something that I tried to do in order to prevent burnout and create more support. Because at The Varsity, we think a lot about taking enough time to properly report a story if it involves trauma, and we’re pushing a lot for equity-based stories, making sure we cover all the different communities on campus in a sensitive, human way. So sometimes it feels like we are a little bit short, even though our team is big.

Melanie Morassutti
That's something we face too. We talk about slow print at the West End Phoenix, and something that differs here from other publications I've worked for is that we give ourselves time to work on a story slowly, and there's so many benefits to it.

Jadine Ngan
I'm a big believer in slow timelines. Most of my work outside of The Varsity is primarily in magazines. And I really like the six-month lead time on that.

Melanie Morassutti
The same goes for our photo approach. Taking time to get the assignment right.

Jalani Morgan,
photo director of WEP
We have to be very cognizant of the ways we think about photography, because it lasts. If we're responsible for a subject's representation, then we have to have those conversations about how to serve them, how to make sure they're in caring hands. You know, oftentimes in vulnerable racialized communities, their photos are not taken by people who look like them. They're often satellited in. And with that, especially in these moments of celebration, you want to share the experience of being photographed by someone who looks like you and has shared experiences with you.

Melanie Morassutti
We also talk about this when we're thinking about who's going to hold the pen on a story.

Jadine Ngan
I don't do a lot of assigning anymore, but when I did, I was kind of thinking along the lines of, if you're part of a community that is being covered, you can cover it like no one else, because you know the ins and outs of it, you know what's silly to ask and you know the nuances. So I'm very much in favour of assigning own voices" reporters wherever we can. I don't think it really makes sense to adhere to an old ideal of "objectivity." Most progressive reporters now know that it's not really a thing.

Melanie Morassutti
What do legacy media newsrooms, or even just media teams with an older staff like ours, get wrong when we're reporting on young people and the issues that affect them? What drives you nuts?

Georgia Nicholson
I would definitely say what jumps out at me is that a lot of times, we're just reduced to wokeness. It completely ignores the people in our generation who have fallen behind and are not progressive. And it makes them resent all the young people around them and fall deeper into the alt-right pipeline. We see that so much — like, "Oh, I was born in the wrong generation," like, "only older people understand me," that kind of thing. Which is, I would say, a result of this generation being reduced to its wokeness. Because then those people just completely reject their peers, which is both harmful to us and to them, because then they just fall deeper into the rabbit hole.

Nathan Abraha
I also think wokeness is deeply misunderstood. And that it's weaponized against young people in general. I think to be woke is to actively fight against a society that has led to people having to be woke. And think using this as a negative or trying to bash the generation for it is ridiculous. I would like for wokeness to not be viewed as something negative or something to fight against but as something to embrace to and to push on.

Jadine Ngan
Something else that think really causes harm is when young people are reduced to a monolith. I mean, young people are so smart. They know so many things. They care about the future. am so close to young people as a demographic in terms of covering things at The Varsity that I honestly don't really think about us as "young people." When you get close enough, you see the diversity within the community as well. And so I'm thinking about racialized students, gender-queer students, students who are survivors of sexual assault, and not looking at like, "What do young people need to know today?"

Melanie Morassutti
I'd like to hear about career highlights the best piece you've worked on, the things that keep you going. Because journalism isn't an easy vocation. I'm curious to know about what keeps the spark lit.

Georgia Nicholson
One of my articles I'm most proud of, that we co-wrote for our very first edition, was about a huge scandal going on [at Parkdale Collegiate] about a teacher's violent act of racism. We were reporting on the protests about it, and we did all this stuff at the protest interviews, photography, quoting of speechesand were the only news outlet at that time actually doing that.

Jadine Ngan
My big thing was bringing back the magazines after a hiatus due to funding cuts from [Doug Ford's] Student Choice Initiative, as well as the disruption from the pandemic. It was such labour of love there were SO many all-nighters but I'm really happy with what we were able to put out. And the reception from the student body has been really wonderful.

In terms of an article, I'm currently working on an investigation with one of last year's Varsity grads, and it's a bit of a grim topic we're looking into suicides on university campuses across Canada. We got a grant from a body called OCUFA [the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations] to do that. It was $10,000 and we're young people. I was pretty shocked. But I'm genuinely very passionate about the project and it does keep me going.

Sania Ali
For me, it was a personal story I wrote for the magazine last year about being visibly Muslim. You know, I often feel like I have to downplay my identity, because I get really nervous about it. But I wrote about how was being more vocal about needing prayer spaces and things like that with my manager at work. And I was secretly hoping that no one would read it, because it was personal. And I didn't think anyone would relate. So I didn't put it up on my Instagram or anything. But I was talking to someone over the summer. And he was saying that he read our magazine, and he was like, "Oh, there was this one story about how somebody was writing about how they wanted to be more vocal with prayers and stuff. And I usually miss mine. So I asked my manager at work." And I was like, "I wrote that story." It was just really interesting to know that other people may feel heard because of something I wrote. And obviously, that's not the point. But it's nice to know that people want to hear your stories.

WE GOT THE BEAT