The first thing I noticed as I walked into Alfred Hermida’s office was the soft rhythm of music that played on his desktop and how the light poured into the room — warm and inviting.
I wasn’t expecting to get a complete tour of the Sao Ting building from Hermida, but as we strolled through classrooms and examined the awards that lined the walls, — I gawked at an Emmy in a case by the main office — I saw Hermida takes pride in the community he helped build at the School of Journalism, Writing and Media (JWAM). It doesn’t take much for Hermida to get excited about talking about journalism, especially at a time when the system as we know it today is simultaneously crumbling and renewing itself.
“The one thing we know is that things change,” said Hermida. “What I see as a really positive development is a broadening of what might be considered journalism and forms of doing journalism that don't necessarily look like an article … but still help a community address an issue they're facing and help them be better informed.”
“If that's what it's doing, then that's journalism to me.”
Hermida is a journalism professor and, from June 2015 to December 2020, he served as the JWAM director. His career has always teetered between journalism and academia — but his two passions merge in his ambition to change how reporting works to better serve people.
“What are the communities that have been underserved? And how can we do something that's different to help those communities?”
The digital renaissance
In 1996, Tony Blair’s UK Labour Party garnered a historic landslide victory, the largest in the party’s history and the most consequential poll results for the country since World War Two.
In the months leading up to the elections, newsrooms across the UK were heating up. And with the World Wide Web activating to the public just three years prior in 1993, a whole new yet foreign dimension to news broadcasting was just beginning: digitalization.
The BBC took the advantage of the significance of the 1996 elections to streamline their website that was already in the works, opting to release a subpage that launched in time for voting.
After coming to London from being based in North Africa, reporting peace processes in the region for some time, Hermida’s boss at the BBC approached him about working on the election site — she knew he loved the Internet.
“They asked me if I had an email address — I had two, including a Hotmail one,” Hermida said. “And so on the basis of that, [my boss] said, ‘Do you want to go and work on this website for the elections?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’”
Hermida went on to help pioneer the website of one of the world’s largest broadcasting corporations — in a wing of the headquarters called The Spur, up on the seventh floor, at the end of the hall, “as far away from the radio [and] TV newsrooms as you could get.”
“What that meant is we, as a team, had the freedom to try things out … to explore different ways of doing [journalism], different ways of thinking about it, while still bringing those BBC values.”
With the prospect of digital news came new expectations from the public. People didn’t have to anticipate the 6 o’clock headlines or the weekly paper, rather news was happening, always, and people were hungry to know. Suddenly, there was an element of instancy and an expectation that the information shared would be accurate in real time.
The deadline to report was not in 20 minutes or an hour anymore — it was now.
“One thing we realized working online is that when there was breaking news, a core of the audience expected us to be there to have a story,” said Hermida. “And if we didn't have a story, they thought we were asleep on the job.”
‘It's hard to know what you're missing if you don't see it’
When you open Instagram or Facebook, you usually won’t actively search up your media outlet of choice. But in Canada, if you do, you’ll be met with a message telling you that the profile’s content is not visible.
Bill C-18, or the Online News Act, was a tremendous blow to local newsrooms. The act aimed for groups like Google and Meta, who profited off news content being displayed on their sites, to compensate newsrooms. By doing so, a more financially sustainable market model of digital journalism would emerge.
But in response, Meta blocked news on their sites to avoid paying outlets that depended on them to promote and share their news.
“What this has taught us is we can't rely on these digital intermediaries, because they can turn off the tap at any moment,” Hermida said.
Suddenly, the social media accounts of many news publications — including smaller community and student newspapers — were inaccessible in Canada and newsrooms had to overhaul their outreach strategy at Meta’s mercy.
“It's hard, because if you're a small local outlet, the challenge you face is people don't know you exist, and you don't have the marketing budget of a large media company,” said Hermida.
Having worked in local television and radio during his time at the BBC, Hermida understood the difficulty of competing for the public’s attention next to other media giants. That attention is not for free. There’s been a general trend towards discounting newsroom subscriptions across the country.
And this year, Canada saw a four per cent increase in the number of people paying for their news, according to an article Hermida wrote for The Conversation Canada, which he co-founded with JWAM professor Dr. Mary Lynn Young. Hermida hypothesized that this increase was due to Bill C-18 prompting the public to be more active in their search for quality and reliable news, evidence that there still is a hunger for reporting.
But this trend is only visible across the world’s largest newsrooms. It seems that people are not willing to pay for local news, even if it's the stories that concern them most.
And for some of us, this model of media consumption — accessing news through social media — is all we’ve ever known.
“Over the last 10 years, newsrooms have largely been told social media is the way to reach newer and younger audiences. That's where they live,” said Hermida.
Almost any struggle experienced by local media as a result of the act has been amplified in student newsrooms — built up of the chronically online generation — simply because their audiences belong to the digital generation. And they’re busy — students don’t have time to fix their habits, especially when it comes to something as subconscious as the reasons behind checking your phone.
“We've actually created a new media ecosystem where most people, especially under 35s, are coming sideways to the news,” said Hermida.
This year’s Digital News Report from the Reuter’s Institute found that 72 per cent of Canadians access news online rather than directly through the broadcaster.
“In effect, what the Online News Act did is close those side doors, which is bad, both for the news outlets, but devastating for the audience … it's hard to know what you're missing if you don't see it.”
Getting an entire cohort to develop an appetite for the print newspapers that fade into the woodworks of your local supermarket is futile — how do you change the habits of getting informed across a generation that has been exposed to current events through the passive convenience of doom-scrolling?
The answer is in the way we do journalism, and it starts with inspiring those who see their futures in the field.
‘As a journalist, you're not doing it for yourself’
When Hermida teaches visual journalism at UBC, he wants students to forgive themselves.
“You're doing what you can in the time you have with the resources you have with the people that have agreed to talk to you,” Hermida said. “The job is never finished, so your learning is never finished. That's one of the beauties of journalism.”
Hermida’s teaching philosophy is about spurring the right questions during discussion, seeing what existing research can offer and understanding what needs to be adjusted to your practice — and why.
“It's always about questioning yourself. Why am I doing this? Who am I doing this for?” Hermida said. “If the answer is, ‘I'm doing it for myself,’ then you need to ask yourself the question again, because as a journalist, you're not doing it for yourself. You're doing it for your community.”
Under these same principles, Hermida founded The Conversation Canada — a nexus for investigation — alongside Young in 2017.
“[Young] and I saw it as an intervention in the media landscape at a time when news was facing cutbacks, where there was a loss of specialist correspondence,” said Hermida. “How can we help to bring more expert-based, informed news analysis and commentary into Canadian media?”
By understanding what an issue means, you can begin to truly understand what it is. When you see what current events mean, the complexities of them suddenly become more nuanced, but easier to consider and make your own.
According to Hermida, it’s clear that the 150-some-year-old mass media model of production and consumption is failing.
Hermida is finding a solution through a micro media approach that emphasizes the exploration of systemic and intersectional topics. It proposes a more engaging, thoughtful and active way to learn about our world and the issues that matter to us because when we see ourselves in the things that journalism covers, we learn about identity and how we all co-exist as a way of learning about what is happening in the world and appreciating its implications.
“If it's 500 people, but you've made their life better, maybe that's better than reaching 50,000 who had a cursory interest in what you wrote and forgot about it the second they clicked away.”
Hermida’s philosophy helps build trust between audiences and their media systems in a climate where the public is becoming more and more hesitant to trust the news under the guise of the misinformation and AI-generated reports that are sprinkled into our everyday life.
Journalism is a truly selfless act when writers operate on trust — trust in their audiences to receive their work the way it’s intended to and trust in themselves to appreciate the trial as much as the error in everything they do.
Those were some of the pieces of advice that Hermida offered as he drew on his own experiences and how aspiring journalists can best navigate the evolving media landscape.
“The goal of learning is to grow and discover. And much as the world changes around you, you change.”
This article is part of The Ubyssey's 2024 student action supplement,Press the Issue.
Share this article
First online
Submit a complaint Report a correction
