The Centre for Law, Technology and Society is delighted to announce that the Global Innovation Journalism Lab released From Flies to File Storage: Policy Issues in the Life-Cycle of Explanatory Journalism, a report co-written by CLTS Faculty member Dr.Elizabeth Dubois and then postdoctoral fellow Dr.Sabrina Wilkinson, with Dr. Heidi Tworek, Elizabeth Ren and Lui Xia Lee. The report examines the life-cycle of explanatory journalism in order to uncover policy challenges and identify how these issues might be addressed. While explanatory journalism has existed for a long time, it has been transformed in new and fascinating ways online. But these transformations also pose unexpected challenges, such as harassment of authors, translation and the discoverability of content. All these issues are linked to how explanatory journalism is made, shared, and preserved. This report proposes a life-cycle of explanatory journalism to uncover policy challenges and identify how policy-makers, journalists, academic authors, and academic institutions might address them. Implementing this report’s recommendations can improve the inclusion of diverse expert knowledge in Canadian policy debates and provide a model to inform policymaking beyond explanatory journalism.
The report is also available in French
Last fall, the Centre for Law, Technology and Society and the Global Innovation Journalism Lab hosted a virtual conversation around the research with Heidi Tworek, Sabrina Wilkinson and Elizabeth Dubois, moderated by Evangeline Sadler. The video recording is available here.
This report is published as part of the research lead through the Global Innovation Journalism Lab supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.