These are the stories we’re watching this week. Here is your Weekly Wire:
- Seniority wasn’t enough to spare a number of top-flight Canadian journalists from pink slips. Maclean’s special issues editor Kim Honey, national correspondent Jonathan Gatehouse, and senior writer Chris Sorensen were among 13 laid-off staffers at the eminent monthly last week. Rogers Media said it would create seven new positions—but made its announcement the day after Bell Media announced layoffs of its own. The latter company’s vice-president of communications told The Canadian Press that over 24 “Bell Media locations” will be affected.
- Fox News backed down and scrubbed its infamous tweet about an alleged Moroccan suspect in last Sunday’s mass murder at a Quebec City mosque after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, no less, sent a formal complaint. The network’s tweet was wrong: a Moroccan man who’d witnessed the shooting was arrested by police and subsequently let go. La Presse also erred, but CBC refused to give any details on alleged suspects until Alexandre Bissonnette—so far, the only one—was formally charged. CBC’s decision enraged anti-Muslim Canadians on Twitter, several commentators at The Rebel, and U.S. white supremacist Richard Spencer.
- Edel Rodriguez took no prisoners last week. The Cuban-American artist’s latest cover illustration for Der Spiegel features U.S. President Donald Trump brandishing a knife—and the bloody, severed head of Lady Liberty—beside his Inauguration Day slogan: America First. “It’s a beheading of democracy, a beheading of a sacred symbol,” Rodriguez explained to the Washington Post. Readers were equal parts aghast and impressed by his gruesome comparison between two “extremists”—Trump and ISIS. Rodriguez’s graphic cover looks like it’s part of a trend.
- The Ryerson School of Journalism is hosting a free panel discussion and book launch this Thursday for Journalism in Crisis: Bridging Theory and Practice for Democratic Media Strategies in Canada. The discussion will be attended by Edward Greenspon, the president and CEO of the Public Policy Forum, which released its report on declines in Canadian media two weeks ago (the RRJ summed up its main points); Gretchen King, one of Journalism in Crisis’s editors; Canadian Media Guild president Kam Rao; and QNet News’s Robert Washburn.
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This is a joint byline for the Ryerson Review of Journalism. All content is produced by students in their final year of the graduate or undergraduate program at the Ryerson School of Journalism.