Editor’s Note
What’s in a team? A pre-conference note from the newsroom editor
By Hannah Rivkin
There are 14 hours remaining until we kick things off. I’ve never had so much anticipation for a conference in my life. I asked myself why the stakes feel so high with this one?
Is it the fact that we are diving into unprecedented territory, sifting through all the rubble of this pandemic? Could things get heated? — I hope they do.
But it’s not that. Nor is it the notion that we have 750 participants, global participants, attending our international symposium.
There are some big names, but I can’t say I feel anything other than deep curiosity and excitement for what they have to say.
This one is about the team. A news team all my own. A group of global hustlers — from New Delhi, to Dubai, all the way across the coast to BC, and of course, right here in my home of Ottawa — who have all come together to create a fourteen person newsroom.
We hope to carry on the legacy from three years previous, when in 2017, Allan Thompson, now head of the journalism program here at Carleton, rallied for a group of students to be hired to create multimedia newsroom to cover the Media and Mass Atrocity conference.
Hired.
That’s a rarity in today’s journalism student paradigm.
Here’s what happens when you give someone incentive (an international conference with global leaders and thinkers to speak; a bit of money; a couple bylines), they rise to the occasion.
Three weeks ago, we all were told to jump on board. To the undying credit of these 13 bachelor and master of journalism students, all who are taking four to five courses, some working extra jobs, all trying to figure it out in this crazy new pandemic world — leapt. Some as team leads, other as reporters, all of them dedicating evenings and weekends.
There are some in particular who dove head first. On day two, Yasmine Ghania stepped in to run all the social media campaigns, building toolkits for reporters, contacting interested parties, and setting the Twitter cogs in motion.
Then there was Meral Jamal, from her family home in Dubai, who offered to take the reins on a conference podcast. As of today, we can all see how fruitful her labour has been.
The cherry on top was talented photographer John MacGillis, who built a database of photos which he conceptualized and shot himself, for each of the seventeen panels. He sent us hurtling over what is no-doubt a barrier that many newsrooms face today when trying to find visuals while covering the inner happenings of a Zoom event.
And I have to mention the rest of the team, whose bylines you will see here in the hours ahead:
Raylene Lung, Emilie Warren, Erika Ibrahim, Baneet Braich, Sarah MacFarlane, Uday Rana, Jonathon Got, Haesun Jung, Marshall Healey and Kieran Heffernan.
As we struggle to find meaning in our education, and for many of us graduating this spring, our career, this newsroom is even more important than the last one three-years past.
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Crisis has many definitions. We know it’s most common use, yet I can’t help but feel that for me, this conference on crisis, fits another definition.
Crisis: A decisive moment.
The decisive moment where we as a team are granted the space to rise to the occasion, to be ourselves, and tell stories that mean something to us and others.
There are 13 hours to go, and I can’t wait.
