By Trent Wilkie, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, St. Albert Gazette
When a community loses a news source, that loss creates a void. This void must be filled, as public information is still important — and Carmine Starnino agrees.
“I’m perfectly happy to get the news from social media,” Starnino said. “I mean that there is a kind of citizen journalism that happens when there’s an outage in my area, or some massive ice storm happening in the city and I’m not getting what I need from major outlets. I’ll go to social media to get the news.”
Starnino, editor-in-chief of The Walrus magazine, recognizes the many faces of news necessity. Be it something hyper-local like a car accident, or something national like an election, it is how it gets to the information consumer that is key.
“As our own newsrooms are being hollowed, we are losing the ability of having eyes and ears in areas we don’t normally have them,” Starnino said. “I’m totally fine with that type of citizen journalism. However, there is the problem that a lot of this information isn’t fact-checked, it isn’t edited, isn’t shaped for public consumption. So, when I take off my citizen hat and put on my editor hat, I do worry about it being seen as trustworthy journalism.”
Starnino points out that journalism has rules, ethics and accountability from a legal perspective. He notes that some topics need a different level of scrutiny.
“It requires processes, it requires editors,” Starnino said. “If people read something from The Walrus, I want them to trust that what they’re getting is accurate to the best of our resources. And we put a lot of resources into that.”
Starnino also noted that when a politician or an interest group poses as a journalist, this can also get us into trouble.
“They can look pretty legit to the average person,” Starnino said. “There’s a lot of unreliable material under the banner of journalism and that’s the verification gap that I think all competent journalists can provide. We’re trained, we have the editorial oversight, we have the rigorous fact-checking and so you know we do sort of provide a kind of safeguard.”
Deirdre Mitchell-MacLean didn’t consider herself a journalist at first. Her intent was to inform herself. Her thirst for political knowledge is what led her into what would become a journalistic endeavour.
Drawn to political conventions around the time Jason Kenney was creating the United Conservative Party, Mitchell-MacLean would buy a ticket, shake hands and consume as much information as she could. She said this political bug also led her to other conventions — Liberal, NDP, Alberta Party — she was hooked and she was writing.
“I don’t have a journalism background,” Mitchell-MacLean said. “I did a sociology degree at the University of Calgary and when I was done I still wanted to write. That’s what I enjoy. I enjoy writing and I enjoy learning.”
This curiosity for all flavours of politics led to her applying for a job at the Strathmore Times. With her teeth cut in the citizen journalism world, she said she wanted to get confirmation on her writing and if she “was doing it right.” Six months later, she left print for podcasting. Her first podcast, This Week in Alberta Politics, was interview-based and kept her in the game.
“I wanted to put some humour into my work,” Mitchell-MacLean said. “I wanted to do a little more analysis and that’s just not necessarily available to you when you’re trying to report. I thought, I’ll find someone else to do the analysis.”
After freelancing for outlets like the Western Standard and the Lethbridge Herald, and appearing as a speaker with CBC and other political media platforms, she launched the Women of ABpoli podcast — now evolved into a Substack publication. Reconnecting with her roots in citizen journalism, she continues to write with a voice that’s unmistakably her own.
“I do try to bring people along with me,” Mitchell-MacLean said. “It’s education and it’s information. Also, I can be snarky. I like being snarky.”
In a modern media landscape that is evolving, the lines between journalism and opinion seem to be blurred. Mitchell-MacLean is fine with that, to an extent.
“I think it’s entirely possible to be journalistic and have an opinion,” Mitchell-MacLean said. “It just must be coming from a verifiable set of facts and grounded in reality. I think too much of the opinion nowadays is not in the same reality that most of us share. I think it’s scary when I see what is going on in the U.S., when I see the reality that they are trying to create for themselves. That is beyond what’s actually happening.”
Where traditional and citizen journalism meet, according to Starnino and Mitchell-MacLean, is that the source of the information is just as important as the information itself.
