Ad campaign touts the value of professional journalism

TORONTO —A new advertising campaign is asking Canadians to consider the value of professional journalism.

The Journalism Is campaign, initiated by a coalition of journalists and media stakeholders, is behind a series of print, digital and video ads that will start appearing in news media across Canada Saturday.

“News is the lifeblood of our democracy,” Mary Agnes Welch, a Winnipeg Free Press reporter and former president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, said Friday at a launch of the campaign at Ryerson University in Toronto.

“As the volume of information and the range of opinion available to media consumers increase, the contribution of professional journalism has become more important than ever.”

The ads display one of 10 principles that represent what journalism means to Canadians, for example, “relentless,” “telling the whole story” and “a watchdog over the powerful.”

Welch says the campaign was born out of the concern journalists were not doing enough to communicate with the public about what they expect from the news media.

“We want Canadians to talk with us about those values and what they think good journalism is and why it matters to them,” said Welch, the spokeswoman for the campaign.

“This is an invitation to Canadians about having a conversation. If we ask viewers or readers and journalists to complete the sentence ‘journalism is,’ we might get all kinds of answers, both good and bad, and that’s fine.

“We want to start this conversation.”

Welch says Journalism Is, which runs until September, is part of a larger effort to encourage journalists and the public to support professional journalism in Canada.

“We believe this is the first step toward taking action to preserve and promote our profession in the future,” she said.

Columnist Chantal Hébert, who attended Friday’s launch, said the role of journalism is to present facts that guide meaningful public discourse.

“That gets missed in the shuffle of social media, losing track of the fact that if we’re going to have a debate, somebody somewhere has to come up with the key elements that are going to feed that debate, otherwise all you are having is an argument that goes nowhere,” she said.

“I tend to think of myself as a reading light. Someone who tries to read in the dark usually doesn’t get very far in the story.

“And if there weren’t people, as imperfect as they may be, trying to shed light on conversations, there would not be very much to read.”

Sponsors include Postmedia, Newspapers Canada, the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Ryerson School of Journalism, and Unifor.