Our Advisory Circle is dedicated to gathering and passing on knowledge that is plentiful among northern and Indigenous media folks. In the early days, and in the days since, we have had members step back and welcomed new members.
In 2020, a group of journalists gathered around a kitchen table to talk about the news industry in the North. The conversation was and continues to be, centered around two questions:
Where are the Northerners and Indigenous journalists in our newsrooms?
How do we get them into the industry?
We could all recall a time when the news was told, at least in part, by authoritative Indigenous northerners.
Sara Minogue had recently completed a labour market survey with the idea to make the case for including a journalism program as part of Aurora College’s transformation into a polytechnic university.
The survey confirmed a dearth of Indigenous reporters and news leaders in eight media organizations, all located in Yellowknife but with coverage areas across the territory. Of roughly 62 editorial positions (reporters, editors, producers, hosts), just 14 were filled by Indigenous people. The survey also found editorial leaders had a strong desire to find and prepare northern Indigenous reporters to join their teams, but struggled to recruit and retain them.
“If we can get a local hire, we will,” Bruce Valpy, the long-time, recently-retired publisher of Northern News Services Limited, told journalist Garrett Hinchey during an interview in 2020. “We have had Indigenous people on staff before. It doesn’t necessarily last long … because I think one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that we’re very much a capitalist, colonialist, workplace, right? So that comes with certain expectations.”
Hinchey included this insight from Valpy in his Jane Glassco policy paper, Reclaiming Our Narrative: A Roadmap to Local Participation in N.W.T. Media, published in March 2021. His policy paper draws on Northern media leaders to highlight the significant barriers locals face to entering the industry and most importantly, discusses solutions.
Our informal collective continued to meet throughout the pandemic. We worked to come together in Yellowknife for strategic planning to produce a common vision — and figure out the steps to pursue it.
Hinchey, an original member of our group, quoted advisory member and Sahtú Dene Elder Paul Andrew in his Glassco paper, who said that he asks himself all the time: “Why do I do this?”
“I have a couple nieces, little ones,” he shared with the group. “I want them to have a better future. This is about reconciliation, this is about healing. People ... we have a chance to make it better for those coming after us.”
Our strategic planning was guided by Dëneze Nahkek’o and Amos Scott of Dene Nahjo — both of whom have their own experience as journalists and filmmakers. This was supported financially by the northern team, Steve Ellis and Killulark Arngna’naaq, of the MakeWay Foundation.
From these two days of collective visioning for the future, we decided to pursue hands-on skills training here in the North. We believe that delivering journalism skills training to this region that has been excluded from traditional journalism education is critical to addressing the present imbalance in northern newsrooms, and a key means to help foster journalistic integrity that’s also grounded in the cultures, languages and ways of doing that are unique to northern communities.
Empowered by the guiding mission we had created, we applied for funding and this process only pushed us further toward where we are today.
In the spring of 2022, Journalists for Human Rights (JHR) connected with our group about an opportunity to partner with them, as they were keen to see this work continue in the industry after the conclusion of their Indigenous Reporters Program in Ontario the year prior. JHR had been working with the Google News Initiative (GNI) to identify shared priorities for supporting journalism initiatives in Canada, and exploring more ways of supporting Indigenous journalists and communities quickly became a focus.
Following a summer of conversation, getting to know each other, and refining the idea, NJTI entered into a partnership with Journalists for Human Rights to design and deliver the northern journalism training program we’d been dreaming of for the past two years, with support from the Google News Initiative.
In 2023, we are launching this initiative with the pilot program in Inuvik, NT. The goal is to learn from the experience, so that the training can improve and expand to more regions across the North.
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