B Channel video newshounds Andrew Ainsley, right, and Chris Johnson

Credit: Darshan Stevens

Making New Media

Exploring Victoria’s recent indymedia renaissance 

With CHEK-TV on life support, the Times Colonist bleeding red ink, A Channel shedding jobs and big media across the globe scrambling for a survival strategy, citizen journalists are seizing the opportunity to report on issues and events that matter to their communities left behind as other outlets retrench.

In Victoria, this trend is growing beyond bloggers who publish their opinions on the news of the day to individuals and grassroots organizations creating their own content, digging for stories and offering context to the issues that matter to Islanders. It can be seen in the streetcorner vendors hawking independently produced newspapers, activist journalists commandeering local television air time and ever-growing online communities like Vibrant Victoria where people share their expertise and insider knowledge of what’s happening in the halls of power and on the boulevards.

And while staff cuts and shrinking advertising revenues may have temporarily hamstrung traditional media, people still yearn to see their communities reflected in print and pictures. Royal Roads University media and culture professor David Black (no relation to the Black Press owner of the same name) says local television and daily newspapers are finding that the business and cultural model that supported their traditional product is disappearing, but the hunger for what it once offered is not.

“The reader, the viewer, is finding themselves without a reliable way of connecting with the larger world and articulating what’s happening in Victoria with what’s happening elsewhere,” says Black. “So people are looking to more granular, more organic, more homegrown media which allow people to assert the importance of seeing local life and local opinions, reflected as complexly and articulately as possible.”

Only a gambler would dare predict the future form of Canada’s mainstream media, and the current crop of independent upstarts may last only as long as the attention span of their founders, but citizen journalists are exploiting the current rupture in the status quo to tell stories they believe must be told while learning the craft on the fly.

Channelling change

Recently, Victoria’s Chris Johnson and Andrew Ainsley brought the web-based B Channel News collective online (bchannelnews.tv). And while the name might be a cheeky jab at Victoria’s CTV-owned affiliate, the pair maintain there’s nothing cheeky about what they hope to achieve. They say they want to cover South Island issues more comprehensively than the typical newspaper or television newscast formula allows, by posting long video interviews with the players involved in a given story, filming meetings on contentious issues and organizing their web coverage by theme or story, rather than just by rolling publication date.

“There needs to be more comprehensive coverage and less quick soundbite reporting in terms of civic issues, especially where we’re expected to be educated enough to make informed decisions or comment on something,” says Johnson, who cites Victoria’s dance with secondary sewage treatment as a prime example. “It’s difficult for mainstream media, when covering a whole bunch of issues at once, to be comprehensive and be truly able to deliver that kind of service.”

Ainsley and Johnson claim that too often in conventional reporting, the reporter becomes part of the story, paraphrasing sources or telling only the story they want to tell. B Channel’s founders say their objective is to let the story tell itself from as many angles as possible.

“I think it’s very rare for someone to actually get to see what people are saying,” says Ainsley. “I think the newspaper often quotes people with very small quotes, I think TV stations cut in for one quote, but then cut out for their story that they’re telling with their reporter. So what we want is to have people speaking for themselves, and I don’t think that people get to see enough of that.”

Out in Langford, resident Steven Hurdle has run the insidelangford.ca website off the side of his desk for two years and it recently surpassed 100,000 hits. Hurdle argues there is a genuine hunger not only in the Western Communities, but all over North America for something of a hyper-local look at the places we live, especially for those keen to understand the forces and processes shaping their communities.

“There’s absolutely no question that local news is one of the things that is very hard to find, even in the local media,” says Hurdle. “Even though they try really hard, it’s very difficult to cover 13 municipalities well, and some don’t try as hard as they could. Even those who try really hard must be frustrated by the fact now that there are 13 local governments to cover and Inside Langford has the luxury of focussing on one—and because of that, we can do a better job.”

Over in TV land, local activist Jack Etkin has been running Independent Community Television on Shaw TV, capitalizing on CRTC regulations that require community television stations to help produce and air community-created content. With four hours of weekly airtime—plus reruns—Etkin’s projects examining everything from corporate control to international affairs have become a breath of alternative air on a channel known mainly for its round-the-clock yuletime fireplace coverage. Etkin also recently started publishing The Bridge, a small newspaper to tell stories he believes are suppressed in the conventional press. Etkin is less charitable than B Channel’s Ainsley and Johnson in diagnosing the current problems with mainstream media coverage, arguing the problem is less the mainstream media giving short shrift to important issues and more ignoring them entirely to perpetuate a world view that serves their owners’ interests.

“My feeling is that the corporate media has somewhere between failed us and betrayed us in giving people the real stories about what’s going on,” says Etkin. “To me, the corporate media in Canada is as tightly controlled as we used to be told that Pravda was in the Soviet Union or maybe the media in a dictatorship. We don’t have a free press. What we have is a corporate propaganda machine. And I think people are just tired of it, and they want something real, so they turn to people who are giving them what they think is real.”

Royal Roads’ Black says that while media helps define the dominate systems of the day and frames our understanding, it can also hold the key to changing those systems, something independent media types are banking on.

“There is a homogenizing quality to media that is in some sense necessary to uphold our common sense view of reality and maintain a coherent culture,” he says. “But there is an ideological benefit to being able to say, you know, maybe the world isn’t built in the way that we’re told it’s built.”

The amateur ascent

Not so long ago, journalism was a paid profession. And while journalist are not necessarily the most trusted professionals (16th out of 22 jobs on a 2006 Harris poll), they are theoretically held to certain ethical standards nonetheless. But by putting the camera and notebook in the hands of volunteer journalists, is there a worry that the hard-won principles of objective reporting might be sacrificed?

For Steven Hurdle’s Inside Langford website, the goal is not to sway readers to a particular conclusion, but to give them the information they need to make informed decisions. With its laymans explanations of matters coming before the municipality’s council and planning departments. Hurdle contends, “Inside Langford is ultimately just a communications tool and not a means to an end.”

Hurdle ran against the long-standing incumbent slate in Langford’s last municipal election, leaving him vulnerable to being dismissed by powerful blocs in the community as a member of the left fringe. But Hurdle says despite any reputation he carries from his political endeavours, the information he and his contributors offer is making in-roads with figures who might have been turned off by his run for office.

“Recently I’ve had people connected to the development community actually compliment me on the service Inside Langford provides,” he says. “More recently, someone said to me that he agrees the majority of what he reads on the site to be accurate and also that he believes it very important that people have access to this information.”

So too are B Channel’s Ainsley and Johnson men with activist pasts. Ainsley, for example, filmed the travails of David Arthur Johnson in his quest to sleep in Victoria’s common places, a project captured in Ainsley’s documentary Love and Fearlessness.

But both Ainsley and Johnson say they want to cast a wide net with their online news channel, and while much of the current content explores issues close to the hearts of those they know and who have volunteered their time—harm reduction services and democracy in Iran, for example—they want a broad audience for their station, one that will grow as more people sign on to film and report.

“I feel like as long as I’m facilitating greater access to information for people that are going to be advocating the things that I will be advocating then we’re going to do that,” says Johnson. “And the people who are going to be advocating for things that I don’t believe in are also going to be able to access that too. I feel that just by providing a channel for comprehensive local information, that’s a form of activism in itself, but not one that’s to be slanted in a particular political direction, and from there you just have to have faith that the best circumstance will come through us working together as a diverse community to tackle these issues.”

For his part, ICTV’s Jack Etkin says many mainstream journalists have simply been regurgitating what they’ve been fed by the country’s corporate and political elite, so the journalistic integrity bar was never set particularly high.

“We’ve had things talked about on our programs and in The Bridge that would never, ever, ever get mentioned anywhere in the corporate media,” says Etkin. “The most important things are the things that never get talked about in the corporate media. That’s their biggest trick, to just not talk about the important issues.”

No money, no worries

If mainstream media’s woes are attributable to declining advertising and subscription revenues, then Victoria’s upstart independent media should have nothing to worry about, run as they are almost exclusively on the volunteer time and efforts of their members.

Langford’s Steven Hurdle says he would devote more of his free time to the site if he could and is happy doing it for free. “Right now I appreciate the fact it’s advertising-free and that way there’s no possible perception of advertising influencing our editorial policy,” he says. “The only thing I’m beholden to is the community and my desire to report things as accurately as conceivably possible.”

Over at B Channel, Ainsley and Johnson hope to grow their stable of volunteer reporters beyond the current half-dozen who are involved. But all that video tape and equipment costs money, and they may one day have to solicit financial support. “We’re open to advertisement. We don’t want to have a lot, and there might be requirements about who we will accept money from,” says Ainsley. “That’s something we’ll decide on. But as far as we can see it right now, it’s going to be totally volunteer.”

From the Moss Rocks Review and Fernwood’s Village Vibe to the rebirth of vicindymedia.org and the continuing viability of the Peace, Earth and Justice News, Victoria seems to be bursting with folks determined to get to the bottom of what’s happening around town.

Royal Roads’ Black says a key to independent media’s success amid the decline of traditional outlets is to ensure that it is open to everyone of all ideological stripes.

“The daily newspaper and broadcast television were never particularly effective at encouraging interaction,” he says. “It would be lovely to see a place where we can restore the media commons, a place where you can confront people who have very different views than you and not suffer the extremism and solipsism that follows from hearing only your own opinion heard and confirmed.” M