We are pleased to announce that journalist, researcher and educator Trish Audette-Longo will join Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication as a full-time assistant professor in the journalism program on July 1.
This is a new position for Audette-Longo, who has been teaching digital journalism, reporting and graduate seminars as a course instructor and term instructor in the department since 2018. Her research plans include launching a new lab geared toward exploring journalism across platforms, contributing to journalism education, and developing digital, research and storytelling skills among our students.
“I am so excited to find out more about questions our students are interested in answering, and to pursue a collaborative agenda of research and experimentation that is both critical and optimistic about the future of journalism,” Audette-Longo said.
Audette-Longo spent much of 2020 supporting the journalism program’s shift to online course delivery in response to COVID-19 public health measures. This included working as part of a team that designed shared teaching resources, online learning workshops and guidelines for safely reporting during a pandemic. She is now working with a student on a research project investigating student perceptions of online learning and professional training.
Through 2021 she has also been working with another student on a new workshop series called J-School in the Real World: Conversations with Journalists.
“In organizing these sessions, which featured journalists sharing their insights on what to wear, how to break the ice and how they use social media, we aimed to get first-year students ready for more reporting-heavy courses in their second year,” Audette-Longo said.
“We also held on to questions about how professionalism works, how unspoken rules about how to act or how to present yourself can work to police students and reporters, and under what circumstances.”
Carleton’s journalism program head, Allan Thompson, said he was thrilled with Audette-Longo’s appointment. “Trish has proven herself capable of teaching in virtually any part of our program, she is innovative and remarkably focused on the well-being of our students,” Thompson. “With her journalistic and academic experience, she will be a great addition to our team.”
Audette-Longo holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Concordia University in Montreal, where her research focused on “oilsands entanglements” in northern Alberta and northern British Columbia, alternative media, Indigenous resurgence and protest politics. Her peer-reviewed research has appeared in a range of national and international academic journals.
She also holds an MSc in Media, Communication and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Bachelor of Journalism from Carleton University.
Originally from the Kootenays in British Columbia, Audette-Longo often jokes that she grew up in a small-town newspaper office, where her mom still works, and she used to deliver and collate papers, answer phones and pitch stories.
After finishing her degree at Carleton, Audette-Longo worked as a full-time education reporter at The Standard in St. Catharines, Ont., then moved to Edmonton for a summer internship. She moved on to the Edmonton Journal’s crime desk, then its Alberta legislature bureau and finally took on the environment beat. Along the way, she spent time reporting from the Northwest Territories, covered a royal wedding for Postmedia and launched one of the newsroom’s first Twitter accounts.
“It was the early days of this new platform and my bureau colleagues and I were also building an audience for our politics blog, Capital Notebook,” Audette-Longo said.
“It was an experiment without editors or many journalists as examples, as we figured out the language of the platform – ‘hat-tips,’ hashtags, retweets and Follow Fridays – and got to know people who cared deeply about Alberta politics. We learned what worked well in that online space that perhaps wouldn’t work in a newspaper.”
In 2017, while still completing her PhD, Audette-Longo joined the online news site National Observer as a reporter and editor based in Montreal. The following year she joined its Ottawa office, where she began managing the news organization’s digital engagement and marketing campaigns.
“My own time at Carleton set me up for a career in newsrooms across Canada, including ones we couldn’t have imagined when I was an undergraduate student in the early 2000s. It also anchored my life-long curiosity about news media, how it works and what we can do better,” Audette-Longo said.
“Journalism doesn’t stay the same, and in constant change there is a lot of opportunity.”
Tuesday, June 22, 2021 in General, Journalism News
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