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Examines whether library reference staff are cognizant of newspapers as a potential source of reference information, and explores what happens when library staff members make referrals--often a sign that they do not know the answer to the question themselves. Discusses results of a recent study of public libraries in Canada which revealed that reference staff are not making good use of this source. (Contains 17 references.) (AEF)

With Canada becoming the first G20 country to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, there has been increasing interest in the emergence of this new marketplace. Newspaper framing helps to shape public opinion on legalization and news sources play a role in determining how the public perceives the use of cannabis. This research analyzes how mainstream newspapers reported on the legalization of recreational cannabis in Canada in the years before and after legalization (between 2016 and 2019). Using a content analysis of 1,390 cannabis-related articles, 11 dominant reporting themes are identified. Over time, there was a shift from negative and sensationalist cannabis news coverage toward more balanced and progressive framing. The findings identify the influence of editorial political stance on thematic coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of the author's research into media representations of vulnerability and disability at end of life, she came across two local news stories, both thoroughly reported on by the "Winnipeg Free Press". In November 1998, doctors at a long term health care facility in Winnipeg, Manitoba insisted on entering a "do not resuscitate" order on the chart of 79 year old Mr. Andrew Sawatzky. In December 2007, doctors in the intensive care unit of a Winnipeg hospital opted to disconnect the ventilator and remove the feeding tube of Mr. Samuel Golubchuk, an 84 year old man. Doctors evaluated both Mr. Sawatzky and Mr. Golubchuk by assessing their levels of awareness and consciousness. Neither man was able to speak, although relatives of both men claimed each was capable of communicating and expressing his wishes. For this reason, both of these medical decisions went against the wishes of their respective families, who then sought judicial intervention to reverse them. At the heart of both these cases was the pivotal debate over the entitlement to the designation of "person" and the moral status that it confers. In this paper, the author focuses on this debate and its conflicting narratives. She aims to deconstruct the newspaper accounts of the different narratives in the cases of Mr. Sawatzky and Mr. Golubchuk. She then uses the news accounts to demonstrate the implications that such narratives can have on the lives of these two vulnerable people, as well as people with intellectual disabilities. She begins by describing the law and policy for providing life-sustaining treatments in Manitoba. She follows this description with a summary of the above-mentioned two cases and continues with a brief review of the literature highlighting the relevant philosophical, ethical and medical concepts which are central to understanding these stories. She concludes this paper with a discussion of the implications that these different narratives can have for people with intellectual disabilities. (Contains 1 footnote.)

This paper outlines how corpus linguistics--and more specifically the corpus-assisted discourse studies approach--can add useful dimensions to studies of language ideology. First, it is argued that the identification of words of high, low, and statistically significant frequency can help in the identification and exploration of language ideologies within corpora. The frequency of linguistic patterns and discursive representations may reveal trends in explicit representations of languages (i.e. metalanguage) and elisions where assumptions are made about the role of languages (i.e. implicit language ideologies). Secondly, collocation data can aid researchers in gaining greater insight into the ways in which languages are being represented (or not) within sites identified through frequency and statistical significance. Finally, the use of dispersion plots can help researchers to identify sites with high- and low-frequency items for closer analysis. The paper concludes with some of the limitations of the corpus linguistic approach in studying language ideologies. Examples are drawn from a larger comparative study of French and English language ideologies in corpora of Canadian newspapers.

The popularization of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has been shrouded in promises of disruption and radical change in education. In Canada, official partnerships struck by higher education institutions with platform providers such as "Coursera", "Udacity" and "edX" were publicized by dailies and professional magazines. This print coverage of MOOCs captures the contemporary ideological struggle over the meaning of both technology and higher education. By means of a thematic analysis of the English Canadian print coverage of MOOCs (2012-2014), this paper shows that both online educational technologies and higher education are constructed through an economic frame. However, this frame does not go unchallenged. Where newspapers construct MOOCs as an easy fix for an allegedly inefficient and outdated higher education system, professional magazines question the relationship between technology, higher education and money. These different representations point to the efforts of academic communities to develop alternative social imaginaries of education as public good within a dominant neoliberal framing of MOOCs and of the higher education system. In conclusion, the paper reflects on how the academic community can create alternative discursive spaces by shifting the discussion of MOOCs from economic concerns to civic goals.

This paper describes how a locally developed school ranking system affected student enrolment patterns in British Columbia over time. In developing an annual school "report card" that was published in newspapers and online, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute created a marketplace for school choice by devising an accountability scheme that highlighted and concealed visibility asymmetries between schools. Against the backdrop of a shifting political landscape, report cards helped focus the public's attention on school achievement scores that identified low-, mid-, and high-performing schools. A quasi-market for education emerged in the non-place of language and discourse when school ranking results became the basis by which parents made decisions about where to send their children to school. When student achievement data is used to identify British Columbia's "best" and "worst" performing secondary schools in this way, standardized assessment practices may be considered high-stakes.

Newspapers and other media are often used as a source of information on science issues, both by the public and teachers in classrooms. Over six months, we collected discussions of global warming issues from the online forums of a national newspaper. Our analysis of these contributions suggests there is a considerable effort in these forums, especially from certain individual posters, to detract from the arguments in support of global warming by using a variety of strategies. This paper summarizes strategies employed by these frequent posters and discusses how we see many of them emerging from traditional classroom science environments. (Contains 1 note.)

This article examines the salience and content of representations of language education in a corpus of English- and French-Canadian newspapers. Findings suggest that English-Canadian newspapers foreground official-language education issues, in which public schools are represented as the primary means by which Canadians can gain equal access to social resources. In contrast, French-Canadian newspapers do not foreground language education issues; in the few cases where these are discussed, the focus tends to be specifically on immigrant acquisition of French. Since representations of these issues reflect beliefs and attitudes toward languages, the paper concludes that they also reveal the successes and failures of discourses concomitant with Canada's language policy.

The NCTM Research Committee identifies key influences on mathematics education that are largely outside the domain of the academic world in which most mathematics education researchers live. The groups that are identified--including the media, companies and foundations, and other academic domains--affect the public's perception of mathematics and mathematics education. They argue that mathematics education researchers can intervene to shift these storylines and positionings and have greater impact on policy, practice, and public perception in the future.

By exploring the ways in which Kenora's daily newspaper spoke to the deep-seated, endemic, systemic anti-native racism woven into the fabric of Canadian society since its inception as a political entity in the nineteenth century, this paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of Canada's colonial imagination as expressed in the popular press. Kenora, after all, can lay claim to near complete Canadian ordinariness. While the images discussed in this article speak to a single newspaper's yearlong coverage, with special emphasis on a charged yet discrete incident, there are grounds to suggest that the "Miner & News" depictions of aboriginals typified (and typify) Canadian newspaper representations of natives since Confederation. To begin with, as noted, scholars have identified the mainstream press as a central instrument in structuring and naturalizing colonialism. In short, then, one may argue that the "Miner & News," in addition to serving its business masters and the local reading audience with the "news," also contributed to the Canadian imperialism by promoting racist notions about the alleged inferiority of aboriginal peoples. Further, that the images reflect the racialized image patterning common in other colonial societies, as noted, and that the press has been found to serve a key role in the promotion and affirmation of colonialism in such societies, again as noted, shows that the "Bended Elbow" narrative qua news story also very much served to add yet another brick in the wall of the Canadian colonial project. The research presented and discussed here, albeit limited temporally and by geography, also fits neatly within historical molds of press treatment of natives in Canada, though more work needs to be done. (Contains 99 notes.)

Reading youth writing is an avenue for the youth where they can express their opinions and ideas. In this article, the author questions whether practitioners in the field of cultural studies are actually engaged in this particular dialogue. The author has examined several articles written by young people from "Toronto Star." He realized that while those writings are most often incomplete "readings" of everyday life, they came with socio-historical urgency. He also observed that while individual pieces of writing represent profoundly different class, race and gender positions, hybrid moments bring them together in shared tropes such as body image, media stereotypes, peer pressure, parental and other forms of authority, generalized bias towards youth, antiracism, global consciousness, sexuality, concern about education and jobs, and social change. (Contains 6 notes.)

Demonstrates how political cartoons may be used to teach Canadian history using the cartoons of Arch Dale, who worked for the Winnipeg Free Press between 1927 and 1954. Provides six cartoons and a collection of study questions for classroom use. (JDH)

Examines cliches, vogue words, redundancies, ungrammatical constructions and lapses in style occurring in various Canadian newspapers. (HTH)

BRISKIN L. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 285-296 Resistance, mobilization and militancy: nurses on strike Drawing on nurses' strikes in many countries, this paper explores nurse militancy with reference to professionalism and the commitment to service; patriarchal practices and gendered subordination; and proletarianization and the confrontation with healthcare restructuring. These deeply entangled trajectories have had a significant impact on the work, consciousness and militancy of nurses and have shaped occupation-specific forms of resistance. They have produced a pattern of overlapping solidarities - occupational solidarity, gendered alliances and coalitions around healthcare restructuring - which have supported, indeed promoted, militancy among nurses, despite the multiple forces arrayed against them. The professional commitments of nurses to the provision of care have confronted healthcare restructuring, nursing shortages, intensification of work, precarious employment and gendered hierarchies with a militant discourse around the public interest, and a reconstitution and reclamation of 'caring', what I call the politicisation of caring. In fact, nurses' dedication to caring work in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries may encourage rather than dissuade them from going on strike. This paper uses a trans-disciplinary methodology, qualitative material in the form of strike narratives constructed from newspaper archives, and references to the popular and scholarly literature on nursing militancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Mass media are very influential in shaping discourses about health but few studies have examined the extent to which newspaper coverage of such stories reflect issues embedded in health policy documents. We estimate the relative distribution of health stories using content analysis. Nine meta-topics are used to sort stories across a range of major influences shaping the health status of populations adapted from the document Toward a Healthy Future (Second Report on the Health of Canadians (1999)) (TAHF). A total of 4732 stories were analyzed from 13 Canadian daily newspapers (10 English, 3 French language) using a constructed week per quarter method. Stories were sampled from each chosen newspaper for the years 1993, 1995, 1997 and 2001. 72% (n=3405) of stories in this analysis were from English-language papers, 28% (n=1327) were from French-language papers. Topics related to health care (dealing either with issues of service provision and delivery or management and regulation) dominated newspaper stories, accounting for 65% of all stories. Physical environment topics accounted for about 13% of all stories, the socio-economic environment about 6% of stories, personal health practices about 5% of stories, and scientific advances in health research about 4% of stories. Other influences upon health identified in TAHF were rarely mentioned. The overall prominence of topics in newspapers is not consistent with the relative importance assigned to health influences in TAHF. Canadian newspapers rarely report on socio-economic influences frequently cited in the research literature (and reflected in TAHF) as being most influential in shaping population health outcomes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper posits journalists as cartographers who, through their reporting, produce a news geography which maps the world and sketches the contours and connections of their communities within that world. Employing a methodology adapted to the analysis of newspaper sites on the World Wide Web, this paper reports on an intensive news-flow study of the on-line editions of Canada's three national newspapers - the Globe and Mail, the National Post and Le Devoir - to determine whether these newspapers are taking advantage of the Internet's technological capacity to expand their news geographies beyond conventional borders. We argue that not only do these newspapers portray a highly circumscribed world, but they fail to exploit fully even the national space of Canada, thus reinforcing the conventional news value of proximity - physical, cultural or emotional closeness - as a strongly determinant factor in mapping their news worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the manner through which the International Hockey League (IHL) and its operations were portrayed in newspaper coverage in the larger urban centers of eastern Canada, where hockey had its developmental and organizational roots within the middle- and upper-middle-class community, and compares it to coverage that appeared in newspapers in the communities that hosted IHL teams, which were communities driven by industry and had large working-class populations. To do so, a comparison of newspaper coverage of the IHL in local IHL newspapers with reports published in newspapers in major Canadian cities strongly associated with the origins, development, and organizational control of ice hockey, is undertaken. The development of the sport of ice hockey in both Canada and the USA, and newspaper coverage generally, and hockey specifically, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is reviewed. Representative examples of the coverage of IHL games and operations over the course of its three-year operations are then provided. Having compared the coverage of games and operations of the IHL between IHL and Canadian-based newspapers, the paper concludes with a discussion of how business competition, competing ideologies toward high-level sport, and class-based perceptions regarding violence, aggression, and masculinity can affect the newspaper coverage of sporting events.

International news-flow research has repeatedly identified significant imbalances in the global exchange of news among regions of the world. With the emergence of thousands of news sites on the World Wide Web, and the corresponding ability of news audiences to access these sites, the Internet offers the technological capacity to globalize media content. This paper seeks to test that possibility by exploring the way one Canadian daily newspaper, the Montreal Gazette , occupies the geography of the Internet with its on-line news operation. The paper reports on an exploratory comparative news-flow study of the Gazette 's hard-copy and on-line editions to determine whether on-line publishing has prompted the Gazette to alter the boundaries of its news coverage. While the paper concludes that, indeed, the Gazette 's website consistently carried far more international news items than its hard-copy edition, it also notes that this distinction is largely explained by the website's very heavy reliance on wire-service copy and its emphasis on sports news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from Shoemaker and Reese's hierarchical model of influences on media content, this paper summarizes content analyses by NewsWatch Canada on different dimensions of potential corporate influence on Canadian newspaper content: (1) the offsetting tendencies of content rationalization and duplication in chain papers; (2) newspaper coverage of their own parent companies, and of the media industry; (3) the influence of newspaper editorial positions on news coverage; (4) some potential impacts of advertising; (5) potential double standards related to politics and social class. While the research is exploratory, there is evidence of systemic corporate influence, particularly on the second, third and fifth dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Canadian reporting on suicide and the ways it changed over 150 years. Archival research on the reporting practices of two long-standing newspapers presented here shows that suicide was not always taboo in the media. In fact, the silencing and tip-toeing around reporting on suicide only began in the mid-twentieth century. Early newspaper accounts frequently included reports on suicides, both local and far removed, including details on the exact manner of death. As public perceptions of suicide, and the laws surrounding it, gradually shifted from considering the act a crime to an aspect of psychiatric malady, reporting on suicide changed. Once suicide became an untouchable subject in newsrooms the stigma became entrenched, making it hard to address in any meaningful way for decades [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the sociology of vital statistics by examining the understandings of infant mortality which circulated in Alberta in the early 20th century. In those years, infant mortality came to be represented as an unnatural and unacceptable diminishment of Alberta's population and an appropriate object of political concern. This paper deals with the ways in which infant mortality became saturated with symbolism, even before the full emergence of policies and programs for reducing it. Using a database of 73 digitized Alberta newspapers, I identify the dominant metaphors for infant mortality as economic inefficiency and military defeat. I also set this concern for lost infant life within the context of other population anxieties, including xenophobic fears about "unnatural increase" through immigration and fears about "population quality" which culminated in calls for eugenic sterilization. I argue that infant mortality is a unique form of population process in that it temporally fuses birth and death, creating, in the collective imagination, a spectral collection of those who might have lived, had they not been deprived of life unnaturally soon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a language ideological debate that took place in Canadian national newspapers following the opening ceremonies for the 2011 Vancouver Olympics. Reports on the insufficient use of French during the opening ceremonies sparked protest from politicians, official commentators, citizens and online newsreaders alike. Previous research has suggested that language ideological 'debates' (i.e. overt manifestations of ideologies) are a useful site for studying the role that languages play in the construction of social groups (see Blommaert 1999a, b). In Canada, a national cliché is that Canadian identity is fractured both linguistically and geographically. Thus, the debate over the status of French in the Vancouver Olympics involves not only ideologies of language, but also ideologies of identity and belonging. An analysis of this language ideological debate, then, can shed light on the often naturalised and commonsensical understandings of Canadian national identity. The data consist of articles and commentary drawn from two national newspapers ( The Globe and Mail and Le Devoir). The findings suggest some of the ways in which languages are represented as unifying and dividing characteristics of Canadian identity, representations of which often differ according to the language of the newspaper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]