On the Record (newspaper)
The Ryersonian is the masthead news title produced by students at the Ryerson School of Journalism in Toronto, Canada. Students produce daily news for the Ryersonian website, live blog local events relevant to students and broadcast TV news, also available on the website, at least once a week.
Select news content is also published once a week and distributed on campus Wednesdays while students are attending classes throughout the calendar year.
The Ryersonian accepts submissions from the entire Ryerson University student body but students in their fourth year of the school's undergraduate program are required to edit, produce and write for the masthead for six-week blocks throughout the year. Students in the Master's of Journalism program also take control of the masthead for six weeks.
In 2010, The Ryersonian began tweeting from @theryersonian and developed a Facebook page, The Ryersonian.
At the start of the 2011 academic year, The Ryersonian transformed into a title that aims to produce news and features in all media to meet the needs of students in a new curriculum that had retired the old print, TV and online streams to better reflect the way media are evolving globally.
Controversies
All references below to The Ryersonian include links to the now deprecated ryersonline.ca.
Several editions in the 2006–07 year addressed issues of on-campus racial tension. In November 2006, it was reported that a group called "I'm a White Minority @ Ryerson" was formed on Facebook, the popular online networking site.[1] The controversy snowballed as known white supremacist, and leader of the Nationalist Party of Canada Don Andrews, a Ryerson alum, was profiled on the front page of the March 21 edition.[2] He defended the Facebook group's rights to form a white culture student group.
Some criticized the paper for the story's poor timing, as March 21 is also the International Day for the Elimination of Racism. The Eyeopener, Ryerson's other student newspaper and competitor to the Ryersonian, ran an editorial[3] critical of the Ryersonian's coverage and ran a spoof issue lampooning the coverage of racists by the Ryersonian.
In response, students and members of the RSU conducted a one-time protest by gathering up editions of the paper and dumping them in front of the Ryersonian's office. A blog known as Ryersonian Watch[4] was also set up by an anonymous student. The blog only contained a handful of posts highly critical of The Ryersonian and sympathetic to the paper's competitor, The Eyeopener. The controversy led members of the Ryerson Students' Union to call for harsher restrictions on what could be published in the Ryersonian. However, since The Ryersonian is produced by students of Ryerson's journalism school and has no connection financially or editorially from the RSU, the move was seen[by whom?] as a way to retaliate against prior coverage that didn't show the RSU in a positive light.
Furthermore, a debate was held between Judy Rebick and the managing editor of The Ryersonian to discuss the reasons between how and why the article was published. The debate helped to explain the editorial reasoning as to why editors at the newspaper decided that the Facebook group and Don Andrews were worth covering and helped to eliminate any notion that The Ryersonian was biased in any way in its reporting.