The Ryersonian

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The Ryersonian is a weekly campus newspaper produced by students at the Ryerson School of Journalism[1]. It competes with The Eyeopener to provide the most complete coverage of events at Ryerson University in Toronto. As well as appearing in print, The Ryersonian can be read online as part of RyersOnline [2], a news portal for the School of Journalism, featuring material from students in the broadcast, newspaper, magazine and online streams.

Students in their fourth year of the school's print stream are required to report, edit, photograph and produce the issue, and work on the masthead for 6 week blocks.

[edit] Controversies

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[3]. 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[4]. 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 [[5]] 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 [6] 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 have no connection financially or editorially from the RSU, the move was seen 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[7] 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 to as why editors at the newspaper decided that the Facebook group and Don Andrews was worth covering and helped to eliminate any notion that The Ryersonian was biased in any way in its reporting.

[edit] Links

• The Ryersonian [8]
• RyersOnline [9]
• The Eyeopener [[10]]
• Ryerson's site [11]
• The Eyeopener editorial [[12]]