Position Title: Editorial and Events Assistant
Location: 555 Richmond St. W, Suite 1101, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

About CJFE:
CJFE monitors, defends and reports on free expression and access to information in Canada and abroad. Rooted in the field of journalism, we promote a free media as essential to a fair and open society. CJFE boldly champions the free expression rights of all people, and encourages and supports individuals and groups in the protection of their own and others’ free expression rights.

Duties/Job Description
The job will be a 12-month, full-time contract position with the possibility of roll over into a full-time, permanent position. Primary duties will include writing and copy editing content for the CJFE website, assisting with the publication of CJFE’s annual Review of Free Expression in Canada, coordinating logistics for the annual CJFE Gala: A Night to Honour Courageous Reporting, helping with membership engagement, and other miscellaneous tasks as needed. The employee will report to the CJFE Executive Director.

Duties include, but are not limited to:

• • Writing, copy editing, and fact-checking assignments for CJFE’s Review of Free Expression in Canada and CJFE.org
• • Assisting with the annual CJFE Gala: A Night to Honour Courageous Reporting (tracking ticket sales and sponsor payments, communicating with committee members, etc.)
• • Conducting research on press freedom issues and other topics in Canada and internationally
• • Writing alerts and press releases on behalf of CJFE
• • Contributing to CJFE’s social media accounts
• • Assisting with other educational and outreach events as needed
• • Assisting with membership outreach
• • Undertaking other duties as needed

Requirements:

• • Excellent written communication skills
• • Excellent organizational and time-management skills
• • Strong copy editing skills
• • Strong attention to detail
• • Minimum undergraduate degree in a related field (journalism, international relations, etc.)
• • Strong Excel skills
• • Interest in and knowledge of current affairs and free expression issues
• • Previous experience (work or voluntary) with event planning considered an asset
• • Fact checking experience considered an asset
• • Previous journalism experience considered an asset
• • Bilingualism considered an asset
• • Website development, graphic design skills and experience with HTML considered an asset

Meeting these requirements is important. However, passion, intelligence, a strong work ethic and a willingness to learn is what the job requires above all else. We will be open to applications from strong candidates who possess these qualities even if they don’t meet all the requirements outlined above.

Hours: 37.5 hours per week

Remuneration: $20,000 annually

How to apply: Submit an application including current CV, cover letter and clippings by e-mail to thenheffer@cjfe.org.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: Monday, January 26, 2015.

We thank you for your interest, but only short-listed candidates will be contacted. Interviews of short-listed candidates will likely take place in the first week of February. Start date will be as soon as possible following the interviews.
____________________________________

Tom Henheffer
Executive Director

Canadian Journalists for Free Expression

O: (416) 515-9622 ex. 226
C: (647) 992-4630
www.CJFE.org

@henheffer

OTTAWA (June 23, 2014) – CWA Canada, the country’s only all-media union, is outraged at the sentences handed down against three journalists in Egypt today and demands their immediate release.
Mohamed Fahmy, an Egyptian-Canadian serving as Al-Jazeera’s Cairo bureau chief, and two of his colleagues were each sentenced to seven years in prison on trumped-up, terrorism-related charges.
CWA Canada joins other journalist groups and human rights organizations in condemning the action.
“We cannot allow the Egyptian government to get away with this,” said CWA Canada President Martin O’Hanlon.
“We cannot allow journalists to be punished or imprisoned for doing their jobs.

“Democratic countries and organizations must stand up to defend freedom of the press or this sort of injustice will spread. As journalism goes, so goes democracy.”
Fahmy, Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed were accused of supporting Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which the authorities have declared a terrorist organization.
In fact, they were simply doing their duty as journalists, covering protests against the military-backed government.
For more information contact:
Martin O’Hanlon
President, CWA/SCA Canada
(613) 820-8460

Source: rabble.ca

Last week the Toronto Starannounced a couple of things. First, they laid off 11 full-time page editors. Second, they announced the creation of a new department, torstar.ca and its intention to hire 17 new digital staff including video editors, digital producers and social media assistants. This is the first time folks in the torstar.ca wing of the company have actually been journalists. Historically torstar.ca been staffed by production folks and was, for a few years, jobbed out to another company completely.

The odd thing is, the new hires will be paid a good deal less than their compatriots in the print newsroom. According to a memo sent by the paper’s editor-in-chief Michael Cooke and its managing editor, Jane Davenport, the Star will pay the new hires the same kind of money they could make at Bell Media, Huffpo or Facebook. They called the lower salaries (over $200 per week lower, in some cases) “market-based rates.” The memo states: “… new digital jobs cannot be rated on print business legacy rates of pay.”

This is an odd position, especially in a unionized shop that is in the print business. A digital journalist is still a journalist and must be doing the same work as a print journalist. So why is one employee paid less just because his or her work doesn’t end up as ink on cellulose?

And, the new positions are in a different department from the main newsroom, which means that although they are unionized jobs, the new hires won’t be bumped, if there are layoffs. And, of course, that means that print journalists don’t roll into the torstar.ca positions. They could, of course, apply for the 17 new slots, but they’d have to take a cut in pay.

According to Unifor unit chair for the Star, Liz Marzari, the union is worried that the digital journalists are getting substantially lower pay for the same work. And, since, in the near future almost all journalism work will be digital, that means the new hires will set a new low bar for journalists working at the Star. “We object to the company trying to take an end-run around hard-won seniority,” says Marzari. “We understand that if there were lay-offs the new digital journalist hires would be vulnerable, but let’s have a conversation about it, not just isolate them.”

She says Unifor can take legal action and wants to continue discussing the situation withStar management.

Of course, in an ideal world Star staff would have already acquired the digital skills they need to be capable online journalists. And, in that same ideal world, they would be paid the same no matter what kind of journalism they practiced. But clearly, that’s not the case. TheStar has historically treated online work as production work, not journalism.

Back in the late ’90s I visited the Toronto Star to see how they tackled online news. My hosts directed me to a sprawling space full of eager young faces, all illuminated by monitors that still gave off the nerd-attracting pheromones of fresh packaging. But this was not the newsroom of the Toronto Star. This was a whole other team, the web team. They were not journalists, not part of the Guild and they were not paid on the same wage scale as the ink-stained folks nearby. In fact, they weren’t even allowed to alter copy from the newsroom. What went in the paper went on the site, no rewritten headlines, no new subheads, no grabber quotes. Certainly no video or new photos. Nothing. The people in the room were just web jockeys, there only to shovel the print edition online. The Toronto Star wanted to keep these young people as far away from journalism and as far away from the Guild as they could.

But now, even though the new torstar.ca team will be doing journalism, the old ideas of the print view of the worth of digital journalism seem to prevail. It is devalued. And the Starseems to want it both ways. They want the cachet of being an elder statesman of print journalism in Toronto, but when it suits them, they expect to behave like a nimble, digital native, despite having far more overhead, legacy equipment and legacy union agreements.

That’s not fair. It’s not fair to long-time Star journalists who will be bought out, retire or move on without truly participating in digital journalism. It’s not fair to the new hires who will be blamed for setting a new low in journalism wages and who will lack the deep experience of the Star culture and maybe of serious journalism and still be expected to publish quality work. And, it’s not fair to the publication’s readers, who should expect both the best journalism and the most modern delivery of that news and not have to settle for one or other because the Star wants to cavort around as mutton dressed like lamb.

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years, and is a long-time writer for rabble.ca on technology and the Internet.