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Vancouver-based illustrator of:
Why We Live Where We Live (Owlkids 2014)
The Art of the Possible: An Everyday Guide to Politics (Owlkids 2015) by Edward Keenan
Little Cloud (Orca 2020) $19.95 978-1-4598-2184-2. Written by Johanna Wagstaffe
[BCBW 2019]
Breaking News: Why Media Matters by Raina Delisle, illustrations by Julie McLaughlin (Orca) Ages 9-12
Review by Tom Sandborn
Young news junkies often get their first information fix from newspapers and news on social media. Some of them, like Raina Delisle, the author of Breaking News: Why Media Matters, go on to adult careers in journalism. Whether or not they make a career in journalism, kids who get addicted to the news early in life mostly go on to adult lives as prodigious and, hopefully, sophisticated consumers of media. This is good news for democracy, so dependent on voters having access to the necessary information for choosing their political leaders.
Delisle targets kids in the crucial years between 9 and 12. Lighthearted in tone and beautifully accompanied with cartoons by award-winning Vancouver Island illustrator Julie McLaughlin, the book includes a thumbnail history of news media down the ages and a survey of the 21st century’s rapidly changing and often problematic media landscape, complete with its dying newspapers, trolls, cyberbullies and fake news. Along the way, Delisle introduces her readers to pioneers of journalism and to tools and resources they can use to make their adventures in media safer and more productive.
One of the many pioneers Delisle covers is Elizabeth Cochrane, a young woman coming of age in America in the late 1880s. Cochrane, 18 years old and outraged by an editorial in the Pittsburgh Dispatch that insisted women were obliged to stay home and tend the house and the children, wrote a stinging rebuke to this sexist view in a letter to the editor. The paper’s editor was so impressed that he hired Cochrane. Using the pen name “Nelly Bly,” Cochrane went on to an illustrious career as an investigative reporter. In one instance, Cochrane reported on the abuses found in the punitive “mental asylums” of the day by going underground posing as a patient. For another ambitious story, Cochrane persuaded her editor to fund her round-the-world travel in an attempt to navigate the planet in less than the 80 days claimed for the trip in the popular Jules Verne novel. She completed the journey in 72 days. Bly’s motto was, “If you want to do it, you can do it,” and Delisle clearly means for her young readers to adopt that motto for themselves.
Delisle’s quick survey of the history of news and its propagation, from petroglyphs to pixels, is a brisk, entertaining romp. She spends some time on the evolution of news technology from the first known newspapers—the Acta Diurna or “daily events,” handwritten sheets circulated during the heyday of the Roman Empire—to the creation of moveable type in the Chinese and European Middle Ages, as well as the decisive technological leap achieved when Friedrich Koenig linked an early steam engine to a printing press—at a single stroke quadrupling the speed and volume possible with earlier hand presses modelled on Gutenberg’s invention from the middle of the 1400s.
As soon as you have a press, the issue of freedom of expression is posed, and that has been a fraught and contested issue ever since. Kings, aristocrats, priests, Inquisitors and prelates all had an interest in shutting up critics and restricting the limits of allowable expression. This impulse to censor grew stronger with every technological improvement. According to Reporters Without Borders in its 2022 World Press Freedom Index, which assesses 180 countries and territories, journalists face not only censorship from official sources but also chaotic torrents of misinformation and propaganda from official and unofficial sources. The Index notes: “Within democratic societies, divisions are growing as a result of the spread of opinion media following the ‘Fox News model’ and the spread of disinformation circuits that are amplified by the way social media functions. At the international level, democracies are being weakened by the asymmetry between open societies and despotic regimes that control their media and online platforms while waging propaganda wars against democracies. Polarisation on these two levels is fuelling increased tension.”
The first law guaranteeing freedom of the press was passed in Sweden in 1766, and the existence of papers, publishers, and writers willing to speak truth to power has remained one of the defining characteristics of a working democracy. At its best, a working journalism sector can act as Socrates’ “gadfly of the state,” calling out abuses of power and informing citizens so they can more effectively engage in self-rule. Delisle clearly values this role, and her book invites young readers to become critical thinkers about the torrents of data that engulf them in the 21st century, and to consider themselves as working journalists, both now and in the future.
But Delisle is realistic about the challenges young people will face in any attempt to master the current media universe: far too much content, fake news, silos of computer-driven agreement and mutual reinforcement, trolls, sensationalism, clickbait and censorship. Although recognizing with commendable frankness all the reasons for despair about journalism’s future, (and humanity’s, for that matter), Delisle ends her charming book on an optimistic note with two aspirational chapters titled “Saving Journalism” and “Become a News Hound.” As bonus content, she adds a list of resources for the aspiring young news junkie, including biographies of fearless feminist journalists and news sources purpose-built for kids, including the intriguing MediaWise Teen Fact Checking Network: www.poynter.org/mediawise/programs/tfcn/
All in all, this book would be a great gift for any bright and aspiring young journalist, or for any young person who wants to be a responsible adult while navigating the turbulent waters of the current media world. 9781459826564
Tom Sandborn lives and writes on unceded Indigenous territory in Vancouver.
[BCBW 2023]
Why We Live Where We Live (Owlkids 2014)
The Art of the Possible: An Everyday Guide to Politics (Owlkids 2015) by Edward Keenan
Little Cloud (Orca 2020) $19.95 978-1-4598-2184-2. Written by Johanna Wagstaffe
[BCBW 2019]
Breaking News: Why Media Matters by Raina Delisle, illustrations by Julie McLaughlin (Orca) Ages 9-12
Review by Tom Sandborn
Young news junkies often get their first information fix from newspapers and news on social media. Some of them, like Raina Delisle, the author of Breaking News: Why Media Matters, go on to adult careers in journalism. Whether or not they make a career in journalism, kids who get addicted to the news early in life mostly go on to adult lives as prodigious and, hopefully, sophisticated consumers of media. This is good news for democracy, so dependent on voters having access to the necessary information for choosing their political leaders.
Delisle targets kids in the crucial years between 9 and 12. Lighthearted in tone and beautifully accompanied with cartoons by award-winning Vancouver Island illustrator Julie McLaughlin, the book includes a thumbnail history of news media down the ages and a survey of the 21st century’s rapidly changing and often problematic media landscape, complete with its dying newspapers, trolls, cyberbullies and fake news. Along the way, Delisle introduces her readers to pioneers of journalism and to tools and resources they can use to make their adventures in media safer and more productive.
One of the many pioneers Delisle covers is Elizabeth Cochrane, a young woman coming of age in America in the late 1880s. Cochrane, 18 years old and outraged by an editorial in the Pittsburgh Dispatch that insisted women were obliged to stay home and tend the house and the children, wrote a stinging rebuke to this sexist view in a letter to the editor. The paper’s editor was so impressed that he hired Cochrane. Using the pen name “Nelly Bly,” Cochrane went on to an illustrious career as an investigative reporter. In one instance, Cochrane reported on the abuses found in the punitive “mental asylums” of the day by going underground posing as a patient. For another ambitious story, Cochrane persuaded her editor to fund her round-the-world travel in an attempt to navigate the planet in less than the 80 days claimed for the trip in the popular Jules Verne novel. She completed the journey in 72 days. Bly’s motto was, “If you want to do it, you can do it,” and Delisle clearly means for her young readers to adopt that motto for themselves.
Delisle’s quick survey of the history of news and its propagation, from petroglyphs to pixels, is a brisk, entertaining romp. She spends some time on the evolution of news technology from the first known newspapers—the Acta Diurna or “daily events,” handwritten sheets circulated during the heyday of the Roman Empire—to the creation of moveable type in the Chinese and European Middle Ages, as well as the decisive technological leap achieved when Friedrich Koenig linked an early steam engine to a printing press—at a single stroke quadrupling the speed and volume possible with earlier hand presses modelled on Gutenberg’s invention from the middle of the 1400s.
As soon as you have a press, the issue of freedom of expression is posed, and that has been a fraught and contested issue ever since. Kings, aristocrats, priests, Inquisitors and prelates all had an interest in shutting up critics and restricting the limits of allowable expression. This impulse to censor grew stronger with every technological improvement. According to Reporters Without Borders in its 2022 World Press Freedom Index, which assesses 180 countries and territories, journalists face not only censorship from official sources but also chaotic torrents of misinformation and propaganda from official and unofficial sources. The Index notes: “Within democratic societies, divisions are growing as a result of the spread of opinion media following the ‘Fox News model’ and the spread of disinformation circuits that are amplified by the way social media functions. At the international level, democracies are being weakened by the asymmetry between open societies and despotic regimes that control their media and online platforms while waging propaganda wars against democracies. Polarisation on these two levels is fuelling increased tension.”
The first law guaranteeing freedom of the press was passed in Sweden in 1766, and the existence of papers, publishers, and writers willing to speak truth to power has remained one of the defining characteristics of a working democracy. At its best, a working journalism sector can act as Socrates’ “gadfly of the state,” calling out abuses of power and informing citizens so they can more effectively engage in self-rule. Delisle clearly values this role, and her book invites young readers to become critical thinkers about the torrents of data that engulf them in the 21st century, and to consider themselves as working journalists, both now and in the future.
But Delisle is realistic about the challenges young people will face in any attempt to master the current media universe: far too much content, fake news, silos of computer-driven agreement and mutual reinforcement, trolls, sensationalism, clickbait and censorship. Although recognizing with commendable frankness all the reasons for despair about journalism’s future, (and humanity’s, for that matter), Delisle ends her charming book on an optimistic note with two aspirational chapters titled “Saving Journalism” and “Become a News Hound.” As bonus content, she adds a list of resources for the aspiring young news junkie, including biographies of fearless feminist journalists and news sources purpose-built for kids, including the intriguing MediaWise Teen Fact Checking Network: www.poynter.org/mediawise/programs/tfcn/
All in all, this book would be a great gift for any bright and aspiring young journalist, or for any young person who wants to be a responsible adult while navigating the turbulent waters of the current media world. 9781459826564
Tom Sandborn lives and writes on unceded Indigenous territory in Vancouver.
[BCBW 2023]
