PDF AVAILABLE HERE As a public utility, The Griffins’ Nest aims to supply voters with information pertinent to the running of our democratic system. With that, the Candidate Questionnaires preceding the 2022 Vancouver Municipal Election has the objective of showcasing the positions of potential VSB Trustees on major issues concerning the District. As such, our Candidate Questionnaires must hold candidates responsible for any actions in the past, present, and future. This means that specific, tangible, and quantifiable answers by individual candidates are required to provide accountability. Th ..read more

The 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 Griffins' Nest Editorial Boards have teamed up to cover the 2022 Vancouver School Board Election. As The Griffins’ Nest is a student club, we are generally confined to the school calendar when it comes to our journalism. However, as a publication focused on public-interest reporting that has frequently taken on stories that extend beyond the hallways of our high school, editors decided that a special summer reporting project was incumbent upon us given our duty to our community as journalists. To that end, we strongly encourage readers to fill out our Public Input ..read more

The above post by @raperelief on Instagram shares a screenshot of a few paragraphs of a Global News article, “Canada’s top court says voluntary extreme intoxication a defence in violent crimes.”  The screenshot does not display the full article, and does not elaborate on the context of the headline. Instead, it leaves interpretation up to the viewer. The interpretation gathered from said post by the seven thousand commenters was that voluntary drunkenness would now be considered a defence to violent crimes in Canada, the post targeting sexual assault especially. This conclusion is not tr ..read more

The following letter was sent via email to trustees Chan-Pedly, Fraser, Gonzalez, and Wong on May 10, 2022. A PDF is available here. MAY 10, 2022 Vancouver School Board Policy and Governance Committee Members (trustees Chan-Pedly, Fraser, Gonzalez, and Wong) - Sent via email Dear Members of the Policy and Governance Committee, OPEN LETTER RE: Proposed Administrative Policies Restricting Student Journalism We write to you as the editors of The Griffins’ Nest, a nationally-recognized, independent student newspaper based out of Eric Hamber Secondary School. It has come to our attention that t ..read more

PDF AVAILABLE HERE The Griffins' Nest Editorial Board would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to Tamara Taggart for organizing a funding campaign for freedom of information requests, as well as to all those who donated following the Vancouver School Board's disappointing decision not to waive the $10 application fee for general requests made under Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. We now have more than enough funds to conduct the reporting we intended to. General FOI requests were free, prior to the passage of Bill-22 late last year. Public bodies across the province ..read more

VIVIAN ZINK/SYFY/NBCU PHOTO BANK/NBCUNIVERSAL Musician Neil Young has demanded that his work be removed from Spotify due to the spread of COVID misinformation on the platform. He attributed his decision to one podcast in particular, “The Joe Rogan Experience” (‘JRE’), where the host, Joe Rogan has made numerous false claims about the virus. In a letter posted to his website, Young issued an ultimatum: “[Spotify] can have Rogan or Young. Not both.” The popular streaming service began pulling Young’s music from its site only two days later. Canadian artist Joni Mitchell has since followed in Yo ..read more

Thomas Lefebvre/Unsplash In journalism, sources are attributed. This contrasts academic papers, which often require an organized list of all sources used. This blog post will go over different citation styles for both journalistic pieces and academic writing.  Attribution For everything except well-known information (ex: There are over 30 million people in Canada), reporters should clarify where they got their information.  The teacher said her lessons were challenging for the average Grade 9 student. “We should get another cat for our family,” said Greg Smith.  This process w ..read more

Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images "Joe Biden is pretending to be the president-elect," declared broadcaster Greg Kelly, host of Greg Kelley Reports on the American conservative media TV network Newsmax, on November 12, 2020.  "Trump won the election. He'll win the recount. He'll win in court" One America News anchor Christina Bobb forcefully asserted to her viewers on November 14. Lies like these, chiefly espoused by Fox News, One America News, and Newsmax, became entrenched in the minds of millions in the days and months after last year's US President Election on November 3, fue ..read more

In a November 18 Journalism Blog post, we went over the differences between fact and opinion. We determined that a fact was defined as something that can be proven and evidenced to be true, whereas opinion cannot. So what happens when you put start putting facts or opinions together to form an article? What types of articles are there, and what's the difference between them? That's what I'll explain. Like a lot of terms in journalism, newspaper article types vary across different news organizations. The Nest has its own way of making these distinctions and explaining them to readers, but this ..read more

Credit: Toronto Star In The Nest's last issue, student journalist Max von Dehn took a look at Canada's notably corporate controlled news media landscape, and what it meant for the future of local news. The Canadian journalism ecosystem is well-established to be dominated by a few key players. Decades of reports from academic institutions, consulting groups, governmental commissions, and news media themselves have confirmed the true-north-strong-and-free's lack of news media diversity.  Here’s one example: nearly every major Canadian daily newspaper are in the hands of the Postmedia netwo ..read more