Harley Dickinson of the University of Saskatchewan was part of several projects with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, seeing a common purpose between the newsroom and university.
Harley Dickinson of the University of Saskatchewan was part of several projects with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, seeing a common purpose between the newsroom and university.
By Catherine Wallace Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy
In an era when collaboration is a buzzword, academic Harley Dickinson and reporter Gerry Klein are pioneers.
Over the years, they’ve acted as matchmakers, instigating partnerships that have married the University of Saskatchewan’s research and analysis strengths with the storytelling power of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. And together, along with many others, they worked on Taking the Pulse, a major survey of Saskatchewan residents’ attitudes on a range of social issues. The project was published in 2001, with a second edition carried out in 2012.
Today, Dickinson, who is diving back into social research after 10 years in administration, says he sees a broad trend towardsuch synergies: “I think there’s potentially something very significant here which takes advantage of the fact that boundaries are now permeable, motivations to collaborate are growing, and that creates a bit of an incubator environment where things can happen.
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“My experience at the university is that almost every initiative now is a partnership, a collaboration. You just need to find who the interested parties are.”
Much of Dickinson’s focus during his years as vice-dean of social sciences at the University of Saskatchewan went into that idea of partnership and outreach. He was instrumental in conceptualizing and setting up the university’s Social Sciences Research Labs, which he calls the community’s “doorway into the university.” Anyone with an idea or a research question can bring it to the labs and be matched up with an interested professor.
And he was part of several projects with the StarPhoenix.
“Every person in the newsroom has ties to the university in some way, just by virtue of the fact that we’re both rather major players in the city,” says StarPhoenix editor Heather Persson. “And we have a common purpose in educating the community and enlightening them and being a place of discourse.”
Klein began reaching out to professors in the 1980s, tapping them for their expertise in polling and other research.
But it’s the bigger, more formal research and storytelling collaborations that took this partnership to another level — particularly Taking the Pulse.
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“These projects strengthened the bond every time,” says Klein, now retired from the paper. “(Academics) gained trust in the newspaper, and the newspaper gained connections and confidence in the university.”
For Taking the Pulse, the newspaper and university came up with survey topics together. The university was responsible for the methodology, polling and analysis of the results, and then the newsroom went out to find the people who would make the statistics come alive — “a really interesting collaboration with academics doing their sort of aggregated statistical analysis and the reporters breathing life into that,” says Dickinson.
When the second edition of Taking the Pulse was carried out in 2012, CBC Saskatchewan became a partner and the Regina Leader-Post also joined in the reporting. The issues ranged from how safe people feel in their neighbourhoods, to attitudes on new immigrants and on assisted dying, to fears about Alzheimer’s.
Peter Stoicheff, then arts and science dean and now president of the university, said at a public forum tied to the release: “I don’t think anywhere in the country has seen such a collaboration between so many news outlets and a university.”
However, not everyone in academia is committed to community outreach, Dickinson notes.
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“There is still resistance in universities to doing things that don’t fit the traditional academic mould,” he says. “There’s lots of lip service at universities to other criteria and other ways of communicating knowledge, but at the end of the day very few units have actually changed their recruitment, tenure, promotion standards to put meat on those bones.”
