Editorial: Taking accountability
In Volume 44, we messed up.
We made tremendous strides towards bettering and healing our paper, but we also soured our reputation with some beloved community members and readers.
On Oct. 17, 2023, we published the article "Students denounce double standard in Concordia's Israel-Palestine statements." We failed to contact Concordia University for comment on this article, resulting in a factual error and a public statement from Concordia condemning our mistake.
We should have contacted Concordia for comment. We should have held ourselves accountable and issued a public statement.
We've since issued online and in-print corrections and apologized to our bulk of staff writers and contributors for this error.
On March 5, 2024, we published the article "Student kicked off campus for peaceful protest." Following publication, we received a tip advising us that the student featured in the article had prior ties to a right-wing organization with troubling ideologies in complete opposition to ours.
We should have done more in-depth research to confirm our source's identity.
This article has since been retracted. The author wrote a detailed apology letter to the editor, and we've issued a public apology on Instagram underscoring our mistakes, signalling a pending internal reform.
As of May, The Link has shifted into a new volume with a renewed masthead. We have undergone serious internal reform to ensure issues like this never arise again.
Following these events, our previous management instilled the necessary precautions in the Volume 44 masthead to prevent future unacceptable events.
We needed to do more.
During the transition into Volume 45, the managing team ensured that our new team reviewed new policies and handbooks in their training. We created a procedure booklet titled "The Link 101," which all masthead members must follow. This booklet includes, among other topics, a comprehensive guide to editing an article, proofreading an article and, most importantly, fact-checking.
We also publicly announced our mandate revision. We invited members of the community to review, comment on and contribute to a new propositional mandate, an important governing document in The Link's structure. Over the summer, our mandate was updated for the first time since 2017, curated with the help of our community.
The Link has also been made aware of the discomfort of our contributors, namely artists, regarding our use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create last-minute graphics.
We’ve had several internal discussions on its ethical use. We hear your concerns and we agree.
Using AI in any way, shape or form to create our content undermines our mandate and our long-standing ethics and principles. AI not only steals content from artists but also guts the opportunity to employ them on a project. As of July 2024, we have published The Link's first AI policy, outlining our zero-tolerance policy concerning AI use in all our published content.
If you are reading this right now, it is a testament to your investment in The Link. You care and are interested in this extension of a hand to our community; this is an apology, this is recognition and this is a promise.
For 45 years, The Link has been an award-winning, community, student-run advocacy newspaper.
Since 1980, we have been vital to the fabric of the Montreal community. We have held governments and administrations accountable and played an immense role in documenting movements left in the dark by legacy media. We became one of the first newspapers based out of a Canadian university to be recognized as a community newspaper for our civic journalism.
Our utmost priority is to find ways to better support our workers, sources and readership. As you finish reading our first issue, The Student Power Issue, let us remind you it is a new volume with new staff, new regulations, fresh minds, fresh ideas and, hopefully, new contributors.
Volume 44 saw a record number of contributors and staff writers, with over 120 contributors and 60 staff writers. This record number attests to our reach to students and creatives in the Montreal community, who have taken the leap in trusting us with their work. Thank you; it is an incredible thing. A larger team of contributors offers The Link a heightened perspective, yielding a more dynamic newspaper that continues to give back.
Welcome to Volume 45; The Link is here to serve you. We invite everyone to get involved, just as they are. Thank you sincerely for hearing us address our past mistakes. Let us learn from them and move forward together.
This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 1, published September 3, 2024.
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