Mary Lynn Young


Mary Lynn Young, is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism, and co founder and board member of The Conversation Canada, a national not for profit journalism organization, an affiliate of The Conversation global network. She has held a number of academic administrative positions at UBC, including Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts (2011-2016), Director of the UBC School of Journalism (2008-2011), and Acting Director (June-December 2007).

DJRG Fellow, April 2020

Young has two recent co-authored books: Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities (Oxford U. Press, November 2019) with Candis Callison and Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News (Routledge, 2019) with Alfred Hermida. Her research interests include gender and the media, journalism startups and the business of news, data and computational journalism and journalism coverage of crime. An overarching goal of her work is to link academic knowledge and journalism expertise through scholarship, teaching and professional engagement.

Her list of scholarly awards includes: Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ), Oxford University (April-June 2016), the UBC Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies Early Career Scholar Award (2009-2010) and the 2007 Rufus Z. Smith Award for the best article (co-authored) published in the American Review of Canadian Studies.

Title and abstract

Digital born journalism startups in a time og crisis

What would a multi voice history of the present tell us about the role that digital born journalism organizations can and should play in the repair, reform and transformation of the field of journalism? Instead of moving quickly to a defense of a modern journalism in crisis, it might open up a conversation that includes multiple perspectives in order to understand what needs repair and reform. Assumptions that narrowly assume funding and technology are the main pain points miss the big picture. Journalism like information is abundant today, and modern journalism has a lot to repair before it can account for its place in an evolving and increasingly complex civil society. How journalism and journalists emerge alongside newer social institutions that are performing the historic roles of journalism (yet not always by that name) is essential and likely will be a work in progress for quite some time. The talk examines digital born journalism start ups and organizations to explore the multiple journalisms experimenting with and expanding our understanding of what journalism could and should do today. How journalists shift from being lone wolves with Clark Kent-like ideals to relational identities able to integrate often competing perspectives is a process that is both already happening and not a certainty.

Selected publications