UNBeknownst Podcast Episode 15

Alexandra Pope (BPhil’06) graduated from UNB Renaissance College's bachelor of philosophy in leadership program and went straight to work in social media and journalism for local newspapers. She jumped to The Weather Network and then joined Canadian Geographic as digital editor – a dream job. In 2022 she was named editor-in-chief of Canadian Geographic magazine and its sister publication, Canadian Geographic Travel. Although much of her time is spent behind a desk editing other peoples’ work, Alex has had the opportunity to travel to many amazing places in pursuit of interesting stories, including a tidal energy platform in the middle of the Bay of Fundy, a fur trading post in northern Saskatchewan, and the Vimy Ridge battlefield.  

UNBeknownst podcast host Shauna Cole (BA’02, MBA’12) chats with Alex about being at the top of your game doing what you love, and about the current climate of polarization in the media.

Listen to the episode

Highlights from the episode

Shauna: Congratulations on your appointment as editor-in-chief! What is the magazine’s mission? 

Alex: We are published by a not-for-profit society called the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and broadly our mission is to make Canada better known to Canadians and the world. As a magazine, we do that through storytelling – visual and written and through cartography. And then organizationally, beyond the magazine, we have a range of other programs that we run to advance that mission. We have our educational wing, Canadian Geographic Education, which provides resources for free to educators across Canada. We have a network of over 25,000 teacher members. We also do a lot of events and have an amazing facility on the Ottawa River just a couple doors down from the Prime Minister's residence and sort of across the street from Rideau Hall, a very historic location where we were doing a lot of talks and exhibits. So really highlighting Canada's incredible biodiversity and our cultural diversity. Including the incredible history of Indigenous Peoples on this land and the importance of protecting it all for future generations. 

Shauna: It seems there's so much politics in reporting now and almost all facets. Do you see that in your role with Canadian geographic? 

Alex: Well, we're certainly living in an age of increasing polarization of views, and I think a lot of that is related to our consumption of news through social media platforms because, of course, the algorithm shows you more of what you consume and the more you consume, the more it shows you and it feeds this vicious cycle of sealing yourself into an echo chamber where everything you're seeing is reinforcing a position or a range of positions that kind of adhere to one side of the political spectrum or another. And I certainly think that, you know, daily news journalists struggle with this a lot more than we do in the magazine publishing side, where we have longer lead times, we have more word count to play with. We can get more into the nuances of story when you're talking about a 3000-word feature versus a 500-word newspaper story. But we're certainly not immune to it. We cover some very contentious issues: climate change, truth and reconciliation. You know, readers have taken up pretty entrenched positions for or against these things, so we have to be very careful to do the work, do the research, be as fair and balanced as possible, while still respecting the fact that we have taken editorial positions on the importance of certain things. You know, we accept as a publication that climate change is real and happening, and it's a crisis that demands our attention. Similarly, we've taken the position that reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples in Canada is really important and so we're doing whatever we can to elevate Indigenous voices and let them speak for themselves on the issues that are affecting them the most. So, it's a challenge that we face all the time and I don't expect that it's going to get any better as social media evolves and becomes ever more intense and the algorithm becomes more aggressive in its pursuit of your attention. I would encourage everyone to read more magazines because we have that time and space and the breadth of pages to lay out a story step by step. It's rigorously fact checked. I really feel like magazine journalism is potentially the answer to this problem of polarization in our news landscape. 

Shauna: I like the way that you put that, around the disinformation. It's almost like we believe more what the algorithm serves us than what someone is actually telling us about their lived experiences, which is such a problem for so many reasons. Do you have a take on where journalism is heading in light of this? 

Alex: Probably not an educated take, to be honest. I do see that there is a splintering of the media landscape into more and more special interest publications and more independent publications. And I think in many ways that's a good thing. But I think there's a flip side to that. It becomes harder and harder to know who to trust. And legacy publications who have been around for, you know, in our case, we've been publishing Canadian geographic in some form or another for 93 year...you know we only exist because of the trust that our readers have in us. They know that they can count on us for rigorously fact checked quality writing by some of the top talents in the country. People who really know what they're talking about and how we maintain that trust in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. It’s honestly something that keeps me up at night. It just means that we need to be so on top of everything we publish and as the editor, I need to be 100% behind it. You know there can be no doubt in my mind that this is a Canadian Geographic story that we've told to the best of our abilities, that we are absolutely clear that this version is the truth as we understand it at the time of publishing. And it means owning up to our mistakes when they're made, as soon as we can. That’s really the only way that we go forward and maintain that trust. 

Shauna: So what do you think is like the top challenge that you face in your role of editor-in-chief? 

Alex: Well, aside from managing an extremely busy workload because of all of the things that we're trying to do, my job as editor-in-chief doesn't just touch the content, it also touches stuff that we're doing on the education side. It touches the events that we're coordinating at the building. It touches promotional opportunities for the organization, the brand to people outside the organization. So that's very challenging in terms of my to-do list in a given week. But macro, I think the biggest challenge that we face in terms of our future as a publication is a maintaining the trust that I just spoke about and capturing the audience's attention in this fragmented landscape where you have so many things competing for your attention and so many different sources of information that you can go to. What would make somebody come to Canadian geographic again and again and stay true to us and stay loyal and ideally subscribe to receive our communications either in their mailbox or their e-mail inbox or via a push notification sent to their device? That is the challenge that I have to really put my mind to if we're going to survive for another 93 years as an organization. 

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