Melissa Vincent
Journalist and Researcher
Melissa Vincent is a music journalist, researcher, and strategist based in Toronto. Her work broadly investigates questions of equity, intimacy, and community formation as it relates to music, technology, and culture. She’s been featured in Pitchfork, Elle Canada, The Globe and Mail, Canadian Business, Billboard, NPR Music, and The Fader among others. In 2022, she was nominated for a Digital Publishing Award in the category for Best Science and Technology Storytelling for her essay, Ethical AI has Not Solved Tech’s Problem with Racism.
In the past, she’s led content platforms operated by Blue Ant Media, Universal Music Canada, and Banger Films, and produced a podcast for an 8-part music docuseries on pop music for Netflix. She’s a Prism Prize juror, a SOCAN Songwriting Prize Panelist, and the Polaris Prize jury foreperson and board member. She’s a frequent on-air music correspondent for The National, CBC’s flagship nightly news program. Vincent is currently a graduate fellow at University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information and McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology.
Schedule
20 mins
St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts - Jane Mallett Theatre
Reimagining Canada's Playbook for Digital Content
The media ecosystem in Canada for storytellers across all mediums has long been in a state of transition. With the passing of both Bill C-11 (the Online Streaming Act) and Bill C-18 (the Online News Act), we have a renewed invitation to consider a looming question: how do we advocate the infrastructure creators deserve when technology, corporations, and policy intersect? Exploring solutions ranging from which values should inform new legislative paradigms, to how tech companies can meaningfully support Canadian art from those on the periphery, we’ll brainstorm out loud what we want our collective future to look like.
