Jay Ashdown

Jay is in his final year of TMU’s Bachelor of Journalism program. He has worked at Ricochet Media and The Eyeopener, and occasionally dabbles in film critique for Met Radio. Passionate about journalism with a focus on social justice, he believes strong reporting has the power to upend the status quo. Jay spends his off hours running campaigns for the campus Trans Collective, (still) figuring out how to use Photoshop, and waiting for the next Luca Guadagnino movie to come out.
A woman in distress reading social media comments
2025, Featured, Long Reads, Spring 2025, Stories, The Magazine, Under Attack

Don’t Read the Comments

“Okay, ma’am,” a crackling voice interrupts the caller. “Ma’am, can I talk?” Minutes into her report to the Ottawa Police hotline, journalist Rachel Gilmore feels exasperated. She is reporting a violent email sent to The Hill Times’ Erica Ifill—a name-dropping salad of verbal abuse such as “woke,” “cunt,” and racial slurs—including death threats.

An illustration of five Canadian media company logos sitting in a courtroom. The five companies are the Globe and Mail, CBC-Radio, Toronto Star, Postmedia, and The Canadian Press.
2025, Corruption, Quick Reads, Spring 2025, Stories

Big Tech, Big Lawsuit

“Big tech, again and again, shows itself to be an industry that moves with entitlement and lack of care,” wrote author Michael Melgaard in a contribution for The Walrus in 2023. Not long before the magazine’s interviews with Melgaard and other Canadian writers, The Atlantic’s Alex Reisner had exposed the contents of Books3, a text database used to train LLaMA, Meta’s large language model (LLM) for AI-generated text.