With university students off for the summer and some student newsrooms slowing down, Canadian news consumers may be noticing a void.
Increasingly, student newspapers are stepping up to cover community stories that would otherwise go untold.
“ I want us to bring a unique value to the Concordia population,” said Marieke Glorieux-Stryckman, who served as editor-in-chief of The Concordian at Montreal’s Concordia University this past academic year. “But more and more, part of that unique value is covering community initiatives that might be interesting to students rather than just covering campus.”
Glorieux-Stryckman attributes this shift to changes in Canada’s broader media market.
“Legacy media … have disappeared, or just become a lot smaller in their operations,” she said. “More and more, students are not feeling represented in mainstream media in Montreal.”
A shrinking sector
The Canadian news industry has faced years of layoffs and corporate consolidations, producing gaps in local coverage across the country.
Since 2008, 521 local news outlets have ceased operating due to closures or mergers, according to a 2024 study by the Local News Research Project, a project at Toronto Metropolitan University. Most of the outlets that closed were community papers.
Partially offsetting this decrease, 228 new outlets have launched in the same timespan.
Kamloops, B.C., is one example of a community that has lost its legacy outlets. Kamloops Daily News ceased publishing in 2014, ending an 80-year run. The outlet Kamloops This Week closed in 2023.
The startup publication Kamloops Chronicle is now the only community paper serving the city of 100,000 people. And it currently publishes just one edition a month.
But the student newspaper at Kamloops’ Thompson Rivers University is, in a small way, also stepping in to fill the gap. Robert McAlaster, editor-in-chief of The Omega, says TRU’s newspaper primarily serves students. “But of course, we do have people from the community who read us as well.”
The Omega has been making efforts to engage with Kamloops’ business community, says McAlaster, who noted community advertising accounts for a small portion of The Omega’s revenue.
The Omega, like most campus newspapers, gets the majority of its revenue from student levies. These are fees that students pay as part of their tuition fees. While students are generally free to opt out, most do not.
These fees are a key reason university newspapers are not facing the same existential struggle as community papers, which have seen their ad revenues plummet in the digital age.
McAlaster says their paper is strategic about the community topics they choose to cover.
“If we want to grow locally, if we want people to know us locally, we have to cover local businesses and stuff like that,” he said. He cited the local restaurant scene as one area of interest to the broader Kamloops community.
The Omega also prioritizes covering local arts and culture, he says. “People love hearing about new bands that are coming up, especially if they’re Canadian.”
McAlaster is not the only one to see an opportunity in covering local arts and culture. Glorieux-Stryckman and Lily Polenchuk, former editor-in-chief of the University of Alberta’s The Gateway newspaper, both pointed to arts and culture as key areas of focus for their papers.
“We cover a lot of [arts and culture], not just at the U of A, but in [Edmonton] and provincially,” said Polenchuk.
Here, too, broader industry trends may be a factor. While Canada’s larger cities continue to be served by legacy papers — such as the Montreal Gazette and Edmonton Journal — years of newsroom layoffs have all but eliminated these publications’ coverage of local arts scenes.
Unique capacity
Recent years have also seen university newspapers at the centre of a story that has captivated audiences across the Western world.
In both the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years, the Israel-Gaza conflict ignited demonstrations across university campuses.
Sources said their papers were well-positioned to cover the demonstrations as they unfolded — and beyond.
“We were there early in the morning and we were there late at night,” said Polenchuk, who noted The Gateway published breaking news coverage of the U of A’s on-campus pro-Palestinian demonstrations. “We were in communication with people within the encampment and within the university.”
Maeve Ellis, former managing online editor of the University of Toronto’s The Varsity newspaper, says their paper was able to offer more in-depth coverage of the demonstrations than city publications.
For example, The Varsity’s reporting revealed that the University of Toronto spent $4.1 million on costs related to their school’s encampment, including security, legal fees and repairs.
“I think one difference that comes to mind in the Varsity’s coverage of the encampment versus broader newspapers is that we have had the capacity to do reporting after [the demonstrations] ended,” she said.
Hurdles
However, in their efforts to serve a broader community of readers, university papers have faced an obstacle shared by legacy outlets as well.
Like legacy news organizations, student newspapers have been hard hit by the Online News Act. The 2023 legislation, formerly known as Bill C-18, resulted in Meta blocking Canadian news publishers from sharing their stories on Facebook and Instagram.
“Bill C-18 killed us,” said McAlaster, of Thompson Rivers University.
“We need to be seen in order to grow and to grow our business, but also to grow our skill sets,” he said. “Without feedback, we have no idea what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong. … What we need is to be able to be visible.”
Glorieux-Stryckman says that, after The Concordian’s Instagram account was blocked by Meta, the paper created a secondary account to maintain a presence on the platform. That account has not yet been branded as part of the news organization.
But now, “we have to be careful in how we present our content,” she said. “[W]e’re always a little bit scared that we’ll make a post that’s a bit too newsy.”
McAlaster says that, without reform, the Online News Act will handicap student newspapers’ ability to grow — and serve their communities.
“We need the government to take a look at student-run news organizations and see that this is harming us as much as it’s harming the big guys, and maybe even more,” he said.
