When It Matters Most, Student Journalists Are Showing Up

In April 2024, students set up encampments at universities across Canada and the United States to protest Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Columnists with prestigious outlets wrote condescending op-eds about the protesters. At the Wall Street Journal, they were called “cowardly” and “not compassionate,” with the writer claiming that onlookers were “relieved to see the NYPD come in [and drag] the protesters away.” These writers seemed ready to dismiss the demonstrators and paint them negatively, without really interrogating what was prompting them to set up camp for weeks on end.

Meanwhile, the student press meticulously covered the encampments. They interviewed protesters, carefully constructed timelines of events, and produced near-round-the-clock radio coverage in the case of Columbia University. The student press also fulfilled one of the most important tenets of journalism: making sure those in power were being watched.

In the weeks leading up to the launch of an encampment at the University of Toronto that spring, a group of students staged a sit-in at Simcoe Hall, outside the offices of leadership, including President Meric Gertler. They called on the university to disclose the names of all the companies it invests in, to divest from those providing military resources to the Israeli government, and to end all partnerships with institutions that either operate or support settlements outside Israel’s internationally recognized border.

One student protester told me that the administration initially delayed and avoided meeting with them. However, he said, he saw a look of “shock” on an administrator’s face when he noticed a student journalist from the campus paper, The Varsity, wearing her press badge and reporting on the sit-in. He believes the journalist’s presence pressured the administration into taking action.

Times have never seemed grimmer for the media industry: layoffs, AI-fication, shrinking budgets, misinformation, and an increasing crackdown on press freedom. Then there are the journalists in Gaza, still starving and under siege by the Israeli military. While they have reported relentlessly on the onslaught that has decimated Gaza—killing over 67,000 people, at least one-third of them children—they have also been subject to the same hardships they are reporting on: displacement, drone strikes, and arrests. Amid all this terrible news, it has been hard to feel hopeful. But for a long time, and especially over the past two years, I’ve looked to the student press for inspiration for how to cover this moment with persistence, courage, and accountability.

For example, in September 2024, student journalists Elissa Mendes and Cassandra Bellefeuille, writing for Carleton University’s student newspaper, the Charlatan, broke significant news: the university had fenced off the campus quad to prevent an encampment from being set up, contrary to the president’s initial claims that it was set up for maintenance reasons. According to Mendes and Bellefeuille, the fencing was put up on April 29, the same day the pro-Palestine encampment began at the University of Ottawa. Their story quotes the Carleton University president addressing a senate meeting that fall, saying, “I make no apologies for having taken that decision. The possibility of an encampment at our campus was a real one at that time,” and that an encampment on campus would have been “dangerous” for both protesters and community members.

Now, more than a year after the end of many of the encampments, some of which were violently raided and taken down by police in military gear, the rest of the world is catching up to these students’ simple message: what’s been happening in Gaza is wrong. Students have long demanded that university administrations should not be invested in human rights abuses there. Bellefeuille and Mendes’s reporting is an important record of how the university administration essentially lied about their plan to curtail a student protest movement that is vindicating itself against bad-faith smears in real time.

I saw evidence of this moral clarity among student journalists stateside. When I attended the National Association of Black Journalists Convention in Chicago in the summer of 2024, nearly a year into Israel’s assault on Gaza, which had killed at least 100 journalists, the only public mention I heard of Gaza in all the panels, programming, and events I attended came from a student journalist named Domonique Tolliver. As she accepted the award for Student Journalist of the Year, she reminded her peers of the immense authority journalism can hold. “American media wields the power to shape and influence various world issues,” she said. “As seen in the coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement or the Palestinian genocide, it is important to remember our responsibility as public servants to create a space for balanced voices within journalism.” Here was one of the youngest journalists in the room, being more courageous than anyone else there.

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One can’t help but think of the parallels in history with what student movements and the student press documented during the Vietnam War. In the 1960s, just as today, students at campuses all over the world protested against the war, and the student press captured the anti-war movement while mainstream media paved the way for its legitimization.

What is it that fuels the bravery of the student press? Surely there is the optimism and passion of youth, but it’s more than just that. Many of them have yet to enter the mainstream journalism ecosystem, which is less likely to go against the grain, challenge conventional norms, or question the status quo. They have not yet learned to self-censor and adapt their ideas to ensure they get the green light from editors and publishers. Their superpower, to quote Domonique Tolliver, is that their perspective is firmly rooted in the future: “What I can offer you are fresh eyes. My newness in the industry allows me to see the evolving picture with a future lens.” And who better than the student press to see—and fight to protect—the future more clearly, and urgently, than any of us?

But we’re also at risk of losing some of this courage. Enrolment in journalism schools is down. A beleaguered industry is being beaten out by personality-driven or influencer content, which overwhelmingly eschews some of the rigid norms of traditional journalism: out with the faux objectivity, in with having a clear point of view, for example, but sometimes little to no fact-checking, legal, and research resources. University budget cuts are affecting the longevity of journalism programs and the range of courses being offered, and student papers themselves are facing an existential crisis as funding declines. This all but guarantees a future in which the public is less informed, where stories for and about underrepresented communities will dwindle, where we’ll be even more polarized and splintered as we consume highly tailored media, including some where facts are up for debate or interpretation.

I’ve seen and experienced this journalistic downturn first-hand too: for the past three summers, I have been teaching aspiring journalists at Boston University’s Summer Journalism Academy, a short immersive course on the basics of journalism. Few things bring me more joy than seeing initially tentative and tepid aspiring reporters become more confident, intrepid journalists over the course of our time together.

This year, however, I, along with the rest of the instructors, got some tough news. Citing budget cuts, lower revenues, and other challenges, the administration suspended the program for 2025. A few weeks later, I heard from a reporter for the Daily Free Press, Boston University’s independent student paper, who was tasked with writing an article about the suspension of the journalism academy that summer. The ultimate irony: she herself was a graduate of the very journalism program whose possible demise she was writing about.

The journalism industry—and by extension the student journalism space—is changing, suffering perhaps, but also being re-made in real time. To quote from the Boston University Summer Journalism Academy administrator, who wrote with news of our program’s cancellation for 2025, “I have no way of knowing, of course, what the future holds.” None of us do. But one thing I do know is that student journalists are doing the important work of witnessing, documenting, and reporting on these times—even when their more senior and mainstream colleagues are absent. And, as time has shown, they’re often on the right side of history.