Editorial: The argument for the student press

OpinionsEditorialThe Link — Published March 31, 2026 4 minutes

It is not here to flatter the university, recycle institutional messaging or pretend that student spaces are only valuable when they are convenient. A student newspaper exists because universities are full of power, contradiction and neglect. It exists because students deserve a press that takes those realities seriously.

For us, that is where a simple truth emerges: it is still cool to care.

As we close this volume, we do so knowing that none of this work happens by accident. A student paper only exists because people keep choosing to make it, question it, read it and care about it. 

At a time when so much of public life pushes people toward passivity, strong journalism is important. At a time when media culture often rewards detachment, student journalism asks people to care enough to pay attention and take student spaces seriously.

That belief has shaped The Link over the last few volumes. Past mastheads faced pressing problems within this paper, from burnout to questioning fairness, accountability and who could afford to take part. 

Part of that shift was the Contributor Freelance Fund, a payment system that would allow contributors and staff to be compensated for their work.

The fund was not a full solution to the pressures facing student media, but it mattered. It showed that The Link was trying to change not only what it published, but how it treated the people who made it.

This year was not about starting over, but continuing the paper’s mission of advocacy. It was about providing care and accountability, about keeping our namesake and linking the student body to the issues that make up their institution.

It has meant reporting on limited-term teaching staff being pushed further into precarity under the logic of austerity. It has meant reporting on student union dysfunction and on election promises meant to speak to students’ material needs. 

That is not negativity. That is the job. It exists to ask the obvious question when nobody else will, and then the harder one after that. 

Informing students properly is not just telling them what happened at a meeting or what policy changed. It is to explain what kind of campus is being built around them, and for whom. It shows that the same university that talks about innovation can move ahead with technologies that raise real concerns about privacy and accessibility.

It is also about showing that student politics is not some side theatre, and that everyday conditions of student life—from food services to academic support to labour conditions—are never separate from larger institutional values.

That work also means taking student spaces seriously as spaces worth defending.

Universities love the language of community—until community becomes inconvenient. They celebrate diversity, belonging and student experience in brochures and campaigns. But the spaces where students actually make meaning together often survive because students build them, staff them, protect them and insist on their value.

A student newspaper should recognize that. It should be able to cover not only rupture and scandal, but also the forms of collective effort that make campus life livable in the first place. 

These stories are part of the full record of campus life. That is why uplifting voices at Concordia University cannot just be a slogan. Advocacy, at its best, is what happens when journalism is honest about who has power, who is asked to absorb the cost of institutional decisions and whose concerns are easiest to dismiss.

This matters even more now, because the conditions around journalism are getting worse, not better. The current media landscape rewards speed over care. Misinformation spreads easily because it is built to spread. 

AI adds to this by flooding public life with convincing, contextless text and images that mimic the shape of information. The result is a weakening of public trust and a lowering of expectations. In that environment, student journalism becomes more important. It offers something increasingly rare: reporting rooted in a real community, by people who are accountable to that community. 

Journalism can still care about what happens in student spaces without treating that care as unserious. That is the point. Student journalism is not lesser journalism because it is campus-based; if anything, that proximity gives it more force.

And if journalism is changing this quickly, then journalism education has to change, too.

Journalism programs like Concordia's cannot assume students are entering the same profession they did a decade ago. They need to prepare future reporters for a media environment shaped by AI, competing independent reporting and constant information warfare. 

For The Link, this will soon mean providing students with stronger training in verifying information and reporting responsibly, as well as revising bylaws and assigning additional responsibilities to editors. At its best, student journalism is a place where people care enough to pay attention, and where that attention can still mean something.

So, as this volume ends, we leave with a clearer sense of what this paper should keep being: a place where people care enough to pay attention. 

And for The Link, it has always been cool to care, since 1980.