Student journalists across Canada are increasingly facing delays, ghosting, and centralized message control from universities and student unions, raising concerns for the future of press freedom and the learned practices of the next generation of Canadian reporters. 

“Sometimes we’re waiting on emails for too long and then the story withers on the vine,” said Thai Sirikoone, the editor-in-chief of MacEwan University’s student paper The Griff. 

After taking over the position as editor-in-chief in 2022, he led his eight student reporters to do more news reporting. Since then, he’s noticed the university administration shy away from answering tough questions. 

“It’s really made us think outside the box,” said Sirikoone on the ways he and his team have had to get around publishing when the administration puts up road blocks.

The Griff is one of many student newsrooms across Canada having to deal with repressive university administrations. Where administrations take advantage of the inexperience of reporters who don’t know how to identify what is an attack on their press freedom or not.

“I’m hearing from [members] all the time about stuff like that,” said Canadian University Press president, Andrew Mrozowski. 

“It puts us in a difficult position because admin on the university level or admin on a student level think we’re just students,” he said.

Mrozowski said he has seen threats to press freedom at university papers across Canada get worse during his time as president since 2023.

Marieke Glorieux-Stryckman, former editor of The Concordia, says it was stressful getting into legal battle with the university over the paper’s journalism.

Glorieux-Stryckman and I were co-winners of World Press Freedom Canada’s student achievement award last year.

In her second year of the journalism program at Concordia University in 2023, she filed the kind of wide ranging access to information request that would usually be met with a phone call for explanation. Instead she was served with a cease-and-desist and had to go to mediation to settle the request. 

This year now as editor-in-chief of The Concordian, she has not received a cease-and-desist, but interviews with university officials are few and far between. The university’s strict procedure for filing media requests has gotten even more challenging.