At U of T, artifacts of cultural diversity are everywhere: from laptop stickers with Japanese kanji characters to good luck messages etched in Urdu on desks. On campus, I have seen U of T students use a wide variety of expressions to reflect the diverse array of languages and cultures. While our campuses hum with culturally diverse energy, I believe many of our university media outlets often fail to reflect this diversity. 

While U of T’s student body boasts diverse ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds, English is the university’s primary language for academic instruction and communication. My journalism education at U of T focused on reporting for the Anglophone world — an English-speaking audience. To diversify news, I advocate for establishing multicultural news outlets that move beyond English as the exclusively dominating force of both news content and conveyance. I believe both formal academic instruction and student-led campus publications concerning journalism, news, and media should make room for the growing diversity of their readers.

What if the stories told on campus reflected the languages and cultures of a wider pool of students, creating a multicultural news media ecosystem as diverse as U of T itself? Campus newspapers and media outlets must step up to the duty of reflecting U of T’s multiculturalism by amplifying voices and stories often overlooked in mainstream or English-dominated narratives. 

News media as a bridge to better dialogue

The main way to establish this multicultural news ecosystem is for student storytellers — shaped by their unique cultural and linguistic backgrounds — to share stories that capture issues that matter to their communities. Encouraging students to pitch stories covering politics, social issues, and arts from the unique perspective of their cultural backgrounds would enrich the U of T community with diverse global insights while simultaneously honing students’ journalistic skills. 

Canadian news outlets are no longer available on two prominent social media sites in Canada: Facebook and Instagram. Now, there is a worrying issue of how effectively news can travel to young Canadians. I believe one key way to bridge this visibility gap is to strengthen community and campus news media outlets through a diversification of language. 

Campus news outlets can fill this gap by offering content in multiple languages — specifically languages most popularly spoken by the largest pools of students — connecting students to both local and global issues. This initiative aligns with the statistics of international diversity at U of T, where the top five countries of origin for international students include China, India, the US, South Korea, and Hong Kong. The Varsity launched a Chinese-language edition of the paper in 2017, but it has not been updated since 2019.

Campus news outlets can also take steps to create more representative reporting. Translation services within campus media could help ease these cultural exchanges and facilitate intercultural dialogue. Campus outlets could launch multilingual news columns and collaborate with cultural clubs to co-produce special cultural features and reports. An example of this might look like a monthly section of a newspaper that profiles international student experiences in different languages, accompanied by translations or subtitles. 

When different cultures interact and coexist, they exchange ideas that deepen mutual understanding and appreciation. While providing translations for articles written in English is a good first step to bridging language gaps, nuanced coverage of specific socio-political topics would benefit from journalistic sensitivity and cultural awareness. 

Campus news outlets could offer workshops to teach student journalists about the unique, culturally-specific histories of the marginalized groups they report on, or the culturally appropriate language to use to respectfully portray these traditionally misrepresented groups.

Moreover, because visual storytelling also plays a vital role in journalism — through videos, photo essays, infographics, maps, and creative graphics — visual elements could also adapt to cultural contexts to help bring news stories to life and make stories accessible beyond languages and communities. With the incredible talent among U of T’s visual storytellers, I believe these tools could work to facilitate a multicultural news ecosystem. 

Collaborations between student societies and campus publications 

Gathering updates on U of T’s linguistic demographics is key to fostering a thriving intercultural community. 

A 2016 poll by the U of T Magazine surveyed 100 students at UTSG and found that Mandarin, French, and Hindi were the most spoken languages outside of English. Nearly a decade later, this data has likely become outdated with the expansion of U of T’s student body and the linguistic diversity that has likely resulted from it. 

When I contacted U of T’s Institutional Data Hub for data on students’ language demographics, I learned that there is no recent data on the languages spoken by students. There is a need for an institutional effort to empower U of T students to share their languages. 

Beyond language courses or cultural clubs, there are few opportunities for students who speak different languages to participate in intercultural dialogues on campus. As such, I urge student societies and campus news outlets to collaborate on creating new news platforms that contribute to the development of a multicultural news ecosystem at U of T and capture the diversity of this campus beyond an out-of-date survey. 

Diversity is one of U of T’s greatest strengths. By embracing multiculturalism and multilingualism in student media, we can ensure that more students feel represented and have equal access to news and information. It’s time to build bridges across languages, foster dialogue, and let our stories reflect the vibrant, global community in which we study. 

Khaleda Khan is a recent graduate from UTSC who specialized in journalism and linguistics.