As a Bachelor of Business Administration student specializing in marketing, I have always known that this was the path I wanted to pursue. What I did not know was how many different places it would take me.
My journey at Laurier began in first year with Women in Leadership Laurier and continued through The Citizens Foundation, CultureXChange, and the Laurier Football Media Team. Since then, I have taken on more than five roles across campus. Some days, marketing means being lifted on a scissor lift above University Stadium to capture content for the football team. Other days, it meant creating hashtags, graphics, campaigns, and finding new ways to make students stop scrolling.
If there is one thing all my business classes and experiences have taught me, it is this: you have to pay attention to what is changing around you and be willing to change with it.
This summer, I joined The Cord as a Social Media Assistant, and that lesson became very real, very quickly. Introducing Bill C-18, a piece of legislation passed three years before I even joined the team, but one that now directly shapes how I do my job.
More and more people were getting their news through platforms like Facebook and Instagram, but the news organizations creating those stories were not being paid by the platforms for their content. In 2023, Canada passed Bill C-18, the Online News Act, to change this. The law was meant to make large platforms compensate Canadian news organizations for their work. In response, Meta chose to block news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada instead.
The goal of Bill C-18 was to better support Canadian journalism. News organizations put time, money, and resources into producing original reporting, and the bill aimed to make sure they could benefit when large platforms used their work. However, Meta’s response also created a tricky situation for publications that had relied on social media to reach readers.
So, how do you promote journalism on a platform where news is blocked?
“When Bill C-18 passed, it hit The Community Edition really hard. Instagram was the primary way we were reaching our readership outside of the paper itself. Without Instagram, it felt like we got cut off from the community,” Adrian Quijano, Editor-in-Chief of the Community Edition, said.
That question has become one of the most interesting parts of my role, and the answer is not always obvious. It is tricky finding the line between sharing The Cord’s work and creating content that can still live naturally on social media.
That means experimenting. Instead of simply posting a headline and linking an article, we can create interview-style videos where students share their opinions on campus topics. We can highlight the people behind the stories, capture conversations happening around Laurier, bring more personality into our content, and show what happens behind the scenes at The Cord. We can also look beyond Instagram. YouTube, for example, gives us another space for interviews, student discussions, and video storytelling.
The goal is not to disguise journalism. It is to think differently about how students can interact with The Cord and stay connected to what is happening on their campus.
The audience is still there. Reaching them just looks different now.
Graphic by Anna Koehler
