'Without journalism, it's dark': Pouring their hearts into ethnic media, coping with rapid change

YouTube host Anhelina Taran carried her own plant into the rented studio, then helped hang a brown sheet to frame the makeshift set.

It looked like an old bedsheet, but soon studio owner Luiza Yaromchuk was busy steaming the wrinkles out. By the time the volunteer crew was ready to shoot their weekly local news instalment, it looked smooth and professional. 

This is the fledgling news upstart, Taran, a Ukrainian-language media outlet serving newcomers in the Calgary community. It has news on everything from why you really must clear the snow from your walk, to how to optimize your tax filing and the latest changes in Canada's immigration policy.  

It's one small upstart in an industry sector of local ethnic media — a group of mostly small businesses that suffered many of the same challenges dogging mainstream media, but one that's also innovating and finding new ways to serve a need.

At their best, these outlets have been proven to help immigrant communities lean in and get more civically engaged in their new cities and country, breaking down barriers and increasing participation. But researchers say policymakers don't tend to recognize those benefits with support or training for the journalists involved, and turning out a useful product takes a lot of work.

"Honestly, sometimes when we meet, we think maybe we can't do this today. Maybe we're finished," Taran said, looking around the set. Her team members are all recent arrivals themselves but they encourage each other to keep going. "Our energy keeps us together."

"It's a platform, a bridge for our community, for people because they trust us," said Taran. "We try to do as much as we can."

Taran came to Canada two years ago and left behind a career in journalism. In Canada, she's working full time as a marketing co-ordinator for a local real estate company. Taran is a passion project she's running on the side, promoting it on the social media platform Telegram. She sells ads but pays for most of the expense herself.

The first media outlets in Canada focused on specific ethnic communities started more than 100 years ago and took off in recent decades as immigrant communities flourished. The media monitoring group MIREMS now follows roughly 600 publications across Canada, about a third in print, a third online, and the rest in radio or television.

MIREMS (Multilingual International Research and Ethnic Media Services) monitors the outlets for clients, including the Government of Alberta, to spot misinformation and highlight community concerns. It follows 56 outlets in Calgary alone, 40 in Edmonton, and that doesn't include small upstarts and podcasts like Taran. 

Daniel Ahadi is a senior lecturer at Simon Fraser University who recently co-edited a handbook on ethnic media. He says no one knows exactly how many Canadian ethnic media outlets there are, especially now that many of them have moved to new digital platforms. 

But from their reach and growth, he says it's clear immigrants in Canada value these efforts long after their communities are well-established.

Outlets provided a lifeline

Ahadi remembers his mom watching television in Farsi when they first came to Canada from Iran. She still watches today, even after a 30-year career working in English in the public service.

In those early years, "those outlets provide a lifeline," he said. 

"They provide vital information, which is a really good start for people to feel they're not alone in this; there's a community they can rely on."

"That's an immensely important psychological support because, without it, there's a sense of loss and despair, especially in the first stages of migration."

Copy-and-paste news

But the media sector is changing. As the Internet grew, advertising moved online, where it was cheaper and easier to target audiences. That wreaked havoc with mainstream print and broadcasting budgets, limiting their ability to hire reporters. 

Similarly, in Ahadi's book, The Handbook of Ethnic Media in Canada, one author describes the challenges hitting print media and says some outlets have shrunk to little more than a sheet of advertisements with stories cut and pasted from the country of origin.

Television broadcasting has also suffered. Another author in the handbook said some local shows laid off journalists, replacing their work with stories read from text taken straight from state-run media overseas after the federal government changed the Canadian content regulations.

But every outlet is different. Radio is a favourite medium in several immigrant communities, and social or digital platforms, like Taran's YouTube channel, opened the door to more voices.

When Ahadi first started picking up a newspaper at the Iranian grocery store in the 1990s, there were nearly a dozen options. Now there's two or three, and instead he follows Farsi-speaking influencers or media personalities on Instagram, from Vancouver and around the world.

"I follow them for local news, local events, local debates and issues, controversies, politics, debates. And they're followed. I mean, one of the biggest ones in Vancouver has about 100,000 followers.

"Many people in Iran follow these outlets because they are thinking about migration.… People sort of tune in and out from different parts of the world."

"Bike lanes, traffic, crime, overdose — they cover anything that is covered in mainstream media. They covered Trudeau's resignation.… Some of them are pro-Trudeau, some of them are anti-Trudeau. On top of that, they also cover Iranian news."

Back in Calgary, Jayanta Chowdhury is quick to offer a tour of his studio. He's the station manager for RED FM 106.7FM, a radio station that now broadcasts in 21 languages. He lingers proudly by the photos on the wall of famous local politicians who came in for interviews.

A new 'foreign correspondents' club'

Chowdhury got his start in ethnic media in the late 1990s. At that point, there was just one radio station programmed in Calgary with South Asian languages for just two hours a day, he said. 

"People were just waiting for 7 o'clock just to hear news, their language and music."

Then these new outlets took off. Soon there were two mainstream radio stations with shows in multiple languages, language programs on the community station CJSW, and that was in addition to the many newspapers, new and old. For a time, multicultural TV was even shot locally with an OMNI TV studio. 

But that was the heyday for ethnic media in Calgary on those traditional platforms. Then came the digital revolution.

Chowdhury said there's been few grants or government funding to help with training and innovation. And many of the entrepreneurs and individual show hosts can't afford to take journalism, ethics and legal courses at university when they're doing this as a passion project and supporting a family. And he sometimes wonders how much research, fact-checking and journalism is being done by the social media influencers.

What Canada is missing is a foreign correspondents' club, he said. 

"I have been to so many countries. I lived in Thailand for 12 years, in Korea, in Hong Kong, and in Brazil. As a foreigner [interested in journalism], we always go to the foreign correspondent clubs. There we have a platform to share and gain knowledge from each other, right? That's what is missing here. Canada doesn't have one of those."

So last year, Chowdhury and four others founded the Asian Media Federation of Canada. They get together several times a year, and they're hoping it can grow and support more ethnic media to thrive. He's also working with CBC Calgary to host a networking event for local ethnic media on March 15.

"A lot of people say that the media and journalism is a dying industry," he said. "I will say it is a living industry. It's like a volcano, you know, it can erupt any time, and when it comes, it comes in a big way." 

"At the end of the day, all the democratic process is only done through journalism and media. That's where we keep people informed."

'We don't understand what fuels adaptation'

Research into ethnic media shows that strong newsrooms can do two things at the same time — help immigrant groups integrate into the larger community, and maintain a sense of belonging within their own cultural community. 

Policymakers often don't realize how important this is, said Elim Ng, an Edmonton-based policy analyst who wrote a chapter for Ahadi's book, on Chinese-language broadcasters.

When outlets shrink and have more copy-and-paste content from overseas, it's not enough. People need news and to debate Canadian issues in their language, she said. That's information and connection.

"When a person feels isolated, they're just less able to reach out and try new things. This connects them," she said.

"They're not just bonding over shared cultural heritage. What they're bonding over is the challenge of life in Canada — everyone wants to be financially successful; no one wants to be a failure."

Policymakers need to understand that, she said.

"We expect all of these adaptive behaviours but we don't understand what fuels adaptation. [The media] creates a discursive space for the people."

Young adults bridge the cultural divide

Sherry Yu, a University of Toronto associate professor, sees another challenge. The discussion within ethnic media can be robust and nuanced, but generally the information exchange flows only in one direction. 

Immigrant communities hear the mainstream discussion, but little is heard of the immigrant discussion outside each community, said Yu. The online collaborative New Canadian Media tried to solve that by publishing pieces from immigrant journalists in English, but it closed in November.

Yu is watching the young journalists and influencers. When they get involved online, they are often working in English and hosting conversations that span national borders and even cultural groups.

She points to Lilly Singh, a YouTube star originally from Toronto with 14 million followers, as a possible example of this trend.

At a smaller scale, Dozie Anyaegbunam launched The Newcomers podcast in 2023, interviewing immigrants about their journey and lessons learned. He's from Nigeria and lives in Calgary, but he interviews immigrants from many backgrounds in English.

But he doesn't see this as a conversation involving only Canada's minority communities.

"Immigration is not technically an ethnic conversation, even though we tend to make it so," he said. 

"It's a cultural conversation that cuts across communities. At the core, it's about what does it mean to be human? Because the human race is an immigrant race — we claim borders now, but the human race has immigrated in many different ways."

Coming back to traditional ethnic media — media focused on serving one ethnocultural group in one location — one more example can illustrate the utility and the time that individual Canadians pour into this over the years.

'Journalism gives you an eye on society'

Michael Teclemariam has been the volunteer radio host for the Eritrean community in Calgary for 20 years. He's 54 and has no formal training in journalism. He works as a shuttle driver and fleet supervisor, while taking calls and spending hours a week finding guests and going to events to prepare for his Sunday show.

He says attitudes toward media in his community changed over the years. Eritrea doesn't have a free press. So when he started, launching a 30-minute program in Tigrinya with the campus and community radio station CJSW, he eased into it. He started with music and simple announcements about community life.

Then he started to occasionally push the boundaries, translating and explaining local news for the community, and inviting guests onto the show to talk about mental health, Calgary and Canadian politics, and topics that were more contentious for a conservative or traditional audience.

At first, he got pushback within his community, and people wondered why he would think to put subjects like that in the public realm. But gradually, he also heard from more people who appreciated it, who came to understand the role of media better over time.

"Recently, someone told me that because of what I was doing, he didn't like me. He told me straight. He said, 'Mike, I didn't know what you were doing back in the day, but now I get why.'"

"Having media in Calgary makes a difference because we have checks and balances," said Teclemariam. "I show our opinion, and I go to the youth, then to the Eritrean cultural school and talk with the parents about the schooling changes we've had in Alberta." 

"Without journalism, it's dark. You don't know — whether it's politics or social or anything. Journalism gives you an eye on society."

Now in addition to the CJSW radio show, he files for Radio Erena, a transnational podcast, serving Eritreans living around the world. His dream is to expand further and create more of that two-way street — to get a job that would let him share the views and stories of the local Eritrean community — not just among themselves, but to the rest of Canada through the mainstream media.