This study explores how international students in Sweden understand and engage with news in their everyday lives, and how it relates to acculturation and identity negotiation. Drawing on qualitative interviews with ten international students, the study uses reflexive thematic analysis to examine participants’ understandings and experiences. The findings show that participants’ definitions of news were relatively stable, but its relevance was continuously repositioned. News engagement was often incidental and socially/visually mediated rather than driven by deliberate use of news organisations’ sources. Participants selectively seek, verify, avoid, and curate information, according to their everyday circumstances, social mediation, and future trajectories. These were shaped by language, social networks, platform environments, emotional capacity, and structural/legal conditions, including differences between EU and non-EU students. The study further shows that news engagement is connected to participants’ experiences of representation, belonging, and positioning between home and host societies, as well as persistent tensions between how they were perceived and how they experienced themselves. Belonging emerged as an ongoing negotiation rather than a stable outcome of adaptation. The study therefore conceptualises acculturation among international students as continuous repositioning within a liminal space, highlighting how everyday news engagement reflects and mediates identity and belonging.