Friday, May 12, 2023

The Daily Bulletin at 30, Part II

The Daily Bulletin turned 30 years old yesterday. To mark the occasion, here is Part II of a two-part history of the Daily Bulletin. Check out Part I.

Building the Bulletin

In the mid-1990s, the University of Waterloo took the on-ramp to the Information Superhighway with a brand-new website on the brand-new Web, and the Daily Bulletin quickly followed suit. Bit by bit, the building blocks of today's Daily Bulletin were set as Chris Redmond experimented with all sorts of newfangled ideas.

The Link of the Day debuted in February 1998, with the first one linking to the CBC's website coverage of the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. Check out the elaborate hyperlink - http://cbc.sympatico.ca/fs-intl-low.html.

As you can imagine, many of the Links of the Days from those early years now point to dead sites. The earliest Link of the Day that is still functioning is February 9, 1998's link to the official Olympics website, which happens to be the second-ever Link of the Day posted in the Bulletin. You'll have to engage the services of the Internet Wayback Machine to resurrect a number of those linked sites these days.

As the internet entered the Hampster Dance era in the late 1990s, the occasional animated GIF found its way into the Daily Bulletin, like the blinking Christmas tree in December 11, 1998. The uploading of (mostly static) JPEG photos in the Daily Bulletin became more commonplace in 1999.

At first, the Daily Bulletin was intended to supplement the information provided in the Gazette, repeating and updating print stories with supplemental information, but as it continued to grow in size and breadth of coverage, the situation began to reverse itself, with the Gazette's columns becoming filled with reprints of news and chatter from the previous week’s Daily Bulletin. Redmond, who served as editor of both the Gazette and the Daily Bulletin, shifted to writing, editing and curating the Daily Bulletin full-time and in 2004, the Gazette ceased publication. The Daily Bulletin picked up the slack, publishing the listings of available job positions from Human Resources, and the notices of PhD oral defences, a tradition that continues to this day.

In the spring of 2001, the University redesigned its homepage and began to include the day's top three Daily Bulletin story headlines as hyperlinks, which increased the Daily Bulletin's visibility. This tradition continued until August 2012, when in the spirit of 'one step forward, two steps back,' the Daily Bulletin headlines were removed from the redesigned website and relegated to a widget on the student, faculty and staff "pathway pages."

Though it appears more sporadically these days, the "One Click Away" roundup of interesting post-secondary news items from around the world began appearing in December 2002 as "Of Interest on the Web", and was renamed "One Click Away" on March 13, 2003. 

The “When and Where” event listings began in 2003, appearing sporadically at first, before taking permanent residence in the right-hand sidebar after a substantial redesign in June 2006. That graphic design refresh would remain the standard for 9 years.

A short-lived experiment was UW Opinion, which was linked off the Daily Bulletin's website in March 2007 as a digital "letter to the editor" website that was intended to replace the long-running letters page in the erstwhile Gazette. The Daily Bulletin's format didn't easily lend itself to two-way discussion or op-ed material, and UW Opinion offered an opportunity for faculty, staff and students to speak out on issues related to campus life and post-secondary education in general, and speak out they did, on a variety of issues. Due to a lack of resources and technical difficulties, maintenance of the site ceased in 2011 and it languished as a menu item until September 2013. It wasn't until the COVID-19 pandemic led to the creation of the coronavirus email account in 2020 that such a vehicle for comments and criticism of University operations made its return.

Embedded videos began to show up in the Bulletin in 2011, which required fancy coding as opposed to a handy widget. As near as I can tell, the first such video appeared in the February 7, 2011 issue, and starred the unflappable Dave McDougall in a Feds election promotional video. (That video was actually featured in yesterday's article about Dave's retirement - how serendipitous.) Earlier videos appeared as simple links or hyperlinked images, like the classic "Streets of Waterloo Vol 2" music video that appeared in the July 11, 2008 issue. 

The Daily Bulletin joined Twitter in September 2009. 

Even the Daily Bulletin's URL would change over the years, from bulletin.uwaterloo.ca to uwaterloo.ca/daily-bulletin. The name of its publisher would also change regularly, from Information and Public Affairs to Communications and Public Affairs in 2003 to Marketing & Strategic Communications in 2014 to University Communications in 2016.

From one editor to another

For more than 18 years at the helm of the publication, Chris Redmond wrote, edited and published 4,566 issues of the Daily Bulletin between May 1993 and November 2011. In advance of his retirement, Redmond shifted gears to work on researching some institutional history. Having previously written Water Under the Bridge, an unofficial history of the University in 1998 in support of the institution's 40^th anniversary, Redmond followed it up in 2012 with Lions and Chevrons: A Fragmentary History of the University of Waterloo, a photographic essay replete with historical notes, digressions and background information that came in very handy during the University's 60^th anniversary in 2017, appearing as several blog entries on the anniversary website.

Picking up where Chris Redmond left off was yours truly, on November 9, 2011. I had big shoes to fill, literally and figuratively, as I did my best to emulate the approach that Chris took to communications—done openly, honestly, and with integrity. I was also mindful of his legacy on campus as a staff member who helped build a shared sense of community and identity. Chris Redmond retired from the University in February 2012 and was named an Honorary Member of the University at Convocation that October in recognition of his efforts to create common ground for students, faculty and staff, and a space where they could learn about themselves and each other.

My current issue count is 2,838 so I have a ways to go before matching Chris's output.

E-newsletters, podcasts, and beyond

Over the next decade, the University of Waterloo continued to grow in both size and complexity as an institution and the Daily Bulletin went through a number of changes as well to keep pace. For example, being dragged kicking and screaming into the WCMS in April 2015 (prior to that the Daily Bulletin had been put together using a modified, hacked version of Adobe Contribute). One of the key innovations of that design overhaul was the ability to automatically embed anchor tags in article headlines, making it possible to jump to individual articles on the page.

We established an e-newsletter version of the Daily Bulletin in September 2016, which goes out to nearly 5,000 campus inboxes every working day, summarizing the stories and linking back to the main website. This belatedly fulfilled one of the most consistently-requested feature on readers' wish lists as determined through repeated audience surveys. Why not subscribe if you haven't already?

We also launched the Beyond the Bulletin podcast in June 2019, which aims to highlight top stories in recent issues Daily Bulletin, forecast a look-ahead to important campus events and activities, and showcase the interesting work and activities of students, faculty and staff members across campus. We're up to 153 episodes of witty banter and informative interviews, all available on SoundCloud or wherever you usually get your podcasts.

During the COVID pandemic, on the suggestion of Library staffer Jordan Hale, we initiated the Good Buddies of the University series in the Daily Bulletin, which ran continuously from March 27 to May 28, 2020 featuring new pets and animals daily. After a pause, it picked up again in June, with a final batch on July 13. The Daily Bulletin received 214 submissions with 267 Good Buddies, including cats, dogs, birds, rodents, rabbits, a faun, and a few stuffed buddies. These helpful homebodies gave us all something to smile about during a difficult time.

We also introduced the When and Where to get Support sidebar as a temporary supplement to the sidebar in March 2020 to provide information about the existing and emerging supports that students, faculty, and staff could access to make life and work during lockdown a little easier. And by "temporary" I mean it stuck around for three years.

And time no doubt will continue to march on. The Daily Bulletin crossed the 7,400-issue mark just this week—on Monday in fact—and with 7,405 issues published as of today, the Daily Bulletin has amassed an archive of 14,800,000 words (give or take), not bad for a publication that averages about 2,000 words an issue (give or take) and is produced between 246 and 248 times a year.

So what's next for the Daily Bulletin? After more than 8 years of publication in the WCMS environment, it is well past time to usher the Daily Bulletin into WCMS 3, which will happen sometime soon, no doubt. Before that happens, the e-newsletter will be undergoing a much-needed refresh as we switch from Mailchimp to a new email management platform, Upaknee, in the coming weeks. The redesigned Daily Bulletin e-newsletter will be much more aligned with our current brand standards and should provide an improved reading experience for our audience.

Because at the end of the day, we write and publish the Daily Bulletin for our audience, as in you. The Daily Bulletin has been described as "a combination of breaking news, facts, highlights and a modest amount of literary comment," and as much of it comes from the bottom up as it does the top down - the Daily Bulletin is a mirror held up to the University community that helps the campus's left hand know what its right hand is doing, if I can mix a couple of metaphors in between headline puns.

Ultimately the Daily Bulletin seeks to be the perfect blend of material that is useful to the reader, useful to the University's administration, and interesting enough to keep someone reading.

And on that final note, as always, thank you for reading.

Save the date for September's Pow Wow

A message from the Office of Indigenous Relations (OIR).

September 23, 2023 marks the 20^th anniversary of the United College (formerly St. Paul’s University College) annual Pow Wow. This year is the inaugural collaboration on this celebration between the Waterloo Indigenous Student Centre (WISC) and the University of Waterloo Office of Indigenous Relations (OIR).

In addition to the Pow Wow being co-hosted by WISC and OIR, there will be another major change from years past, as the Pow Wow moves to the University of Waterloo Campus at an indoor venue, Columbia Icefield (CIF). This is a one-day event featuring vendors, dancers, and singers from the Region of Waterloo and beyond.

This is a non-competition Pow Wow, with a focus on celebrating Indigenous culture and tradition through song, dance, arts, and cuisine. Most importantly, this Pow Wow is intended to be a safe, welcoming, and vibrant opportunity for Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks from the UWaterloo community and beyond to gather and spend time with each other in a beautiful display of Indigenization, decolonization, and reconciliation. All are welcome and encouraged to participate in the celebration.

Deep Health: Setting a Foundation webinar coming up next week

A message from the Continuous Improvement and Change Management Community of Practice.

The Continuous Improvement and Change Management Community of Practice is hosting a health and wellness session with guest speaker Stacey Majaury, Coordinator, Strength & Conditioning, Athletics on Thursday, May 18 from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.

In this session, we will lay the foundation to help get one step closer to your deep health. You will create a destination postcard that will help you define what the future you may look like. With that, you will learn how to connect your identity to your behaviours and how key this is to behaviour change that is both effective and flexible.

This virtual event will be taking place on Microsoft Teams. If you have questions about the event or would like to register to attend, please email the event organisers at CICM@uwaterloo.ca.