June 5, 2008
‘University Week’ then and now: An open future online, starting in September
This school year, University Week, the UW campus newspaper for faculty and staff, turned 25 years old. To note the occasion during the year we revisited a few stories from the newspaper’s past and provided brief updates on how things have changed over our quarter-century. This is the last in that series, and looks ahead to University Week’s future as an online-only publication, beginning in September.
The online world might have seemed a futuristic concept to the much of the campus community who read the first University Week issue, printed on Oct. 6, 1983.
Not that computing hadn’t been exploding in popularity by then. IBM released its first XT computer and Microsoft released MS 2.0 that March and the first version of Windows in November. The True Basic programming language came out in 1983. Time magazine announced, somewhat oddly, that its “Man of the Year” for 1982 was the computer.
Of course computers were proliferating on campus even then, but they hadn’t become the necessities of life they are today. In fact one of our first issues included one story headlined “Is there a terminal in your future?” Another offered training on the use of keyboards.
But here in 2008, as UWeek enters its second quarter-century and environmental concerns are ever more urgent, publishing only on the Web, paper-free, is clearly the wisest — and the greenest — choice.
We’ll keep publishing on paper throughout the summer (trying to avoid getting misty-eyed as a beloved era passes), but for those only on campus during the school year, this will be the last paper University Week.
It’s a big change, but the 25-year history of UWeek has been one of changes as technologies develop.
Back in those first years, Publication Services — now called Creative Communications — did the newspaper’s layout and printing for Uweek‘s founding editor Bob Roseth, longtime director of News & Information.
Back in the 1980s, UWeek editors would stand near staffers in the “composing room” of the Communications Building — like newspaper editors worldwide at the time — to double-check headlines and story cuts. Stories were cut on paper-cutters, pasted to the page and trimmed with X-Acto knives if they ran too long. (Composing room staffers throughout the newspaper industry were among the first to see their jobs change radically due to technology. The advent of computer layout programs virtually eliminated their jobs globally.)
Times changed, though, and in 1989 then-editor and assistant editor Nedra Pautler and Nancy Wick (a former newspaper editor and columnist who is UWeek‘s current editor) began building UWeek‘s pages themselves with Adobe PageMaker. Wick and current assistant editor Peter Kelley switched to Adobe’s InDesign program in 2005.
UWeek published its first online issue in 1998, and its Web presence has grown every year since. Publication Services posted the issues online at the start, and UWeek staff took over in the 2001/2002 school year. Also in 2002, due to budget cuts, UWeek‘s paper edition was cut back from weekly to every other week, though the newspaper added new online content weekly. The newspaper started taking advertisements in January of 2003, and will in time incorporate such ads into our online presentation.
And so, our year of anniversary reflection now complete, University Week is looking forward to a burgeoning future as an online publication. We plan to continue building community through communication at the UW and serving faculty and staff reader needs.
We rolled out our free UWeek Classifieds a couple of weeks back and readers have responded eagerly, posting ads for everything from cars and houses to tennis rackets and commuting connections.
But the UWeek Classifieds are only the beginning. Look for more interactive features in coming months.
And so as one era winds down, another is gearing up. After five summer editions on paper, we’ll be at www.uweek.org. Keep reading.
