Hey readers,
As you’ve no doubt come to realize by now, Imprint is the University of Waterloo’s official student newspaper, and it has been since 1979. Every week (and every month during spring terms) our paper covers the issues that matter to UW students, and surprisingly enough, all of it is put together by some very competent volunteers.
Imprint generally covers things that happen on campus or in the KW region, and breaks it down into four main sections: news, arts and life, science and tech, and sports and health.
Of course, news isn’t the only thing we cover. We also have an opinions section for readers who really want to share their views (or maybe just get extra credit in their poli sci class), a campus bulletinand a distractions section — just in case you want the appearance of reading the newspaper without actually having to read the news. There are also columnists in pretty much every section that write about the topics they’re passionate about.
So with so much going on at Imprint, you might be wondering how all of it gets put together. We start with weekly story lists, where our editors run down all the stories we can cover for the next week and assign writers. The writers conduct interviews or do research and then write up their stories, and photographers or graphic artists produce visuals to go along with them. It all comes back together during production nights, where proofreaders make sure everything that’s been written is at least legible, while our layout designers figure out how to put the art and the articles together. All the while, we put articles up on our website, uwimprint.ca, as they’re written. As you can probably tell, it’s a very big process that can take up a lot of time, which probably raises the question of why anyone would volunteer in the first place. Everyone’s got different motivations, but generally they have at least one of the following reasons:
- Having an interest in journalism
- Enjoying the sense of community
- Wanting to learn or improve writing, graphic, photography or layout skills
- Resume-building (i.e. “My, you wrote for your student newspaper? How positively prestigious of you!”)
- Just really, really being into the free food you get during production nights
Whatever the reason, there’s no way that Imprint would be able to run if it weren’t for all the dedicated volunteers that take time out of their busy student lives to put a newspaper together. With that said, if any part of the production interests you, come visit us to get involved. Imprint is always looking for new volunteers, and our staff are more than happy to welcome newcomers.
