Before you could find Community Edition on stands around Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge. Before Best of Waterloo. Before we published 10 years of updates on the ION train. Before the Lobster font, before Steel Rails, before everything else, this newspaper was borne out of a conversation with the late Henry Champ, a former CBC Washington correspondent.
The spark that lit the fire was best summed up by publisher Bryn Ossington in our inaugural October 2012 issue.
“What Henry brought to us was a challenge. He dared us to stop looking at ourselves as ‘student journalists’ but rather as journalists who happen to be students.”
And so, it happened. Wilfrid Laurier University’s student newspaper, The Cord—now celebrating its own 100-year milestone—spun out a sister paper that started as an insert and grew into its own unique thing. Since then, Community Edition has been through many changes, but its commitment to serving the residents of Waterloo Region has remained consistent.
Like any university town, KW swells with new life each fall and deflates by June. Businesses stake their claim on a fluid demographic of young adults, and so, if you stick around long enough, you’ll eventually come to recognize a unique, paradoxical brand of disposable innovation. We’ve lost track of the apps and startups and initiatives that either launched here and landed somewhere else or simply failed to launch. A quick glance at the ever-changing arts scene here evokes a parallel narrative: you haven’t made it until you’ve made it out of KW.
And we’re not trying to tear anyone down for leaving. At times, the local scene gets bloated with resume padders—and people who can’t wait to get their degree so they can move back to Toronto. But once you dip beneath the surface, you’ll discover all kinds of people who chose KW, and, in turn, you might learn a little bit more about what might have possessed them to do such a thing.
We’re talking about people like Julie Hall, director of CAFKA; Ben Gorodetsky, creator of Pinch Cabaret; Willa Coward, founder of Public Seating DIY; Ren Navarro, founder of Beer. Diversity.; Bangishimo, co-founder of O:se Kenhionhata:tie; Rob Hern, founder of Short Finger Brewing Co.; Alanah Jewell of Morning Star Designs; Aashay Dalvi of Rad Riot Books—and so many more—all of whom, by varying means, found their way into the community and ended up gracing the pages of Community Edition over the last 15 years.
This publication was born by students and emerged from the pages of a student newspaper in a student town. Its existence is a testament to the fact that the stories of people in Waterloo Region are worth documenting and sharing.
And as we move on to this new volume, we want to bring it all back to where it started, with the words of founding publisher Bryn Ossington:
“As this publication grows, we hope that you will engage us and help us to tell stories that you feel matter. The power of journalism in this age is that it no longer has to be a one-way conversation. We encourage you to reach out to us with your thoughts, complaints, compliments and story ideas. We want you to hold us accountable to the standards of fine journalism that journalists like Henry Champ stood for so that you feel the same sense of pride and ownership over The Cord Community Edition that we do.”
Leave a Reply