Identity area
Type of entity
Campus group
Authorized form of name
Imprint
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1978-
History
The origins of Imprint, University of Waterloo’s student newspaper, are rooted in Waterloo’s start as the Waterloo College Associate Faculties, a semi-autonomous and non-denominational entity affiliated with Waterloo College (present-day Wilfrid Laurier University). Waterloo College’s two student newspapers, College Cord and Newsweekly were merged in 1958 to form The Cord Weekly, now called The Cord, which remains Laurier's student newspaper.
Engineering students at the Waterloo College Associate Faculties started their own newsletter in early 1959 shortly after the formation of the Engineering Society. The newsletter was dubbed Enginews and was originally published as a mimeographed sheet of foolscap. By late 1959, Enginews joined The Cord Weekly and appeared as a special section with its own masthead within the newspaper. The collaboration between The Cord Weekly and Enginews ended in the spring of 1960.
Enginews continued to publish issues in the spring and summer of 1960 until a new, initially nameless, newspaper was released in the fall of that year. This new newspaper was named The Coryphaeus, the Greek word for leader, in the second issue. Early issues of The Coryphaeus looked like The Cord Weekly, and Enginews continued to appear as a separate section with its own masthead in the paper. However, this special section slowly disappeared as the paper focused more on engineering.
The dominance of engineering news in The Coryphaeus disappointed many arts students who slowly organized and took over the newspaper. The Coryphaeus was renamed The Chevron in 1966, and as times changed, began to take a more radical editorial slant as the activist student movement of the 1960s got underway. Focus shifted away from engineering coverage to reporting on social and political issues of the day.
Believing they were no longer represented by The Chevron, a group of engineering students relaunched Enginews with a crude and irreverent style in July 1967. Publication of the new Enginews stopped in 1985 after the Iron Warrior, a paper with a more professional, serious-minded profile launched in 1980, proved to have more appeal with students. The Chevron*’s continued promotion of what was viewed as a radical left-wing agenda continued into the 1970s and resulted in a lack of confidence from the Waterloo’s student body. In November of 1978, after an extended dispute with the Federation of Students executive, now the Waterloo Undergraduate Student Association, the newspaper’s budget was frozen and The Chevron was overwhelmingly rejected by students in a referendum, leading to its removed as Waterloo's official student newspaper.
In the spring of 1978, the University of Waterloo Journalism Club, made up of former Chevron staffers and other Waterloo students, started its own weekly publication called Imprint. Initially funded solely by advertising, the paper won the support of students in a referendum held in March 1979 and the Imprint was named Waterloo's official student newspaper. Publication of the award-winning newspaper continues today with a large circulation in the Kitchener-Waterloo area and a six-figure operating budget.
Places
University of Waterloo
200 University Ave. W
Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1
Student Life Centre, Room 0137
Online: Imprint
Legal status
Functions, occupations and activities
The University of Waterloo's official student newspaper.
Mandates/sources of authority
Internal structures/genealogy
General context
Relationships area
Access points area
Subject access points
Place access points
Occupations
Control area
Authority record identifier
Institution identifier
Rules and/or conventions used
Status
Level of detail
Dates of creation, revision and deletion
Created in 2019 by NM.
Edited in 2020 by SP and DR.
Language(s)
- English
Script(s)
Sources
- O'Donnell, Joe. "UW gets a second student newspaper". Kitchener-Waterloo Record. June 16, 1978. p. 3.
- The Chevron - Wikipedia
- Water Under the Bridge: An unofficial history of the University of Waterloo by Chris Redmond and Simon the Troll