Over the summer, we took a lot of time to reflect on and pinpoint the exact challenges and issues facing The Ubyssey.
For years, The Ubyssey didn’t train anyone, and it seriously underserved you, our readers. We overworked editors with tasks they were never qualified to perform and challenges they never learned how to confront. We didn’t build a sense of community among our participants, and we certainly didn’t work to build trust among sources.
But between being a full-time student and the hundreds of tasks editors have to do in a day (edit, report, run meetings, attend editorial meetings, publish, make pages for print, and so on), it isn’t surprising that past editorial boards — including ones we have been a part of — haven’t had the opportunity to hone in on these problems and work towards a solution. Still, this has caused issues to fester, and cannot be ignored anymore, lest we risk the quality of our reporting and lose trust within the community as a reputable and respectable newspaper.
The result of this work was the creation of a strategic plan — The Ubyssey, Reloaded.
The report outlines what we identified as the four biggest problems facing our newsroom: the knowledge problem, the participation problem, the organizational problem and the relevance problem.
The process included reviewing almost all of how The Ubyssey is organized: from how we find stories to how we plan internal meetings to the participant experience. We looked closely at what we had been doing for the past few years, and looked elsewhere to learn from publications across North America.
It also includes what we plan to do about each problem, from beginning reviews of our website and print design, changing how we hire editors, implementing and formalizing training and much more. In total, we gave ourselves 28 recommendations on how to proceed as a community-focused student news service.
Many of the goals in this report have already been put into motion. We’ve circulated it internally for a few weeks now since first written this summer. Editors began receiving training at the start of their terms in May and have continued to do so; we have moved away from giving out pitches to first time reporters via ‘pitchlists’ and have created a formal entry level program which ensures all of our journalists are trained and equipped with the tools for success; we have started designing new pages on our website to better explain who we are, what we do and why we do it. And that’s just the beginning.
We acknowledge that in the past, we have not been the best at communicating how we operate. We haven’t been deliberately open about how we make editorial decisions. It wasn’t our intention to leave people with the impression that journalism is an opaque practice, and we’ve come to realize that this newspaper may be many students' first time interacting with journalism and the press. We have not done enough to explain what we do, why we do it and who we do it for.
You can download the full report here. We will work tirelessly and continuously to win your trust and serve the UBC community to the best of our ability, each and every day, all year round.
The final page of the report includes a cutout from our very first issue in October 1918 that asks readers to “watch this space.” 107 years later, we hope you do.
— Aisha Chaudhry, Spencer Izen and Saumya Kamra
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