From the editor: Bringing The Cord into the community

A community is made of stories. Since 1970, Wilfrid Laurier University Student Publications has been telling some of these stories through its premiere weekly campus paper, The Cord.

As The Cord has grown in scope and quality, we’ve realized there isn’t enough room in our weekly edition to tell all the different stories we want to.  That’s why we’re adding a new publication to the Cord brand.

Starting October 2012 The Cord Community Edition will distribute monthly to over 30,000 homes, bringing Kitchener-Waterloo excellence in news and feature-length journalism. Our goal is to tell the stories that affect everyone in the community.

The Cord Community Edition isn’t for students, business owners, politicians, commuters or urban dwellers. It isn’t here to divide us or separate us. What we’re setting out to do is create media that is for everyone — or more accurately, everyone that cares about building the K-W community.

If you have a stake in this region, whether it be for the four years you come here to learn, or the 50 years you’ve been living here, The Cord Community Edition is for you.

That said, we aren’t going to be afraid to get our hands dirty. Opening up to more voices means including voices that challenge the status quo. Kitchener-Waterloo faces challenges as a region and it’s the Cord Community Edition’s job to expose and explore each one of them.

The great thing about starting something new is that we get to define what it will become.

The Cord Community Edition’s direction will evolve along with the voices we can feature in it. Our hope is that as the magazine grows, community members will become our writers, artists, photographers and designers.

We want this project to be one people have a personal investment in (and if it already peeks your interest, shoot me an e-mail at communityeditor@thecord.ca).

We can’t wait to learn more about this great community with you.