By Nick Ubels (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: January 30, 2013
The Cascade is always in a state of flux. Student press is naturally prone to transitions. This is typically thanks to a revolving door of graduating staff and contributors, and recently, the move away from traditional media.
But more than usual, big changes are afoot at your friendly neighbourhood student newspaper.
The big, structural evolutions are as follows: an impending move into the Student Union Building; the creation of new memorandums of agreement between The Cascade, UFV and the SUS to ensure our autonomy; a change of servers that will make our website much more reliable with room for growth into multimedia content; and a potential print and/or website redesign.
All this has us contemplating an even bigger change: our name.
Drafting new policy agreements, changing office locations and overhauling our appearance make it the right time to consider such a change. If we were ever to change the name of our student press, now is the time to do it.
The Cascade may have been in existence since 1993, but we’ve never thought it a particularly compelling name for a student-run alternative newspaper. Some of you may know that The Cascade started out as a SUS newsletter. The board of directors were in charge of hiring editorial staff and exerted a lot of control over the content that made it into the paper. This went on until we secured our autonomy by referendum just over 10 years ago, thanks to the intrepid renegades behind The Toque, a rival publication that eventually took over The Cascade.
Not only that, but we’ve run into all sorts of name confusion when we cover UFV’s varsity squads: the Cascades.
What would we change our name to? Well, that’s not something that has much entered the discussion so far. We’ve toyed with the idea of returning to The Toque because of its history as the current Cascade’s spiritual ancestor as an autonomous source of campus news and opinion. At the same time, I find it hard to believe The Cascade as it currently stands would ever quite return to the “hip and subversive” badassery of The Toque. And that’s a legacy we don’t want to tarnish.
A name change poses a couple of risks. First and foremost is the loss of name recognition. The Cascade has been hitting campus newsstands for 20 years. Faculty, student organizations and the local community have at least a marginal awareness of what The Cascade is and whose interests it represents. At the same time, in less than four years we could be looking at an entirely new student body. After all, I had no idea what the hell a “Cascade” was when I first set foot on campus.
A name change isn’t something we take lightly. It isn’t something we want to become a regular pattern; if we decide to change the name of The Cascade, we want it to be a permanent change, not a yearly whim of the current editorial board.
It’s important for us to have a name that captures the spirit of the student press. Masthead as manifesto. Something that distinctly tells readers and passersby the type of reporting they can expect inside and inspires contributors to make the content to match.
Unfortunately, The Cascade just doesn’t cut it.
