On October 6, The Ukrainian Weekly celebrated its 82nd birthday. Sure, it’s not a “big” birthday, or a round number, but 82 years of service to our community surely is something to celebrate.
A lot has changed during those eight decades plus.
When it first rolled off the presses in Jersey City, N.J. on October 6, 1933, the Ukrainian Weekly (“The” was not part of the name at first), was a simple four-page tabloid-size supplement to the broadsheet-size Svoboda, the Ukrainian-language daily newspaper published by the Ukrainian National Association. A single copy of Svoboda with the Weekly supplement cost 3 cents. The Weekly was all text, no photos.
The new newspaper was geared toward the youth of the Ukrainian American community. In fact, an editorial in Svoboda strongly encouraged the older generation to share the Weekly with their children and other young Ukrainians in order to keep them involved in Ukrainian community life and interested in events in Ukraine. The Weekly was seen also as a tool that could be used by Ukrainian Americans to tell Ukraine’s story to the English-speaking world around them at a critical time in history.
In addition to front-page articles introducing the new newspaper, the top story in the premiere issue of the Weekly was “Ukrainians protest deliberate starvation of Ukraine by the Bolsheviks,” focusing on community demonstrations against the Soviet-perpetrated genocide that today is widely known as the Holodomor. During the first year of its existence the Weekly published documentation about the Great Famine of 1932-1933; it strove to counter Soviet disinformation and news reports by those journalists who denied the Famine.
Printing technology changed through the years, progressing from the old, noisy and dirty hot-lead process using linotype machines to phototypesetting and offset printing. The Weekly grew from a four-page tabloid insert to a separate 16-page tabloid independent of its sister publication. The number of pages, articles and staffers grew, with full-time bureaus functioning at one point in both Kyiv and Toronto. What was once a black-and-white paper is now printed in color. The Ukrainian Weekly became a newspaper for all generations of Ukrainians.
Readers, who in the past would deliver their stories to the editorial offices in person or send them via mail, began to fax stories to The Weekly. Contact with our correspondents in Kyiv, who have been officially on the ground in Ukraine since January 1991, were also via fax – then a modern technology. Today, of course, most correspondence is via-e-mail (though we still do get some info via what is now referred to derisively as snail mail). Our newspaper is now available to subscribers in both print and online editions, and The Weekly’s digitized archives – spanning the years 1933-2014 – are free and open to the public at www.ukrweekly.com. In addition, in July 2012, we added a Facebook page that keeps our friends in touch and allows us to post the latest news about Ukraine and Ukrainians around the globe from a variety of credible sources.
Take a look at this week’s issue. The Weekly continues to report on events in our ancestral homeland and the activities of our communities wherever they may be. The Holodomor continues to be a topic on our pages, especially as we prepare for the historic unveiling of the long-awaited Holodomor Memorial in Washington.
As we mark the 82nd anniversary of The Weekly’s establishment, we are grateful to the visionaries who founded it; its pioneering first editor, Stephen Shumeyko, and all those who followed in his footsteps; our publisher, the Ukrainian National Association; and, of course, the loyal subscribers who have read these pages for many years and supported this newspaper’s valuable work with their subscriptions and generous donations to The Ukrainian Weekly Press Fund.
Sure, a lot has changed in 82 years, but not our commitment to our community and the Ukrainian nation. And our founding mission – to tell the world the truth about Ukraine and Ukrainians – endures.