#PULSEFORLIFE

10 years. 50 issues.

Story by Bailee Wicks | Design by Matthew Conrardy

Fall 2008

PULSE comes into being as a weekly updated website.

Winter 2011

PULSE becomes an online quarterly flip-through magazine

Fall 2011

Jennifer Green becomes faculty advisor, and PULSE staff overhauls the previous structure and look of the magazine

PULSE starts publishing two issues per quarter

PULSE goes through remake involving the entire structure and look of the magazine

Spring 2012

PULSE wins its first professional association award: 3rd place Mark of Excellence Best Student Magazine in the region from the Society of Professional Journalists

Winter 2012

PULSE’s “Tattoo cover” – got a lot of attention on campus

PULSE puts out its first promotional video (see PULSE's YouTube page)

Spring 2013

PULSE goes truly multimedia with videos, including an award-winning MTV Cribsstyle tour of CWU President James Gaudino’s home

PULSE wins another regional SPJ award as Finalist for Online Feature Reporting

Spring/Fall 2015

PULSE enters a new phase as a print publication

2014-2015

PULSE earns new professional recognition as:

Best Student Magazine (Winner)- Society of Professional Journalists, Mark of Excellence Award (regional)

Non-Fiction Magazine Article (Winner)-Society of Professional Journalists, Mark of Excellence Award (regional)

2016

PULSE staff makes a push towards longer, investigative features and stories covering more diversity issues. Some of these pieces included “Pressure to Perform: Disordered Eating, Exercise and Body Image in Female College Athletes,” “Women in Film,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Sexual Assault on Campus,” “Muslim at Central,” “Veterans and the Brotherhood of War,” and “LatinX.” These led to some significant awards in 2017 for PULSE, including a national Best Non-Fiction Magazine Article award from the Society of Professional Journalists for “Sexual Assault on Campus”

Spring 2016

PULSE Radio launches and wins its first award the next year

PULSE revamps its website, also earning the magazine professional awards

2017-2018

Thanks to staff continuity and a new level of collaboration between journalists, designers and photographers on team, the magazine solidifies its visual look. This can be seen especially in the cover art starting from Fall 2017 with “Body Positivity,” “Me Too,” “Keeping Culture” and “Men’s Floral Fashion.”

The photography staff makes another push to include more videos. PULSE gets recognized for all of these activities with a range of awards acknowledging the growth in multimedia.

Fall 2018

PULSE launches Virtual newsroom to replace the classroom setting

PULSE was not always an online and printed 64-page magazine… it had to start somewhere.

Flashback 10 years ago- Central only had a newspaper, but the communication students wanted more... theywanted a magazine.

Starting in the fall of 2008, an online informative magazine was published weekly on a website and PULSE had become an official class offered to all communication students.

Website to Issuu

A huge switch came in 2011 when the staff decided to leave the informative style and switch to something more upbeat.

“My goal was to combine journalism and journalistic skill with art, elements of design, and make it easily accessible to anyone [on the internet],” says Britta Shuster, PULSE’s EIC from Jan. 2011-Dec. 2011. Britta and her predecessor, Erika Solis,were at the forefront of the decision to make the magazine a flip through magazine uploaded through Issuu.

So that winter quarter, PULSE produced its first flip-through magazine. However, this did not mean that it came easy or without challenges.

We didn’t have a graphic designer, so I taught myself how to use InDesign and put together the first three magazines I was editor

adds Shuster.

PULSE EIC, Advertising Coordinator and Assistant Editor alumna Devin Larson adds, “I remember going to businesses and no one knew what PULSE was, let alone what it was even about. So talking about our readership with little stats to back us up was difficult.”

Even through the challenges, staff continued to write, design and edit two magazines a quarter, slowly increasing the page length to the now standard 64 pages.

New Staff, New ideas

With each quarter and students graduating, PULSE’s staff was and still is constantly changing. “PULSE changes with every issue and each new staff that comes in,” says Faculty Adviser of PULSE Magazine Jennifer Green, Senior Lecturer in the Communication Department. Green joined PULSE in Fall 2011 and helped staff overhaul the structure and look of the publication as well as recruiting graphic design and public relations students to the staff. When EIC Chloe Ramberg took the helm in Fall of 2013, she says she worked on creating more of a team in the production. “I knew I would need a solid team of editors behind me. It was my goal to implement assistant editors and graphic designers for each section of the magazine.

We would regularly meet to discuss what each issue would need, and they were an essential element to the final production of the magazine,” says Ramberg.

The, the magazine went from being online only to also having 1,000 copies printed and placed on newsstands around the CWU campus and throughout Ellensburg twice a quarter in 2015.

In 2015, inspired by feedback at a conference, then-EIC Lindsey Wisniewski led the charge to get the first edition of PULSE into print. PULSE would eventually publish 1,000 copies twice per quarter and distribute them on news-stands around the CWU campus and throughout Ellensburg.

From Print to the Present

Once PULSE started consistently printing their issues, the staff focused on covering longer investigative stories and featuring diversity issues. “My focus was on changing people’s perception of the magazine,” says Nicole Trejo-Valli, EIC in 2016- 2017. “Countless times people categorized PULSE as a women-only magazine, which was something I wanted to break first. When I became EIC, I turned my thoughts and visions into reality--

I made sure there were stories relatable to everyone, timely and worldly, and ones that made people think differently.”

Many of these focused pieces mentioned were not just a focus for Trejo-Valli, but also for the 2016 EIC Bailey Williams. Some of the hard-hitting pieces covered were “Pressure to Perform: Disordered Eating, Exercise and Body Image in Female College Athletes,” “Women in Film,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Sexual Assault on Campus," "Muslim at Central," "Veterans and the Brotherhood of War," and "LatinX."

EIC Brielle Rutledge worked hard to incorporate more music-oriented stories to the magazine, turning the focus of PULSE8 to up-and-coming bands from the region.

PULSE has also continued to move into multime dia to offer readers different entry points for its stories, including podcasts, an interactive website and videos on a dedicated YouTube channel.

The diversification paid off. PULSE has been recognized over the years with regional and national awards from collegiate journalism associations for everything from its photography, designs and writing to radio features, illustrations and website.

The Future

Not only is the content and staff of the magazine changing, but the entire structure of the class has too. In the past, editors would hold lecture twice a week to focus on the basics of interviewing, writing in AP style and reporting.

Starting fall of 2018, the leadership staff has changed to an online newsroom to mimic the professional journalistic world. PULSE is at the forefront of the collegiate magazine world in making this switch and is hoping to be a model for other publications.

PULSE staff continues to make the positive strides to a more cohesive, visual and hard hitting magazine.