Celebration and evolution were the key drivers that defined 2017 for the Daily Commercial News (DCN) and the Journal of Commerce (JOC), Canada’s leading construction industry newspapers published by ConstructConnect.
The core focus of celebration for the DCN and JOC this year was Canada’s sesquicentennial. We launched our ambitious and wide-ranging national feature series, called Building Canada 150, which looked at the various impacts the construction industry has made in helping shape the country we know and love.
From the iconic and transformational projects that built Canada, to the labour, project methods and materials to make these projects a reality, Building Canada 150 was a signature series that not only looked at what construction has done but also what is set to do in the future.
We also celebrated the DCN’s 90th year of being published. Long considered one of the “bibles of construction” along with the JOC, celebrating this milestone gave us the opportunity to review and further strengthen our mandate to serve our readers, subscribers and advertisers with the industry-leading construction intelligence, project information and insight they have become accustomed to.
If the successful execution of Building Canada 150 was a hallmark achievement for our editorial team, the launch of The Construction Record, Canada’s only regularly running construction industry podcast, was at the tip of our evolution spear.
The podcast was received with great fanfare and has steadily grown in its reach and audience since March. Though the podcast is an innovative digital tool for news sharing, we gave a nod to our storied past of covering construction through the DCN and JOC by naming it The Construction Record. The DCN’s former full name was The Daily Commercial News and Construction Record and the JOC’s was the Journal of Commerce and Building Record. Calling our podcast The
Construction Record was the logical choice.
With a combined 200 years of construction industry storytelling between the DCN and JOC via print and online, breaking into this medium of the spoken word to discuss what is of importance in the industry further entrenched our position as the meeting place for insight and discussion for all things construction.
Our evolution in 2017 did not end there. In August we ceased publishing the JOC in print twice a week.
This decision was not made lightly and a lot of planning and preparation was undertaken to ensure the Wednesday edition of the JOC evolved to a new digital format that would continue to meet the needs of our subscribers and readers.
The early returns of this evolution have been positive and we will continue to ensure both weekly editions of the JOC continue to be the best construction industry news and project lead source in Western Canada.
The last of our evolution achievements this year came in November with the launch of our new websites. The sleek new design, enhanced search functionality and increased ability to share visuals on the new DCN and JOC websites is just the first step in a major investment by our company to serve our reader and customer needs.
Despite all the above described celebration and evolution, I can confidently say our team did not lose sight of what matters most, our day to day coverage of the construction industry. If there was a key story that impacted anyone in the construction chain, from those on the tools to those in the boardroom, we delivered the insight and perspective you, our readers, needed in 2017.
From all of us in the DCN and JOC newsroom, thank you for your hard work in making construction the great industry it is and all the best in 2018.
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