Ten Years of AUBG Daily - The Beginning of the Journey

This year, AUBG Daily will turn ten years old. During this period, it has become the main source of information for AUBG students. The founder of Daily was Angel Ivanov. He graduated in 2012 with a double major in Journalism and Mass Communication and Business Administration. Ivanov is one of the Co-Founders of Skapto burgers and is currently a film producer.

AUBG has had quite a few media ever since the university was founded in 1991 – Aspecter, FlashNews, and Defacto to name a few. AUBG Daily was created in 2012 by a group of around 15 students who wanted to create a new media which was different from the others. “During our time at the university, the old student media were starting to decline. I think that they had a wrong model as they were doing long-term investigations. By the time their findings were published, the whole AUBG community already knew about it and no one had interest in reading their articles,” Ivanov said.

Ivanov and the team decided that there should be a flexible media that does not do such investigations, but rather tries to inform the community about what is happening on campus. This is how AUBG Daily got its name. Usually, the team tried to publish two, three articles a day.

The idea for Daily was born in the middle of the 2011 Fall semester. Ivanov and the other co-founders worked for a few months before the official release. Each member had their role and the topics were split between the reporters.

When Daily was founded, all articles were published on the online platform. Ivanov remembers February 20, 2012 with fond feelings. This was the day Daily was launched. “We probably published between 15 and 20 articles so that you wouldn't have to open the page and there would be only one thing that you could read. However, the site crashed about two hours after we launched it because a lot of people visited it.”

Currently all AUBG clubs have an assigned advisor who looks after the activities of the club. Ivanov does not remember receiving support from any particular professor. However, he remembers that he went to the chair of the Journalism department at the time. Ivanov wanted the work of Daily’s reporters to be considered as work done for the university and to be paid like the RA’s or the teaching advisors. His efforts were unsuccessful.

One of Ivanov’s favorite memories from AUBG Daily was connected to the honors convocation which was supposed to be held on April 1, 2012. He was a RA at the time and was approached by the Senior RA who asked him whether Daily was going to publish anything for April Fools’ Day. “I really liked the idea so we published an article that was untrue. The honors convocation was supposed to be held at 18:00 so we published an article around 16:00 which stated that the honors convocation was postponed due to bad weather or something like that. Many people had believed it and had not gone to the ceremony, which was indicative of the fact that people read Daily and believed in it.”

Ivanov believes that Daily helped him for his future career as it was something that was started from scratch. He gave some advice to the current team. “I would say Daily is a lot of work, but it is worth it. It requires discipline, but this discipline is very useful in real life afterwards,” Ivanov finished.

While some things in Daily have changed since it was founded ten years ago, it still carries the spirit of those who started it with so much passion and enthusiasm.