Celebrating 20 years of Women on Wednesday (WoW!)

IT’S important to stop and mark the milestones in life - little or large. It’s good to reflect on achievements, successes, as well as the ‘could do betters’ and acknowledge what can be improved.

And so this week we stop and mark a milestone for our WoW! supplement, which celebrates its 20th anniversary.

WoW! was first published in The Echo on May 14, 2003. More than 1,000 have been published since, providing more than 16,000 pages worth of exciting, informative, enjoyable content — hours and hours of great reading for the women of Cork — and men too!

In one sense, it doesn’t seem that long go since the first supplement rolled off the presses – but it is fair to say that Ireland was a different country back then.

Internationally, it was the year a space shuttle crashed, the highly infections SARS virus spread from China, and Finding Nemo was in cinema.

In Ireland, Mary McAleese was President, while Mary Harney was Tánaiste, and thousands took to the streets of the capital to protest against the invasion of Iraq.

Beyonce’s Crazy In Love was in the charts, as was Justin Timberlake’s Rock Your Body. Girls Aloud won Pop Idol. Fringed belts and bell tops were in fashion. It was the infancy of social media - MySpace was founded in 2003, Facebook followed in 2004.

On the pages of The Echo, we reported on these national and international happenings listed above – but key to serving our readers was all things local. Spotting a gap in the market, but also an opportunity to serve our local female readership further, the WoW! supplement was born.

For 20 years, WoW! has shared human interest stories and interviews as well as features on topics of importance and interest to women, such as health, business, education, careers, entertainment, beauty, style and more.

We have had special editions to mark International Women’s Day or Cork Pink Week, as well as our Christmas food supplement and a one-off edition honouring Cork’s frontline workers during Covid.

Once a print supplement only – our WoW! content is also now available on EchoLive.ie and you can access it from your phones, tablets, or desktop - at your fingertips, any hour of the day. You can even download our EchoLive App and find out what is coming up in WoW! in The Echo’s weekly Ezine – and keep an eye out for us across EchoLive.ie socials too – Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

We revamped WoW! back in March, 2020, and gave the supplement a complete refresh, by not only tweaking the design, but also our content — giving our readers an even better product than before. We hope you have enjoyed these changes over the past three years - from new columnists, to the ‘Big WoW! Interview’, a new monthly WoW! Bites column by the award-winning food writer Kate Ryan, a revamped fashion and style offering, and much more.

Julie Helen, who writes ‘As I Am,’ is our longest running columnist – she has been with us since the start and continues to file weekly, and definitely deserves a mention here for her engaging, educational and entertaining copy.

Every week, we bring you big interviews with Cork women, sharing their personal and career stories in our Big WoW! interview. We put Cork’s businesswomen in the spotlight in our ‘My Career’ section.

We will continue to create and publish content that readers of WoW!, can engage with, learn from, and enjoy.

We always want to hear a good story idea – and you can contact us at any time on elaine.duggan@theecho.ie.

I am proud to have served as the editor of WoW! in my role as deputy features editor for almost eight years. I am excited to mark its 20th anniversary this year with a special series - 20 interviews, with 20 Cork women, over 20 weeks – people who beset represent Cork women in 2023, and we hope you enjoy reading those in the months ahead.

Thank you

A special thank you to John Dolan, Features Editor, for always supporting and encouraging our work in WoW! Today, we also want to remember former colleagues who worked on WoW! over the years – including Wendy Good, Joanne O’Flynn, Maria Rolston and Emma Connolly. We want to also acknowledge those behind the design, the photographers, the graphic artists who take care of our eye-catching covers, the advertising team and anyone else whose fingerprints have been on the editions over the past 20 years.

To the writers we commission, or who send us their ideas, we are grateful too! We also very much appreciate our regular readers’ loyalty over the past 20 years and look forward to welcoming new ones! Last, but certainly not least, to the women of Cork who allow us to tell their stories, we are privileged, and it is something that we do not take for granted. We thank you for trusting us. We thank you for ‘letting us in’, and we are proud to be your voice.

“The lives of women in Cork have seen plenty of changes over the last 20 years and a glance at this selection of covers shows that WoW! has been with them every step of the way,” newly appointed editor of The Echo and EchoLive.ie Gráinne McGuinness said. 

“From charting the ongoing battles in the fight for true equality, to telling the stories of the women who inspire us, WoW! has seen many changes in style over the decades, but what hasn’t changed is the commitment to reflecting life in Cork as it is experienced by women of all ages and interests. 

"As WoW! editor Elaine Duggan says, it is our privilege to tell your stories and we will continue to do that in WoW! in the decades to come.

“As part of the anniversary celebration, we are delighted to be launching a new online feature asking who is the WoW! person in your life. Our readers have always been central to our stories and we look forward to hearing and sharing more great tales in the months ahead.”

See next week’s WoW! for more 20th anniversary coverage and celebration.