Twenty-two years ago, RNAO – and by extension, Registered Nurse Journal (RNJ) – was experiencing a shift with the arrival of Doris Grinspun as its new executive director in April 1996. “We need to engage many more members in speaking out,” she said in an introductory Q&A published in the June/July issue of the magazine that year. “We have a lot to say and we are not loud enough.” 

As part of this push to increase the visibility and voice of nurses, the Journal became a more valuable vehicle to engage and motivate members. In fact, 1996 marked the final year RNJ was published by an external publishing house. At the start of 1997, RNAO’s communications team expanded and took over production to fulfill the vision to “…have more control over the timeliness of the content, the quality of the publication, and to have direct contact with readers.”

It was at this time as well that the ‘Internet’ and ‘World Wide Web’ also began to emerge as innovative and valuable tools for nurses. “RNAO surfs the net,” read the headline in a winter 1995/96 article written by the association’s co-ordinator of information research and corporate records, Ray Banks. “What is the Internet?” he asked readers. “For the first time in human history, there is a common denominator for all means of communicating information,” he wrote. “Information conveyed by voice, text or image can now be digitized.” He described the Internet at that time as “…an international confederation of some 12,000 electronically linked computer networks, most at universities, government agencies and corporations.” Who could have imagined just how much that online world would explode in the years to follow?