Solution: Wat's New? UWaterloo Affairs Weekly Answer: TYPISTS
This puzzle is formatted as a ‘mini meta’ puzzle. A puzzle that contains smaller puzzles that come together to form the solution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these mini puzzles are all contained in the Puzzles section of the newspaper, namely: The Cryptic Crossword, Sudoku, and DropQuote. These puzzles are all relatively common, and have a known set of rules. These rules are all followed in the puzzle, but with one catch. In a vacuum, they are all impossible. The crossword’s clues seem meaningless, the sudoku doesn’t have a unique solution, and the DropQuote is missing nearly all of its letters. While the Puzzle section has each puzzles’ ‘shell’, the necessary tools to solve them are all contained in the rest of the newspaper: The crossword clues reference ads in the Classified section of the paper, the DropQuote uses the paler letters across the articles, and the Sudoku extracts additional numbers from the titles and authors to become uniquely solvable.
Cryptic Crossword
As stated above, the first step to the Cryptic Crossword mini puzzle is to recognize the connection between the clues and the Classified Ads. Each clue makes a reference to one of the classified ads. Reading these specific classified ads, you might notice that each contains another reference to both an article in the newspaper, an ad, and an italicized keyword suggesting the cryptic wordplay you must perform. Reading the article and the ad, you will notice the articles have a bolded word, and the ads have letters highlighted. Finally, performing the cryptic wordplay onto these, and you will get your final answer to the crossword clue.| Crossword Hint | Classified Ad | Article | Bolded Word | Ad | Ad Letters | Wordplay | Answer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Call Jenny | Health Sciences student, single and ready to... | Disastrous Health Student Assignment | flan | Baking Company Ad | pies | mingle (anagram) | lifespan |
| Arctic Exploration | Highly unstable architecture tired of defying... | Conceivable Danger in MC Stairwell | still | Di Salvo's Car Ad | di | start | distill |
| "Captain Crash" From Dallas | Horse lover looking to snag a great catch... | Department of Mathematics Funds Lasso | shot | Band-Aid Ad | up | start | upshot |
| Doing Time Together | Brave engineer seeking a loyal... | New "Jail Cell" Built By Psychology Department | pig | Rolex Ad | skin | end | pigskin |
| Bring Your Own Chair | Apathetic voter seeking... | Election Turnout Shatters Records | real | Big Mac Ad | new | filling | renewal |
| Hardy-Ramanujan Number | UW President, feeling empty inside... | Err At The Luncheon | tis | Coca Cola Ad | thing | inside | tithings |
| Duck Duck | Inseparable trio looking to relocate... | Espionage In The BSA? | lab | Aluminum Windows Ad | our | beside | labour |
| Dine and Dash | Tall brunette with a bit of a wild side... | Non-Stop Price Rises | sound | Instant Coffee Ad | jar | wild (anagram) | adjourns |
After completing the crossword, and reading the intersecting letters, you get NILLSON, an author of one of the articles in the newspaper. NILLSON is the solution to the first mini puzzle.
Sudoku
As previously mentioned, there are multiple valid solutions to this sudoku. So even if you solve it as is, it is more than likely the incorrect solution, leading to issues in the final extraction. To make it unique, you must gather more numbers from the newspaper. There are many possible ways you could notice this information. Perhaps reading the first letter of every title is second nature to you when solving a puzzle. Perhaps you found the titles slightly odd. Or, you might have noticed the small hint in the article “Record Made by Dana Porter Library”: "…remove the first letter from all titles and authors in an effort to “save weight.”In fact, this paper is considering implementing this idea in our own publication…" Either way, if you put together all the first letters of the articles titles, you get: DEAD CENTRE NINE And reading the first letters of authors’ names, you get: TOP RIGHT IS FIVE Adding these numbers to their respective locations on the sudoku board makes it uniquely solvable. 
Now, with a solved sudoku, the last step is to take the highlighted numbers, and translate them into letters through A1Z26 (A=1, B=2,...Z=26). This will get you the answer: 18, 15, 23, 6, 15, 21, 18 => ROW FOUR ROW FOUR is the solution to the second mini puzzle.
DropQuote
One key to solving the DropQuote is recognizing that the mini puzzle has 14 columns and the newspaper has 14 articles. This, along with the 2nd article containing the letters ‘H’ and ‘N’ in a paler colour and the 2nd column of the puzzle containing these letters should hint that the pale letters in each article represents the letters in that column of the DropQuote. After making this realization and filling in the rest of the letters from the articles into the puzzle, it is a normal DropQuote that you must solve. 
Searching this quote will give you that it is in reference to a movie called ‘The End of the Line’. ‘The End of the Line’ is the answer to our last mini puzzle.
Putting it All Together
Combining our three mini puzzle solutions, we get: NILLSON END OF THE LINE ROW FOUR Looking at the article Nillson wrote, at the end of the line on the fourth row is the word: TYPISTS. 
TYPISTS is the answer to the puzzle.
Author’s Notes
This puzzle was a blast to make! I don't really know where the idea for this puzzle came from, I just randomly thought it would be cool to make a puzzle that would be appear as a regular newspaper unless you were specifically looking for a puzzle. To an extent, I think I succeeded in this: the bolded words and pale letters kind of look like printing errors, and the highlights make it appear already read by someone. Originally this puzzle was a lot different (and worse). It did not start as a mini meta style puzzle and used far less of the space available in the newspaper. I want to especially thank Joey, who suggested the mini meta style and made an interesting sudoku, and Sarah, who suggested the use of a DropQuote puzzle and the classified ads. Truly, a massive thank you to everyone who helped me make and test this puzzle. Each iteration improved this by leaps and bounds, and there is no chance it would have anywhere near as good without everyones help. One fun fact about the extraction that you might not have noticed, is that all the letters for the DropQuote are contained in the quotes of each article. I had considered adding red herring letters outside of quotes to make this a necessary thing to notice, but it did not make it to the final version. I tried to keep it as time accurate to 1975 as I could, only referencing existing buildings and such; however, I will be the first to say that there are many time related errors in this. Notably the use of the terms WUSA and Faculty of Health, which I decided to use instead of the techinically correct "FEDS" and "Department of Kinesiology" to make it more clear, and references to pop culture that did not yet exist.