25 leaders, 25 moments at 25 years: IAPP publications

In 2001, the Privacy Officers Association — that's what the IAPP was called back then — launched a monthly print magazine called The Privacy Officers Advisor. Complete with featured stories on the latest issues challenging privacy professionals at the time, including EU-U.S. data relationships, California's role in the legal space, workplace litigation, data breaches and more (sound familiar?), the POA was among the first publications to focus directly on privacy.

"This publication, in the early days of the organization, was the primary means of communicating with the small but growing membership on the wide variety of new developments," said Wilmer Hale's Kirk Nahra, CIPP/US. Nahra was the publication's first lead editor.

Though Nahra did not start the publication, he had been a frequent writer "from the first days." Once the opportunity to become the editor emerged, he took it and then spent more than 15 years in the role, witnessing the organization's "massive development" first-hand.

"I worked with a very small internal staff — to both do some overall editing and to identify topics and writers on the various issues," he explained. "For the first several years I was a very hands-on editor — then over time it became more staff driven.”

By September 2005, the POA was renamed The Privacy Advisor and managed by a small team.

"The members loved it," Nahra recalls. "At the time, it was the best way in the industry to keep an eye on all the major developments. There were some news organizations doing real-time news developments, but this was the main place for people's thinking and analysis about the important issues that were developing."

As with now, the IAPP relied, in large part, on its member contributors to share best practice and analysis on significant issues developing on the ground. In the early days, Nahra recalls, it "went very quickly from having to beg for articles to being overwhelmed with submissions.

"It also became — in my opinion — a critical place for building the community," Nahra said. "You knew who was working on these issues and who to pay attention to in the space."

With The Privacy Advisor in full swing, members received in-depth monthly analyses, but when J. Trevor Hughes, CIPP, took the helm, he realized members also needed timely news updates. Though email newsletters were in relative infancy at the time, Hughes reached out to well-known privacy attorney Reed Freeman, who had organized a news-driven email client alert, which was sent to a few hundred recipients and generally featured two to three news "blurbs" with each send.

Hughes asked Freeman if he could repurpose the newsletter for the IAPP, and he agreed. That's when the IAPP Daily Dashboard was born.

The birth of the Daily Dashboard crucially allowed the IAPP to also share organizational news about its conferences, certification, training and KnowledgeNets, and its delivery continues to this day.

For more than 20 years, the Daily Dashboard has hit members' inboxes Monday through Friday with the latest privacy — and now artificial intelligence governance, cybersecurity and digital responsibility — news developments. It goes out to more than 75,000 inboxes and serves up the latest news, contributed analysis, op-eds and in-depth research from the IAPP's Research and Insights team.

Over the years, the IAPP also rolled out regional digests for Canada, Europe, the Asia-Pacific region and the U.S., as well as an all-Spanish Latin American Dashboard Digest. It sends a monthly Career Central Digest to share job openings with members, and most recently, the IAPP launched a weekly AI Governance Dashboard dedicated to regulatory, legal, business and technology updates for this burgeoning field.

Though The Privacy Advisor, which went electronic-only in 2010, ?was retired in 2022, the IAPP continues to publish in-house, contributed and third-party news, analysis and research through its email newsletters each day.