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It’s hard to believe the Nassau Weekly has been in print for 43 years.
This publication — and the whole of print journalism — has changed immeasurably since the fall of 1979, when our founders brought the alternative voice of the Nass to campus for the first time. We have moved on from leasing the Compugraphic EditWriter 7500, the state of the art in digital typography in 1979, to passing down knowledge of InDesign from design generation to generation, sharing the week’s layout files online.
And although the Nass has always stayed true to its roots as a source of quality investigative reporting in a different style from that of the Prince, over the last four decades we have welcomed and celebrated the work of new voices: campus poets, storytellers, cultural commentators, satirists, and this publication season, for the first time ever, crossword writers.
But to make progress in print journalism over four decades comes at a cost, which is why we need your help to keep the Nass in print.
As print ads become a tougher sell — on campus and beyond — we’ve found that despite our business team’s best efforts, we continually struggle to come up with the funding we need to put the Nass in print on a weekly cycle. With the help of pro-bono legal counsel and our board of nine excited trustees, we have established Nassau Weekly, Inc, a New Jersey not-for-profit corporation. We hope to build an endowment so that we can keep creating and printing for years to come.
The print issue of the Nass is extremely important to many who have worked on the paper in the past, and especially those who have been involved with layout and design. While a move to online-only publication would eliminate the bulk of our expenses, it would deem unimportant the weekly labor of love that puts the treasured words of our writers into a tangible, beautiful form every Sunday morning. The thrill of opening up the issue and seeing your own work featured in the center spread, or awarded the prime real estate of page 20, would be lost without a print issue. The campus-wide flipping of the cover page to get to the freshly printed Verbatims, or the breakfast-table conversations around the newest crossword, would happen behind individual screens. Of course, the Nass’s online form — and the work of our wonderful web team — is something we take pride in as well, but we believe strongly that print and web components should exist side by side, complementing each other in the celebration of the words and artwork we publish each week.
We thank you for your continued engagement with the Nass and for your support as we celebrate more than four decades of this amazing publication. If you are interested in making a donate, please do so here.