It’s hard to believe the Nassau Weekly has been in print for 50 volumes. As we look back at the labor, love, blood, sweat, and tears put into the magazine by the past 50 mastheads, the community that this publication has sustained, built, and recorded is evident and awe inspiring.

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, state of the art in digital typography in 1979, to passing down InDesign templates from Nass generation to Nass 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, over the last (almost) five decades we have welcomed and celebrated the work of new voices: campus poets, storytellers, cultural commentators, satirists, crossword writers, and, of course, artists.

But to make progress in print journalism over half a century 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. Eight years ago, with the help of pro-bono legal counsel and our board of trustees, we established Nassau Weekly, Inc, a New Jersey not-for-profit corporation. Now, almost a full decade later, we are planning to implement a pseudo-endowment in order to build a publication that will sustain and last into the future.

Print issues of the Nass are extremely important archives for the 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 decrease both our readership and the pay-off for those that submit their work to us. 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 Verbatim, 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 and audiovisual teams — 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 50 volumes of this incredible publication. If you are interested in making a donation, please do so here.