The Williams Record gets $17,384 each year from their student government — in fact, the student government at Williams added $8 per year in each student’s activities fee, just to fund The Record; The Bowdoin Orient receives $22,668 a year from theirs; The Wesleyan Argus gets $39,476, and so on.

Welcome to The Student, now one of the only fully-independent newspapers in the NESCAC.

After a financial crisis exacerbated a previous poor decision to publish fully in color, The Student was funded by the AAS for nearly two and a half years. Much like Goldman Sachs, The Student is far too big to fail. For the last year and a half, the publishing team has worked to retool how The Student operates its business ventures, ensuring year-over-year revenue increases of over 50 percent in fiscal year 2010, and further increases of five percent so far in fiscal year 2011. We are now one of the only newspapers left receiving no money from any College organization. We believe this was a duty not only to our readers, to ensure fair reporting standards, but to the student body at large, so that funds for the paper may support other worthy activities on campus.

We are not done working. Given the terrible market for newspaper advertising, especially for a newspaper barely reaching 2000 people every week, the future will be a fight for our independence and our survival. But we have fixed the problem for now. We hope to ensure our financial security in the coming months and years to guarantee the future of independent journalism at Amherst College. The publishing team hopes to make The Student as powerful and mobile as possible, so that future generations of students at the College can experience running what has become an incredibly tough business.

We would be remiss without paying our previous publishers some praise for the extraordinary amount of work they put in to truly reform the business of the newspaper. Many thanks to Matt Ruark ’12 for helping our publishers discover what it actually meant to support a newspaper and to Shannon McKenna ’12 for solidifying much of Matt’s work. Without them, The Student would have never gotten back on its feet.

Not to blow our own horn, but … toot, toot.