Type Weekly newspaper Editor Art Morrill | Format Broadsheet Founded 1907 | |
Owner(s) Virginia Military Institute Headquarters 3rd Barracks Concourse, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia | ||
The Cadet is the weekly student newspaper of the Virginia Military Institute. Started in the fall of 1907, The Cadet has been independently run by the VMI Corps of Cadets since its first issue, and continues to be done so to this day. The paper is published almost every week while the corps is at VMI. The Cadet did cease production for three years during World War II, however, it has been continuously published since then. There is a project currently underway to digitize every issue of The Cadet, starting with the earliest known issue from 1907. The VMI Archives, operating out of VMI's Preston Library, will have the project completed by the end of 2011.
The Cadet focuses almost entirely on issues related to the Corps of Cadets and seldom runs articles about off-campus topics. Regular staples of the paper include; a "Cadet in Focus" feature in which a selected senior from the corps is interviewed and given a short biographical article, an editorials page that focuses on U.S. or Virginia politics and issues relating to the corps, a sports section that exclusively covers VMI NCAA sports, and a humor page. The humor page is featured on the back of the final page every week and is made up of content exclusively submitted by members of the VMI corps.
Significant expansion in terms of staff, circulation and content, and reformatting are planned for the 2011-2012 cycle. There are also preliminary plans for an expanded weekly online version of the paper, although this will probably not be realized until late 2011 or early 2012. The current distribution of the paper is almost entirely exclusive to the corps, faculty, staff, and alumni of VMI. The paper plans on increasing circulation in the upcoming cycle by including more news stories from Lexington, Virginia and the surrounding areas of Rockbridge County.