The Cadet is the weekly student newspaper of the Virginia Military Institute. Started in the fall of 1907. The Cadet has always been independently run by the VMI Corps of Cadets since its first issue. The paper is published almost every week while the corps is at VMI and had an original subscription price for the magazine of $1.50 per annum, postpaid. It was not produced for three years during World War II, but has been continuously published since then. There was a project underway to digitize every issue of The Cadet from the earliest known issue from 1907 scheduled to be completed in 2011. The VMI Archives, operating out of VMI's Preston Library, now have a digitized copy of each issue published since 1907. The VMI Archives Catalog now contains detailed descriptive information about manuscripts, historical institutional records, and other primary source research collections. 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, an event page with annual and special events, 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 was planned for the 2011-2012 cycle. There were also preliminary plans for an expanded weekly online version of the paper, which 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.
