The students raised money from private sources ($68,500 being the initial goal), since the editors did not expect to receive tax-exempt status given the heated nature of such a paper; thus large foundations would be unlikely to contribute.
The paper was a multiracial effort, and its reporters were asked to integrate into the localities they covered as much as possible, without being either unattached "drive-by" journalists or involved community activists.
[4] In September 1965, when Lottman returned to his newspaper job in Chicago, Robert Ellis Smith became editor; he had worked as a reporter at the Detroit Free Press and Trenton Times and had become anxious about the state of the country after the Sunday School bombing in Birmingham.
The weekly paper borrowed from The Harvard Crimson its six-column, six-page appearance, its allegiance to well-sourced and balanced stories, its professional headlines, its immediacy, its inclusion of items about the arts, TV, some sports, individual profiles, first-person accounts, and attention to all sides of the civil rights battle.
Lottman caught the essence of the paper in speaking of how it covered the core details of the federal "War on Poverty", "The coverage by the Courier was just about the only way, at that time, that readers found out what people in other places were doing, what kinds of issues others were confronting and letting them know that they were not alone.
The 30,000 papers were shipped every Thursday night by Greyhound buses throughout Alabama to "stringers" who distributed them locally (and for the most part provided news tips and written reports back to the Montgomery office).
A $60,000 grant from the Ford Foundation in 1967 gave the paper another year, but in the end funding dried up, in part because opposition to the Vietnam War attracted more attention from donors in the late 1960s.