Bill O'Reilly Helps Out His Old College Newspaper At Boston University

Conservative author and TV pundit Bill O'Reilly is one of a few notable donors coming to the rescue of the Boston University student newspaper.

The BU student paper, The Daily Free Press, started a crowdfunding campaign online last week with a goal of collecting $70,000 to get themselves out of debt and maintain a print edition of their publication. Online, they collected $22,000 in less than a week, but offline they received an additional $10,000 from O'Reilly, and another $50,000 from local auto dealer Ernie Boch Jr.

The grand total raised now surpasses $80,000, which goes beyond clearing them from their $68,000 in the red.

O'Reilly wrote for the Daily Free Press as a BU graduate student in the early 1970's.

"As a former Freep-er, he got his start here and he remembers his time at the Freep," the newspaper's editor-in-chief Kyle Plantz told the Boston Globe, after speaking with O'Reilly.

Among the other notable donors were New York Times columnist David Carr, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Don Van Natta Jr. of ESPN and CBS News legal affairs correspondent Andrew Cohen.