Last week, The Lawrentian had the opportunity to meet with trustees and students and discuss the business of running a newspaper on campus. Members of the Lawrentian staff and I spent a little over two hours talking with a dozen trustees and two students about everything from the day to day problems of running the newspaper to issues of strategy for the future. We found the discussions very enlightening, and we think the trustees did too.
We also took the meeting as an opportunity to introduce our intention to explore a new business model for The Lawrentian. At present, The Lawrentian is an LUCC-funded organization, and as we have worked to improve our standing in the community and to improve the quality of our coverage, we have found this relationship to be problematic on a number of occasions.
The editorial board has discussed the significant ethical conflicts created by covering the organization that provides our funding and with whom we share an advisor, and we have a number of potential solutions in mind, but we saw the meeting with the trustees as an excellent opportunity to gather other viewpoints and suggestions on the matter.
We were very pleased with the largely positive comments and suggestions we received, and we will be considering them carefully and returning for guidance as we move forward with these matters. We look forward to working with the committee in the near future, as we continue to make improvements to The Lawrentian.