The ailing Illini

The Daily Illini, an "independent student news agency" for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has recently decided to halt its opinion page's staff editorial until further notice. Sitting with our own editorial board here at the Indiana Daily Student, it was difficult to fathom what went wrong to force a paper much like our own to take such drastic measures. An open forum without an editorial? Unthinkable.\nSo what happened? Egregious errors happened.\nOn Sept. 20 the editorial titled "Students missing out on Madness tickets" spoke out about how quickly the Illinois Basketball Midnight Madness event sold out. The article depicted the tickets as supposedly having "vanished into the hands of excited fans at up to six tickets per person" and went on to describe how students had been left out of this process by a department that "simply 'forgot' to reserve some seating for students in the process of organizing the event." The next day a correction was printed. In regard to the tickets being sold out, the correction letter stated that in reality "the tickets were given away for free to increase attendance" and added that "at the time of publication, the tickets were not sold out. Roughly 500 tickets remain(ed), as of 4:45 Wednesday evening, free for anyone to obtain."\nInstead of leaving students out of the loop, like the editorial had explained, the correction acknowledged that "a press release was made to inform students of the ticket availability, and persons who had purchased sports tickets in the past were also informed through e-mail."\nIn light of these major errors that would obviously threaten the credibility of any established news agency, another statement was made explaining that "The Daily Illini Editorial Board has decided to stop publishing editorials until further notice." While we can sympathize with the severity of printing something that has been "based on faulty facts, providing nothing but misinformation and misrepresentation," other measures should have been put in place that would allow the editorials to continue.\nPublishing a college newspaper, though it can, at times, be just as stringent as a professional news-writing process, is still a learning experience. While it is hard to see how these errors slipped through standard fact-checking procedures, like the ones used here at the IDS, one must wonder why more precautions weren't taken, especially since the paper has admitted to publishing several editorials with faulty content before.\nStaff training and strengthening the opinion page's fact-checking process by reinforcing current procedures with additional measures to ensure the accuracy of every editorial's claim is necessary. There are many other measures that could structure the staff without hindering its right to express a combined opinion in an editorial. These actions should have been taken before the publishing of editorials halted. A paper owes its readers. Admitting defeat is the wrong call. We can only hope that the editorials will not be stopped long and that procedures will be put into place that lessen the possibility of a next time.