The No-Spin Loan?
Student journos may get an unlikely savior.
BU's student newspaper, the Daily Free Press, has cut its page count and left its beloved office for cheaper digs, all to pay down a years-old, $100,000 debt to its printers. Now a touchstone of its bid for solvency—creating an association of alumni boosters—has set up its toughest decision: whether to embrace Fox News megaphone (and 1970s-era FreeP columnist) Bill O'Reilly, who is offering big aid. "Just to throw them a check ain't going to help in the long run," he says. "I need to see exactly what their situation is; then I can come up with a plan to help them."
Former FreeP editor Kyle Cheney, an alumni association cofounder, says he's heard students on the liberal campus recoil at the idea of taking succor from the über-conservative. But with the paper's future at stake, he says, biases should matter not: "There's no reason we should distinguish between alumni."
