Inside LINK is a weekly column from our CEO, Lacy Starling. If you have questions you’d like Lacy to answer, email her at lacy@linknky.com.
At LINK, we have two boards that help us run this organization, abide by our Guiding Principles, and make sure we are meeting our mission.
First, we have our managing board. This board oversees all our financial and strategic business operations, and they are who I report to. The managing board is made up of seven individuals – three investors who put up money for us to get started, and four community leaders to make sure we’re serving the interests of the community, not just the investors.
I meet with the managing board once a month to review our financial position, talk about strategic business moves (like starting a weekly print newspaper) and discuss managerial issues. They have no say in any editorial operations or content and must go through me if they want to speak to any member of our editorial staff.
Second, we have our editorial board. This board was established to help us make sure we are truly meeting our mission of telling the stories of all of Northern Kentucky. It consists of a group of seven volunteers who meet once a month to discuss our coverage – the good and the bad.
Our editorial board is a diverse group of people from all over the NKY Metro – from Newport to Union – and they represent many different communities. They help us see into communities where we might not have visibility, and they also keep us honest about how well we’re doing covering the big issues.
In our monthly meetings with the editorial board, we discuss everything from sports coverage to the language we use to identify indigenous populations. The conversations are wide-ranging, and their opinions are truly important to the way we consider certain topics and coverage.
It is important, as well, that the folks on our editorial board aren’t working in public relations or communication for any one particular organization, political candidate, or company. We were very careful in selecting our first editorial board members to ensure we didn’t have those types of conflicts, and we built out a board that was as well-balanced and neutral as possible.
But last month, we were thrown a curveball. Rich Boehne, our editorial board chair, was named as the Chair of the Board of Regents at NKU. He’s long been a member of the Board of Regents, but this new title put him in a unique, and conflicted, role. As the Chair, he is the spokesperson for the board and will need to speak to the press about any issues they are voting on.
Again, in a normal year, that probably wouldn’t be a big issue – most of the things the regents discuss are very inside baseball, NKU-specific issues. But 2022, and 2023 to come, are special because of the passage of HB9. I won’t try to explain HB9 here, but our Mark Payne did a fantastic job in this story.
In short, NKU’s Board of Regents needs to decide if they are going to be the authorizer for a charter school in Northern Kentucky, a controversial topic. To have the person responsible for messaging that decision to the press on our editorial board was a conflict Rich and our team felt was too large to ignore.
So, as of Sept. 23, Rich resigned from his position on our editorial board. Because he was the only member of the board with previous news reporting experience, we knew we needed someone with that experience to replace him – having someone in the room who can speak to the ethical and journalistic standards we need to follow is invaluable.
Luckily, we have a great journalism school in our backyard at NKU, full of exceptionally talented individuals who have worked in the press for years. We’re very pleased to announce that Rich will be replaced on the board by Michele Day, a professor of practice and the student media adviser at NKU.
Michele has almost 20 years of experience as a news editor and reporter, and before teaching at NKU, worked at the Kentucky Post. We are very lucky that Michele agreed to add our editorial board to her already busy schedule, and are looking forward to her contributions to our organization.
We’ve been working with Michele since the start of LINK last year through our content-sharing partnership with The Northerner, and this extension of our relationship will only make our news coverage stronger.
Rich will absolutely be missed – there isn’t anyone else in the community with his depth of knowledge and experience in running a news organization – but we respect and appreciate his willingness to put separation between his roles at NKU, and with us. We look forward to working with him as a source on the charter school issue, and are grateful for his contributions in our first year.
