KSU Provost Chapman, however, was undeterred. In June 2009, he invited Barnes to Frankfort and, over lunch, asked her to help him assemble and chair a steering committee to advise KSU on how to proceed with both the program and the news bureau. She agreed and recommended that he hire Erin Gilles, a young academic who had just earned her doctorate in communications from UK , into a tenure track journalism position. Chapman brought Gilles on in August, a hire that deepened the relationship between the two schools and solved KSUs credentialing problem. Gilles, though, had little journalism background; her only experience was a year-and-a-half as an assistant photo editor on her college newspaper.

Listen to Chapman talk about his decision to hire Gilles.

This put the pressure on Barnes to use her pulpit as chair of the advisory committee to craft the news bureaus shape and mission. The bureau had to be done right or it was obviously not going to work, Barnes says. Part of the role of the advisory board was to make sure KSU understood that. This was delicate because Barnes had no formal say on several decisions she considered key to the success of both the bureaus educational and civic mission.

First, Barnes believed that the bureau needed editorial independence from the university in order to have credibility with the news organizations she hoped would publish the students work. Then there were the financial questions. Barnes hoped that KSU land-grant money could subsidize the bureaus operational costs. However, that funding was available only to the agricultural arm of the university, which was both physically and bureaucratically separate from the department of Literature, Language and Philosophy, where KSUs few journalism courses were listed. This meant either moving the journalism program out of the humanities or, more likely, running the news bureau separately from the department, as an independent arm of the agriculture program. Moreover, she was not aware of any precedent for a university directing land-grant money to fund a journalism program. This meant KSU would have to make the case that the bureau served the schools agricultural mission. Then there were finer grained questions of what institutional supportacademic, housing, and administrativeKSU was prepared to lend students from surrounding journalism schools while they served tours in the bureau.

But these questions assumed a KSU-sponsored bureau. Barnes was well aware that a strong faction at her own universitywith whom she had discussed the proposed student news bureau at lengthbelieved that UK should run it. Al Cross, the member of her print faculty with the most journalism experience, led that group. Cross was himself something of a political and journalistic institution in Kentucky . He had worked for most of his career at the Courier-Journal, where he rose to chief political reporter in 1989; in 2004, he became the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues (IRJ) at UK . He still lived in Frankfort , a few blocks from the statehouse, where he remained on a first-name basis with several senior Kentucky journalists and lawmakers. He tended to focus even casual conversation on the future of Kentucky journalism and the intricacies of state politics. Cross believed that a student-staffed capital news bureau was more than a timely idea with educational and journalistic virtues: it was a civic necessity.