Over the fall, Barnes helped Chapman assemble a six-person committee to discuss and settle on the parameters of a journalism school for KSU—and the news bureau that would be its star attraction. Together they enlisted Dick Wilson, Barnes’ predecessor at UK; Bill Wilson, the former director of Kentucky Educational Television (KET), former KSU Board chair, and currently in KSU development; Sam Oleka, April Fallon, Erin Gilles, and David Shabazz—respectively the dean, chair, and faculty members associated with the journalism and mass communications program; Brack Marquette, a public relations executive; and Marilyn Clark, a former broadcast journalist. But by far the most important figure, in Barnes’s estimation, was Chapman, because as provost he controlled where the bureau would be located in the university and ultimately how much money would be earmarked to fund it.

Barnes scheduled the committee’s first meeting for November 17, 2009. That morning, as Barnes prepared to leave for Frankfort to convene the committee, she received an email Al Cross had sent the previous night to journalism educators across the state alerting them to an industry news item that sharply changed the calculus for the need, scope, and timeframe for the proposed bureau: the Associated Press announced that it was cutting its Kentucky capital news bureau from two fulltime staffers to one. Describing the contraction as “a journalistic disaster of unprecedented proportions,” Cross wrote:

Almost 20 daily papers in Kentucky depend almost entirely on AP for Frankfort news. Among the remainder, the CNHI [Community Newspaper Holdings Inc] papers depend primarily on AP, and The C-J [Courier Journal] and Herald-Leader depend on it more than ever because of their shrunken bureaus. KPA once had a Frankfort reporter but he had little impact; now there's a KPA news-sharing service but several key papers have declined to sign up and it rarely has anything on the state-government beat. The question of who will pay for accountability journalism has now hit Kentucky smack in the face. [1]

Moments after Barnes read the email, Cross stuck his head in the door of Barnes’s office and asked if she had seen it. Barnes looked up over the piles of student work and reports cluttering every corner of her desk, and told him that she was just that moment preparing for a meeting later that afternoon with Kentucky State . “If there was ever a time to launch a student bureau,” she said, “it’s now.” Upping the ante, Cross responded: “Is there any chance that we can do this by ourselves?”

Barnes was as shaken by news of the AP contraction as Cross. This made the steering committee’s task more urgent than ever. She was pretty sure a KSU-run project remained the only way forward in the immediate term. Far from taking over the project, she probably needed to use this inaugural meeting of the advisory committee to convince Chapman and his colleagues at KSU to take even greater ownership of the bureau. But as she headed west to Frankfort , she found herself less sure. To whom was she ultimately responsible—to students, or citizens? Was Cross right that the University of Kentucky had a civic obligation to lead this effort and do it right? Had she been thinking too narrowly in terms of financial resources at a moment when statewide political reporting was in retreat, if not outright collapse? Might the state or a private foundation step in if UK took over the project? Or should she trust her instincts that they must seize on this opportunity—as journalistically and educationally imperfect as it was—because it might prove their best chance to step into the journalistic breach?