Representatives of the ISU Foundation and the Iowa Newspaper Association are trying to find some common ground.

Foundation President Tom Mitchell met with executives from three Iowa newspapers Tuesday to discuss the purpose and goals of both university foundations and newspapers.

“I think we needed to just find a way to work to a more ideal conversation level,” said John Eighmey, who moderated the meeting. “It had become a bit confrontational.”

Members of the Iowa Newspaper Association have tried for several years to open university foundation records in the state of Iowa, arguing that Iowa residents should know how money given to state institutions is being used.

Foundation officials have been opposed to these efforts, citing the concern that opening detailed donor records may scare away people who don’t want their personal financial records available to the public.

“Everyone is interested in advancing the state of Iowa,” said Eighmey, professor and chairman of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “We all have the same goal in the end.”

Bill Mertens, editor and publisher of the Burlington Hawk Eye; Mark Bowden, executive editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette; and David Kraemer, editor of the Ames Tribune, represented the Iowa Newspaper Association during Tuesday’s meeting at the Gateway Center.

Members of the Des Moines Register’s staff were also invited, but did not attend because the meeting was closed to the public and newspaper reporters could not attend to write about it firsthand.

“The point of this was we wanted to talk about . public access to records of the foundations, and that includes members of the news media,” said Rox Laird, Register editorial writer and president of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council.

“It just struck me as a mistake to go into a meeting in which reporters were excluded.”

Due to the dispute about reporter attendance, INA Executive Director Bill Monroe also did not attend the meeting. But Monroe, who initially met with Mitchell in January, said he thinks Tuesday’s meeting and efforts toward more open dialogue between the two organizations are beneficial to the overall progress of opening foundation records.

“Understand that before we met with Tom Mitchell back in January, nobody from the media had ever sat down with the foundation president,” Monroe said. “We’ve gone from where we were to that point, even though we didn’t get there by the road map we first thought we were going to use.”

Now that the two groups have met and discussed their respective views and goals, Mitchell said they have found a “commonality of purpose.”

Future meetings with foundation presidents from the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa are also being planned.

Any future meetings between the respective organizations would be open to the public, meaning reporters would be allowed to attend.

Upcoming meetings will likely focus on the debate of whether it’s possible for “university-related foundations to consider themselves as open as the institutions they serve,” Mitchell said. “I think that is the question that will revolve around our future discussions and the issues that surface as we move forward.”