Lack of information regarding the university’s agreement with the Daily is unsettling.

Iowa State Daily Editorial Board: Troy McCullough, Tim Davis, Jennifer Holland, Kathleen Carlson and Jenny Hykes.

There’s a lot of ways to keep a story from being reported in the campus media. One of the best ways is to simply refuse to comment on the story until the semester ends and the newspaper stops publishing for one month.

It’s sad that such things happen, but once again it has happened to us. The story we are referring to involves the the new relationship that is being formed between the Daily and the university.

Maybe those involved didn’t want to see the story published. But more likely, it just took too long for them to reach a finalized agreement and go public with it. Either way, it is unfortunate for the Daily and for the public.

For a long time now, the Daily has been sitting on the fence. In some ways it is a private business, but in many other ways it is connected with the university and thus can be considered a public entity as well.

This has caused the newspaper a lot of problems, so a wise and well-overdue decision was made to formally define the relationship that the university has with the Daily.

Officials from the newspaper and officials from the administration started meeting behind closed doors to hammer out an agreement. In late January the Daily’s newsroom, which was eager to report on the newly created agreement, was informed that the new relationship would be announced in a couple of weeks.

A couple of weeks came and went.

So did a couple of months.

Finally, at the April 24 meeting of the Daily’s publication board — the board that runs the business operations of the paper — a finalized report was given on the newly formed, but still secret relationship.

But the details of the new relationship were not made public at that time. One of the Daily’s lawyers said that the agreement would be released very, very soon.

All that remained were a few signatures from a few people.

Fine, we thought. At least we will be able to report on the story before the semester ends and students leave Ames for the summer.

But a couple of days came and went.

Then a week passed by.

We began making phone calls.

But to our surprise, the Daily’s lawyers still couldn’t answer our questions about the agreement, saying it was still being finalized.

When we called officials from the administration, they too said it was out of their hands.

They promptly referred us to their lawyer Paul Tanaka, who never returned our repeated phone calls.

Now the semester is over, and because those involved in making the agreement were unable to finalize it in time, the story has yet to be reported. This disappoints us.

We understand that such agreements are delicate and that they take a lot of time to finalize, but we are eager to report on the agreement’s results. It isn’t the most exciting story on campus, but we feel the story is newsworthy for several reasons.

First and foremost, we feel that if the new agreement will potentially affect the operations of the newspaper — specifically, the paper’s news coverage or distribution — the public has the right to know.

Secondly, any formal agreement between the university and the Daily is precedent setting.

It will invariably affect other campus publications such as ethos, the Iowa Agriculturalist, the Iowa Engineer and The Drummer. And again, if this is the case, then the public needs to know.

Third, the relationship is a direct result of several controversial issues that have arisen between the university, the Daily and the Ames Daily Tribune over this past year.

The relationship is partially a conclusion of those previous stories, and once again we feel the public has a right to know.

Unfortunately, the public will not get to know about it for a while yet.

But the Daily will begin publishing again in June.

We’ll be waiting. We won’t forget.