Laurel to The Principia Pilot for truth-telling under difficult circumstances. When rumors began to circulate that CEO Stuart Jenkins, who oversees Principia College, had been given a big pay raise, editor Caitlin Carpenter began digging. She soon found out that not only were the rumors true, but two trustees had resigned in protest. The resulting January 2007 piece was a departure from the school-funded Pilot’s usual role of covering campus happenings at the five-hundred-student, Christian Science-affiliated school in southern Illinois. It became the first of a series of articles on the controversy. (The same issue carried the unexpected news that college president George Moffett, who served as the titular publisher of the Pilot, would resign at the end of the year—more on that in a bit.) While the CEO complained of “inaccuracy and bias,” the biweekly continued to break news and frame the resulting governance debate. In April, the Pilot published an editorial letting the campus know that its access to relevant information had been curtailed, and that the editors felt they were being discouraged from reporting on “controversial” topics. The tension came to a head just before graduation, when a tipster gave the paper e-mails exchanged among Moffett, Jenkins, and the board of trustees showing that Jenkins had worked to strip Moffett of his power shortly before his previously unexplained resignation. The editors published a special issue that included the smoking-gun e-mails. Moffett told CJR that the night before the issue was to be distributed, Jenkins demanded that the paper be held back. (Jenkins says he doesn’t recall the conversation, as it was “very late at night.”) At 6:30 the next morning, Moffett says a trustee rang his doorbell to deliver a letter from the board “implying possible financial sanctions against me if I allowed the paper to be...

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