There have been some Septembers at URI when the Cigar ' s editor in chief, the two managing editors and all four news editors are new to their jobs. You can understand how mistakes can occur, how a naive freshman once wrote a story for the Cigar in which she noted in passing that a faculty member at one time had been a finalist for a Pullet Surprise. The busy student copy editor, no doubt more worried about a mid-term exam in her political science class the next day, failed to notice the mistake. The campus had a laugh, and the Cigar staff was deeply embarrassed. But the error sent faculty to their lecterns to discuss how and why someone wins a Pulitzer Prize.
Some campus newspapers receive some or all of their funding from the college.
The Cigar gets a small portion of its revenue from the URI Student Senate. As a result, the expectation is that any student, not just journalism majors, can write for the paper. Another difference is perhaps more subtle. While a community newspaper encourages citizen discourse on its editorial pages via letters to the editor, the larger the newspaper the fewer letters of the many it receives it can publish. Campus papers often want all the voices in their marketplace to be heard, and their readers, youthful, exuberant and highly opinionated, expect their letters to the editor and their columns, from the serious political essay, to the inane and even, on occasion, the inarticulate, to be printed for the campus to read, discuss and argue over.