The Daily Illini, the 141-year-old student newspaper of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has enlisted former Editor-in-Chief and award-winning Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert to help raise funds in a fight for the paper’s survival.
The newspaper’s nonprofit umbrella organization, Illini Media Co., is delinquent on its mortgage payments and owes $250,000 in back payments to its printer. Given its financial independence from the university and its inability to get a loan, the paper — a daily broadsheet with 12 pages — is facing a cash crunch.