Editor’s note: On April 24, 2018, The Chronicle for Higher Education reported that “Drew Cloud,” a widely quoted “expert” on student loans, was in fact a fictitious character created by the owners of The Student Loan Report and
LendEDU.com, a student loan shopping site.
In the course of researching whether we had quoted “Drew Cloud” in any of our own stories, we have discovered that, in 2016 and early 2017, the Centre Daily Times published a series of articles purportedly authored by other LendEDU writers in connection with an advertising arrangement between the Centre Daily Times and LendEDU. LendEDU has now informed us that all but one of these writers were also fictitious characters.
While the Centre Daily Times was not aware that the authors of most of these articles were fictitious, the articles should not have been published without full disclosure of the advertising relationship with LendEDU.
We profoundly regret that we failed to fully disclose the advertising relationship between the Centre Daily Times and LendEDU.
Where each of those articles appeared on the Centre Daily Times’s site, we have now replaced the text with an editor’s note explaining the situation. In the interest of transparency, we have collected the texts of all of those articles in one file so that you can see them for yourself.
Comments