In today's Tribune, we printed a story on the front page looking at the experiences of gay and lesbian students at Marquette before the 2006 election. We believed this story was important to our readers and deserved the placement it received, for several reasons. Here are some of the issues we considered before we agreed to put the story on the front page:

~One of the key issues in the fall election is the vote on a state constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage and civil unions. The students in our article believe they have a strong stake in the results of this amendment.

~The precedent set in Tuesday's issue was to run installments of this series on the inside pages of the newspaper. On Tuesday, the first installment of the series was on out-of-state students; that story ran on page 8.

~In this issue, we also ran an installment of our series looking at key points in Marquette's 125-year history. Until today's issue, each installment had received prominent placement on the front page. We considered not breaking this precedent.

In the end, the editors reached a consensus that the election story about gay and lesbian students was more relevant and more important than the story pertaining to Marquette's history.

We encourage readers to pick up Tuesday's issue, in which we will run another installment of the series. This story will look at devoutly religious students on campus. We plan to publish this story in a similar manner then.

If you have any questions, please e-mail [email protected].