| PRESS RELEASE AS OF Apr 25, 2018@9:03:38 PM PT ~~~ Hello, My name is Nate Matherson, and my company runs The Student Loan
Report. We created The Student Loan Report in 2016 as a source for news on the
student loan industry, financial aid, and scholarships. At the time,
we were building a marketplace for student loans, LendEDU, and felt we
could contribute to the conversation. Especially because each of us
had deep and personal experience finding student loans from
trustworthy lenders. Personally, I graduated from college with over
$50,000 in student loan debt. Today, I am still working to repay the
majority of that debt. As we prepared to launch The Student Loan Report, we debated who
should author it, and felt that it was really a blend of our personal
experiences and perspectives that would create the best source
material, so we created a pen name of “Drew Cloud,” and conceived a
background that we felt personified a lot of the perseverance we hoped
to inspire with The Student Loan Report. When we pictured what Drew
Cloud looked like, we pictured a friend of ours from college, so we
used his photo (with his permission) to round out the pen name. We used this character of “Drew Cloud” as the primary author of the
site -- a shared pen name through which we could share experiences
and information related to the challenges college students face while
funding their education. There were also other pen names used to
publish content on the site. The thoughts, stories, and opinions come
from the actual experiences of our team. We have always held ourselves
to high standards of content quality -- all of the data we published
on The Student Loan Report was vetted, accurate, and licensed from the
related polling companies. Now that you have that background, and now that I have been able to
reflect on how we got here, I want to apologize for a couple things: (1) We never disclosed that “Drew Cloud” was a pen name that
(represented a group of us writing these posts. I really regret that.
(We are proud of our personal backgrounds and where they have brought
(us today. We should’ve chosen to be clear about who was authoring the
(posts. We have made a change on the site, effective immediately, to
(use each author’s real name for every post. We will also
(retroactively notate posts by Drew Cloud. (2) We have always worked to keep editorial separation between The
(Student Loan Report and our other site, LendEDU.com, which is our
(main business. However, there have been nine Student Loan Report
(articles that mention LendEDU. We now realize that we should’ve had a
(disclosure that the sites were owned by the same company. We are deeply sorry for any confusion or frustration our readers may
feel. Please reach out to us at hello@studentloans.net with any
questions or concerns about past content. Source: https://studentloans.net/ (homepage) |