More than 30 people came to the Journal-World office last week for our first Coffee and a Newspaper session, a turnout far bigger than I expected, for which I’m grateful — it shows our readers are interested enough to come out and share their views.

I also got some pretty pointed feedback from a reader, for which I’m even more grateful.

This reader’s concern — her anger, really — was about a story we’d run in Monday’s newspaper about three Kansas University athletes who were arrested in a fight at The Cave, a nightclub at The Oread hotel. The reader’s view was that our decision to run this story across the top of the front page, and to use photographs of the three, who are black, was overplaying the story and was racially insensitive.

She said she’d seen this pattern in our paper over 40 years and was concerned in particular that we seem inconsistent in how we run photos of defendants in public safety stories. Her belief is that we run photos of minority defendants more consistently than white defendants.

We had a bit of conversation about when and whether photos are available to us from law enforcement, but the real message for me wasn’t about what pictures we run on a particular day. It was about the fact that when this reader looks at our paper, or website, she does not see her community accurately reflected. If she feels that way, others must too.

The reader asked if we had a community group to talk with us about how minority communities are covered, and we don’t. I think having one is a good idea, so I’m going to invite people who want to talk about those issues in for a meeting in January. Stay tuned for details.

We’ll also continue to do Coffee and a Newspaper each month. January’s will be at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 14.

Among the other feedback from this week’s meeting:

• A retired Lawrence Police Department employee said she sees an anti-law enforcement bias in our public safety coverage.

• A couple of readers asked about our failure to cover a meeting on the proposed Ninth Street arts corridor that drew 200 residents. They were right; we should have been there.

• A reader asked why we don’t run Sound Off questions and answers each day. (The answer: We don’t get as many questions as we used to, and we don’t seed the garden with questions we pose ourselves.) A different reader called the next day with a great suggestion: Name the feature something less confrontational sounding, like “I wonder why….”

• A reader said she likes the fact that we print poetry from local writers.

• A reader suggested that we run profiles of interesting or accomplished local residents on Mondays.

• A reader cautioned us to use East Lawrence only when we mean the neighborhood, not anything in eastern Lawrence.

• A writer asked that we review self-published books.

• A reader from Lecompton asked that we increase coverage of that community and Eudora.

• A reader asked for more coverage of research going on at Kansas University and more aggressive coverage of the community planning process.

• A reader asked if we leave out national stories that might anger liberal Lawrencians (we don’t), and said that he doesn’t like editorial cartoons by Mike Luckovich.