Danny Lawhon 2/1

So the big news coming out of the UM Curators meeting this week involved the big, bad budget. The squeeze put on both the university and Joe Student seems to become tighter every year. Of course, rising tuition costs isn't new. Nor is an underfunded higher education department in the state. To me, the story coming out of this year's numbers is the perceived gap between what is given and what is needed — the UM system asserts that it needs $100 million — $100 million! — more dollars to keep up with inflation costs than what is being given by the state. The system's hands are a bit tied by the MOHELA bill.

As a student, I feel relieved my tuition is likely to go up just 4.1 percent this year. Based on the money shortage, God knows they could have raised it by double digits again. As a citizen, I'd have mixed feelings — if I had children, then I'd be sighing alongside my real self while simultaneously wondering if we aren't doing the state a bit of a disservice. And as a reporter, both sides of the coin can be seen and deserve to be heard. In short, what a mess. I know Reuben already mentioned it in lecture, but the university's ever-morphing financial timeline is a shell idea that — in this state, anyway — could have a long shelf life.

Progress:  Sometime in the next couple of weeks, an interview with the outgoing interim president will surface, and in between, I'll hopefully make some headway on these Study Abroad programs' allocations. 

Rebecca's Delaney's Blog, week of 2/1

From as far back as freshman year of high school, teachers have warned my classes not to trust Wikipedia. The way they talked about the site made it sound like it’s actually run by a Satanic conspiracy group, but I’m still glad the message set in. Wikipedia is a useful tool for rapidly gathering background information and building a frame of reference when I’m clueless about a topic, but now that I’m writing real news stories, getting factual information from a site anyone can edit is basically like playing journalistic Russian Roulette. Sure…most of the time, Wikipedia’s accurate. You could pull facts from it and seldom make an error. But once in a while, you’re bound to get blasted with a glaring mistake (or several). It’s not smart to gamble when it comes to accuracy.

Readers shouldn’t have to gamble with accuracy either. But I think they should still have the luxury of convenience when it comes to being informed, and that’s why I’m so fascinated by the idea of modifying news web outlets to mimic a wiki model. Wikipedia is popular because it’s so incredibly easy to use. Wikipedia wrote the book on context — each page branches out in countless links offering background and tangents to explore. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a news outlet like the Columbia Missourian could offer coverage with the same contextual strength?

Blog sites already use the kind of technology the Missourian could adopt to become a little more “wikiish.” The tags bloggers attach to their posts could be modified to suit the needs of a newspaper’s web site. If we indexed all of our stories under certain categories and could hotlink a series of older articles offering readers context when they check out a new topic, we’d be doing them a huge service. I’m envisioning a turbocharged version of the “more story” thing we do now. I don’t just want “more story.” I want a Columbia dictionary, defining every single key term we can think of so that we can link those terms to their definitions when they appear in stories. Instead of a few more articles linked to new stories, I want readers to be able to click a link where they can see a visually appealing, chronological presentation of relevant coverage.

Let’s say we run a story about City Council elections for the First Ward. To me, an ideal news site would link to condensed bios the first time a candidate is mentioned in every story. If an important issue is being discussed in the story, I want a link to a short summary of what that issue entails. And if readers want even more background, they could click a link to access stories from the past several months about the First Ward, City Council elections, etc.

I know this whole concept is incredibly idealistic; implementation would be a logistical nightmare. But if we can’t get the ball rolling to explore how to better inform readers, then what’s the point of being a journalist at all?

Progress report:
The first story was the big obstacle for me. Now that it’s out of the way, I’m feeling infinitely better about my newsroom performance. I think my story on the Ragtag was a really solid bit of coverage. We broke the news that True/False will intentionally be slowing its growth to avoid becoming something of a Midwestern Sundance, and I think that’s a great start to my semester. Also, the story idea I pitched last week for a future Saturday cover looks like it will pan out beautifully. I want to cover a new exhibit at MU’s Art & Archaeology museum featuring pre-Columbian (Christopher, that is) artwork of the Americas. But instead of doing the generic preview story, I want to cover the heck out of this exhibit, linking it to Columbia, Missouri and Midwest pre-Columbian history and artwork. Hopefully, this story will appeal to a wider demographic than strictly those who would be interested in a new art exhibit.

back to square 1

So. The tanning story.

  Turns out that it is already being worked on, and in much more depth than I was bringing to the table. Jackie Whipple has been working on it for two semesters and is trying to get final-type information about it from stonewalling administrators. 

  I'm glad I found out before moving forward with more interviews and writing; it would be too bad to blow up her story.

  Since this wasn't an issue of not checking Merlin, I guess what to think about is how now to overlap another reporter's scoop. The best way, I think, is to spread the word as wide as possible, especially in beat meetings. 

  I'm inclined not to say anything about a story I'm writing (except to friends) because a) I don't think it would be of interest, or b) I don't like to talk about writing before I actually do it, otherwise it sounds like a big windbag. 

  Lesson learned. And, go see There Will Be Blood when it comes out. 

Let there be blogs

Hmm, blogs. This is my first one ever, and I'll probably celebrate afterward with a flute of champagne and a Quizno's sub. 

This semester I'm taking Advanced Writing and Advanced Reporting and hope to be able to converge some ideas for longer stories. Signing up late for A.R., I didn't really have a choice for my beat, but I'm on higher ed. now and look forward to it. 

Word has it that I should become an expert on one topic or interest, but I don't see it that way. I think my expertise should be in writing and reporting, immersion, story structure, creative narrative and economical management of time. 

I look forward to an intense semester of writing, and hope to address a variety of subjects. I'm starting with something small — a story about the tanning beds at the Mizzou Rec Complex. Artificial tanning (or "sunning" as the rec center publication calls it) seems antithetical to the healthy-lifestyle message the rec center promotes. 

I'm trying to nail down exact numbers, but the spa technician has been slow to pull them up and says it will take awhile. I'll just annoy him until I get the stats. 

Rebekah's take on Week One

This week at the Missourian was my first as a print reporter, and although I have not written a story yet, I am researching for my first one, which will be an update on the visioning process that the city is doing.

Also, when I had my meeting with Scott Swafford this week, we definitely talked about the potential of adding multimedia, especially interactive graphics, to the stories coming out of the public life beat. Hooray! The more multimedia, the better, I say. And this semester the convergence department has more students available to work on projects than ever before.

I think that my biggest impressions came from the breaking news this week – there was a lot of it! Both the stories of Governor Blunt deciding not to run again and the story about the St. Francis House required multiple online updates throughout the day. Compared to the past few semesters that I have paid attention to things at the Missourian, the capacity to update a story online like a professional newspaper would has grown exponentially. I also really appreciated how everyone sat down and talked about it in budget. I feel like in a normal newsroom, that is something that would be done in a small committee and the reporters would have no real input.

Justin O'Neil Week 1

This is my last semester at MU, so the task of taking advanced reporting, advanced editing, and my capstone while beginning a job search should lead to interesting results, to say the least.

My role has not been defined as far as what I will be writing about for the semester, but I am writing for the public life beat, and I will be working with my former editor Katherine Reed to address an ongoing story I wrote about last semester about police brutality and oversight.

I am looking forward to our final project in this course, as I think my weakness as a journalist is my lack of design and understanding of technology. The type of site we will be designing is one of the ways online newspapers can stand apart and add information for readers that could not be presented in other formats. I want to learn as much about interactive sites and software as I can, and I think I can turn this into a strength as long as I continually put in the time and effort to learn the technology.

Danny Lawhon 1/25

In the ever-evolving world of journalism, I guess it's not too surprising that the buzzword — more often than not — is change. This profession is one that continually adapts both on micro and macro scales. We adapt by reporting the new events that come with each day. We adapt by retooling our craft to take advantage and utilize the newest and most efficient technological methods. We adapt, too, at times, simply by responding to and implementing the best of reader feedback. Change is a continual process.

When viewing the widespread changes at the Missourian from the past few months, it seems the business is growing and evolving by becoming more compact in nature. The average physical size of many newspapers (ours included) has been reduced. The Web provides virtually limitless amounts of space for stories; nevertheless, many stories are served to the public in numerous transparent bursts as opposed to the longer storytelling methods of old. Is this a result of the battle for the public's precious few moments of free time? Is this at all an effect of the public's growing distrust toward mainstream media?

The evolution of journalism isn't at all a negative process. It's just a particularly rapid, forward-thinking metamorphosis. And though it takes some getting used to, it's not really all that different from the work we've done before. In the two stories I've written or helped to write this week, I think I've begun to understand the adaptations required of us. It's about immediacy, surely. But it's being more transparent about the work we do as well. And the way we do our job won't remain the same for long. Just like evolving what you're working on to cover new developments in a story, which seemed to continually happen with the fan blogger story this week, or even dropping everything you're doing to cover something of urgency — as in my contributions to Gov. Blunt's announcement this week — so, too, must you allow your methods of reporting and writing to evolve with the times, embracing change as best you can.

As for my progress, I'm satisfied. As mentioned, I contributed 6-8 inches to the Blunt story and wrote what felt like a resolution piece regarding the university's dispute with a fan Web site. It contained the "what's next" angle that I thought several outlets couldn't get by rushing news of the story to print. Again, I'm content with my work so far. I've started research on a story involving the firms funding and managing some of our Study Abroad programs, so we'll see where that takes me next week.