Columbia Missourian

By: Mark Fitzgerald Don't you dare call the Columbia Missourian a college paper. Tom Warhover, the Missourian's professional executive editor, makes that clear each semester when 240 or so journalism students begin their required work at the paper: "I tell them, first and foremost, we are a community newspaper for the people of mid-Missouri. Secondly, we are a laboratory for the newspaper industry. And thirdly, we are a teaching lab."

It's that second raison d'etre that sets the Missourian apart from any other 7,000-circulation daily. Serving as a laboratory for the industry has been part of its mission since Walter Williams created the newspaper ? and the world's first journalism school ? at the University of Missouri in 1908. But the Missourian has been on a real innovative roll recently.

Just this spring, Roger Fidler ? the new-media guru who is now at Mizzou on a fellowship from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute ? used the Missourian to conduct a 10-week field study of his Electronic Media Print, or EmPRINT (a digital publishing standard for a downloadable digital newspaper that combines multimedia interactivity with the reading experience of a print newspaper).

What makes the Missourian unique, Fidler says, is that it provided both a real-world environment to test EmPRINT in the market every Sunday, and a boatload of graduate j-students to conduct research. The Missourian is no ivory tower. "This is a very media-saturated environment," Fidler notes. "The Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune, St. Louis Post- Dispatch, Kansas City Star, USA Today, The New York Times ? they all have home delivery in Columbia."

The Missourian's nonprofit ownership structure insulates it from only some of the problems faced by dailies. What's different is how it tackles those problems. With its Sunday edition faltering last year, it invited readers into the redesign, even providing blank sheets for their ideas. From this "public prototyping" process, in September it launched a Berliner compact with a new editorial mix, and name: the New Sunday Missourian.

"People ask me, how long are you going to keep calling it 'New'?" Executive Editor Warhover says. "I say, 'I don't know, when it stops being new, I guess.'"

Don't hold your breath: The Missourian hasn't stopped being new for 97 years. -- Mark Fitzgerald