Job #1 at the University of Missouri School of Journalism (also known as Mizzou) is to produce students ready to deliver quality work from the jump.
Some 2,000 students are working — not just studying — to graduate and then shoulder the responsibility of informing the populace. If you work as a journalist in the U.S., you are at least tangentially aware of Mizzou’s impact on journalism. The clout is not just in the school’s brand and reputation as one of the most prestigious J-schools in the country but also in the names of its alums. Scores of Mizzou grads have won Pulitzer Prizes over the decades. Among Mizzou’s journalism graduates are executives at major news companies and household-name anchors you’ve seen on television.
Mizzou is involved in much more than producing an army of journalists. It’s also connected with research and institutional groups that support the industry behind the scenes. Among them are the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), which has more than 5,500 members, and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI), which has emerged as an industry leader in innovation, research and support.
Then there’s the Journalism Library, the McDougall Center for Photojournalism Studies, the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism and the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk.
What has emerged during Mizzou’s 100-plus years of journalism education is a powerful system that overlaps students' learning and educators' professional curiosity with an industry yearning to conquer the perpetual information disruption of the last two decades. The school is simultaneously preparing students for a turbulent journalism journey while helping the industry engineer best practices and new tools to ascend again. Students are in the middle of everything that’s happening — even on the ground floor of innovation.
At the core is “The Missouri Method.”
The Missouri Method
The University of Missouri was established in Columbia, Missouri, in 1839, the first public university west of the Mississippi River. Columbia, with a population of roughly 120,000, is the fourth largest city in Missouri, founded roughly in the middle of the state between St. Louis and Kansas City, along Interstate 70.
In 1908, Mizzou established the world’s first journalism school. Dean Walter Williams established a newspaper to provide practical training for journalism students. Teaching by doing became known as “The Missouri Method.”
The University of Missouri has been “teaching journalism by doing” longer than any educational institution in the U.S. This partly explains why one of the nation’s most revered institutions is housed in a small city of a small state nearly a thousand miles from the East Coast.
Missouri School of Journalism Dean David Kurpius explained that the students produced a newspaper on the first day of classes in 1908. That “do” style of education has expanded over the last 100-plus years.
Today, in addition to the professionally run Columbia Missourian newspaper, Mizzou has added an NPR station, an NBC television station and a community magazine called Vox. Students are involved in Missouri Statehouse reporting, which is distributed across the state; a digital newsroom that publishes statewide business news; and AdZou and MOJO Ad, full-service ad agencies where students engage in sales and campaigns.
In the last 10 years, many of these programs have begun operating more collaboratively, representing a strategic shift.
“So, when I came here a decade ago,” Kurpius said, “all of those entities operated separately, with separate faculty and curriculum. We renovated a space, moved them all into that single newsroom space, and created space for them to collaborate. Then, we broke down the barriers in the curriculum when we rebuilt it. … You’re going to learn journalism, and you’re going to learn the different techniques, platforms and technology, and then you’ll specialize as you move up. … Now, students choose their own path. They make themselves interesting. [They] do a semester at the Missourian and a semester out of KOMU because they know they must build both skills. Then they may leave and do something that is a hybrid of those two.”
Mark Horvit, the university's department chair for Journalism Professionals, is ultimately in charge of the classes that feed the professional newsrooms.
“A lot of it really is collaboration, which is becoming increasingly important in the industry as resources get tight. We're figuring out how you can work with other outlets in your area, even if they work on a different platform or approach the news differently than you do. I think that’s going to become more and more essential. So, what we’re trying to do is work with our outlets here to see everything from economies of scale to smarter coverage to being able to do multi-platform coverage, because we have experts in audio, video and text. So, I’m tasked with helping to figure it all out … when it makes sense, to work together, to support each other, to broaden coverage, to diversify the way we can cover things.”
Training future journalists and ensuring there’s a future
The student-based career path curriculum that Kurpius explained can lead students to epiphanies about other non-typical career tracks within journalism. That’s where some of Mizzou’s organizations, such as the Reynolds Journalism Institute, can come into play.
Students may discover they get more enjoyment from problem-solving. The RJI is constantly working with journalism companies and organizations to do just that. The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute was launched in 2004 with a gift of $31 million from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. The RJI headquarters opened in September 2008.
The organization rolls up its collective sleeves in many ways. It helps find new methods to improve information delivery and production by experimenting and testing different types of platforms. It hosts conferences, training and workshops for journalists.
One recent example is the RJI's commitment to help the newly formed Climate News Task Force. Emily Holden, one of the task force's leaders, said the RJI is helping the group “fill in the gaps” as they try to build more collaboration within newsrooms that focus on climate journalism. The RJI presented the task force with a collaboration toolkit and offered expertise in organizational structure and legal support.
Students often help the RJI organization research solutions. RJI Executive Director Randy Picht explained that among them is a digital ambassador program where 10 students are sent to 10 small newspapers in Missouri every year for one week. While there, the students help the newspapers launch or advise on a particular area. It might be an area such as search engine optimization or launching a newsletter or social media channel. It begins with an industry consultant teaching the students; then, the students apply what they've learned to a small newspaper.
“So, what I tell people in terms of our relationship here is that the J-school's mission is to make sure that we have smart and talented journalists in the future. RJI's mission is to make sure there's going to be a future for journalism,” Picht said. “Putting those two things together, it’s a powerful company combination for journalism now and into the future. One of the things that we focus on is practical innovation. So, sometimes people think of RJI as a Think Tank, [but] we at RJI are a ‘think and do’ tank. I think working with students is integral to what we do. It amplifies what we do.”
RJI is involved in both long-term and short-term projects. The longer-term projects typically fall under the purview of Kat Duncan, the RJI’s director of innovation. Duncan oversees RJI’s professional fellowship program. The fellows, alongside RJI staff, build out new tools and platforms that can be introduced industrywide.
Duncan also teaches emergent innovation for the J-School, so students can learn much of what she’s learning during RJI’s projects. Among the topics she talks about with students are the different types of artificial intelligence and the ethics of using them. They dabble in creating games for publishers; they train in vertical videos and other such tech and techniques.
“I try to introduce them to a lot of different spaces where they can learn to do nontraditional, creative storytelling, but also to help you know whatever newsroom they go into next to know how to tell stories in a really engaging, interactive way,” Duncan said.
While Duncan heads larger projects, Emily Lytle, the Innovation in Focus editor, is more involved with connecting students with newsrooms on smaller projects. Innovation in Focus is a monthly web series in which students and publishers experiment with new ideas and storytelling methods. Students do projects, and the results are published on the RJI website and in a monthly newsletter.
“It could be anything on the editorial side, the audience side or the business side — it takes a couple of different shapes,” Lytle said. “One of them could be we're going to partner with a newsroom and test out these five different tools — for video editing, transcription services or something else. We’ll evaluate them, use them with the newsroom and test out which worked best and which were the most cost efficient, and evaluate those tools while actually using them,” Lytle said. “And, the other form it can take is, ‘Hey, we’re going to try this new strategy.’ An example is that we recently partnered with a newsroom in Oregon that wanted to try creating walking tours based on their news coverage. So, we went through that process of planning these walking tours, created almost a step-by-step guide of how we did it, provided templates and lessons learned so newsrooms can replicate it.”
RJI also offers student fellowships where students are matched with a newsroom for a 12-week summer project. The projects often involve audience development and community engagement.
“I’ve had so many students come out of that program and say, ‘I didn’t even know these types of opportunities were possible in journalism,’” Lytle said. “Or ‘Oh, I can still be in journalism and work in product, or I can work in audience or do all these other things.’ And often, they say, ‘Oh, I want to work in a small newsroom. I want to work in a nonprofit newsroom.’ Or they realize there are all these other options beyond the traditional New York Times/Washington Post job they came into J-school thinking they wanted to do.”
During students’ time at Mizzou, they’re taught a variety of skills, including the pitfalls of the industry.
“They’re wondering what their future is in this profession. Right?” Horvit said. “Because of economics, government pressure and public perception of what journalism is and isn’t. All of those things are really scary. I mean, they’re scary for everybody, but they’re especially scary if you’re a young person looking to enter the field. What I talk to them about is there’s never been a time when it’s more necessary to have smart young people entering the field. They are needed now more than they’ve ever been. … The idea is that you can go in and do the work, and you can fight for information. You can push back against things you see that might not be working the way they’re supposed to. It is really exciting and invigorating for a lot of young journalists. They have an opportunity to sort of go into this new world and figure out how things are going to work. They have an opportunity to go into newsrooms and bring new skills, new approaches and new energy. I think it’s an exhilarating time for them.”
Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.
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