Category: Journalism 4450

Sign No. 354 the semester is ending: I covered my last Faculty Council meeting Thursday. My first Missourian story was a Faculty Council meeting recap. In that meeting, the council voted to ask Chancellor Deaton to maintain the Nuclear Science and Engineering Institute. How fitting, then, that at my last meeting, the council voted on additional matters concerning the institute. The Nuclear Science and Engineering Institute saga is just one of several issues I covered during my Faculty Council time. That issue might not be resolved yet, but I'm happy to say I've seen a few issues wrap up during my time as a reporter. I saw the root cause analysis report concerning the University of Missouri Press, a hot issue first semester, that answered a lot of previously unresolved…

Last Wednesday's GA shift was pretty uneventful — for most of the day, anyway. Severe storms, a flood watch and a tornado warning hit Columbia that evening, sending everyone (and especially those people like me whose only idea of a tornado is from "The Wizard of Oz") into a frenzy. The editors watched the radar. Everyone got calls and texts at the same time from MU Alert and the National Weather Service. We looked outside at the dark, eerie sky and crowded in front of the budget room windows and saw who could spot the largest piece of hail. Upon hearing about the warning, we all had to drop everything and head down to the basement of Lee Hills Hall (where the Missourian is housed) for about half an hour.…

I spend a lot of time writing about the governing bodies in higher education. Thursday, I road-tripped to Rolla with another reporter to cover the first day of a meeting of the highest governing body we cover: the University of Missouri System Board of Curators. We had written an advance the night before, so we knew this meeting would be mostly informational — and most of the information was subject to change. We braced ourselves for an abundance of "might," "could" and "preliminary." But I don't think either of us was prepared for the extent of it. We sat through hours of budget proposals, debt analysis reports and talks about relations among the UM System's four campuses. Our main story was the only action item, which was the vote to…

I think I've grown so much as an interviewer this semester, especially in the past few weeks. "Think Like an Editor" describes interviewing as both an art and a science — an art in terms of technique, but a science in terms of research and preparation. The more I think about it, the more I agree with this definition. As a logical thinker and former science kid, I've had the "science" part down for a while, I think. I prepare for each interview by doing background research — mainly by Googling and asking around — and write a list of questions. I don't adhere strictly to this list, but it helps provide an outline so I don't forget to ask anything important. If I do come up with additional questions…

We've been talking about voice a lot in lecture — how to incorporate voice into reporting while maintaining accuracy and avoiding bias. Our teacher, Katherine, mentioned how some people have voice in their blogs but not in their news writing, and I'm pretty sure I'm one of those people. I got into writing like many journalists: through creative writing. I always liked to tell stories, and in first grade, my teacher gave me a notebook to fill with those stories when I got done with work early. I spent hours writing about fairies and treehouses in the woods, Carmen Sandiego and Scooby-Doo's latest adventures and the joys of being outside. My artistic friends and I would sometimes even collaborate — I'd stick to the text while they'd draw the illustrations.…