Four international master’s students at the Missouri School of Journalism have been chosen for the 2026 class of Student Innovation Fellows at the School’s Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI).

This summer, each Fellow will spend 12 weeks helping a news outlet create or expand upon innovative projects that address a particular need in community journalism. Through how-to articles they will publish along the way as part of RJI’s Innovation in Focus series, their work will also help local newsrooms around the country who are facing similar challenges.

“Community newsrooms are often bursting with ideas but don’t always see a path forward to execute them,” said Randy Picht, executive director of RJI. “The Fellows can bridge that gap and inject fresh, experimental energy into the newsroom while providing a roadmap for other organizations to follow in their footsteps.”

The Fellows will each receive a minimum $8,000 stipend and will be paired with a mentor at their news organization, whom they will meet with regularly until the Fellowship draws to a close in mid-August.

Previous projects have included a civic engagement guide, a translation and marketing initiative to boost an outlet’s Spanish-language audience and a strategy for maximizing impact by providing personalized replies to audience members in online comment sections.

“Each of these partnerships between the Fellows and the news organizations starts with an initial plan or idea for a project,” said Emily Lytle, Innovation in Focus editor. “But I always love to see how the Fellows surprise us — and sometimes themselves — with their unique ideas and the real impact they have on these newsrooms and communities they serve.”

Learn more about the Fellows below.

Meet the Fellows

Muhammad Osama Farooq

Farooq will head to the Detroit Free Press, one of Detroit’s major daily newspapers, to enhance its social media marketing and vertical storytelling. He also anticipates testing new ideas for collaboration between other news organizations in the area and the Free Press, which is part of USA Today Co.

The fellowship gives him an opportunity to practice a fusion of storytelling that combines his passions for visual journalism and strategic communication.

“I’m excited because even though I’m still covering news, it’s in a new, innovative way,” he said. “To get to do that professionally and get paid for it — that’s what I want to do.”

Farooq embraced the openness toward vertical video and other novel methods of effective storytelling practiced in an emerging technologies course taught by RJI Director of Innovation Kat Duncan, inspiring him to seek further ways to broaden his experience beyond the television production and script writing already under his belt from his time in his native Pakistan. He leapt at the opportunity to continue producing innovative storytelling through this fellowship.

“After this fellowship in whatever role I do, even if I go into the corporate sector and make ads for brands or if I’m working in a newsroom, I want to focus on new, effective storytelling techniques,” he said. “I don’t want to keep repeating the same process for each and every story — I want to do different things.”

Farooq’s mentor will be Brian Manzullo, Digital Director at the Detroit Free Press.

Mariia Novoselia

Novoselia will assist Technical.ly, a digital outlet covering entrepreneurship and innovation. Technical.ly’s startup tracker, which rates the potential success of startup companies across a wide range of industries and locales, is currently populated manually. Novoselia will be tasked with incorporating automation tools into the process to create a more streamlined workflow that allows for the inclusion of more startups in the tracker.

Since coming to Mizzou from Ukraine, Novoselia has gathered experience in environmental, investigative, health and higher education reporting as well as data analysis. For her, journalism is about more than putting together the skills she’s gained from that varied experience — it’s about creating something new that engages and informs audiences who are burned out or distrustful of news.

“I really like that this fellowship allows you to practice journalism in non-traditional ways,” she said. “That’s very important because we see that some people are turning away from news, and I’m very happy to be part of something that can help.”

Novoselia hopes to become a data journalist after earning her master’s degree from the School of Journalism.

“I love working with data and code, which is why this internship is perfect,” she said.

Her mentor will be McKenzie Morgan, project manager for Technical.ly Media.

Elizaveta Orlova

Orlova will work for Mirror Indy, which provides community-driven coverage of Indianapolis. She will assist with a project amplifying youth voices and featuring children interviewing their peers about life in the city.

Orlova sees the project as an opportunity to infuse humor into the reporting process, engaging audiences in a new way while lightening the tone of journalism and potentially reducing news avoidance among audiences who feel the news is too grim.

“Content creators are talking about serious stuff but from the lens of humor and satire,” Orlova said. “I want to share important things with people from this light state of being, and when I saw there was a project connected with kids, I thought, wow, this is perfect for me.”

Coming to Mizzou from Russia, Orlova understands all too well the importance of balancing the tone of reporting to avoid overwhelming audiences. She hopes to make a career out of that approach to journalism after earning her degree.

“People are so tired of politics and all the bad things that are happening everywhere — sometimes they want something simple,” she said. “When they consume content about serious stuff from the humor perspective, it can be easier for them to process the trouble they have in their lives and in their countries.”

Orlova’s mentor will be Amanda Kingsbury, managing editor of innovation at Mirror Indy.

Laiba Khan Zai

Zai will be working at the Times Union, a daily newspaper serving New York’s Capital Region. There, she will help promote informed civic engagement by building a state legislative tracker that will allow audiences to easily access past and present legislation.

Hailing from Pakistan, Zai seized on the opportunity to continue feeding a passion for the intersection of accessibility, technology and journalism that she first discovered in her home country.

“In Pakistan, I was working in this organization that was adapting to newer techniques in journalism to make it more accessible for the public and using all new kinds of tools,” Zai said. “That was something that I saw being implemented at RJI, and that drew me to this new opportunity.”

Her focus on accessibility is part of a larger interest in investigative and data-driven journalism, a preference that meshes neatly with the legislative tracker project’s goal of providing user-friendly information and context to audiences.

“Sometimes there are a lot of numbers involved in stories that people don’t fully understand,” she added. “There are more stories to be discovered in those numbers.”

Zai’s mentor will be Erica Smith, managing editor for digital at the Times Union.

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Cite this article

Fitzgerald, Austin  (2026, Feb. 20). RJI Student Innovation Fellows to spark innovation at four newsrooms around the country. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/rji-student-innovation-fellows-to-spark-innovation-at-four-newsrooms-around-the-country/