RJI news
RJI Fellowship team will use technology to bring more citizens, journalists into the council chamber
As newsrooms shrink in size, so does the amount of meeting coverage, says Mike Wheeler, a member of an RJI Fellowship team working to make meeting deliberations more accessible and “on demand” to journalists and citizens. He is a managing partner for Westerly Partners. Local government transparency is crucial to a community’s well-being, he says. … Continued
Digital preservation: Why is this important to me?
Journalists are dependent upon access to back files for research and context, but those back files may no longer be there. Almost all news content created in the U.S. today is digital, but digital content is even more fragile than print and might be scattered over a variety of media and storage systems. How long … Continued
Take Action! Public-Private Partnerships: Importance/Difficulty Matrix
EDWARD MCCAIN: [00:10] We’re going to break up into groups here in a little bit. At the first Dodging the Memory Hole we broke into groups, and we were looking at partnerships. I’ve ranked them here; and I also have some hard copies that I’m going to share with you as groups, but I wanted you to … Continued
How do we engage news consumers in the digital world?
If you operate a nonprofit newsroom, email appeals have likely become an essential fundraising tool. Yet while recommendations for how to grow your mailing lists are readily available, it’s much harder to find good information about retaining subscribers and engaging them as active community members. As a result, many successful efforts to gain subscribers are … Continued
The path to college starts with just one caring person
Can you remember being very young and wondering what you’d be when you grew up? My first goals were to be a cowboy, then maybe a fireman. A little later I upgraded to wanting to be the second baseman for the Detroit Tigers. These were all fine for kids. But as many of us grew … Continued
AP’s Kia Breaux passionate about helping young people pursue college dreams
“I am the end result of the Talk Story, Write Story program’s mission,” said Kia Breaux, Midwest Regional Director of The Associated Press based in her hometown of Kansas City. “I certainly could have benefited from this program, and I know many others who could have as well.” She offered her remarks during a day-long … Continued
Talk Story, Write Story demonstration project is a success story
I used my Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute fellowship this year to test my hunch that trained volunteers could successfully help financially challenged high school students write their way into college scholarships. If my theory was correct, others could do what I had loved doing, mostly alone, for nearly two decades. My Talk Story, Write … Continued
Take Action! Public-Private Partnerships: Brian Hocker and Edward McCain
EDWARD MCCAIN: [00:08] We have a fairly large group, and we're going to break up the group and continue some of the work that was done on partnerships in the first Dodging the Memory Hole last November. But since we had Brian here today I thought we'd explore a little bit more about his … Continued
From widescreen 3-D TV to Cardboard: The evolution of teaching VR in the classroom
No textbooks. No PowerPoints. No crib sheets from the previous class. This is teaching college? The University of Missouri School of Journalism prides itself with staying one step ahead of the news industry, but the light-speed immersion of virtual reality this year tested the system to its limits. Thanks to a talented corps of students, … Continued
RJI Fellow to create pipeline of ‘deputies’ in pursuit of news coverage of Alabama communities
One unseasonably warm weekend this past February, I found myself chatting about transportation spending deep in the bowels of a dark, loud motorcycle club headquarters in a warehouse on Birmingham, Alabama’s gritty west side. We were eagerly waiting for the latest Vikings recruits to be doused in water and beer as an initiation into the … Continued