Production studio at RJI receives facelift

The production studio at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism has received a facelift. Thanks to the upgrades, staff will now be able to deliver a product more in line with what audiences are accustomed to seeing online and on television in the 21st century, says Travis McMillen, senior … Continued

Looking for a subscription success story? Try Scandinavia’s Schibsted

Scandinavia online readers lead the world in paying for online news, with 26% on average in Nordic countries answering affirmatively to the 2020 Reuters Digital News Report question, “Have you paid for online news content?”  In Norway alone, the percentage of readers who pay for online news is 42%, up eight percentage points from 2019. … Continued

Mapping COVID-19 cases in Observable with Vega-Lite

Choropleth maps show how data varies across a geographic region, a visualization technique used often to present a wide variety of data, including economic data, election results and, more recently, the prevalence of COVID-19 cases and deaths. I recently created a choropleth map that pulls live county-level COVID-19 case data from the Missouri Department of … Continued

A pop-up newsroom goes digging on Facebook to share its COVID-19 news

When COVID-19 first hit, the Missouri School of Journalism quickly realized local newsrooms everywhere would be struggling to keep up with news about the virus. So the school created a “pop-up” newsroom called the Missouri Information Corps. We spent the summer reporting issues related to the pandemic and distributing stories and information to news outlets … Continued

La Voz de Chatham

During my RJI innovation fellowship at the Chatham News + Record this summer, I worked on a variety of audience engagement-related projects. One of the efforts that particularly excited me was a project made possible by a Facebook Journalism Project COVID-19 Local News Relief Grant, which the News + Record received right before the start … Continued

Journalists, business leaders consider roles in creating a more equitable, resilient local economy

As RJI continues to explore the links between rebuilding local economies and futureproofing local media, we want to better understand how to incentivize local conversations and experiments that help newsrooms build deep, reciprocal relationships that generate community-led solutions, revenue streams and business models to ensure their survival. The first of those experiments gets underway today … Continued

The Missouri Info Corps COVID-19 widget

What is the COVID-19 widget? And why should I want it on my news site? This widget is a free and easy way for your news organization to display Missouri Info Corps COVID-19 stories on your news site. If your news organization has taken a hit in resources and reporters over the past few months, this … Continued