AdZou visuals team

Team: Troy D'Souza, Cassie Florido & Zach Sayer

Clients: The Southeast Missourian, Pop-up Newsroom and the RJI Communications staff

Mentor: Jim Flink, Strategic Communication Professor

You and the section of Strat Comm's capstone course supervised by professor Jim Flink will work this semester with three RJI clients:

The Southeast Missourian in Cape Girardeau, one of the most innovative publishers in the state, which is seeking advice on how to attract more digital subscribers.
RJI Fellow Fergus Bell, who wants a brand and marketing strategy for his Pop-up Newsroom project aimed at helping small and mid-market news outlets collaborate better during natural disasters.
And RJI itself, which is looking to improve its communication efforts as it makes plans to restructure its website.

Our convergence team will work as one unit to assist each of these three AdZou teams with video and other multimedia content. This is an excellent opportunity to share your talents while learning more about research, marketing and business planning.

Building digital loyalty and subscriptions

Team: Samantha Bowers, Grace Lett & Chris Olszewski

Client: The Kansas City Star

Mentor: Randy Picht, RJI Executive Director

The Kansas City Star and parent company McClatchy have launched a campaign to dramatically grow digital subscriptions in 2019. Creating trust and loyalty with their audience is key to this business initiative, and the efforts will include targeted “calls to action” and other transparency modules, including “behind the story” elements, bio boxes, “about us” pages and better presentation of newsroom policies involving corrections and anonymous sourcing.

The effort includes building relationships with readers both in-person and online through various platforms and channels; offering dynamic experiences online that match our reader's habits; improving marketing channels; experimenting with pay meter limits; and improving checkout flow.

But the most important focus is on the quality and the appeal of the Star's journalism. They would like to analyze and track the kinds of stories and content attributes that are most successful at driving new subscriptions. What are the stories that lead readers to pull out their credit cards and sign up? They finally have the data sets to connect those stories with point-of-purchase decisions.

Students will work with The Star’s audience editor, Eric Nelson, in Kansas City and remotely from Columbia. They will also engage with McClatchy audience and analytics experts, including Mizzou alums, from across the country. The team will spend a good bit of time dissecting analytics and working with editors, reporters and even our Audience (the new-age circulation department) to understand what's working and what isn't.

Disaster in a Box

Team: Chengzi Cao, Elli Fitzgerald, Kaixin Liu & Blythe Nebeker

Client: The Associated Press (Noreen Gillespie and Troy Thibodeaux)

Mentor: Reuben Stern

The goal of this project is to help the Associated Press provide to its customer news organizations a modernized, packaged approach to covering the latest storm, wildfire etc., that would be heavy on tools and data and would enable AP and its customers to cover these disasters better and faster.

Students working on this project will get the opportunity to build expertise in research, product development and all that goes into covering large-scale disasters. Students also will get a chance to interact with a variety of professional journalists at the AP and other news organizations.

The project involves two parts:

• Phase 1, Research — Students will look at previous AP coverage of disasters to identify patterns and opportunities. They then will work with AP managers to design and run a survey, conduct interviews with journalists, and write up a summary report to drive the second part of the project.

• Phase 2, Prototype — Students will develop a list of ideas/recommendations and prototype one or more possible solutions that AP could offer to its members.

Throughout the research and product development components, student will learn a lot about how news organizations cover large-scale disasters, as well as how data and tools support this aspect of news reporting.

Hyper-local investigative reporting

Team: Haoyi Jiang, Jonathan Mitchell, Tatum Pugh & Xinyu Wei

Client: Southland Investigative Reporting Cooperative (Carole Sharwarko)

Mentor: Randy Picht

In the wake of waning attention from larger news outlets, newspapers that serve a few small towns shoulder even more responsibility for in-depth coverage. Journalism in the Chicago Southland has felt the brunt of this change along with regional newspapers and media outlets in other suburban and exurban areas across the country.

These newspapers have loyal readers – local residents who are hungry for real journalists to report about their communities, their schools and their cultural touchstones. But local newspapers work on shoestring budgets, with freelance-only reporting staff laboring to keep up with coverage of basic news on their beat. This leaves few resources for in-depth investigative reporting, the kind of journalism that catches corruption and unveils injustice.

The Southland Investigative Reporting Cooperative will be an independent, non-profit engaging reporters in the south suburbs of Chicago to perform journalistic investigations and report on their findings. Its work will be citizen-driven and funded by grants and donations.

The capstone team will:

Research similar programs in the United States and compile data about funding methods and outcomes, staff sizes, organizational operations, and long-term realized or expected outcomes

Determine the financial viability of the project including start-up capital, reporter compensation amounts, long-term sustainability
Research available and relevant grants that could support the SIRC project, and potentially assist in preparing grant proposals
Consider possible content distribution models, both internally and for “sale” to media outlets
Conduct a survey of Chicago Southland residents regarding their willingness to contribute financially toward investigative reporting in their towns and what types of investigations they think would be most valuable.

Improving 360 and VR journalism

Team: Nnamdi Egwuonwu, Johannah Grenaway, Ran Huan & Yanran Huang

Client: Thomas Seymat

Mentor: Mike McKean

Thomas is a French journalist, currently a residential fellow at RJI, and before that the VR editor of Euronews. As part of his fellowship, he is developing a digital tool for content creators who use 360° video and VR environments. The objective for the tool is to provide the users (content-creators) with evidence-based best practices for both storytelling and advertising in 360/VR. Content creators need better data, especially qualitative feedback, to consolidate audience engagement and consumption through improved storytelling. Through this platform, creators will be able to test/prototype content and ask feedback directly from their own audience.

The capstone team will help Thomas:

plan, circulate and analyze a survey of people in the immersive content industry (360 video, VR).
produce two, 2-3 minute-long videos designed for Youtube and social media -- one presenting the project, the other being a demo/tutorial.
set up and execute the dissemination strategy, including blog posts and other PR content.

This project needs students with multimedia skills who are passionate about tech and innovation. Ideally, you should be interested in the marketing/communication operations surrounding the launch of a new product. Prior knowledge of immersive journalism or VR is not mandatory.

Producing Post for InvestigateTV

Team: Jake Cookson, Healy, Antoinette Miller & Joe Ward

Client: Jamie Grey, Producer of Gray Television's InvestigateTV

Mentor: Mike McKean

Students will help produce the monthly media review show Post for InvestigateTV, Gray Television’s OTT and online channel dedicated to investigative and in-depth content.

Students will work with producer and host Jamie Grey (a former KOMU producer and RTV faculty member) to select content, book guests, edit video, and improve the show’s digital and social media presence through more interactivity. The show is still in its first year, so part of this project will involve innovating the digital presence in new ways to gain a bigger audience, so creativity is highly encouraged.

Post tapes in the Futures Lab Studio of the Reynolds Journalism Institute and is also produced in partnership with Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Show Me the State: the launch

Team: Madison Conte, Molly Dove, Zia Kelly & Humera Lodhi

Client: KBIA

Mentors: Ryan Famuliner and Kris Husted

KBIA is launching a special reporting project that will explore Missouri’s strange and misunderstood past as it relates to the present. “Show Me The State” will clear up the fables and help explain why Missouri is the way it is. The main target audience is Missouri residents, but we hope to pique the interest of any cultural aficionado who loves a good narrative.

The episodes will air on KBIA and be released in a podcast format in spring 2019.

Last semester, a capstone team researched concepts for the podcast and each member produced one episode.

This semester, you'll work with News Director Ryan Famuliner and Project Host Kristofor Husted to pitch and research stories; conduct interviews; write, edit and produce episodes. The capstone team will also plan a community event to promote the podcast launch as well as research the best ways to promote the program to a statewide audience.

State government audio reporting collaborative

Team: Kate Begle, Aviva Okeson-Haberman & Megan Smaltz

Client: Missouri Broadcasters Association

Mentor: Mark Horvit

The J-School's state government reporting program is launching a new audio wire service in January 2019 for broadcast outlets in Missouri.

The Missouri Broadcasters Association is backing it and will distribute the material. We will be gathering audio daily and making it available that day, during every day of the legislative session. Sometimes it may be clips from a hearing or floor debate, sometimes a press conference, sometimes from one-on-one interviews we do.

The team will help assign stories, edit audio files, put together the text that accompanies the clips and upload them. There will also be some direct reporting to supplement the work of other j-school students covering state government under Mark.

You may also experiment with putting together fully reported stories that you voice, to see if subscribers want that.

The audio will be available to all MBA members.

Student startup podcast

Team: Hope Howard, Madeline McKernan & Michelle Stoddart

Client and mentor: Missouri Business Alert managing editor Michael Stacy

Missouri Business Alert, a School of Journalism newsroom, is launching a short-run podcast. It will tell the stories of student entrepreneurs working to get businesses off the ground and competing against one another for tens of thousands of dollars in cash prizes.

During the spring semester, the University of Missouri System will debut the EQ Student Accelerator program, an eight-week bootcamp designed to help 40 selected student startups improve and grow. The program will culminate in two rounds of pitch contests, during which the startups will compete for a share of $150,000.

This podcast seeks to tell compelling stories of student entrepreneurs and their businesses — and, in doing so, shed light on what it takes to make a young business successful.

The capstone team will lead development, production, distribution and promotion of the podcast.

Individual Projects

Lexi Churchill -- Lexi will cover the Missouri legislature for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Quinn Ritzdorf -- Quinn is the RJI Innovations Fellow at The Greeley (CO) Tribune. He will support the launch of a high school sports newsletter that the Tribune hopes will generate more engagement and subscribers.

Danny Stewart -- Danny will help develop a strong social media presence for the Triple-A farm team of the Boston Red Sox as they prepare to move from Pawtucket, RI to Worcester, MA in 2021.

Last semester's projects are here.