Over the next year, MGP Director Bill Densmore will be living and working in Missouri, where he's serving in the first class of Reynolds Fellows at the University of Missouri. He'll be writing to this site from there, a sort of dispatches from Missouri.
The Missouri School of Journalism is the oldest and largest in the country, and the new Reynolds Journalism Institute (with highlights of the new building pictured above) aims to put the J-school on the forefront of research on the future of journalism. While there, each of the six fellows will be expected to carry out an innovative project to this end. You can watch a short video introducing Bill's project, the Information Valet, here.
From the Reynolds Journalism Institute website:
RJI focuses on innovation and problem-solving aimed at improving the practice and understanding of journalism and all of its diverse specialties. The primary programs to carry out this focus are:
- The intellectual work of the Donald W. Reynolds Fellows while in residence. Each RJI Fellow will be expected to produce a major project intended to enhance the practice or understanding of journalism or advertising. RJI will conduct appropriate forums and other events and publish summaries of the work to expand the impact on real-world media.
- The one-of-its-kind Journalism Futures Lab and Demonstration Center. In these closely related programs, professionals, students and researchers work on exciting new experiments in the forms and technologies of journalism and advertising. Products of these incubators will help media around the world discover ways to better serve their audiences.
- Periodic public-practitioner forums on critical, timely issues in journalism practice. Journalists often pay insufficient attention to and demonstrate too little understanding of public attitudes toward the media. Likewise, most media consumers have little understanding of how and why journalism and advertising professionals do what they do. RJI will work to improve the two-way understanding that is crucial to democratic societies.
- An extensive publications program, including exhibits, research summaries and curriculum materials and related workshops built on RJI research and other RJI activities, the Missouri School of Journalism and its affiliate professional organizations.