What you need to know about running for an ONA Mizzou office

By Elise Schmelzer

It's that time of year again: Final exams lurk in the near future, summer can't come soon enough and ONA Mizzou is looking for its next batch of student leaders.

Student leaders are in charge of the club's events from the first brainstorming session to putting the chairs back after everyone has left.

This year, our events included topics like web analytics and our guests included former New York Times reporter Brian Stelter, who now is the senior media correspondent for CNN. We also hosted a hands-on tutorial on building custom Google maps and offered portfolio site reviews.

Anyone who has attended at least one of our events is welcome to come hear the candidates' speeches and then cast a vote.

When: 6 p.m. on Thursday, May 1
Where: Palmer Room (100A Reynolds Journalism Institute)

What a snowstorm taught me about interactive journalism

This blog post was originally published on ONA Mizzou Secretary Laura Davison's personal blog.  

By Laura Davison  

This semester I’m working on the Community Outreach Team at the Columbia Missourian. Our goal is to make the news gather process more open and make it easier for readers to participate in the process. A lot of the work we get to do is experimental. Here’s the short list of what we do:

• Try out new tools to better report and tell stories
• Use social media both to communicate and to listen
• Look at site analytics to see what content is resonating with people
• Brainstorm new ways that the Missourian can expand its reach and that we can  bring the community into the newsroom (both literally and figuratively)

The week of Columbia's first big snowstorm was definitely one of my favorite weeks on duty this semester. The day before the storm hit, the team was busy planning ways to cover the snow. Community Outreach director Joy Mayer has been talking about RebelMouse, an embeddable page that aggregates posts from social media. The page is customizable to include posts with certain hashtags, updates from select accounts or by manually entering posts the moderator selects. This page included posts from Missourian staff members and other photos or tips posted by social media accounts using the hashtag CoMoSnow.
Rebel Mouse CoMoSnow.