Tag Archives: Missourinet

New Convergence program at MU J-School

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Mike McKean heads up the new Convergence program at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. This fall he begins his 20th year teaching at the J-School. Once upon a time, he was a reporter for The Missourinet, one of the state news networks owned by the company I work for. Mike and I get together every few months to talk about radio and journalism and the Internet and stuff like that.

Today I took my recorder along and asked him about: Teaching journalism in 2005; podcasting; blogs; radio; advertising; newspapers; “citizen journalism” and some other stuff.

AUDIO: Interview with Mike McKean 20 min MP3

Execution journal: Donald Jones

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In his capacity as news director for The Missourinet, Bob Priddy has witnessed 15 executions. The most recent was the April 27th execution of Donald Jones, for which Bob produced an “audio journal” that begins as he leaves his motel in Bonne Terre to go to the prison and ends as he prepares to leave the prison about two and a half hours later. Bob telescoped the audio down to about half an hour and some segments have been shifted for context purposes (the reading of the final statement of Donald Jones, for example).

Bob was not allowed to take his recorder to the execution witness area, so he summarizes the events that took place in that approximately 90-minute span. The main voices you will hear are those of Missourinet News Director Bob Priddy, Corrections Department spokesman John Fougere, and Corrections Director Larry Crawford. Voices of various other officers will be heard as part of the process.

Edward R. Murrow Awards

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Warning: Self-serving shop talk follows. The Radio-Television News Directors Association announced the winners in their annual Edward R. Murrow Awards competition today. This is kind of a big deal in the radio and TV news business. This year they started out with 3,182 entries and gave 74 awards to 53 news organization. The regional winners were announced a few weeks ago and today they announced the national winners. And one of our network websites won.

Entries fall into one of three categories (Network/Syndication Service, Large Market and Small Market) for radio and the same three for TV. And this year they added a category called Websiste Non-Broadcast.

Our entry (Missourinet.com) won in the Radio Network/Syndication Service category. Pretty cool given that the competition was ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN and god only knows who else. You gotta figure there’s some “online journalists” in NY and Atlanta scratching their heads and asking each other, “What the hell is a Missourinet? Somebody get a map!”

For some reason the RTNDA website provide the urls of the Website winners but didn’t create links. That seems a little clueless to me.

*Radio Network/Syndication Service: Missourinet, Jefferson City, MO
*Television Network/Syndication Service: MSNBC

*Television Large-Market: News 14 Carolina, Charlotte, NC
*Television Small-Market: Capital News 9, Albany, NY
*Radio Large-Market: KSL-AM, Salt Lake City
*Radio Small-Market: WBLL-AM, Bellefontaine, OH
*Website Non-Broadcast: Washington Post, Washington; Belo Interactive, Dallas

I’ll probably never know what they judges liked about our site. And let’s face it, those big national network websites have some cool features our site does not. But I can name a few things we’ve got that are unique or cool or both:

Crash Reports: Missouri State Highway Patrol accident reports, updated 24/7.
Legislature.com: Live debate audio from the state legislature. Then we archive. We’ve got it back to 2002.

Supreme Court Arguments: Oral agurments (live & archived). I think we have nearly 500 arguments online.
Missouri Death Row: Ours has become the “official” site for Missouri.

Last time I checked, there were no other websites featuring this content. On the planet. At least not the way we do. Of course, there’s a lot we can do to improve our site but, for now, it’s nice to know someone appreciates the effort. The big award show is October 4th in NY. Gomer Goes to Manhatten in a Rented Tux.