Priceless little poem from one of my higher education colleagues about a budget overview given by Tim Rooney on Wednesday. Maybe sharing the budget breakdown in poetry can be one of our more creative ways to make the budget “insider baseball” stuff more accessible.
Category Archives: The Missourian
Offseason wrap up
At the beginning of the fall semester I wrote a short piece about what it meant to finally have my shot at the Missourian, and I wanted to make it count. And hell, after more than 40 bylines, a theatre agreement, performance funding and a new UM System president, I think I’ve made the first impression I laid out in that original post.
But a new year brings a new semester and a new set of challenges, and it’s time to get right back at it.
All of the lessons I learned over my first semester at the Missourian were really just the foundation and basic structure of what I’d like to do as a professional journalist and writer — like a Phase 1 of the “Missouri Method” we were promised as freshmen.
But after the first reporting class for the Missourian, the method isn’t based so much structure as it is opportunity.
I’m taking Advanced Reporting this semester (and have the distinct privilege of staying on the higher education beat, which means I get to keep all those sources I’ve come to know so well) which is essentially enterprise reporting 101. It’s all the same newsroom resources without all the general assignment strings attached and that freedom will give me the chance to take on longer, more challenging pieces within the higher ed beat.
There’ll be more investigation, more analysis, bigger issues and harder hitting reporting. I’ll have more time to settle in to a big work and make it a reporting masterpiece.
So after a semi-hiatus from (almost) all things work this winter break, I’ll be back in Columbia Saturday to get to work on “what’s next.”
On the slate now are a few things I can talk about, and a couple of things I want to keep secret (for now).
Obviously UM System tuition increases will dominate the coming weeks, but I want to get a good jump on one of my secret ideas and hopefully have something really substantial out in the next four or five weeks.
Issues like e-Learning, the system retirement plan and even (dare I say) an MU diversity course requirement could be major players in 2012.
But not to get ahead of myself, what’s most important is to plug back in to the Columbia community and settle down for what should be the most challenging — and hopefully satisfying — semester I’ve had yet.
Tim Wolfe named system president
For the most up to date information on the UM System presidential announcement, follow along all afternoon on columbiamissourian.com and on Twitter from @zach_murdock or #umprez.
Look for more analysis here late Tuesday evening and Wednesday.
UPDATE: presidential search analysis
*This is an update on the post titled “A quick, semi-speculative presidential search analysis” that I published Monday night about this week’s developments in the UM System presidential search.*
I’ll be straightforward — I was wrong. My initial hunch that the UM System Board of Curators would announce a new president this week turns out to be incorrect.
I talked about this gut feeling with UM System spokeswoman Jennifer Hollingshead after Tuesday’s search advisory committee meeting and I believe that may have prompted the phone call I received while I worked on my story.
Hollingshead called to explain that after talking with board Chairman Warren Erdman that she didn’t want to string people along and leave folks confident that the meeting with a single candidate today would mean that we should expect a presidential selection Friday morning.
I think my openness with her — and my not-so-subtle assertion to her that I really did believe we’d have a new president this week — put her in a position where she saw what direction my writing would take. On the phone we even spoke about how the nature of Tuesday’s meeting certainly made it seem to the all of the media present that the search was all but officially over.
But, she assured me that the search is very much alive and kicking. Which means I need a new hunch…
Now I think I may understand the procedure the rest of this search could take. Perhaps (and of course, I’m still stuck speculating here) the search advisory committee will reconvene again — and even once (twice?) more — and interview this list of the curator’s decided finalists one by one.
That would mean that over winter break this advisory committee could continue to interview candidates individually and get a sense for which finalist they think is the best fit for the system. And that means we’ve still got some time on our hands.
This revelation changes things for me, and shakes up any idea of a timeline that I thought I had. Frankly, I think we may just have to wait and see how this week plays out before I can predict how things may continue.
I’ll be in St. Louis for the board’s regularly scheduled December meetings this Thursday and Friday. As always, I’ll be tweeting from @zach_murdock, blogging right here and publishing on columbiamissourian.com — follow along at all three for the latest (and I’d say most comprehensive) coverage/analysis of the #prezsearch.
Zach Murdock 