Tag Archives: Columbia Missourian

Clever Curator Consonance

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Still confused about exactly what happened at the UM System Board of Curators meeting last week? That’s OK, so are all of the sports reporters (just kidding, though all the important news was reserved for us higher education writers).

Last week was a regularly scheduled board meeting that once again got the sports spotlight treatment, even though meeting included so much more than conference realignment.

The board met behind closed doors Wednesday and Thursday night to discuss the presidential search and again all afternoon Thursday to cover a ton of information points and action items. The board voted to approve a much-debated retirement plan, renovations to the MU campus and a new athletic training degree program.

In the end though, everything was overshadowed by the press conference Friday. Board Chairman Warren Erdman made two announcements — first, that the board would produce a group of system presidential finalists to their advisory committee (the hot news I was there to cover), and second that the board had chosen to give Deaton all the power he needs to change MU’s conference affiliation.

I know and understand (both as a reporter and a fan) that the sports story is unbelievably big deal, but the way the conference realignment announcements have overshadowed the other vitally important things the curators are doing is a little frustrating.

Nonetheless, I had a great time reporting the meetings and spending time with education and sports reporters alike.

Much like the Oct. 4 curators meeting in St. Louis, I split my time reporting and live-tweeting the meetings, this time with a mix of personal and Missourian twitter accounts.

I felt much more comfortable operating CoTweet to publish tweets from the Missourian’s Twitter accounts, and published 19 tweets over the course of three days (plus many more from my personal account). Nine of those came as general updates about the curators meetings from @CoMissourian, and another 10 from @CoMoSports during Friday’s press conference.

To keep things flowing over the multiday meetings we chose to tie together all the tweets relating to the curators with the hashtag: #umcurators. That way folks who were genuinely following along could search the hashtag to find all of the relevant tweets and see the chronology of the meetings.

Plus the content of what I was tweeting was infinitely more effective than the last time I live-tweeted the curators, and the number of retweets proves that people found the information valuable. Although I would have loved to see more engagement with @CoMissourian during the meetings, perhaps the folks most interested — and that have the most questions or concerns — about the retirement plan aren’t exactly of the Twitter generation (which is admittedly an unfair assumption, because there are lots of older adults on Twitter and lots of younger folks concerned about retirement plans).

Regardless, the week was full of steps forward: for my tweeting skills, for the presidential search, and for (apparently) the future of MU’s conference affiliation.

Curators and conferences

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I’m in Kansas City today and Friday at the UM System Board of Curators meetings at UMKC.

There’s a lot of speculation surrounding a couple of big topics — namely the UM presidential search and conference realignment — and I’ll be blogging, writing and tweeting live as things develop throughout the day.

The curators meet in full this afternoon and tomorrow morning, and are scheduled to have big discussions during Finance and Audit committee meetings before entering a regularly scheduled, full-board (quorum) executive session scheduled for 3:45 p.m.

Regarding conference realignment, UM System Spokeswoman Jennifer Hollingshead told me this morning:

“The curators are not expected to discuss conference realignment, at least for today. Let’s just take it one day at a time.”

After a short press conference following open-session meetings tomorrow morning, the board will again enter a regularly scheduled executive session. Hollingshead said the curators will not be holding an additional press conference following the session and will not make statements on the content of the meeting.

In addition, no announcement will be made regarding the status of the board’s search for a new UM president.

Follow @zach_murdock, @CoMissourian and the #umcurators hashtag for the most up to date information about the meetings.

Mid-week update

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This week has been a marathon already — a libel law exam, a Missourian GA shift, a sociology book review, internship applications — and this afternoon I’m headed to Kansas City for this week’s UM System Board of Curators meetings.

It’s this kind of week that gets me frustrated, not because I don’t love what I’m doing, but because in trying to juggle being a student and a reporter I miss out on stories that I know I could (and very much would) have covered if I’d had the time.

The Kansas City Star’s Mará Rose Williams was able to publish an advance that I wanted to do about the addition of a closed-session presidential search meeting to this week’s previously scheduled Board of Curators meetings. But because of my student responsibilities, my own version of this article just never made it into my top priorities and now I’m simply following up a story that’s already been read by so many people.

And I don’t mean to be making excuses.

This same kind of frustration hit me in my post “Go with your gut,” when Janese Silvey of the Columbia Daily Tribune (almost) scooped us on a big story. As a professional, she’s afforded more time to develop relationships with sources and she’s more entrenched in her beat, something we student-reporters simply cannot do in 15 weeks.

But as a competitive, hungry reporter I don’t like losing. I don’t like being second and I don’t like chasing stories after someone else has broken them. It doesn’t make the story any less important or the reporting any less valid, but there’s that old-school point of pride in being the writer that broke the story.

Even worse, it’s not a frustration I can do anything to change. No matter how organized I am or how efficient with time I become, sometimes I just cannot compete with folks who get to put every minute of their day into their reporting. And the day I can do that too just can’t come soon enough.

CoTweet and Curators Part II (Belated)

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Although it’s several days late, I can’t help but publish the post I had written following Tuesday’s UM System Board of Curators meeting and subsequent press conference.

A couple of things stood in the way of the publishing of this post: a) a lead on a news story that came about up about a proposed academic freedom policy and b) the passing of Apple CEO and technology mogul Steve Jobs.

Tuesday was a reporting marathon for those of us who made the trip to the UMSL student center for the Board of Curators meeting and press conference.

Though I did get the chance to write an article of my own on the proposed new retirement plan, the real learning experience came from just watching MU football beat writer Harry Plumer and his sports-writer colleagues from other (competitor) newspapers/media outlets.

Listening to those writers talk shop as they stood around waiting (nearly 4 hours) for the night’s press conference was an awesome backstage look at the community of sports writers that cover Mizzou athletics.

And it is very much a community. As Harry told me later that night, they’re all in it together — and that’s the attitude each of the writers brought to the meeting, and it was cool to see them help each other out.

My other big learning experience Tuesday was CoTweet, and getting a feel for what it really takes to live-tweet an event. It’s a situation where you’re required to make a lot of split-second decisions, and the pressure is on when you’re tweeting live alongside you’re competitors.

During the public session, I had trouble taking diligent notes while trying to make those on-the-spot decisions about tweeting, so I abandoned the idea and focused instead on the article I knew I needed to write.

But that evening, Harry and I decided that I would take over the @CoMoSports twitter account and live tweet the press conference. With my focus just on tweeting, I think I did a better job of actively listening for tweet-worthy lines, but I’d just scratched the surface.

Even with all of my attention turned to tweeting, I was still faced with a multitude of decisions — do I directly quote or paraphrase? How should I attribute? Should I mention other twitter accounts?

In the end, I tweeted 7 times from @CoMoSports, and though none of the tweets were really substantial, they did get the main points of the press conference across to readers who were watching their timelines. If I got to make excuses for myself, I’d chalk up my difficulties to being a rookie and I’d argue that I’m much better prepared for the next time I get to tweet.

Overall, it was fun to be a part of such a big announcement and it was a good, long reporting day.

CoTweet and Curators Part I

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Today’s a big news day here in Missouri, and all eyes are on the Millennium Student Center at the University of Missouri—St. Louis and the UM System Board of Curators.

The board meets today in St. Louis to discuss the latest draft of a new employee retirement plan (that’s where I come in), but will also have two executive sessions that will be closed to the public, the second of which will be a full board executive session behind closed doors (where everyone else comes in).

The student center should be packed — there’s been plenty of speculation that following this full board meeting, board chairman Warren Erdman will make an announcement regarding Mizzou’s allegiance to the Big 12 (or its infidelity with the SEC). MU has been flirting with the idea of pursuing another athletic conference for awhile, but as Harry Plumer told me yesterday: it’s time for MU to put up, or shut up.

Harry’s one of the Missourian’s MU Football writers, and has been covering MU’s position in the conference realignment for awhile. He and I will be in St. Louis for today’s meetings.

But a rumored conference announcement is not my interest (as a writer at least). Instead, I’ll be covering the curators’ discussion of the new retirement plan which has been a hot issue and even has the curators disagreeing. I’ve covered official Board of Curators meetings before, but what’s different today is that I have access to the @CoMissourian twitter account through CoTweet, an online engagement platform.

Even though I’d consider myself an experienced Twitter user, there is a sense of power associated with tweeting from @CoMissourian. In a way, the Missourian’s reputation is most vulnerable on Twitter and I’d hate to be that guy that tweets something embarrassing or incorrect from the paper’s handle.

Of course I’ll have plenty of support back in the Missourian newsroom from Community Outreach Director Joy Mayer and her on duty team member. They’ll be looking over my shoulder to edit tweets and keep mentioners engaged.

The ability to live-tweet important notes and quotes from the meeting isn’t exactly new to me, but I’ve never tweeted officially for the paper as part of my reporting. It’ll certainly be a valuable learning experience and I’m sure it won’t be the last time I incorporate live social media into my reporting.

Follow today’s meetings on Twitter from @zach_murdock and @CoMissourian, and keep an eye out for a “CoTweet and Curators Part II” follow-up post tomorrow morning.

Go with your gut

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Last week marked an interesting development in the UM System presidential search, or did it?

I’m not sure I know, and even though Janese Silvey of the Columbia Daily Tribune did know, it seems to me now that nobody actually knows what happened, err — can speak to what happened.

This whole thing reminds me of that great scene in the beginning of State Of Play, when Russell Crowe's character tells the cop, "Let's play a little game of 'Confirm or Deny.'"

Wednesday afternoon we got word that Janese, the education beat reporter for the Trib, had published the name of one of the potential candidates for the UM System president position. [The UM System Board of Curators has been in search of a new president since former president Gary Forsee stepped down in January. There’s been a lot of coverage, so it’s easy to catch up!]

Naturally we scrambled to follow up on the story ourselves, and advanced reporter Abby Eisenberg and I frantically called everyone we could to confirm the story. Though we expected a lot of “no comment” responses, we did expect to be able to corroborate Janese’s report — if only to run her story on our site.

In fact, we had a good debate with our editor Liz Brixey about whether or not linking to Janese’s story was a good idea; and if it served our audience to at least get the information out, event if it meant posting a competitors article (and thereby catapulting visitors to our website in the exact opposite direction we want them to go: to the Trib’s).

In the end, Abby and I agreed we didn’t feel comfortable running her story without confirming the basic facts on our own. Despite the frustration of missing out on what we thought was a great development in the search, we went home byline-less and chose to wait things out.

Turns out a whole night was the exact amount of time we needed to let the story incubate, because Thursday afternoon a Kansas City Star report opposed Janese’s story:

But in a telephone interview this morning, Van Matre denied saying that Hoenig, 65, is a presidential candidate.

“I said just the opposite,” Van Matre told The Star. “I don’t want to be in the middle of this. I can’t say either way.”

Stunned, Abby and I beamed at our Wednesday afternoon gamble to forgo linking to the Trib’s story on columbiamissourian.com. I’m not a gambler, nor a confident decision-maker (ex-girlfriends can/will whole-heartedly confirm), so guessing right was a fantastic relief to the otherwise frustrating storyline of chasing down news broken by other local outlets.

For me, the incident highlights two fundamental things of my time at the Missourian, and my (cross-our-fingers) entire career as a journalist:

1) Being a rookie sucks. Janese’s career isn’t broken up into 15 week increments, so she has time to develop relationships with regular sources and earn their trust to get tips like Hoenig’s (potential) candidacy. At the Missourian, we’re perpetually at a disadvantage in that arena because we’re always cycling new reporters in and out of the newsroom, and consequently, in and out of relationships with sources.

2) If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. I have a healthy skepticism about a lot of (OK, most) things, but sometimes there’s nothing wrong with trusting your gut—and I need to do it more often.