The University of Missouri’s journalism program in Washington, D.C., has a long history in Washington, D.C., with students reporting for various national media such as Slate and the Washington Post.
This past semester, the university assigned four students to cover the Missouri congressional delegation, a journalistic task mostly ignored since the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Kansas City Star closed their Washington bureaus. The Post-Dispatch once assigned one of its seven or eight reporters in the capital to the Missouri members of Congress.
Kathy Kiely, a veteran D.C. journalist who supervised the program this spring, noted that Capitol Hill “remains the most porous beat in D.C. and a great place for young reporters to start developing sources.”
On one spring day, for example, students asked Missouri Congress members about a proposed war powers act amid President Trump’s war against Iran, and the next day followed a confirmation hearing of a Trump nominee to a Missouri federal judgeship as well as campaign finance reports due from candidates at the Federal Election Commission.
Molly Gibbs, one student in the spring semester program, wrote this piece about the confirmation of Trump nominee Megan Benson as a federal district judge based in Kansas City.
Fellow student Kalli Fowler wrote about the House passage of a bill America’s National Churchill Museum in Fulton, a national historic landmark 80 years after Winston Churchill made his “Iron Curtain” speech there.
Fowler also wrote this feature describing how, as Women’s History Month came to a close, “Missouri continues to lag behind many other states in female political representation, with just 10 women who have served in Congress and no example of a female governor.”
Gibbs had covered the Missouri General Assembly in Jefferson City and California state government as an intern for the Sacramento Bee.
Gibbs says the challenge in Washington was to learn the “pace, procedure and relationships on Capitol Hill that you can’t truly learn or understand until you are there.”
She noted that aides to her primary assignment, Sen. Josh Hawley, “were very responsive to my being there and understood right away that I was there to work just like any other reporter.”
Because she was the only Missouri reporter with daily access to Hawley, Gibbs called it a “fun challenge in gaggles with national reporters to ask Missouri-specific questions.”
She noted that in a group of up to 20 reporters surrounding Hawley, she had to keep speaking up to ask the senator about Missouri residents who were stuck in the Iran region after the war started. In the end, I asked the question, got the information for our readers and grew as a journalist.”
Mark Horvit, a University of Missouri journalism professor overseeing the program, says it is part of a broader effort to offer opportunities to students to cover government at every level, city and county, statehouse, national and international. The school plans to distribute the stories statewide, and has a distribution arrangement for its statehouse coverage with the Missouri Press Association and the Missouri Broadcasters Association.
Ted Gest covered federal and state courts in St. Louis for the Post-Dispatch between 1972 and 1977. He later covered legal affairs, including the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts nationwide, for U.S. News and World Report magazine between 1981 and 1996. He now edits a daily news digest, Crime and Justice News.
