Jennie Crabbe and Colleen Schrappen finished their last shifts on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch copy desk on May 1, signing off on Twitter and in an email to colleagues. Lee Enterprises announced in February that it was eliminating the copy desk and moving copy and design functions to Indiana. Avis Meyer, a veteran of the…
At almost 77, my Midwestern mother has a complicated relationship with her local newspaper. For more than half her life, she’s been a daily subscriber. When she goes on vacation, she has a neighbor save the papers for her so she can go through them upon her return. She clips out obituaries and articles about…
Reporter Megan Jones of the Aurora Beacon-News was one of the first reporters on the scene of a mass shooting in Aurora in February. She had just finished interviewing a mother whose son was shot the month before when she heard an ambulance scream past on its way to the Henry Pratt Co. manufacturing plant…
The sweeping Green New Deal effort to combat climate change choked in Washington this spring, dying in the U.S. Senate before most Midwest news consumers had a chance to consider its merits–or failings. That’s because fact-based journalism on the Green New Deal was rare and spotty in regional news outlets. The majority of Midwestern media…
In 2012, University of Missouri journalism professor Mike Jenner was making a presentation to students in a “Journalism and Democracy” seminar about how the tough economy had affected newspapers and what challenges reporters would face in the future. At one point a woman said, “Mike, we’ve been here four years, and this has been going…