BY TERRY GANEY / Dean Mills, who has served as dean of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism for nearly 25 years, announced Feb. 6 that he would be stepping down effective Aug. 31.
This winter, the most-talked-about local news is the weather. It seems like every few days we have another storm of some type. This puts extra pressure on the local television stations who know that people are tuning in to see what it is going to do – and when.
Soon after tragedy struck a sleepy New England town more than one year ago, residents of Newtown, Ct., vowed the place they called home would be an epicenter for change. There needed to be changes in gun laws, some cried out. Others advocated for a national movement to increase school security. A need for better mental health counseling became a topic of conversation in homes and coffee shops among the town’s 26,000 residents. More subtle and in the undertones, there also were pleas for Newtown to be the epicenter of change in how stories of mass shootings and grief are covered.
JPMorgan Chase announced Jan. 24 that Jamie Dimon, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, will earn $20 million for 2013, amounting to 74 percent more than he earned the year before. This was done even though the investment bank paid out more than $ 20 billion in regulatory fines last year and laid off 4,000 employees. The story in the New York Times posted on the day of the announcement called 2013 a year of “bruising legal setbacks” for JPMorgan and concluded with a quote from Boston University professor of law Cornelius Hurley: “It doesn’t reconcile for JPMorgan to be paying out billions in fines while its CEO’s compensation is nearly doubled. You usually get fired for that, not rewarded.”
BY JAN SCHAFFER / When the St. Louis Beacon and St. Louis Public Radio cinched their deal to merge their two newsrooms in December, they stepped right into the front lines of how old and new media are re-imagining journalism. The combined news organization (http://news.stlpublicradio.org), which will have a hefty three dozen-plus editorial employees, promises not only to alter the nature of journalism in St. Louis, but it also will chart new pathways for media entrepreneurs around the country exploring ways to make their startups sustainable.