Founded as St. Louis Journalism Review in 1970
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.
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.
No other way to put it: St. Louis television station KSDK (Channel 5) really messed up in their attempt to expose school security flaws. On Jan. 16, Channel 5 sent people to five area schools to check on security. One of them was Kirkwood High School. The Channel 5 staffer was able to get in to the school unchallenged. He did, in fact, uncover what appears to be several flaws in the Kirkwood system.
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce does something rare for a Missouri prosecutor: She tweets prolifically. Joyce said she views Twitter posts as a way to “engage the citizens” and let them know what happened after initial news reports on a crime. But a Missouri appeals court said last week that Joyce’s tweets in a 2012 child-rape trial came too close to crossing an ethical line.
BY WILLIAM H. FREIVOGEL / St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce has called upon St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Gilbert Bailon to order an “independent audit of the reporting” for the paper’s high-profile “Jailed by Mistake” investigation. She wrote in a Nov. 26 letter to Bailon that her staff had found “substantial factual errors” in the paper’s conclusion that more than 100 people had been mistakenly jailed for more than 2,000 total days.