Work

KSHB 41, Kansas City – May 2019 to present

I love Kansas City. Ask anyone in my life and they’ll tell you how obnoxiously obsessed I am with my hometown. When the opportunity presented itself to do what I love in the city I love, I couldn’t say no. The opportunities at KSHB 41 have been endless. My daily tasks involve writing original web stories, editing colleagues’ stories, managing social media, generating story ideas, running the assignment desk and cutting videos. However, I’ve had the opportunity to do everything from hosting and producing a podcast on a local murder trial to learning to curl for Olympic social media content.

WOWT NBC, Omaha – June 2018 to May 2019

WOWT was my first job post-graduation. As a digital content producer, everything that goes online went through my desk. My main tasks involved taking each story a reporter worked on and putting it on the web and taking press release and breaking news material and generating original station web stories. I then took all local content and pushed it to social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Social News Desk is the tool we used to do most of this. I also searched for national content from the AP wire, CNN wire and NBC to post to our station website and social media to keep viewers engaged in national news. I created a digital analytics weekly report for the newsroom to best understand what stories are excelling, and where there could be an improvement. I rebooted the station Instagram by cleaning up prior posts and working with reporters to use it as a tool in the field.

Science Friday – Fall 2017

For my Convergence Capstone project I have had the opportunity to work with a podcast called Science Friday. We are building social campaigns and modules to make controversial science topics easy to consume and share with friends and family. Our goal is to simply use facts and scientists to build social videos, audiograms and infographics to deliver to Science Friday’s audience as resources. It has been an incredible exercise in understanding audiences and learning how to be a link between science and social consumers. The project has given lots of hands on experience producing social content and simplifying complicated topics.

PolitiFact – Fall 2017

I had the opportunity to write for PolitiFact Missouri for a semester. This involved fact checking politicians and political statements and bringing factual truth to readers. Reporting for PolitFact increased my research skills and helped me better communicate with politicians and experts. It also taught me that facts are still a foundation to American journalism, despite living in an era of fake news and exaggeration. The process was rewarding because fact checks end in closure, and the confidence that you taught someone something new.

The Missourian – Spring 2017

I worked on the Community Outreach Team at the Columbia Missourian during the Spring of my junior year. We were the team that worked to build a bridge between the newsroom and the community. We engaged with community members online and created content based off information they gave us through crowdsourcing. The tools we used to increase engagement included analytic reports, Facebook, Facebook Live, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, surveys and much more. Each student also had a niche within the newsroom. I worked with the state government reporting team to create resources that would make complicated topics easier to digest for our audience. I created a legislative update that broke down all of the stories into topics and kept the public up to date on where those stood in the Missouri legislature. The goal of the semester was to make news more accessible and involve the audience in all steps of the reporting process.

Project Management – Fall 2016

Upon completing the convergence reporting class, students have the opportunity to become project managers for the next group of reporters. I took this opportunity and got to work with teams of students to guide them in the creation of their own stories. I helped them through sourcing and interviews, aided them in creating and producing their content, and acted as a liaison between the team and the faculty editors. I took student work and drafted digital packages to demonstrate how I would use their content if I were publishing it. This experience involved a lot of time reviewing the student work with the editors and learning about what the strengths and weaknesses of the package were so that I could apply that to my own work.

Newsy – Fall 2016

Through my convergence courses I had the opportunity to spend time at Newsy. I worked with the livestream team to write headlines, choose stories for the show, create the topic blocks, and write and produce topic headlines. This gave me experience in identifying newsworthy qualities in stories and identifying their strengths. It also gave me experience communicating with professionals, writing for anchors and editing video.

The Missourian – Fall 2016

In my Online Audience Development class we worked in teams to develop branding strategies for one of our city’s newspapers. We worked primarily on their social media to identify ways to better brand the paper and engage their followers. My tasks included creating video of faculty and students to be pushed to Missourian social media in order to humanize their brand.

Electionland – Fall 2016

Electionland was a nationwide project created by ProPublica and held on Election Day 2016 to use social media to identify voting problems and get that information to reporters in the area. I used social tools such as TweetDeck, Facebook Signal, and Dataminr to flag potential problems in the Midwest region of the country. Once a potential problem was spotted, I used search tools and social media interactions to verify this information and relay it to the teams that distributed the stories. Learn more about the project here.

You can find the case study for the project here.

Mizzou Hunger Strike – November 2015

I published this article on Medium in the wake of the protests that happened at the University of Missouri in November 2015. I was in a multimedia class where I ended up gathering photos and some video at the protests. It was the first big thing I covered as a journalist, and has a lasting impact on my work.