Month: January 2019

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/sports/mizzou_sports/mu-wrestler-lewis-named-mac-wrestler-of-the-week/article_edc4318c-0f86-11e9-a0d5-8b0b8a6d6a66.html

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/sports/other_sports/local-roundup-stars-comeback-falls-short-against-harris-stowe-state/article_c001e048-0fc5-11e9-8689-f78b65775f98.html

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/want-to-be-interim-police-chief-start-writing-a-letter/article_9e5d0e36-0f9d-11e9-8adf-8f1c79b7fe6e.html

Busy day. A busy day that didn’t start out that busy but transformed itself as the day waned on.

Throughout the day, I was working on two small tasks: getting in contact with Steven Sapp, the city’s Community Relations manager, to answer a few questions about the Sanders trial and to find out information on the interim city manager’s memo request seeking candidates to fill the void that is Columbia’s police chief position right now.

I wasn’t having too much luck hearing back from Sapp but in the meantime, I wrote up the little thing on MU wrestling’s Daniel Lewis being named the MAC Wrestler of the Week. This was just a good thing that came up on Twitter because it got me to produce at least something while I was waiting on Sapp’s response.

During the waiting period, Keegan also asked me if I wanted to do the Local Roundup again, so later on in the night, I did that too.

But not before I finally heard back from Sapp. This is where things got interesting.

He couldn’t answer my questions about the Sanders trial just yet but he helped me out by sending the memo that the city manager sent about a new police chief. I had just finished writing that story when word broke from KMIZ that the Deputy City Manager was leaving his job.

We got to work right away to try and confirm this. I went back to Sapp and I didn’t get a response. I called a Council member and she said that she and the rest of the Council hadn’t seen nor heard anything about the situation. I called the mentioned Deputy City Manager on his office and personal number and didn’t get a response. Then I called the main help line for City Hall and I was being iced on hold until finally being put through to someone who said “we’re not making a comment at this time,” which is one of the worst things to hear.

We then tried to call the mayor without any luck.

We were deciding on whether or not we wanted to ride the coattails of KMIZ but decided against it. We knew the situation was fishy but we didn’t want to cannonball in on the situation without solid grounding first. We’ll see what happens moving forward.

This whole situation was cool though because it was a journalistic rush. Though we ended up not getting any information to go on, it felt cool trying to crack that egg.

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/sports/mu-city-approach-starting-line-on-cross-country-course/article_6a6bbe46-0e04-11e9-b0ca-133311369379.html

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/sports/other_sports/from-player-to-coach-reynolds-still-brings-leadership-to-cougars/article_dff199ba-0ddc-11e9-95c3-df1f2247c7a6.html

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/sports/prep_sports/local-briefs-rock-bridge-wrestling-falters-in-jeff-city-tri/article_51ec20f4-0eef-11e9-97a9-c791f2feeff1.html

Happy New Year all.

I spent the entirety of New Year’s Day writing up the two larger stories that ended up posting on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, I added to each story by accuracy checking everything. The Nic Reynolds feature is my first true focused feature in a while. My football stories can be considered features however, it’s been a while since I wrote a real profile feature.

It was great to get that done and it was cool because Reynolds was the first basketball player I had ever interviewed during my reporting last year. So, to tell his story this year was kinda cool. I also made centerpiece again writing this.

After that, the Gans Creek Cross Country story is  about development plans. One member of the Parks Department was extremely helpful in getting back to me with information on the development plans.

The Missouri Athletics department was not. I waited to get a call back for what felt like eons. All I needed answered was like 3 simple questions and it took hours just to get a callback.

After I did get a callback, I was able to get the information quickly. Then, when I thought all was well I got another call from a different member of the Parks department during my walk home. He thought I was fabricating information. Though the information he said I was fabricating was on a document that the Parks department had sent out.

I called Scott and my article ended up being published so obviously he worked some magic with the guy to figure the whole thing out.

It was pretty frustrating but it was good to get both of these stories out after making multi-day processes out of both.

I also wrote the Local Briefs which was solely made up of Rock Bridge wrestling in a Tri-Dual. This was just easy to do but only because somebody was actively tweeting about this meet. I was able to mine information from the tweets to write it while already at home for the night.