The Missourian
The Columbia Missourian is Columbia, Missouri's local newspaper, as well as being a teaching paper closely associated with the Mizzou school of journalism. I am currently working as a City and County Government beat reporter, as well as working GA shifts in the general newsroom, giving me practical experience on the job. You can view my full staff profile here!
May 4, 2026
With Natalie Schaefer
During my work on a piece about Vidwest, a local media nonprofit, a source let me know that they were hosting a Star Wars-themed rally on May the Fourth to raise awareness about their cause. I knew right away that it was worth a story, and I wanted to be the one to report on the rally and subsequent speech at city council.
May 2, 2026
With Natalie Schaefer
After nearly a semester covering city council, I had grown accustomed to regular speeches from Vidwest representatives until my editor pointed that we had rarely included the advocacy campaign in our coverage. My co-writer Natalie and I took the story on as an enterprise piece, spending several weeks listening back to speeches, looking into the funding Vidwest lost and investigating the measures they are taking to get it back.
April 7, 2026
​With Ava Johnson, Maggie Bane and Natalie Schaefer
On election night, our newsroom split between several candidate watch parties across town, with me being assigned to a city council challenger's event. When the candidate I was following got word that she had been elected, I was there for the night's peak to get exclusive interviews with both the candidate and her supporters.
March 27, 2026
This story was entirely based in my own curiosity. I discovered at a city council meeting that feeding stray cats in Columbia requires a permit, but that few people actually hold one, making their actions technically illegal. The resulting piece took several weeks of investigation and interviews to really get to know feral cat caretakers in Columbia.
March 18, 2026
This coverage presented a unique challenge: writing a day-turn profile without the chance to interview the person being featured. To do this, I used research, an interview with a media contact, and a singular brief quote from a press release to weave together my best picture of the subject.
March 4, 2026
**Republished in Branson Tri-Lakes News
It's not every day that a college sophomore gets sent to interview the governor, but that's what I was sent to do this Wednesday! Gov. Kehoe was on the Mizzou campus to talk about agriculture, giving me direct access to ask about not only agriculture, but also other topics relevant to State Government reporters.
February 18, 2026
About a week before this General Assignment shift, an editor reached out to tell me to get excited about owls and prepare to interview a naturalist. With little of my own knowledge about the animals, I wanted to preview his talk and capture his personality.
February 16, 2026
With Natalie Schaefer and Luke Hahnel
I wrote this my first time leading city council meeting coverage, an opportunity that required me to pre-write much of the piece, direct two other reporters in getting quotes and contact info from speakers, and meet a tight deadline to make it to the next morning's print edition.
February 15, 2026
With Natalie Schaefer
This was a longer-term project that we worked on over several weeks. After our first time covering city council, Natalie and I had questions about the balance between development and infrastructure in a fast-growing city like Columbia. In this story, we used multiple examples of housing developments in residential areas to look into the fragile ecosystem of growth amid residential outcry.
January 20, 2026
With Brendan Berger and Natalie Schaefer
**Republished in Branson Tri-Lakes News
Covering a City Council meeting for the first time taught me so much about local government. As a secondary writer on this story, I was responsible for transcribing and verifying quotes, which was essential to this meeting's recap, which focused on a new housing development that sparked significant public comment.
January 20, 2025
This was my first byline with the Missourian, and my first time writing such a data-heavy story. My goal was to highlight what would matter to readers and make it easily digestible.