Reynolds Journalism Institute

06/11/2026

Ready to build stronger roots in your community? Join us to hear from four newsrooms that successfully launched unique, community-centered initiatives. You will walk away with practical, replicable models for your own team.

— Time and date: 11 a.m. CT Thursday, June 25, 2026.
— Format: Quick presentations followed by an open Q&A.
— Takeaway: Actionable ideas you can use right away.

Register now: https://umsystem.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_T0BTTE7lTzSlM4ZTABbQUw #/registration. J. The Jewish News of Northern California Conecta Arizona

06/09/2026

What if "meeting audiences where they are" meant literally meeting them on the street?

RJI Fellow Cara Kuhlman built "A Tour Guide for Journalists" to help newsrooms turn city walking tours into a fresh medium for local journalism.

"A journalism walking tour could be a high-value, low-cost benefit for sustaining members or major donors," writes Kuhlman in Current.org. "There’s opportunity for underwriting and corporate sponsorships, as well as grant funding."

Ready to test it out? Here's how a small-scale tour might look for a public media station.

Tours offer the opportunity to build trust, boost audience engagement, generate revenue and communicate local news and information.

06/03/2026

Media outlets worldwide are experimenting with humanlike avatars with synthetic voices as news presenters.

New research by Elia Powers, an associate professor at Towson University, reveals who young adults choose to deliver the news when AI gives them a choice. Popular choices?

Read on: https://rjionline.org/news/new-research-reveals-who-young-adults-choose-to-deliver-news-when-ai-gives-them-control/.

06/02/2026

RJI's annual Community-Centered Symposium recently hit the road, convening at Mirror Indy in Indianapolis. This energetic two-day workshop brought together journalists and news leaders to brainstorm innovative, collaborative and community-focused initiatives. Every participant walked away with actionable project plans ready to launch in their local communities.

Here are a few of these new-to-them projects — created with the support of the cohort and RJI — along with advice on how to replicate them.

From student-led newsletters to cafecitos and audio history, the Community-Centered Symposium helped newsrooms and support orgs connect with their communities.

06/02/2026

How do you move from traditional, deadline-driven election coverage to one that allows readers to follow the issues that mattered to them?

The Columbia Missourian built a digital voters guide using off-the-shelf digital applications.

"Reporters still attended the majority of the candidate forums," writes Genevieve Smith, municipal elections manager at the Missourian, "but instead of trying to summarize multiple candidates and topics in a 700-word story, they added questions and candidate answers into a sortable chart for readers to review."

Here's how the guide was built, using Airtable and Softr.

A sortable voter’s guide allows readers to see candidate responses to key issues.

05/29/2026

One of the ways The Texas Tribune experimented was by converting its text articles into audio. This began in 2024 with a third-party tool called AdAuris, but in 2025 The Tribune switched to Everlit because of how it aligned with the original mission of the experiment while also helping the newsroom more easily tap into new revenue streams.

Three reasons Everlit works for The Tribune:
— Automatic audio workflows
— Full control over ad placement
— Easy CMS integration

Read on.

The text-to-audio tool Everlit is helping The Texas Tribune make its journalism more accessible while also helping the newsroom tap into new revenue streams.

05/28/2026

"Individuals and corporations looking to turn a quick profit using AI slop — low-quality, digitally created content — are increasingly scraping news websites, using hard-won journalism without paying for it," writes Jared Schroeder, an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism.

"How can news organizations protect the fruits of their investments in journalism from being used to create immediately competing AI products? A century-old Supreme Court tool — the 'hot news' doctrine — could provide a legal mechanism for doing so."

More than a century old, the Supreme Court’s ‘hot news’ doctrine could help blunt the growing influence of AI news scrapers

05/27/2026

"Over the past year, Missouri Business Alert has experimented with Nextdoor for News as a low-maintenance way to expand our audience and connect with readers in our local communities across Missouri," writes Lorah Lackland.

"For smaller newsrooms with limited staffing and social media bandwidth, Nextdoor offers an interesting opportunity: a largely untapped platform focused on neighborhoods and community conversation. While it’s not a replacement for owned audiences like newsletters or direct website traffic, we’ve found it can be a useful top-of-funnel awareness tool when used strategically.

"Here’s what worked for us, what didn’t and how other small newsrooms can get started."

Missouri Business Alert tried Nextdoor for News for a year, here’s what we learned.

05/22/2026

The opening segment of the 2025 RJI Student Innovation Competition Awards Show won a bronze Telly Award for Best Show Opening Segment from The Telly Awards Judging Council.

Watch the opening segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PulZJVzLA5w.

Six student teams from across the country were finalists in the 18th annual RJI Student Innovation Competition. Each team tested their idea, which this year ...

05/21/2026

The Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism has selected the 2026-2027 class of RJI Professional Innovation Fellows, who will work to build free, open-source resources for journalists.

Two projects in the fellowship’s new emerging technology category will focus on building AI-powered systems that help newsrooms deliver more informed and impactful coverage to audiences. Two additional projects will create collaborative journalism platforms aimed at making it easier for independent journalists and newsrooms, respectively, to develop and publish stories that rely on deep research and documentation.

Meet the Fellows: https://lnkd.in/gRSAuYir. Story by Austin Fitzgerald.