The Missourian Community Outreach Team is basically a think tank. We engage with readers on multiple levels, all for the purpose of making better content or making content more easily available and accessible. We innovate connection between The Missourian reporters and their readers. We crowd-source from our readers so we can provide them with more information about things that are relevant to them. We stay up-to-date on different media platforms and present the news there as appropriately as possible such as various social media like Facebook, Twitter, Snap Chat, Instagram and other mediums as we see fit. We also routinely meet with various groups in town to stay up to date on local events and keep two-way communication open which includes inviting them to our open budget meetings. We are in charge of getting everyday readers to contribute to the news through our From Readers section, analyzing reader engagement with google and social analytics and covering live events on social media.

During my time with the COT, I routinely used and analyzed google analytics to

• track news impressions on readers and identify different target audiences
• write up reports for the newsroom that clearly identify processes that work and areas of interest as well as places for improvement

I also covered several events via Twitter such as the Mizzou Law School Symposium on Ferguson

and the Myrlie-Evers Williams Speech on contributing to the Civil Rights Movement through activism and journalism after the murder of her husband, Civil Rights Activist Medger Evers.

I curated Facebook galleries, such as one on the importance of voting after a local election,

as well as one on how locals celebrate National Record Day.

I managed the production of an archival project,

and fostered community contributions to our From Readers section such as this story about a classroom of high school students taking knowledge into their own hands and curating an in-class library or this college professor’s humbling story of her struggle for tenure and the resulting research that showed she was not alone.