Missouri Press Association
Serving Missouri Newspapers Since 1867
I’d like to start 2026 by thanking you for entrusting me with the stewardship of an organization that means a great deal to me and one I truly believe in. I was flattered when I was first asked to serve on the MPA Board, and that experience has been both humbling and fulfilling. I know many of you reading this already, and I look forward to getting to know those I don’t over the coming year.
This is a pivotal time for newspapers. I hope my blend of industry experience, paired with my connection to the University of Missouri School of Journalism, brings a useful and perhaps slightly different perspective to this role. One of my goals is to help connect MPA members to the deep bench of resources at the J-school.
As our industry continues to constrict, I feel a responsibility, to the university, to Columbia and to communities across Missouri, to help develop sustainable business models that allow local newspapers to continue serving their audiences. I want to see trusted, local, trained, professional journalists reporting the news, and I worry about what happens when those voices are diminished or silenced.
I moved to Columbia from the Chicago suburbs in the fall of 2000 to attend Mizzou. I can promise you that at 18 years old, I did not envision myself spending the next 25 years coming to campus every day. I was destined, I thought, for more mountainous surroundings. But here I am, and now I can’t imagine it any other way. Along the way, I met my wife, settled down, bought a house, got a dog and had a son. With each of those milestones, my connection to Columbia deepened, not just to the university I hold dear, but to the broader community beyond campus.
I’ve always believed you don’t truly care about the day to day life of a place until you decide to put down roots there. That was certainly true for me. I now own a home off campus, have a son in third grade, and my wife and I have worked in the community for nearly two decades. At this point, I identify far more as a Columbian than a Chicago suburbanite. That perspective, as both an insider and an outsider, shapes how I think about local news and its role in a community.
The value I hope to bring to MPA comes, in part, from the nature of my position. At the Columbia Missourian, we are able to experiment with business models and publishing strategies in ways many newspapers understandably cannot.
We can try things, take risks, make mistakes, learn from them, and try something else. We are fortunate to have an army of student reporters supported by some of the best professional editors in the business.
Their former students fill newsrooms around the world, and their fingerprints are everywhere.
They have taught me the importance of being right, the value of our relationship with our audience, and the central role truth plays in that relationship.
They’ve reinforced the idea that you never compromise ethics for short- term gains, that you seek truth and report it, and that you do so without fear or favor. Those values are among the things I admire most about our industry. We report the facts to clarify, to inform, and, when necessary, to hold accountable. We cover our communities because without that work, much of what happens in them would go unseen.
The headwinds facing our industry are strong. I’m not one to pump sunshine where it’s unwarranted, but I remain optimistic about newspapers. We will need to adapt. We will need to embrace new technologies and new opportunities. But the core of what we do —reporting on local news and events for a local audience with local impact — is just as necessary today as it was in 1908 when the Columbia Missourian published its first edition, the same year the Missouri School of Journalism was founded. I would argue it is even more important now, given the rise of social media and the spread of unvetted, unsourced content. Newspapers are trusted because that trust has been earned over generations.
When you read my columns this year, I hope you take away at least one idea, one small insight you hadn’t considered, and perhaps find a way to apply it at your own newspaper. I will be leaning heavily on the experts within the Journalism School and beyond, and I want to connect as many of you to those resources as possible. The path to sustainability will not be one size fits all, but we are very much in this together.
When I first started at the Missourian, Tom Warhover, who was editor at the time, often described its mission as threefold: first and foremost, to be a community newspaper; second, to serve as a laboratory for students; and third, to be a laboratory for the industry. His belief was that if you do the first well, the other two naturally follow. I’ve always appreciated that framing, and I continue to believe it holds true, that when a newspaper is truly serving its community first, everything else it hopes to accomplish becomes possible.
