This summer, I stuck around Columbia to serve as an adjunct professor within Mizzou’s magazine faculty. I worked with younger writers as the reporting beat leader and writing coach at Vox, the student-produced weekly magazine covering Columbia.
I also continued my assistantship on campus with Investigative Reporters and Editors, where I transitioned from a contributor on the IRE Radio Podcast to its host and producer.
Here are a few things I worked on.
From May: The Story That Freed Hundreds of Slaves. An AP investigation busted a slave-driven fishing operation off a small Indonesian Island. I wrote and produced a podcast episode that goes behind the story.
From June: The House that Crane Built. I wrote a magazine feature about a homey little museum tied to an eatery in tiny Williamsburg, Missouri, about a half hour from Columbia. The man in charge is a character, and his wife has stories.
From July: Solitary to the Streets. We podcasted on a The Marshall Project/NPR investigation about what happens when prisoners go straight to the real world from solitary confinement. The episode is an honest conversation about what it takes to do an investigation with so little cooperation from the state.
From August: @25. At a June brainstorming session, I threw out a barely formed idea to talk to successful Columbians about their former lives at 25 — something I’d taken from a similar series on NPR (which I haven’t located since.. help?). It grew from there, and I’m happy to have helped conceptualize and edit this package, and to have written the intro.
Shawn Shinneman 