Missouri School of Journalism Professor Amy Simons wins AEJMC Baskett Mosse Award
COLUMBIA, Mo. (June 7, 2023) — Professor Amy Simons is the winner of the 2023 Baskett Mosse Award for Faculty Development, an honor bestowed by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in recognition of an outstanding young or mid-career faculty member. The award comes with $1,000 in funding for a professional development opportunity.
“This award recognizes both Amy’s skill as a teacher and her desire to keep improving for the benefit of her students,” said David Kurpius, dean of the Missouri School of Journalism. “I’m excited to see her plans for this funding come to fruition.”
Simons teaches multimedia journalism and advanced social media strategies at the School of Journalism, and she also serves as the course coordinator for the introductory “Applied Projects for Journalism and Strategic Communication” course. She plans to use the funding from the award to travel to a single news market in the Midwest, where she will visit a variety of newsrooms — from television and radio to newspapers and business journals — and gather up-to-date knowledge that she can pass along to her students.
“I want to observe what the digital workflows and expectations are in the types of newsrooms we are preparing our students to work in,” Simons said. “It’s an opportunity to reconnect with newsroom leaders so I can better prepare students for the future needs of the industry.”
A key aspect of this tour will be understanding how digital work permeates newsrooms in an era when few — if any — jobs in the industry don’t require familiarity with digital content creation or multimedia platforms.
“We have entire groups of students focusing on digital, but it’s becoming the expectation for every employee on some level,” Simons said. “What I really want to see is, what is expected in 2023 of rank-and-file newsroom employees in that digital world?”
She is already introducing novel elements in her courses designed to keep her students ahead of the curve. This summer, master’s students in the “Engaged Journalism” course are experimenting with machine-learning tool ChatGPT to write social media posts, and Simons is continuing to look for ways to incorporate similar tools into the classroom. And as a course coordinator, she has steered “Applied Projects” toward an increasingly group-focused approach that accounts for the collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of modern newsrooms.
We have entire groups of students focusing on digital, but it’s becoming the expectation for every employee on some level. What I really want to see is, what is expected in 2023 of rank-and-file newsroom employees in that digital world?
It’s the same philosophy that led to the creation of the One Newsroom, where students and leadership from each of the School’s professional news outlets come together to plan and execute coverage. Simons said there is still room to push the concept further.
“My instructional design background is what I hang my hat on,” Simons said. “So I’m thinking about what we’re teaching in the classroom and how me might need to adapt things. Do we need to do a better job of adding digital workflows into regular reporting classes, design classes or copy editing? The Missouri Method is so great because I can see what is going on in the newsrooms where they are headed, and we can put those ideas into practice in the One Newsroom.”
Simons is the first faculty member from the School of Journalism to receive the Baskett Mosse Award, which has been given since 1984. The award is not bestowed annually — only six people, including Simons, have earned the honor in the last decade from AEJMC, one of the foremost scholarly organizations in the field of journalism and communication.
Updated: June 7, 2023