$10 million gift ushers Murray Center for Documentary Journalism into new era at start of second decade
Jonathan B. Murray
By Austin Fitzgerald
Photos by Nate Brown
COLUMBIA, Mo. (Feb. 25, 2025) — Just over a decade after funding the creation of the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism with a $6.7 million gift, Jonathan Murray, BJ ’77, has given another $10.3 million to the unique documentary film program at the Missouri School of Journalism to create new ways to support students and alumni as they create short and feature-length documentaries.
The gift from one of the originators of reality TV — Murray’s production company, Bunim-Murray, created MTV’s “The Real World” — further bolsters what was already one of the country’s largest documentary film programs open to undergraduates as it enters its second decade.
“This is a natural extension of our vision of where this documentary program can go,” said David Kurpius, dean of the School of Journalism. “It’s going to make such a difference as we train documentary journalists in new storytelling techniques to cover issues and stories with depth. I’m grateful to Jon Murray for his support for documentary journalism and this school.”
Undergraduate and graduate students at the Murray Center create documentaries that are shown at the annual Stronger Than Fiction Film Festival, and they have also found success at other film festivals around the country, a trend that this new gift aims to supercharge.
“The center and its mission have really been proven during these first 10 years,” Murray said. “It’s clear that what we all thought was possible is actually happening. The graduates of the program are moving into the documentary journalism world, and they’re also taking the skills that they achieve and moving into other worlds.”
The gift’s priorities lean into the Murray Center’s status as an unusual-but-effective program — one that is based at the Missouri School of Journalism but has received recognition as one of the best “film schools” in the country.
The Murray Center will now be able to provide expanded support to students and alumni alike as they endeavor to create professional films and enter them into festivals. This will include financial support, but it will be more than that — the gift also formalizes an alumni network headed by Adam Dietrich, BJ ’17, a member of the center’s first graduating class. Dietrich has served as the unofficial alumni coordinator since 2022 but was officially hired earlier this year thanks to Murray’s gift.
“There really are connections that are built during those two years in a film school or, in this case, a documentary journalism program,” Murray said. “Those students end up continuing to work together as they move into their professional lives and end up calling upon each other. I think we’re just trying to help them continue what they started and help them launch successfully.”
Helping alumni blossom
Dietrich, co-founder of production company Tree Fort Films, knows all about the journey from student to professional and the importance of a support network.
“Professors are only going to be there to be your professors,” Dietrich said last year. “We have to have something else for people to evolve and grow into, to place roots into and blossom.”
Many aspiring filmmakers inevitably end up placing those roots in New York City, which is why the gift also contains a provision for building a stronger relationship between the Murray Center and the School of Journalism’s New York Program, a semester-long opportunity for students to study in the country’s media capital while completing a professional internship. Reuben Stern, director of the New York Program, will help connect the School’s vast web of successful, New York-based alumni to the center’s students and alumni.
Some of those connections will happen as part of the Visiting Artist program, a core feature of the Murray Center that has brought Oscar winners and other prominent industry figures to speak with students and offer advice. The Visiting Artist program has flourished thanks to the center’s Filmmaker-in-Chief and working documentarian, Robert Greene, leveraging his connections to bring professionals and insiders into the classroom, but Greene said Murray’s gift will allow the program to be even more ambitious in attracting industry figures “that don’t go to other schools.”
Murray said the center’s emphasis on students learning from working professionals extends not only to visiting artists but to staff and faculty like Dietrich, Greene and Supervising Producer Sebastián Martínez Valdivia, all of whom have varying degrees of experience making documentaries. The center’s founding director, Stacey Woelfel — who retired in 2021 — was a veteran broadcast journalist who spent more than 24 years as news director at KOMU-TV, the School of Journalism’s NBC-affiliate news station.
“We never want to fully step out of having people who are currently working in the industry, because we always have to be current in terms of what’s going on,” Murray said, referencing the School of Journalism’s Missouri Method of learning — and teaching — based on firsthand experience. “It’s just like how the School of Journalism has always had people who come fresh out of newspapers, television, radio and magazine. These are the people who make students’ eyes light up at the possibility of documentary.”
Of course, Murray was once one such student, and his own experiences have taught him the importance of acknowledging that the Murray Center isn’t only educating future documentarians. In his view, access to mentorship from deeply knowledgeable faculty, staff and alumni gives students a body of knowledge that can apply to all sorts of related pursuits.
“I’ve always felt that the education I got at the School of Journalism really created all sorts of possibilities for me,” Murray said. “I ended up going off and helping to create reality TV, and no one would have thought that. But those storytelling skills and everything I learned there allowed me to work as a television news producer, then move into television programming and management and eventually start my own production company and help create a genre.”
The Midwest’s documentary hub
Cumulatively, Murray believes the $10.3 million in added funding will help to enhance the center’s increasingly prominent profile in the industry and add to Columbia’s growing profile as a locus for documentary filmmaking in the Midwest.
Columbia is already home to True/False Film Fest, which Forbes called “the biggest documentary festival in the United States” in 2023. Murray’s gift will allow the center to forge a deeper partnership with True/False’s umbrella not-for-profit organization, Ragtag Film Society, which also runs a local independent cinema. Such a partnership is evident in this week’s Based on a True Story (BOATS) conference, the Murray Center’s series of master classes and workshops often featuring filmmakers whose work is featured at True/False. The conference is usually timed to finish just before the start of True/False, but this year, the final two days of BOATS will overlap with True/False’s opening days, with its programming slotted into gaps in the film festival’s schedule.
Coupled with the integration of the New York Program into the center and the building up of a far-reaching alumni network, Murray hopes to emphasize that promising students can come from anywhere — and that the documentary film program that carries his name can be plugged into the industry at a nationwide level without being dependent on coastal talent.
“The majority of young people who come through the School of Journalism are Midwesterners, and we need their voices,” Murray said. “We don’t just need people from New York and California. It’s already clear from the True/False Film Fest that mid-Missourians love to be exposed to the different worlds that these documentary filmmakers explore; everything that we need is already here.”
Updated: February 28, 2025