New Missouri Regional Reporting Fellowship sends Missouri School of Journalism student to the Ozarks
COLUMBIA, Mo. (June 18, 2026) – Senior Jake Ciancio is the first recipient of the Missouri School of Journalism’s Missouri Regional Reporting Fellowship, a new internship program that places journalism students in local newsrooms to report on under-covered communities across the state.
This summer, Ciancio is based in Missouri’s 8th Congressional District, reporting for Cape Girardeau’s Southeast Missourian on business developments, local sports and other news important to the region until the end of July.
“This is a great opportunity for students to cover local and regional news in underserved Missouri communities,” said David Kurpius, dean of the School of Journalism. “It’s the Missouri Method at its best — community reporting that benefits the public while providing a valuable hands-on learning experience.”
Ciancio will receive more than $6,000 in wages over the course of the summer along with a living and travel stipend. Since starting at the beginning of June, he has covered collegiate summer baseball, the unveiling of a time capsule at a local police station, a new business roundup and more. Professor Mark Horvit serves as his faculty mentor in addition to guidance from Southeast Missourian staff.
As someone who enjoys both sports and business reporting and hopes to forge a career in one of those realms, the work aligns with Ciancio’s goals while immersing him in the self-driven life of a community reporter in southeast Missouri.
“They did a nice job of tailoring the internship to what I was interested in,” he said. “For the time capsule story, my editor just gave me a Facebook post and said, ‘I want you to go to this.’ It is pretty chill, pretty calm. Very ‘do your own thing and get your work done.’”
This is not Ciancio’s first internship — he previously served as a grant writer for the London Basketball Association through the School’s Global Programs office — but it will allow him to further refine the skills he has developed in work at two of the School’s professional newsrooms: the Columbia Missourian and Missouri Business Alert.
He said it was his time at Missouri Business Alert that first widened his horizons beyond a strictly sports-focused mindset, exposing him to statewide business reporting that he quickly found a taste for. Fittingly, it’s that process of broadening one’s outlook that Laura Barnitz, BJ ’86, aimed to promote by sharing the concept of the Regional Reporting Fellowship with the journalism school and donating to the program.
Barnitz reported for daily newspapers in and out of Missouri before transitioning to a career in policy communications for organizations like the nonprofit Global Health Council. Now a published novelist, she wants to help students author their own futures and provide an important public service.
“I hope it will really ground students in journalistic skills in general, but in reporting on rural areas particularly — we desperately need more trained journalists in those areas,” she said. “To have young people who are trained in understanding the importance of their role in the community and how to report facts is really important. When there is a dearth of reporting, that vacuum can be filled with opinions that are not so well informed.”
The soul of this year’s fellowship, however, is in the way it serves District 8 specifically. Barnitz’s family has owned a Century Farm in Missouri’s Lake Spring community since 1867, and she feels a strong connection to the state’s Ozarks region.
In giving back to her alma mater, she sought to serve an area increasingly at risk of news deserts as local publications shutter.
“I wanted to do something that would help support journalism students and the university, but I also wanted to help my home district,” she said. “This has always been a fairly impoverished part of the state, and our newspapers are disappearing — our community fabric is fraying. I think you could say that for a lot of the country, but I feel it very, very strongly here in the 8th. So I wanted to find a way to support the vital information that journalism provides to the community.”
For Ciancio and future interns, she envisions an experience that leaves them changed for the better by a summer spent getting to know distinctive regions of the state. This summer, that means becoming acquainted with the Ozarks.
“I hope we will see students able to take away an appreciation for the Ozarks culture, the river culture, the community culture,” she added. “I think it’s a vastly underreported, under-known area of great diversity and interest. They can feel like very closed communities at times, which can present challenges. But if a student is able to handle that over a summer internship, they’ll be ready for whatever else is coming down the pike to them.”
If you would like to support the program with a donation of any amount, click here.
Updated: June 18, 2026