Missouri School of Journalism’s Amy Simons inspires new generation of storytellers
COLUMBIA, Mo. (Oct. 21, 2024) — Amy Simons was in fourth grade when she realized she wanted to be a storyteller.
It was 1987 in Chicago and the city’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, had died in office, triggering widespread speculation in the media and among the public about the cause of his death and the ensuing impact on Chicago’s political future.
Less than three weeks later, Bernard Epton, Washington’s former opponent in the 1983 mayoral election, also died, only adding fuel to the speculative fire.
For Simons, the media frenzy was a revelation. At the time, her fourth-grade class was studying the golden age of radio programming — the era before television in which the vast majority of people in the U.S. were radio listeners — and she was primed to understand what was happening around her in a new way.
I don’t have a five-year plan. I always meant to be in TV news, and then I got a call about a web producer role at the Chicago Tribune as digital journalism was taking off. And then I never imagined I could be part of a university journalism school. Every one of the twists and turns in my career to date has been the result of being willing to answer the phone and go with the flow.
Amy Simons
“That was the first major news story I remember following,” Simons said. “In just that one year, I was becoming really entrenched in how we could have these shared experiences in radio or television. The idea of radio plays, of the theater of the mind and seeing how good storytelling could captivate an audience — I knew I wanted to have something to do with broadcast and storytelling.”
She soon went from reading about famous people to covering them. In high school, she covered local women’s basketball for a suburban Chicago daily newspaper, following the early exploits of Tamika Catchings, then the #1 women’s high school basketball player in the country and a future WNBA star. She would later follow Barack Obama from his early days in the Illinois Senate to the eve of his presidential candidacy while coordinating election coverage at CLTV, at the time a 24-hour Chicago cable news station.
Finally, at the Chicago Tribune she specialized in another kind of celebrity: the internet, the star of the then-burgeoning digital media market.
Simons is now an award-winning professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, where — far from losing the spark of curiosity and imagination that she acquired so early — she is teaching new generations of student journalists how to develop their own sparks of talent and passion into career-ready skills.
“Amy’s varied background makes her an invaluable resource for students, no matter which career path they hope to take,” said David Kurpius, dean of the School of Journalism. “Her ability to inspire students to be more thoughtful, engaged news consumers and citizens helps lay the foundation for the community-centered reporting our Missouri News Network outlets produce.”
Picking up the phone
One former student, Joe McLean, is now the Missouri capitol bureau chief for Gray Television, which operates nearly 200 television stations across the country. But the success he has enjoyed was not always a given. When he first met Simons in J4804, at the time a notoriously challenging reporting class required for those studying convergence media (a multimedia discipline that now underpins the entirety of the School’s curriculum), she proved to be critical in seeing him through a personal crisis.
“I think Amy took notice of me because I felt that this was really important work, but I felt incapable of it,” McLean said. “I felt like I was not measuring up, and I was experiencing panic attacks because of how ill-equipped I felt and how much I had to learn. But she noticed that I was invested in becoming a better journalist and she became a really great support for me.”
Students at the School of Journalism often discover new mediums and interests that lead them toward career paths they might never have previously considered — McLean is no exception, having moved into journalism after initially studying strategic communication. These students find in Simons a kindred spirit who not only teaches openness to new experiences and perspectives but practices that openness herself.
“I don’t have a five-year plan,” Simons said. “I always meant to be in TV news, and then I got a call about a web producer role at the Chicago Tribune as digital journalism was taking off. And then I never imagined I could be part of a university journalism school. Every one of the twists and turns in my career to date has been the result of being willing to answer the phone and go with the flow.”
The last time she picked up the phone was on the day of the funeral of Carlos Hernandez Gomez, a colleague she had mentored at CLTV. Lynda Kraxberger, now the associate dean for undergraduate studies and administration at the School of Journalism, wanted her to join the School’s faculty. Simons, recalling how she had helped Hernandez transition from radio reporting to television news, realized that moving into the academic realm felt like the natural next step.
“I felt like if I could do that with Carlos, what types of really cool things could I accomplish with brand new journalists who are blank slates?” Simons said. “How could I make them as excited as I have been in this industry?”
Telling other people’s stories
Once Simons joined the faculty in 2011, Kraxberger quickly took note of a skill set that was valuable not only for teaching but for a variety of administrative roles. Since 2016, Simons has served as chair of Mizzou’s campus-wide Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, which reviews proposals for curriculum changes. She spent seven years as chair of another committee that reviews matters of residency as related to tuition, and perhaps most prominently, she is the course coordinator for J1400, an introductory course in applied projects for journalism and strategic communication.
“Amy has always been able to imagine future scenarios and ask policy-related questions,” Kraxberger said. “So much of teaching a class is not just the topics you cover — it’s thinking through potential outcomes so that you can come up with policies and decisions that don’t lead to unintended consequences.”
Simons hasn’t just put those skills to work for the School’s benefit. From the beginning of her tenure at Mizzou, she has also put significant effort into reaching beyond the boundaries of the campus as an educator. In her first year, she developed a full-day workshop for television journalists. More recently, she has provided trainings for journalists, strategic communicators and even public school districts on the topic of responsible use of generative AI, a subject she has also begun to introduce into the classroom.
What brings it all together for her isn’t necessarily the minutiae of video editing techniques, the cultivation of a solid social media presence or what goes into a good chatbot prompt. These are all elements of the collaborative, interdisciplinary approach reflected in her teaching and in the Missouri News Network of professional media outlets in which students gain hands-on experience, but the core of her passion is the same spark first ignited by that year of news discovery in fourth grade.
“It’s great to teach someone how to spot a jump cut or normalize audio, but teaching curiosity, empathy and the ability to connect with others — that’s the part that jazzes me,” Simons said. “Having people engage with each other in a way that matters and brings us together through good storytelling, it reminds us to take a step back and remember we’re in the business of telling other people’s stories.”
Updated: October 21, 2024