By Elizabeth Stephens

Things might look a little different in this week’s Boone County Journal. This is the first issue published under the Missourian Publishing Association’s ownership.

We hope you’ll find that all of the content you expect is still here, but we have a different printer and need to adjust some of the page layouts.

We are excited to partner with the community in publishing this newspaper. I have spent the last three and a half years as the community newspaper management chair for the University of Missouri School of Journalism. In that time, I’ve spent time talking with and visiting community newspaper publishers around the state.

Amid many changes in the industry, I find that community newspapers with local ownership are thriving. The Boone County Journal is one of them. We are grateful to Tara Blue for entrusting the newspaper to us, and we plan to continue the legacy of this community newspaper. The Ashland and Hartsburg communities have sustained this newspaper and its predecessors for decades, and we hope you will come alongside us and continue your support for the Journal.

I wanted to take this opportunity to share about myself and the Missourian and what to expect during this transition.

I am a two-time graduate of Mizzou, and 14 years ago, I came back to work at the journalism school “for just one year.” Famous last words. Mid-Missouri has a way of pulling you in, and in that first year, I managed to find my dream job — teaching and working in a newsroom — and my husband.

I’ve worn a number of hats as a faculty member at the journalism school, but for the last three and a half years, I have been the executive editor for the Columbia Missourian and the community newspaper management chair.

On the personal front, I’ve built a life in Boone County. My husband, Jesse, and I live between Columbia and Ashland with our two daughters, ages 10 and 7. Jesse is a Columbia native, and he is the grandson of the late Andrew and Ella Sapp, which makes it seem like he’s related to half of southern Boone County.

We enjoy community activities with our girls, keeping up with their school and extracurricular activities, attending Mizzou football games, visiting states to reach our goal of seeing all 50 and, hopefully, finding time to relax at home.

At the Columbia Missourian, we have 10 faculty members who serve as editors for students working in our newsroom. These editors have decades of professional experience, and most have lived in mid-Missouri for years. They are the constant in a newsroom that does change and shift each semester.

If you have questions or a follow-up, you should feel free to reach out to me or one of the editors. There will be a staff list with contact information in each edition.

We expect our students to hit the ground running as reporters and live up to professional expectations. They are learning, but they have a strong support system in our editors. I often tell community members that they are part of the village teaching our students, and I hope you all will help us in that.

Because we have a larger staff, we hope to be able to provide even more coverage of Ashland and Hartsburg. We will also have sports reporters dedicated to covering Southern Boone High School athletics.

We are sticklers for accuracy, and we have a process in place to get things right as often as possible. Our reporters are required to circle back with sources to conduct an accuracy check. This means they will read back quotes in context to a source before the story publishes. When they are at an event, they will usually read things back in that moment, but for a story with more lead time, they reach back out for the accuracy check.

If we get something wrong, we will correct it immediately online and run a correction in the next print edition. Please let us know if you see an error so we can make a correction.

A few other notes

We will be transitioning the website to our platform and are in the process of moving over the archives. We’ll let you know when we fully transition to the new site.

We want to continue to publish your submissions. We hope you will continue to send us photos and information about what’s happening in the community. You can continue to send your submissions to bocojoreporter@gmail.com.

We have some forms available online for submitting calendar events, photos and community news, you can find all of them online at bit.ly/bcjforms.

We are keeping the current office for the Boone County Journal and will post our staffing for the office in each week’s edition and on Facebook. This week, I plan to be in the office from 9 a.m. to noon Friday.

If you need to reach me directly, my email is stephensec@missouri.edu and my office phone number is 573-882-9951.

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