Hoping a Meeting Sparks More Journalism

Jada Veasey, adjunct advisor to the MMU Times.

The cookies were exceptional and the energy was good. I hope it picks up and something comes of it—the energy, that is.

On March 12, I was invited to speak with a small number of Mount Mercy University students in the newsroom of the Mount Mercy Times. For various reasons, the Times, which had been a student newspaper in years past and now is a student online news source, has been inactive this year, and some at MMU are hoping to change that.

I retired in May 2025 as a communication professor at MMU, and was the faculty advisor to the Times for two decades. This year, a relatively recent MMU graduate, Jada Veasey, was named as the adjunct advisor to the Times. I was speaking with the students at her invitation.

The main reason to bring me in, I think, was to give the students a sense of what journalistic writing is—how a news story is structured. But I started by asking the students what they were doing in the room—what they saw as the role of journalism at MMU.

The questioned stumped them, a bit, but that’s OK. I wasn’t seeking a quick answer nor a “correct” answer, I was more interested in prompting them to think about the “why” of the MMU Times. If you know why you’re doing journalism, the “how” has something to drive it.

Lainey Henley, sophomore English and political science major.

Anyway, we had a bit of a broad-ranging philosophical discussion, and then I went over a bit of newswriting 101. I reviewed, briefly, what a lede is, what a bridge is and how to proceed form there.

It was way too quick to turn aspiring writers into journalists but I guess the whole point of the meeting wasn’t to cover a semester’s worth of intro to journalism. It was more to try to feed the spark, prime the pump, get the students to get out there and get started.

Kade McPherrin, sophomore social work major with a minor in sociology.

Meanwhile, Jada, the advisor, also has her own cooking blog and had brought in a set of chocolate chip cookies to test our reactions.

I don’t know how the open-ended ramblings of the old man would be rated. I did leave the meeting feeling good about the potential for student journalism at MMU and hoping that the students, who were only a day away from Spring Break, would feel now is the time to dive in and get something done. As for the cookies, my rating was simple. They were 10 of 10.

Keira Carper, senior English major and creative writing minor.

Jada, a registered nurse in her day job, was an excellent student journalist at MMU. As a nursing student, she had a difficult, time-consuming major, yet managed to make time to be a guiding light at the Times. She seems to viscerally understands that a community, even a student community, is richer and more informed with journalists active in it.

I think the students there sensed that, too. I hope that they live it.