FAQs for applicants to the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s non-residential fellowship
I was a Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) non-residential fellow from 2018–2019 working on the Community Info Coop and our first research project and white paper, How to Launch an Info District.
Recently someone reached out to me to for my thoughts on the fellowship. Since then, others have done the same. So, I’m publishing some of their questions and my responses here for others to reference. This was originally written haphazardly in an email in January 2019 and I’ve tried to edit it for tense and clarity.
Note: The Reynolds Journalism Institute is currently accepting applications for its residential, non-residential, and institutional fellowships. The deadline is January 17, 2020. Find out more and apply here. (Seriously, do it.)
What’s the time commitment like?
I worked part time on the work funded by the RJI fellowship from May 2018 through June 2019. I spent between 5–15 hours per week on the Community Info Coop. But sometimes a few weeks will go by without much work. Conferences, etc. take up more time on a given week. Most folks stick to Mizzou’s academic calendar.
What form does RJI’s support take for non-residential fellows, and is it actually helpful?
Non-residential fellows are paid quarterly installments of their $20,000 stipend. In addition, I had a handful of additional spending requests for RJI for things like conference admission, travel, consultants, and professional development. Only one of my requests was ever denied and it was admittedly grand and an unnecessary expense. Reuben Stern was my mentor in the fellowship and he gave me as much as guidance as I asked for. Depending on my needs, he was available weekly.
Other fellows leveraged more of RJI’s resources, including support from grad students on research, data, and design. I wish I had made it more a point to take advantage of those additional resources.
Were those eight months sufficient to develop and launch your project?
I had been working on info districts since September of 2016 and planned to continue work on this project with our without support from RJI. But the fellowship effectively acted as an accelerator, giving me a broad runway to position myself for the next phase and create opportunities to reach that phase. I agreed to produce a guide to launching info districts as a part of my fellowship but was also positioning myself to launch the first info district campaign in 2019. But a funding opportunity fell through so I pivoted to focusing on more thought leadership, including professional development in cooperative governance and marketing around the vision for a community-managed news ecosystem.
Being a fellow now, what do you wish you had known going in that you’ve learned?
Create structure as soon as possible: a schedule, strategic plan, outcomes, KPIs, major action steps, minimally viable product. Then focus on minimally viable action to take your project forward on step at time.
Make sure you ground yourself in the “why” of what you’re up to. If you don’t focus on your principles and your vision for a world operating under those principles, it’s easy to get lost and miss the part of the hustle that’s most important: living the way you want to see the world live.
Any other thoughts?
I don’t know what project you’re thinking about but I encourage you to apply. At the very least, you’ll have your chief innovative ideas sketched out on paper. At most, you may end up opening a new door to your future that you get to construct yourself, and there’s no better opportunity than that.
Also, strongly consider the residential fellowship if it’s possible. $80,000 over eight months is an incredible value. I was told Columbia, Missouri is a really cool, inexpensive town. (Though I never did visit!) If you’re fully employed, you could ask your employer to take you down to part time and work remote temporarily.
And if you don’t want to uproot or miss family too much — I did the math and found that I could continue to pay for my apartment in New Jersey and travel back and forth a couple of times a month if need be and still have a couple of thousands of dollars leftover per month. Though, I obviously did not take that route.
