From personal ads to web scraping and revenue streams; here’s what we learned

When we begin projects for our Innovation in Focus series, we always start with a vital question: What is a challenge that your news organization has been meaning to tackle, but you haven’t had the time or resources to address yet? 

In 2025, this led to 16 different experiments lasting from a few weeks to two months each and for every one of these experiments we partnered with at least one newsroom. For our Mini Revenue Experiments, 25 news organizations participated together. Our partners serve communities everywhere from Oregon, Texas, Kansas and Pennsylvania to Canada and the United Kingdom.

Tools we’ve tried (and liked) 

• Octoparse with Zapier — Partnering with The Haitian Times, we used Octoparse, a web-scraping tool with Zapier to automate the collection of information for a community guide. Here’s how we did it.

• Descript — We used this tool with Dallas Free Press to transform long public meeting videos into short clips that they could use on social media. Here’s what we learned, and how Dallas Free Press planned to incorporate this into their Documenter’s program. 

• BillTrack50 — With legislation changing so quickly, we searched for a tool that would help The Appeal track updates for specific beats. We liked how BillTrack50 addressed this challenge and connected with Slack. See how it stacked up to other tools here.
• GlitterAI — We partnered with KASU to find more efficient ways to onboard new staff to the content calendar, and we appreciated how GlitterAI used transcriptions and screenshots to save time.

Community engagement ideas you can replicate

• Walking tours — Inspired by Cara Kuhlman’s walking tours at Future Tides, we partnered with Newsberg to conduct a walking tour this summer, including a cute zine, and the small news organization hopes to keep them up! Here are some of the templates and early lessons learned.

• Making community feedback fun and in-person — We worked alongside CivicLex as they planned to gather feedback from their community on future growth and changes to their newsletter and website. The results were fun, helpful and provided good examples for future engagement!

• Personal ads — We partnered with Pittsburgh City Paper as they reimagined bringing back personal ads, opening up creative opportunities for social media interactions and in-person events. Here’s what we learned.

Revenue strategies that made impact 

• Competition and collaboration — Partnering with KBIA and Kansas Public Radio, we ran a fundraising experiment that centered around a big college football rivalry. Find our templates and takeaways here.

• Thinking creatively about sponsorships — We interviewed Erica Schopmeyer who shared some practical strategies for building out sponsorships, and how to think outside the box when partnering with community organizations and businesses.

• Breaking down big revenue goals into small experiments — In our Mini Revenue Experiments, we identified and tested four ways that newsrooms can try something new related to fundraising in just one month.

Want to partner with us in 2026?

Email Innovation in Focus Editor Emily Lytle at lytle@rjionline.org.

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Cite this article

Lytle, Emily (2025, Dec. 17). This year we launched 16 short-term experiments with newsrooms across the country. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/this-year-we-launched-16-short-term-experiments-with-newsrooms-across-the-country/

Night flying regulations are just part of the things you need to plan for to keep you, and others, safe

Many drone pilots revel in the chance to fly around their town’s annual 4^th of July pyrotechnic display. It is usually the highlight of their year. But that wasn’t the only exciting aerial light show I flew this year. I’m talking about drone light shows, like this one over the skies of the University of Missouri, back in September. 


Drone light shows are soaring across the world, even replacing conventional fireworks displays, and are setting records at the same time. The largest drone light show in history  debuted in October over Liuyang, China. Nearly 16,000 drones dazzled the skies during a colorful and choreographed display of complex three dimensional images. This wasn’t just a show to me; it was one of the most technologically advanced forms of entertainment I’ve ever seen!

In the States, Sky Elements Drone Light Shows is the dominant competitor for drone light shows. The company puts on hundreds of shows a year and partners with the biggest marketing brands to portray any aerial scene imaginable. Sky Elements operates four or five shows across the country on any given day, flying up to 2,000 drones per show. Each 12-minute performance is incredibly technical and requires special permits to emit pyrotechnics, for which they hold the world record for doing so with a drone light show last year.

Drone light shows are here to stay. Many Part 107 commercial drone pilots are going to get the chance to fly near them to capture an amazing vantage point. What the common pilot needs to understand is there are inherent risks associated with operating in proximity of drone light shows. There should be a proper approach to flying safely so that everyone can enjoy the show while avoiding a potential catastrophe.

Planning for covering a light show

Before flying the show Sky Elements put on for Mizzou, I had the opportunity to meet Hayes Walsh, a creative content director for its production team. We strategized about the flight I was planning. The key factors for coordinating that flight involved:

• Discussions about the airspace boundaries for the show’s drones;
• The communications equipment used to control their drones and the risk for possible radio interference;
• And the positions of other pilots who planned to operate at the same time.

During the show, the most important known concern for me was keeping my physical distance from the swarm. I planned to stay along a corner perimeter just to the north and along the east of the Francis Quad. Another pilot I knew of flew the opposite corner. Flying at night also poses challenges, which may be read about here, but the show drones provided ample light to see the surrounding buildings and typical collision hazards. There was no issued Temporary Flight Restriction.

The most critical unknown concern in any of my drone flights usually happens after the launch. The Sky Elements team was flying an FPV style drone around the entire display with incredible acrobatics! That drone was also permitted by the FAA to operate without a strobe, making it nearly impossible to see. Walsh described the FPV operations as being incredibly choreographed and that the lack of a strobe allows for the audience to enjoy the show without a pesky light buzzing about. This poses a collision risk for pilots who are unaware.

Controlled landings

About a month later, Walsh joined my drone journalism class. We learned that there’s so much more happening behind the scenes than I ever imagined. You can listen in on the conversation by watching the following video. Pay close attention to time stamp 21:21when Walsh begins to describe how the drones maintain their position. “Obviously when you’re working with thousands of robots for flying out 1,000 shows every year a couple of them are going to miss cooperate or they’re not gonna have a signal like be sent to it correctly,” said Walsh. “What our team does is we make sure that if it goes wrong, that it (a drone) does the safest thing, which is a controlled landing in our zone.”

This is critical for how they get these drones approved to fly almost anywhere. If a drone were to deviate from their position by even a mere foot, the drone will automatically drop out of the formation to the ground below.

Clearly, the largest concern for emergency officials was the pyrotechnics, which had never been discharged that close to Jesse Hall, and required additional approval between the City of Columbia Fire Department and Office of Environmental Health and Safety. Lest not forget, Jesse has burned down once before, and it’s obvious they didn’t want a repeat due to a small UAS with a flare floating from its hind rotors! 

No plan? Don’t launch

My simplest advice, if you’re a drone pilot who sees a drone light show above you, but you didn’t plan to fly in advance, simply don’t launch, or at least not anywhere near the show. Don’t forget to check the Aloft Air Control App to ensure you’re in compliance with any controlled airspace nearby and file for LAANC, if necessary. 

After all, impulsivity is one of the five hazardous behavioral traits identified by the FAA likely to cause a collision. Anti-authority is also one of the other traits for those pilots who think the airspace is all theirs and are looking to fly as close as they can. 

In conclusion, as a pilot who’s now flown my drone around a drone show, the next time one comes to town I’ll probably just sit back and watch. It just feels more natural that way. For those who plan accordingly, communication with the group putting on the show and working well in advance to coordinate with other possible pilots is going to be the best course of action for a spectacular view from above. 

Cite this article

Lee, Dominick (2025, Dec. 17). Sharing the airspace with a drone light show. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/sharing-the-airspace-with-a-drone-light-show/

With Press Forward funding, The SHOUT pioneers stand-alone arts culture coverage in Wichita

The SHOUT, Wichita’s go-to site for arts journalism, was born in Waterford, Connecticut, a coastal town almost as far east from Kansas as founders Emily Christensen and Teri Mott could be.

It was summer of 2023, and Christensen had just spent a weekend at the National Critics Institute. For nearly 60 years, the institute has offered training for arts journalists at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, a Long Island Sound retreat named after one of America’s most famous playwrights. As Christensen and a cohort of arts journalists gathered to watch new plays and workshop reviews, she realized that Wichita had no outlet for the type of writing she wanted to publish, and the coverage she believed her community wanted. 

“There really are some phenomenal people that are covering arts and culture in Wichita and around the state of Kansas, but no one’s doing it full time, and no one’s running reviews,” she said. 

On her last day at the O’Neill, Christensen boarded a shuttle with Chris Jones, the Chicago Tribune’s longstanding theatre critic who runs the program, and shared her pie-in-Wichita-sky idea: What if they launched their own local arts news website? 

Jones agreed that she should, especially if her co-founder was Teri Mott, another Wichita-based alumna of NCI. Five months later, Mott and Christensen were chosen to receive one of three $30,000 grants from the Wichita Foundation, using money allocated by a nationwide effort to pull resources and boost funding for journalism. The SHOUT also received a membership to Tiny News Collective, an umbrella organization for nonprofit start-ups. 

“At the National Critics Institute we really try to work with super-talented arts journalists from across the country who can bring criticism and cultural reporting to cities that are in need of smart and independent coverage,” Jones said. “Emily and Teri are two of the best fellows we ever had, and we couldn’t be more excited about this project.” 

Growing The SHOUT, with growing pains

Since launching in April 2024, The SHOUT has emerged as a hub for all things creative in south central Kansas, publishing up to four reviews and features each week. Unique monthly visitors are up to 7,500. The Wichita Foundation renewed (and increased) The SHOUT’s seed funding grant for 2025, and Christensen and Mott have proudly put 75 percent of that money into paying their editors and contributors, offering higher freelance rates than The Eagle, Wichita’s daily newspaper.

“We want to really be covering people’s labor,” Christensen said.  

Coverage in The SHOUT ranges from image-heavy reviews of art exhibits, to a light-hearted essay on fonts and lettering spotted around Wichita, to unexpected hard news: The November arrest of an actor accused of “aggravated indecent liberties with a child” who was affiliated with the theater. The theater’s artistic director subsequently resigned, saying he was wrong to give the actor “a second chance.”  The case has roiled Wichita’s arts scene and expanded The SHOUT’s role at a time when Wichita artists are realizing their community needs more accountability. 

Wichita has a larger cultural footprint than one might think, in part due to support from the aviation industry and philanthropic efforts by the Koch Brothers, Wichita’s hometown billionaires. Music Theatre Wichita attracts more than 50,000 patrons each year. Spanish artist Joan Miró designed the only glass mosaic of his career for Wichita State University’s Ulrich Museum. There’s also professional ballet, a symphony orchestra, a film festival, a second art museum and robust gallery spaces.

Mott and Christensen met while working in arts-related communications jobs at Wichita State: Mott at the museum and Christiansen for the School of Art, Design and Creative Industries. Christensen has balanced journalism and communications work for most of her career and was a 2022 recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the largest monetary award in the field. Mott’s resume includes jobs in writing, acting, radio and record stores. (True story: She once sold albums to Prince.) When The SHOUT launched in April 2024, she was onstage playing Frȁulein Schneider in the musical “Cabaret.” 

These arts-adjacent gigs may raise eyebrows; it’s not ideal for journalists to work in industries they cover. Because achieving that level of arms-length editorial independence isn’t feasible for an arts-news outlet in Kansas, Christensen says she constantly wrestles with ethical questions. 

“We have a paragraph on our website acknowledging that we’re a small community, so we are writing about people that we know sometime,” Christensen said. They require contributors to abide by some “obvious things,” she said, like not writing about romantic partners or people with whom they have financial relationships. She adds that The SHOUT would also, “never, in a trillion years, run a good review because somebody took out advertising.”

But beyond those principles, “we sometimes shoot from the hip,” she admitted. During one mentorship conversation, an advisor from the Tiny News Collective suggested a helpful guiding principle: “At the end of the day, you have to know that you are a person of integrity, and people will always have issues with how you go about doing your work. They have a right to.” 

“That has really stuck with me,” Christensen said.

Because of their direct ties to major local institutions, The SHOUT founders cede decisions about gallery and museum coverage to Genevieve Waller, a writer, artist and curator who grew up in Wichita but is now based in Denver. They also offer an informal appeals process if someone in the community dislikes another editor’s decision. For example, one arts organization recently complained to Christensen about “negative” coverage. Mott played “good cop” and took the disgruntled arts leaders out for coffee. 

“I am happy to have that conversation anytime,” Mott said. 

Many local arts news websites that have sprung up in recent years focus on supporting communities at the expense of not providing accountability. Jones said that’s one reason he’s so proud of Mott and Christensen as National Critics Institute alumni. 

“Supporting an arts community does not mean pollyannish enthusiasm or cheerleading,” he said. “The best cultural communities thrive from a keen critical voice that tells the truth and from reporting that respects their presence as a cultural asset as much as, say, a sports team. …“The SHOUT will do all of that and become an essential part of the Kansas journalistic ecosystem.”

Cite this article

Ritzel, Rebecca (2025, Dec. 16). In the aviation capital of America, an unexpected art journalism outlet takes flight. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/in-the-aviation-capital-of-america-an-unexpected-art-journalism-outlet-takes-flight/