The Missourinet is now in the post-Ryan era. Ryan Famuliner has left us to become an assistant news director at the University of Missouri-Columbia NPR station, KBIA. It’s a chance he couldn’t pass up. Ryan, who’s still a young sprout, is attracted by the opportunity to teach young people to be good journalists, and his position in Columbia lets him do some of that while he pursues a Master’s Degree.

Ryan came to us almost a year ago after he spent a few years in television in South Bend, Indiana. But he’s a Missouri guy at heart and wanted to be a Tiger again.

We wish him well as he pursues his goal of creating good journalists for a rapidly changing world of journalism. It’s a huge challenge because those of us who believe the public journal is a public trust are trying to deal with a fragmentation of delivery systems, not all of which are reliable and not all of which are run by True Believers in the public journal/public trust philosophy.

We hope to fill the slot in our newsroom that Ryan has left vacant.

The really sad thing about his departure is that it comes just as some of our news sources were learning to pronounce Famuliner.