The Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) at the University of Missouri administers a Student Innovation Fellowship that places emerging practitioners inside newsrooms and organizations for a summer of applied, non-reportorial work. This call is directed not at the fellows themselves but at the mentors and institutions that will host them: the application must be completed by the staff member who will supervise the fellow day to day. RJI pays the student fellow a stipend directly; hosts are permitted, and encouraged, to supplement that stipend with an hourly wage where budgets allow. The arrangement is designed to remove financial barriers for the fellow while asking the host to commit genuine supervisory attention. The fellowship is explicitly structured around innovation rather than traditional journalism. Fellows must work on at least two innovative projects or initiatives across the summer, and those projects are to be shared transparently with the wider journalism industry through articles the fellow writes for RJI. Those articles appear in RJI's Innovation in Focus series on rjionline.org and in the IIF newsletter. The fellow is not to be assigned conventional reporting tasks—writing articles, copy editing, or covering daily stories—which distinguishes this program from a standard newsroom internship and places the emphasis on experimentation, product, process, and institutional learning. For the host, the application is effectively a proposal for a working relationship: a defined mentor, a plausible set of innovative projects, and a willingness to participate in the fellowship program as designed. RJI's role is to fund the fellow and to publish the resulting work; the host's role is to provide the conditions in which that work can happen. The deadline for this cycle is November 9, 2026, and there is no application fee.