After years of involvement with reporting, writing and editing, junior Katie Yaeger, formerly of The Maneater staff, has been awarded a $1,000 scholarship from the American Copy Editors Society.
Yaeger applied for the scholarship in the fall and was one of four nationwide recipients of the award.
Yaeger first became interested in journalism when she was in middle school, where she was involved with her school’s yearbook and literary magazine. In high school she also worked for her yearbook and literary magazine, which led her to start looking at journalism as a career option.
She was involved with a variety of Advanced Placement classes and extracurriculars, but journalism was always her favorite.
“Doing all those activities and thinking back to all the time I put into them and the amount of passion I had for it, at the end of the day, that’s what I was really proud of,” Yaeger said. “Just doing that and having been a part of it — that’s just something that I really loved, I was really passionate about. I figured if I spent that much time outside of my regular classes doing that, that may be something I want to do for a career.”
Throughout her time at MU, Yaeger has worked for publications such as The Maneater, Newsy, the Columbia Missourian and the Orange County Register in California. She is also the treasurer of the campus chapter of ACES.
This summer, Yaeger will be working for the Kansas City Star as one of its Dow Jones News Fund editing interns.
Maggie Walter, the faculty advisor for the MU chapter of ACES, knew Yaeger during her time at The Maneater and worked with her at the Missourian.
“She has a passion for copy editing and for making sure our coverage is as fair and as accurate as it can be,” Walter said. “She worked very diligently to correct all those little mechanical errors that are easy to let slide by but you hope you don’t. But beyond that, she also asked the bigger questions: ‘What’s not working here? What else does the reader need to know?’ ”
Yaeger said she is honored to receive the ACES scholarship and she’s excited to continue doing what she loves — journalism.
“I know I want to be more on the production side of journalism, so I don’t really want to report, but I’d rather edit content or engage with readers through social media or design or something like that,” Yaeger said. “I really like copy editing, but I’m definitely open to exploring other areas of journalism as well. I’m hoping that in my last year at Mizzou, and possibly if I stay for graduate school, maybe I’d kind of get to explore some of those areas and figure that out.”