Missouri journalism school gets $6.7 million gift

The Missouri School of Journalism announced a major donation to create a documentary journalism program on Tuesday.

Jonathan Murray, a 1977 alumnus, pledged $6.7 million gift to create one of the largest documentary journalism programs in the nation.

“[The gift] will give us the chance to marry the innovative approaches of documentary storytelling and presentation with the strong tradition of accuracy and fact-finding that has always been a hallmark of the School of Journalism,” Dean Mills, dean of the MU School of Journalism, said in a news release Tuesday.

The documentary journalism program will offer bachelors and masters degrees, starting as early as the Fall 2015 semester. Murray’s gift will help fund three new faculty positions and bring visiting professionals to the Columbia campus.

“The establishment of this new documentary journalism program is my way of helping to ensure that we’ve prepared the media and entertainment industry’s future documentary film makers to do great work, a goal that I share with MU,” Murray said in the news release.

Murray is the Emmy Award-winning executive producer and creator of MTV’s The Real World and Project Runway, now on Lifetime network. He founded Bunim/Murray Productions with the late Mary Ellis Bunim.