You can call ‘This is How a Child Dies of Measles’ an act of ‘creative non-fiction,’ but where I’m from, we call it ‘lying’

The opening of the story about “your children” and “your” experience watching one of them die from the measles.

DISCUSSION STARTER: This is a good opportunity to have students read the story, “This is How a Child Dies of Measles,” before digging into this post to see how they feel about the approach, particularly if they are unaware of the truth of the story.

(The story is behind a paywall, so you might need to get creative to gain full access to it. Some school libraries have it on file, while some of you might have your own subscription. Maybe it’s even worth it to pay the $1 for six months thing and then cancel after the class. Just a head’s up in case you hadn’t planned for this.)

We did this a couple times over the years in my features classes, where they read the standard “almost journalism” stories of “Hack Heaven,” “Jimmy’s World” and “A Rape on Campus.”

Once they read through it and you make the reveal, a discussion about their thoughts, their concerns and maybe their willingness to do or not do something like this could be good. Then, if they want to pick through the blog post and argue with me, that could be fun, too.

 

THE LEAD: The story, “This is How a Child Dies of Measles,” by The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig has gained significant attention for the way in which it walks the readers through a child contracting the measles and eventually dying of it.

The problem? It’s fiction.

When I initially read Bruenig’s story, I was stunned: An Atlantic staff writer’s unvaccinated child had died of measles in the 2020s, and now she was writing about it? At the end of Bruenig’s piece, though, there’s an editor’s note: “This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.” That was the point when I sent a gift link to my mom group: “as far as I can tell this piece is fiction. What do we think about this choice? I am very conflicted!!!” My conflict stemmed from my concern that, though the piece was heavily researched, it was not a true story.

 

THE BACKGROUND: The story is written in second person and provides excruciatingly detailed information about everything from the way in which the illness can be passed among children, to the scene-setting elements of propping a kid up on a couch to watch “Bluey.”

Each paragraph provides the reader with a more and more desperate sense of inevitability in terms of “your” children suffering from to something we thought we had eradicated.

Given your son’s fever, runny nose, and evident discomfort, you feel a grim sense of resignation when his measles test comes back positive. You are, however, alarmed when you discover there’s nothing his doctors can do about it. Had he been seen by a doctor within 72 hours of his first exposure, they could have given him a prophylactic dose of the MMR vaccine to protect him from infection. But it’s too late for that now.

(SIDE NOTE: Few writing approaches are more jarring and risky than the use of second person. That’s true when it comes to simple things like, “UWO is hosting a blood drive and you should donate,” but even more so with big, complicated stories. 

I love Jay McInerney’s work from soup to nuts, but his novel “Bright Lights, Big City” is a massively painful read for me because “you” are the main character and “you” are doing stuff that, quite frankly, I can’t really imagine “me” doing, not the least of which is referring to a woman as “the sexual equivalent of fast food.”)

The finality of the piece is like one of those “Friday the 13th” movies: Just when you think this is all over, the terrifying specter rises again to finish off its victim:

For roughly eight years, you will believe that your family made it through this crisis without suffering a tragedy…

As the neurologist examines the results, she will note the presence of Radermecker complexes: periodic spikes in electrical activity that correlate with the muscle spasms that have become disruptive. She will order a test of his cerebrospinal fluid to confirm what she suspects: The measles never really left your son. Instead, the virus mutated and spread through the synapses between his brain cells, steadily damaging brain tissue long after he seemed to recover.

You will be sitting down in an exam room when the neurologist delivers the diagnosis of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a rare measles complication that leads to irreversible degeneration of the brain. There are treatments but no cure, the neurologist will tell you. She tells you that your son will continue to lose brain function as time passes, resulting in seizures, severe dementia, and, in a matter of two or three years, death.

After all that, you get kind of a semi-disclaimer that doesn’t exactly disabuse of you of the notion that this is real:

This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.

THE AUTHOR EXPLAINS: In a Q and A with the folks from the Nieman Lab, Bruenig walks through her approach to the topic and her decisions that led to the piece. She then makes kind of a sweeping statement about the greater good she feels she is doing with this fact-based fiction:

Owen: Where do you expect this piece to be shared and who do you expect to read it? Do you think people who choose not to vaccinate their kids will read it, and if so, how will they come across it? Have you heard any reactions from readers so far?

 

Bruenig: I have heard from several readers, one of whom had a heartbreaking experience with measles involving a family friend who died of the virus. People have been generally very encouraging! I have no doubt that there are a lot of people out there who are unhappy with the story or reject its premises, and they are entitled to their interpretations. I get it.
But my job is to report the truth about the world — and I use all kinds of literary, and narrative devices to do that. I do it because telling the truth is important in its own right, whether or not anyone finds it persuasive.

 

A FEW OF THE 932 REASONS THIS APPROACH WAS A BAD IDEA: First, let me say, I’m a huge fan of vaccines. Got all of mine, my kid got all of hers, my wife is a nurse who gets shot up like a dart board every year… This isn’t about the ethics or efficacy of vaccines, but rather the ethics and efficacy of this kind of journalism.

 

First Problem – Deception: Journalism is about fact-based reporting, which this piece has, but it’s also about providing information to the audience in an honest and trustworthy fashion. When we deceive the public, even if it’s for a good cause, we destroy the credibility we need to survive.

 

Bruenig says she’s reporting “the truth about the world,” which to me sounds both self-aggrandizing and disingenuous. She did rely on the facts as they related to the illness and she did draw from experts to understand how the illness works. However, and it bears repeating, WHAT SHE WROTE ABSOLUTELY DID NOT HAPPEN TO A KID IN THIS WAY.

 

This reminds me of when politicians would tell stories about “regular folk” who brought up dire concerns or who were traumatized by something specific. When journalists couldn’t find that “regular Joe Farmer” who lost everything thanks to a terrible government plan or that “regular Jane Business Owner” who had to give up her life savings to keep her staff paid, the politicians would always backtrack it and say it was an “amalgamation” of the stories they’d heard over the years.

 

In other words, they were lying, but hey… it’s the bigger picture that counts!

 

Then there’s this weird thing Chuck Schumer did, creating a fictional family based on the types of people he felt he represented:

 

 

I mean, yes, those kinds of people exist, and yes, those kinds of concerns are real, but again, you can’t just Frankenstein a bunch of pieces of people together and call it good.

Also, the supposed “disclaimer” doesn’t come right out and say, “This didn’t happen to one kid, but rather is a collection of all of the terrible stuff that can happen to an unvaccinated kid.” It’s almost like the author is trying to avoid accusations of writing fiction while doing as little as possible to make it clear that this literally did not happen.

When we are deceptive, we end up doing more harm than good. As I made the point in an earlier post, when my students read stories like “Jimmy’s World” and “A Rape on Campus,” they were angry, hurt, scared and otherwise emotionally wrought. When it came to light that Jimmy didn’t happen and that the attack on Jackie did not happen, they were really, really ticked off. They also felt less likely to trust the pieces they would read in the future.

As much as I prefer “non-denominational skepticism,” I definitely don’t want to prod it along with some borderline fraud.

Second Problem – Hyperbole: This comes back to the whole amalgamation of potential impacts issue, and how piling it all on to this one hypothetical kid is really overkill.

A number of the things she lists as symptoms of measles happen in many cases, ranging from the spots and fever to the cough and pain. However, when we get to the areas of pneumonia, we’re down to about 6 percent of all cases that end up here. Even more, the degenerative brain disorder that flares up years later happens to about 1 in 1,000 measles victims. In justifying the conclusion where “this is how your kid eventually dies,” Bruenig said:

I wanted to highlight this complication specifically because I sense that there’s widespread belief among anti-vax parents that since most healthy children will survive a measles infection, there are no important long-term consequences. But that’s simply not the case. Measles can seriously damage the body, and in rare and tragic cases, can result in death many years after the symptoms pass.

OK, but that’s a massive outlier for this disease and, again, that’s on top of the 83 other things that could or couldn’t happen that you saddled “your child” with in this story.

It would be like me stating, “I laid in the hospital, facing the grim specter of death. As the pain shot from my gallbladder, time ticked away in the day, each moment a chance I might die. Surgery, hours away, I pondered what would happen when my light was extinguished by an organ I’d long forgotten I had.”

Well, yes, I was in the hospital and yes, that gallbladder hurt like hellfire. And yes, if a person’s gallbladder ruptures, there is a chance the person goes septic and dies. However, that’s somewhere between 2 and 11 percent of all cases. I could make the argument that it was for the larger good that I painted this hyperbolic picture, hoping people will take gallbladder attacks seriously. However, I think most people would just say I was being a drama queen.

Third Problem – Laziness: I wholeheartedly believe in telling stories in journalism for the greater good of society. I also know there are an unfortunate number of children who have died after contracting measles. Telling a story about these deaths might inspire people to vaccinate, to change their minds about the severity of the illness or otherwise impact a broader discussion on the topic.

So, don’t be lazy. Go find an ACTUAL story of a measles death that happened to a REAL kid and tell that story.

Here’s one that even involves that rare illness that killed Bruenig’s hypothetical child:

That’s not to say you need to tell the story in this kind of staid news format. You can do more of the narrative work, using the parental recall, photos, medical records and expert interviews to paint a more vivid picture.

Strong interviews with the parents of a child can give you that emotional angst of anxiety, fear and despair. Spending time looking at photos can give you the “favorite blanket” and “watching Bluey” details that paint a picture in the readers’ minds. The experts can walk you through the files so you can describe in detail how each cough wracked the child with pain or how the fever created a mix of burning and chills that couldn’t be sated.

This takes a ton of work. You have to find a case where a kid died, you have to find parents willing to talk, you have to find experts who understand what happened to the kid and you have to spend time gathering granular-level elements through observation. Doing this also puts the reporter at risk of some significant emotional trauma, as they relive the death of a child in such a gut-wrenching way.

So, I can kind of see how it’s more appealing to just go to a handful of experts who can give you the clinical stuff and then just whip together a “Hypothetical ‘You’ Mom” character to tug at the emotional heartstrings of the readers, without fully acknowledging that’s what you did.

However, if you want the reward of the tough story, you really have to take the risks associated with the tough story. Doing it this way only codifies the certainty of people who don’t already believe you and undercuts your standing with people who do.

Journalism-related concepts that played out as well in the medical world while I was getting gallbladder surgery

My boss was nice enough to let people know I’d be out for a bit, but this is a little vague… Not like THAT’S gonna lead to speculation…

At the start of every semester, I try to come back with a “X number of things I’ve learned” or a “X years of teaching have taught me” kind of post. It was ruminating (I swear) when my second gallbladder attack in four days hit me badly enough to head to the ER at midnight the day before school started.

Although everything went well, I found myself living out little moments that had me shifting into “analogy mode” as I saw parallels between where I was (the hospital) and where I wanted to be (a journalism classroom). So, as I continue to mend and catch up with the 82,324 things that have landed on my desk while I was gone, I thought a simple slow-walk post of advice would be a good start to what has already been a shaky semester.

(Also, to be fair, I’m still on meds, somewhat hazy and worried I’d somehow come in hot on a topic like Bad Bunny or something that would end up getting me fired without me entirely knowing why.)

So, here are a couple of the maxims that ring true in journalism that kind of came home to me throughout my hospital stay and recovery:

ACCURACY ABOVE ALL ELSE: We’ve been having a lot of conversations like this around the house:

Me: Who called?

Zoe: She didn’t leave her name on the voicemail.

Me: Can I listen to it?

Zoe: She was just like “Hi, this is mumble mumble and I’m with…

Me: So she did leave a name, but you just didn’t understand it? Is it possible that maybe if I listened to it, I could figure it out?

Zoe: Well, I guess…

As much as I expect that out of my kid, I didn’t think I should expect it from a healthcare provider.

Case in point: Upon leaving the hospital, the discharge nurse is going through all the stuff I should or should do, eat or drink. She tells me to avoid fried food and fatty food like bacon. Due to the lack of the gallbladder, these things are likely to create severe gastric distress in the early stages of my recovery.

OK, got it. Most of my diet goes on the shelf.

The other night, Amy made this amazing chicken and potato thing that was part of our “healthy eating” resolution for the year. About 20 minutes after I ate it, I’m in stomach-cramp hell for about two hours. Turns out, she used olive oil on the stuff, which has the same basic effect as those other two things, even though the nurse didn’t mention it and we all usually seem to think olive oil baking is good and deep-fried drumsticks are bad.

I often think about the way in which we ask questions of people in journalism and how we get “almost” answers, or how sources provide information that’s direct but not entirely accurate. From now on, I plan to start interrogating sources like the entirety of my GI tract depends on it.

 

VOCABULARY MATTERS: We always talk about picking the right word, the proper descriptor or the exact phrase to help the audience understand things accurately. In news stories, it’s relatively important. In the medical field, it means a hell of a lot more.

In trying to explain what he found when he dug into my gut, the surgeon referred to the gallbladder as “angry,” “wicked” and “gnarly.” Those descriptors sound more like the tappers at a South Boston pub than a description of a human organ.

In addition, he explained that something had happened causing my gallbladder to grow a “rind” over the top of it and encase it tightly against my liver. What created said rind and what the rind was composed of, he would not venture a guess. Apparently, I just have a brie-like defense mechanism against gallstones or something.

I didn’t need the whole medical textbook explanation, but it did dawn on me that I felt like I was interviewing Nuke LaLoosh in “Bull Durham” for a bit here:

When it comes to telling people things, keep your audience in mind and use strong, clear vocabulary that helps the folks out there understand exactly what is going on and why they should care.

 

CONNECTIONS CUT BOTH WAYS: We talk a lot in reporting about the importance of having strong connections with good sources. Those kinds of relationships can give you an edge when it comes to a big scoop, a key interview or a sense of confidence on a topic.

They can also be a problem if sources try to ask you for things you can’t provide or they assume you won’t write about things they don’t like. I always tell students, “It’s great having the mayor feeding you tips, right up until the point his kid gets busted for a DUI and he wants you to keep it out of the paper.”

In terms of connections at the hospital, I was not only being treated at the same hospital where Amy had worked for several years, but I was actually on her old unit. This led to some significant comfort for me in terms of knowing (relatively speaking) who some of these folks are. It was also great because they had nothing but praise for Amy and wanted to know how she was doing at her new job and so forth. I also knew I had a rock-star surgeon because Amy had worked with this guy’s post-op patients over the years, so she knew him and his work.

The “cuts both ways” part really was more of my own making, in that I was groggy and gimpy most of the time, with that “gown” barely doing much of anything. As a massive social hermit, I don’t even like to be in the house when Amy has friends over, so you can imagine how I’d feel about needing their help to wander semi-bare-assed to the bathroom several times a day.

(The closest parallel I can offer is this one time when my parents and I went to a restaurant during the summer and it turned out one of my mother’s teaching colleagues was there waiting tables. She ended up as our server, which felt awkward as hell when I needed to flag her down for another Diet Coke or ask about desert. And at least I was fully clothed there…)

The nurses and staffers were totally professional, even when I managed to set off the bed alarm that Amy used to tell me would tick off the staff to no end. They were also patient with me as my body seemed to be re-calibrating all functions at the same time for no real reason. And it wasn’t like I would be flailing naked down the halls if Amy DIDN’T know these people. Still, it was a combination of comfort and clumsy.

And finally…

TRANSPARENCY IS THE BEST VIRTUE: My buddy, Pritch, used to tell me that in PR transparency is everything, even if what is happening is something you’d rather hide. Abiding by that rule, the first chance I got, I told everyone in my classes what had happened, what the doctors were saying and when we might be able to get back together.

Some kids who knew me but weren’t in the classes I’m teaching got the message on the whiteboard outside my office and kind of freaked out. My boss explained he didn’t want to disclose my health issues without my permission, which is great. However, I know how the minds of journalists work and I could only imagine what it was these people thought had happened to me.

I’ve told Amy this many a’ time: When I die, put the cause of death in the obituary, no matter what. If I died when I broke my neck falling off the couch trying to complete the “bite your own toenails TikTok challenge,” tell people that. It may appear stupid and demeaning, but if I cared enough about it to die doing it, well… there you go. Besides, whatever I did, the speculation of what I might have done will be far worse, I guarantee.

I understand that some folks might be more demure or more guarded than that, which I get, but the less you tell people, the larger the space for the rumor mill to operate. It’s a good rule for PR folks putting out messages and it’s a good thing to remind sources of when they try to get weaselly.

 

The Gall of Some Bladders: a brief post

I’m writing today from a hospital bed, the result of an emergency gallbladder surgery. This is the first time I’ve been able to function at any level for the past few days.

It started apparently Thursday, when I was bloated and in excruciating pain in my stomach. I got sick and it got better so I thought it was food poisoning. I had the chills and shakes for the next day or so and then that pain hit again.

I’m no wuss, so when I told Amy around midnight that some had to drive me to the hospital, it was clear this wasn’t something simple. The doc told me today that this thing was so messed up, he couldn’t see the arteries he needed to clamp around it.

Sufficient to say I’m on the mend and relatively feeling better. I will hopefully be sent home in a day or so and maybe back to work in a week or so. I figure the blog will come back on line around that time as well, given it’s taken me about an hour to type this much functionality.

Not looking for sympathy or pity, but rather just wanted to let you all know why the blog will be quiet for a bit

Best,

Vince (aka the doctor of paper)

Four things to know to keep your first media writing class from sucking (A throwback post)

I ran into one of the students from my upcoming media writing class the other day. She’s a graduating senior who’s taking it as an elective for her marketing degree, so I asked what she’d heard about the class and why she wanted to take it.

“I heard it’s hard as hell,” she said. “I also heard it was amusing. I’m taking it because I love to write and I need to write better.”

She then asked if we were doing a lot of writing, to which I obviously replied yes, but with a caveat: “We write a ton, but it’s not like the classes where you’re writing 25-page papers on some obscure topic. In fact, the first assignment you’ll write for a grade is going to be one sentence long, but it’ll take you three class periods to do it.”

Her face turned blank. “That’s a lot of pressure for one sentence. I mean, if I could write more than that, I could probably make it work better…”

“Better for you or better for the people who would want to read it?” I asked her.

Blank again. “Aw…”

And so we start another great semester, remembering a few ways for your students to really get something good out of a class that they probably aren’t really ready to experience:

 

Four things to know to keep your first media writing class from sucking

With the close of the Labor Day weekend, it’s a safe bet that most students reading this will be starting the fall semester or have just started it (apologies to those of you who are on trimesters or who just have a ridiculously early start date). When we start this week, I know I’ll be face to face with another fresh crop of students experiencing their first media writing class and I can already smell the anxiety.

For those of you students in a similar boat, in that you’ll be taking your first media writing or reporting class, here are four things to know from the start so that your experience will be less painful:

Your work will suck for a while: One of the most difficult things about going into media writing is how frustrating it can be for people who have always been good writers. People who struggled to write? They tend to have an easier time with it, even though that sounds counter-intuitive.

Let’s call the rationale behind this the “Michael Jordan Plays Baseball” Theory. In 1993, Michael Jordan had cemented his place as the best basketball player in the world. He had just led the Bulls to a “three-peat” as NBA champions and he won the MVP award in each of those finals. In October of that year, he retired from basketball and decided to try playing baseball. He’s a super star athlete, he’s in his prime and he never stunk at anything, so this shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Wrong.

Jordan played for Double-A Birmingham Barons and to quote Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller, “He couldn’t hit a curve ball with an ironing board.” Eventually, he got his first hit, his first run batted in and so forth. Even though he only hit .202 for the season, his manager (Terry Francona) said that he improved and could have been a major leaguer if he had committed to it. Instead, Jordan went back to basketball, much to the chagrin of everyone who wasn’t a Bulls fan.

The point is, you have always written well, but this is a different kind of writing and you’re going to suck at it for a while. All the things you used to have at your disposal that worked well won’t always fit into this style of writing. The format, the verbiage and the overall approach are all different, so get used to the feeling of falling on your keys for a while.

 

Learn from your screw ups:  I have this conversation at least once a semester:

Student: “I was wondering why I got such a bad grade on this piece.”
Me: “OK. Did my comments on the paper not make sense to you?”
Student: “I didn’t really read those. I just saw my grade and kind of freaked out.”

Look, I love writing, but writing out tons of comments on a story that was so bad it sapped my will to live, only to have the student ignore them all isn’t my idea of a good time. The whole purpose behind instructors writing comments on papers isn’t so that we have some sort of ground to stand on when an annoying student sues us over a grade. The idea is that we want you to learn something, so we tell you what went wrong so you don’t do it again.

As painful as it is to read the bloody mess of red ink that adorns your paper, dig into it. Learn what didn’t work so you don’t do it again. If you still don’t understand what you did wrong after you look your paper over, be proactive and meet with the instructor. Trust me, we love reading well-written papers so the more help we can give you on the front end, the less Advil we’ll need when we have to grade stuff.

 

Care more about the skills than the grade: If you would like to cause your instructor to have a “Scanners” moment every single day, make sure to ask two questions at the end of every class:

  1. “Do you know what my grade is?”
  2. “Is this going to be on the test?”

 

I get that grades matter for some things beyond the classroom: Scholarships, sports eligibility, having mom and dad not disown you… But seriously, once you are done with school, nobody is going to care about your grades, least of all you.

I can remember exactly three grades from my entire academic career:

  1. C-double-minus in penmanship from Mrs. Schutten in third grade. (The rule at that time was that if you got a D, they held you back, and although I was smart enough to pass everything else that year, my penmanship was godawful and she wanted to make absolutely sure I knew that.)
  2. C in Media Law in my junior year of college. (I skipped six weeks of class [long story] and was really, really bad at this whole concept. I prayed out loud for a C to pass during the final. I received applause, much to the chagrin of the instructor.)
  3. A in my first news writing class. (The only reason I remember this is because I wanted so damned badly to impress the instructor that I poured everything I had into that class.)

Beyond that, it’s a long alphabetic blur that ceases to have any value to me. If you focus on just doing stuff to get the grades, you’ll miss out on the skills you need to learn to make yourself marketable once you graduate. Even if you don’t see the point in what you are doing at the time, learn the heck out of the skills and practice them. Case in point:

At the end of the day, the skills will follow you and they will translate from job to job. Nobody, however, is ever going to say to you in a job interview, “So, it looks like you’re a perfect candidate, but let’s talk about this C+ in feature writing…”

Now is the time to care: I’ve told this to students before and it’s the best bit of advice I can possibly give you for any class:

Instead of saying, “I need this class (to graduate, to move on in the major or whatever)!” to your professor after you screwed up your work and you have no hope of getting out alive, say “I need this class (to graduate, to move on in the major or whatever)!” to yourself every day from the beginning of the semester and act accordingly.

Have a great semester and knock ’em dead.

“He put himself in that situation:” The reason why people can justify the shooting death of Alex Pretti

In reading through the articles and posts related to Saturday’s shooting death of Alex Pretti in Minnesota, I forgot the most basic rule associated with the internet:

“Don’t read the comments.”

However, in digging into the comments and hopping amongst media bubbles, I found a few trends in terms of people who usually support the Second Amendment and the right to carry and how they squared the circle involving Pretti’s death:

  • Pretti was threatening the officers with a gun, and the officers had the right to defend themselves.
  • Pretti put himself in harm’s way as a purposeful instigator, thus leading to his untimely death.
  • Pretti had the right to carry and the right to record their actions, BUT when he chose to interfere with law enforcement, he forced the officers’ hand in terms of use of force.

(There are tons of other claims, including one weird-as-hell, AI-photo with Pretti wearing a female body suit made of tattoos and a set of curled horns, but this trio is among the most common.)

If you are asking the question right now of, “How in the hell can people believe this stuff, when we can all see the DAMNED VIDEO?” I have an answer that starts with some research I did about 20 years ago that reflected this dichotomy perfectly.

A few of the front pages that I still have from these two shooting deaths. I was the adviser for the Ball State Daily News in the early 2000s.

THE HISTORY: During my first year at Ball State University as the student media adviser for the Daily News, the campus had a number of students who died in some shocking ways. The two at the heart of this discussion are Michael McKinney and Karl Harford.

In November 2003, McKinney was  21-year-old student at BSU. He spent a Saturday night drinking with friends at some near-campus bars and had planned to stay at one of those friends’ homes, rather than driving home that night.

In his inebriated state, he went to the wrong home and banged on the back door to get let in. The home owner called 9-1-1 to report this person trying to force their way into her home and Ball State police officer Robert Duplain responded. Duplain was 24 years old and had been on the force for 7 months. He had not yet attended the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy when this incident occurred.

Duplain entered the fenced backyard of the home through the only access point and confronted McKinney, who attempted to flee. Duplain shot several times, hitting McKinney with four rounds and killing him.

Subsequent investigations found no wrong-doing on the part of Duplain, who returned to the force briefly before resigning.

Less than six months after that shooting, on March 6, 2004, 20-year-old Ball State student Karl Harford was found shot to death in his car, which was abandoned on the city’s east side.

Police investigations determined that Harford was at a campus party when he offered three individuals a ride home. Experts later stated that Harford had a blood alcohol content of 0.16, which would be twice the legal limit for driving and would have likely impaired his judgment. One of the men had a gun, which he used to force Harford to drive to an abandoned building. The three men forced Harford to his knees, robbed him of $2 and shot him to death. The trio then stuffed his body into the backseat of the car and fled.

Police eventually arrested Brandon Patterson, 18, Damien Blaine Sanders, 21, and a 14-year-old juvenile in connection with the killings. Patterson and Sanders had previous interactions with law enforcement that involved incidents of car theft and gun possession. Patterson pleaded guilty to a “robbery resulting in severe bodily injury” charge and was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Sanders pleaded guilty to robbery and murder and received 85 years. The 14-year-old was held for 15 months in a juvenile facility and subsequently released.

THE RESPONSES: The Daily News covered both shootings extensively and the online coverage drew readership that was disproportionately large in comparison to all other stories the paper had posted at that time. In addition, the comment sections under the stories for these pieces were extremely active.

Many of the responses to the McKinney story had people offering sympathy to Duplain as well as McKinney. People were saying things like, “Rest in Peace, Mikey,” but also things like, “I feel bad for that officer who has to live with this for the rest of his life.” Others noted how this was a “senseless tragedy.”

What I remember most, however, was the way in which a good number of posters were trying to hang some, if not all, of the blame on McKinney. People had commented that he was “way too drunk” and that “he put himself in that situation.” Some people speculated that he had something in his hand that could have been mistaken as a gun. Others noted that he “rushed” at Duplain, leaving the officer no choice but to fire his weapon.

Things kept getting uglier as time went on, with people saying negative things about McKinney and even how he was raised. I still remember one post that McKinney’s sister, Rosie, put on one of the stories, begging people to just stop this, as her parents were seeing all of these negative statements. The posters then turned on her.

In the case of Harford, the commenting was much more cut and dried. Harford was the victim and “those cold-blooded murderers should pay.” Rarely did any of the comments deviate from this pattern and the few that did were quickly shouted down by other posters.

THE STUDY: In all honesty, these shootings devastated the Ball State community, and I know my heart just bled for these families who lost these children. As is the case with most things, when I am in a state of difficulty, I tend to dig into the topic and do some writing (thanatology researchers call this “instrumental grieving), so I looked into doing a study. My buddy Pritch and I decided to look at why it was people reacted so differently to these killings via their online media posts.

I won’t bore you with the details of the study, but if you want to download it and read it, you can grab it here.

Sufficient to say, the statistical data bore out the general vibe we sensed: People in the Harford postings were much more dichotomous in where they placed sympathy (Harford, his family, his friends) and where they placed blame (Patterson, Sanders and the 14-year-old). Meanwhile, the sympathy and blame were much more spread in the case of the the McKinney posters who were much more willing to blame McKinney for his own demise while also feeling sympathy for Duplain.

The “why” came to us from two areas of research: Human cognitive processing and the way in which news stories (especially crime stories) tend to follow “scripts.”

The Harford situation fit a stereotypical news-as-script pattern to a T: White kid, trying to do a good thing, meets with criminal black element that is his undoing. Police find the evil-doers who are subsequently punished.

The McKinney situation doesn’t do that. McKinney was a white kid who got shot by a white cop. Nobody was arrested and nobody eventually was punished for it.

For the people reading this story, there was suddenly a cognitive disconnect: Good white people don’t get killed by white cops for no reason. Also, deaths like this need some form of resolution, in which blame and punishment are effectively assigned. This situation didn’t fit into the expected patterns of action, so people desperately sought SOMETHING the rationalize why this happened.

(NOTE: We couldn’t code for race, but a number of people did mention their own race in posts and it was almost entirely a white audience. We did see that amplification of  both the racial element between the situations as well as finding it easier to sympathize with Duplain as as well. We had a whole section on that, but any academic will tell you, a lot gets cut on the way to publication, thanks to anonymous reviewers.)

When something terrible happens and it doesn’t fit the patterns pre-established in people’s minds, they need to make sense of it and that usually means they bend reality to fit their assumptions:

O’Sullivan and Durso (1984) found that when information being processed ran counter to the established understanding of how a situation was supposed to unfold, individuals did not alter their perception of what should be happening. Instead, they attempted to cognitively reposition the new information to make it congruent with the prior script.

Goleman’s (1985) work also shows that when individuals are faced with an anxiety-provoking alteration to their standard scripts, they actively seek ways to block information or rationalize it in a manner that allows them to return to their comfort zone.

In short, people aren’t going to change their minds when something like this happens. They’re going to change reality to fit what they believe.

BACK TO PRETTI: In bringing this around full circle, a lot more of what people who want to rationalize Pretti’s death are saying starts to make sense. In this world view at least a few of these things are held as fact:

  • Law enforcement officers are the “good guys.”
  • People have a legal right to safely carry guns, as per the Second Amendment.
  • White people and U.S. citizens = good, Non-white and non-citizens = bad

So, when you have a white, citizen who is legally carrying a fire arm that gets killed by law enforcement officials, now what? The thinking has to start shifting the reality.

Just like McKinney, Pretti must have done something wrong to provoke the shooting.

Just like McKinney, Pretti shouldn’t have been there in the first place, so it’s really on him.

Just like Duplain, these officers clearly had to act defensively because they had a reasonable fear of what this individual might do.

The more I read the Pretti coverage, the more I found myself finding parallels to what happened with McKinney.

  • In both cases, stories trying to find “more dirt” on the victim hit the press: A recent story on Pretti said he had previously scuffled with the feds, leading to a broken rib. (DHS says it has no record of this.) A story after McKinney’s death said he had previous encounters with police, including one leading to a charge being filed against him. (That turned out to be a ticket he received for trying to steal a STOP sign for his room.)
  • In both cases, the families were pleading with people to stop smearing their kids. The NY Times presented this piece quoting those who knew Pretti, while I remember what Rosie McKinney went through in regard to the postings about her brother.
  • In both cases, the official narrative painted the shooters as having absolutely no choice but to respond in the way they did.

Even more, as evidence continues/continued to come out in cases like these, people continue to find ways to bend the reality to fit their narrative. For example, a preliminary DHS investigation did not state that Pretti “brandished” his weapon, directly conflicting with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s original statements. However, that hasn’t stopped people from pressing the point in comment sections that Pretti put himself in harm’s way or that the officers had no choice but to shoot.

Then, there are people like this guy at NewsMax who are stretching reality a little more.

This is why no matter which side of the issue continues to gain ground, there will still be people with a strong attachment to seeing things the way that best fits their prior beliefs. Expecting something different is to expect human nature to change.

Random Journalistic Thoughts After The Shooting Death of Alex Pretti

(The front page of the AP online story about the memorial to Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed in Minnesota on Saturday morning.)

One of the first things I tell student media practitioners whenever a major event hits is not to just be part of the noise. If you have something unique to say in a way that matters to your specific audience, do so. If not, you are just as likely to be subtracting from the sum of human knowledge as you are in adding to it.

The death of Alex Pretti on the frozen streets of Minnesota brings out in me so many more thoughts and emotions than I can honestly and fairly express right now, so I’m doing my best to follow the credo I outlined above. Please know it doesn’t mean I am not feeling what so many others have already said, written, shown or expressed.

What comes below are the bits and bites of my thoughts as a journalism professor, former media adviser and citizen of these United States that might be helpful to you in your classrooms and student newsrooms today as you discuss the killing and the coverage:

 

JOURNALISTS (OF ALL KIND) ARE MY HEROES: They say that journalism is the first draft of history, and the work these folks in Minnesota are doing is absolutely incredible, given the great personal risk people are apparently faced with at this point and time.

The television coverage has been both deep and restrained in terms of saying only what is known, but also not sugarcoating things. That this is so well done is doubly impressive given that it’s happening on a weekend.

When most media outlets hit the “weekend shift,” you end up with a lineup of a recent grad anchoring the desk, providing whatever the regular staff canned up on Friday along with a lite-brite on some Saturday Festival. Add that to an intern holding down the wire desk, some rando doing the weather and an overly excited 14-year-old doing sports, and it’s a recipe for disaster if something really big happens. The networks out there managed to “scramble the bombers” and get everyone doing big work in difficult circumstances and trying times.

In particular, KARE 11 has always been a top-flight news organization that demonstrated the ability to cover all of the things involving the Twin Cities and beyond, and this situation is no exception. Here’s the lineup of stories that KARE has covered since the shooting.

On the front lines has been Jana Shortal, an accomplished broadcast journalist with several decades on the job. She not only covered the scene, but then returned to the studio having been pepper-sprayed (or whatever the hell they’re using) while trying to comply with officers’ commands:

(SIDE NOTE: The woman in the middle is Lauren Leamanczyk, who is featured as one of the media pros in the “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” textbook. She’s also one of my former students, which is another mind-boggling part of this whole thing for me.)

I’m always a fan of student media and the folks at the Minnesota Daily also made sure these moments of history were captured to inform the present and remind the future of what has happened here. The photography, the stories, the videos and the relentless pursuit of information has been exceptionally impressive.

Above all else, the citizen journalists, who would likely count Pretti as one of their own, put their lives on the line to gather the videos that have showcased exactly what happened during this situations and others like it.

High-end media outlets like the Wall Street Journal have the capability to stitch together frames from a dozen or more videos to showcase exactly what happened here or in the shooting of Renee Good. However, they wouldn’t have those videos without the brave souls who availed themselves of their First Amendment rights at a time in which individual rights seem to be less and less inalienable.

 

DON’T BE AFRAID TO POKE A SOURCE: Just because a source is saying something, it doesn’t follow that they are making sense or answering a question. Far too often, we fall into the “get a quote” mode when it comes to doing our work, like we’re checking off a chore or picking up a dozen eggs at the grocery store. This is where the concept of active listening comes into play. If you are merely focused on getting the information from the source, and not really listening to that information in real time, you aren’t going to get what your audience needs.

Here is a perfect example of a journalist poking back at a source. Dana Bash had Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino on air for a 20-minute interview, in which she was trying to get answers to a few basic questions regarding the shooting. Far too often, situations like this escalate like one of those stupid sports talking head shows, with two people screaming at each other. 

In this case, Bash was respectful and focused. She admitted missteps in her own language while still pushing Bovino to actually answer a question. Literally, any question:

She did make points that a) what Bovino was saying was not what she was seeing, b) she might not have been privy to the same type/volume of evidence Bovino had as a law-enforcement officer and c) she would be willing to accept Bovino’s statements if he could provide proof they were accurate.

This is the essence of journalism: Report, question, verify, disseminate.

 

CHECK YOUR SOURCES: In listening to the press conferences and press appearances of Bovino and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, it is clear they have a common approach and shared vision of what happened in this shooting. That doesn’t mean they should be quoted with impunity. 

In the case of Bovino, his version of ICE and DHS situations has repeatedly been called into question by those who were present at certain events. In one case, a federal judge in a civil suit found that Bovino’s statements related to ICE actions in Chicago were “evasive” and “not credible,” adding Bovino was “outright lying” about his actions. In regard his comments regarding the Pretti situation, Bovino stated the presence of federal officers was related to a “violent, illegal alien” in the area, something that Minnesota’s Department of Corrections has strongly disputed.

Noem has frequently been accused of misrepresenting reality in terms of deportations and crime. The numbers related to how many people have been captured during her tenure, what crimes the have committed and how successful and welcomed ICE agents have been strongly contradicted through even some cursory reporting. Also, a civil court filing in this case includes testimony from two witnesses who dispute Bovino and Noem’s statements, including one deposition by the “woman in pink” who was literally feet away from Pretti during the shooting.

Saying a politician has lied is kind of a “Dog Bites Man” story, but in the case of both of these situations, it’s a bit more. If it’s any indication, Minnesota’s Department of Corrections felt these folks were so wrong so often, the DOC launched a website for the “combating of DHS misinformation.”

This is also a perfect point to remind everyone why “said” is my best friend. I don’t know what these two people think, believe or know about this situation, nor would I feel comfortable stating the things they have said as unattributed facts. However, putting out there that Noem or Bovino “said” certain things and letting my audience compare that to their own reality is exactly why I cherish attributions with “said” on them.

 

DEALING WITH LANGUAGE CHOICES: The way in which people are trying to frame this situation comes down a lot to the language choices we’re seeing out there. This is also why parroting a source (in non-quote format) is a bad idea.

Bovino referred to Pretti as the “suspect” in the situation, a term that implies someone sought for a crime and isn’t usually used to refer to someone shot multiple times on the ground by law enforcement officials. When Bash referred to Pretti as a “victim,” Bovino attempted to invert that term to apply to the border patrol officers, who he deemed “victims” of whatever he thought Pretti was doing.

Language coming out of the administration has included the term “illegal” and “alien” to refer to the individual the officers sought that day, which, again, paints a picture different from terms like “migrants” or “immigrants.”

Whatever terms you choose to use in situations like this, you’re going to be shaping how people look at a situation, so you want to both follow AP style when applicable and also make sure you are remaining neutral

Beyond that, you want to make sure your terms are correct. For example, I’ve read stories that refer to the federal law enforcement officers as “ICE” and “Border Patrol.” Officers in these groups are both housed under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, but the terms that describe them are not interchangeable. A good primer on who does what and how they differ can be found here.

A number of opinion pieces, social media posts and so forth have referred to the shooting death of Pretti with a variety of terms, including “assassination,” “execution” and “murder.” Each of these terms is defined specifically, both in law and in journalistic style, so no matter how you feel about what happened, you need to take care in using these terms.

Here’s AP’s version of what’s what:

If we consider AP style our rule book, we need to follow the rules, even when we don’t like them.

Finally with language, there is something to be said about how people say things so that something can be factually accurate while also being deliberately misleading. Here’s an example of a statement from Noem’s press conference:

“An individual approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.”

There are two facts in that sentence that are accurate, at least to a reasonable degree:

  • Pretti, the “individual,” approached a scene with U.S. Border Patrol officers at it.
  • Pretti was armed with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.

However, putting them together in this way could lead a reasonable person to think that Pretti approached a group of officers with his gun present in a way that threatened the officers. Noem later used the term “brandished” the gun, although every attempt to get Bovino to provide proof of such a thing led to a dead end.

The point here is why we don’t a) take things people say at face value without proving them for ourselves and b) don’t extrapolate beyond what people tell us. I often tell students that if a police officer says something like “alcohol was believed to be a factor in the crash” or “the driver was operating while under the influence,” you don’t want to say the person was a “drunk driver” as those are two different things. The driver might not have been legally drunk or the driver might have been baked out of their mind on weed.

 

NOBODY KNOWS NOTHING: I keep going back to that saying because I remember how reporting on crimes and disasters was always a random lottery of “will I have to write a correction tomorrow?” moments. As much effort as journalists put into getting things right, nobody really has any idea of what we will find out as this continues to unfold. It also doesn’t help now that anyone with a phone and an internet connection can say anything they want with absolute certainty, regardless of its veracity, and we all get to hear it.

“Nobody knows nothing” has always been true, as new witnesses could emerge, more video could show up, interviews with the agents have yet to be completed and more. Hell, we’re still trying to figure out if Babe Ruth really called his shot in the World Series almost 100 years later, so I have no doubt that things are going to evolve here.

I also have no doubt that various groups involved in any situation have their own motives for releasing or withholding information from the public. To that end, a lot of what we learn will be based less on the totality of information, but rather the totality of AVAILABLE information.

This is why we need reporters, not stenographers, in the media today. Good journalists will always find a way to pry loose a fact, debunk a statement filled with “bovine excrement” or get a source to finally explain what’s what. When they do, we all tend to be better for it.

Get the name of the dog and the brand of the beer: Why details matter in journalism.

I have no idea who said it first, but I always attribute my first exposure to the journalism maxim in the headline to the legendary George Hesselberg from the Wisconsin State Journal. It’s become one of those things like, “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out,” where we all heard it from somewhere and it relates to a larger truth about our field. (Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark even wanted to name his book, “Get the Name of the Dog,” so trust me, if you haven’t heard it before, it’s out there.)

It popped up in my mind a couple times this week, particularly after Indiana won the national championship on Monday and a reporter asked coach Curt Cignetti about his reference to cracking open a cold one in celebration:

Aside from giving a massive platform to Upland Brewery in Bloomington, Indiana, and earning himself a lifetime supply of suds to boot, Cignetti helped fill in a detail that would likely make for a great story or 500 the next day.

Despite my father’s theory that the difference between a good beer and a bad beer is three of them, the brands of beer can convey a lot about the person drinking them and how they perceive themselves.

Consider this scene from the original “The Fast and The Furious:”

Rob Cohen, who directed the first film, said he felt Corona had the L.A. vibe he was going for with the film, so he put it in. In spite of not paying a dime for that product placement, Corona ended up with more than $15 million in free advertising throughout the series.

(SIDE NOTE: I’m working on a “Snide Guide to Beer Choice” that falls along the line of the “Bitter Personal Analysis of Your Font Choices” that we did a few years back. We’ll see if it gets there…)

Another reason I thought of that maxim came when I saw this press release from the local fire department:

The lack of a name for the dog isn’t the only problem with this release, as it’s got a number of holes that leave me scratching my head:

How bad is it? We can argue what “heavy” means and what it doesn’t, but I always have trouble when I’m faced with a comparative term instead of a concrete one. Think about it like this: The word “tall” is comparative. Are you tall at 6-foot-1? Well, if you’re in a kindergarten class, you’re a giant. If you’re on an NBA team, you’re a point guard at best.

This is where details matter: If you told me the house was uninhabitable due to that damage, I’d be closer to understanding how heavy it was. If you told me how much damage was done via a financial estimate (The fire caused $150,000 damage.), I’d be closer as well. If you told me the house and its contents were a total loss, I’d be OK as well. However, we lack details to fully understand this.

What else can you tell me about the house? I’ve got a two-story wood-framed dwelling, but that’s it. We tend to measure houses based on size (square footage) or rooms (a four-bedroom, two-bath home). That gives us a size of scope. It’s also important to understand if this was packed among a dozen other homes or by itself.

I did a quick Zillow search to see what I could find and this gave me a better sense of what we’re looking at. Still, we need a bit more help here than, “It was a house. It was on fire.”

The occupants: The first time we hear about them, we hear they weren’t home when this happened. Then, we find out that they apparently were given shelter at Jeff’s on Rugby, which is a local eating establishment. What I don’t know is how many there are, who they are or when they showed up. I also don’t know what’s going to happen to them next.

I understand that not all of this would have likely made any press release from the fire folks, but it is information I would expect to see in a story of any kind on this topic, as these are the details people likely want to know.

To that end, here are a few tips:

Get as many details as you can, sort them out later: I always assumed that a good editor was going to put me through the paces on what I had and what I didn’t have while they read my story. I remember at least one case where Hess himself asked me if I knew the names of the parents of a kid who had passed. I didn’t, and I really should have, so I had to go back out and get them somehow.

In another case, I had someone ask a coroner what was the caliber of the gun used to kill someone on campus. While that might seem prurient or pointless, I wanted to know because some guns make bigger noises than others when fired and supposedly “nobody heard anything” while this incident was taking place.

For all the times we ask really stupid questions like, “Your husband just died in a giant pork processing machine… How do you feel about that?” the least we can do is ask for details that might lead us to better storytelling later.

 

Put yourself in the shoes of the reader: One of the best exercises we do each year is a fire brief, in which we have the class members each write a short piece off of a fire department press release similar to this one. They almost all read exactly like this release.

Then, I’ll ask one of the kids in the class, “Let’s say you go home after class and your roommate says, ‘Hey, your mom was trying to reach you. There was a fire at your house.'” What would you most want to know FIRST?

The answers become obvious:

  • Is anyone dead or hurt?
  • How bad was the fire?
  • What the heck happened?

Then, we go back to the releases and start reading them aloud and they realize they either didn’t include ANY of that stuff or they put it in the wrong spots.

One of the best ways to get journalism done well is to think of the people for whom you are doing it. Start with their needs and interests and work backwards into your reporting.

EXERCISE TIME: Go pull a press release or a story and look for places where you think key details are missing. It could be “How many kids were in the class that won the award?” or “What made it harder to de-ice the roads this time?” It could even be, “So was it a Diet Coke or a Diet Pepsi?” See what’s not there and make a case for reasons you would want those details.

UPDATE TIME: Another AP style poster, big bin of exercises and information about the second edition of “Exploring Mass Communication”

With a bunch of folk already heading back to school, it seemed like a good time to boot up the blog and get back to the weekly schedule. Then, my body said, “Hey, what would it be like if you coughed so hard, you blew a blood vessel in one of your eyes?” To that end, the blog might be spotty until further notice, but I’m working on it…

Let’s kick it off with some free goodies that might be useful this year:

EXERCISES ABOUND: A few months back, I put together a bin of random exercises that I thought might be helpful to folks. They included everything from in-class writing pieces to some AI-oriented activities.

As a lot of folks might not have been teaching a class that needed them last term, or this might be the first time you found the blog, here’s a link to the previous post on that topic and the directions on how to get the bin of goodies.

Speaking of helpful…

A NEW VERSION OF THE AP STYLE POSTER: One of the other asks from previous semesters was a giant “cheat-sheet poster” of AP style stuff that most people tended to look up quite often. Sage did a fantastic job of building something out, but it got a great improvement over the break.

Jean Norman, professor of emerging media and journalism at Weber State University, hit me up with a new version that she had tinkered with to make it more helpful for more people:

I’ve been working on my spring classes and am incorporating your AP Style poster into them. I am grateful for all the work that went into it. You may be aware that the federal government is requiring all online work to be accessible starting in April. So I ran this through the accessibility checks and fixed the issues on that front.

I am attaching the accessible version. You will notice that some of the subheads are now black instead of white. That is for contrast and readability. I thought you might want this version to share for those with online classes.

Jean’s reboot can be found here for download. Thanks again, Jean, for improving on this situation and helping me help other folks.

Speaking of improvements…

HELP ME HELP YOU IN “EXPLORING MASS COMMUNICATION” EDITION #2: I got an email over the break from my main man, Charles, over at Sage, who let me know that “Exploring Mass Communication” is a go for a second edition. I honestly can’t thank you all enough for putting faith in me and my stuff, let alone taking the time to revamp your classes to fit my odd whimsical approach to content provision.

With that in mind, I’ve got the giant post-it note set up for the second edition, which will definitely include a stand-alone chapter on artificial intelligence.

The wall was looking naked for a while there…

HOWEVER, there is still plenty of room to add, subtract, multiply and divide, so I’m looking to anyone out there who is using the book, considering the book, thinking about the concepts of books in general or who just wants to add their two cents to the mix:

  • What do you like that we should keep in the book?
  • What is missing that needs to be added to the book?
  • What did you think was a colossal waste of time in the book?
  • How can we improve the book? (Caveat: I have no say over the cost of this thing, but I have actively pushed for it to be cheaper than whatever else is out there.)

In short, help me help you so this book can be exactly what you would want it to be.

And finally, if you or someone you know is a Wisconsin high school journalist, here’s a cool thing for them:

An intern from the  Wisconsin Chapter of JEA hit me up with an ask to share this with anyone I knew who might be a good candidate. I figured you all knew more people than I did, so let’s start with the blog and move on from there.

In looking at the WisJEA board, I realized at least two of the people on it are former students, as is the intern who asked me for help promoting this. They are all amazing people, in spite of somehow being connected to me.

For more information on this great opportunity, you can click here.

 

Want to be a better journalism professor this year? Learn how to weld

It’s not “stacked dimes” as they say in welding, but I was ridiculously proud of my first weld under Gene’s guidance. I need to figure out how to get this into my next textbook, somehow… 

If the headline seems a little click-baity for you, I totally get it, but hang with me for a bit here, and I promise this will make sense.

If welding isn’t your idea of a good time (or if you’re already a master welder on top of your professorial gig), the same thing can apply to any one of a number of skills that fit the following parameters:

It must be something you actually care about doing and doing well. For me, I not only wanted to learn to weld because I thought it was an amazing skill that seemed interesting, but I needed to learn how to do it to get my classic Mustang back into shape. Half the front end started rotting out somewhere in the past 15 years I’ve owned it and I can’t really afford to have someone go through it and rebuild it at about $175 an hour. Thus, I NEED this skill and I have to do it well.

It reminds me of my first stats class in my doctoral program: I’m in an undergrad pit class with a few master’s students thrown in for good measure. It’s at 8 a.m. and members of the men’s basketball team and one-third of the football team are there, barely paying attention. I’m writing things down like I’m getting a list of instructions on how to disarm a bomb I’m sitting on top of.

The difference was in value: They didn’t care about the topic and just needed a passing grade to survive. For me, I HAD TO HAVE this skill if I was ever going to get my Ph.D.  That’s the level of “care” I’m talking about here.

 

It must have an actual, tangible outcome that can be measured in terms of quality and accuracy. I spent the past 20 years or so learning how to refinish furniture. The tangible outcome was the beat up dresser or mangled table that I restored to something more useful and less ugly. The same thing is true of a task like knitting or sewing: You can have beautifully made clothes or things that look like your cat was playing with a ball of yarn or string.

Like most skills, practice can improve the outcome, which is something that can be measured either concretely (the outcome of a statistical analysis) or with an eyeballing of the item (the table looks nice, great or amazing). You need to pick something where tasks lead to outcomes and those outcomes can easily range from poor to perfect.

 

THE BACKSTORY ON ALL THIS: When I went to start the Mustang up this summer, I realized that the battery tray under the hood had rusted to the point where the battery was actually going to fall through a hole in the car. As I started trying to disassemble that part of the car, I realized this was all constructed with spot welds in the factory.

In short, I had to drill out all the welds, pry the metal pieces apart and then weld a new piece into place.

By the time I got into it, I realized there were a lot more pieces that needed to be replaced if this car was going to survive, so I couldn’t just get someone to come over and weld one piece for me. I needed to learn how to weld myself or else this was never getting done.

The tech out here offers great programs, but they tend to teach the classes when I’m at work. Furthermore, I’m told that most of that welding is meant for thick steel, like building car frames or working on giant pipes and stuff. I needed to learn how to do thin sheet metal welding.

The internet is always helpful, but it wasn’t enough in this case, so I put out a plea to folks around me via Facebook for a welding instructor. I offered to pay whatever they wanted for an afternoon or two, explaining I knew my way around tools, but had no welding experience.

This is Gene. He totally rules.

A nice guy named Gene agreed to help out. He was probably about 10-15 years younger than I was and he had learned welding by doing it with his dad. He picked up his certifications later, adding tools to his toolbox, but he retained that simple, “Watch, understand, now do” approach from his dad’s tutelage.

So, one rainy Saturday in August, Gene came over to my garage and helped me learn the basics of welding, which are pretty inconsequential for most of you here. That said, here are the things I picked up from that experience that I honestly think might be helpful for improving (or maintaining a high standard of) teaching:

Remember what it’s like to be afraid

When I decided I was going to make the leap into welding, I picked up what I thought was a decent used welder, some safety gear and a welding station. It then sat in the garage for more than two months as I read every book and watched every “expert” on YouTube to figure out what to do.

The truth of the matter was, I was scared.

The fear definitely came from at least one video titled something like “Five ways to kill yourself by making a mistake while welding.” However, it was deeper than that, in that I wanted to be good at it, the advice on how to get good was so varied and everything about this process seemed foreign to me.

When was the last time you were honestly afraid of being terrible at something important to you? How hard was it for you to attempt doing that thing? Also, if you were in a room full of other people that you automatically assumed were better at this thing than you are, how tense and awkward are you feeling?

Even when it was just Gene and me, I had trouble pulling the trigger on the welder. He never gave me any sense he’d make fun of me or tell me how bad I was at this, but I still didn’t want to be the guy who he talks about when he meets up with his buddies later and says, “If you think YOU wasted your day, lemme tell you about…”

As much as we say we can all remember being a student in class or being at the beginning of our journey as journalists, it’s a whole different thing to actually be AT that point. Furthermore, maybe we were better at journalism than these kids perceive themselves to be, so it’s gotta be even worse at that point.

 

There is a difference between a rule and a preference

Various areas of education have specific rules to them that are unbreakable, while other areas have malleable rules, strongly suggested approaches and nuanced levels of preference. As I have aged in this field, I’ve found that the more I lean toward teaching the latter, students tend to crave the former.

As a welding student, I could understand why: Rules provide certainty. Rules lead to specific outcomes. Rules are easier than nuance.

In short, rules rule.

In watching all of the welding videos, I went looking for rules. There were rules as to how to set up my welding helmet so I could see my arc, but not go blind. There were rules as to how big of a hole I should drill in sheet metal to make the appropriate plug weld. There were rules as to the type of wire to use, the settings on the welder, the way to prepare the metal for welding and more.

The problem? All of these rules that each welder told me ran contrary to what every other welder told me. All of which left me more confused and upset when I would try to replicate their work and end up with really miserable results.

Gene was great because he helped me see that a lot of what these guys were calling “rules” were just preferences based on how they had learned or what they felt was best. Even more, breaking any of those rules wouldn’t leave me blind and on fire with giant holes blown through the sides of my car.

The only rules that really mattered, he explained, came down to looking for specific things that happened and reacting accordingly. When the wire sticks to your weld, you’re too far away. When you blow a hole in the metal, you have your settings too high. Start dark on the helmet and move up until you can see but it doesn’t feel overwhelming.

I know that a lot of folks like to lay down a lot of rules with rubrics and scales and “do-this, not-that” requirements, and that can help in some cases. However, I also know that as a student, I started feeling trapped by the rules, especially those that didn’t really work out all that well.

My goal for this year has been to stick with only the rules that are absolute, don’t-break-them-or-else-level rules. The personal preferences, I’m going to explain and moderate with the idea of making sure they hang onto the big things and stop freaking out about everything else.

 

Explain “how” and “why” a lot

Expertise provides you with a sense of internal logic that allows you to accomplish tasks easily and seamlessly without a lot of thought going into them.

In furniture restoration, it can be picking what grit of sanding disks I use to remove layers of age and crud. In the pinball world, it’s tracking circuits through a diagram to determine which ones aren’t making contact. In journalism, it’s knowing which words to use, in which circumstances, to best tell the story that needs to be told.

The problem for most of us is that we’ve attained the level of expertise in our field, so much so, that we don’t always slow down to explain ourselves to the students. What is natural for the professor needs to be learned in a high-detail way for the student.

Almost from the beginning, Gene was preemptively offering me “how” and “why” answers about the settings on the machine, the pattern he used in “stacking dimes” on a particular weld and how best to move the puddle along. That not only made me feel more confident, but it also helped me feel comfortable asking additional “how” and “why” questions on things that still confused me.

Students, generally, don’t want to ask questions because they fear looking stupid, or because they assume if no one else is asking a question, nobody else must have that question. When those questions are about how something works or why we approach a concept in a certain way, it’s crucial to make sure they get answered one way or the other.

If you’re waiting for a student to ask a question, you’re likely waiting on the corner for a bus that had its route cancelled, so it’s really helpful to proactive in getting the “hows” and “whys” covered.

 

Encouragement makes all the difference

Contrary to all the click-bait ads I’d received on social media since mentioning an interest in welding, I knew I wasn’t going to be a master welder in one day. I also knew I had tried a few things before Gene agreed to teach me and they looked like absolute garbage to me.

What Gene did, which is something I have to constantly remind myself to do in a classroom, is provide encouraging feedback.

He looked at my earliest attempts and was able to tell me what was wrong with them, in terms of the settings on the machine and the speed of my welding. However, he also pointed out the things I should keep doing, as they were promising first efforts.

“You’re balancing it right,” he told me as he referenced the gun. “You’ve also got a good angle when you’re dragging.”

When I did my welds with him, he was quick to offer encouraging pointers. It wasn’t, “This part is good, this part is bad,” but rather  “Can you see how much cleaner this one is than your last one? That’s great!” He also helped me understand why my welder wouldn’t produce the immaculate welds I was seeing online.

“You’re using flux-core wire,” he told me. “Those guys aren’t showing you that. They’re using a gas set up, which is always going to have less spatter. You aren’t spattering any more than anyone else using flux.”

As a struggling student, all I wanted to know was that I didn’t suck and that I wasn’t a lost cause. When I applied that thought process to lead writing or inverted-pyramid briefs, I realized that even just a “Hey, good verb choice there!” could make a huge difference.

The thing I realized about Gene’s encouragement was that when he was ready to leave, I not only felt like I COULD do some welding on my own, but I WANTED to persist in the activity. I had an excitement about trying things to make them better and wanting to send him pictures of what I had done. It wasn’t about impressing Gene, but rather showing him what he had brought out of me and thanking him for it.

If I can do that for one or two kids this year, I’ll call it a win.

Have a great start to the semester!

Vince (a.k.a. the guy who loves to weld now)

My first four-side pipe weld. That sucker isn’t coming apart any time soon. Gene said it looked amazing, which makes it even better. 

Blog Post No. 1,000: A Bit of Heartfelt Gratitude to Sage

When Sage had me start this blog eight years ago to promote my reporting book, I did so under two strict conditions:

  1. I had total control over the content. They couldn’t demand, require or censor anything I decided to post here.
  2. This was not going to be a “rah-rah site” that just pimped out my books or blindly praised the company that published them.

With those two things in mind, I decided to dedicate the 1000th post of this blog to the company that changed my life 12 years ago and that has my loyalty for as long as they’re willing to have it. Please consider this an honest, heart-felt endorsement. 

My bookshelf the day I got my very first copy of my very first book for Sage. At the time, I couldn’t believe I had three titles with my name on them, and one with my name only on it. 

 

I can still see the strange confluence of events that happened at an AEJMC convention in Washington, D.C. that really altered the trajectory of my life and led me down a path that has made me ridiculously happy as a teacher, a writer and a colleague.

I was a few years into what seemed to be a terrible professional decision to come home to Wisconsin and teach at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. I had given up a job where people loved me, I had a sparse teaching load and I advised one of the best college newspapers in the country for a position that required me to give up rank, take a pay cut and work with at least one “colleague” who had publicly expressed disdain for my hiring.

(Another colleague told me that in the meeting where my hiring was announce, at a pay level that was a 25 percent cut from where I was coming, mind you, this individual stated, “For that kind of money, we could have gotten someone good.” Eeesh.)

The biggest problem I was facing was teaching basic media writing to students across a wide array of disciplines, including advertising, public relations, print-style news, broadcast, interactive web management and more. My background in news was seen as a bias and the books I could offer as texts basically crapped all over everything that wasn’t a newspaper reporting job. Thus, I set out to find a text that would make for a more equitable discussion of media while still imbuing students with the core elements of media writing that most news-writing texts professed.

Matt Byrnie, who was an acquisitions editor staffing the Sage booth at AEJ that year, asked me to sketch out a concept for a book like the one I needed and then meet with him later in the conference. Despite having my name on two books already at that point in time, I had no idea what to do here. That said, in the middle of an interminable panel session, I found a bit of hotel stationary and started scratching out a few concepts. The idea wasn’t necessarily WHAT needed to be taught, but rather HOW to approach this concept.

The rough sketch of what I pitched to Matt Byrnie still hangs in front of me every day in the office. It reminds me of what I promised I’d do and how important it felt to do it well at that point.

After our meeting, Matt seemed enthused, but I’d been there before with people in publishing: At first they’re all excited and then they ghost you like you owe them money. Still, I reached out to Matt and pitched the book. He not only agreed to do this one, but he also had me pitch a second book at that point as well.

He hung in there with me as I fumbled about the process of meeting the needs of his production team while I tried to stick as close as I could to the “rules of the road” I built on that bit of scratch paper. He was enthusiastic and supportive, kind and decent. He made me feel like what I was doing mattered, not just because it could sell X units for a corporate overlord, but because he thought it could add value to the field.

If it had all started and stopped with Matt showing faith in me, I would be fine with Sage, but not nearly as loyal as I am. Shortly before “Dynamics of Media Writing” launched, Matt reached out to me and told me he had been promoted and that my book would now be in the hands of some Terri person I’d never met. I lost my mind, thinking, “Here we go again. I’m totally screwed.”

Instead, Terri turned out to be every bit the partner Matt was. So was the person who followed her when she left the field, and so was the next person after that person got promoted. And on and on it went. Each editor I worked with from Janae to Lily to Anna to Charles and more gave me the sense that I was the most important thing in the world at that moment and that they’d do anything to help me get where I thought my work should go.

They encouraged me to try new things like the blog, guesting on podcasts, doing videos and more. They also provided financial support to keep the lights on at the blog, professional support to make sure the podcasts didn’t sound stupid and strong editors to make my videos look a lot less like a guy filming a hostage video in Saw’s kill room.

They also supported me in some of my more insane ideas, even as I’m sure they had to endure a few moments like this in explaining me to their bosses. When I decided to wear a bulletproof vest around for a week and write about it on the blog, they didn’t try to talk me out of it.

When I referred to promotional efforts as “book pimping,” they winced, but didn’t tell me to knock it off. When I decided to take the 11-day forced vacation from UWO and turn it into a John-Oliver-esque “furlough tour” complete with T-shirts to commemorate the event, Sage not only supported it, but they bought T-shirts for their staffers.

The person who bought the shirts for her team was Staci Wittek, probably the best person I’ve ever had the privilege of working with at any level, anywhere. Staci’s official title is Senior Product Specialist, Communication and Media Studies at SAGE Publications, but that doesn’t come close to what she has done for me (and I’m sure many others) who have books under her watchful marketing eye.

She’s had me do videos for her reps to explain the book, reach out to potential leads on behalf of reps, build additional resources for people who need them and more. She’s also so willing to do pretty much any ridiculous promotional idea that comes rolling out of the junk drawer that is my brain.

Without Staci, none of my books would have succeeded because she put so much work, energy and faith into what I’ve built. She’s the difference-maker, like Michael Jordan was with the Bulls.

The reps for Sage stop by my office for a chat every time they’re on campus. It’s always, “What can I do for you, Vince?” not “Here’s how you need to help me sell your stuff.” We laugh about various things, share stories and get to know each other. It really does have that family vibe, a rarity in a day and age where corporate culture and survival of the fittest seem to rule the roost.

Every time I part company with someone from Sage, I always say the same thing: “Thanks for everything, and if you ever need anything, just tell me what it is and you’ll get it.” It’s the same thing I say to my students, my colleagues and everyone else who matters to me in life.

And by the way, here’s that same bookshelf, 10 years later…

The books in Chinese and Arabic are two translations of one of my textbooks. You have to take my word for it, as I had to take someone else’s word for it. If you read either language, and it turns out they’re actually “Mein Kampf” or something, please tell me so I can fix this…

Thanks for everything, Sage folks. I look forward to the next great adventure.

Most sincerely,

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

Four Questions To Help Journalism Professors Rethink Finals

I’m sure it really feels like this when taking the exams in some courses, particularly when you forget that just because you didn’t show up for 21 class periods, it doesn’t mean we didn’t talk about anything that day… 

Whoever said this is the “most wonderful time of the year” clearly wasn’t a college student or professor. As the winter semester comes to a crashing conclusion, papers come flying in at the last minute, pleas for extensions clog email in-boxes and exam cheating operations make James Bond plots look simplistic by comparison.

If you could bottle the tension and stress in your average college at this point in the term, you could power every car Elon ever built for the rest of time.

Finals week always bothered me for a number of reasons, which I explained to a student last week:

“Essentially, each class you take is choosing the exact same time to have you complete one of the most difficult and comprehensive parts of the class, thus spreading you incredibly thin and almost guaranteeing you won’t be capable of putting forth your best effort. In addition, each of these parts carry with them an extremely high percentage of your grade, all at a time in which you have the least amount of time or motivation to complete them. Oh, and it’s highly likely you’re either sick or getting sick and you have everyone on earth asking you to tell them when they can expect to see you for the holidays.”

I get that comprehensive finals in a single time period is a tradition, but then again so was throwing a virgin into a volcano for a while. I also understand that these kinds of exams are crucial for certain fields, like nursing. The last thing you want is to be assigned a nurse who tells you, “Oh, yeah, I bombed the final on passing medication to patients, but it was only 10 percent of my grade and I made up for it with some extra discussion points. Now, which of these little blue thingies am I supposed to give you?”

That said, in journalism and other media-related fields, we aren’t in a life-or-death situation and I often wonder why we feel it necessary to back load courses with these monstrous projects, papers and exams. As a result, many years ago, I shifted a few things around when it came to finals in an attempt to address some of the flaws in the system I listed above.

Here are a few questions that led me to certain choices I made, especially in regard to my media writing and reporting courses. I don’t know if they’ll change anyone else’s mind but I’d like to think they’re worth pondering:

 

Should it be a paper, a project or a test? Ask 100 students what they prefer for a final assessment of their work and you’ll get a wide array of answers. Professors tend to break things down into final papers, final projects or final exams, each of which can be dialed in based on the type of class they are teaching and to what degree each method best assesses learning.

And of course there are those of us who do whatever requires us to do the least amount of grading while we’re grading 112,001 other things at that point in the semester.

There are a number of reasons to reconsider whatever it is we’re doing for this grand finale. Term papers used to be a bulwark against cheating on tests, but with AI, that’s no longer the case.

Exams used to give professors more control, but with the broad range of special accommodations available to students, it can feel more variable than ever.

Group projects always seem like a good idea, until the whole process feels like trying to herd cats and there always ends up being one kid who basically has to “LeBron” the whole thing to get it over the finish line.

Given all of this, it’s a pretty good idea to do a few pro/con lists on these options.

 

Does this need to be cumulative? In a lot of cases, tests do need to be a full recounting of the entire semester. However, not every class has that need, and to make a test cumulative actually draws attention away from whatever you were doing in the second half or final third of the course (depending on if you do midterm and final or five-week, 10-week, final exams).

In my media-writing classes, we don’t do cumulative exams, per se, in that if they ask for multiple choice questions, they don’t have to cover the entire pile of content we discussed. Obviously, there is some level of “culmination” going on, in that when they’re writing, it takes into account all the things we learned about writing. I can’t have a kid writing sentences without a verb in them because, “Well, we covered verbs in the first half of class and you said this wasn’t cumulative.”

 

How much should this be worth? When I was an undergrad many years ago, I took a class I absolutely loved on Greek mythology. The professor was engaging, the TAs were great and I still have the text packets in my house somewhere to this day.

What I didn’t love was the final, as it was somewhere in the range of 50-60 percent of the course grade and it was insane. The guy brought in 100 slides for a slide projector and each slide contained a piece of pottery, a sculpture or a mural that depicted some aspect of Greek myth. We had to write a short block of text for each one that identified and explained each myth.

About 100 slides, 120 minutes and several blue books later, I realized that I could itch my right elbow with my right hand, thanks to the massive writing cramps I had just experienced.

To this day, I still see almost no point in doing this to a group of students. A class that covered 16 weeks basically came down to a two-hour block of time for no real reason. Also, the professor had people scouting the place like Secret Service agents, seeking out potential cheaters because so much of the grade relied on this one element.

So there were three inherent problems associated with this approach:

  1. Students could either save or kill their grade with one “Hail Mary” throw to the heavens.
  2. The incentive to cheat was magnified because this thing was worth so much of the grade.
  3. Nothing I was asked to do in that exam proved anything, other than I could write with my hand in excruciating pain.

Once I became a professor, I identified another problem: Me.

For starters, I realized as much as the kids weren’t on their game, thanks to the deluge of work they were facing, neither was I. After digging through a massive mound of exams or papers or whatever, I found that after 85 kids did a specific stupid thing, I was really likely to take out my frustration on the 86th kid who did it as well.

I might have been sharp on the first couple dozen papers while spotting AP errors, but some tired eyes might let a few compound modifier issues slip later. Maybe a spelling issue slipped by on the first couple, but I figured it out later and thus there was an imbalance of fairness.

All of this led me to decide having a mega-final wasn’t really a great idea, so I started cutting back on the percentage of the course value any final project was worth. It made it easier on the kids, who could then dedicate more time to other finals that were significantly overvalued. It also made it easier on me, so that I didn’t feel like I was disarming a bomb with every point I was deducting or adding.

 

What’s the value in the exercise? I have found over the years that students will dislike a lot of things I do. It’s the nature of the beast, particularly when I’m teaching media writing to people who either a) hate writing and don’t want to do it or b) have always been told they are god-like in their writing, only to find out that they aren’t.

Still, in spite of all of the complaints, I’ve rarely gotten students saying what I had them do was unfair or pointless. I’d like to think the reason for that is because I make sure to tell them the point of what they’re doing as they’re doing it.

My reporting kids have called my midterm “The Midterm from Hell,” but they all seem to survive it and they learn something. In this case, they learn how to operate under tight deadline constraints, work around unforeseen problems and generally that journalism is never done, it’s just due. They aren’t thrilled, but they get it.

One of the PR classes I took over had a group project built into it and I thought about scrapping it due to issues of fairness. (Read: I was always the kid who had to “LeBron” the thing at the last minute because I wasn’t going to lose my grade because Beavis McGee decided he wanted to repeatedly clear a six-foot bong  this weekend instead of writing up his part of the project.)

However, in talking to the professor of the class, she explained that group-based work (particularly when forced to work with people you don’t agree with) in PR was crucial to being a functional member of an agency. So, I kept it and explained that to the kids. It seems to have worked, as there was less grumbling than I would have expected.

I tend to think that everything I do in class has a purpose, which is why I hold myself to the standard that I need to tell a student why something is valuable if they ask why they need to do it. If I can’t fully explain why I’m doing what I’m doing, I can’t expect buy in from the students at any level. At that point, it just feels like I’m a kid chasing ants around with a magnifying glass on a sunny day.

So, in the case of an exam, what’s the point? Do I want them memorizing things so they can recite them on the spot? If so, why is that important? Do I want them analyzing a social media post for errors. If so, what can they do with that later in their school or professional careers? Do I want them writing under deadline pressure? If so, how will this improve them as they prepare for life outside of school?

A final exam, paper or project needs to have that “This matters because…” explanation or the whole thing is likely doomed from the start.

 

I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on this or if you have a strategy for finals that goes a different way. Feel free to post in the comments below.