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Journalism, Journalism Education and Generative AI (Part II: The Perils of Generative AI)

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Since AI isn’t going away any time soon, journalists and journalism educators are in a bit of a bind when it comes to how best to use it or to help students use it appropriately. This week, we’re doing a three-part series on the blog this week that take that “overhead” view of generative AI from three key angles:

    • The tools
    • The potential perils
    • The human angle

We covered the tools in Monday’s post, so if you missed it, you can catch it here.

As for today, let’s consider the perils of generative AI:

WE LOSE SELF-SUFFICIENCY: I will never disparage the concept of technological advances. Microwaves have allowed me to feed myself from college up to this morning without burning down my humble abode. Seat warmers have kept my rear end from flash-freezing to those leather-ish seats of the Subaru on most winter mornings in Wisconsin. The implementation of whatever stretchy stuff they’re making blue jeans out of these days has allowed me to keep fooling myself that my size hasn’t changed over the past five years.

Even as a journalist, I’m grateful that recorders have allowed me to significantly reduce the scrawl and shorthand I used to use while interviewing folks. Google has made it exponentially easier to ease my paranoia when I write something and then think, “Wait… are you SURE that’s right?” Even better still, I am entirely grateful that I no longer have to hold a piece of correction paper in between my teeth while banging out a story on an IBM Selectric typewriter, as I did back in high school.

The problem is that when we become overly reliant on technology, we are at the mercy of its functionality and lack the ability to cope when it fails. I’m not even talking about that “everything will cease to exist” failure. I’m talking about basic stuff that used to be common sense until computers just did the work for us.

(The analogy I immediately think of is my dad paying at a fast-food restaurant with cash. The kid punches in the total and it’s like $11.28. Then, Dad will say, “OK, here, let me give you three pennies to make it easier” after the kid assumes Dad’s just giving him a $20. Watching this kid try to do the math in his head because of those three frickin’ pennies is enough to make you weep for the future of humanity.)

Back when I was in doctoral school, the stats professor I had for my analysis of variance class made us do all the statistical calculations for an ANOVA by hand. This took forever and a day and ate up about 10 pages of notebook paper for each one. When we bitterly complained that we’d be using a computer to do this in a fraction of the time, he’d tell us, “Yes, but if you don’t know how to do each step, you’ll never know why it works the way it does. You’ll also never know if the computer is right or not.” As annoying as it was, I can still just look at an ANOVA result and figure out if I punched something in wrong, thanks to Dr. Osterlind.

There has always been an effort-free default option for everything, even back when you were learning to tie your shoes. If mom or dad was in a hurry, they’d say, “Here. Let me do that.” OK, fine, but if they never let you learn how to do it for yourself, you’d be totally screwed at this point. (Or into cowboy boots, shower shoes and a lot of velcro.) Some level of self-sufficiency has to be built into the process.

 

WE DON’T KNOW WHAT’S IN THE AI “BOX:” One of the biggest complaints I get about my intro to writing class, other than I keep having it at 8 a.m., is that I make the students buy the print edition of the AP Stylebook and read the whole thing. Random assignments and quizzes are part of the check-in approach I take to seeing how well this is working.

Students find out that for about the same amount of money, they can buy a digital version that provides them with a search-engine function, so they want that one instead. I tell them, “Once you move into the upper-level classes, that’s an option. Until then, you’re reading the damned book in print.”

My rationale is pretty basic: If you don’t know what you’re looking for and you don’t know if it’s in there, you’re at a disadvantage when it comes to finding it. Thus, if you read the book, you get a handle on the things that AP gets all hot and bothered about and thus you are making mental notes about the kinds of things you should look up. At that point, a search function is your friend, not a game of “Wheel of Fortune.”

Generative AI is pretty much the same thing: If you don’t know what’s in the “box,” you have no idea what to expect will come out of it.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I entered a simple prompt that I figured a student in an entry-level civics class might toss in to avoid writing a short, basic essay:

“Write 200 words on how to deter criminal behavior”
Here is what ChatGPT came up with:

Deterring criminal behavior involves a multi-faceted approach that addresses the root causes of crime, enforces strong laws, and promotes a sense of community responsibility. Here are some key strategies to achieve this:

  1. Education and Awareness: By investing in education and awareness programs, communities can help individuals make informed decisions, reducing the appeal of criminal activities. Teaching ethical values and social responsibility from a young age can create a culture where crime is less likely to occur.
  2. Economic Opportunities: High unemployment and poverty are strongly correlated with crime rates. Providing meaningful employment opportunities and vocational training can reduce the incentive for individuals to engage in criminal activities.
  3. Strong Law Enforcement: A robust and fair law enforcement system is crucial. Visible policing, quick response to criminal activities, and the consistent application of justice can act as a deterrent to would-be offenders.
  4. Community Engagement: Encouraging community involvement in safety and crime prevention fosters a sense of ownership and shared responsibility. Neighborhood watch programs, for example, can help deter crime by creating a community that looks out for each other.
  5. Rehabilitation and Support: Implementing effective rehabilitation programs for offenders reduces recidivism. Offering support services like counseling, education, and job placement helps former offenders reintegrate into society, lowering the chances of repeat offenses.

By combining these strategies, communities can effectively deter criminal behavior and create a safer environment for everyone.

I have no idea where this all came from or why it went this way in terms of answering the question. I don’t know from which sources of information it drew its inspiration or how it decided to approach the topic in this fashion. I also have no idea if there are better or worse answers in there.
If all I know is that I wanted an answer to turn in for an assignment, all I know is that ChatGPT provided me with this answer.
As someone who has looked at various resources and looked into this topic before, I find it interesting that when prompted in this nature, chatbot made a couple key choices:

This leads to another primary concern associated with generative AI…

 

BIAS IN, BIAS OUT: The way AI platforms are trained is by exposing them to tons of content from a vast array of sources in which it kind of picks out a “prototype” of each element it can ascertain from what it has “seen.” The problem with that is the more mainstream content is likely to dominate while the less mainstream content is likely to get shoved aside.

In addition, just because something is shown or written about in a certain way, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it should be a representation of a larger thing. This is how stereotypes are built and reinforced. Consider the following image creations based on several prompts:

A server at a restaurant:

A criminal in court:

 

A basketball player passing a ball:

 

A boss of a company at a podium:

(In the future, you will all be ruled by this one white dude. To be fair, the iStock paid generator did slightly better, but not great.)

 

I tried these prompts with multiple AI generators and these were pretty much the standard fare. Notice we’ve got all fit and relatively attractive looking people in here. The servers are all young and female. The criminals aren’t white, and neither are the basketball players. (To say nothing of the fact only one of them is passing and one of them has two basketballs for some reason.) Bosses are predominantly male and in at least in one set of responses all white and young.

Authors T.J. Thomson and Ryan J. Thomas at The Conversation found similar problems in an assessment of AI, noting that the image generators demonstrated biases from racism and sexism to ageism and classism. As more and more people continue to generate content, this kind of things is only going to continue to build on itself until we’ve got a really stereotypical and myopic view of a lot of how society looks.

 

DIMINISHED CRITICAL THINKING: Most of what journalism requires of us is to be nosy and to dig into topics that are of interest to us and our audience. When we’re doing our work, if something goes wrong, or a source messes us over or we encounter a strange plot twist, we figure out how to improvise, adapt and overcome. In a broader parlance, the whole driving force behind this job is critical thinking and problem solving.

The risk of relying on AI for too much is that we can cognitively atrophy and find ourselves in a journalistic rut. This already happens in some cases, as I’ve seen with stories written about my own institution. When we decided to do a reorganization, the university announced which plan was going to be favored and the local paper did a piece on the topic. The entire thing was basically direct lifts from the press release statement and several other response statements issued about the topic. No deeper examination, no interviews with the stakeholders and no other content than what was provided.

I’ve also seen it where people decide that rather than look for sources to react to important topics, they’ll scan social media and do screenshots of some of the loudest voices out there. It’s like, “Don’t strain yourself reaching beyond your keyboard, buddy. Let’s not try to do some actual work here…”

Students already tell me things like, “I can’t get a quote in here from (NAME) because they didn’t email me back!” To which I follow up with a few basic concepts like emailing again, picking up the phone and calling the person or even going to someone’s office and talking to them. This isn’t Woodward and Bernstein sorting through library punch cards or something. This is “Can-You-Fog-A-Mirror-level” journalism stuff. If I had a dime for every “You mean I should call them… on the phone?” response I got, I wouldn’t need this job.

If the AI tools can help aid in your critical thinking by challenging you to think about things differently, or to consider options outside of your personal experiences, that’s great. If they tell you to stop thinking for yourself, that’s a bad sign.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE:  As much as I’m worried about kids getting lazy, that’s nothing new, really. When students figured out that the Encyclopedia Britannica could do a better job of explaining what an iguana is, they copied it straight out of the book. When students realized the kid next to them studied harder for the exam than they did, they “dropped their pencil” a few times and took their time leaning over to pick it up. When students realized they could punch search terms into a computer and get an answer better than the one they came up with, they found the copy and paste keys. Generative AI is just the next stage of this process and we’ll all eventually catch on and catch up.

What really bothers me about AI is when it basically becomes a black box.

I don’t have to fully understand how everything I use on a daily basis works, but I do feel better when I have a general grasp of a situation. For example, I might not be able to fix the pump on our well, but when I see smoke coming out of it and we have no water in the house, I can surmise what’s going on and call a plumber. If the plumber comes out and can tell me what happened, I can pretty much follow along. I’m fine with that.

What I’m not fine with is “heavy mystery time” in which we have no idea what a major piece of our lives is doing and people have an increasingly difficult time explaining it to even other people who work in that field. The reason is that it’s hard to trust things that can’t be explained, and even more, it’s hard to believe they will benefit people other than their creators.

I go back to this clip from “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” which chronicles the rise and death spiral of Enron. Financial expert Jim Chanos didn’t buy the bull that Enron was putting out and when he asked the analysts to explain how Enron was making its money in a clear and coherent fashion, he got the “black box” speech:

In other words, trust us… It’s fine… Until it’s not.

NEXT TIME: Why can’t we have nice AI things? Because people are… well… human.

 

 

Journalism, Journalism Education and Generative AI (Part I: The Tools For Your Toolbox)

One of the cool things about doing “mechanic stuff” is that parts manufacturers and tool companies would give you stickers for your toolbox when you purchased their wares. Enjoy an AI version of an AI toolbox. (via Pixlr)

After I posted about the need to smack around students who used AI to do their work, a colleague asked a really important question:

(P)lease allow me to respectfully play devil’s advocate here. AI is here to stay. We are not going to manage to get rid of it in our lives and in our classrooms. Students will keep using it no matter how many drums we beat for them not to. So, why don’t we instead embrace it and start teaching them how to properly use AI – responsibly and ethically? We can turn this into a tool for all. A friend, not a foe.

She’s definitely right in that AI isn’t going away and people will use it no matter what we say, something the folks at Arizona State University’s student newspaper learned the hard way last week. The State Press retracted 24 articles a reporter had written after staffers discovered the pieces were the work of generative AI.

It’s worth noting here that ASU is actively partnering with OpenAI to help students on campus see the ways in which generative AI could be used responsibly and ethically. That’s not to pin the blame on the university for the State Press situation, but rather to demonstrate that even with efforts to properly train and guide students, you’ll usually run into a chucklehead or two.

To take a look at AI from more of an “overhead” view, we’re doing a three-part series on the blog over the next week that will look at it from three key angles:

    • The tools
    • The potential perils
    • The human angle

Let’s start with the tools:

HOW GENERATIVE AI WORKS: According to technology experts, generative AI models take large, complex pieces of information and break them down into simple elements that the AI system can retain easily and replicate on demand. The technology is essentially “trained” by introducing it to millions and millions of pieces of content, which it uses to make sense of concepts and then generate new material.

AI scholars at MIT have noted that this approach is not new, in that computers have done these kinds of things on data sets and science hypotheses for decades. What is occurring now is just an outgrowth those early efforts, with computers consuming vast amounts of written and visual material, breaking it down into simple pieces and then recreating new things based on the “rules” it learned during its examination of the content.

This is also how humans learn, as we learn how to write in the inverted pyramid format or paint a picture in the style of one of the great artists, like Picasso or Renoir. Theoretically, what makes this different is that humans are taught other things like morals and ethics (as well as societal norms) that serve as kind of a traffic signal for what they “should” or “shouldn’t” do, as opposed to just what they “can” or “can’t” do, based on the requirements of a prompt.

 

AI TOOLS THAT CAN BENEFIT YOU AS A JOURNALIST: Of all the analogies I’ve used over the years, the concept of putting “tools in your toolbox” has been the most frequent one. As much as it seems reductive, I like to think of each talent I have, skill I develop or lesson I learn as a tool I’m putting in a toolbox for later use.

In terms of AI, there are tons of great tools out there that can benefit you as a journalist, as they can automate mundane tasks, prompt you to think of things you otherwise wouldn’t and generally make life easier on you. Consider these options:

TRANSCRIPTION: One of the most time-consuming things journalists deal with is taking audio interviews and turning them into useful text for stories. AI has made transcription services both readily available and reasonably accurate. Tools of this kind, such as VG’s Jojo and Otter.ai, use algorithms to decipher speech patterns, pick through background noise and convert sound to text.

IMAGE GENERATORS: These tools have been the source of great fun for people who want to see what kinds of strange combinations of elements they can pair and how the image generator will display their humorous whims. However, AI image generators can assist journalists who are covering serious topics.

Newsrooms have long used photo illustrations and artists renderings to accompany stories in which more traditional means of capturing visual content isn’t possible. Image generators, like Image Creator from Microsoft and versions of DALL-E from OpenAI, can use text prompts from users to generate a wide array of potential visuals. As is always the case in journalism, any kind of illustration or created work should be labeled as such.

RESEARCH: In journalism, good writing is predicated on good reporting, which means we need to dig around a lot. Finding basic facts can be easy through current search engines like Google and Bing, but several companies are constructing AI tools that will allow investigative journalists to do significant deep dives in a fraction of the time. Google introduced Pinpoint in 2024, which is meant to help journalists and other researchers dig through vast quantities of documents to find specific content within the collection. Google states that a Pinpoint collection can contain up to 200,000 documents, including written text, images and audio files.

Other AI tools, like Artifact, which was recently purchased by Yahoo, can be used to create quick summaries of articles and files for you to give you a general sense if the piece is worth digging into more deeply or if it doesn’t fit your specific needs.

FACT CHECKING: The journalistic fact-checking motto has always been, “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out.” Thanks to advances in AI, that might be a lot easier than it used to be. Tools like Chequeado’s Chequeabot are capable of taking factual statements and comparing them to vast repositories of knowledge to determine the accuracy of those statements. These tools can help assess the validity of data-based statements through to public declarations that governmental officials make, in a quicker and more accurate fashion.

WRITING: A number of media organizations have attempted to use chatbots and other similar AI tools to write content for publication, with varying levels of results. Gannett attempted to automate some of its sports coverage, only to stop once it was clear the readers weren’t thrilled by the results. Sports Illustrated even went so far as to create AI staffers to augment their site, something they quickly pulled back from once the situation was discovered. This approach to using some of these content generators is often where problems occur and society at large tends to freak out. That said, it’s important to know how these tools work and that they can be exceptionally helpful. Tools like Writesonic, Notion AI and Text Blaze can assist you in restating material in new and innovative ways, offering suggestions as to how to approach a new topic and assisting you in search-engine optimization efforts. The key here is that these tools are meant to “assist” you, not do all the writing for you.

These are just some of the tools and options out there for you as a journalist. The Society for Professional Journalists maintains a giant list of similar tools for your consideration here.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: I’ve gone back and forth how best to approach AI, because, like so many other tools we use in life, it has both stated purposes and potentially problematic misuse options.

A hammer is a great tool and you can build a lot of cool stuff with it, but you can also use it to bash in someone’s head. The same concept is true of a knife: You can teach a kid to use a knife carefully and responsibly to help make dinner, while simultaneously explaining that, no, you can’t stick it into your sibling’s head because they took the last Mountain Dew out of the fridge.

(I suppose we could also argue that AI might be more like cocaine: We can’t teach you to “responsibly” use it and in merely introducing it to you, the risks outweigh the rewards. I don’t like that analogy, but given what people have been doing with AI, it perhaps merits a deeper look.)

What AI really lacks at this point that most tools have are things like an instruction manual and set of safety features to prevent unintended disasters. The instruction manuals tell you what each switch or button does on a tool and also how to avoid doing something pathologically stupid. The safety features also limit you in some ways, like putting a guard over a table saw’s blade or having a fuse blow instead of letting the whole thing catch fire. AI feels more like those sci-fi movies, where a human discovers a piece of alien technology and is just kind of winging it.

The other thing that makes AI more dangerous than other tools is that we don’t have learned masters under which we can apprentice, like we would in learning to use other tools. When I started working at the garage as a teen, I had a guy there who knew how to use every tool in the place. He helped me on everything from the basics, like which cars used SAE tools and which ones needed metric ones, to the big safety things, like how to prevent a tire machine from taking off my head with a giant iron bar. Here, we’re all relative newbies and as much as I like the idea of learning from my mistakes, I’d prefer to know if something is going to take my head off before I start playing with it.

NEXT TIME: The significant concerns associated with AI technology.

 

Ketchup, cauliflower (ear) and all the wonderful little observational moments that lead to great stories

One of the things students have told me they find difficult is finding stories outside of the typical news grind. If the police aren’t arresting someone, if the teams aren’t playing games, if important people aren’t giving speeches or if governmental groups aren’t having meetings, well… Now what do we do for content?

We’ve talked a lot about this in a variety of ways before, but one of the best ways to find stories is to stop looking for them as stories. Instead, just open up your mind to wonder and open up your eyes to the small things that you can see all around you.

This concept came to mind when a story from ESPN about the condition called “cauliflower ear” popped up randomly in my news feed. The condition has long existed among athletes involved in contact sports, such as boxing, wrestling and martial arts, but this author started with a basic question: “What do people who have it think about it and why?”

What follows is a deep dive into the “beautiful and grotesque honor of cauliflower ear.” The writer starts with a narrative thread about an MMA fighter whose goal since the age of 8 was to get one of these “badges of honor.” It then discusses the history, the medical condition, the attitudes people in sports have about it and the reasons why it is truly that honorific talisman for so many people these days.

The story reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell’s epic feature, “The Ketchup Conundrum.” The story started with an observation Gladwell made while walking through the grocery store’s condiment aisle: We’ve got like 912 kinds of mustard in here, but really only one type of ketchup. Why?

What followed was about 5,000 words that broke down the history of ketchup, the rationale of how kids came to love it, the psychological satisfaction that only a specific ketchup can provide and why everything else is just viewed as a pretender or a “sauce” instead of another form of ketchup.

In both cases, the concept started small and with a simple observation. The level to which the story grew was directly correlated to the writer’s interest in every aspect of the topic and the wild level of curiosity that comes from child-like wonder.

(In just looking at these two topics, I thought about two weird things like that right off the bat: Beauty marks/freckles and ramen. I wondered about how beauty marks form, grow and are in some cases good and others not so much. I also wondered how one type of ramen (Maruchan) became kind of like the McDonald’s hamburger of the ramen world here in the states. Plus I know that there are tons of ramen restaurants etc. blowing up as well.)

If you are having trouble coming up with stories, a lot of simple observations and general moments of wonder can get you on the path to something deeper than you ever imagined. Give it a shot and see what happens.

Four fun election-year stories that go beyond horse-race coverage

Journalists are often accused of doing “horse-race coverage” when it comes to elections, telling stories about polling data, attitudes toward key election issues and how to properly eat a corn dog at the county fair. The primary season is in full swing and with the November election is being talked about like this scene in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:”

With all of that in mind, consider a few stories that could be relevant, useful and dare I say fun for college journalists who want to break the election mold:

RENTERS OR OWNERS? WHO CHOOSES THE SIGNS? In driving to work each day, I pass a ton of student rental housing, including single-family homes and multi-unit apartment complexes. The lawns of a good many of them display signs that pitch candidates for local, state and national elections. The question that popped up in my head was this: “Who is supporting these people? The folks renting the place or the owner of the property?”

There is likely a set of rules in your city or state regarding the display and removal of political signage, so this might be a good time to look into this. It might also be interesting to pull the rental agreements to find out if there are any rules woven in the fine print that can explain who has the right to do what in terms of display and promotion like this. In today’s fractured political environment, I imagine that at least a few students would have some issues if a sign for CANDIDATE X was on their lawn and those students hated CANDIDATE X.

 

PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE OF DETAILS: Politics covers a great many things including party affiliation, issue stances and campaign promises, but often the smallest of weird details can win or lose someone an election. The story that Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder tells about making his first big betting win in politics touches on this: In a documentary, he notes that he put his money on Harry Truman after his sister told him that she wasn’t going to vote for Thomas Dewey because women don’t trust men who have mustaches.

Similar weird things have made a difference for politicians along the way. A former pol told me that he had been advised to use a shortened version of his name instead of the full name, because it sounded more relatable. In other words, if I were to run, I should be on the ballot as “Vince Filak” not “Vincent Filak” and certainly not “Vincent F. Filak, Ph.D.” Everything from the color and font people pick for their signage to the types of things they do or wear on the campaign trail can be part of this. Color gurus note that blue-collar voters prefer base colors like pure reds and blues, while more educated or sophisticated voters tend to go for obscure colors or muted hues.

A cool story might be to talk to poli sci and psych profs about this kind of thing if you can find an expert in the area. See if there is a way to separate fact from fiction and data from superstition.

 

THE STATE OF ELECTION SWAG: Over the years that I’ve visited estate sales, I’ve seen a wide array of election-related items for a wide array of office seekers. There were the Milwaukee Braves game schedules that included pitches for judicial candidates, bottle openers for city council reps and pin backs for all sorts of folks. Bumper stickers seem to always been in fashion, as are hats and signs and flags. There were also some weird spoons I saw once for someone running for something that was likely from about the late 1800s or early 1900s.

With everything seemingly going digital these days, are there more or fewer of these items being put forth by candidates? I think I got a Wisconsin sports schedule at a Fourth of July parade in Omro one year, and I know I can get a bumper sticker from either the Dem or GOP headquarters in Oshkosh. Beyond that, are there other creative items that are making the rounds or is swag on the down slope? What are some of the best/worst ideas out there, according to collectors. See what’s available to you on the average Saturday at the farmers market or a parade/rally.

 

ELECTION DAY FOR THE “DONE” POLITICIAN: When athletes retire, they often end up on those game day shows, where they talk about strategies and tactics and all that. They also often talk both publicly and privately about either missing the game or not missing the game at all. Getting this kind of insight is helpful and amazing to sports fans, who never once experienced what it’s like to be in a locker room or on a field like that.

Find a former politician who isn’t running for something and see if you can hang out during Election Day to do a piece that echoes the sports thing. It could be someone who lost an election and is dying to get back in or a person who retired and feels burned out by the whole situation. What’s life like for the “player” when they are no longer “in the game.”

 

UW-Madison gets sued to produce athletes’ NIL agreements, likely leading to an open-records battle with UW Foundation

THE LEAD: A journalist is suing UW-Madison after the public university refused to release documents related to name, image and likeness (NIL) contracts it has in place with student athletes. The university is playing a fantastic shell game here, claiming it doesn’t have the contract, but rather the UW Foundation does. The Foundation thus argues it doesn’t have to release the contract because it’s a private entity:

“There’s no good reason why UW-Madison should be using its foundation to effectively offshore public records,” journalist Daniel Libit told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Spokespeople for both UW-Madison and the UW Foundation said they hadn’t received the complaint and wouldn’t comment on pending litigation.

(ED NOTE: To clarify, the contract under discussion is the one between the UW and Altius Sports Partners, “a firm other large universities have hired to support student-athletes who can now profit from endorsement deals they strike.” Individual deals like athlete Bill Smith agreeing with Vince Filak Ford to appear in commercials are private contracts between private individuals and private companies and not subject to open records law.

If, however, athlete Bill Smith signed an NIL agreement of some kind with a PUBLIC institution, the public entity would would be required to fork over the paperwork. Bill Smith could still tell you to go to hell and take a left.)

BACKSTORY: The true NIL set up is about three years old, but it traces its history back to a lawsuit filed by former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon in the early 2000s. O’Bannon discovered that his likeness was being used in an NCAA video game and he was not provided with compensation for that.

The NCAA argued (as it had for generations) that O’Bannon was a “student-athlete” which meant he didn’t get paid in cash, but rather got a really cool scholarship and the ability to be exploited… er… part of a team sport. The courts thought differently and rendered a judgment of more than $44 million in legal fees. The upshot of that was that the universities were either going to have to stop making money off of student athletes (Hard No) or find a way to compensate athletes (Not thrilled, but grudgingly complied).

Thus, the NCAA let the students have say over their usage in commercials, endorsements and more. This is why you now see commercials like this one, with Iowa star Caitlin Clark:

 

CHAOS ENSUES: Name five things that happen when money gets involved in anything where money wasn’t there before, and at least four of them will not be pleasant.

Over the past three years, the NIL experience has fallen in line with maxim this for a number of reasons:

  • Laws differ from state to state and with no federal law on it, it’s the wild west.
  • Schools differ in terms of resources, so basically one place can essentially “buy” a college kid with the promise of a sweeter NIL agreement than wherever they currently play.
  • People have always taken advantage of student athletes for their own nefarious interests, only now the money getting thrown around is bigger and at least quasi-legal.

Long story short, the NIL situation is like spotting a cockroach in your house: Whatever you saw, chances are the problems you didn’t see are much worse. Thus, the need to pry records out from under whatever rock these institutions are keeping them to figure out what is going on.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: First, I really hope Libit wins because what little experience I have had with foundations and private money has shown me that there is likely a LOT of shady stuff going on related to the NIL situation.

I remember trying to find out how a coach’s contract was bought out, only to find the money came through a foundation. I tried to figure out how a student newspaper was staying afloat, only to find out that the money came through a foundation. In my own institution, we had a ridiculous game of three-card monte that almost landed our foundation in bankruptcy and our former chancellor in jail. In each case, the foundation pulled the “we’re a private entity” card and it wasn’t until everything went to hell in a speedboat that we even got a sniff of what had happened, if we found out at all.

Second, Libit is absolutely wrong about there being “no good reason” why UW-Madison is stashing these contracts somewhere that open-records requests can’t get them. It’s the same “good reason” people go out to eat at a conspicuous place, pay with a credit card and make sure everyone at the bar talked to them from 7-9 p.m. on a Tuesday, the exact time a hit man is whacking one of their enemies.

If I had a dime for every time a public official used some weaselly dodge to avoid creating or turning over public records, I’d probably be able to NIL my way into a great team here at UWO in every sport. There was Sarah Palin and Scott Walker using private emails to dodge open records when they served their respective states. There was Missouri’s governor, Eric Greitens, who had his staff using an app that destroyed messages after they were read to avoid open records requests.

And then there was the time Ball State told us that the documents pertaining to a provost search weren’t “open records” but essentially an “inter-office memo” only intended to be shared with the 35, 000 people at or around the university.

Third, and most importantly, if I were the people at Foundation, I’d give them the damned Altius contract right now. As it stands, courts haven’t ruled that foundation records are public. If these chuckleheads let this go through a court system and some judge (or multiple judges, as I’m imagining they’d appeal a loss) decides ALL their records ARE open, that’s not going to bode well for foundations everywhere. That’s not just me yammering. The pro journalists know it:

It’s like when people in the state of Wisconsin wondered, “Gee, why are the Republicans agreeing to Democrat Gov. Tony Evers’ redistricting maps after fighting against them for years?” The answer was, the court was going to make its own decision and it was likely going to screw them more than if they just signed off on Evers’ maps.

Of course, I’m guessing the Foundation isn’t going to be this smart, so it should be a fun fight to watch.

Read your stories for holes and plug them before you publish (A Throwback Post)

This is the last minute of what Sports Illustrated called the greatest sports moment of the 20th century and I remember watching it live as a kid. Today, it turns 44 years old, making me feel even older than I already feel…

On Feb. 22, 1980, the U.S. Olympic Hockey team, comprised of college kids and amateurs, took on the greatest team of hockey players ever assembled, The Soviet Union’s Red Army Club in the semi-final game of the medal round.

The 4-3 U.S. victory became known as the Miracle on Ice and after the U.S. beat Finland two days later, the “Boys of Winter” became the second U.S. Hockey team ever to win a gold medal.

Why do I tell you this?

  1. I love telling that story, so I’ll tell it every chance I get.
  2. It showcases the point of this throwback post: Don’t leave a hole in a story.

If you’re like most people reading this, and you hit that final statement about only being the second U.S. Hockey team to win gold, you might wonder, “OK, but when did they win the first gold?” In short, I teased some information and didn’t follow through.

(For the record, it was the 1960 team, which performed its own “miracle on ice” by defeating half the Communist countries on Earth, it seemed, en route to the gold. The captain of that team was a 34-year-old named Jack Kirrane, a firefighter from Brookline, Massachusetts, who sold his truck to pay for his travel to the tryout site and then went unemployed for four months for the privilege of being an Olympian. I could talk about this stuff for days…)

The point is, you need to look through your stories and figure out if you have left people hanging or if you have filled in every key hole that could pop up in your piece.

Take a read:

 

Stories with holes: It’s not really journalism if you leave me with more questions than answers

10 Cities With the Big Bad Pothole Problems | Firestone Complete Auto Care

If your story looks like this, you’ve got problems.

Sunday morning had me facing my own level of mortality when my dad flashed the obituary section of the paper in front of me and asked, “Did you know this guy?”

Sure enough, I did.

Peter and I had gone to high school together and even been on the debate team at the same time. He was a year ahead of me and was wicked smart. He tutored me in geometry, a Herculean task to say the least, and he was the school’s valedictorian the year he graduated.

He went off to two Ivy League schools, earning a law degree and spending much of his career in patent law out on the West Coast. He died far too young, at age 47, which left me with the question I’m sure most people would have asked:

“How did he die?”

Despite my best googling and research skills, I couldn’t figure this out. I asked a couple people we held in common over the years, only to have them asking the same question I had. I even emailed his law firm and they didn’t have anything to tell me.

Which leads us to the point of this piece: Journalistic content shouldn’t have your readers asking crucial questions when they are done with the story. When I teach editing, I refer to stories that have this problem as having holes. The job of reporters and editors is to make sure the holes get filled or discussed before a story is published.

In the case of obituaries, we’ve discussed this before and explaining that they’re more for the living than the dead, so we need to make sure they serve as a complete telling of the person’s life. It should be clear that the story of the person’s life is the most important portion of the story, but it also remains the case that the only reason we’re telling it now is because the person has died.

(Side note: When I worked at a newspaper a long time ago, the local style guide dictated that an obituary written on anyone under the age of 70 included the cause of death whenever possible, as most people would be curious of what caused this person’s too-soon demise. I found an older edition of the style guide, which required the COD for those older than 60. Several of us surmised that our boss changed it when he got older, as he didn’t want to be in the “acceptable to be dead” demographic.)

(Second side note: I have told Amy that when I die, however I die, she needs to include the cause of death in my obituary. I don’t care if I died breaking my neck by falling off the couch trying to kiss my own butt as part of a TikTok challenge. If it mattered enough for me to die while doing it, tell people. I don’t need folks speculating…)

In the case of larger investigative stories, holes can unintentionally undermine the credibility of sources. When something is missing and readers have questions, they can become suspicious of the entire story.

Case in point: The Kansas City Star dropped a bombshell story of a former KU football player who stated that several of his former teammates harassed and threatened him and his family. The allegations included a teammate loosening the lug nuts of one of his car’s tires, teammates bursting into his apartment to threaten his family and the athletic department trying to buy his silence to the tune of $50,000.

The story mentions four players, but never names them.

I spent half the story wondering who these former KU football players were.

I spent the other half of the story why, if these allegations were credible, the paper didn’t name these dudes who attacked and threatened this kid.

Neither question got answered in the text, leading me to wonder more about the kid making the allegations and the author of the piece than anything else.

Filling in holes like this can allow the readers to make up their own minds about the credibility of sources, the seriousness of a situation and a dozen other things. However, when they are left hanging, they can’t exercise proper judgment.

I recall reading a story more than a dozen years ago about a small-town beef between a mayor and a city administrator over something the mayor had said. The administrator called it something like “the most offensive slur I have ever heard” while the mayor said it was something like “just a plain-folks saying that was being misinterpreted.”

I read the whole story, waiting to see what was said. The writer didn’t include it, didn’t clue me in on what it might be (a racial slur, a demeaning phrase describing people with disabilities, a sexist remark) and also didn’t tell me why that wasn’t included.

The fact I remember this, while I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, clearly demonstrates that holes can stick with a reader for quite some time.

Here are a few things you can do to find and fill holes that will have your readers thanking you:

CONVERSE WITH THE READER AS YOU WRITE: Journalism has long had a tradition of filling in 5W’s and 1H or checking off news values and considering the job done. Those elements still have value, but we really should be spending more time focusing on the needs of the audience.

After all, when those tenets were crafted, journalists usually knew their audiences intimately and the number of sources of information were far more limited than they are now. Audience-centricity was baked into the process back then and people couldn’t just hop on the internet and find answers to their questions elsewhere.

A good way to make sure that you’re working for the audience is to imagine a conversation with the readers when you are writing. You tell them the most important thing you can and then follow the thread of how you imagine that conversation will go:

You: Hey, your mom called. There was a fire at your house around 2 a.m.

Reader: OH NO! Is everyone OK?

You: No one got hurt because the smoke detector woke them up and they got out right away.

Reader: How bad was the fire?

You: The house is a total loss. Firefighters say more than $200,000 in damage.

Reader: How did this happen?

You: The water heater in the basement got a short circuit and started some oily rags on fire…

When you’re done going through the process, see if what you’ve written does what it needs to or if there are holes. Also, you can review the ordering of your content to see if it follows the pattern of what you think they’ll want to know first. This helps you avoid starting the story with “The Berlin Fire Department, assisted by volunteer firefighters from the town of Aurora, responded to a report of a fire at 111 S. Main St. around 2 a.m. Sunday…”

IF YOU GIVE THE READERS DIRECTIONS, MAKE SURE THEY CAN FOLLOW THEM: A number of stories will tell people to do something or avoid something or respond to something. These stories become problematic when people aren’t told how to do these things.

Back when the illness we were all freaking out about was the Swine Flu (H1N1), a local daycare had an outbreak and had to shut down. The people at the daycare told parents to watch their kids carefully for symptoms of the illness. In fact, the story on the outbreak mentioned this important activity at least three times in six paragraphs.

The problem? The story never said what the symptoms were, so that wasn’t really helpful at all.

A similar story I remember reading was back when Zoe was about 4 and she really had an interest in Santa. The local paper reported that breakfast with Santa, which was in danger of being cancelled, had been green-lit, thanks to a generous donor. The whole story talked about how kids were going to have breakfast with Santa and that it was so great we didn’t lose breakfast with Santa and how important breakfast with Santa was.

The story never once mentioned when and where the event was taking place. Did the writer expect parents to wander the streets of Omro, looking for a fat guy in a red suit?

In the digital age, we can, obviously, look up things like H1N1 symptoms or local events on a city website, but that’s not the point. If we’re supposed to inform readers about important things, we need to go all the way. Saying, “Well, they can look it up” is akin to listing Chicken Kiev on the menu at a nice restaurant, and then serving patrons bunch of raw ingredients and a recipe card.

IF YOU CAN’T (OR WON’T) FILL THE HOLE, ACKNOWLEDGE IT: Not all holes in stories come from poor writing and reporting. In some cases, information isn’t available. In other cases, a publication decides to err on the side of caution while reporting. Even more, the publication might have a policy that prohibits the publication of certain content.

In those cases, you’re going to leave a hole. When you do, explain what’s going on so your readers can follow along:

“At the family’s request, the name of the MegaJackpot winner will not be released.”

“The cause of death has not been determined, the medical examiner stated.”

“In accordance with the Daily Tattler’s policies, stories do not name assault victims and instead provide a first-name-only pseudonym.”

Explaining WHY the paper wasn’t naming names could have been really helpful Kansas City Star story:

“Due to the lack of supporting legal documents/At the request of the paper’s legal team/Because we believed the kid enough to run the story, but not enough to risk a libel suit, The Kansas City Star is not naming the four players accused of harassing Caperton Humphrey…”

At that point, I could figure out if this was a case of “The lawyers won’t let us, even though we have the goods” or a case of “This story’s hanging by a thread anyway, so let’s not make it collapse.” Knowing which way the wind is blowing on this story would not only satisfy my own curiosity, but it would also make me feel more or less willing to share it on my social media.

In the end, make sure you’re giving the readers the most complete picture possible, even if that means explaining why that picture is incomplete.

Quality endures while quantity fades: Three helpful hints for finding ideas for rich, deep stories

I always liked this clip because it showed the importance of quality over quantity in some cases. That and it was essentially the moment Ford launched what I consider to be the greatest car ever made: The Mustang.

The nice people at the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association put this together to promote my Furlough Tour stop. All I could think when I saw this pitch was, “Dammit… I better be good at this…”

The Filak Furlough Tour hit Texas recently, as I got an opportunity through the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association to address students and advisers across the Lone Star State. The whole thing started with a basic request:

“One thing I see my students struggling with — and no doubt other campuses are the same — is staying on the surface. I’m seeing a dearth of deep dives, investigative and data-driven journalism, watchdog journalism, in-depth features. What we do have in abundance are truckloads of fluffy editorials.”

So, what’s the best way to get into all of this? Well for starters, here is Rule #1 to start you off in the right direction: You aren’t writing for yourself. You’re writing for an audience.

One of the main reasons people end up doing “fluffy editorials” is because they want to write things they care about. OK, that’s fine, but ask yourself this question: Does anyone else care about that thing?

I once had a student tell me that he planned to write an editorial for our student newspaper about how the U.S. should annex Puerto Rico. I remember asking him, “OK, but why should the readers of the Advance-Titan on the UWO campus care about this?” He stiffened up and said in a rather haughty voice, “EVERYONE should care about this!”

Um… OK… But a) do they? B) why should they? and c) what’s the point of it for a student newspaper on a regional campus in the middle of Wisconsin?

He didn’t get it, but my point was this: Writing about things you care about without thinking about your audience and what matters to the people out there is like deciding to become a chef at very nice restaurant because you like to eat. A chef is cooking for OTHER PEOPLE, so that’s where the joy and purpose lives. I wouldn’t want to go somewhere, order a steak and lobster dinner, only to have my server return with a plate of weird green stuff, explaining, “The chef feels strongly that people should be eating more organically braised kale, so enjoy!”

In terms of writing surface stuff, the reason why we end up doing it is because it’s easy and we’ve been trained to grind out pieces. There’s nothing wrong with learning how to bang out speech or meeting stories if you can find things that matter to your audience (see rule 1 above). However, as much as journalism is about quantity, it’s also about quality. You can’t just spend your whole life doing nothing but menial stories or you’ll want to throw yourself in front of a bus at some point in life.

Besides, quality endures while quantity fades.

Here’s what I mean. Every year, students come to campus and set up their apartments. They go to Walmart or Ikea and find a $50 tagboard piece of crap kitchen table and build it for the year. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of thing for students on a budget, especially if you’re sharing a house with people who view vodka as a food group and throw more parties in the place than a birthday clown on meth.

However, it’s never going to retain value or have lasting power. Throughout the year, I see broken ones of these tossed on the side of the road in front of apartment row on campus. A leg gave out, a side fell off, the top broke. At the end of the semester, none of those things is still around.

Contrast that with the table my great grandmother bought the year my grandmother was born. It lived in her house for decades and it was where all the meals of the family were eaten, the bills paid, the problems discussed. When holidays came, they tossed a couple leaves in there to make it big enough to accommodate everyone who could attend.

After she died, her son took the table with him and used it at his art studio. It withstood easels being banged on it, paint being dripped on it, brushes drying out on it and more.

When he died, my mom had to clean out his apartment. We saw the table there, just beat to hell and my mom said, “It’s a shame. That was where we used to have all of our best family gatherings and now it’s just done…” I told her, no way. I was taking it with me. I took it home, stripped off all the crap on the top, sanded out the imperfections and re-stained the whole thing. I then coated it all in a rockhard top coat. Today, 103 years after my great grandmother bought it, that table is beautiful and it’s in my dining room at my house.

The point is, you can’t just rely on throw-away crap if you plan to have any kind of value in this field. Sure, that table of my grandmother’s probably cost more than your $50 Ikea wonder, but it’s worth more, it carries on and it retains value. That’s where you want to be in this field at least some of the time.

So, how do you get there you might ask? Well, here are three things I think might help you find those stories and stick with them:

 

OPEN YOUR BRAIN: Freelance writer Jenna Glatz is fond of noting that coming up with a story idea is about learning to think that everything you experience could become a story. “Once your brain has opened up to this kind of idea generating, you’ll be amazed by how much more perceptive you’ll become in general,” Glatzer writes in Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer. “Conversations you overhear will trigger ideas for new articles. An event you witness in a parking lot will trigger another. Moments before drifting off to sleep, you’ll think of your most compelling idea ever.”

I spend a lot of time driving to work each day along wide open roads and I do my best to open my brain. I try to notice what’s on the billboards along the highway or what vehicles are more prevalent around me. I listen to local radio to see what’s in the news and what’s on the ads. I also think about whatever the people in front of me at Kwik Trip are yammering about while buying their donuts and vape.

One of the first exercises I have my reporting and feature writing kids do is to leave their phones, their headphones and every other device in the classroom and then just go wander around for an hour with an open mind and open eyes/ears. When they come back to class, they have suddenly noticed all sorts of things they never knew were there before.

 

LEARN TO WONDER: Little kids are great for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is their sense of wonder.

A 4-year-old’s favorite question is “Why?” Kids want to know how stuff works, why it happens and the answers to all sorts of other important questions.

At some point, we stop incessantly asking “Why?” because we fear of looking stupid or because we stop caring about how things work. We stop engaging with the world around us and we no longer enjoy the wonderment we once experienced as little kids.

That’s a shame, because wondering more will lead to some incredible stories. Pair some of the 5Ws and 1H with the phrase “I wonder” and you’ll get some pretty interesting story ideas. Here are a few that rattled through my brain just this week:

  • I wonder why I can’t get a Diet Coke out of one of our vending machines. On our campus there is only one place I can actually buy a Diet Coke: A convenience store. Every place else, all I can get is a Diet Pepsi, which to me tastes like I’m licking a piece of chemically treated sheet metal. Why? Because our campus has a vending contract with the Pepsi Mafia, so I’m stuck. That said, I wondered why we got stuck with Pepsi. How does your university decide who gets the vending contract on your campus, how long is the contract and what kind of cash does the U get for exclusivity? Who has the say in where that money goes?
  • I wonder what the hardest scholarship to get on my campus is: What is the least-often claimed scholarship on your campus and what makes it a difficult one to achieve? (A scholarship for professional banjo players of Bohemian descent? A scholarship that requires perfect attendance since kindergarten?) Every year, we give out tons of scholarships, but there are those that go unclaimed every year because nobody applies or nobody is qualified for them. What is the longest untouched scholarship for your school and what other weird ones are out there?
  • I wonder if that law really exists. There are tons of urban legends out there about laws and rules at various schools and institutions. The one that makes the rounds from time to time is that certain housing set ups on campus are illegal if more than X number of women live together, as it technically qualifies as a brothel. It’s been debunked time and time again, but it still shows up.
  • I wonder what other people are wondering about: The Freedom of Information Act and state open records make certain documents to the public. If you are at a public university, you can get all sorts of information, including people’s salaries, departmental budgets and contracts the U signs with outside agencies.
    One thing that most people don’t think to request? A list of the open records requests that people have made over a given period of time. (I had a student do this once. When I asked him why he did it, he said, “I just want to know what other people want to know.” Good point.)

 

GIVE A DAMN: The best bit of advice anyone ever gave me about writing a bigger piece was that I needed to make sure I cared about what I was doing. Charles Davis, now the dean of journalism at the University of Georgia, was one of my professors for my doctorate at Mizzou when he told me this. He explained that completing a dissertation, a giant monstrosity of research that no one would ever read, was only possible if you made sure you cared about what you were doing and you wanted to find the answers to the problem you were tackling.

“It’s like a marriage,” he said. “It’ll be with you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, until death or degree do you part.”

I think about that a lot when I’m writing a longer blog post, a book or anything else that is more than a brief but courteous email to a student explaining that, no, I’m not changing your grade after I filed it with the university. It’s not my fault you missed so much class that we almost held a candle light vigil for you.

Case in point: I read this fantastic story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently by a reporter named Mary Spicuzza. In 1978 in Milwaukee, her cousin Augie was killed by a car bomb, something her family never spoke of for decades. Over the past year, she dug into the history of her family, her cousin’s various transgressions in life and how a powerful mob boss in Milwaukee likely ordered the bombing that took Augie’s life. In reading this piece, you can sense the amount of work that went into it and how much deep digging it took. Why did she do it? She NEEDED to find the answer and thought her audience would want to know as well, given how famous this incident was all those years ago. In short, she gave a damn.

When I think back on the stories I wrote that I liked the most, they were the ones where I gave a damn. I cared about breaking a story about how the KKK was distributing pamphlets on newspaper racks in grocery stores. I gave a damn about being right when it came to whether a local dog track was going to close down, costing hundreds of jobs and thousands of dollars to the local economy. I really felt it was important to do a six-part series for the blog on mass shootings, so much so, I wore a bulletproof vest everywhere I went for six days.

Even with the books I write, I think less about what I want to tell you, and more about what you really want and need to know and how best I can help you and your teachers get that stuff.

If you care, you’ll get into it and you’ll be like a dog with a Frisbee: You won’t let go until you’re satisfied.

And that can do a lot for you and your audience.

Dealing with interview subjects and memory lapses in telling your stories (A Throwback Post)

In discussing interviewing today in class, a student asked me a question that should bother more folks than it probably does:

“What if a source is wrong about something, but it’s not a big factual thing you can check? What do you do?”

It’s a good question, in that I’m sure I’ve told the same story 10,001 times to various classes with variations on a theme. In some cases, I’m often wondering if I’m accurately remembering the car I was driving when I went to the scene of a shooting, the editor who told me to “check on that fatality” that turned out not to be dead or a dozen other things that pretty much anybody involved might remember in some other way, but in no way does a big book of facts help settle the issue.

Case in point: This Christmas, I was at a family gathering where the time I somehow volunteered my dad to be a grade school soccer coach came up. The story was that Dad agreed to go to a meeting where this whole thing would be discussed and he then agreed to coach with a bunch of other dads.

The memory I had was of Dad putting on his nice brown suit to go to this meeting, where it turned out all the other dads were told that they’d be playing the game a bit. So my dad, being the awesome guy he is/was, ended up playing a bit in his dressed up clothes. To me, that story was burned in my head, as I remembered him coming home sweaty and carrying his coat. It also was a great touchstone for me about how much Dad loved me, in that he’s out there banging around a soccer ball in his good suit.

Dad looked at me and said, “That never happened.”

I explained my memory about it and said, “I know it happened because of (XYZ).”

He said, “No, that never happened that way. I never played soccer in a suit. I don’t know where you’re getting that from…”

We both immediately turned to Mom as the arbiter, and she couldn’t remember any of this, so for the rest of the night, I kept thinking, “I know I’m right” and I’m sure my Dad thought the same thing, too.

The point is, not everyone remembers everything the right way, so what happens when you’re supposed to tell stories that revolve around facts and not everyone agrees with what those are?

Here’s a look at how to help work through that issue:

 

How to avoid letting a source’s memory lapses or outright lies destroy your stories

I’ve made a point of telling anyone who will listen that if they need ANYTHING from me in terms of content to help their students or their student newsrooms, all they have to do is ask. Thus, the following request came from a fellow journalism teacher:

Do you have any great lessons or content on how to analyze if a source, esp a source for a profile, is lying or misrepresenting information (either purposefully or due to memory erosion)?

It’s difficult to know for sure when someone is lying or if there are memory gaps that make for some problematic moments within the story you want to tell. As I’ve often told folks in my classes, it’s not always about being perfectly successful in your efforts when it comes to something like this, but rather avoiding the things that can really screw you over that matters most.

With that said, here are a few things beginning reporters can do to mitigate disaster when dealing with a source that might not have the facts 100% perfect:

GET A SENSE OF THE SOURCE: One of the primary reasons I tell students they need to conduct interviews in person is so they can capture more observational elements to add color and feel to their pieces. A good side benefit of being in person is you can get the vibe of the source and decide how much you really want to trust them.

Some sources are great at hyping themselves up like they’re trying to sell you the Bass-O-Matic ’76. Others do some great “humblebrag” stuff that really can sound like they’re important and vaguely decent people. In spending time with these people, you can find out who is likely worth trusting and who you can’t trust any further than you’d trust a pyromaniac at a gas station.

The one thing to understand is that there is a crucial difference between people who are full of crap and people who literally have lost track of things over time. Honestly, I have told a number of stories over and over again to the point that I’m not sure if they’re perfectly accurate, slightly altered or complete BS. (I am grateful, however, that I found support for the famous “Olde Un Theatre” robbery and the “Mraz, where’s Mrefund?” headline.)

I had one student who SWORE she wrote an obituary that had a particularly awkward headline on it. I found the piece, with the headline she described, and it wasn’t her byline. Maybe she wrote the headline, or edited the piece or something else, but it wasn’t her byline. This is why it’s important to fact check basically everything when it comes to people telling you stuff that you plan to use in your work.

Once you get that vibe, you can do more work with the questions you have and the level of insistence you enact when dealing with your questions.

IN GOD WE TRUST, ALL OTHERS MUST PAY CASH: Even in profiles, there is a benefit to becoming what I call a “non-denominational skeptic” about the information you received. Whether you like the source or you wouldn’t believe them if they came into your house, soaking wet, and told you, “It’s raining out there,” apply a similar level of rigor to your questioning. This is particularly important when it comes to things you really plan to focus on as part of your story.

Let’s say you’re doing a profile on a business person who turned his life around after a rather rough patch in his 20s and now helps ex-convicts find work. You likely are going to ask what was the turning point that got this guy on the right path, and here’s the answer you get:

“I wasn’t a good person back then. I was arrested for a series of burglaries back in ’85 around the Cleveland area. I was supposed to get 6 years, but the judge gave me 12 and shipped me off to Folsom prison, way across the country. Being that far from home, in a prison like that, well, it changes a man. About 50 prisoners were killed while I was there for those 12 years and I always thought I’d be one. I told God, ‘If I ever get out of here alive, I’ll make my life right for whoever else gets out of here.’”

Sounds compelling and amazing. Now, how much of that is stuff you NEED to check? A goodly amount:

  • Check arrest records from “the Cleveland area” in 1985 and find out if this guy was ever arrested.
  • Check court records to find out if he did get sentenced to 12 years.
  • Check prison records to find out if he went to prison, let alone Folsom
  • Check prison records (and others) to find out if 50 people REALLY got killed out there from about 1985 to 1997.

This is just smart reporting and it will help you fill in some of the key details about the source’s live. Also, the more of this you can verify, the better off you are. The less you can verify, the less you should trust this source.

Clearly, you can’t verify if he “wasn’t a good person” or if he had a conversation with God. (“Hello, St. Peter? Yes, this is Vince Filak with the Dynamics of Writing blog. Is God there? I need to confirm a conversation He had back in 1985 or so…”) But you can check out enough stuff to feel like you’re not getting fed a line.

TRUST, BUT VERIFY: Another key way to poke back at people is to show interest and engagement with their stories while offering them ways to help verify this information for you.

If you’re interviewing someone and they say, “I was amazed when I received my Silver Star for my tour in Vietnam, but I really was just doing the same job as everybody else…” you could check a database when you get done with the interview. However, you could also try this approach during the interview:

“That is truly incredible! Could you show me the medal? I’d love to see it!”

or

“Do you have any pictures of the ceremony? My editor would love to put something visual with the story!”

If the answer is yes, you’re in decent shape. If the answer is a dodge or something like, “Nah, I threw it away.” then you are probably going to want to push back a bit more with stuff like, “So where was the incident that took place that got you considered for the honor?” or “I would love to talk to anyone who was in your platoon at the time for more on this…”

In other words, you’re giving the person an opportunity to verify this stuff for you. If they can’t or won’t, tread cautiously.

WEIGH COST VERSUS VALUE: Journalism in a lot of ways is like catching sand in a sieve. You’re never going to catch everything, but you want to make sure you don’t lose too much of the small stuff or any of the big stuff. To that end, you want to weigh the cost versus value of the amount of work you’re doing on any particular fact-finding dig.

Let’s say you’ve got a source that was paralyzed from the waist down during a car accident in high school. After that, he went into a deep depression, but found God and now goes on speaking tours throughout the country to explain how to overcome obstacles in life. The source tells you this:

“I was driving a 1979 Ford Thunderbird with this great V-8 351 Cleveland in it when I had the accident. The truck that hit me mangled that car like you wouldn’t believe. I honestly feel that if I had been driving something smaller, I’d be dead.”

The guy shows you a picture of the wreck, so you can see what happened to the car. He’s clearly paralyzed or has been faking it well for decades. The opinion is his that he might have died in a Toyota Camry. is it really important to fact check whether that car had the 351 Cleveland engine in it or if it might have had a 302 or a 351 Windsor? Probably not.

Look at what matters most and make sure those things are solid. The random fringe stuff can be checked if you have time and if it’s easy. However, it’s not going to behoove you to go plowing through thousands of DOT and Ford Factory Sheets to figure out what engine landed in what car in a case like this.

RESEARCH BEFORE, FACT CHECK AFTER: The goal of quality research in advance of talking to a source is to make sure you ask good questions and that you don’t get turned around if the source tries to BS you. The goal of a quality fact check is to make sure what the source told you makes sense before you publish the piece.

You then can decide to what degree you want to keep certain bits of information and what degree you feel the need to actively fact check with in a story. Ted Bridis, a fellow journalism prof, shared this example with a bunch of us to outline the ways in which a “personal tale” can have enough bullcrap in it to fertilize the back 40 acres. The writer of the piece literally takes each element that this source outlines as “fact” and checks it out with people after the fact to show what is clearly not true and why it matters.

If you ask the right questions, you’ll find that many sources will try to snow you less, as it’s clear you aren’t coming to them fresh off a turnip truck. However, there are still people out there who will try to convince you that they were the one who convinced Lin-Manuel Miranda to go with Hamilton instead of “Aaron Burr: The Death Metal Musical!”

That’s where the fact check really comes in.

FIND OTHER PEOPLE TO HELP: I remember certain things about my childhood that might or might not be true. Some of them, Mom or Dad might have an angle on (and judging by how we kept pretty much everything I ever did in the file cabinet in my folks’ back room at the house, we might actually have physical proof of that thing).

REPORTER: “Hey, I was talking to your mom and she said you never scored a basket in your fifth-grade season. She still has all the box scores. You did almost foul out of nine games, thought.”
ME: “I’ll be darned. I swear I hit a basket at least once. Anyway, I’m sure that foul out thing is right, as I played basketball like Danny from ‘Grease’ that year…”

If you can get verification from people who would likely know, it’s probably a safe bet you can go with that information. If you can’t or the information seems to contradict, go back to the original source for verification:

REPORTER: “Hey, I was talking to your mom and she said she thinks that story about Mrs. Schutten screaming at your class was from fifth grade, not third grade. She said the woman taught you in both grades. I just wanted to know if you’re sure on what you told me.”
ME: “Oh, yeah… I forgot that she got us twice… After I had Sr. Kenneth in fourth grade, the beatings we all took from that nun basically scrambled my memory for some things…  Mom’s probably right, then.”

The goal of asking other people for things is to help solidify things that are important to telling your story. In some cases, you’ll have conflicting reports from key sources and it’s up to you to determine who you believe and how important those conflicting elements are.

A great example of this is in the book “Loose Balls” by Terry Pluto, where he outlines the wild life of the old American Basketball Association. He tells this one story about Marvin “Bad News” Barnes and how he missed a team flight to Norfolk, where Barnes and the Spirits of St. Louis were supposed to play the Virginia Squires.

Barnes blows off the flight and figures he’ll catch a later one, but it turns out he missed the last commercial flight to Norfolk. So he chartered a plane (something unheard of at the time) and got down there at the last minute. He shows up to the locker room with like 10 minutes to go before game time wearing a full-length fur coat, carrying a couple bags of McDonald’s burgers and a big smile. He opens his coat to reveal his uniform like he was changing from Clark Kent to Superman and declares, “Have no fear, BB (his nickname) is here.”

The story was verified by a number of people who all told essentially the same story. However, people deviated on one detail. During the game, the pilot supposedly showed up in the team huddle and demanded to be paid for the flight, so someone had to run back to the locker room and get Marvin’s checkbook so he could write the guy a check. The amount of the check varied widely from about $700 to more than $1,500, depending on who told it.

Pluto recognizes that the story perfectly captures the insanity that was Marvin Barnes and this team of weirdos. He knows that it is mostly true and pretty solid in its confirmation. He also knows people want to know what it cost to do this little stunt and that he doesn’t have the goods. He acknowledges that by including that information and the variations in his chapter. Something like that is easy enough to do if you have a few inconsistencies that don’t undermine the larger truth you’re trying to convey.

THE DUTY TO REPORT VERSUS THE DUTY TO PUBLISH: No matter how much effort a reporter puts into a story, there is never a guarantee that the story is absolutely right. Mistakes happen, memories fade, BS intrudes and more. The goal is to try to put forth the best version of reality, regardless of how difficult that is.

This is where we separate the duty to report and the duty to publish. As journalists, we need to ask questions and poke at facts to figure out what happened and why our readers should care. Not every effort we make in that realm will give us the results we feel comfortable with. To that end, we have to be OK with the decision not to publish something if we’re not 100% certain on the issue.

It’s better to have something missing or come up a little thin in a story than it is to publish something that is flat-out wrong.

A great example of this is an article Bethany McLean, a financial journalist, wrote in 2001 about Enron. The company basically had stock that just kept going up and up and up for no real reason and the company big wigs couldn’t explain to her in any meaningful way how money moved through the company. She knew something wasn’t right, but she wasn’t 100% sure of what it was.

 

In several interviews, she noted that there were several partnerships that were doing deals with Enron that appeared to be owned or operated by Enron executive Andy Fastow. She saw them disclosed, but she never mentioned them in her article. In the documentary, “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” she explained:

“There were these partnerships that were run by Andy Fastow that were doing business with Enron and they were disclosed in the company’s financial statements, but I didn’t mention them in the story because I thought, ‘Well, the accountants and the board of directors have said this is OK so I must be crazy to think there’s anything wrong with this.’ The story I ran was actually pretty meek. The title was “Is Enron Overpriced?” (because) in the end, I couldn’t prove that it was anything more than an overvalued stock and I was probably too naive to suspect there was anything more than that.”

She realized she had the duty to dig in hard on this. When she couldn’t make it work perfectly on the first pass, she understood that she didn’t want to screw this up, so she went with what she could prove.

As it turned out, the partnerships were a large component of a major financial fraud and the company was a house of cards, things McLean and others found out after she put out that first article. However, at the time, she couldn’t go beyond what she had, so she stuck to what she could prove and lived to fight another day.

UW La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow fired after appearing in porn with his wife, which raises First Amendment concerns

Sometimes, a headline just says it all…

ED NOTE: I apologize in advance for any double entendres. It is almost impossible to write this without hearing a 12-year-old boy in my head laughing, despite my best efforts to avoid such concerns.

THE LEAD: Less than a year after being lauded as a heck of a great chancellor for his stewardship of UW La Crosse, Joe Gow was fired from his leadership role after the UW Board of Regents found out he’d been doing porn on the side:

“In recent days, we learned of specific conduct by Dr. Gow that has subjected the university to significant reputational harm,” UW System President Jay Rothman said. “His actions were abhorrent.”

Board President Karen Walsh said Gow showed “a reckless disregard” for his role as a UW-La Crosse leader.

“We are alarmed, and disgusted, by his actions, which were wholly and undeniably inconsistent with his role as chancellor,” she said.

The 63-year-old tenured communications professor had planned to transition back to a faculty role after completing this final year of his chancellorship. That is currently under review, after Rothman asked the UWL interim chancellor to review his status in that role as well.

Gow said in a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel interview that he was stunned by the firing, especially since it happened without him present, and noted he felt the First Amendment protected such activities:

Gow said he didn’t know how UW System became aware of the videos, which were all posted within the past two months. No one at UW System or on the UW Board of Regents had asked about his hobby, he said.

“I would say that anything that I do or my my wife and I do, we do as citizens in the United States, who have the freedom of First Amendment to the Constitution, to create and publish books and videos that explore consensual adult sexuality,” he said.

FIRST AMENDMENT CONCERNS: Gow discussed the issue of the First Amendment and his view of how it protected his actions in these films. The First Amendment does cover sexually explicit material, as we’ve noted here before.

It also covers not just speech everyone likes, but speech that people DON’T like. It’s easy to get behind a student newspaper that wants to report that the lunch server was fired for giving poor students extra food. It’s a little more difficult to support speech that leads to a question like, “Hey, wanna watch my chancellor do his wife?”

I reached out to one of my “legal eagle” friends for a general sense of how much ground Gow had to stand on in this case.

He noted that Gow is likely in a “doctrine vs. practical reality” kind of situation. From a pure First Amendment standpoint, he noted, he couldn’t imagine this not being constitutionally protected, so long as Gow wasn’t using UWL time and resources. (In his interviews to this point, Gow noted that he did this on his own time, never once mentioned UWL and basically remained unnamed in his video stuff.)

That said, he also noted that in a more practical fashion, the system would likely make the case that Gow’s video activities made it impossible for him to do his day job as chancellor (and maybe professor) effectively.

The legal eagle referenced the Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) case in which a school teacher had been fired for complaining about the board of education in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. The Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling, saying that off-duty speech of public employees is protected up to the point where it interferes with the functionality of the employees’ organization.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Dear Lord… where to start…

First and foremost, I’m a huge fan of the First Amendment. The ability to say and do things that make other people uncomfortable is woven into the very fabric of our establishment as a country and a society. I don’t like the idea of people of any kind saying that something that is legal should lead to punitive consequences for an individual based on other people feeling “icky” about it.

I also don’t like the lack of due process afforded to Gow in this case. Like most things institutions do quickly behind closed doors in our society, Gow’s firing appears to be a railroading of a man who did his job but now makes us uncomfortable.

Second, this isn’t the first time that an institution has punished an employee for naked stuff. Brianna Copperage, a high school teacher in Missouri, was fired after word of her OnlyFans account got around to the school district. She was doing sexually explicit content on the site to augment her meager teacher pay and noted that nothing in the school’s charter prohibited her from doing so. (It also says something that she made more in a month from OnlyFans than she made the entire year teaching.)

A Colorado law enforcement officer was essentially canned after she was outed as a content provider on OnlyFans. Melissa Williams said she was forced to resign once her superiors found out about her sexually explicit content. A similar thing happened to Detroit police officer Janelle Zielinski and others I’m sure.

Look, I totally get the regents’ reaction to all of this, in that it probably freaked them out to find out one of the chancellors was online doing porn. And yes, he was DOING PORN.

(As much as I really, really, REALLY didn’t want to, the reporter in me forced myself to look at the one free, publicly available site noted in the news articles. I needed to see if a) the stuff was there, b) Gow was actually involved and c) was this actually porn or just some general weird “let’s talk about sex” stuff.

The answers are a) yes, b) yes and c) full-on, hard-core, oh-my-GOD-this-is-happening porn. There are days I really hate myself…)

That said, there’s nothing requiring anyone else to go looking for this guy’s “greatest hits” album out there. If seeing this guy and his wife doing the nasty bothers you, don’t go and watch it. This is the same reason I’ve never been to a strip club. Aside from my awkwardness around people in general and the complete discomfort I imagine that kind of a place would give me, my greatest fear would be finding out that one of my students worked there. I imagine my reaction would be something like this:

The point is , the courts have drawn lines already that limit what the First Amendment does and doesn’t cover. If this guy were doing something illegal, if he were employed by a private company or if he were bogarting state funds to do this, we’d be in a different situation. However, it looks like the regents just tried to kill a fly with a sledgehammer and I’m going to be interested to see what the repercussions are for their actions.

 

 

UW President Jay Rothman gets mad at The Daily Cardinal for publishing exactly what he wrote (And a few unpleasant truths about how reality works)

A screen shot of the Daily Cardinal's exclusive story on how UW System President Jay Rothman discussed campus changes with chancellors at the UW campuses. THE LEAD: The Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published a story about how the system president, Jay Rothman, had emailed the chancellors at the UW schools with some thoughts about the future. In that email, Rothman noted his support for several changes, including moving away from liberal arts programs at certain campuses:

As the University of Wisconsin System faced a dire fiscal situation, system President Jay Rothman suggested chancellors consider “shifting away” from liberal arts programs, particularly at campuses with low-income students.

In emails obtained by The Daily Cardinal, Rothman, a former law firm chairman and CEO with no higher education background before leading the UW System, told campus chancellors UW schools should seek a long-term path “to return to financial stability.”

“Consider shifting away from liberal arts programs to programs that are more career specific, particularly if the institution serves a large number of low-income students,” Rothman wrote in a list of recommendations sent Sept. 1.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m a huge fan of student media, particularly the Daily Cardinal where I cut my journalistic teeth decades ago. I also spent the majority of my junior year bringing the paper back after it shut down under a six-figure debt, so, yes, I’m a fan of the place.)

THE FALLOUT: Rothman was not pleased with this reporting and took to Twitter/X to express that displeasure:

Interestingly enough this “egregiously false headline” and problematic “framing of its story” has not led anyone in the UW hierarchy to demand the Cardinal fix specific errors in the piece, according to the folks at the Cardinal:

(SIDE NOTE: The System has never been shy about asking for things to be fixed when a story is factually inaccurate. I remember a story that ran when I was at the Cardinal with the headline “Negligence Haunts Regents.” The public affairs guy called up our campus editor and politely asked for a fix, saying, “There’s really only two things wrong with the story. It’s in the headline: The word “negligence” and the word “haunts.”)

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE ON THE STORY:

First, it’s awesome journalism. I have no idea how the reporter got that piece of paper, but it speaks volumes about the importance of things like FOIA and open records acts, as well as having good sources. People have the ability to lie to you. Documents have an uncanny way of telling the truth. It’s a great story, a solid read and well sourced.

Second, the headline is not “egregiously false” based on exactly what Rothman wrote. It was “private” (email usually is, compared to him putting stuff on Twitter/X or making a public speech). It was a suggestion, not a mandate. It included the phrase “shift away.” It did say liberal arts was the thing from which shifting away should occur. The only MINOR argument might be between “low-income campuses” and those that serve low-income students, but at that point, you’re arguing about the type of bark that’s on the tree and ignoring the fact you’re in the forest.

Third, the story does contain a response from system spokesperson Mark Pitsch that put in Rothman’s two cents:

UW System spokesperson Mark Pitsch said Rothman has “consistently” stated he valued liberal arts education and shared the report having acknowledged some of its lessons “would not be applicable to the Universities of Wisconsin.”

“He did not suggest that chancellors move away from liberal arts programs,” Pitsch said. “However, as evidenced by the $32 million workforce proposal, the universities are seeking to expand capacity in high-growth STEM, health care, and business disciplines to meet workforce needs.”

As the story then notes, the email says something entirely different. As much as I don’t want to argue semantics, Pitsch is wrong here. Rothman DID suggest that in the email. To what degree he meant something else or failed to make something clear could be debated. Arguing that something didn’t happen when people can see the thing with their own eyes strains credulity.

Finally, there is a huge difference between “I don’t like the story” and “The story is wrong.” I can’t tell you how many people have called me over the years, screaming up a blue streak over a story that ran in the DN or the A-T or the Missourian, demanding we fix the mistakes in it. When I asked them to explain the errors that needed correcting, 99.99% of the time it came down to them not liking that we reported they cheated on their taxes, stole money, shot someone at a Taco Bell drive thru or some other thing that actually happened.

In one case, a student demanded a retraction because she had made several disparaging comments about the LGBTQ community in relation to changes made to Homecoming court. She threatened to sue because people were all over social media and email, telling her how horrible she was based on our reporting. When we dug into it, it turned out she said the stuff IN AN EMAIL TO THE PAPER and the reporter had actually done her a favor by not including some of the more egregious stuff she’d written.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE ON THE SITUATION: This is probably going to be a really unpopular position, but if you read the entirety of Rothman’s emails, he’s right about a lot of stuff he suggested in terms of how to do certain things and what needs to be done to re-calibrate the UW schools.

If you read the whole email (skipping the now-infamous item 13), you get a clear sense of a smart business person who is telling a bunch of people that it’s time to be smart about your approach to your campus.

Here is a basic summary of his points in a simple fashion that I think most folks with common sense would agree with:

FISCAL:

  • Don’t build out insane, pie-in-the-sky programs and figure the money will come from somewhere.
  • Plan based on what money you have, not what you hope to have.
  • Collect money you’re owed.
  • Don’t plan one year at a time for a hand-to-mouth approach. Plan for the long term and hold to it.
  • If you’re going to keep stuff, make sure it’s worth it. That doesn’t mean everything has to be cost-neutral, but it does mean you can’t spend like a drunk sailor on leave and expect everything to be fine all the time.

TAKING ACTION:

  • Do the hard stuff right away because it’s not going to get better by putting it off. Also, do it in one big swoop so that you don’t have everyone looking around each time a shoe drops. Drop all the shoes at once wherever possible and then rebuild confidence for those who are left.
  • Tell people what is going on while it’s going on and be transparent. The more you hide, the worse it gets.
  • Read your policies to figure out what you can and can’t do before you try something. Also, if those policies are from the Stone Age, update them so you aren’t hamstrung by them.

That covers most of what he’s saying. It’s good advice. Does that mean the campuses are following it? No. Does that mean those who have made cuts etc. have done it the right way? Um… heck no. Is that Rothman’s fault? Not a chance.

In terms of his look at what should and shouldn’t be offered, that’s a whole other can of worms, but as I noted in another post, most of the students and families I’ve met here and while enrolling my kid at college are worried about jobs and the cost of this whole process. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have liberal arts, or a broader liberal-arts education.

What it does mean is that just like everything else, liberal arts courses should have their tires kicked from time to time, as should the structure of any program to make sure it’s giving students what they need. I think in a lot of cases, general education courses and the departments they’ve been based in got used to a huge influx of students each term by the dint of merely being part of that system. The level of scrutiny was not there in regard to value for the students (in any sense of the word) and the answer was always the silver bullet of “Kids need liberal arts, so stop asking so many questions and go away.”

I know I benefited from a lot of my general education courses, ranging from the history course I took to understand my parents’ generation to the race, gender and ethnicity course I took through women’s studies. I also know I had more than a few classes where it felt like the professor got a “no-show job” through a Soprano’s associate and didn’t give a damn because the class was required and we all had to take it. (I tried to find a link for a clip but gave up when I remembered how the dialogue in this show would make the heads of my editors at Sage explode.)

A strong examination of liberal arts is not a bad thing and reasonable people can agree or disagree about it. However, everything starts with honesty, accuracy and transparency, which is something the Cardinal article brought to bear.

A Lack of Flo: A look at what can go wrong with an over-the-top approach to profile writing

Read the following opening to a story and see if you can identify what it will be about without relying on an internet search:

One needn’t eat Tostitos Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles to survive; advertising’s object is to muddle this truth. Of course, Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles have the advantage of being food, which humans do need to survive. Many commodities necessitated by modern life lack this selling point. Insurance, for example, is not only inedible but intangible. It is a resource that customers hope never to need, a product that functions somewhat like a tax on fear. The average person cannot identify which qualities, if any, distinguish one company’s insurance from another’s. For these reasons and more, selling insurance is tricksy business.

Once you give up, or cheat, click this link and prepare to be amazed.

Aside from the headline that mentions the topic, it takes more than 270 words (or approximately double what you’ve read to this point) to get a mention of Flo, the insurance lady for Progressive, and her alter ego, Stephanie Courtney.

In chatting online with several journalists and journalism instructors, I found a variety of opinions on the piece and the style of the writer, Caity Weaver. Terms like “quirky” and “brilliant” came up, along with others such as  “obnoxious” and “painful.” To give the writer and the piece the benefit of the doubt, I waded through this 4,600-word tome twice. In the end, I ended up agreeing with the second set of descriptors, but also found myself considering terms others hadn’t, such as “well-reported” and “solidly sourced.”

I learned a lot about Courtney/Flo in the piece and it really did a lot of things that good profiles should do: Inform and engage; provide depth and context; rely on various sources. It also did some of the traditionally bad things we’ve discussed here before: rely on first person; get too into the weeds on certain things; write for yourself, not your audience.

However, here are a couple areas in which this profile reached new heights/depths of god-awfulness that had me reaffirming my general hatred in this “self-important-author” genre:

 

OBSERVATION GONE WEIRD: One of the crucial things we talk about in profile writing is the element of observation, with the goal of painting word pictures in minds of the readers. In this regard, details matter, although I wondered about this level of detailed analysis:

Since appearing in the first Flo spot in January 2008, Courtney has never been absent from American TV, rematerializing incessantly in the same sugar-white apron and hoar-frost-white polo shirt and cocaine-white trousers that constitute the character’s unvarying wardrobe.

I am the first to admit that I’m not a clothes horse and that I have trouble telling black from blue. That said, I’d love to know how the author manages to distinguish “sugar-white” from “hoar-frost-white” from “cocaine-white” when describing Flo’s outfit. (My best guesses include that she was paid by the compound modifier or had massively consumed one of those elements before writing this monstrosity.)

Then there was this exchange about a purse that wasn’t:

Her purse immediately caught my eye: It appeared to be an emerald green handbag version of the $388 “bubble clutch” made by Cult Gaia, the trendy label whose fanciful purses double as objets d’art. Courtney handed it to me while rattling off tips for extending the shelf life of fresh eggs. It was a plastic carrying case for eggs, it turned out — eggs she had brought me from her six backyard hens. “Did you think it was a purse?” she asked merrily.

I’m trying to figure out what this was trying to tell me. My best guesses are:

  1. The writer wanted to weave in a product placement of some kind, in hopes of getting influencer swag.
  2. The writer sucks at fashion spotting as much as I do, in that she mistook an egg container for a $400 handbag.

The author clearly has the ability to observe and describe, but tends to use it in some of the strangest circumstances and for some completely unhelpful reasons. Like every other tool in your toolbox, if you’re going to use it, do it for a good reason (read: in some way that helps your readers).

 

FORCING A THREAD: The use of a narrative thread is something that can be extremely effective when it’s done well and done with a purpose. If you are writing about a forest ranger, for example, spending a day with the forest ranger in the woods, doing whatever it is that forest rangers do, can create a vivid set of experiences that provide a great thread.

The problem with this piece is that it lacks that kind of opportunity and is still trying to force a thread into the story. In this case, as with many cases, it’s a meal (or a coffee, or a drink) that serves as a thread, even as there’s no real reason for it.

This is how we get a chunk of the story like this:

In the absent glow of the patio’s still-dormant fire pit, Courtney and I considered the dinner menu, which included a small quantity of caviar costing a sum of American dollars ominously, discreetly, vaguely, alarmingly, irresistibly and euphemistically specified as “market price.” Hours earlier, my supervisor had told me pre-emptively — and demonically — that I was not to order and expense the market-price caviar. Somehow, Courtney learned of this act of oppression, probably when I brought it up to her immediately upon being seated for dinner. To this, Courtney said, “I love caviar,” and added that my boss “can’t tell [her] what [she] can have,” because she doesn’t “answer to” him, “goddamn it.” She charged the caviar to her own personal credit card and encouraged me to eat it with her — even as I explained (weakly, for one second) that this is not allowed (lock me up!).

Short version: I nuance-begged for caviar from a source and got it.

For reasons past my understanding, she then feels the need to add another 150-word chunk to explain what she did and why she did it and why it’s not an ethical violation:

Subsequently pinning down the exact hows and whys of my consuming a profile subject’s forbidden caviar took either several lively discussions with my supervisor (my guess) or about “1.5 hours” of “company time” (his calculation). In his opinion, this act could be seen as at odds with my employer’s policy precluding reporters from accepting favors and gifts from their subjects — the worry being that I might feel obligated to repay Courtney for caviar by describing her favorably in this article. Let me be clear: If the kind of person who purchases caviar and offers to share it with a dining companion who has been tyrannically deprived of it sounds like someone you would not like, you would hate Stephanie Courtney. In any event, to bring this interaction into line with company policy, we later reimbursed her for the full price of the caviar ($85 plus tip), so now she is, technically, indebted to me.

The author returns to the meal and such at frequent intervals, rarely with insight or depth that would aid in telling the story about Courtney or what her life has been like. It’s not a strong narrative thread and, at best, reads like someone who is describing a meal in an effort to expense it.

 

MEGA-DEEP-THOUGHTS CONCLUSION: The goal of a good closing is to bring a sense of finality to a piece that offers people a chance to reflect on what they have learned. Most writers struggle with this at some point in  time, as it’s not easy to create a sense of closure without either forcing the issue or sounding trite.

A  lot of students I’ve had who don’t know what to do use the “essay” closure where they try to sum up  the entirety of the piece in. In other cases, they do a “One to Grow On” conclusion, where they try to create some sort of morality  play that gives people a learning experience like these PSAs from the 1980s.

As God as my witness, I have no idea what the hell this conclusion was trying to do:

What sane person would not make the most extreme version of this trade — tabling any and all creative aspirations, possibly forever, in exchange for free prosciutto; testing well with the general market, the Black and the Hispanic communities; delighted co-workers and employers; more than four million likes on Facebook; and, though tempered with the constant threat of being rendered obsolete by unseen corporate machinations, the peace of having “enough”? Do we deny ourselves the pleasure of happiness by conceiving of it as something necessarily total, connoting maximum satisfaction in every arena? For anyone with any agency over his or her life, existence takes the form of perpetual bartering. Perhaps we waive the freedom of endless, aimless travel for the safety of returning to a home. Perhaps willingly capping our creative potential secures access to a reliable paycheck. Forfeiting one thing for the promise of something else later is a sophisticated human idea. Our understanding of this concept enables us to sell one another insurance.

I’m not sure if our earlier “guessing game” would have been easier or harder if we used this chunk of info as a “Can you tell what the story was about?” prompt. Either way, I’m still baffled by it as a closing or even a chunk of content.

I could make about 823 random observations about the entirety of this story, but if I had to boil it down to a couple basic thoughts, I’d go with this:

  • I think Weaver did a hell of a lot of good reporting here, which speaks volumes about her as a journalist. The things I got to learn in here really did engage and inform me about the subject of the piece and I’m better for having found them.  I would have enjoyed them more if I didn’t have to play a game of “Where’s Waldo?” among all the rest of the stuff that was in here to find them.

 

  • This piece is basically Patient Zero for what happens when someone decides that their “voice” is a crucial element of a story and has somehow convinced themselves that readers are better served by their “unique flair.” A student once chastised me for editing out “the juice I’m bringing to this piece.” Save the juice for the grocery store and get the hell out of the story’s way.

 

  • I have often found that writers who go this direction of massively overwriting do so because they have convinced themselves of their own grandeur or because they lack confidence in their own abilities and thus bury the readers in verbiage as a dodge. Not sure which one is happening here, but the results are the same.

 

  • I’ve often equated this kind of writing to a “Big Mac vs. Filet Mignon” comparative. The steak is an amazing slab of meat, so all it needs is a little salt rub or something and it’s great. The meat on a Big Mac is grey disk of sadness times two, so that’s why McDonald’s slathers on pickles, lettuce, onions, special sauce and even an extra slice of bread to make it functionally decent. The more crap you have to pour onto something, the worse the underlying thing usually is.

 

  • A piece of this nature requires a lot of a reporter, but also a lot out of a reader. (This was tagged as a “21 minute read” and it took all of that and more.) When a  reader is asked to invest significant time into reading a story, the writer should do everything possible to maximize value and minimize waste. If you read the whole Flo story, ask yourself if you feel this was true of the piece.

 

  • And finally, if you think this blog post is long, realize it’s less than half the length of Weaver’s piece on Flo.