Advanced Writing

Still Stuck on Flo: When profile writing focuses more on the writer than the subject (A Throwback Post)

When this post originally ran, the comments went one of two ways:

  1. Thank you for this, because every student I have thinks they should write like this and I’ve yet to be able to disabuse them of this notion.
  2. Your criticism lacks merit because your standards make it impossible to write a magazine-style feature. If you had your way, everything would just be paraphrase-quote, paraphrase-quote with a news lead on top.

The first view is fine, but I’d argue a great deal with the second one. There are plenty of amazing profiles, features and longer pieces that are fantastic reads without devolving into the self-important mess that is discussed below.

As an example, here’s one I frequently use in the feature-writing class that is lengthy, detailed and well sourced all without mentioning Tostito’s Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles, having a reporter beg for caviar or using a “That’s One To Grow On” conclusion.

(I’ve got others if you think I just like this one because of the sports angle, including one on a fallen city council member, a photo editor who makes ugly people stunning and beautiful people perfect and a reality TV star who is trapped in a tabloid spiral of her own making.)

Since it’s been a couple years, I wanted to bring this back to see if the mood in the field has changed about it, my critique or what profiles should be in the age of AI. Let me know what you think in the comments below:

 

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.

A Sarcastic List of Serious Writing Rules We Need as Media Writers

(It’s important that you get key information in a timely fashion, for obvious reasons, so enjoy the list.)

 

One of the best things I get to do as a former media adviser and college professor is judge media contests. Between the pros, the college ranks and the high school pubs, I find myself deluged in content on a regular basis. It’s a ton of fun to see what’s going on all over the place, what makes for news in various corners of the country and how certain things are relatively universal across all levels of media writing.

I have to say, and I really believe this, the hardest part of the job is picking and then ranking the winners. It doesn’t matter if it’s just one winner or a top ten, it always seems like there just aren’t enough awards to go around. A lot of good folks are doing some good work all the time.

That said, I also run into a relatively large swath of copy that has me shaking my head a bit. Regardless of experience level, the size of the publication or the purpose of the piece, writers can be uncannily consistent in some really godawful ways.

With that in mind, I’ve built a running list of rules based on the bad, the awkward and the generally problematic writing I’ve been seeing lately. My hope is that it helps break a few bad habits, so folks can make next year’s judging even harder:

If you only have one source, it’s not a story. It’s a soliloquy.

Adding a dozen adverbs to an event story doesn’t transform it into a feature piece.

If you have to tell me, “When asked about XYZ…” in a story, you need to have another place in the story where you tell me, “In a spontaneous outburst of information somehow relevant to this story…”

The key to making a story better isn’t just making it longer.

If a kid from the 1980s could follow your concluding line with, “And that’s one to grow on!” pick a new closing.

Apparently, nobody is a typical professor, a typical administrator, a typical minister, a typical politician or a typical sophomore, so skip telling the reader that in your profiles and just explain who this person is.

Instead of thinking about what you want to write, think about what you would want to know if someone else were writing the story. Then, structure your story accordingly.

Unless you can prove you checked in with every human being on Earth, avoid generalizations like “nobody,” “no one,” “everybody” and “everyone.”

Put extra effort into your opening, whether it is a news lead or a feature opening. If you don’t grab the readers in the first 10 seconds, it won’t matter how awesome the rest of your story is, because they won’t see it.

An expansive vocabulary isn’t meant for you to show off. It’s meant for you to use the exact right words to better inform your readers in a way they can understand.

What you write won’t be perfect on the first pass. If you think so, save a copy for later and try to disprove your assumption with subsequent efforts.

Don’t try to tell me and sell me in your writing. Show me through facts, sources and descriptions and let me come to my own conclusions. You’re a journalist, not a MLM owner.

If you have to explain four things to me before I can understand a fifth thing, that fifth thing better be able to cure cancer.

If you wouldn’t read it, don’t write it.

“Can You Libel a Disaster?” (And several other questions that came to mind after The Atlantic gave Ruth Shalit Barrett $1 Million)

Ruth Shalit Barrett received more than $1 million after suing The Atlantic for defamation, based on its approach to retracting this story. For that kind of money, they must have said this is a photo of Barrett drowning a couple dozen kids in a pool laced with electrical lines. 

THE LEAD: When in doubt, sue somebody, because it apparently works:

The Atlantic quietly agreed to pay more than $1 million early this summer to settle a lawsuit by the writer Ruth Shalit Barrett, who had accused the magazine of defamation after it took the rare step of retracting an article she had written and replacing it with an editor’s note, according to a person with knowledge of the settlement.

Ms. Barrett, who wrote an article about youth sports in wealthy areas as a freelancer for The Atlantic in 2020, sued the publication and one of its editors in January 2022. She said the outlet had smeared her reputation and asked for $1 million in damages.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER FLASHBACK: I was working on another post over the weekend when I noticed a post I wrote several years ago about Barrett’s article and subsequent lawsuit was getting heavy traffic for no apparent reason. A quick Google search of her name helped me figure it out.

At the time, I figured there was NO WAY this thing was going anywhere. The strength of my prediction powers is also why I suck at Fantasy Football.

 

THE DETAILS: Barrett wrote a story about niche sports that rich parents were pushing their kids to enter, in hopes of gaining an edge when the kids applied to Ivy League schools. The story had a number of problems, including an anonymous source that wasn’t that anonymous, the creation of a kid out of thin air, the exaggeration of an injury to a kid during a fencing match and more.

Eric Wemple of the Washington Post dug into this story and started finding more and more things that didn’t make sense, something the editors of The Atlantic also began to notice. At some point, they decided, “Screw it, we can’t save the patient” and retracted the story with a lengthy editor’s note about the story and Barrett’s history in media.

As a result, Barrett filed the suit, arguing that the note defamed her in several ways. She asked for it to be rewritten and that she be given the story’s publishing rights. The two sides went to arbitration, leading to some edits to the note and a lot of cash.

 

A FEW QUESTIONS: In reading this over and over again, I found myself asking several rhetorical questions, one of which was, “Can I sue Sage for no good reason with the hopes that they give me a squillion dollars to go away for a while?”  While the answer to that one marinates in your mind, here are a couple others:

CAN YOU LIBEL A DISASTER? I’m not calling Barrett a disaster for obvious reasons, not the least of which is I don’t have a million bucks I want to throw away. I’m more or less wondering how we started with a story so bad that it required a full retraction and ended with a pay day of this nature.

The publication stated it was aware of her history of not quite exhibiting the best level of judgment in regard to journalistic integrity. Wemple dug a bit deeper into her life and found more than a few clinkers along the way, including problems with the story on these weird sports. The fact checkers were lied to in at least two cases, with one source being encouraged to lie. (The original note said “at least one” while the new note says “one,” a distinction without merit from a language position. Also, who told you it was “only” one? The person you initially found was involved in all the lying and encouraging others to lie, so… um…)

Courts have ruled on a number of occasions that certain people and situations are “libel-proof,” in that nothing further can be done to harm their reputation. In addition, courts have stated that libel doesn’t apply if only “incremental harm” can be demonstrated. In the former, the courts basically say that someone or something is so bad, any statement that might be libelous toward any other person or group won’t qualify as libel. In the latter, it’s like a person in prison for 10 counts of murder sues you for reporting that they have a dozen unpaid parking tickets.

In looping back to this situation, I fail to see how the changes to the note or the statements regarding Barrett improved the situation to the point of avoiding libel. The distinctions in here feel to me like the quote in “Great Balls of Fire!” when someone yells at Jerry Lee Lewis that  he married his 12 year old cousin, Myra, to which she retorts, “Second cousin, twice removed!” Oh. Well.

The question of how bad was the defamation in relation to what was already out there has me pondering what level of reputation she recouped as a result of the suit. In short, do people who thought poorly of her now think better of her after this? Or did people who thought better of her before the retraction think worse of her AFTER that retraction?

Or did the big check just make things better?

 

WHEN DID GP GO MIA? I seem to remember a time, not so long ago, when people did things on “GP” or “general principle.” In other words, it was standing up for the right side of something or holding someone to account for something, even if it would be easier to just throw in the towel.

Case in point, my parents told me when I first got my license that if I got a speeding ticket, I’d lose my right to drive for a protracted period of time. No muss, no fuss, no BS. Just put the keys on the table. Sure enough, when I was 17, I was ticketed for speeding along a stretch of road that was a notorious speed trap. I walked into the house, put the ticket on the table, dropped the keys on top of it and that was that for a while.

What my parents DIDN’T foresee was that I was involved in about 912 activities that required me to be at various locations at night and on weekends. It would have been far easier for them to just give me back the keys and let me drive myself. However, Mom and Dad dug in and ended up driving me to and from all those things until the predetermined punishment time had ended. It was inconvenient for them, but they decided the principle of the thing mattered. I learned a lot from that and have since avoided speeding tickets, although now that I’ve said that, I’m sure I’m getting nailed on the way home.

The larger point is: When did we stop fighting just because the fights were hard? We’ve recently had the “60 Minutes” lawsuit, the ABC lawsuit, and several other lawsuits that have the “Fourth Estate” folding like a cheap cardboard box in a rainstorm. It’s like, “It’s cheaper and easier to just pay people to go away.” Well, that’s like paying protection money to the mob, assuming it’s a one-time thing.

It’s not just the news business, but it seems like we fold up everywhere: A kid threatens us, we change a grade. A social media “influencer” pulls focus onto a post we made, we take it down and apologize. Don’t even get me started about what the kids are doing in the ice cream aisle at Walmart these days. What happened to standing on principle?

There are times where I go into a situation knowing full well I’m going to lose and there are other times, where the risks are pretty damned high that I will. Still, there’s something that says, “No. You aren’t folding. You’re gonna play this hand out, because you can’t live with yourself if you don’t.”

I feel this moment so deeply

I understand that money is a predominant factor in pretty much everything in the world today and I know that it’s easy to say what I would or wouldn’t do when it’s not my money to spend. That said, I think back to the people I admire the hell out of in this business, who would never have acquiesced as easily as it seems like so many people are so willing to do.

Charlie Kirk, shooting deaths and trying to find a way forward. (A Throwback Post)

The death of Charlie Kirk, a political activist and leader of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, led to a number of expected outcomes when it came to social media and public expression. Some mourned the loss of the 31-year-old, noting that this brand of political violence is never the answer to disagreements. Others pointed to Kirk’s own words about guns, especially the time he noted that gun deaths in the United States were “worth it” if it meant we got to keep the right to bear arms.

Photos of Kirk and his family have also circulated, bringing home the message that two little kids will never see their father again.

As the shooter has not been captured as of this writing, the speculation about motive continues to be a hotly contested issue. Depending on which rabbit hole you enter, this is either a deranged liberal attempting to silence a strong, conservative voice or part of a larger conspiracy to martyr him to the causes that continue to move the country closer and closer to a fascist state.

(It also didn’t escape my notice that a school shooting in Colorado basically flew under most of the media’s radar Wednesday. Part of it, I’m sure, was Kirk’s fame and the pull of that story. The other part, sadly, was that not only have we grown numb to this idea, but that “only” three people were critically wounding, including the shooter, who died later that day.)

As much as I disliked Kirk and his message, I remain appalled at his death. I have always believed, and continue to do so, that the answer to speech you don’t like isn’t censorship or violence, but more speech. That said, this message isn’t where my brain found itself going as I started to think about all of this today.

When several friends and family members were talking about who could have shot him, the idea of a “liberal with a gun” seemed a bit too farfetched for a few folks. For me, I found myself hearing UWO professor and mass shooting survivor Joe Peterson in my head. When we spoke for my “First-Person Target” series, he mentioned how there was a social media group called something like Liberal Gun Owners. He laughed at that, explaining that there are a lot of liberals who own guns out there, so it’s not really a flex to start a group like this.

When my wife asked me how I couldn’t be absolutely terrified of what all of this means, particularly as our daughter fears that we are sliding toward becoming Gilead, it was Tracy Everbach’s words that spoke to me when as she reflected on how she could be shot at any moment by one of her students: “I’ve chosen not to be afraid.”

Today’s throwback post looks at the reflection piece I did a few years after the series ran. I think a number of the points are more relevant now than ever. If you’d like to read the whole series, I’ve linked to it here. (Warning: It’s a massive slog, and I say this as the person who wrote it.) I remain grateful to the people who gave of themselves and their time to help me learn lessons that I wish no longer were relevant in society today.

 

Four things I learned about the mass-shootings debate after wearing a bulletproof vest for a week

TeachingVest

Nearly three years ago, I decided to live in a bulletproof vest for a week as part of a journalism project to find out about guns, fear, mass shootings and more. (Photo by T.R. Gleason)

Over the past two weeks, the country has suffered two mass shootings: A gunman killed 10 people at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado and another killed eight people at three spas in Atlanta, Georgia.

News coverage of these events have examined the motives, the shooters and the “next steps” elements of this in a way that has become all too common in the United States. For me to do so here would be redundant at best, so feel free to Google these incidents and read all about the various elements of these crimes.

A few years back, in the wake of several mass shootings, I decided to take on a project where I dug into things that went beyond what you read in the horse-race coverage after a mass shooting or the political grandstanding that comes with gun-related violence of this nature. Instead of going out to people we normally talk to in the wake of these events, I wanted to talk to people who had specific angles on the various facets of the issue and then just shut up and listen to them.

The project that had been rattling around in my head for three years. After one of my friends noted that her university had become a concealed-carry campus, she expressed concern about what this meant for her safety. After several colleagues weighed in on potential ways to deal with the situation, all to no avail, I made a simple suggestion:

“Wear Kevlar.”

In other words, if you couldn’t play offense, play defense. A bulletproof vest might get people talking about the issue in a different way. She didn’t go that route, but I thought it was worth taking a chance. What followed was a week of personal participation reporting, several months of reporting and eventually a six-part series I called “First-Person Target.”

Here is the link to the main site for that project and all six pieces if you are interested.

After these more recent shootings, I went back and reread what I wrote during that time and found a few minor epiphanies that I thought might be worth sharing. I wanted to note that these are only my opinions based on looking back at what I wrote back then. I wish I had better answers to the bigger questions, but here’s what little I do have:

 

FEAR IS A COMMON THREAD: We often talk about guns as an issue of Constitutional rights or personal freedom or safety. What we don’t talk about, but is embedded in all of these topics and more is the concept of fear.

On a basic level, we do talk about the fear of someone deciding to unleash an internal fury upon a group of unsuspecting people in a seemingly random act of violence. I doubt people who entered a spa or a grocery store earlier this month in Georgia or Colorado thought to themselves, “I’m putting myself in harm’s way by going to this place right now.”

However, once these killers opened fire, many more of us now think about how it could happen to us at any time, in any place. For most of us, the fear will eventually subside when the story is no longer leading the nightly news or filling our news feeds with updates. Then, when the next attack occurs, our fears will be stoked once again.

Beyond that, however, I found that fear is at the heart of every action or lack thereof regarding the gun issue. People who dislike armed citizens fear the havoc guns can create. People who arm themselves do so for fear of not being able to protect themselves. People who oppose legislation that would limit access to firearms fear losing rights they see as sacrosanct. People who could propose legislation to limit access to guns fear the backlash from gun owners and lobbying groups as a result of trying to move the needle.

When I tried to get this project off the ground, fear was right at the forefront. I asked the UWO police chief if he knew where I could borrow a bulletproof vest to wear. He offered me instead a dose of reality:

Vince,

I’m sure you could purchase a vest for yourself, however I do not know of any police outfitter that would loan out this type of equipment.  In fact, if you started inquiring about borrowing a vest it could cause some concern from these vendors on your motives. As you stated people have a heightened awareness because of these mass casualty events.  Sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you.

When I sought people associated with firearms to help me understand a topic I really lacked knowledge in, I found fear as well. When I asked the folks in my community for someone to talk to about sales and gun registration and so forth, they all pointed me to one person in Omro, who owned a gun shop. I reached out to him and got an initial response, but after that, all I got was silence.

In talking to other people who knew this guy, the answer was simple and common: “He’s afraid to talk about this.”

Of all the people I talked to during my project, only one really told me they acknowledged the fear that comes from all of this, and it was Tracy Everbach, the professorial colleague of mine from the University of North Texas whose initial concerns helped spawn the project:

“I don’t spend a lot of time wondering if someone in my classroom is carrying a gun anymore or thinking, ‘Are they going to pull it out and shoot you with that?’”

“It’s just a personal thing to me,” she added. “I’ve chosen not to be afraid of it. I figure I’m as likely to have that happen as a car accident or whatever. Anything can happen to anyone at any time.”

 

WE ARE NOT SIDES OF A COIN, BUT FACETS OF A GEM: Journalism always talks about getting “both sides” of a story, as a way of avoiding bias. If someone is pro-X, we need to find someone who is anti-X. When we do, we quote them both and we’re done.

While some stories, like those on sporting events, do follow that pattern, most stories are much more complex than that. Even more, the people behind those stories are far more complex than many of us care to know.

When I started this project, I didn’t want archetypes or the “usual suspects.” I didn’t want a press release from the head of the NRA that spoke in platitudes. I didn’t want a “thoughts and prayers” statement from a politician. I didn’t want to collect soundbites that I could repeat in my sleep and move on.

I wanted real people who could help me understand their lives and interests and positions without fear of judgment or reprisal. I wanted to look into the heart of the issue through their window and see what they saw, whether I agreed with what they were seeing or not.

What I found is that reality isn’t what we see playing out in the wake of shootings on the news or at protests or elsewhere. I didn’t find “gun people” and “anti-gun people,” but rather people that saw their lives intersect with firearms in a variety of ways and how those intersections shaped them in some fashion.

UWO police officer Chance Duenkel carries a gun every day as part of his job, and yet knows that the weapon and his protective gear might not keep him safe in certain situations. In referring to a fallen officer he knew, he explained:

“He had all the equipment, he had the experience dealing with these types of firearms and weapons calls and the cards, unfortunately, weren’t in his favor.”

Nate Nelson, who trains people how to use firearms safely and is an avid hunter, carries a gun as well. He knows better than most the importance of training, safety and respect for weapons of this kind as well as the ramifications of choosing to carry one:

“If you draw that gun you’re probably going to spend six figures in legal defense,” he said. “People need to take that portion seriously on top of the fact of you might end up taking somebody’s life and it might be the assailant that’s bothering you or it might be somebody else that’s innocent because of where those bullets go beyond that.”

Joseph Peterson, a professor at UWO, owns a gun and works with the FBI to help people better understand mass shootings. Peterson was wounded when a gunman entered his classroom at Northern Illinois University in 2008 and opened fire. The shooter killed six and wounded 17 more.

Peterson spent time  learning a great deal about guns and what he refers to as “gun culture,” and found both the fallacies associated with the law and the nuanced nature of people with whom he interacted:

“Gun laws don’t prevent anything,” he said. “Absolutely. Laws don’t prevent anything. It’s that most people agree with them and people agree not to break them. Safety comes from having more good people than bad people.”

<SNIP>

“I think I’ve been in this kind of journey that I’ve been trying to put myself through on this,” he added. “In learning more about gun culture, learning more about firearms and learning to appreciate them for what they are, demystified a bit, I’m learning that there is a lot more middle ground covered. It’s the extreme views that muddy these waters and that’s what’s keeping things from getting done.”

 

LISTENING VERSUS WAITING TO TALK: During one interview, a source (I can’t remember who said it) stopping abruptly to tell me that they found themselves talking way more than they ever have on the topic. The reason, the person explained, was that I hadn’t said almost anything during the interview.

A similar thing happened when I was talking to Nate Nelson. At one point, about a half hour in, he asked, “Are you getting what you wanted from this?”

My answer was honest: “I really didn’t have anything I wanted to get. I just wanted to listen.”

In many cases, we know what we “want to get” from a source. We have questions that need answers and quotes that need to be gathered. I have done it dozens of times, asking the “How do you feel about X?” question to get the “I’m proud, happy and thrilled” answer. I don’t say this with any great level of pride in my reporting acumen, but rather to explain that experienced reporters and experienced sources know how to do the dance.

In this case, I went the completely opposite way. I had questions, sure, but they were more of a “Tell me a story” variety than a “Give me an answer” form. I also came in with as much of a blank slate as I possibly could. My goal wasn’t to poke back at people, but rather just hear what they wanted to tell me. Could they have been blowing smoke up my rear end? Sure, but that goes back to the earlier point about whom I chose and whom I avoided.

In several interviews, I got the sense that the people with whom I spoke weren’t used to people who listened. They were used to people who were waiting to talk.

I understand that passions can be loud and strong around life-and-death issues and that not everyone had the luxury I had in trying to just sit back and let information envelop me. However, when we aren’t listening, we are simply waiting to tell the other people why they’re wrong, and that’s not going to get us anywhere anyway.

In listening, I got to hear important points that made a lot of sense:

  • If people are going to say that mental health concerns are more to blame than guns for mass shootings, they need to be willing to put forth the money, research and resources to deal with that. They also need to be willing to look beyond that issue if this issue becomes a definitive red herring in the issue of mass shootings.
  • We’re often looking at the wrong thing when it comes to guns and death. Although the mass shootings draw the most attention and an ever-increasing body count continues to work people into a media frenzy, guns do far more damage in far less public ways. Gun statistics demonstrate that more than half of the gun deaths in the United States are suicides. Homicides account for another third of those deaths, with the majority of the deaths coming at the hands of people who knew their attackers, as in the case of domestic violence. Less than one-fifth of one percent of the gun deaths in the U.S. come from mass shootings.
  • People who don’t know a lot about guns actually talk the most about guns. Joe Peterson mentioned in an interview that shortly after the NIU shooting, he found himself talking a lot about the topic of guns and mass shootings while knowing much about either. He then did the academic thing and really researched the topic like a scholar would: Open the aperture on the lens, see the full picture and come to some provable conclusions. Nate Nelson mentioned that people get freaked out by the AR-15 because of its look and misunderstandings about the reason the gun is preferred in some legitimate circles. He noted the light weight and limited recoil make it valuable for hunters like his son. I also dug around after our interview to find that he was right about its role in mass shootings: Most mass shootings were committed with weapons OTHER than an AR-15. (For example the shooter at Virginia Tech killed 32 people with a pair of handguns. The shooter at NIU employed a shotgun and a handgun as well.) However, if all you see are social media posts, memes and news clips, you might be left with the impression that banning the AR-15 would solve all of our shooting problems.

I figured out a lot more along the way as well and I find myself pushing back at a lot of things I might have otherwise accepted as gospel before this project. I also figured out that I can understand a lot of things people believe without completely agreeing with them, and vice versa.

WE SUSTAIN MENTAL SCARS THAT NEVER COMPLETELY FADE: Of all the things I heard in doing this project, the one that stuck with me the most came from Chase Cook, a reporter at the Annapolis Capital Gazette. In 2018, a man with a long-standing feud against the paper came to the newsroom armed with a shotgun. He killed six of Cook’s colleagues.

Cook was off that day, but upon hearing of the attack, he went to the office where he began to report on the events of the day. The work of Cook and the fellow survivors earned national honors and praise, including a spot as Time’s “People of the Year.”

As the incident faded from the collective consciousness, Cook continued to deal with the aftermath of his experiences.

“I have a hard time in movie theaters now,” he said. “I get anxious when the lights go out, which is a bummer because I love going to the movies. I think about it a lot when I’m in really crowded places… That fear factor has kind of permeated through everything. I’m at work, I’m in danger. I’m at school, I’m in danger. I’m at church, I’m in danger. I have to convince myself that I’m not because while mass shootings are a problem in the country and they’re up, they’re still a rare crime.”

I haven’t spoken to Cook for at least a year now, but I often think about him when a shooting occurs. I wonder if he reads the news coverage. I wonder if he’s been able to enjoy movies again. I wonder if he is OK.

In talking to Kelly Furnas, the former adviser of the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech, I found he also had residual mental scars after dealing with a mass shooting. He mentioned to me simple things, like noticing how certain door handles were replaced because the campus shooter had chained the doors of a building to prevent escape. He mentioned trying to be more aware of certain things but not letting fear dominate his life.

As a newshound of sorts, however, he also found difficulty when it came to reading about each subsequent shooting that occurred in the U.S.:

“Quite frankly when I hear about a mass shooting I read the headline and I mention it to my wife and that’s about it,” he added. “That’s about all I can handle at this point. It’s obviously overwhelmingly sad and it’s frustrating and it makes you angry and upset but it’s also just like not where my energy can be. I think every single time that happens I think back to my students and what they went through and maybe that’s part of it.”

Joe Peterson, who was wounded in a mass shooting, talked about therapy and life changes and other major issues he dealt with. He also discussed minor things like seeking out exits in movie theaters and not being able to sit with his back to the door at a restaurant for a long time. In explaining his experiences, he told me that a lot of those personal difficulties were shared among people who had gone through situations like he had:

“With every one of these tragedies there are more and more survivors,” he said. “We are all members of a club we don’t want to be a member of and we don’t want any more members in it.”

If there was a single thing I think everyone I spoke with would agree on, it would be that.

Tell me what media-writing and journalism exercises your kids need and I’ll build them for you

So, so pretty… And no, I was not inspired by “Wicked” when I approved this. Unless you would adopt it because of that, in which case, I’ll have you know I always sing “Defying Gravity” before I come to work.

With the fourth edition of “Dynamics of Media Writing” set to debut in August, and with the third edition of “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” having just published, it seemed like a good time to add some extra value to the books.

The biggest need people tend to express in reviewing textbooks is the need for more exercises. A friend hit me with an email about that just the other week:

Really hoping to find a text that offers enough exercises so we don’t have to require an exercise book.

I get it and that’s one of the reasons why we shifted from the exercise books that accompanied the texts to the blog approach. Kids pay a lot of money for school, so if we can give them everything they need for less, hey, I’m a big fan.

That said, asking for more exercises is a lot like when Amy says, “What are you thinking about for dinner?” I usually have no idea, as she often asks this right after we eat a huge breakfast, and I’m more of a “eat whatever is near me when I’m hungry” type of guy.

So, to better guide the focus of my summer work that will include both learning how to weld sheet metal and creating some more exercises for you all, I need some help. I also figure it’s a good time to ask this now, as most of you have just finished a semester, so the “Holy hell, do these kids need more practice doing XYZ” angst is likely fresh in your minds.

Either post at the end of this post or shoot me a message through the “Contact” page and answer the following questions:

1) What topics are most in need of exercises for your kids? Look at the chapters in either or both books and see what things I’ve written about that your students struggle with the most. That could be broader topics like grammar or interviewing, or it could be more specific things like how to write an obituary or a press release.

2) What format of exercise is most likely going to help you meet those needs? I tend to categorize these things into a few basic areas:

  • Memory Exercises: Think multiple choice, true false, pick the right word, matching game etc. This is when you want them to know what FOCII stands for or which ethical paradigm is reflected in the phrase “justice is blind.”
  • Explainer Exercises: Think short answer or mini-essays where they have to tell you what they were thinking about and why. That could be something like, “Explain the difference between AI and generative AI” or “List five things that are wrong with this lead.”
  • Just Do It Exercises: Think about things where the rubber meets the road and the kid actually has to create something that demonstrates competency at the task. It could be building a press release out of a collection of facts, rewriting a meeting story to better fit the inverted-pyramid format or using press releases to write leads.

Hit me up with this and I’ll add your needs to the pile. Once I get the pile built, I’ll share with the class.

 

Welcome back to “The Midterm From Hell” (A throwback post)

The reporting kids got a look this week at the legend of the reporting midterm. The legend has grown over the years, with each generation of kids telling the next group of reporting kids about it.

The difficulty level, the unrelenting problems and the general anxiety students regale each other with continues to make this thing take on an almost mythic status. I’m sure they’ll come in expecting that they’ll have to slay a dragon with a pickleball paddle while reciting the “Gettysburg Address.”

The point of this midterm is to do a couple things:

  1. Teach them how to operate under a tight deadline, in which they can’t just sit back and wait for people to email them back.
  2. Help them learn how to improvise, adapt and overcome when problems show up and failure is not an option.
  3. Show them that they are capable of things they didn’t think they were.

In the end, most of the students tend to get it done and have a general sense of amazement that they pulled it off. As much as they don’t like it, I think it does the job.

See what you think on this Throwback Thursday.

—

“The Midterm From Hell”

I often get to hear students complaining about classes and professors, as that comes with the territory of being an academic adviser, a  former newsroom adviser and having an office right next to the computer lab. When they don’t think I’m listening, I’ve heard students mutter about the amount of reading I assign in Feature Writing or the way that AP style is way too big of a deal in the Writing for the Media class.

However, two grievances have been repeated about two specific things I force students to do that are both points of annoyance and points of pride for them. When they gripe about these things, they do so loudly and with an odd tone like someone in a really bad 1980s movie yelling, “I was in ‘NAM, man! You don’t even know!” It’s a mix of irritation and self-congratulations.

The first we’ve discussed here before: The Feel-It Lab.

The second is what one student referred to as “The Midterm from Hell.”

Conceptually speaking, it’s reporting in its purest form: You get an assignment you know nothing about, you research it, you find sources and you turn the story in for publication immediately. Maybe working night desk where asking “Can I get this done tomorrow?” would have gotten me mocked and then fired and then mocked again has jaded me to the difficulty of this, but I doubt it.

Below is the outline for “The Midterm from Hell” as it is presented to the students. Feel free to use it as you see fit or adapt it as you need. Consider it a “share the hate” moment from me to you.

——-

Reporting Midterm Assignment

The 24-Hour Story

As promised, this isn’t going to be your standard “memorize some facts, regurgitate them and move on” type of midterm. Reporting is a skill that you hone over time and in many cases, you don’t have a lot of time to do the honing. You will be responsible for your own fate and the fate of your colleagues in this midterm exercise.

Part I: The Pitch

As per your syllabus, you will have to email me a midterm pitch no later than Sunday at noon. If you do not turn in your pitch, you will not be able to participate in the midterm itself on Tuesday.

(UPDATE NOTE: About one student every other year fails the midterm before it even launches because of this. I guess if I had this threat hanging over my head, I’d make it a priority to beat the deadline by several days.)

What you are attempting to pitch is a story that you believe you could accomplish within a 24-hour period. The pitch itself should include the following things:

  • Your name
  • Your contact information (phone number, email address etc.)
  • An introductory paragraph of about five or six sentences that outlines what the story is about, what makes it worth doing and why it matters to a specific readership.
  • A list of at least THREE human sources, including contact information and rationale behind these people being used as sources.

You should attempt to create a quality pitch, obviously. If your pitch is too weak or fails to meet the basic elements of the assignment, your pitch will be discarded and you will not be allowed to participate in the midterm.

 

Part II: The Story

Everyone who turns in a pitch will be expected to be in class ready to go on Tuesday. I will print off all of the acceptable pitches and give each pitch a random number. Each participant will select a number and thus receive the associated pitch. YOU CANNOT RECEIVE YOUR OWN PITCH. I will read the pitch to the class and give you a copy of the pitch. The person responsible for the pitch can then augment the pitch with additional information or suggestions. We then open the floor for other people to suggest other sources or other places for information. Once you feel comfortable with your pitch, we move on to the next person.

When all the pitches are handed out, you will then have approximately 24 hours to complete a solid news story on that topic. It must be at least 2 pages, typed, double-spaced. It must contain no fewer than three human sources. You do not need to use any or all of the sources suggested to you in the pitch. You can augment the list or stick to it. The pitch is merely meant to guide you.

Your story must be in at noon on Wednesday.  If you are late, you fail the assignment, so remember the old line we repeat in here: Journalism is never done. It’s just due. Your completed work will be graded along the same lines as your previous stories, with one-third of the grade being assigned to each of the three main areas: Reporting, Writing and Style.

This is going to typify the quote on the front of your syllabus: You have to improvise. You have to adapt. You have to overcome. Stuff can go wrong. People might not get back to you. Sources might be out of town.  Your job is to be a reporter and figure out how to get the best possible version of the story out of the assignment based on what you have available to you at the time. Perfection is unattainable, so don’t panic about that. Make sure you’re accurate, clear, concise and balanced. Work on smoothing out your writing without obsessing about how perfect it is.

You can do this. We’ve been preparing for it all term.

Questions? Ask ‘em.

An open letter to Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway: Media folks don’t like dealing with the death of kids any more than you do, so please don’t treat them like crap

Dear Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway,

I saw the comments you made to a gaggle of reporters in the wake of the Abundant Life school shooting, in which you basically accused working journalists of being pain vampires, who live off the misery of others. You chastised these folks for asking legitimate questions, told them to have some “human decency” as if that never occurred to them and then shamed them with a “y’all” that could only come from someone who spent most of their life in the land of Yankees.

I don’t know what compelled you to castigate the media at large in that press conference. It might have been just the stress of the day or it might have been previous experiences with a few bad folks in the field. I can tell you for sure that, just like in politics, there are good and bad people in journalism. And, just like in politics, the lousy ones tend to make the biggest impressions and do the most damage for the whole lot of folks. If I had to wager, I’d say that most of the people in that media cluster would have gladly been covering ANYTHING ELSE that day than a school shooting.

I let this post sit for a day or two, in the hopes that you would issue some sort of apology for this, even if it were completely insincere, so that we could all go back to doing what we’re good at: Media folks covering the news, you not pretending to be a journalism expert. Unfortunately, the PR people who advise you are apparently no better than you are, so I thought I’d offer a few insights on what this situation is like for news people.

I spent three years as a reporter, another five as an editor and then about 15 as a newsroom adviser, and in every case, I’ve had to deal with stories involving dead kids. This is not a morbid flex, but rather a chance to help you understand where I’m coming from.

All those things you said at the press conference? Hell, I’ve been told worse and more loudly by far more traumatized people than you. I’ve been called a vulture, a scumbag, a waste of life and a few other things that could peel the paint off of a car. The hardest one was the lady who told me that “Your mother must not have raised you right, if you think what you’re doing is appropriate.”

Believe it or not, journalists are actually human. Sure, we’re really good at hiding it a lot, but we have the same emotional range as most other bipeds you’ve encountered. If you felt pain, agony, shock, angst or anything along those lines, it’s safe to say that the people who were asking questions of you that day did as well.

If you think that reporters in that gaggle are going to enjoy talking to sobbing parents and bothering traumatized kids before heading home for a nice casserole supper, you’re delusional. This kind of thing sticks with most people for a long time, and journalists are no exception.

When my students would ask me about my experiences writing about death and mayhem, I told them that I could remember the name, age and cause of death of every dead kid I ever covered. It’s been decades since I was reporting and editing, but it’s still true.

Casey Rowin, Shawn Magrane, Matthew Dunn,  Deanna Turner… those names and a dozen more stick with me every day. I think about Rachael Himmelberg, the infant who died after receiving what should have been life-saving open heart surgery. She would be in her late 20s now and I wonder what she would be doing. I think of Jordan Sosa, who died at 22 months old when he wandered out of his grandparents’ house and fell into the Black Earth Creek. He might have been a college student of mine, if he hadn’t drown that day.

My first year at Ball State, we had five college kids die of various causes: Michael McKinney was shot to death by a cop,  Karl Harford was robbed and executed after giving some guys a ride… accidents, suicides and more… I remember one of the more veteran editors of the paper, who had lived in Muncie his entire life telling me, “This is not normal for us around here…” like he was trying to convince both of us that what he was saying was true.

The editor also asked me, “How did you get so good at covering stuff like this?”

My answer was simple and I think most journalists would be on board with it: “You don’t get good at doing this. You become more experienced in doing the best you can. If you ever get to a point where you feel you’re good at covering dead kids, it means you are really broken and you need to walk away for a good, long while.”

Each dead kid we cover is like a wound we receive, the scar a permanent reminder of what it was to be there in the worst moment of someone else’s life. Each mistake we made in how we phrased a question or how we approached a source still stings. Each time we did the best we could and still faced the wrath of a pained family member or friend brings about a wince and grimace.

You mentioned that reporters should go away and give people a chance to grieve. Despite your apparent thoughts on the state of media today, reporters can be a crucial component of that grieving process. I go back to what Kelly Furnas, the adviser of student media at Virginia Tech, said to his students as they went out to cover what remains the deadliest shooting on a college campus:

“The students I talked to were terrified of the fact that they would need to call these families and I said, ‘You don’t assume that these families don’t want to talk,’” Furnas said, recalling that day at a college media conference a few months after the shooting. “That’s a very important thing to these families to tell the story of their son’s or daughter’s lives. That’s a very important thing. A lot of people not only want to do it, but expect to do it.”

I can tell you for sure that this holds water. When it came to the dead people I covered in one way or another, I got one of three reactions 99% of the time:

  1. “I just can’t… I’m sorry…” These people were already at the maximum level of stress and pain and they were just incapable of dealing with anything else at that point. I would apologize for intruding on their grief and then leave them alone.
  2. “You #%*%ing VULTURE!” Yep, we talked about that already. This reaction gave me a ton of anxiety and pain, but I understood. It was like putting your hand out toward a wounded animal: They just hurt so badly, they lashed out, regardless of your intent. Again, I’d apologize and back away.
  3. “The pressure-release valve” This is what Kelly was talking about. These people are so full of emotion and they have nowhere to go with it. Everyone around them is feeling the same pain, misery, stress and more… All they want to do is talk about how great their kid was, or how amazing their parent was or whatever stories make them feel less hurt. As a journalist, we’re that opportunity to not only help, but to share their thoughts with others.

So in the future, please feel free not to tell journalists how to do their jobs at a time like this. It’s a job nobody wants, no one revels in and few people can do and remain unscathed.

If someone asks a particularly crappy question like, “Are there plans to call it ‘Less-Abundant Life’ now that people have died there?” or “Don’t you find it ironic that there was a lot of thoughts and prayers happening in there but the kids still got shot?” go ahead and release your inner scold. That kind of person deserves your wrath.

However, the basic “5Ws and 1H” questions are normal, even if the situation is not and you lack the answers. Everyone is frayed to the nth degree, so you need to operate above the fray. If you can’t, don’t hold the press conference or send someone out there who is actually skilled at PR to do the work for you.

I hope this helps, because I somehow doubt this will be the last time you and the media will spend time together discussing a devastating death or two.

Sincerely,

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

 

 

When Write Goes Wrong: How to avoid the trap of journalistic fabrication (A Throwback Post)

It’s rare to have a group of students be exceptionally engaged at 8 a.m., but when it came to our ethics lecture today, the room was humming. Tons of hands up, tons of questions, tons of despair.

They had read stories about a drug addict and a rape survivor, seeing how their lives were forever altered by the choices they had made and the choices made for them. They cringed as the description of the these people’s circumstances, they flashed anger about the way in which the people around them had acted and they felt both helpless and compelled to act at the same time.

“I wanted to drive (out there) and beat those people up,” one student said of the people who engaged in the sexual assault.

I let them get all of it out, before I asked them to describe their feelings about these stories in one word or a simple phrase. They came up with things like, “anger,” “disturbed,” “disgusted” and “sad.”

I then took a deep breath and told them the truth: None of these stories were real.

In case you haven’t guessed, they read “Jimmy’s World” by Janet Cooke, “Hack Heaven” by Stephen Glass and “A Rape on Campus” by Sabrina Erdley. Each story was fabricated in some part or entirely. Each one fooled people at some of the most influential publications in the country. Each one had readers enraptured in a way that only amazing writing and terrifying topics can.

After that brief reveal, I asked the students how they felt now, knowing this new information. The answers were somewhat similar (anger, disgusted) but also different (relieved, stupid). As we shifted the topic toward how NOT to put themselves in this situation, I told them that any time they feel like they want to cut a corner or bend the rules in this kind of way, they should think about how they felt when they found out these stories weren’t real. Then, realize that’s how they’ll be making their own audiences feel if they fake it and get caught.

Today’s throwback piece takes a look at another case of fabrication and some potential things that might help your students come to grips with this issue.

 

 

“Don’t Bring Shame On The Family.” 4 helpful thoughts related to the Mike Ward fabrication debacle

Every time I see a situation like the one involving former Houston Chronicle journalist Mike Ward, who was found to have fabricated sources for his stories, I always think, “What the hell is wrong with this guy (or gal)?” Thanks to my overly Catholic upbringing and the guilt that comes with it, my next immediate thought is, “Hey, there but by the grace of God, go any of us.”

However, at various points in life, family and friends have hit me with a few helpful thoughts that stuck with me that kept me out of a lot of trouble. In hopes that these things might help you in your journalism career (or life in general), here are four of those bits and bites that might be useful:

 

If you’re going to steal something, steal the whole store

My dad can always make sense of things in a way that usually kept me from doing a lot of stupid things. He once told me a simple adage that helped me understand cost/benefit analysis in a truly elementary way.

“If you’re going to steal something,” he said. “Don’t steal a candy bar. Steal the whole store. I mean when they come back in the morning to open up, there should be nothing left but wires sticking out of the ground.”

His point was that once you steal something (or do something else despicable), you were marked for life, so it better be worth it when you throw away everything for it. I have no idea what Mike Ward was best known for before this, but it’s pretty clear he won’t be known for much else other than this going forward.

It’s hard to find a lot of background on Mike Ward, but he’s not like some of the other “fabulists” like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass who was a 20-something who got in over their heads. He spent more than 40 years in the field of journalism and nearly 30 years doing it in the state of Texas. He was working for one of the best newspapers in the state and a well-respected publication overall.

Was it worth throwing away his whole career and reputation to pep up the stories with random quotes that weren’t all that great to begin with? I doubt he thought about it like that, but I know I always let flights of paranoia take me to the worst possible scenario before I even think about “candy-bar-level theft” let alone taking out an entire store.

 

Stupid is bad, lazy is worse

I think this one came from my mother, but I’m not 100 percent sure. In any case, the underlying premise of not being lazy usually was Mom’s stock-and-trade when it came to things I was doing.

I know my general laziness was like a stone in a shoe for my mother. I can’t tell you how many times I’d be doing my homework and yell to Mom, who was in another room, “How do you spell (whatever I didn’t want to bother to look up)?” Her answer was always the same, “Look it up! You have a dictionary in there.” In short, don’t be lazy.

It could be unfair to deem Ward as lazy, but the way in which he seemed to make up random people would indicate at least some corner-cutting behavior.

It’s easy to find sources you use all the time for stories and to get used to those folks being ready to comment. The investigation into his various stories found that most of his “meat and potatoes” official sources were real people with legitimate quotes. Those folks could be interviewed with a quick phone call or a simple email.

The “real people” who hated guns or gun control, who planned to vote for a specific party, who didn’t like that the McRib wasn’t available all year and so forth require some “shoe-leather reporting.” Reporters have to go to local diners, knock on doors with “Don’t Tread On Me” flags flying outside, ask people they know for help finding people they don’t and generally chase around to get that one pancake-eating source who can give you the “salt-of-the-earth person” quote.

That part of the job is a major pain in the keester and it can be awkward as hell. Truth be told, I used to prefer asking people for comments after a shooting or a fire or something else horrible than walking up to a guy eating a funnel cake at the county fair to find out how much fun he was having at the event. Still, it’s part of the job, so I did it, despite the fact people treated me like I was from the KGB when I asked for their names.

Why Ward thought he could pull this off was a mystery, but it would seem to either be a dumb decision or general laziness. Neither of those approaches is good, so do your best to avoid both of them as a journalist.

 

They never did it just once

This one came from a former journalist and great friend of mine who covered the Chicagoland Catholic church molestation scandals of the early 2000s. I used to ask her how she knew for sure that the priests in her stories were serial pedophiles. The information she gathered came from the accusers, usually years or decades later, and was almost impossible to back up with documents or other “official source” content that I had gotten used to using in my own work.

Her answer was simple: She did a ton of digging, verified in every way she could and then she published the content and waited. In almost every case, if she published one or two accusations, she immediately heard from at least three or four other people who told her the same things had happened to them. It was like this scene at the end of “Spotlight.”

“They never did it just once,” Allison told me. “And they always did it the same way.”

She found that if a priest had trapped a child in the 1970s by promising baseball tickets and then luring the young man into his room, he did the same thing in the 1980s and 1990s. It was never a one-off and it was always the same.

Even though the magnitude is in no way the same, I think about this whenever a student mentions that they only cheated on an exam once or only lied about a source once or only did anything else sketchy once. It’s never just once. It’s just that they finally got caught.

When Blair was caught in New York, his student newspaper at the University of Maryland went back and found other fabrications and noted people were alerted to these problems at the time.Ward has a 40-year career in this field and he just got caught now in Houston. I would be willing to bet that this didn’t just happen once and it didn’t just occur to him now to do it. I have no idea how far back people want to go, but it wasn’t “just this once.”

If the thought ever occurs to you to cut the corner “just this once” and make up a source or hide a detail to spare a friend or fake your way through a story, don’t do it. It’s never just once.

It’s only hard the first time. After that, it becomes standard practice without a second thought.

 

Don’t bring shame on the family

I hear this in my head on a daily basis, courtesy of my father.

As I was preparing to go off to college, my mother was a veritable trove of advice, thoughts and wisdom that made “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” seem underwhelming by comparison. She told me of all things I would see and the experiences I would have and everything else good that college away from home would bring.

Dad was more practical and blunt: “Go have fun, but don’t bring shame on the family. It’s my name, too.”

Tarnishing the family name was unacceptable to Dad, and to be fair, it kept me out of a lot of stupid situations. To this day, whenever I imagine doing something that might not be all that bright, I can see the headline in my mind: “UWO professor arrested on suspicion of (fill in the stupidity here).” I imagine the folks “back home” seeing my dad in the grocery store or running into him at the local farmer’s market and saying, “Hey… I read about your kid…” I STILL do this and I’m middle-aged, to put it kindly.

However, I also think about mistakes that tarnish that other “family” I referred to in the post about how journalists aren’t the enemy. In his 2016 piece on Janet Cooke, Mike Sager talks about how her fabrications led to the general mistrust of various groups of people. Some of his sources said that Cooke led others to distrust African-Americans in the newsroom. Others said it tarnished all journalism, leaving the public to regard all content with a wary eye.

I wonder what Cooke’s professors at the University of Toledo felt when they saw her quick rise and even quicker fall. I remember a few years back when a journalist in Alaska, Charlo Greene, quit her job during a live broadcast while outing herself as the owner of a marijuana-related enterprise.

A number of professors were chatting about this online when a professor I knew messaged me to say she had been a student of his. In discussing Greene’s collegiate experiences and the current situation, I could almost feel his grimace over the internet. If it were my student, I know I would have been rubbing my head and searching for aspirin while muttering, “Oh, good grief…”

Maybe it’s an old-fashioned notion that has people like me avoiding disaster by asking, “Good LORD! What would the NEIGHBORS think?” but I really believe it goes deeper than that. Each of us owes a debt of some kind to the people who helped us get here. The people who support us. Who take part in our lives. Those folks are family in the best possible sense and to create shame through poor judgment is to spread that shame upon them as well.

I might not always be thinking of myself when I do something good or bad, but you better believe I’m doing my best to not bring shame on those people.

I Guess I’ll Never Run Out of Current Examples of Mass Shootings (A Throwback Post)

I had another Throwback Thursday post on the launch pad, ready to go, when news about Apalachee High School in Georgia broke:

Four people were killed by gunfire at a high school in northern Georgia on Wednesday, the state’s bureau of investigation said, sending schools across the region into lockdown just over a month after the end of summer vacation.

President Biden called the shooting — the deadliest episode of school violence in Georgia history — “another horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear our communities apart.”

I remember once thinking about how certain events were touchstones for certain generations. There were things like the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, the Miracle on Ice and more. I remember thinking the Columbine shooting would be one of those eternal events, as nothing like it could ever really happen again at that level.

Shows what I know…

As was the case when I was writing the original post below, I’m in the middle of two revisions to two textbooks and I’m constantly looking for fresh examples of things like a social media influencer running afoul of the FTC, a famous person doing something stupid and public relations efforts that were massively successful, with varying levels of results. That said, I’m never at a loss for something having to do with either defamation or a mass shooting.

The saddest thing is that I’ve actually already DONE one of these shooting posts on a Throwback Thursday. That was when 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley used a handgun to kill four and wound seven others at Michigan’s Oxford High School.

I can’t remember if I wove the Crumbley example into a textbook, as the timing might not have fit my deadlines, but I know that whatever emerges in Georgia will likely make the cut for at least one of these upcoming texts.

I am devastated and saddened beyond all belief, but unfortunately not surprised.

As was the case in 2017 when I originally wrote this:

 

The horrifying revisions of my textbooks: Chapter by chapter, shooting by shooting

The first draft of what would become the “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” featured a sample chapter written in 2008, discussing at length the Virginia Tech shooting. I was pitching a reporting book to another publisher when the rep for that company asked for two chapters that could help her sell the book to her acquisitions committee.

Kelly Furnas, then the adviser at the student newspaper at VT, had done a session at a student media conference about his newsroom’s efforts in the wake of the attack. I knew Kelly through friends and helped book him for that session. I also was able to talk to him after the session for this chapter, assuming that the magnitude of this event would never be equaled.

It turned out I was wrong about that, much to my continuing dismay.

The arguments of when is the right time to discuss broader issues are beginning to emerge in the wake of Monday’s attack in Las Vegas. So are the calls for all sorts of regulations, restrictions, restructuring and more. It is hard to see the carnage wrought upon the citizens of this country and remain dispassionate or above the fray when it comes to the continually evolving topic of attacks like this one.

As a reporter and then an editor and then an adviser, I always believed in the simplest of ideas when it came to covering something like this:

  • Show, don’t tell.
  • Provide facts and let them speak for themselves.
  • Don’t try to oversell it.
  • Just let the readers know what happened.

This blog isn’t a podium or a pulpit, nor will I use it to advance whatever agenda or whatever “side” some displeased readers would disparagingly note I must be on as a professor, a journalist or whatever other label was convenient.

That said, it struck me tonight as I thought about the morning post that the two books featured here, “Dynamics of Media Writing” and “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing,” catalog the expansive nature of violent outbursts, here and abroad. Even more, they do so in a way that shows me something exceedingly painful: My continual endeavors to update these volumes in a meaningful way as they relate to these horrific events is an ongoing, losing effort.

After a few years of discussions, the book in which the Virginia Tech shooting story was included did not come to fruition. The proposal was scuttled when the publisher decided to “go another way,” corporate-speak for “we didn’t really think this was worth the time.”

About three years after that happened, I met a rep from SAGE while at a journalism convention. I was looking for a book to use in my writing across media class, while Matt was trying to convince me to write one instead. In writing the pitch, I built two chapters for him, one of which was on social media. I included a reference to the Aurora, Colorado shooting, in which a gunman shot up a theater during the midnight showing of the Batman film, “The Dark Knight Rises.” The point there was not to show the magnitude of the attack, but rather what can happen when people are inept at social media: The hashtag used (#aurora) to keep people abreast of the unfolding situation was co-opted by a fashion boutique to promote the Aurora dress.

After reviewing the pitch and the chapters, Matt came to the conclusion that I really had two books: one for general media writing and one for news reporting, so he signed me to both. This was 2014 and I had already written several chapters for each book. Almost by accident, I had layered in references to additional shootings.

In my initial discussion of the importance of geographic referents in the audience-centricity chapter, I tried to explain how a reference to a “Cudahy man” who had killed six people at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin drove me to a fit of anxiety. My mother taught grade school and middle school in that town for 40-odd years at the time, so I feared some level of connection between Mom and a monster. (As it turned out, there was none as he had moved to the area more recently. In addition, the whole explanation was overly complicated, so I cut it during one of the draft chapters.)

In the reporting book, I referenced the Charlie Hebdo attack in my discussion of hashtags. In the media writing book, I included a reference to Sandy Hook in discussing magnitude. In a law chapter for one of them, I discussed the Boston Marathon Bombing and the “Bag Men” cover that essentially libeled two guys who just happened to be at event.

At one point, I added and cut references to the Northern Illinois shooting, in which a grad student killed five and injured 17. I knew the DeKalb area, as my grandfather had been a police chief there for years and I had interviewed for a job there about four years before the shooting. The adviser at that student paper was also a friend of mine at the time.

I remember thinking when I cut it that it was because it hadn’t been “big enough” for people to easily recall it. It galls me to think that five dead and 17 wounded could be prefaced by the modifier “only.” Unfortunately, it was accurate: Sunday’s attack in Las Vegas had fatalities ten times that one and injuries scores and scores beyond that attack.

Somehow, and I honestly don’t know how this happened, I was between edits or editions of both books when the Pulse nightclub shooting happened in 2016. I could find no reference to this in any draft chapters and it defies logic that the murder of 49 people somehow slipped past me or didn’t make the cut in one of these books.

However, in finalizing the Reporting book, I ended up coming back around to the story Kelly Furnas told me all those years ago. I was building a section on obituaries and realized I never actually published the story he told me about how his staff wrote literally dozens of obituaries for a single issue of the paper. He had long left VT, but I found him and got his permission to finally publish this incredible explanation as to how his extremely green reporters gritted their teeth and met this challenge.

That book is currently in press and is already out of date as a result of the attack in Las Vegas. However, the Media Writing book is in the completed draft phase of a second edition, so this information will likely supplant some previous horrifying event and make the cut. At the very least, I’m going to include the Jack Sins incident to outline the importance of fact checking, even when it feels almost slimy to do so.

In looking back, it’s not so much the number of these incidents or the magnitude of them that disturbs me in an inexplicable way. Rather, it’s that I have recounted these events not by impacted memory but rather a search through my hard drive, using key terms like “shooting,” “dead,” “killed” and “attacked.”

Each time I added one of these “recent events,” it was fresh, clear and horrifying. As I review them now, it is more like looking through a photo album that provided refreshed glimpses and renewed recollections of vague people and places.

Each incident wasn’t so much of a “I’ll never forget” moment as a “Oh, now I remember” one.

Filak Furlough Tour Update: Hanging out with Wichita State University and The Sunflower Staff

Repping my Sunflower T-shirt for the Sunflower staff at Wichita State University. A nice photo of the group, although I never photograph well. I think it’s that my eyes always look closed and my mouth always looks open. It’s like a demented baby bird or something. (Photo courtesy of Amy DeVault)

 

The Filak Furlough Tour’s final stop of the year is the one I was most excited to make. Amy DeVault at Wichita State University is a great friend and colleague. She advises the Sunflower, the student newspaper there and does an incredible job with some incredible students.

I also have a history with these folks, in that we were blogging about the little …. um… people in student government a few years back trying to slash the paper’s funding and kill the publication. In the end, things worked out well, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the underdog in the fight, which is why I will always do anything I can to help The Sunflower.

Wichita State University — WICHITA, KS

THE TOPIC: The folks there wanted a basic critique of the newspaper itself as well as the opportunity to do some Q and A stuff, so that’s what we did. I had a chance to see the publication a couple times over the years, including a recent review of it for the Kansas College Media contest.

BASICS OF A CRITIQUE: If you want to see a really great, well-rounded news publication that covers its niche well, grab a copy of The Sunflower. They have a great mix of big pieces and small news bits. They have a strong collection of writers, photographers, designers and graphics folks. I loved a lot of what they did, so I made it clear that pretty much any critique was of the “here are some polish points” variety as opposed to a “Dear LORD do you need a wrecking ball and a blowtorch to get this thing into shape” collection of grievances.

Here are some observations I hoped might be helpful to them, and might also be helpful to you all as well:

  • Size versus value: In some cases, stories can get out of hand a bit, particularly when it comes to pieces that feel investigative, but don’t really add up to a lot. For The Sunflower, one piece in particular had a lot of content to it, but it really didn’t add up to a lot. The story looked at allegations of racial animosity during a rec center basketball game. The reporter dug into every allegation and every explanation offered to counter them, but in the end, the story was basically that a couple dudes got out of control playing basketball and nobody could fully corroborate either side of the argument.
    The story could easily have been cut significantly to reflect that reality and the graphic used to create the front-page centerpiece didn’t really add a lot to the storytelling either. This is one of those cases where the size didn’t mirror the value of the piece. It can be tough to see a lot of hard work essentially amount to less than we would hope for as journalists, but it’s worth remembering that the readers need to see value if they’re going to invest a ton of time in a piece. Whacking the hell out of something can be painful, but your readers will thank you.

 

  • Keeping it local: Overall, there was a TON of great local coverage in the publication. My only minor grouse was a common one on the arts/entertainment page: movie and music reviews. If you can give people something they can’t get anywhere else, fine, do those reviews. If not, leave that stuff for the IMDB’s and Richard Roepers of the world and go cover some local bands or some local theater.
    If you’re asking yourself, “OK, so when WOULD I do a movie review?” my answer is an example from a student paper I critiqued years ago. The paper was from a small religious school out west and it reviewed the movies from the perspective of the faith base. The reviews noted how much violence or sex or whatever was in there and how people who practiced certain levels of the faith’s orthodoxy might be more or less offended by this content. I’m not getting that level of clarity on Rotten Tomatoes.

 

  • Use your voice: The opinion page was solid, and it’s often difficult to critique an opinion page, because it’s often at the mercy of whatever is going on around you. When the paper was under attack all those years ago, the opinion page thundered against the stupidity of the student government with the fire of a white-hot sun. That’s not always possible to do when you’re faced with some “meh” news days. Even more, it can make things worse if you’re trying to gin up some false-front rage for the sake of feeling like you’re wielding the power of the press.
    That said, I did note that they shouldn’t be afraid to go in the corner and fight for the puck when news merits their viewpoint on behalf of the student body. If something needs to be called out, it’s the publication’s duty to use its voice effectively to do so.

PICKING FILAK’S BRAIN: Here are a few of the things that came up in our time together. The questions aren’t direct quotes, but more of the general gist of what we were going after. Answers fit the same pattern:

QUESTION: What kind of balance do you think should be present in the publication between the kinds of things people like and the things people need? Is there a percentage split on something like this?

BEST ANSWER I COULD COME UP WITH: I’ve had a version of this question in a number of other stops on the tour and throughout my time working with student media. What I’ve tried to convey is that ALL information should be geared toward things that provide value to the readership, whether that value is in the form of entertainment, editorial insights, informational alerts or knowledge-building content.

What tends to happen is that we present content without a strong sense of WHY readers should care. In other words, people tend to blow off the “newsier” stories because as writers, we don’t make a strong enough “this matters because” statement for them.

My suggestion, therefore, is to worry less about trying to get people to eat their vegetables by force-feeding them dry news pieces and worry more about trying to make those pieces clearly personally relevant to the readers so they’ll be drawn to those stories.

 

QUESTION: What does it take to make a profile really work well as a profile and not feel so blah?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: A lot of profiles fall flat because they lack observational elements that add flavor and meaning to them. The SCAM model can help you better find ways to capture the setting, character and action of your source through spending time with that person. You can then convey meaning by making sense of how those first three pieces work together to inform the readers about the overall “vibe” of this person.

You don’t have to describe every hair on the source’s head, all the way down to the worn heels on their cowboy boots to do a good job of describing a person. In fact, the opposite is almost always the case. You need to paint a word picture so that I can see this person in my mind’s eye while I’m reading the story. That can be their physical presence, if that’s crucial to the story. It can be their emotional presence, if that matters more.

Case in point, I was reading a profile today that one of my kids wrote about a young woman who is on a national-championship-winning gymnastics team here at UWO, while also having committed to the Army ROTC program. The programs seem ridiculously disparate: One requires individuality, and glitz, while the other required uniformity and plainness. Gymnasts tend to be tiny and Army folk tend to be giant. So, to more fully understand how that worked in one person, we needed to have a physical sense of this kid.

In another instance, the person was describing a religious leader who used his own struggles with faith and his practical nature here on Earth to help others find their way. In this case, whether he was giant or tiny was less important than the emotional interconnectivity he displayed in life.

Whatever route you go is fine, but you need to do a lot of observation of that person to truly capture the source’s essence and communicate that effectively to the audience. In doing so, you can focus less obsessively on getting every detail about the person’s life in there, like you’re crafting a resume.

 

QUESTION: The people around here in the upper reaches of power tend to like to route everything through the marketing department or just issue statements when we want interviews. How do we get around that kind of thing?

BEST ANSWER I COULD COME UP WITH: This is a trend with a lot of folks, and it happened here as well for a while. The general consensus is that if you don’t actually do an interview, you can’t say something stupid. This is supported by the idea that statements get about 23 people revising them before they go out to the public. Meanwhile, a mouth can yield a lot of problems when someone forgets to put their brain in gear before opening it.

The problem with statements, other than the general reek of bovine excrement that wafts from them, is that there is no chance to ask follow-up questions, refute basic assumptions in them or generally cut through the fog of obfuscation they offer. Thus, getting the interview is vital to making sense of some things reporters are covering.

I argued that you should always push back against the statement approach and track people down who decline to respond to your email requests. The university leaders have offices. Go there. Professors have teaching schedules. Track them down after class and walk with them. Set up camp outside their faculty office or generally be a persistent pain in the rear end. If they refuse to answer questions, turn THAT into part of the story:

“Professor John Smith refused to engage with a reporter who met him after class, instead saying he would ‘have someone issue a statement on the matter.’ When the reporter noted that a statement would be insufficient, Smith went from a slow walk to a brisk trot toward his office. He quickly entered and slammed the door behind him. Knocking to rouse him was unsuccessful.”

In short, as I said to the staff, “Tell the administrators, ‘You mean to tell me that someone of your educational level is afraid of an undergraduate student who works for a newspaper named after a pretty yellow flower? Come on!'”

 

FIN: And that’s where the Filak Furlough Tour came to an end. Thanks so much everybody for letting me be part of your lives and for making my furlough fun.

 

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

Thinking is hard But you get used to it De motivation, us,demotivation posters,auto

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.