Advanced Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • The tools
    • The potential perils
    • The human angle

Let’s start with the tools:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT TIME: The significant concerns associated with AI technology.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Besides, quality endures while quantity fades.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE ON THE STORY:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FISCAL:

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

TAKING ACTION:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Get the hell out of the way: How to avoid ruining profile stories by checking your self-importance at the door

In more than a few stops on the Filak Furlough Tour, folks have asked me to talk about news features and personality profiles. These appear to be among the most sought-after pieces in student journalism classes and student newsrooms while simultaneously being among the poorest written.

The openings tend to go one of two ways:

  1. “So and so is not your typical college student…”
  2. The “I… I… I…” approach that sounds like Donald Trump writing his autobiography on a cocaine bender.

With that in mind, I reached into the Wayback Machine and picked out a classic that looks at what to avoid while profiling people, specifically that the story is about the source, not you.

In short, get the hell out of the way and let the readers enjoy the subject.

 

Dear profile writers, Readers don’t give a damn about you, so get out of the story.

Personality profiles are among the best stories journalists will ever write. When reporters get the chance to enter the lives of the rich and famous, the eccentric and reclusive or even the “known but unknown” people around them, they can paint some amazing word pictures that will allow readers to gain incredible insight.

That said, journalists have ruined more than a few of these opportunities because they can’t manage to get out of their own way in telling the story.

Consider this opening of a profile on Woody Harrelson:

It’s a Saturday in June and I’m running on time to meet Woody Harrelson, but one subway delay, one wrong turn, one mother with a double stroller failing to keep pace and clogging the already clogged sidewalks of midtown and I’ll be running behind. Adding to my anxiety: the possibility that I have no voice, not so much as a croak (laryngitis, a bad case).

Brushing past a pair of doormen, I enter the lobby of a residential tower on the southwest tip of Central Park. I beeline for the elevator bank, press the up button, and glance at my phone. Two minutes after the hour. I’m now officially late. My pores open, sweat gushing out. At last, a muted ding as the doors slide apart. I board.

To calm myself, I pull from my bag a sheaf of clippings on Woody. The big takeaway of recent years: He spent his entire adult life cuckoo for cannabis and then, in 2016, gave it up.

In 164 words, the author references herself 12 times. Her subject? Twice.

Profiles recently have suffered from a lot of this kind of masturbatory self-importance, with the writers weaving themselves into the piece as being the one consequential element of the story.

Why?

The fact the writer is present should be considered both obvious and inconsequential: The readers came to this piece because they wanted to learn about the person being profiled, not about the writer.

In short, nobody cares about you. The more you find yourself verbally photo-bombing your way into the story for your own edification or out of sheer laziness, the more annoying you will be to your readers and the less valuable your piece will be.

This point became clear this weekend when several folks online were discussing a recent Adam Sandler profile that kept popping up in our news feeds. The opening wasn’t as self-absorbed as the one for the Harrelson profile, but it was similarly focused and similarly annoying:

We cruised down West Pico in Adam Sandler’s ride, a custom Chevy passenger van tricked out in the style of an orthopedic shoe. The cup holders jangled with suburban odds and ends — a pair of tiny glasses belonging to his daughter; a bottle of Dry-n-Clear ear drops. We were bound for Hillcrest Country Club, the oldest Jewish country club in Los Angeles. “You’re going to like this,” Sandler said. He whipped the van into the valet station. Alongside the row of town cars and coupes, it looked like an airport courtesy shuttle.

Compare this to the opening of Mary Jo Sales’ look at “Jon and Kate Plus 8” co-star Kate Gosselin:

“Nobu, Nobu, I want Nobu!”

Kate Gosselin wants to go to Nobu. She’s got a night away from her eight kids—also her co-stars on the hit reality series Jon & Kate Plus Eight—and a reporter is offering to take her out on the town. “I want sushi!” Kate says, leaning back in an armchair in her suite at the Essex House hotel overlooking Central Park, checking her BlackBerry, popping gum.

But Laurie Goldberg, senior vice president of communications at the Learning Channel, which airs Jon & Kate, doesn’t think Nobu’s such a great idea. Kate cried on the Today show this morning, answering questions about why she’s still wearing her wedding ring (“for them,” she said of her children, sniffling), and this afternoon she told People, “I am so emotionally spent” (from her husband’s behavior, which has included philandering with the daughter of the plastic surgeon who gave Kate her tummy tuck), and so it might not look good for her to be out enjoying herself at a hot spot.

“You’re like a prisoner,” Kate says of her newfound fame, annoyed.

Kate, who in the first season of Jon & Kate, two years ago, appeared on-screen as a dowdy, sweatpants-wearing mama hen, is now looking very much the celebrity—from her tanned, trained body to her curiously asymmetrical blond hairdo, now so iconic as to be the model for a popular Halloween wig.

Her phone rings. “Oh, it’s Kelly”—Ripa, of Live with Regis and Kelly—Kate says, holding up a French-manicured finger, signaling for us all to be silent. She’s going on the show tomorrow morning. She and Kelly gab. “Hiya!”

They both rely on description. They both open with a scene setter. However, while Sales puts the focus on the profile subject (Gosselin), Keiles seems to be writing a piece she wanted to call, “Adam and me.”

Keiles turns the focus on herself once again a few paragraphs after she and Sandler arrive at the club, explaining the story behind the story:

I started chasing Sandler in early 2017. His presence in my own childhood had been mythic — a Jewish cultural influence more imposing than anyone I’d ever learned about in Hebrew school. Thinking about the scope of his career, I was enchanted by the prospect of me, a person of modern and hardly coherent gender, grappling with America’s foremost man-child. I dispatched my editor to email his publicist. At night, from my apartment in Queens, I wondered if Sandman, from his mansion in the Pacific Palisades, was considering my offer.

We followed up. Time was marked by the arrival and deletion of my weekly “Adam Sandler” Google Alert, which detailed a still-persistent comedy career, achieved with infrequent engagement with the press. Soon he mocked me everywhere I went, his face staring down from the subway ads for his latest movie, “Sandy Wexler.” On Netflix, his new stand-up special debuted, and he did the late-night shows. I waited. Months turned to years. And just like that, the Google Alert started to spit out photos from a movie set: Sandler in a louche leather coat and diamond earrings, filming the indie thriller “Uncut Gems.”

Sandler had taken dramatic roles before, most notably in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 film, “Punch-Drunk Love.” Then, as now, a question emerged: If he was such a good actor — and he was — then why did he keep making dumb comedies? This was a question I had long since learned that he resented, and in my pursuit, I had been careful to avoid it. Now it seemed the precaution had paid off. By some act of God — or, more likely, behind-the-scenes arm-twisting — we found ourselves together at last, standing in his country club, staring down the gallery of early Hillcrest members.

By this point in the piece, we are learning a lot more about the author than we are about Sandler. We learn about her pursuit of Sandler, Sandler’s influence in her life, how she got an editor to email Sandler, how she wondered if Sandler was considering her offer…

At this point, between the fawning and the overuse of first-person writing, I felt like I was reading a cross between my 14-year-old daughter’s diary and an autobiography Donald Trump wrote while on a coke bender.

Abiding by the theory of “If you’re going through hell, keep going,” I kept reading in hopes of learning something about Sandler that wasn’t tied to the writer.

Nope:

To Sandler, everyone is “bro” or “buddy,” except for me; I was “kid.” Crossing the busy street that cut through the park, he rested a fatherly hand on my shoulder, then yanked it away, as if weighing the optics of touching a young stranger versus letting that same stranger be run over by a car.

Away from the street, we came across a guy absolutely shredding on the erhu. Sandler, who busked in the subway during college, stopped to throw some money in his hat, and I noticed the ease with which $20 seemed to float right out of his hand. I reckoned in that moment that a 20 to Sandler was probably something like $1 to me. Later, using dubious-but-still-plausible figures from CelebrityNetWorth.com, I calculated that his $20 was closer to my one one-thousandth of a cent.

Here’s what I learned:

  • Adam Sandler has a special nickname for the writer. (oooohhh…)
  • Adam Sandler makes more money than the writer. (So cool!)
  • Adam Sandler TOUCHED HER SHOULDER!!!!! (OMG, YOU GUYS!)

I gave up at that point, only cursorily giving a glance at the close of the piece, where Keiles frets about being at a wrap party and wondering if Sandler will remember her. In other words, it ends as it began: All about the writer.

We could continue to beat the dead horse that is this profile, but Keiles is an exemplar, not the cause of this phenomenon. When I groused about a similar approach to a Megan Rapinoe profile, student journalists, professors, former reporters and more all chimed in:

THANK YOU. It’s been so hard teaching our new writers profile writing because they read stuff like this.

I remember this being a MUST DO when I took journalism classes in 1979!

Don’t even get me started with “I caught up with…” and “I sat down with…”

I 100% agree. I hate the inclusion of first person in these things They drive me nuts and ruin the story.

That first person writing drives me crazy!!! I don’t care how you first heard about the person…or how you had to travel to talk to them. You are not the focus of the article!!! It is (EXPLETIVE) lazy.

Based on all of this, consider the following helpful suggestions/concepts:

THE FRAME OF THE MONA LISA THEORY: The Mona Lisa is one of the best-known works of art on Earth. In writing about it for The Independent, John Litchfield called it “the most visited, most written about, most sung about, most parodied work of art in the world.” It serves as a metaphor for everything thought to be the best of anything and it is probably the most recognizable image ever created. I saw it in person about 20 years ago during our honeymoon trip to France. It was smaller than I thought it would be, but it was still compelling in a way I can’t properly articulate.

Now, those of you who have seen it, tell me what the frame on the Mona Lisa looks like.

Chances are, like me, you have no damned idea what that frame looked like. Ask anyone you know who has seen it and they probably have no damned idea what it looked like. Nobody I know walked away from the Louvre saying, “Man, that chick was ugly but the FRAME! Now, THAT was something!” The reason? Nobody gives a damn what the frame looks like. It’s just there to display the artwork in a way that doesn’t detract from it or overshadow it.

Your job as a profile writer is to showcase the subject in a way that other people appreciate it. You display the individual in a fashion that helps the audience members connect to that person. You’re like the frame of the Mona Lisa: Hold up the painting for everyone to enjoy and get the hell out of the way.

SHOW, DON’T TELL: This is Journalism 101, but it bears repeating. If you want to let people know how great a game was, don’t tell them, “This was an awesome game!” Instead, show them what happened so that they independently come to the conclusion of, “Wow, this was an awesome game!” This is true in all kinds of journalistic writing, but it’s especially true in profile writing.

The descriptive nature of narrative storytelling should put your readers into a scene so they feel like they’re viscerally experiencing it for themselves. The distance provided by third-person writing often does this best, because it focuses the readers on the experience as opposed to the writer.

When you rely on first person, you basically are retelling an experience and that focuses the reader on you. Save that for Facebook posts, random blogging and roommates who ask, “So, how was your day?” For profiles, put me next to you at the scene and let me engage the situation as much as you did. That’s fun for both of us.

DON’T BE LAZY: Two of the comments above (one of them rather explicitly) mentioned the idea of how first person allows the writer to be lazy. Leads can be tough to write, so profile writers often resort to some version of, “I caught up with…”

Yeah, no kidding. Otherwise, how would you know whatever it is you are telling me? I’d give anything to hear instead, “I couldn’t catch up with (NAME OF CELEB) because I failed to do enough cardio. Thus, I’ll be making up this entire thing…”

First-person writing has its place: Columns, blogs, personal-participation pieces and several other spots in media. The question always should be, “Do I need to use it to make this piece work or not?” If you can get away without using it, you should aspire to do so for the reasons mentioned above. Consider this opening to a profile on former MLB pitcher John Rocker at the height of Rocker’s fame:

A minivan is rolling slowly down Atlanta’s Route 400, and John
Rocker, driving directly behind it in his blue Chevy Tahoe, is
pissed. “Stupid bitch! Learn to f—ing drive!” he yells. Rocker
honks his horn. Once. Twice. He swerves a lane to the left.
There is a toll booth with a tariff of 50 cents. Rocker tosses
in two quarters. The gate doesn’t rise. He tosses in another
quarter. The gate still doesn’t rise. From behind, a horn
blasts. “F— you!” Rocker yells, flashing his left middle
finger out the window. Finally, after Rocker has thrown in two
dimes and a nickel, the gate rises. Rocker brings up a thick wad
of phlegm. Puuuh! He spits at the machine. “Hate this damn toll.”

With one hand on the wheel, the other gripping a cell phone,
Rocker tears down the highway, weaving through traffic. In 10
minutes he is due to speak at Lockhart Academy, a school for
learning-disabled children. Does Rocker enjoy speaking to
children? “No,” he says, “not really.” But of all things big and
small he hates–New York Mets fans, sore arms, jock itch–the
thing he hates most is traffic. “I have no patience,” he says.
The speedometer reads 72. Rocker, in blue-tinted sunglasses and
a backward baseball cap, is seething. “So many dumb asses don’t
know how to drive in this town,” he says, Billy Joel’s New York
State of Mind humming softly from the radio. “They turn from the
wrong lane. They go 20 miles per hour. It makes me want–Look!
Look at this idiot! I guarantee you she’s a Japanese woman.” A
beige Toyota is jerking from lane to lane. The woman at the
wheel is white. “How bad are Asian women at driving?”

The writer of this piece could have easily started with, “I’m in a car with pitcher John Rocker and I feel like I’m going to die.” Instead, the writing focuses on the subject and the situation. Even when Rocker is directly addressing the writer, first person never enters the mix. Still, we get the picture: John Rocker is a horse’s ass.

No profile is perfect in this regard. Even Gay Talese dropped in a few first-person moments during the legendary profile, “Frank Sinatra has a cold.” However, they are few and far between and limited to points where the writer NEEDS to do this instead of where it’s convenient or the writer can’t think of anything better to do.

Think of using first-person writing in a profile like being forced to take a Friday class that starts at 8 a.m.: It should be an unpleasant experience you only engage in when absolutely necessary. Even then, you should want to move on from it as quickly as possible.

Helpful Hints and Tips on Writing Obituaries (A Throwback Post)

Former basketball coach Bob Knight died this week at the age of 83. His family released the information on Wednesday, noting he had been in poor health for some time.

Actor Matthew Perry died over the weekend at the age of 54. Police reports state he drown in a hot tub at his home.

Both men were well-known and both men accomplished a good amount of incredible things. Knight won three NCAA championships and won more games than anyone in history when he retired. He was a hall of fame inductee and coached the last undefeated NCAA D-I college basketball team (the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers). Perry was an award-winning and Emmy-nominated actor, who had multiple film roles and published a best-selling memoir.

Both men had demons. Knight’s temper was always his undoing, whether it was throwing a chair across the court during a game or choking a player during practice. He was also hostile and belligerent in dealing with almost everything on earth at one time or another. Perry’s drug addiction was well chronicled in his book, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.” Between huge weight swings, rehab and trying to find dozens of opioids each day just to keep himself going, Perry made life extremely difficult on himself and others around him.

These two deaths made me reach back into the Wayback Machine and pull up this throwback post about obituary writing. To write about either without showcasing all of their best and worst aspects would be disingenuous and inaccurate. When we have to write about people who have died, keeping that in mind is crucial:

 

Obituary Writing: Telling truths, not tales, in a reverent recounting of a life

In a discussion among student media advisers, one person noted that obituaries are probably the second-hardest things journalists have to do frequently. (The hardest? Interviewing family members about dead kids.) When a person dies, media outlets often serve as both town criers and official record keepers. They tell us who this person was, what made him or her important and what kind of life this person led. This is a difficult proposition, especially given that people have many facets and the public face of an individual isn’t always how those who knew the person best see him or her. Couple these concerns with the shock and grief the person’s loved ones and friends have experienced in the wake of the death and this has all the makings of a rough journalistic experience.

The New York Times experienced this earlier in the week when it published an obituary on Thomas Monson, the president of the Mormon Church. The Times produced a news obituary that focused on multiple facets of Monson and his affect on the church. This included references to his work to expand the reach and the population of its missionary forces as well as his unwillingness to ordain women and acknowledge same-sex marriages. The obituary drew criticism from many inside the church, leading the obituary editor to defend the choices the paper made in how it covered Monson. (For a sense of comparison, here is the official obituary/notification of death that the church itself wrote for Monson.)

You will likely find yourself writing an obituary at some point in time if you go into a news-related field.  Some of my favorite stories have been obituaries, including one I did on a professor who was stricken by polio shortly after he was married in the 1950s. I interviewed his wife, who was so generous with her recollections that I was really upset when we had to cut the hell out of the piece to make it fit the space we had for it. Still, she loved it and sent me a card thanking me for my time.

Some of my most painful stories have also been obituaries. The one that comes to mind is one I wrote about a 4-year-old boy who died of complications from AIDS. His mother, his father and one of his siblings also had AIDS at a time in which the illness brought you an almost immediate death sentence and status as a societal pariah. I spoke to the mother on the phone multiple times that night, including once around my deadline when she called me sobbing. Word about the 4-year-old’s death had become public knowledge and thus she was told that her older son, who did not have AIDS, would not be allowed to return to his daycare school. Other things, including some really bad choices by my editor, made for a truly horrific overall situation in which the woman called me up after the piece I co-wrote ran and told me what a miserable human being I was. She told me the boy’s father was so distraught by what we published that he would not leave the house to mourn his own son and that she held me responsible for that. Like I said, these things can be painful.

No matter the situation, there are some things you need to keep in mind when you are writing obituaries:

  • Don’t dodge the tough stuff: Your job as a journalist is to provide an objective, fair and balanced recounting of a person’s life. The Times’ editor makes a good point in noting that the paper’s job is to recount the person’s life, not to pay tribute or to serve as a eulogist. This means that you have to tell the story, however pleasant or unpleasant that might be. One of my favorite moments of honesty came from hockey legend Gordie Howe who was recalling the tight-fisted, cheap-as-heck former owner of the Detroit Red Wings:

    “I was a pallbearer for Jack,” says Howe. “We were all in the limousine, on the way to the cemetery, and everyone was saying something nice, toasting him. Then finally one of the pallbearers said, `I played for him, and he was a miserable sonofabitch. Now he’s … a dead, miserable sonofabitch.’”

    It’s not your fault if the person got arrested for something or treated people poorly. If these things are in the public record and they are a large part of how someone was known, you can’t just dodge them because you feel weird. Check out the Times’ obituary on Richard Nixon and you’ll notice that Watergate makes the headline and the lead. As much as that was likely unpleasant for the people who were closest to Nixon, it was a central point of his life and needed to be discussed. In short, don’t smooth off the rough edges because you are worried about how other people might feel. Tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.

 

  • Avoid euphemisms: This goes back to the first point about being a journalist. You don’t want to soften the language or use euphemisms. People don’t “pass on” or “expire.” NFL quarterbacks pass and magazine subscriptions expire. People die. Also, unless you can prove it, don’t tell your readers that the person is “among the angels” or “resting in the arms of Jesus.” (Both of these euphemisms ended up in obituaries I edited at one point or another. They obviously didn’t make it to publication.) Say what you know for sure: The person died.

 

  • Double down on accuracy efforts: People who are reading obituaries about loved ones and friends are already on edge, so the last thing you want to do is tick them off by screwing up an obituary. I don’t know if this was just a matter of newspaper lore or if it was a real thing, but I was told more than once at a paper where I worked that there were only two things that would get us to “stop the presses:” 1) we printed the wrong lottery numbers and 2) we screwed up an obituary.
    True or not, the point was clear to me: Don’t screw up an obituary.
    Go back through your piece before you put it out for public consumption and check proper nouns for spelling and accuracy. Do the math yourself when it comes to the age (date of birth subtracted from date of death) and review each fact you possess to make sure you are sure about each one. If you need to make an extra call or something to verify information, do it. It’s better to be slightly annoying than wrong.

 

  • Accuracy cuts both ways: As much as you need to be accurate for the sake of the family, you also need to be accurate for the sake of the public record. This means verifying key information in the obituary before publishing it. The person who died might told family and friends about winning a medal during World War II or graduating at the top of her class at Harvard Law School. These could be accurate pieces of information or they could be tall tales meant to impress people. Before you publish things that could be factually inaccurate, you need to be sure you feel confident in your sourcing.
    Common sense dictates that you shouldn’t be shaking the family down for evidence on certain things (“OK, you say she liked to knit. Now, how do we KNOW she REALLY liked knitting? Do you have some sort of support for that?”) but you should try to verify fact-based elements with as many people as possible or check the information against publicly available information. Don’t get snowed by legends and myths. Publish only what you know for sure.

 

  • Don’t take things personally: Calling family, friends and colleagues of someone who just died can be really awkward and difficult for you as a reporter. Interviews with these people can be hard on them as well as hard on you. I found that when I did obituaries, I got one of three responses from people that I contacted:
    1. The source told me, “I’m sorry, but I really just can’t talk about this right now.” At that point, I apologized for intruding upon the person’s grief and left that person alone.
    2. The source is a fount of information and wanted to tell me EVERYTHING about the dead person. I found that for some of them, it was cathartic to share and eulogize and commemorate. It was like I was a new person in their circle of grief and they wanted to make sure I knew exactly why the person who died was someone worth knowing.
    3. The source was like a wounded animal and I made the mistake of sticking my hand where it didn’t belong. I have been called a vulture, a scumbag and other words I’ve been asked to avoid posting on this blog. One person even told me, “Your mother didn’t raise you right” because I had the audacity to make this phone call. I apologized profusely and once I hung up, I needed a couple minutes to shake it off. I knew it wasn’t my fault but it wasn’t easy either.

Your goal in an obituary is always to be respectful and decent while still retaining your journalistic sensibilities. It’s a fine line to walk, but if you do an obituary well, you will tell an interesting story about someone who had an impact on the world in some way. I like to think a story about this person who died should be good enough to make people wish they’d known that person while he or she was alive.

Three tips to make the editing process more valuable (A throwback post)

In visiting multiple newsrooms and various classrooms through the Filak Furlough tour, one question that popped up a bit was how to get people to “do it right” when it came to writing stories. Editors spoke of frustration due to writers who wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t learn or otherwise made life vexing for the editors.

What was absent in this situation, however, were the writers, many of whom I would imagine had a completely opposite view of the situation. If I had to wager, I’d argue that they probably felt editors were demanding, picky or otherwise vexing.

In digging back for a Throwback Thursday post, I found this one that might be helpful to both sides: kind of a “peace with honor” thing that might make life easier in understanding how editing should work.

 

 

The battle of wills between writers and editors: Three tips to make the editing process more valuable

If you read Ruth Reichl’s column about her editor, Susan Kamil, you can get the idea of how a good editor can make all the difference. In reflecting on Kamil after her recent death, Reichl offered a wonderful assessment of her friend, colleague and editor in a way that is both honest and honorific.

I have been both the editor and the edit-ee throughout my life and I have found neither of them are a bowl of cherries. As the person being edited, I find myself vacillating between the desire to be told how awesome I am and the need to be told where I really screwed up. It’s almost a borderline disorder of personality: When someone tells me I’m perfect, I push back by saying, “No, I NEED feedback so I can improve before people who read the published version rip me to shreds.” When someone heaps “helpful suggestions” upon me, I often feel like saying, “OK, screw you and everyone who looks like you.”

Sounds dumb? Yep, but I bet I’m not the only one in that boat.

As an editor, the frustration is just as palpable: I can see what needs to happen so I’m pulling in one direction. However, the writer keeps thinking, “What the hell does this chucklehead know?” Having to edit strong-willed people has on occasion led to some of my worst moments, including once telling a student, “I’ve taken (bowel movements) that I would be more proud of than I would be of this lead.” It was like, “If you would just be reasonable and see it MY WAY, we’d get done with this a lot faster and better.”

Eventually, I found more equilibrium in the relationship. It also helped when I started finding editors who worked with me in a way that made sense to me. (As Harvey Spector says in “Suits,” you don’t want to play the case. You want to play the person.) It has gotten to a point where each book I do, I ask if Jim Kelly (the former journalist, not the football player) is available to be my copy editor. Otherwise, can we wait on this?

For those of you who don’t get the chance to pick your poison… er… editor… and for those editors who still don’t get why the writers suck at this, consider a few helpful hints that might make the relationship make more sense:

  • You’re both right, but in different ways: In most cases, reporters are the experts on their stories. They were in the field, they’ve done the research, they have the interviews and they collected additional information. When it comes to the “who did what to whom” elements of the story, the reporters are the experts on everything, which is why they can feel frustrated when an editor starts putzing around with their copy.
    Conversely, the editors are the experts on what the readers are seeing, what they need to see and where the gaps exist in the stories they are editing. The reporters are hip-deep in the content and thus sometimes have trouble seeing the forest through the trees. The editors come to the content with fresh eyes, a general interest in the topic and limited background on what’s going on. That’s exactly how the readers will see it, so it pays to have the editors poking around and changing stuff.
    Much like every other situation in life, if multiple people are involved in a collective task, the goal is to play to each person’s strength and away from each person’s weakness. Thus, the editor should get some leeway in terms of changing things that get in the way of the readers’ understanding of the content while the reporter should get more control over the general gist of the story.
  • You must be able to explain why: I often tell my students that little kids are amazing because they always want to understand what’s going on around them. This is why a 4-year-old’s favorite question is “Why?” They want to figure out how something works, how come something is the way it is and what reasons you have for doing something. It’s an innate element of their being.
    Eventually we stop asking those questions, either because we start to figure things out on our own or for fear that an adult might push us into traffic out of frustration. That doesn’t mean we still don’t have those questions, but rather, we stop verbalizing them, so instead of getting decent answers to our concerns, we simply have to stew in our own displeasure.
    As a writer or an editor, the goal of every decision you make should be to have a reason for whatever it is you are doing. Then, you need to be able to verbalize it in a clear and concise fashion for anyone who might need to know. For example, if you used a narrative lead on your story instead of a standard inverted-pyramid lead, your editor might ask, “Why does it take me three paragraphs to get to the point of the story?” If you have a good reason, like “I wanted to set up the lead more as a nut graf, because I keep weaving this guy in the opening back into the story as a thread,” your editor might see things the way you do and let it sit. If you have the “I just wanted to mix it up” or the dreaded “I dunno” answer, you’re probably not going to have things work out your way.
    The same thing is true for an editor: If you want to change something, have a reason to do so. Also, it helps to ask the “why” question of the writer before you decide to make that change. It shows an interest in what the writer has done, and it provides you an opportunity to reconsider your change. As noted earlier, you’re both going to have strengths and weaknesses, so play to the strengths and explain why you think your position is stronger. If you have established trust with the writer, the writer should give you some leeway on this. If not, you need to start establishing trust, like, yesterday.
  • The goal is the same: In the end, the thing you both need to understand is that you both want the same thing: the best possible product. In some cases, this can be inordinately frustrating because you can’t fully agree on what that “best possible product” actually is. In addition, you might have different ways to get there.
    This is where trust comes in and you both need to make a decision about the value of this relationship. In one of the most frustrating relationships of my life, my doctoral adviser and I butted heads constantly on the editing of my dissertation. I kept pushing for the “good enough” version of things and she kept pushing for the “best possible” version of things. It took a long time for me to admit she was right, but she was. Her goal was my goal, even when I couldn’t see it: Write a piece that was going to be easy to defend and that would help me complete my degree.
    At the end of the day, if you are both honest with yourselves and care about the outcome, you will have the best interest of your readers in mind. That means you’ll care less about getting your way or making your changes than you will making sure the reader gets a good, strong, clear and valuable story.
    If that’s not the case, and you just want to win, everyone involved is going to lose.

Filak Furlough Tour Update: Hanging Out With The University of Central Missouri (Part II)

The Filak Furlough trip to the University of Central Missouri really needed a two-parter, in part because there were really two phases to this: The “dude-at-podium” part that we talked about on Monday and the more relaxed part, where I got to hang out with the staff of The Muleskinner.

I have always loved student media, even when student media didn’t really seem to love me. To understand why would take too long to explain, but I believe in the idea that you really can make a significant difference in the lives of many people if you are a student journalist. I also believe that there’s no better place to learn your craft than in a student newsroom that reeks of old pizza, sweaty anxiety and deadline fever.

Let’s get going…

University of Central Missouri – Warrensburg, MO

This is my happy place: In a student newsroom, talking shop with some great kids and critiquing a paper. Photo courtesy of Mingzhu Zhu, The Muleskinner.

THE TOPIC: Newspaper critique and editorial leadership discussion.

THE BASICS: One of the most important things I wanted the students (and you all) to know is that any critique I do is meant to look at things from a different perspective and help people get better. Yes, there might be some criticism in there, but it’s not about the workers. It’s about the work. As I said in the critique, “I have said to someone before, ‘That’s a terrible lead.’ but I’ve never said, “That’s a terrible lead and your haircut is even worse.'” The first one, albeit harsh, is about the work. The second one is a mean personal attack and I won’t ever go there.

So here we go…

A lot of what I talk about in critiques is based on critical thinking, particularly in terms of what people choose to cover and what they don’t choose to cover. In addition, I push a bit on the idea of how much space is dedicated to what kinds of things.

For example, we were talking about front page of the paper:

What I saw immediately was this amazing, locally drawn illustration that relates to the start of UCM’s welcome week. It was near the bottom of the page, while a photo of a ribbon-cutting on an aviation center that happened three weeks earlier was about the same size and near the top of the page. I asked why they went this route.

The answers were good in some cases: It’s a big project ($5.1 million), the area is really plugged into aviation and it made UCM the only university in the state to have its own public-use airport. These were all smart reasons for putting this story out front and getting it some major attention. On the down side, the image is well shot, but relatively common for a ribbon cutting  and its also really old news. This is one of those moments where you might think, “How can I get the newsy stuff in the right spot while highlighting some very cool things that are unique to my publication?”

The suggestion I had was to push the illustration up near the top and package it as a centerpiece across the 4 or 4.5 columns of space available there, adding a little more information layering about the first week of school. Then you can run the airport thing down a 2 or 1.5 column rail that keeps the headline above the fold (kind of like what you have with the story in pink) and then strip the research story across the bottom, with the headline spanning all six columns and having the graphic breakout box in the last 1.5 columns of space next to the text.

If the airport story was really so important as to demand more attention, you could flip the whole concept a bit: Make a couple phone calls to airport folk to find out how things are going and give the story a quick refresh. Then, strip the airport story across the top, with a headline across all six columns, put the text below it across four columns and run the art in a two-column set up in the strip. Then centerpiece the illustration and run the research thing like you have it, but just lower on the page. Either way, you get more emphasis on one thing on the page that can really draw people’s attention: The local artwork.

We also talked about the arts page, which features reviews of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” My question was, again, why this and why now? The students mentioned that these were pretty big movies and they had people who like writing movie reviews. I agreed  that they were big, but they were big three or four months earlier. Also, people could get this kind of thing anywhere, whereas readers could only get info about UCM from the Muleskinner. When it came to the paper, they got like one, 8-page edition per month to cover the entirety of the school, so is it a great idea to give away 1/8th of that space in this way?

This isn’t to say there wasn’t great content in this paper, as there clearly was. I loved the photos of the basketball team, the artwork out front, the features related to their sports fans and more. Even the BarbiHeimer page had a great local illustration on it. This isn’t about the idea of something being good or bad, but rather a question of asking why we’re doing what we’re doing. If you have good reasons for doing something, great. Do it. If you don’t, reconsider.

We also talked about life on staff and how people tend to burn out over time. The EIC was particularly stressed and I can understand why. The head editor has to deal with all the content, the people, the readers, the budget stuff, the administrators and more. This kind of “face of the franchise” stuff is precisely why I never wanted to be a chair, a dean or a chancellor. Well, that and I’d have to dress differently…

Rather than cover all that here, I’m providing some links to a few pieces we did back in the day about stress, burnout and college media.

In Part III, I have a link to the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which allows you to test yourself for burnout in three key categories. If you want to do that and then want a copy of the decoder sheet, just hit me up via the contact page.

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: (This one came from the social media director Mingzhu Zhu, who was nice enough to share some photos of the events and make the promotional piece I put up on the previous post. She is a heck of a great media kid and any place out there would be lucky to have her after graduation.) I noticed that you’re only really on Twitter/X and LinkedIn for social media. Why are you using only those two platforms?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: I’m really only on those platforms (plus Facebook) because that’s where my audience is and that’s where I can spend the most time effectively.

Knowing your audience and what they use is a key component of being effective on social media. I know I have a lot of current and former students on LinkedIn, who still read my stuff and like to learn from it. I know that I have both a broad reach on my regular Facebook profile and access to teacher-specific groups like Teachapalooza on Facebook.

Twitter/X is becoming more of a wildcard, and I’ve started to shift over to BlueSky now (same handle: @DoctorOfPaper), but the idea is that I still have solid connections there, and using that platform is a good way to share headlines and links. I’m able to track blog traffic to see where people come from and who shows up a lot. That helps me keep my focus on specific targets.

Also, these platforms rely heavily on text-based sharing, which is kind of my bread and butter. I’m not on Instagram that much because my images tend to suck and most of what we do here isn’t visual. I’m also not on TikTok, as it’s more video driven and meant for entertainment in a lot of ways, so it’s not something that fits my niche. Same thing with YouTube: I’m not doing vlogging.

Finally, I believe in making sure that I’m keeping an active presence on whatever social media channels I use. At a certain point, picking out too many channels will lead to a weaker overall social media presence across all of them. Even more, I don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing five people across four platforms. There’s a law of diminishing returns when you start pouring tons of time into the social media landscape, so a more targeted approach that yields richer returns is what I feel is best for me and the folks who pay attention to me.

SPECIAL THANKS: I wanted to really thank the staff of The Muleskinner for making me feel like a part of the family. I do miss a lot of the best of student media and these folks really do represent the best of us:

ONE LAST THING: I have been working on the bats for people and have been making relatively steady progress. I not only managed to get the bat for UCM done before I got there, I managed to apply my extremely limited art skills and get a relatively decent recreation of their mule mascot:

I’m also waiting for mail supplies for the folks that got done earlier. We’re getting there…

More on the tour soon.

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