QUICK UPDATE: The “Filak Furlough T-shirts” are live and have a few days left on their ordering clock. If you want to order one, here’s the link and here are the shirts:
Thanks to about a dozen random things, I fell behind a bit on the Furlough Tour updates. Part of it was we did a lot of stops in a short period of time and the other part of it was catching up with work after being furloughed. There’s something weird about having work pile up while you’re not allowed to touch said work. I think this is what vacations must be like for normal people…
In any case, it’s good to be back and we’re starting off on the East Coast with…
William Paterson University – Wayne, NJ
I think I was happy here because I didn’t see the kid wearing the Yankees sweatshirt until after the photo was taken. 🙂
THE TOPIC: What kinds of stories are out there and how do we find them?
THE BASICS: The students had some great story ideas when it came to things going on around them at the school. The one that sticks in my mind is about a woman who lives on or around campus and she takes care of stray cats that are around the area. (It was more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of what my age-addled brain can remember at this point.)
The other students had ideas that percolated from things they had seen every day as well, which is a pretty good way to go about finding stories: Open the aperture of your mind and look at the things going on around you as potential story ideas. In that way, if something is of interest to you, it’s probably going to be of interest to other people.
BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: One of the key issues that the person working on the cat story brought up was how best to make sure that she wasn’t exploiting the woman or portraying her in a way that might be offensive to her. How can a journalist tell a story about someone like this without potentially damaging that person?
BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: This is a good sign of a good reporter who is growing into their role in the business. Far too often, we think, “Get the story!” instead of “How can we do this in a way that causes the least amount of damage?” In many cases, we learn a lot by screwing up in that way, but it’s so much better for everyone concerned if we can avoid screwing that up in the first place.
One of the key things to do is to spend time with the source and get a handle on how that person feels about the story, the concept and the approach you want to take. In some cases, like crime or politics, this isn’t really a thing, in that the facts and the public’s right to know might outweigh how a criminal or politician would like to be portrayed. However, in the case of a feature story on a private individual who has no duty to be in the public eye, it’s important to make sure you think about these things.
If your approach and the person’s general sense of the situation match up well, it’s easier to move forward. If they don’t, you can either try to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing to that source, or you can see if that person’s thoughts should reshape your approach to the content.
At the end of the day, you want to consider if the juice is worth the squeeze when it comes to doing the story and the potential collateral damage that could come with it.
If I’ve been through a worse day at work than Tuesday, I don’t want to remember it. UWO just passed out more than 140 pink slips to employees, with another 75 or so folks taking early retirement and dozens others not being rehired on annual contracts. According to the news, 1 in 6 employees here got canned.
I needed something to make me smile, and thanks to Jenny Fischer and Heather Tice, who have design and art ability far, far, far beyond mine, I got it.
The Filak Furlough Tour T-shirts are ready to go.
Since there seemed to be a split between a neutral color and a loud color, we decided to offer both.
HERE IS THE LINK TO THE ORDER FORM. The window is about two weeks to order with another two weeks to ship. The cost should range between $15 and $18 depending on how many we sell. Each order has a shipping charge, but it will be directly shipped to you and you pay the company directly.
No “middle-Vince” to screw things up.
Just to make this absolutely clear, what you pay is what the shirt costs based on what CustomInk is doing. I don’t make a dime on this and I sure as hell don’t want to.
Look, I’ve been accused of a lot of things over the years in academia, with many people using words that my editors at SAGE would not allow me to repeat here. Being an opportunistic entrepreneur has never been one of them.
When the Filak Furlough Tour started, people were asking, “So how much are you charging to do this? Is there a fee for you to teach a class or visit my school?”
Nope. I just figured it’d be a nice thing to do. The best part of my day is working with kids in media, helping out fellow educators and feeling like I’m relatively useful. The furloughs took all that away from me, so I saw the tour as a way to get some of that back.
Then it was, “OK, so is this your attempt to gin up some job opportunities? Are you looking for the next big career move out of Oshkosh?”
Nope. Despite UWO treating folks here like my nieces treat their diapers, I really want to stay here. I love the kids, I love my classes and it would take somewhere close to half of a year to pack up all my bobbleheads. Besides, I really like our house, my workshop and even the chickens have kind of grown on me. If they fire me, OK, fine, I’ll go somewhere else. In the meantime, UWO is stuck with me.
Then it was, “So you’re trying to do some book-pimping, right? Is SAGE sponsoring this?”
Nope again. They had no idea I was going to do this. Other than what people tell me, I have no idea if anyone signed up for the tour is using my books for any of their classes. Just like the blog, it’s open to everyone for without cost.
The books I’m giving away are from my author’s stash that I got for publishing each book and if I run out, I’ll buy some more on my author’s discount and use those. The bats were nicely donated from the stash my dad had in the basement of my parents’ house. I’m paying for the supplies and postage myself. I made a promise to give this stuff away, and even though I had no idea people actually liked me and/or free stuff this much, I’m making it happen.
This leads me to the T-shirt thing: I set up a design at CustomInk because I’d used them before and the quality and service are good. I could have made it a fundraiser or something, but I just wanted as many people who wanted to buy a shirt able to buy a shirt at the best price. And if I’m honest, I wanted to rub a little shame on UWO as well for this debacle.
So buy a shirt and enjoy telling the story about this insane weirdo you know who took a pay cut due to his school’s fiscal mismanagement and turned it into a Quixotic adventure that involved free books, bats and classroom lectures.
If you really want to know what I’m getting out of all this, that explanation should cover it nicely.
We’re taking a run at interviewing in my writing classes this week and one of the biggest concerns my students have is asking a “dumb” question and then feeling stupid in front of a source. A lot of what we talk about in class is the importance of preparing for the interview and how that can mitigate a lot of this. If you research the subject, understand the purpose of the interview and focus on what your audience wants to know, you should be relatively fine.
Still, there are always landmines just hanging out everywhere, so for this week’s “throwback post” I’ve found the various ways in which we can screw up interviews and some pretty easy ways to avoid them.
Enjoy
Dumb, stupid or idiotic? Questioning the questions we ask in interviews
The line I use when it comes to interviewing is, “Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.” However, it dawned on me this week in reading through some students’ analyses of press conferences that some distinctions should exist regarding the specific level of “duh” related to questions journalists ask.
Dumb questions: Journalists fear looking like they don’t know what they’re talking about. I know that I sweated out more than a few interviews with the only thought running through my head being, “Please, don’t think I’m dumb.” Dumb questions, as outlined in Jason Feifer’s article here, aren’t questions that should embarrass you, provided you have prepared well for an interview.
In this sense of the word, these are basic questions that the source has easy answers for on topics that are common in his or her field. In some cases, people avoid asking a source to clarify what an abbreviation means or how a process works for fear of looking dumb (and thus avoiding asking a “dumb question.”).
Feifer is right that you should feel free to ask for clarification and to ask the person to explain things like he or she would to a 5-year-old. I always try to research a topic before I go there, but there are things that will come up that I don’t understand. If the source balks at explaining this or tries to treat you like a dummy, simply explain, “You are the expert at this. This is why I’m asking you these questions. I don’t know this stuff as well as you do and I want to make sure I get it right so we both don’t look dumb.”
Stupid questions: These are the questions that you want to avoid because they are flat-out goofy, incorrectly phrased, rely on misinformation or otherwise make the sources question the size of your brain pan. Here’s a list of the stupidest questions asked in court and it covers a lot of those areas of concern. Perhaps the best one is this:
Q: What happened then?
A: He told me, he says, ‘I have to kill you because you can identify me.’
Q: Did he kill you?
The legendary question of this variety is the one that so many people swear didn’t happen, even as others swear it did. In the lead up to Super Bowl XXII, the press focused on Washington’s Doug Williams, who was poised to be the first African American to start at quarterback in the NFL title game. At one point a reporter was said to have asked Williams, “So, how long have you been a black quarterback?” Despite frequent attempts to debunk this myth, the story lives on as an example of a question that was really, really stupid.
In most cases, you can avoid stupid questions by doing a few things:
Research your topic well. The more you know about something, the less likely you will be to ask something that sounds really stupid.
Read your questions aloud to someone else before you ask them of your source. A lot of times, questions sound good in your head but somewhere between your brain and your mouth, a translation issue occurs. This is why it’s always a good idea to ask them aloud. It also doesn’t hurt to have a second person go over them with you to make sure you’re asking what you think you’re asking.
If you’re not sure how something will sound, try to come up with a better way to ask it. If you can’t get at it that way, at least explain in advance to the source that you’re struggling to come up with a way to ask for some specific information. At least that way it won’t come out of left field.
Idiotic questions: These are the ones you should never ask at any point for any reason. They lack any semblance of decency and they often come across as really asinine. The question that got me rolling on this post was one a sports journalism student brought up that I had missed. A reporter asked Russell Westbrook if fellow basketball player James Harden was worth a “max contract.” In NBA speak, that means “Is he worthy of being one of the highest-paid players in the game?”
It isn’t easy talking about how much money you make, let alone commenting on what you think someone else should make. It’s an idiotic question and Westbrook dealt with it as such.
In other cases, it’s simply a rude question that no one should be expected to answer. Consider this one asked of actress Scarlet Johansson in an interview about her role in “The Avengers” films:
Because nothing says, “serious journalist” like asking an actress if she was “going commando.”
A similarly idiotic question came out when another male journalist decided to ask Anne Hathaway about her body:
(This blog could fill up the entire internet with nothing but idiotic questions male journalists asked of female athletes, actors and celebrities, so we will move on.)
It’s not always just what the question is but how it’s asked that can make it idiotic. Prior to the 1981 Super Bowl, a reporter was asking quarterback Jim Plunkett about his family’s unfortunate health history, including his father’s progressive loss of vision. However, he asked it this way: “Lemme get this straight, Jim. Is it blind mother, deaf father or the other way around?” Think about how you would react if that question were asked of you in that fashion.
When it comes to asking questions, you always want to put your best foot forward. At the very least, you don’t want to step barefoot into a steaming pile of cow dung. Do your research, look at your material, review your questions and ask them out loud before you get to your source. Then, you’ll likely be in better shape to conduct an interview that doesn’t embarrass you or your source or both.
Many of my students look forward to the time in their journalism careers when they can move beyond the the inverted-pyramid, paraphrase-quote structure of meetings, speeches and news conferences. The idea of sinking their teeth into something much longer, more complex and multifaceted feels like a rite of passage from beginner to expert.
Most of them, however, find themselves exceedingly frustrated when they attempt to ply their trade to those bigger pieces, as it can feel like juggling Jell-O while trying to herd cats. The pieces don’t fit together right, the focus seems to drift and the overall concept of the story becomes one blurry mess.
The key thing to writing any story is being able to answer two questions:
What am I trying to explain here?
Why should anyone care?
That is as true for basic meeting stories (“The city council made it illegal to park on the streets overnight, which means State University students will need to find private parking and pay a premium price.”) as it is for major investigations. (“Banks were improperly incentivized and got greedy in the subprime mortgage market, leading to risky decisions that tanked the U.S. economy.”)
I remember catching a session at a college media convention many years ago, in which an investigative journalist for a popular sports magazine told the students in the room that if they were writing a story, they needed to be able to explain it in less than 30 words.
“If I ask you what your story is about and you tell me, ‘Well… It’s complicated…’ that tells me you really don’t know what your story is about,” he said.
After the session, I introduced myself, told him how much I liked his presentation and then I pressed him a bit on the “30 words” thing. I made the point that if we’re talking about a game story or a speech story or something, I could see his point. However, the work he did? That’s got to be impossible to capture in 30 words.
“No,” he said emphatically. “You need to nail it down like that or you don’t get the message across to the readers.”
To push back, I asked him about what he was working on at that point. This was in the early 2000s when baseball was starting to sniff around the issue of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. He was digging through records, leaked emails and other things that explained who knew what, when and where and how. He also had information on individual players, suppliers and owners who all found a way to kind of absolve themselves of the sin of cheating.
“How in the hell can you boil that kind of thing down to 30 words,” I asked him.
“As far back as the mid-1990s, players were taking steroids and everyone knew, but no one did anything because everyone was making too much money,” he replied.
25 words. Bam.
So how do you get to the point of being able to do something like that with your stories? Here are some simple ways to make it happen:
FOCUS ON THE CANDY: When we talk about basic writing and sentence structure in the book, we start with “The Holy Trinity” of noun-verb-object. The sentence starts with those three elements and then builds outward from that core. This ensures us that we’ve got the main idea at the heart of what we’re trying to say. As we add more content, it has to support and augment that, or it’s no good.
The same thing is true for when we write basic inverted pyramid stories: The lead is the essential foundation of what we’re doing in the story. Each subsequent paragraph has to support or augment that element or it needs to go away.
Writing longer and more complicated stories is no different. Just because you gathered 20 times the material you would normally gather for a simple news story, it doesn’t follow that all of that can or should be added to the piece. In fact, you want to strongly resist the urge for “notebook emptying” when it comes to bigger pieces.
Focus on the core element of what you want to say and get rid of everything that isn’t that. One of my favorite scenes from Aaron Sorkin’s old “Studio 60” show exemplifies this perfectly: Two rookie writers are trying to a sketch about the world’s worst criminal who takes hostages in a bank.
They try so hard to do so much with it, it doesn’t work. Once they essentially realize that problem, the do addition by subtraction and start eliminating stuff that isn’t about their premise. That’s where they get it to work.
FOCUS ON YOUR AUDIENCE: For generations, journalists have operated under the mantra of, “I write, you read, because I know what you need.” The fact was that the audience read the stuff or watched the stuff because they lacked for better options. When there’s one or two newspapers and three or four TV channels, well, you’re stuck with whatever is there.
Today, that’s not the case as not only do we have an almost infinite number of media platforms from which to choose, but we also have exponentially more content providers than at any point in time. The thing that’s going to make you stand out, and thus your story stand out, is understanding what your audience needs from you and then providing it in a clear, coherent and helpful fashion.
In big pieces, we try to show how everything we have gathered can affect everyone who might ever come across our work. It’s like we’re trying to be everything to everyone.
This is where audience centricity really comes into play. For WHOM are you writing this piece? What are the demographic, psychographic and geographic elements that you can use to tailor your piece to a specific group of folks that will benefit from your work?
In talking with my class the other day, we were going through the issues hammering our university right now, including an $18 million budget hole. In that, we started parsing specific audiences and what they would want to know:
Students care about their majors getting cut, the classes they need to graduate being available, tuition going up etc.
Faculty worry about increased teaching loads, the length of furloughs, the potential elimination of majors.
Non-academic faculty worry about getting fired, as we’re cutting about 200 jobs, and those that remain worry about what their jobs will look like after the culling.
In each case, you can create a solid focus based on the audience and then really know what your story is about. It can’t be about all of these things in depth, but it can be several stories that each focus on one key set of stakeholders and the issues that matter to them.
(If you’d like to see a master course on sterile jargon, enjoy reading Patient Zero here…)
All faculty members are getting some degree of furlough, while the folks who are in the academic staff, administrative staff and other non-tenured spots on the campus await layoffs and other levels of anxiety-provoking announcements.
(Some of us sat through an hour-plus event that included the explanation that to close our $18 million budget deficit, the university would be using the $5 million remaining in its surplus fund, furloughing faculty to save $3 million and then relying on $1 million in cuts. Even my journalism brain realized something was wrong with that math.)
Given my use of humor to deal with darkness, the jokes on this have come fast and furiously through my brain:
“Welcome to UW-O, home of the furlough!”
“It’s UW-Furlough, where the customer comes… into an empty office at least a few days this month.”
“You can’t spell furlough without F-U!”
I also liked the line of “You are not to be performing any work for UW-Oshkosh” as I’m trying to imagine the enforcement mechanisms that will be employed:
(Sound of SWAT officers kicking down my front door, annoying the dog and scattering the chickens)
Cop: “Filak! Are you GRADING PAPERS? Hands off that laptop now!”
Me: “No! Officer! I swear, I’m just surfing for porn!”
Cop: “Yeah… you BETTER BE!”
In any case, this isn’t a pity party for me but more of an opportunity to go out Irish-Wake style on this thing, so here’s what I’m pitching:
THE 2023-24 UW-UH-OH, FILAK’S ON FURLOUGH TOUR
I’ve basically got 11 days to kill, so let’s do something positive with those. I’m putting out the Bat Signal for anyone out there who is teaching journalism at the high school or college level, anyone running a student media outlet at any level, any group of students who need help in journalism or basically anyone who is looking to take advantage of a journalism professor/blogger chimp with a desire to help you in any way I can while making a mockery of the system.
I am ready, willing and able to do pretty much anything you want me to do for your classroom, your newsroom, your student media organization or whatever for one of my 11 furlough days.
You want me to hop on a Zoom call and teach a topic? Fine.
You want me to drive out to your school and meet with students to do some brainstorming for the next issue of the student publication? Totally cool.
You want me to come out to your student media conference and teach a dozen sessions on stuff that people want/need? I’m there.
You need me to go through resumes, cover letters, copies of your student newspaper, last year’s yearbook and your relatively weak “break-up poetry” from sophomore year? Sure… Hey… Let’s do it!
In addition to that, I’m willing to kick in the following things:
A blog post about whatever we did, promoting your place and giving the readers a nice bit of information they can use in their own classroom/newsroom/journalistic lair
A copy of the latest edition of any of my textbooks. (I’ve got your choice of Media Writing, News Reporting and Writing, Media Editing and Exploring Mass Com, all of which are suitable substitutes for Ambien.)
One of my personalized, hand-burned wooden baseball bats for your office or classroom
(I’ve done some pretty cool bats…)
And, if I sell out the tour on all 11 dates, I’m getting T-shirts with your class/team/organization as an official tour stop.
Who you are, what you do and where you are located
What you want me to do for your class/group/organization
When you want this to happen, as apparently I can only take a certain number of furlough days in a certain set of pay periods for reasons past my understanding
How you want to do this (in-person, on Zoom, via the Pony Express, whatever)
Why you want to do this
Let’s turn a truly stupid thing into something awesome for you and your folks, which I think Is the unofficial motto of this blog.
Although it’s about a year old now, the Washington Post’s guide to gender, LGBTQ issues and other similar topics has started making the rounds again. The Post’s approach is both educational and explanatory, outlining what it is doing and why it thought publishing this would be helpful:
Depending on one’s life experiences, it can be challenging to navigate some of the terms of the debate. Informed by the guidance of a number of organizations, including GLAAD, the Trans Journalists Association, InterAct, the American Medical Association and the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, The Washington Post has compiled a glossary of the terms and concepts that show up in our coverage.
The glossary below is not comprehensive, and there is ongoing conversation about which language is most appropriate and accurate. This guide is intended to be a clear and accurate starting point to help readers better understand gender issues.
The organizations that the Post listed have provided guidance to the media over the years with style guides that have defined similar terms, made specific requests for eschewing certain words and generally provided journalists with ways to speak more inclusively and intelligently on these topics.
The Post’s effort is helpful in providing additional context to its readers regarding specific terms they might have seen in the paper’s coverage. It also provides that mainstream voice that can convince other publications to make similar decisions in terms, explanations and approaches. As much as journalists tend to think of themselves as ahead of the curve on what’s happening around them, a lot of us tend to stick to our own tried-and-true approach until “the big dogs” make a move. (This is why we tend to cling to our AP style books.)
EDITOR’S NOTE: In an attempt at “less is more,” we’re trying out the Axios approach to working through some of the more “event-based” posts. Tell us what you think in the comments. — VFF
The brief shows that Fox News stars and executives were afraid of losing their audience, which started to defect to the conservative cable news alternatives Newsmax and OAN after Fox News called Arizona for Mr. Biden. And they seemed concerned with the impact that would have on the network’s profitability.
On Nov. 12, in a text chain with Ms. Ingraham and Mr. Hannity, Mr. Carlson pointed to a tweet in which a Fox reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fact-checked a tweet from Mr. Trump referring to Fox broadcasts and said there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion.
“Please get her fired,” Mr. Carlson said. He added: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Dominion’s filing casts Mr. Murdoch as a chairman who was both deeply engaged with his senior leadership about coverage of the election and operating at somewhat of a remove, unwilling to interfere. Asked by Dominion’s lawyer, Justin Nelson, whether he could have ordered Fox News to keep Trump lawyers like Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani off the air, Mr. Murdoch responded: “I could have. But I didn’t.”
Background and recap:
We covered the suit here when Dominion first filed it back in March 2021, in which the company stated Fox folks knew Trump was lying, but refused to say so on air.
Dominion’s suit for defamation noted Fox’s actions were reckless and created true harm to the company and its workers. Not only did the company stand to lose about $600 million over the next eight years, but it stated that many Dominion workers received threats from people who believed what Fox was selling.
Fox responded that the company was attempting to be fair and balanced and did not knowingly lie to its audience.
Dynamics of Writing Flashback: When we first pitched the “Dynamics of Media Writing,” the idea of audience-centricity was at the core of the model we were pushing. One of the earliest reviewers of the book pitch took us to task for essentially “pandering to an audience” instead of doing actual journalism. In having to “sell” the book to the powers-that-be at SAGE, we had to address this issue both in the response and in the front of the book, so that people better understood what we meant.
The key point we wanted to make was that people have choices on where to go for their information and we can’t just tell them whatever it is we want to say and figure that’s good enough anymore. We need to understand who is out there using our content, what makes them connect with us so we can better connect with them and how best to present the information to them in a relevant, useful and interesting fashion. That’s helping your readers, not pandering to them.
TWO KEY WAYS TO KNOW WHICH ONE YOU’RE DOING: If you aren’t clear on how to tell the difference between catering and pandering, consider a couple thoughts below:
Seek Balance Within Reason: One of the things that protects journalists in presenting information that might turn out to be incorrect is the fair reporting privilege. In short, courts have held that if reporters are telling both sides (or however many sides are clearly present) in a fair and equal fashion.
If you have Group A telling you Group B is trying to kill the environment with its housing project, did you talk to Group B about those accusations and give those folks a chance to respond? If you are told a police report shows the mayor of your town is running a cocaine ring out of the back of the local thrift store, did you make every reasonable attempt to get that report and interview the mayor? These are all reasonable things.
The “within reason” portion is where we provide kind of a buffer against the need to interview people who think the reason the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade is because they’re Illuminati Lizard People who are attempting to turn humans into a colony of breeders whose offspring will feed the reptile race on their home planet. There is a limit, but letting people blather on about things you know not to be true (especially any person you call “a nut job” behind the scenes).
Tell people what they need to know, not what they want to hear: The key aspect of audience-centricity is knowing what the audience needs to know and making sure you deliver that content. People don’t always LIKE to hear things they NEED to know, like if taxes are going up, why eggs now cost more than Taylor Swift tickets or how many more months the highway they take will be under construction. The most popular part of the news around here is the weather, which pretty much sucks from about late October until God shows mercy sometime around Memorial Day. Still, people NEED to know if the should plan extra time for a trip, plan to put away a little more money for the IRS or switch from eggs to something less pricey, like lobster.
The pandering folks at Fox were more worried that if they told their audience things they didn’t want to hear, the audience would go somewhere else where a different group of hairdos would. Fox knew instinctively that they didn’t have an audience that loved them. Instead, they were basically “sugar dating” a group of people who would dump them once they no longer got what they wanted.
I’m quite certain Walter Cronkite wasn’t all that thrilled to tell the country that JFK had died or that it was clear the Vietnam War was unwinnable, but he did it anyway, because people needed to know these things and he felt an obligation to his profession and viewers to say them. And I’m sure more than a few people weren’t thrilled to hear these things, but Cronkite had built up enough credit at the Bank of Credibility that those folks stuck with him.
As my first journalism teacher once told me, “If you want to be loved for doing your job, go teach kindergarten, because you’re not going to get that here in journalism.”
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of Smart Brevity, it’s the bread-and-butter approach Axios takes to telling stories. The goal is simple: Tell people what they need to know right away, tell them why they should care about it, give them the option of going deeper without making it mandatory and move on with life.
With that approach in mind, here’s the best brief review I can do:
“Smart Brevity” forces writers to economize their work for the sake of their readers. This audience-centric approach cuts through the content deluge readers receive each day and improves multiple communication experiences. “Smart Brevity” won’t work in as many places as the authors state, but the underlying tenets can be helpfully adapted to various situations. It’s a quick read and worth the time, especially for non-journalists.
In the tradition of Axios, if you want more than that, here’s a deeper dive:
POSITIVES
IT’S BRIEF: Axios talks the talk and walks the walk on brevity. The book weighs in at 218 pages, but it is easy to read and the pages fly by. Anecdotes are limited to those that really emphasize the point, examples hit the point before quickly moving on and the bullet-point structure familiar to Axios readers makes for bite-sized chunks that are easy to consume.
IT’S HELPFUL: The hard part about being a writer is that writers love to write, almost to a fault. Axios sympathizes with that instinct, but shows key ways to do more with less. A lot of what the authors emphasize (NVO structure, get to the point immediately, tell me why I care, focus on the audience) is at the core of good journalism. The book serves as an entry point to non-journalists who need to write clearly and succinctly while providing journalism-style folk with a reminder to avoid falling in love with our own prose.
(The focus group was interesting in that we had journalism faculty, PR faculty, broadcast faculty and business/marketing faculty. The business person gushed about how amazing and revolutionary and special this was. She went on and on about how the business school was adding this book to its curriculum and making it a must-read and how her life was essentially changed by this book, as she Post-It noted the thing to death. The journalism and broadcasters in the room were looking at each other like, “Um… Yeah… This is kind of what we do already…”)
IT’S ENGAGING: The writing in here is clear and direct but also conversational and engaging. One of the best compliments a student ever paid to my textbook was, “I can hear you in my head when I’m reading this.” I don’t know what any of these guys actually sound like, but I felt the same way here. This wasn’t a preacher’s sermon. It was a valuable chat.
IT’S HUMBLING: These guys didn’t emerge from the womb as smart-brevity writers. It took a while for them to get here and they explain that backstory in places. The examples range from VandeHei’s interaction with a demanding Washington Post editor to Mike Allen’s experience developing his newsletter and show how they moved from the “It’s gotta be long to be good” paradigm to the “Brevity is confidence. Length is fear” motto that Axios espouses.
NEGATIVES
IT’S A ONE-TRICK PONY: The latter half of the book shows how you can apply the smart brevity model to everything from emails and presentations to meetings and speeches. In each case, there’s a ton of repetition without much nuance. In addition, as we discussed here before, the Axios model can fall into the “Law of the Instrument” problem, in which they pitch it like a 1980s infomercial:
We can all use tighter speeches, presentations and emails to be sure, and I would give real money if someone could find a way to make meetings no longer than five minutes. However, the smart brevity model can come across as abrupt and blunt in some of these situations. (If I got a “smart brevity” email from my boss like the example in the book, I’d immediately think he’s pissed at me.)
IT’S AUDIENCE-CENTRIC, BUT NOT UNIVERSAL: One of the things that the Axios crew knows better than anyone else is how to serve its audience. The book hits on audience-centricity repeatedly, and for good reason: Writers often write for themselves, which is where we get into trouble. The audience for Axios, and the authors’ previous home of Politico, was a group of on-the-go political junkies who were well-versed in the language, culture and vibe of D.C. scene. The writers were part of that scene as well, so it was easy to “speak the language” of the sources and make points quickly.
(When I mentioned this in the group discussion, VandeHei noted how they’ve helped BP, CitiGroup and other organizations to implement this form of writing . He also mentioned that each time he brought this format up to various groups, ranging from scientists to lawyers, they all said it would never work for their field, but it did. My point was still that these people had a shared culture and vocabulary so, yes, it does work in that way, but not if you’re bringing folks into the fold on something new or talking to people outside of this area. I got the sense he disagreed.)
The “Smart Brevity” approach works in this format, but not in situations like teaching someone a new skill, laying out a detailed plan or other things that require writers to bring along people who don’t have the foundational knowledge Axios knew its audience had. That’s not to say the content of the book can’t help improve the writing in these situations, but the writer has to know the audience well enough to adapt the “Smart Brevity” approach to the needs and acumen of that group.
My subdued reaction when my students use second person in their news stories…
One of the more difficult habits to break for beginning journalists is the use of second person in news stories. Although they tend to mix first, second and third person into their work, it’s usually easy to kick “I,” “We” and “Us” to the curb after a few sessions. Third person generally becomes the default option for them, based on the years of research papers that demand the detachment not found in first or second person. However, for some reason, second person seems to show up without rhyme or reason within news stories, particularly news features.
This concept took on new relevance for me this weekend when Terry Pluto of the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote an epic story about his colleague, Mary Kay Cabot. Cabot has covered the Cleveland Browns for 31 years and was recently inducted into the The Press Club of Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame. His story begins this way:
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Thirty-one years.
You’re Mary Kay Cabot, and you’ve been covering the Cleveland Browns for 31 years – the same team you watched on TV every Sunday while growing up in Lakewood.
Your dad was Joe Cabot, a Lakewood fireman and a Korean War veteran. He always had a game on of one of the local pro sports teams. But the Browns … the Browns were special. Your father “lived and died” with the Browns.
To see his daughter cover the Browns, that was as meaningful to him as if you had played quarterback for the orange helmets.
“If I ever run into that (Mike) Trivisonno, I’ll take care of him,” your father told you. He had heard the late WTAM talk show host rip you on the radio. To this day, you love that story.
Now, they’re your Browns, the team and the job that has loomed over you for three decades.
“It’s the Browns and our three kids,” is how you describe your life with Bill Murman, your husband of 29 years.
The first time I ran into this kind of cognitive dissonance was when I was about 17 and I was going through an “’80s nihilistic authors phase” in my reading habits. Jay McInerney, a brilliant writer who has penned some of my favorite novels, used the second-person approach for the entirety of “Bright Lights, Big City,” which begins this way in a chapter titled: “It’s Six A.M. Do you know where you are?”
“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might become clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not…”
So there I was, a teenager from the Midwest who had yet to take an illegal drink, trying to put myself into the shoes of a coked-up magazine copy editor who is trying to get laid in a New York City night club at the crack of dawn. It didn’t work out all that well, despite my best efforts.
In both cases, the writers were skilled professionals who were taking calculated risks, based on a variety of factors they seriously considered before stepping into the “you-niverse.” As we have said here before, if you learn the rules well enough, you can figure out when it’s best to break them. (In short, you earn the fungus on your shower shoes.)
That said, most of my students haven’t earned that right yet and tend to use second-person missives as a writing crutch.
To figure out if second person is the way to go, consider these questions:
How will your audience respond to this? Like most things we talk about in media writing, the audience should be front and center when you decide if you should go with second person or not. If the readers aren’t at the forefront of the decision-making process, a lot can go wrong with second person. People don’t like being told what to do, especially if it seems like you’re coming at them from a higher moral position. Thus, telling them “You should give money” or “You should donate blood” or anything along those lines can feel off-putting. Second person is also something that readers aren’t used to in certain formats and platforms, so using it can be really jarring to some folks. In thinking about my experience with Pluto’s story, I would be really interested in what the general Cleveland sports audience thought about the Cabot piece and the use of “you,” especially because Cabot is such a rare gem in the field.
What is the tone of your media outlet? “You” has become a staple of television news over the years, as has “I,” because broadcast is an interpersonal medium. When done well, broadcasters make viewers feel a one-on-one connection that is less like a news report, and more like shared information from a trusted friend. Columnists and bloggers often get away with “you” as well, in that the format is less formal and more conversational. To pretend to carry some sort of objective detachment feels fake or even snobby. More traditional or general-interest outlets still need that sense of detachment, primarily because the audience is so varied and the tone of formality has been ingrained over time.
What is the tone of your piece? Standard news stories tend to have multiple angles and facets, thus it’s hard to know which one “you” the reader will connect with. Even a story about a landlord evicting poor tenants on Christmas Eve has multiple facets, and second person can make it look like you’re taking sides. Conversely, “how to” pieces on niche blogs or websites might need a lot of “you” moments to guide readers along and reassure them that they can fix the garbage disposal or Bedazzle a jean jacket.
Are you just being lazy? In the case of the two authors noted above, the use of second person was a clear, conscious choice that they stuck with all the way through the piece. They decided to ride or die with second person. Most of the pieces I’ve read that contain second person don’t take things to this extreme with this kind of forethought. It’s a case of a writer shifting into second person because they don’t want to take the time to rewrite a sentence in third person. Using second person as a literary device is worth a shot here and there. Using it as a writing crutch is just plain lazy. If you can easily rewrite a sentence into third person and the majority of the piece is in third person, take the time to do it. If you have a clear and coherent reason to go into the “you-niverse,” take the risk if you have worked your way through the points above.
Like most tools in your writing toolbox, second person can be useful in certain situations. If you use it for the right reason, you can do a lot of good for your readers. If you use it for the wrong ones, you can undermine the value of your piece and annoy your audience.
Of all the topics that students request help with throughout their journalism journey, the most common one is learning how to interview sources well. Whether it’s in my intro class or my senior capstone-style courses, whenever I ask, “What do you want to get out of this class?” the answer is usually, “I really suck at interviewing… How can I get better at this?”
Repeatedly doing the task is always one good way of improving yourself whenever you feel deficient in an area. However, interviewing can cause problems for other people while you learn. It’s like expecting people to stand against a wall while you learn the art of knife-throwing: Until you get good at it, this is really going to hurt.
I often experience a few painful interviews throughout the term, because first-year students in one of our intro classes are required to comb the building for a professor to interview and I usually make the mistake of keeping my door open. They become enamored with the bobbleheads and then, BAM, I’m explaining what life as a professor is like to some kid who looks as scared as a fawn trapped in a semi’s headlights.
A lot of what goes wrong in those interviews is covered in the textbook, in that the students don’t actively listen or really plan things out very well. To them, I’m just a slab of meat with a mouth that can satisfy their need to accomplish a task. However, a more senior student requested a specific interview with me for a departmental blog post, only to make the same kinds of mistakes these newbies made.
With that in mind, here are four questions a newer journalist can ask themselves prior to requesting an interview that might make their lives (and the lives of their subjects) a little better:
Have you done enough preparation before requesting the interview?
The worst experiences I’ve had as a journalist were the ones where I didn’t feel prepared. In some cases, I was able to get a bit of a pass, given that I covered a lot of breaking news. Thus, there’s no real way to prepare for a random shooting or a house fire that got way out of hand. However, there have been plenty of times where I would need to profile someone or do a news feature on a topic and I kind of half-assed the prep work, only to come face-to-face with a source who wasn’t all that thrilled with me.
The results felt like an awkward blind date, only there was no waitress to bring enough alcohol to improve the situation.
Before you decide, “I’m gonna interview this person,” consider how much you actually KNOW about that person and what it is that will improve the overall vibe and informative nature of the interview. Read up on the person, the topic and the newsworthiness of both before you send an email or make a call to get that person. The better handle you have on the source, the better you can approach them effectively and get everything off on the right foot.
How important is this person to the story you want to tell?
I have found a strange inverse relationship between how important a person actually is to a story and how important they think they are to it. In many cases, I’ve gotten the, “Oh, no… You don’t really need to talk to me about this…” response from people who are vital to a piece and brilliant beyond reproach. I have also had people get into a huff that their bland comment, which added nothing to the sum of human knowledge, didn’t get published because, “Do you know who I AM?”
The value of the source can vary greatly depending on the story you intend to write. In the case of a “Everyone had a great day at the fair” story, if you’ve seen one person eating a funnel cake, you’ve seen them all. Thus, when a source rebuffs your request for an interview, it’s not the end of the world. Feel free to hunt elsewhere.
Conversely, if that person is supposed to be the star of a major profile piece or news story, you need to come loaded for bear. You need to be able to explain to that person why they matter, what makes the story worth telling and how important their participation is in this piece.
It also matters in your overall approach. I’m not saying you should treat sources poorly if they are a dime a dozen for the story, but you do need to be exceedingly careful with wary sources who can make or break a story or reticent individuals who are playing it a bit close to the vest. This is the perfect time to practice those persuasive skills you learned in your public speaking or public relations courses.
Have you practiced?
It sounds almost childlike to practice your interview, either with someone else or by yourself, but you can save yourself a lot of aggravation if you put in a few practice rounds before the big event.
Reading the questions aloud can help you figure out if they actually make sense when you verbalize them. Some things sound great in your head, but lose traction when they hit the paper. Even more, this is where you can figure out if you accidentally slipped in a loaded question or you failed to ask the question you intended to ask.
It never hurts to ask someone to work with you, especially if you’re new at this kind of process. When you ask a question and it strikes an unfortunate nerve with your practice partner, you realize you might need to rewrite that question or rethink the concept.
For example, there are 1,001 ways to ask how a person is coping with the loss of a loved one, and just as many ways of screwing up the ask. Asking “Now that your husband is dead, where do you see yourself going from here,” is probably not going to get the response you had hoped for, unless you really wanted a widow to punch you in the head.
Practice also helps you improve the interview’s flow, prevents you from having to look at your notes as often and makes it feel more like a conversation than an interrogation.
Have you considered what this will be like from the source’s perspective?
We talk a lot about audience-centricity in the “Dynamics” textbooks because the goal of journalism is to work for the audience. With that in mind, think about the “audience” of this interview: the person on the other end of the questions.
When you request an interview, what you are essentially saying is that you want someone to do you a favor. You want that person to stop whatever else it is they’re doing, set aside a block of time for you, allow you to poke at them with a series of inquiries that will likely benefit you more than it will benefit them and then leave them in a mild to moderate panic over what it is you’ll do with what you’ve learned. It’s also an even-money bet they’ll worry you’ll screw stuff up and they’ll have to spend the next several days/weeks/months undoing the damage your stupidity has done to them.
Sounds like a big bag of fun for your interview subject, doesn’t it?
With that in mind, you should probably spend some time putting yourself into the shoes of your interview subject. What can you do to make the process easier on them? What can you do to help them feel like you’re not wasting their time? How can you structure the interview to make the process work more smoothly?
This also plays into the earlier elements as well. How would you feel if someone asked you for a favor and you graciously granted it, only to have that person show up late? Or look unprepared? Or just sit there like, “Well? Just gimme something quick so I can get out of here!”
As difficult as all of this can be on you as a newer journalist, it can be exponentially harder and uglier for the people who have to deal with the back end of your growing pains. Do whatever you can to take that person’s perspective into account before you decide to make the interview request.
The Public Relations Student Society of America chapter out here requested a guest lecture on blogging, as they know blogs will be part of what they need to do to be successful in their fields. Students have often told me that when they show up for an internship or a job, the first thing they are told is, “We need a blog. Go do it.”
What should be on that blog? “We need a blog!”
What’s our audience for the blog? “We NEED a BLOG!”
Do you have any advice on how to go about blogging for this organization? “Look, kid. You know the interwebs and stuff. Just go build the damned blog…”
Unless you want to be roadkill on the information superhighway (or worse), it pays to understand the concept of blogging and why it is certain blogs work and certain ones don’t. As a sneak preview of tonight’s talk, here are a few basic things to keep in mind when you want to build an effective blog:
RULE 1: It’s not about you.
Starting a blog because you want to write about something is like becoming a restaurant chef because you like to eat. The point of the job isn’t to give you a cheaper version of group therapy or to help you share your feelings with people. The point of a blog is to find an audience that has an interest in something you know about and a need for information that you possess.
What you know about your audience will largely determine how successful you are at drawing traffic to your blog. You need to know who is out there, what interests they have and how you can engage them, either digitally or interpersonally. This is particularly important if you are working for an organization that requires you to blog for it. Your personal stories won’t go far and the readers won’t give a damn about you.
To make this work, you need to learn who is out there that is reading the blog, what they need and how you can get it to them.
There are three things you need to examine to understand your audience: Demographics, Psychographics and Geographics. The type of blog you have will determine to what degree each of these elements is more or less crucial to your success. However, unless you have a sense of who is out there, you’ll never know if you can be of help to them. In marketing, we talk about the idea of a “buyer persona” while in news we talk about a “typical reader.” All we’re really trying to get across is that a certain type of person is going to be using your stuff, so you have to know who they are, what they want and how best to reach them.
For example, if you are doing a blog on fashion, you need to know who will be reading it. Are they younger people who wear a lot of leggings and ripped jeans or are they senior citizens who want to get out of the 1970s and its polyester phase? Are they New York jet setters or small-town kids who don’t want to wear overalls every day? Do they have gobs of money or are they shopping on a budget? Even more, things like how label-conscious they are, the degree to which they have a solid self-image and how often they like to shop will all play into this.
Regardless of what you choose to do, you need to make it about them. Not you.
Rule #2: Get narrow and get focused
Blogs can’t be about everything. They have to be about something. If you decide that you’re going to “blog about things that I notice,” you have managed to violate both rule 1 and rule 2 in one fell swoop. Writing a “personality” blog would only work if you are someone like Kendall Jenner, and even then it wouldn’t work because if you were Kendall Jenner, you’d need to learn how to write first.
We don’t live in a “mass media” world any more, so you have to find something specific that will draw readers and give them something they can’t get elsewhere. (Or, at the very least, they can only get a few other places, but you give it to them in a better way) That means you need to locate a niche that badly needs something you have to offer and then fill it.
Let’s look at how best to narrow this down:
Stage 1: I want to write a sports blog. (WAAAY TOO BROAD)
Stage 2: I want to write a blog that looks at college athletes. (STILL TOO BROAD)
Stage 3: I want to write a blog that looks at college athletes and issues of mental health. (Probably workable)
Each cut, you see us getting closer to a niche. In this case, you have something that not a lot of people are talking about (mental health and athletics) so you have a lot of potential blogging options. You could look at star athletes and the mental pressures of success. You could look at athletes who graduate but won’t go on to a pro game and how they deal with that. You could look at athletes coming back from injuries and their fears and concerns about this. Sources can include sports psychologists, former athletes, coaches, mental health experts and more. No matter what’s going on, you have the ability to sharpen the focus by going more narrow.
Rule #3: Before you blog, answer the question, “Why you?”
The greatest line ever delivered in the history of professional sports came from Indianapolis Colts GM Bill Tobin after the first round of the 1994 NFL Draft. A draft analyst had criticized his picks on ESPN, which was covering the event. After hearing this over and over, Tobin went on live TV and asked,
“Who in the hell is Mel Kiper anyway? Here’s a guy that criticizes everybody, whoever they take. He’s got the answers to who you should take and who you shouldn’t take. And my knowledge of him: he’s never ever put on a jock strap, he’s never been a coach, he’s never been a scout, he’s been an administrator and all of a sudden he’s an expert.”
His point is one you need to consider when you decide on your blogging topic: Who the hell are you and why should anyone listen to you about this topic?
If you are going to be successful at blogging, whether it’s as a news blog, a promotional blog, an opinion blog or anything else, you have to be able to explain to your readers (or better yet just show them) what it is that makes you a credible and valuable resource on the topic at hand. This is where research REALLY comes in, especially if you are working for an organization or corporation.
For example, let’s say you are blogging for a travel agency that specializes in European travel. There might be a big gap in the area of food blogging for people with gluten allergies who travel in Europe. The questions of “Where is the best quality of gluten-free pasta?” or “Which restaurants use separate prep stations for gluten-free meals?” and others need to be answered. You have an audience that really wants to know this stuff, as for some folks, it’s a matter of life and death. You can draw traffic from other similar gluten-free blogs that exist like Chronically Gluten Free and Gluten-Free Fun, as people often post a need for these answers on those sites.
However, if you don’t travel through Europe, or you have no background in celiac allergies or if you never eat, who the hell are you to talk about this stuff? If you can’t be an expert based on your experiences, you better be an expert based on research, interviewing experts and doing more than just spitballing about the topic based on what you once heard at a PF Chang’s.
You have to be able to demonstrate to the readers that you have an expertise in this topic and showcase that expertise in pretty much everything you do. Imagine your doctor starting off your surgery by saying, “I’ve never done this before, but let’s give it a shot…” Not exactly awe inspiring.
If you can’t demonstrate good solid reasons why you should do the blog, don’t do the blog. If you don’t have a choice, you need to gear up and game up through research and checking in with experts. You need to make yourself into the expert.
Once you nail those things down, you can start figuring out where a blog should go or what you should include, but that should get you a running start at a successful blog.
