Awkward ’80s Reference

An open letter to college students: Please learn to give a shit

Dear students,

I know that there are a solid number of you out there who actually abide by the request in this post most of the time. That said, that number appears to be dwindling significantly recently, so I need to make this plea.

I’ve always believed that as a professor, I owe it to you to try to explain things so that you can understand them. I also believe that if I don’t actually SAY something in explicit terms, it’s my fault when you screw up. If I do my best to lay it out, like I’m trying to teach a dog how to do calculus, and you still screw up, well, then, that’s on you.

I felt the need to put this post together after the first half of a semester that had me utterly vexed and befuddled at the current state of my courses. This isn’t a typical semester in which I have a couple kids who skip class constantly, a few others who fake their way around a few things and some dumb-ass behavior that makes me question the functionality of at least one student’s frontal lobes. There will always be one kid who shows up late so often I swear they’ll be late for their own funeral.

And it isn’t about the life events that get in the way for all of us. I still get the “I’m sick” emails or the notes about emergency surgeries and funerals. That happens all the time and, honestly, any professor who doesn’t understand this is someone I don’t want to know.

No, this appears to be a pandemic level of “I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit-itis” that has hit in a way I’ve never seen before on the college level. I had students miss deadlines for quizzes, writing assignments and even exams. Students were given days and even weeks to meet those goals, only to let the deadlines go by like a knee-buckling curve ball.

This isn’t just affecting my intro-level students, as several folks who are in their senior year have forgotten about midterms. The excuses are of the “I have no excuses, but let me fix this anyway” variety, with a steady stream of “I was unaware” emails, which appeared strange to me, given that I’d posted the information in the syllabus, flagged the deadline in the LMS and spoken repeatedly about it in class.

I keep thinking that these folks are suffering from whatever the hell Guy Pearce had in “Memento” and I’m strongly considering bring tattoo kits to class:

This also isn’t just affecting the students here at UWO, as I asked the hivemind of educators I trust if they’ve seen this as well. It turns out this is hitting states across the country, even those that haven’t recently legalized weed or consider a pub crawl to be a national holiday. A constant stream of attempting to spoon-feed students review questions, examples, instructions and extended deadlines has not proven to be a panacea for this situation.

Some educators speculate that this might be some sort of “long COVID” impact, with the idea that college students who spent their formative years merely trying to survive what we all assumed was the end of days weren’t properly prepared for self-reliance in their education. Others wondered if students felt their college efforts lacked value, given the high number of good-paying jobs that are currently available, sans a college degree. Still others pondered about the effects of artificial intelligence, as students looked for easier ways to get out of work. My sister-in-law, who teaches dance, had this insight:

“People are just lazy. We have a new generation of stupid on our hands.”

The cause and the cure are outside of my scope of knowledge, as I’m really not that kind of doctor. That said, please consider the following advice, as you move forward into the second half of the semester. Some of this may seem like it’s stuff you heard in second grade, but that’s probably because we need to dive that far back into the realm of education to properly reboot a few folks:

GIVE A SHIT: This is really the core of everything I’m going to say below, but again it bears repeating. If the way in which my 8 a.m. class tends to listen, I might have to say this six or seven more time before we’re done here.

I have told students over the years that the one thing I absolutely cannot teach them is how to care about a course. I can teach the basics of all sorts of rudimentary journalism skills and quite a few higher-level elements at that. I can teach students how to be tough, or brave, or nosy, or a dozen other “soft skills” that can aid them in their work.

The one thing I can’t make them do is “wanna.” If you don’t “wanna,” I can’t help you.

I get that not every course is your muse and that every class is not an Academy-Award-winning performance on the part of your instructor, but I know that a lot of us are really trying to make a difference. However, if you don’t care, it doesn’t matter.

And, if you don’t care, you should probably think about why you’re sitting in that classroom, spending a boatload of money that you’ll spend decades of your life paying back.

READ DIRECTIONS: When I was growing up, we were inundated with ads for a program called RIF: Reading Is Fundamental. The idea was that if you couldn’t read, you probably weren’t going anywhere in life:

This is really true in college, as you should be somewhere further along in your personal literacy than the crew of kids surrounding a relatively young Ed Asner here. Reading directions is a fantastic way of figuring out how much content you have to write, how many citations you need to include or even when something is due.

It might not be as much fun as if we did the directions in a TikTok, but when the Feds block this app for fear that the Chinese government is using it to figure out how stupid we all are, those literacy skills might come in handy.

PAY ATTENTION: College professors often have difficulty when we see you on laptops and tablets during class, because we’d love to pretend that you’re using these items to take copious notes and add deadlines to your calendars. However, when we call on you to verbally add your thoughts to the topic under discussion and your head pops up like a prairie dog getting electroshock therapy, you kind of give up the game.

Look, I get that we’re boring, despite how hard we work. I also know that not everything will apply to any one student in class. That said, you are PAYING for this. It’s like buying entry to the Golden Corral buffet and then quietly sipping a water in the corner. If that’s all you’re doing, why the hell did you come here?

Paying attention in class is a great way to actually learn stuff. This is particularly true if you are opposed to reading directions. I’m a big fan of both, but you need to do one or the other in order to survive in college. Neither of these things is asking too much or should come as a massive shock to you. We showed you the library, the classrooms and even professors’ offices during your campus tour: Books and lectures were not hidden from you.

Unless, of course, you were on your phone the whole time…

STOP PSEUDO-APOLOGIZING: I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve gotten that start with “I’m sorry” and then follow that up with a detailed outline of some easily avoidable screw up. I finally went and looked up what an apology actually entails and this is what I’ve found:

The Three A’s of Apologies
  • Acknowledgement. Acknowledge the situation and say you are sorry for what happened.
  • Acceptance. Hold yourself accountable and work to rectify the situation.
  • Amends. Talk about what you will do and start working on corrective measures.

What I’ve come to realize is that most of the apologies I get had none of those elements to them.

You’re not really sorry, in the idea that you are acknowledging the situation. Hell, some of you wouldn’t realize you’ve been hit by a bus until your phone told you as much or your Apple Watch stopped tracking your pulse. You just don’t like the negative outcome of what occurred and you want some way out of it.

You aren’t really accepting anything. Some of the emails I get say that the sender “will accept whatever punishment” I have in mind, but quickly following that up with “but I would really like it if (Fill in way of getting away with screwing up here).”

Also, I’m looking for amends. Maybe the sacrifice of a fatted calf would be a bit much, but some actual contrition and showing up on time for at least a week or two would help.

DON’T LIE: Journalists deal with weasels for most of our lives. This is why we have such great BS detectors and why we love nailing liars to the wall. In most cases, the lies students tell are so frickin’ unnecessary that they boggle the mind.

Case in point: I had a student tell me last week that she was going to miss class because she was sick. Totally fine, as they get two skips the whole term, and I don’t care what they’re for. I even go out of my way to say, “Look, if you want to tell me, ‘I got totally ‘faced last night and I reek of vomit and vodka sweat, so I’m skipping,’ I’m fine with that.”

However, when I got home, I found out from my kid that she met one of my students, who was applying for a job at the Olive Garden where Zoe works. It was my bed-ridden sickly waif who couldn’t make it to class, because it turned out her interview for the job was at that time.

The same thing applies to using AI to write your papers. We read enough college writing to know when something comes from a college student and when something comes from a computerized dictionary that spasms content. We also know that nobody writes to EXACTLY 500 words, so stop telling AI to write you a 500-word paper on a given topic.

I have worked ridiculously hard to be an empathetic ally to my students, so when I’m doing that and you lie to me, it makes me want to bring down a raging storm of hellfire upon you.

QUIT WASTING OUR TIME: After all of this, if you STILL can’t find it in your heart and soul to give a shit, that’s fine. Just stop wasting our time.

Believe it or not, some of your colleagues out there are desperate for help. They are applying for internships and jobs, but need help with resumes and cover letters. They are trying to bend their brains around this new form of writing that will be the foundation upon which a lot of their work after college will depend. They actually mean it when they stop by the office and start the conversation with, “Sorry to bother you, but…”

Every time you turn in some AI bullshit, you make us waste time determining how you cheated and filling out paperwork to have you penalized somehow. Every time you skip a class because “OMG earleeeee,” you make us waste time catching you up. Every time you blow a deadline and beg for forgiveness, you make us waste time taking a moral index of ourselves to see if we should bend a rule and help you out.

That’s time we could be spending on people who actually and honestly need our help and want to do the work. You’re not just annoying us, but you are actively depriving other people of an education they paid for and value.

If you can’t get to the point where you’re going to become one of those people, fine, just don’t make the rest of us suffer because of it.

I would tell you to just go work at Olive Garden, because I know they’re hiring, but something tells me their standards are probably higher than those we have here at the U.

Sincerely,

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

 

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.”

 

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

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

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

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

Why do I tell you this?

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

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

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

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

Take a read:

 

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

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

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

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

Sure enough, I did.

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

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

“How did he die?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story mentions four players, but never names them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reader: OH NO! Is everyone OK?

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

Reader: How bad was the fire?

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

Reader: How did this happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s where the fact check really comes in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

The ‘Exploring Mass Communication’ textbook is officially available. Give it a look to get a free T-shirt (and more)

“And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the book swaddled in recyclable brown paper, lying in a cardboard box…”

I don’t know if I can fully describe the feeling I had when my kid lugged this box into the house recently and said, “It’s heavy as hell. It must be a book thing.”

It was, and at that precise moment, “Exploring Mass Communication” became real for me.

Never mind that I’d seen links to digital versions on Amazon and Sage’s website.

Never mind that I’d seen cover mock-ups, proof editions and various Vantage versions.

Never mind that I had put together an hour-long presentation to Sage reps on the book about a month earlier.

That box was proof this whole thing wasn’t a St. Elsewhere Kid/Fever Dream situation. I wanted to just scream and cry and jump around and roll around in the snow while cradling a copy of it.

I quickly reached out to the folks at Sage and the conversation went something like this:

Me: I got my copies of the book! Can I tell people it’s out now?
Them: Yes!
Me: You sure?
Them: Yes.
Me: It’s not gonna be like last time, right? This is a real “go for launch” for the book?
Them: Yes… In fact, if you could write a blog post to tell people to adopt it for their classes, that would be great!
Me: Um… No…

I never wanted the blog to be a book-pimping tool because a) nobody wants to read that kind of stuff and b) I can’t promote myself worth a damn. Other people’s accomplishments, student media successes, good causes and great organizations, yes.

Me promoting myself, no.

That doesn’t mean I’m not ridiculously excited about this book and what I think it can do for people. Here is the link to the Sage page for the print text and digital version that lays out all the features, options and fun stuff we poured into “Exploring Mass Communication.” When I read it, even I was like, “Damn… I did all that?”

I have to say, though, the coolest thing about this whole thing is the Sage Vantage system. This is honestly a real game-changer for anyone teaching any course with any Sage book.

When I first heard about Vantage, every conversation went like this:

Me: I want to do (X).
Sage: Um… You can’t. It won’t translate into Vantage.

Now that I see how it works, I totally get why my weird ideas needed to be streamlined. Here is a 90-second video that explains Vantage. It impresses the hell out of me. The knowledge checks, the plug-and-play with any LMS, the ease of grading and more are all part of Vantage and this book was written specifically to work with that system.

That’s about as much self-promotion as I can handle: Bragging about someone else’s tools that make my textbook a “immersive digital learning experience.”

I have no idea how to tell you that I love this book and that I want you to love it too. So, I’m just going to offer you a bunch of bribes to make your life better in some way and perhaps get you to look at the textbook/digital-immersive-learning-experience thing.

 

BRIBE 1: REQUEST A REVIEW COPY OF THE BOOK AND GET A FREE “FILAK FURLOUGH” T-SHIRT

The folks at Sage are looking for people who want to adopt the book for a class. Me? I need to look cool in front of my publisher while simultaneously moving an excess supply of T-shirts.

So here’s the deal: If you’re teaching an intro to mass media/mass com class and you would be willing to take a look at the book, hit me up on the contact link here and I’ll get you on “Staci’s Magic List of Wonder” for a free copy. (Most folks like the digital version with all the Vantage toys to play with. If you’re old school or just need a new coffee coaster, I’m sure we can get you a print text.)

Send me your name, your school and your school email address. Also, send me the size of T-shirt you wear and a snail mail address and I’ll send you a “Filak Furlough Tour T-shirt.” All freebie. I’m covering shipping costs on my end.

(If you are thinking, “Vince, I’d love to see the book, but having your name on my body in any way feels profoundly creepy…” you can feel free to pass on the shirt. I totally get it. I still have trouble hearing my name as a descriptor as in, “Don’t forget to read Filak Chapter 5!”)

The shirts are a result of CustomInk doing an awesome thing and reprinting them after they made a mistake on the back of the first batch. Sage bought a bunch for a promo at its annual sales meeting, which was back in December, so when the reprinted shirts came, it was too late. Thus, I told the the Sage Folks I’d take the shirts and do something positive with them.

Sizes are somewhat limited and first come, first served. They are available while supplies last, but if that many people are that jazzed about this book that I run out of shirts, I might just do another order.

As you can see, I’m a total dork.

 

BRIBE 2: TELL ME WHAT I MISSED AND I’LL WRITE IT FOR YOU ASAP

The key reason I want you to look at the book isn’t to adopt it for your class.

Hyperventilating Breathe GIF - Hyperventilating Breathe Sheldon GIFs

Hang in there, Sage reps… I know this isn’t what you’re used to for a book launch…

My rationale is this: I know that despite five years of my life, 27 edits, five complete reboots, 128 reviews and innumerable prayers to St. Jude (the patron saint of lost causes) for intervention, I probably missed more than a few things in here.

If you have ever written anything, you know that eventually you read it over and over and over until you basically go blind to it. Over the course of this journey, we added, removed, reworked, replaced, added again, removed again and reconfigured everything in here at least twice. That means I need some people to tell me what works and what doesn’t, which is where you call come in.

If you read this thing and see something that needs to be there and isn’t, tell me and I’ll write it for you and post it on the blog. It doesn’t matter how big or how small. I’ll start a complete new section of the blog called “The Exploring Mass Communication Hotline” and post all fresh content to fill in any holes, add any additions, improve on any thin spots and generally augment what you get in the textbook, regardless of if you plan to adopt the thing or not.

I’ll also credit you on the blog. If the book gets picked up for a second edition somewhere in the future, I’ll fix the problem and you’ll be personally thanked in the Acknowledgements section.

People often think I’m kidding when I say stuff like this, but it’s real. Case in point: After the reporting book came out a few years back, a rep got a hold of me and said he had some feedback from a professor. The professor told him that if I had included a section on freelancing, the book would be much better.

So, I got in touch with several former students who were working various aspects of the freelance game and wrote a three-part, 8,000-word series on how freelancing works. I then sent the professor the links to use in the class, even if she hadn’t planned to adopt the book. We then took that series and tweaked it out for an appendix in the second edition. Her response? “This is great, but you’re crazy. Why would you do this for ONE PERSON?”

Well, because you asked. I just like helping folks.

Which leads to…

BRIBE 3: IF YOU TRY THE BOOK AND HATE IT, I’LL HELP YOU PUT YOUR CLASS BACK TOGETHER USING ANY BOOK YOU WANT

I would be honored and humbled if you’d consider my book for your class. Over the past few years, I’ve come to know a lot of great folks I otherwise never would have met if I hadn’t decided to turn my life into a series of book deadlines and giant Post-It Notes.

I use a giant Post-It to keep track of each book I’m working on at any given time. Yes, this was when things clearly got out of hand…

I understand that if you’re trying out my book, it means you’re not entirely happy with the one you’re using or looking for something specific. Nobody just switches books because they’ve got six weeks of stress-free time to kill or because they’re trying to help out a friend. The goal, I assume, is to plug a hole, fill a gap or generally improve upon whatever it is you’ve been sticking with through the last five or six editions.

That said, over the last 27 years of teaching college, I’ve come up with two universal truths:

  1. Rewriting a class for a new textbook is a massive pain in the rear.
  2. I am not everyone’s cup of tea.

In combining these two truisms, I realize I’m asking a lot of anyone who might be considering adopting “Exploring Mass Communication” for a class. In short, it’s like trying out a new hairstyle: It might be awesome or you might spend the next six months saying, “How long until I can get rid of these bangs?”

(I have been bald since I was 20, so I’m mostly guessing at how hair works…)

So, here’s the best deal I have for you: If you find yourself interested in trying this book for your class and it turns out it’s like eating sardine-flavored ice cream for you, I will work with you to rebuild your class in any format using any other mass-com text out there. I will literally fill in gaps, plug the holes and improve SOMEONE ELSE’S TEXTBOOK, based on what you tell me you want so that you can use it to fulfill your needs.

(Cut to a reaction from the offices of Sage…)

The first thought you might have is, “Vince, that’s a cute idea, but I’m using (NAME)’s book and I’m sure you haven’t read it…”

Hold my beer. Here is a sample of what I read in preparation to pitch Sage on this book:

I read everything in that photo at least once, most twice and one three times. I’ve read multiple editions of all of these, and these were just the ones I could still find on Amazon with a quick search of my internet history. That’s not counting the dozen or so other texts I borrowed from people or checked out of the library. In short, I know what’s out there because it informed on what I did or didn’t do when I wrote “Exploring Mass Communication.”

The second thought you might have is, “Vince, this has to be the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. Why would you actively improve your competition?”

Well, to start, it’s not even close to the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. This is comfortably below the “free tequila slammers” night and the “hey, let’s work on a pinball machine’s electric transformer without unplugging the game” situation. You could also ask my wife about the time I bought a beer can collection if you want to get me in real trouble…

Second, in answer to your question, I am constantly driven by two basic needs:

  1. Help people
  2. Make things work right

This is why Amy hates it when I see a broken lawnmower or vacuum cleaner on the side of the road. She knows I’m grabbing it and fixing it, even though we have no need for another lawnmower or vacuum cleaner. It’s also why I have a bunch of dead pinball machines in my game room and a garage full of dilapidated furniture: I’m bound and determined to fix them.

The whole reason I got into the textbook game was to help people. That’s why I did the blog, the Corona Hotline, the “Filak Furlough Tour” and pretty much everything else. To me, there is nothing that is more gratifying than feeling like someone who came to me with a problem actually left my presence with a solution.

When kids come to my office for help, they often say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but…” I immediately disabuse them of that notion: “You’re never a bother. Whatever you need is more important than what I am doing right now. Helping you is the best part of my day.” And I mean it.

So, that’s the pitch: Get a free copy of a book, get free stuff for doing so and get free help even if you don’t want to adopt the book. It should be clear from this proposal why I never went into sales and marketing.

In any case, operators are standing by, so thanks for being part of this journey with me.

Best,

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

 

 

 

How to react when a student asks, “Which classes do I really need to attend?” (A Throwback Post)

A good friend and fellow professor inspired this Throwback Post, after a student reached out to her near the beginning of the semester with this request:

“I have a lot going on this semester. Can you tell me which classes are the most important so I can try to attend those?”
She politely responded to the student that she could not classify any one class period as more or less important than any other. That level of restraint means she needs to be involved in the next round of global peace talks.
Of course, the rest of us started chiming in with some of the better dumb things we’ve been asked or told over the years by students, including one person posting this gem:
I had a student who raised his hand on the first day going — this class is a lot of work. Why? It’s supposed to be a blow off course!
Yup. I’m here just to give you three credits and a side-order of fries…
So without further ado, here’s a look at some potentially useful comebacks for generally stupid questions…

Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions: Journalism Educator edition

Despite my parents’ best efforts, I got addicted to Mad magazine as a kid and fell in love with Al Jaffee’s acerbic wit. I’m sorry, all my former, current and future students…

Al Jaffee probably had a bigger influence on me than most people wished he’d had. The longtime cartoonist for Mad Magazine who died earlier this month at age 102, was both a gifted artist and a gifted humorist.

During his time at the publication, Mad had an amazing collection of talent, and each artist brought their own special vibe to the publication. Paul Coker drew his “horrifying cliches,” movie parodies and single-panel pieces. Sergio Aragones literally filled the magazine with his dialogue-free sketches, as he drew in the margins of the various spreads. Don Martin did some truly ridiculous cartoons, of which my favorite was the detective-wannabe Lance Parkertip, Noted Notary Public.

Jaffee, however, wrote his way into history with his “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” which did exactly what the title promised. He’d present one of the dumber questions people tend to ask, and follow it with a series of sarcastic, snide or otherwise snappy responses, intended on laying low the idiot inquisitor.

As a kid, I took to Jaffee’s biting snap-backs like a fish to water, using his style of humor to keep bullies at bay in grade school and dabble in some class-clowning in high school. As I got older, I was told this kind of thing wasn’t age-appropriate for me but hey, if a guy can do this kind of stuff until he’s 102, I’ve got some time left on the clock.

In honor of Jaffee’s passing, here are a few Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions most of us tend to get as journalism educators:

 

“Sorry, I overslept. Did I miss anything important in class today?”

  • “No, we only did a bunch of unimportant stuff, like we do most days.”
  • “No, we just sat here and thought about how much we missed you.”
  • “Yeah, it was the best! We didn’t have to slow down and reexplain everything to this one kid who never pays attention and is constantly missing stuff while he’s Snapchatting the class period away.”

 

“Is this going to be on the test?”

  • “No, I enjoy throwing random facts at you for the sake of seeing how you react. It’s like my own little version of giving a lab rat an electric shock.”
  • “I’m not sure yet, but God forbid you be presented with information that might be valuable in its own right.”
  • “Probably not, because even though I said, ‘You want to write this down, because it’s going to be on the test,’ at least 912 times, I’m still debating how to handle this.”

 

“Why did I get an F on this assignment?”

  • “Because the university hasn’t figured out a way for me to give you anything lower.”
  • “Because given your writing ability, I figured this was as far as you ever got in learning the alphabet.”
  • “I understand that it’s probably a mystery, shrouded in the 20 or so sentences of feedback I wrote at the bottom of your paper, clearly outlining every point deduction.”

 

“Can I get an extension on this paper?”

  • “If you mean you want me to make the paper longer, sure.”
  • “Absolutely, because the six weeks I gave everyone else to accomplish it clearly wasn’t enough time for you to craft your incredibly expansive effort.”
  • “But what will I do in the meantime, as I wait to consume your exquisite prose? How will I pass the time as I await the dawning of your genius?”

 

“Can I do some extra credit to make up some points?”

  • “Given the effort you put into your ‘regular’ credit, giving you extra credit right now would seem to be an exercise in futility.”
  • “Sure, because when I said at the beginning of the year, and at least 12 times since, that the class will offer NO EXTRA CREDIT, I only meant that for other people who didn’t have the chutzpah to ask for it.”

 

“Do I HAVE to take the final exam?”

  • “I lack subpoena power and the university doesn’t equip me with a gun, so I can’t force you to do much of anything. That said, you probably won’t pass the class without at least a decent attempt.”
  • “Given that it won’t save your grade, no matter how well you do, I’d actually prefer you avoid wasting both of our times.”

 

“You know I’m graduating in two weeks, right?”

  • “Well, not if you need this class to do it…”
  • “That puts me in a quandary, as to pass you would mean I gave up on any standard I had for this class whatsoever, but to fail you would mean I’d need to tolerate your pointless presence again for a whole semester. Let me think about how much I hate myself right now and I’ll get back to you.”

 

“Is there ANYTHING I can do to pass this course at this point in the semester?”

  • “Can you invent a time machine and travel back to the start of the term when I told you to make sure you kept up with the reading and the assignments and kick your own ass to make sure you did so? If not, probably not.”
  • “Well, I’d ask for a bribe, but given your performance in class to this point, you’d probably screw that up, too.”

 

“Do you know who my father is?”

  • “Does HE know how to build a time machine to fix things for you? If not, I’m not sure how this is relevant to your grade.”
  • “No, but that’s probably because he found out how poorly you’re doing in school and immediately entered some form of witness protection.”
  • “No, but maybe a “23 and Me” kit could help.”

If any other pathologically stupid questions have come your way and you’d like some snappy answers, feel free to hit me up here and I’ll do my best to put together another list at some point.

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

Sometimes, a headline just says it all…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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.

 

Filak Furlough Tour Update: Hanging out at Iowa State University (Part I)

I think I only own one or two shirts. Also, I do not like my “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” profile…

The Filak Furlough Tour actually hit the road a few weeks back to drive out and visit a campus. Most people were fine with the “Vince on Zoom” experience, as it allowed them to shut me off and mute me when I got annoying. The good folks at Iowa State University knew me and decided that a couple days of me would be, at the very least, interesting.

Of all the campuses I’ve been on as a student, parent, faculty member and more, I found Iowa State to be among the best in terms of just feeling like it fit my personality. (I mean that as a compliment, not as a potentially libelous statement…) Nice people, smart kids, good questions and more. Totally worth the 4 a.m. car ride…

 

IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY – AMES, IOWA

THE TOPIC: I did one class on finding stories and trying to come up with the best ways to tell those stories and one on sports journalism, sports marketing and DEI. Since I’ve done a lot on the issue of finding stories, we’ll go after the second one.

THE BASICS: This had to be one of the more interesting experiences I’ve had, in that the class was set up like a press conference, with the students driving the discussion on the topic and then live-tweeting the entire thing as they saw fit. The professor gave me the option of asking them not to record or put me on social media.

“Nah,” I said. “Let them do it. If I say something pathologically stupid, that’s my fault.”

Thus began my life on a tightrope for an hour or so…

One of the key things we discussed was the way in which race, gender and other similar issues get covered in the media. We talked a lot about how the “oddity” interest element tends to get played up when it comes to those topics. It’s often stories about “The first (fill in the blank) to do (job white guys have done for forever)” instead of “Here is a person who brings XYZ skills and valuable elements to the (job).”

I apparently made this case about not being at a point of equity yet in a truly “me” way:

 

A student asked me how we could get closer to that kind of thing, both in terms of news/sports coverage and in terms of sports marketing. I think the key is to look at the person first and what it is that makes the person worthy of focus. It could be an athletic skill set or their personality or a dozen other things. Then, help that person tell the story they want to tell about themselves, rather than focusing on whatever quick and easy distinction we can make, whether it’s race, gender, sexual orientation or whatever:

The important thing to understand is that nothing gets done in an instant. That doesn’t mean we should accept mediocrity when it comes to making progress, nor should we say, “Well, that’s good enough for now.” However to fail to see that things have come a decent distance over a protracted period of time is to diminish the value of the people who worked and fought to get as much improvement as we have gotten to this point.

 

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: What did you think of how Coach Prime dealt with the media and how the media was dealing with Coach Prime?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: Deion Sanders has always been very much his own person and has not really given a damn what other people thought of him the sense of if he was being “too much.” (Whatever the heck that means.) He was never going to come to college coaching and suddenly turn into a “We gotta play them one day at a time… I’m just glad to be here…” kind of person. He is who he is and he’s comfortable in his own skin, which I think is fantastic.

The person that I most thought of when I saw his situation in Colorado was Muhammad Ali: He was brash, confident and not afraid of telling people what he thought. In doing so, he ruffled a lot of feathers of people who didn’t like his approach. It was like the media was waiting for him to fail so they could say, “See? You’re not all that. Now sit down and shut up.”

That’s never going to happen. He will continue to be who he is throughout the process. Even if you don’t like him as a person or find him to be annoying on those Duck commercials, you gotta respect the sense of self he has and the way it can inspire and raise up his players.

 

ONE LAST THING: I saw these advertised in the campus bookstore.

Despite my best efforts, Amy wouldn’t let me come home with a pair of these.

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.

Help protect student journalists in Wisconsin by supporting New Voices legislation this week. (Please share)

Please put this on blast: The State of Wisconsin is moving toward passing New Voices legislation. Assembly Bill 551 will have a hearing on Thursday, Oct. 26 (see below) and they need your help.

The Student Press Law Center has a whole roster of information on New Voices legislation throughout the United States. In simplest terms, here’s how it works:

New Voices is a student-powered nonpartisan grassroots movement of state-based activists who seek to protect student press freedom with state laws. These laws counteract the impact of the 1988 Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier Supreme Court decision, which dramatically changed the balance of student press rights. New Voices supporters include advocates in law, education, journalism and civics who want schools and colleges to be more welcoming places for student voices.

Seventeen states have this legislation passed in some form, which guarantees  student press rights Not only will this free high school media outlets from significant censorship, but it will codify the rights of college student media outlets and voices as well. In short, ham-handed administrators who just don’t like things that fail to paint the rosiest of pictures about their institution can’t crush student media for reporting the facts.

Please read the information forwarded to me last night via Matt Smith, the Wisconsin JEA president about this important hearing and how you can help get this law moving in the right direction

After years of waiting, Wisconsin finally has movement on a New Voices bill that protects student First Amendment rights by stipulating that student journalists are responsible for determining the content of student publications at public secondary schools and colleges! Assembly Bill 551 would prohibit administrative prior review and outline specific, legally defined forms of expression that are unprotected (such as libel, obscenity and invasion of privacy or speech that would cause a substantial disruption of school activities or violate other state or federal laws).

Students at every level need to know they can ask questions about and report on topics that are important to them and their communities without fear that their choices will be made for them or removed altogether. It’s more important than ever that our institutions put learning first and foster environments that develop critical thinking and communication skills our students will need to succeed in future workplaces and as future citizens in a democracy.

URGENT: This Thursday, Oct. 26, at 10 a.m. in Room 412 East of the Wisconsin State Capitol Building in Madison, the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities will hold a public hearing on the bill (Assembly Bill 551). The legislation is sponsored by several representatives, both Republican and Democratic, but it is IMPERATIVE that we show how important this bill is for our students. If at all possible, please help out by doing AT LEAST one of the following in the next couple days.

ATTEND THE HEARING

If it is at all possible for you (or any of your students or former students or anyone else who is supportive) to attend, it would mean a LOT to have more numbers involved. Those in attendance may share some brief testimony outlining their reasons for supporting the legislation. See some suggestions HERE and HERE.

EMAIL STATEMENTS TO THE COMMITTEE CHAIR AND OTHERS

The chair of the committee is Rep. David Murphy (R-Greenville). If you (or any of your students or former students or anyone else who is supportive) can send messages of support for the legislation to Rep. Murphy and any of the other committee members (and maybe your own legislators) prior to the hearing on Thursday, that would be amazing. Again, find some suggestions for points to make HERE and HERE. You can find your own legislators using THIS LINK, and contacts for the committee members are below:

PROVIDE VIRTUAL SUPPORT DURING THE HEARING ON THURSDAY

Starting at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday the window will open for online testimony that should allow everyone to virtually signal support for the bill. You (or, again, any of your students or former students, etc.) can click THIS LINK to access the legislative calendar. Starting at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday the listing for that day labeled “Colleges and Universities” should provide an option for online-only testimony. Please consider having anyone interested jump in, if they can.

USE THE BILL TO START OR CONTINUE DISCUSSIONS WITH YOUR STUDENTS

The hearing for the legislation may not only help enshrine their rights in state law but also provide a chance to discuss history in the making. Use this as an opportunity to have students research or discuss New Voices laws (the Student Press Law Center is an excellent resource for this). What are the benefits to such legislation? Why is it important? What are conditions like for students at your school?

  • If you or any students would like to write statements in support of the New Voices bill or explanations of ways they have experienced restrictions on their expression, feel free to send them along to New Voices Wisconsin (newvoiceswisconsin@gmail.com) or to the Wisconsin Journalism Education Association (wisconsinjea@gmail.com). Thoughts on this topic may also obviously just be written up and shared in-class, if you prefer.

STAY INVOLVED

Feel free to share this email or information with any students or others you know who may be interested!