One of the biggest hidden gems in education is the media program at Northwest Missouri State University. The program there has had a ton of success with student media outlets, often securing the top awards available through CMA, ACP and others. The place also boasts great journalism educators, including at least two CMA Hall of Famers, and a ton of great young talent.
Dr. Kyle Miller was nice enough to bring me in via Zoom as part of a two-part panel with Latonya Davis, the coordinator of diversity and inclusion at NWMSU. Professor Davis had an amazing presentation that covered most of the broad strokes on this topic, which covered a wide array of issues we need to continually discuss. For me to try to repeat it here without screwing up on my part is like trying to catch last night’s rainstorm, but I’m sure she’d be more than willing to share with anyone who asked.
Once she was done, I spent my time filling in around the edges, covering more of the sports angles in relation to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Northwest Missouri State University — Maryville, MO
A nice bit of promo work on X by Dr. Miller.
THE TOPIC: Race, gender and other DEI issues in sports writing
THE BASICS: Sports writing is one of the more interesting areas when it comes to racial, gender, socio-economic and other forms of biases. In a lot of ways, it comes from the way in which there was significant segregation in sports. For example, it took until 1947 for an African-American player to enter Major League Baseball and it took until 1975 until an African-American man was given the opportunity to manage a team in that league.
In my lifetime, and I don’t mean like when I was an embryo, we had people saying stuff like this on TV about people of color and sports:
We also had the head of international soccer at one point answer a question about how to make the women’s side of the game more popular with this gem:
“Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball,” he said.
“They could, for example, have tighter shorts. Female players are pretty, if you excuse me for saying so, and they already have some different rules to men – such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not do it in fashion?”
In short, sports isn’t the most socially enlightened place on earth when it comes to issues of race, gender and more.
In today’s coverage, a lot of what we see falls into what some have dubbed “aversive” racism or sexism as opposed to people coming straight out and saying stupid stuff like this:
This is where language choices can make a difference, particular in how we write about certain players. For example, let’s look at a couple descriptions that area almost the same:
Quarterback Jim Johnson is gifted when it comes to finding the open receiver downfield.
Quarterback Jim Johnson is talented when it comes to finding the open receiver downfield.
Quarterback Jim Johnson is skilled when it comes to finding the open receiver downfield.
They all seem to be saying the same thing: This guy can find a receiver down the field better than other people can. However, if you look at the descriptors, you realize that they mean different things.
GIFTED: He was given something by God or nature that other people don’t have through no fault of their own or through no actions of his own.
TALENTED: He had an advantage based on something innate within him that allowed him to be better at this than other people.
SKILLED: He worked hard to develop an ability based on his desire to get better at something that was important to him or his craft.
This is not to say that every reference to being gifted is unfair. Sometimes, you just get an advantage by the mere dint of something about you. My uncle coached basketball for 40 years and he used to say, “I can’t teach tall, but I can teach almost anything else.” In other words, if you are born with genes that make you 8-feet-tall, you are gifted with an advantage of height in a game where that matters, like basketball. It’s not like you worked hard to getting taller every day.
The point is, how we describe people can lead an audience to feel certain ways about them. The more we tell people that certain players are “gifted,” the more it seems like they don’t work hard for their success. Therefore, it’s important to think about what we’re saying and how we’re saying it.
BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: What do you think about the Jets not signing Colin Kaepernick after Aaron Rodgers went down?
BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: It’s a joke, but it’s been a joke all along when it came to how the NFL teams have treated this guy.
Most of the reasons given over the years for not having “Mr. Take-a-knee” on a roster is that it would be too much of a distraction and that he has too much baggage to be considered for a role. That said, consider this:
I have a sense they’ll keep pulling this stuff until eventually the guy is too old to really be an effective player and then they’ll do the, “Oh, it’s such a shame he’s too old… We really would have LOVED to have someone with his talent…” thing.
People can feel however they want to feel about what Kaepernick did, what he felt he was doing, how that relates to society and so forth. That’s a personal opinion and I’m never going to tell anyone how to feel about stuff like this. That said, when your fans are not above doing stuff like this at tailgate parties, this pearl-clutching by NFL teams about Kaepernick’s supposed baggage is complete crap.
This week’s stop along the Filak Furlough Tour was an actual stop, meaning Amy and I packed up the truck and drove to Warrensburg, Missouri to visit the University of Central Missouri. Julie Lewis is the adviser of The Muleskinner, the student newspaper down there, and arranged for me to meet with her kids.
Initially, it was going to be a “get-to-know-ya” session where I did some newspaper critiquing and hung out in the newsroom. Then, she mentioned something about talking to high school kids and advisers, which was fine.
Then, I got this promo piece she was sending around to drum up attention for the event:
Great… No pressure… In any case, welcome to the next stop on the tour:
University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO
I’m apparently channeling my “Karate Kid” training to help the students learn something important. Photo courtesy of Ellie Whitesell, UCM Muleskinner
THE TOPIC: Given the current state of journalism, what does it take to be good at this job?
THE BASICS: I know we’re all taking a beating these days in the field of journalism, and I’m sure many students have family members wondering why the heck they’re going into this field in the first place. I believe in the future of journalism in the same way I believe in the future of pretty much anything: If it’s done well, provides a valuable service and connects with people who need it, things will be fine.
To help the students and advisers get a better handle on what I meant by that, here are four things I talked about that I thought could help journalists thrive in today’s media ecosystem:
Know Your Audience: One of the biggest things that we have seen over the past ten or fifteen years is a shift in how journalists need to conceive of their craft. Back when I was in school, we learned the 5Ws and the 1H, a handful of newsvalues and were told, “Get this into your story and everything will work out fine.”
The approach we took was one of “I, as journalist, want to tell you, the fawning mass of readers, what you need to hear from me.” That worked out pretty well for a long time, when we had one or two newspapers that served a certain area and three or four TV stations that did the same. If you’re the only game in town, you can set the rules as you see fit and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.
Today, we have more choices than ever before when it comes to what we get from myriad media outlets. The sheer volume of content we get on a minute by minute basis could stun a team of oxen in its tracks. People can pick and choose as they see fit, and we need to acknowledge that and adapt to it.
To that end, it’s more important than ever to know who is out there, what they need to know and how we can best give it to them. It isn’t about “I want to tell you something” anymore, but rather, “What do you want to know and how can I get it to you in a way that you’ll understand it?”
Spend time getting to know the people who you want to reach and you’ll do much better at reaching them.
Be Nosy: A lot of journalist bandy about the concepts of “deep dive stories” or “critical thinking paradigms” which all sound really serious and important. At the heart of these things, however, is a simple concept: Be nosy.
A teacher once asked me if I could teach her kids to be nosy, which I said I wasn’t sure about. After all, you’re either the kind of person that noses around in stuff or you’re not. And once you have that nosy gene, it’s really hard to shut it off. As a reporter, I learned how to read things on people’s desks upside down so I could get news scoops. Today, my boss is constantly covering things up on his desk when I show up in his office, because I still do that.
What I can say is that we all start off in life with a sense of wonder. If you think about it, what’s a 4-year-old’s favorite question? WHY! They are constantly trying to figure out why something is the way it is, how something works, what someone is doing and why they’re doing it.
Yes, this can get annoying after a while and you probably want to give the kid a fork and tell them to go play with the toaster, but that instinct they have is one of just pure nosiness.
Somewhere along the way, we lose that sense of wonder. Maybe it’s when we’re in middle school and teachers get exasperated with us. Maybe it’s in high school when it’s no longer cool to ask questions in class. I don’t know.
What I do know is that the way to get back to great journalism that is fun, valuable and engaging is to find that sense of wonder again. We have to find joy and passion in the idea of trying to learn something because we are just so darned curious. Once we learn that thing, we can’t wait to share it with everyone else around us. That can lead to a great number of fantastic stories.
Become a Non-Denominational Skeptic: This is a simple idea that has become much harder to do these days because everyone seems ready to jump all over you if you are perceived to be on the “wrong side” of an issue.
The goal of journalism is to report and reporting requires that we dig into a situation and we ask a lot of questions, many of which may seem rude or problematic to people who don’t like the questions we ask. I can’t tell you the number of times someone took offense to a question I asked, calling me a vulture or a scumbag or other things I won’t repeat here. I even remember someone once telling me, “Your mother didn’t raise you right if you think this is appropriate.”
Ouch.
Granted, sometimes I wasn’t exactly the most skilled interviewer and I tended to cover a lot of crime and such, so there wasn’t always a good way to ask a particular question. That said, in most cases, people were taking umbrage at the idea that I wasn’t just taking their word at face value.
Being a non-denominational skeptic means doing exactly that, regardless of the source or the topic. It could be your best friend or your worst enemy. It could be a topic you totally support or it could be a topic that you would spend a lifetime opposing voraciously.
It doesn’t matter. Either way, you should be skeptical until you are given enough context, sourcing or support to make you believe the information at hand.
This isn’t always easy and it isn’t always fun, but it’s what we signed up for as journalists.
Be Brave: It is so easy these days to be afraid of so many things. Thanks to social media and arm chair warriors, any single thing we do can be dissected, analyzed, criticized and more. We are constantly at a heightened tension that a mistake, a joke, a misunderstanding or more could lead to a firestorm of controversy and irreparably harm us.
It’s a scary time to be in the public eye, particularly if we’re digging around on something that someone doesn’t want us digging around on.
It’s easy to be brave when there’s nothing to fear. It’s easy to write stories when they bandwagon on trendy topics or that hammer on people, places or things that are extremely unpopular. What’s harder is doing the right thing, regardless of the odds or the enemy.
I go back to this story that Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler once told about his decision to integrate baseball, despite having owners voting 15-1 not to. He said, “I’m going to have to meet my maker some day and if he asks me why I didn’t let (Jackie Robinson) play, and I say because he’s black, well, I don’t think that’ll be a satisfactory answer.” Chandler was not a perfect man by any means, but when it came time to put up or shut up, he was brave.
If each of us can do just a little bit of that, I think journalism will be just fine.
BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY (PART I): Has there ever been a time where you struggled to maintain journalistic objectivity? And, if so, how did you go about handling that story?/ How do you, as a journalist, stay unbiased on hot topics that you may a strong opinion towards?
BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME (PART I): I try to practice what I preach in terms of being a non-denominational skeptic when it comes to interviewing people or listening to what they have to say about a topic. I tend not to think of my approach like a light switch, where I’m either on or off, either for or against something.
Instead, I like to think of it like a door. It can be wide open or totally closed, but it can also be partially open to a variety of degrees. To that end, I like to think that I’m giving people at least a chance to convince me of something before I totally slam the door on them.
Granted, there are times where it’s easier to keep the door really open, like when two equally qualified candidates are running for political office. I’ll keep that door open on both of their thought processes, regardless of how I personally feel about their positions on taxes, land use or how Diet Pepsi doesn’t taste like melted tin and cat urine. Keeping that door open allows me to show both people to my readers effectively.
It’s a lot harder, and thus a lot more narrow of an opening if I’m talking to a white supremacist leader, for example. That door is pretty much closed, but I have to at least keep it open to some degree.
The door is open in regard to things like free speech: As long as you’re not inciting imminent lawless action, you can publicly say whatever you want as part of a protest on a city street corner, so if we’re talking about that, the door needs to stay open because that’s an important truism.
That said, I’ve had to listen to some pretty vile stuff over the years due to these folks making the news and me having to interview them, and I’m not putting up with that crap. So, when he starts veering into “the superiority of the white race….” yeah, that door’s getting slammed pretty damned quick and hard.
Those are obviously the extreme examples, but the point is, you can’t reflexively close a door on a topic just because you don’t like it. If you do, you might miss something important or fail to serve your audience appropriately.
BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY (PART II): What do you feel is the biggest benefit that your books have brought to campuses that other books haven’t?
BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME (PART II): I’m glad someone out there who is actually reading my books thinks there’s some benefit to them, so that was nice to find out. Usually the three questions students ask about my books are:
How much does this cost?
Do I actually have to read it to pass this class?
Can I sell it back at the end of the semester?
If I had to boil down my books to a simple concept, I’d say I try to treat students like they’re actually people, instead of drones who are lucky to be fed the knowledge I have gathered. I have found that tone goes a long way in terms of how much I like what I’m reading.
For example, there is a textbook that is pretty much the only game in town for a specialized area of journalism and I refuse to use it because it just feels so arrogant in its tone. It’s like, “I, the author, am a golden GOD and you are fortunate to be in my presence to garner the knowledge I feel you are capable of receiving, given your limited mental capacity.”
When I started writing the books, I thought back to the people I enjoyed reading. I loved how certain columnists would put me in a place and time by writing like we were just equals, sitting together, having a chat. I loved how authors would weave humor into moments of a book that helped me laugh and helped me remember things. I really loved it when writers would take a complex topic and boil it down to some simple, memorable elements for me, without making me feel inferior for not knowing the stuff to begin with.
Whether I’m successful or not is in the eyes of the readers, but that’s what I’m trying to do.
As we start the unit on interviewing in my classes, a lot of students are getting nervous about talking to people. I like to blame it on a lot of things like COVID’s push to make everything a distance discussion, this generation’s over-reliance on digital communication and a general sense of fear that people will say no.
Truth be told, I was always fearful of calling people up or walking up to people for basic interviews. Strangely enough, I never had a problem walking past a burning building or stepping over something dead to ask a firefighter or a cop, “So, what happened here?” I think the adrenaline of the moment helped push me past my socially awkward nature.
In any case, getting what you need often comes down to knowing who can give it to you. Bothering people for an interview, a set of data or even a ride in a nuclear sub can be arduous, but when it comes to making it happen, this throwback post has some pretty good advice:
“Don’t Take No From Someone Who Isn’t Empowered To Say Yes”
My friend Allison used the quote in the headline this weekend when we were teaching her daughter/my goddaughter how to negotiate for better prices at a flea market in South Haven, Michigan. It turned out to be a golden bit of advice she learned from Peter Greenberg, a Emmy-award-winning journalist who was talking to the students at our old college newspaper.
Greenberg was explaining how to get an important story and how to persist when people didn’t want to be helpful.
He wanted access to a nuclear attack sub as part of a story he was working on. This was in the late 1980s when this was happening, which happened to be when we were still in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, so letting a journalist wander around a nuclear sub was laughable at best.
Greenberg kept poking at Naval officials for access, each one basically telling him, “There is no way this is happening.” At one point he asked, “OK, if this COULD be done, who would be the one person who could allow it to happen?” It turned out to be the commander-in-chief in the Pacific, stationed in Pearl Harbor.
Greenberg got the Navy to agree to give him the meeting, which was supposed to be kind of a 10-minute, “we had a meeting” meeting. Instead, Greenberg noticed a photo of a ship on the admiral’s wall and Greenberg knew a lot about that particular ship. Instead of talking about sub access, they started talking about the boat. By the time the 10 minutes had ended, the admiral invited Greenberg to lunch and eventually granted him the permission he sought.
“Don’t take ‘No’ from someone who isn’t empowered to say ‘Yes,’” he told the group.
At the heart of his story were three key things that can be helpful to you as a journalist:
TAKE A SHOT: When Greenberg kept hearing “no,” he asked for a meeting that the people essentially told him wasn’t going to lead anywhere. In the podcast mentioned earlier in this post, Greenberg said the people setting up the meeting for him basically asked him why he’d want to fly all the way to Pearl Harbor just to hear “no” from one more person. He figured he had nothing at this point, so he might as well take a shot in person with the one person who could get him what he needed. What was the worst thing that could happen? He might have no story and a case of jet lag and that’s about it.
If the story is important enough to you, you need to take a shot at it before deciding it’s not going to happen. You never know what you might get if you give up before you give it a chance to succeed.
FIND COMMON GROUND: The thing that made this work was a bit of serendipity. If the admiral had a picture of a sunset, a poster of Porsche or a velvet Elvis on his wall, Greenberg might have not found his in. However, as he explained in the podcast, he realized he needed a connection and he found it:
They gave me a ten-minute appointment at 9:00 in the morning on a Monday. I flew up on a Saturday. I walked in to see him. He could care less about me. I was told to have a meeting. He didn’t want to be there. It was an office the size of Grand Central Station. Everybody was in their dress whites. They didn’t want me to be there. It was like a courtesy call, give him a commemorative coin and get him out.
This is the difference. You seek out common ground and I knew that I had maybe fifteen seconds to figure out what the common ground was. I got lucky because behind his desk was a photograph of a boat and it turned out I knew the boat well.
I said to him, “Is that a Bertram 31?” He said, “Damn straight.” I said, “That’s the best boat they ever built.” He said, “You’re not kidding?” I said, “Let me guess. When you make a hard right turn, the engine cavitates and the water pump overflows?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Here’s how you fix it. You’re going to do a bypass on the impeller.”
We start talking like that and ten minutes later, the officer is going to say, “Admiral, your time is up.” He looked at me and said, “Do you got lunch plans?” I said, “I’m all yours.”
<SNIP>
That’s called chutzpah and luck.
If I’d walked into his office for that ten-minute meeting, he’s like, “Can I go on a sub?” “Get the hell out of here.”
You want to look for ways to connect with a source during an interview. That’s why doing it in person is often so valuable. You can look around and see things that they have around them to help you size up your subject. Starting with a discussion about a picture or a plaque or even a baseball card they have on display can get you an “in” that makes them see you as a kindred spirit as opposed to a pain the butt.
GO TO WHO CAN SAY YES: I think I’m going to use that quote with every interviewing class for as long as I live now, in that it perfectly captures what we should be doing when it comes to getting key information.
“Don’t take ‘No’ from someone who isn’t empowered to say ‘Yes’” is simple, direct and yet amazingly mind-blowing, as it dawns on me that I’ve probably failed in this regard myriad times in my journalism career and my daily life.
When you want permission for something, you need to go to the person who can grant it. Unfortunately, there are often underlings, minions and other pencil-pushers who get put in your path and try to dissuade you from getting that permission. If it’s important enough for you to pursue that permission, get past those people and go find the person who is empowered to grant it.
Like many things, this can be taken too far or in the wrong way. I am in no way saying you should become the snotty person who is holding up the line at the store, loudly proclaiming, “I need to speak to your manager!” because the bananas are ringing up at 39 cents per pound when the sign clearly said 36 cents per pound. However, I am saying most folks take the first “no” as a reason to give up far too easily.
Find the person empowered to say yes and see what that person says. If it’s still “no” at least you’ll know that nobody else is getting your story. If it’s “yes,” you got what you came here to get.
A number of my good friends have been proudly announcing their students’ good fortunes recently, as the College Media Association has announced its list of finalists for the Pinnacle Awards and the Associated Collegiate Press has announced its list of finalists for the Pacemaker Awards. These accolades recognize high levels of achievement in student media and to win one means a great deal to everyone involved.
In watching the social media posts from these adviser folks slide through my various feeds, I felt especially grateful that I wasn’t advising any more. This time of the year was always ridiculously stressful for my student media staffs, each of which were desperately checking their emails or refreshing websites to see if the finalists had been announced. The anxiety levels of “Did we win?” were just far too much to bear in many cases.
As great as it was to win something, I often found that it meant less than it should have in some cases because people had come to expect greatness from certain staffs. It was like the old Soviet Red Army hockey team: They won and won and won, so there was nothing but either the status quo or true disaster.
I also know a lot of staffs put in a lot of effort and when their names don’t show up on these lists, it’s like getting stabbed in the heart. What did we do wrong? What should we have done differently? Why do we suck? (The answers are nothing, nothing and you don’t suck.)
Today’s throwback post is meant not to throw dirt on anyone’s accomplishments, but to better help the majority of folks out there who didn’t grasp the brass ring understand why they should still feel good about their work and not feel so bad that they didn’t get the awards. It might also be helpful in the future to those folks who “succeeded” this time but might end up “failing” next time.
“We lost. This sucks.” Why not making the cut for journalism awards shouldn’t bother you so much.
Fall convention and awards season for college media is officially in the books, after the annual conference closed up shop in D.C. last week. ACP’s Pacemaker winners, CMA’s Pinnacle winners and the media convention’s best of show provided the student publications with a chance to strut their stuff and get recognized for their hard work.
You seem to hate awards even as you worked for places that won boatloads of them. What gives?
It’s great for the people who won, sure, but we lost. This sucks.
I never liked awards much, even when we were winning them, because they don’t mean what people think they mean. Even worse, administrators placed far too high of a value on them, equating award-winning publications with valuable publications. I watched as my students fell under that assumption as well, with the concept of “must-win” casting millstones around their necks and dragging them down into fear and anxiety.
The most vivid convention memory I have is one in which we were up for a major national award. My editor, a young woman with a brilliant track record and an impeccable intellect, sat quietly in the ballroom with me and several staffers. As the announcer began to read off names of winners and “not-quite winners,” I saw her hunched over, almost in pain as she rocked back and forth mumbling something. A student later told me, he heard her saying, “Please… Please… Please…” over and over again.
When our school was announced as a winner, she managed to straighten up and walk up to the front like a newborn deer that was just gaining its legs. She produced a wan smile for the photographer who shot a grip-and-grin image, and she retreated to spot in the audience. She smiled for about three seconds and then said, “What happens if we don’t win NEXT year?” The moment was over. It was already about doing it again.
This isn’t a one-off thing either. A good friend of mine mentioned that he still occasionally feels the sting of being the “one who broke the streak” when it came to winning his state’s “College Paper of the Year” contest. He’s in his 30s, he has a wife and a kid and he lives a wonderful life. Still, it’s the one that got away.
When it comes to contests, I’ve been on all three sides of this: The person putting in for an award, the person judging who should get an award and the person running an organization that needs to provide the awards. With that background, I’ve been able to tell students something that they don’t want to hear, that never seems to make the loss any better and that still is accurate in every way possible:
“Awards are great things and you should be proud to win one. However, they aren’t the end-all and be-all of life. These contests border on being entirely random when it comes to what makes the cut and what doesn’t, so when you win something, you should be honored, but don’t let it get to your head. When you don’t win something, you should NOT let it make you feel inferior, as there’s often more at play than just who did the best work.”
Before you read on, this isn’t meant to denigrate places that win stuff or give you a bunch of excuses if you don’t win. Sometimes, other people are just better or we just don’t make the cut. I’d like to think that everything we sent was gold, but if I had to be fair about it, when we lost, we probably deserved to lose. (And if I wanted to be even fairer, we probably won a few times when we shouldn’t have.)
The reason I’m opening this can of worms is because I see the devastated look on students’ faces too often after they don’t win stuff like this. They can’t distinguish between “My entry wasn’t good enough to win this year” and “I personally suck and should go die in a fire somewhere.” No matter what advisers say or what professors say or even what Mom says about you being just as good and just as gifted, it’s hard to see things that way when someone else is hoisting the hardware.
Here’s a look at a few key things that should help you feel not so bad about not winning awards for your hard work:
Showcase Editions on Steroids: I read a book once in which the author referred to the Russian concept of pokazuka, a slang term that means “just for show.” The idea dated back to the Potemkin villages and the tours of them that Catherine the Great used to take. To puff up their status, restaurants would cram their menus with foods that they didn’t have, farms would be quickly put into the wasteland to showcase unreal agriculture and everyone wore their Sunday best like it was common. This impressed the great leader and she marveled at her kingdom. When she left, the place went back to the same craphole it always was.
A lot of publications rely on pokazuka when it comes to contests. For example, one convention’s “best of show” required that the schools enter their most recent copy of the paper. Naturally, everyone knew when the convention was, so some papers would save the big features, the photo essays, the double-truck spreads and more for that issue.
Then, if you were really lucky, an administrator would resign, someone would crash a car on campus or some other form of insane entropy would occur while you were working on the paper: Bam! Breaking news gets added to the mix. When my livelihood came down to winning these things, we’d run multi-section papers, full color and insane graphics projects. My feature class always had a feature or two that was insanely long or good (or hopefully both) and we’d dump that in there as well. It turned out OK in many cases and even better in others.
Thus, rest assured, it wasn’t that your regular Tuesday paper wasn’t good enough. You just didn’t feed it enough steroids.
Making it rain: It’s not always about the quality of your entry, but rather the quantity of your entries.
For one contest, (again, back when my livelihood depended on such things) I found that we could enter the main event for X dollars: Send your five best papers and see if you win the big prize. However, with that X dollars, you were able to enter a certain number of individual entries for free as well, such as best news story, best front-page design, best column and so forth. If you wanted to enter more than that, it was like two bucks per entry. I started doing the math and I realized that I could do a hell of a lot of entering at that nominal rate.
I would require the upper editors to come to the newsroom on one Saturday before the deadline and we would spend all day there finding entries, pasting them up (pre-digital stuff) and signing forms. I’d buy lunch and dinner because it usually took about 13 to 16 hours to do all of it, but in the end, we’d have hundreds of entries.
It wasn’t that I was entering crap, but I stopped debating the minor merits of Entry Candidate A as opposed to those of Entry Candidate B. I just sent them both, as well as Candidates C through Z. It was like the Lazlo Approach to the Frito-Lay Sweepstakes in “Real Genius:”
In other words, just keep shooting and eventually you’ll hit. And we did. Bigly.
I can’t remember what the record overall was, but we swept through categories like Grant going through Richmond, often taking first through third and all three honorable mentions. In other cases, we might only grab one honorable mention, but it was still an award and it still meant something to a kid who earned it.
I couldn’t be certain that people weren’t just giving us an award because we had so damned many entries in each area and they felt a duty to give us SOMETHING. After all, it might have backfired on us if our massive presence meant people got annoyed. However, it didn’t seem to go that way, as we won more and more each year I did it.
So, you might be competing with a maniac out there like this, who essentially wipes out a forest of redwoods and overburdens the postal service with the idea of making it rain on a contest.
You hit into the shift: Baseball used to be relatively simple in terms of infield play: Two people on the left of second base, two on the right. Now, thanks to moneyball and advanced metrics, almost every pro game features more shifting than a fat guy trying to get comfortable in an airplane seat. You get three on the left or the right. You get right fielder playing like a deep roving second baseman. If they could let the peanut vendor stand to the left of the first baseman, I’d imagine we’d see that, too.
Thus, what used to be hits aren’t hits anymore. You essentially get unlucky in some truly unfair ways. That said, sometimes you get lucky and the shift benefits you, like when a left-handed power hitter accidentally check-swings a double down the left-field line while everyone on Earth (including the peanut vendor) is crowded on the right side of the diamond.
For example, one national convention tried to prevent people from steroiding up their editions for entry, so they set it up that you had to submit a certain number of issues from certain time periods. In one case, they kept those time periods so consistent that people could do the “steroids” thing and just pour resources into those papers during those time periods and then cycle off for another month or two. However, what tended to happen was that a few people got fortunate and other people got unfortunate. That giant scandal you covered for five weeks that brought down an administration? Yeah. Wrong weeks. The National Championship your school won, which you covered in glowing visual and graphic detail? Wrong weeks.
However, for some people, the ball bounced the other way: Their big stories synced up beautifully with the selected weeks and they get lucky as hell.
Luck plays a pretty big role in some of these things…
The Greg Maddux Theory of Being Great: Reputation matters an unfortunate amount when it comes to contests. That’s not to say that the reputations are unearned or that those are the only reasons why people from “Name Programs” win stuff, but reputations add a lot to the mix.
It’s a lot like when Greg Maddux used to pitch in the majors. He established himself as a guy who was always able to throw the ball EXACTLY where he wanted and that he was always able to hit the corners of the plate. He earned the reputation fair and square. However, Maddux didn’t ALWAYS hit the corner on every pitch. However, since he had the reputation of always throwing strikes, the umps gave him the benefit of the doubt and called a lot of balls strikes, thus making Maddux happy and pissing off the rest of the league.
The unfortunate comparative here is that when the “Name Programs” enter contests, they get the benefit of the doubt. They get the second look. They get the, “Oh, that’s OK” pass on a minor misstep here or there. They also get judges thinking they’re seeing something “groundbreaking” when it really might just be crap.
I worked at a couple of the “best” schools when it came to writers and designers and we had some great kids. However, the truth is that we had just as many kids who couldn’t find their asses with two hands and a flashlight as anywhere else. We had kids who designed pages that looked like a ransom note mated with a Rorschach test. We had kids who wrote narrative leads that sounded like they were conceived on acid. Still, having that “Name Program” rep got their work a second look.
In one case of judging, I was picking through publications to see who would make the cut for a collection of national awards. As Koretzky noted, a lot of the first pass is about skimming out stuff that’s not good, so my job was to eliminate stuff before a group of us would come together to and debate the merits of what was left. I kept tossing the ones that didn’t make the cut on the floor next to me and eventually the contest coordinators came by to scoop them up.
At one point, one of them picked up a paper and handed it to the other with a worried look. They both murmured something like, “Uh.. Uh-oh…” I asked what the problem was and they said, “Well, this paper ALWAYS wins an award so we’re just surprised…”
OK, but that year it sucked and I started laying out why I thought it wasn’t going to make it. They both backed off immediately, but as they walked away, I heard one of them say something to the effect of how upset the adviser at that publication was going to be.
Part of me wanted to give it another look because I started to doubt myself, even though I knew I was right. The other part of me got pissed that I was second-guessing myself because of the reputation other people had conferred upon this publication. It stayed out of the stack, but that bugged me. And it still does.
Judges are human… : The word “judge” seems to communicate fairness, clarity, wisdom and more. For most of the media contests, however, the word “judge” seems to translate to “person who answered the email plea for help.” Koretzky does more than an adequate job of going over this, so I won’t belabor it here. What I will talk about is the ways in which human failings can lead you to miss out on the prize you covet.
We get tired, so we might glaze over an error that should have bounced out a competitor or we might glaze over while reading your amazing prose. We can get grumpy about something in particular that leads us to be overly harsh in making the first cut. (Personal beef: I hate verb-noun attributions. When I see them I start to twitch. I try to push past it in judging contest entries, but it does take a toll. I know I’m not the only one with a personal gripe that can nudge something to the “pitch” pile.)
We also don’t all have the same experiences, which can lead to vastly different readings of pieces. Case in point: I was judging a pro contest with two other people and we individually needed to pull our personal finalists that we would then debate as a group. In the column-writing category, the best column out of the entire pack, in my opinion, was this one that reflected on how getting the one thing you always wanted sometimes was more about the memories it created than the item itself.
The guy who wrote it was in his mid-50s and he used the analogy of how he and his brothers begged for Electric Football for Christmas.
His parents kept saying no, but eventually they relented and that Christmas was a joyful one. However, it went beyond that to explain how that game and that joy and that experience became their sibling touchstone for years to come.
For me, it was the slam-dunk winner. For the other two people? It didn’t even make it out of the junk pile.
“I never heard of this stupid game,” one judge said. “Why would people watch little plastic guys vibrate on a table?”
The other judge added, “Did kids really play with that?”
Um… YES! It was the greatest game on Earth at the time and it was something we all desperately wanted. Even if it wasn’t, it was more of a metaphor for the connectivity of siblings. Hell, even I knew that and I was an only child. Still, the more I tried to explain this, the less they seemed to see the value in it.
Another point was why didn’t the kids just go out and buy it themselves? Well, because not all of us were rich, so we had to beg for stuff for Christmas.
It was clear that my experiences didn’t match theirs and it was an impediment in the judging process.
The column didn’t win first prize, but with a lot of argumentation, it made the top five.
…And occasionally biased as hell: In some cases, judges play favorites. This can be because they know a program, they worked some place or they are friends with an adviser. The converse can also be true, if a program, place or adviser really pissed off the judge. We do our best to ignore those things and if we’re really ethical, we spend a lot of time trying to make sure we don’t fall into that trap.
In college media, a lot of state contests get judged by people who used to be in student media, so they carry those battle scars with them. If you think I’m kidding, ask someone who worked for the Daily Cardinal what they think about the Badger Herald. These two papers competed as dailies at UW-Madison for decades and if you find someone in his or her 30s, 50s or 70s today who worked on one side of the newspaper war, they STILL hold grudges.
I also know that when I needed judges, I always went to former students who were currently in the field. At first, this made sense because they’re pros, they tend to owe me a favor and I can hold their feet to the fire in case they let the thing slide. However, in retrospect, I wondered if the judges held on to little biases based on how snotty bigger schools had been to them or been more open minded when it came to schools like the ones they attended.
That can make for some difficult judging decisions.
Then there are cases like this one that I experienced on a “shared judging” assignment:
We were looking at high school papers to determine which ones would be finalists for a set of national awards. Again, the goal was to cut down the stack to a predetermined number so that a bunch of us could debate the merits of the survivors. The rule was each person got say over a specific stack. If they had a concern, they could call in another judge for help, but it was basically one person’s say and that was that.
Another judge came by and looked at my stack of rejects. “What’s this one doing in here?” he demanded.
I told him it didn’t make the cut and that I had others that were better and that’s about it.
He stormed off in a huff and I heard him loudly talking to the contest coordinator about this. How he knew the adviser and she was a friend of his and how this was CLEARLY a judging error and on and on…
The contest coordinator asked a second judge to give this a second look. The judge concurred with my opinion that, no, it wasn’t horrible, but it didn’t make the cut and that it wasn’t as good as the others she had seen in her stacks (or assumed were in mine).
The guy then flew into a series of histrionics about how unfair this was and how neither of us understood the greatness of this school’s program and on and on. The next day, they had a THIRD judge read it, who was a friend of both the coordinator and the apoplectic judge. He said that it would just be better if we moved it into the “finalists” stack.
Which they did.
The kicker was that after all that, this judge STILL wasn’t satisfied because not only did it deserve finalist status, in his estimation, but it deserved one of the awards we were giving out. That’s when I put my foot down and basically said to the coordinator, “Look, there is no way this thing is a winner. We had TWO judges look at it and it wasn’t even supposed to get this far. Now that we jury-rigged the system to get it this far, you think we should go even a step further?”
After I threatened to name names on all this in public, it remained just a “finalist.”
I’m mystified when I hear that so many of our 20-something news assistants prefer to work from home. At that age, I would have had a hard time finding mentors or friends or boyfriends if I hadn’t been in the newsroom, and I never could have latched onto so many breaking stories if I hadn’t raised my hand and said, “I’ll go.”
Mary McGrory, the liberal lioness columnist, never would have gotten to know me at The Star, so I never would have gotten invitations from her years later like this one: “Let’s go see Yasir Arafat at the White House and go shopping!”
As Mayer recalled, when a big story broke at The Star: “You could see history happening. People would cluster over a reporter’s desk, pile into the boss’s office, and sometimes break into incredibly loud fights. There were weirdos in newsrooms, and fabulous role models occasionally, and the spirit of being part of a motley entourage. Now, it’s just you and the little cursor on your screen.”
Dowd’s column toasts a lot of the things that I loved about newsrooms: The weird quirkiness of working with a group of people just this side of the cantina scene from “Star Wars,” the post-work drink/cuss sessions, the adrenaline pulsing through the entire building when a major story was in the works.
All of these things were fun, although I often wonder if most of them would exist today in our sterile, HR-driven, “watch these videos on (fill in the topic of the day that people fear getting sued over) so we can say we told you not to do X” environment. A veteran reporter once told me about his time as a newsroom cub when he got to know the veteran cops reporter. The woman, a rarity at that time, used to bring a six-pack of Pabst to the police station to loosen the tongues the cops she knew. She also carried a two-shot Derringer in her purse.
(I’d be more skeptical, except the source is one of the best journalists I’ve ever met. I’m still not good enough to carry that guy’s typewriter. Oh, and at one point when I complained of a headache and asked if he had something to ease the pain, he directed me to one of his desk drawers, which contained a fifth of some rot-gut vodka.)
Although it’s easy to look at the past with rose-colored glasses, I’m sure the newsrooms from “back in the day” weren’t all that great for women, people of color, non-Christians and other folks along those lines. However, the concept of a newsroom, that central junction point for people and ideas to germinate, remains essential to journalism for a number of reasons:
SIMPLE CONNECTIONS: As much as the internet connects us, it also allows us to be isolated in ways not possible in the newsroom of old. Yes, we can look up much more information online than we could get from a grouchy old copy editor who memorized the AP style guide and still remembers who won the mayoral run-off election back in 1963.
That said, I know that when I was working on a story that crossed news and sports boundaries, for example, I could walk 10 feet across the room to one of the sports folks and ask a couple questions about how they would approach a specific aspect of the story. The same was true when one of them needed some help on a story that involved an aspect of crime.
When I needed more context for a photo for which I had to write a caption, I could duck back into the photo bubble and ask the shooter what caught their eye. When the shooter had some information that mattered to the captions, I often got a visit at my desk. (I could always tell when something was important to Joe Jackson, one of my favorite photo folks, because he’d quietly place his hand softly on my shoulder before saying, “When I was taking this shot, I was seeing/thinking/feeling…” It made my job much easier and it helped me to better understand what to look for in quality photos.)
Years later, as an adviser, I knew that if I was in the newsroom, the kids would ask me to look at a layout or check a headline. They’d also yell, “Hey, Vince, is (X) a real word?” and I could yell back, “Not unless the dictionary’s changed in the last 5 minutes.” I also knew that they wouldn’t bother to call my house or email me to get those answers if I hadn’t been there.
COLLECTIVE WISDOM: Again, not to harp on how technology has changed us, but knowledge and wisdom aren’t the same thing. By merely being around good people who were doing their jobs well, I was better able to improve my own craft.
As I mentioned in a previous post, my desk at the State Journal was jammed up against the one Pat Simms occupied, putting me in the perfect position to basically get smarter through osmosis. I could hear how she used strong questions to quash BS answers before they could get started. I listened to how she worked a source until she was sure she had the best version of whatever the story was from that person. I also learned how to turn a story around quickly, with limited time and even less flab.
Spending time near editors like Phil Glende and Teryl Franklin (to name only a few) gave me a sense of how to find holes in a story and how to fix them if the reporter couldn’t. I watched the copy desk clean the copy thoroughly and quickly by figuring out who could do what the best and making sure that person got that specific job. In a lot of ways, watching the pros operate in person was like watching an orchestra perform live. (Some days it looked like Cirque du Soleil being performed with chainsaws on an oil-slicked linoleum floor, to be fair.)
It’s not the same when it’s not live.
SOCIAL NORMS: One of the best journal articles I ever read for my doctoral program was Warren Breed’s 1955 study of social norming within a newsroom. Breed examined the ways in which knowledge and practice was shared among those in a newsroom and found that journalists tended to eschew formal documents or written policies. Instead, they shared information one to another as a way of training younger generations to behave as those before them had.
Reflecting on his seminal study more than 40 years later, Breed recalled how he was writing about a parade of some kind and an older journalist advised him to hype up the patriotism. The vet mentioned that he should start with something about the bands playing and the flags flying. Breed did as he had been advised and was later praised for his effort. A few years later, he found himself doling out similar advice to a novice writer, who also led his story with the image of flags waving and bands performing.
The idea can seem a little problematic in some ways, especially if you realize that this can really narrow the view of what makes for “news” or how to “do news right.” However, a lot of the norms that I picked up in the newsroom meant a lot in terms of imbuing me with some important lessons.
For example, it’s easy to blow off a deadline (or a demanding editor, who is steaming over your inability to make a deadline) if you’re in your home 50 miles from the editor in question. However, when I watched a person blow a deadline by five minutes and then saw that five minutes turn into 10 more at the editor’s desk and 15 more at the copy desk, I saw the chain reaction associated with that failure. In addition, I knew when an editor was circling my desk like a shark, I stepped on the gas pedal a little harder in banging out whatever I was working on.
Even more, a lot of social norms that matter more now than ever get passed down from our mentors in a one-on-one situation. I know that journalistic malfeasance has happened as long as journalism has been around, but I know that feeling a stronger collective “we” made any one person less likely to take the easy way out. I can’t imagine having to see Teryl every day if I had faked a source, got caught and had to live with it in that newsroom. A random editor halfway across the country that I never met? I’d like to think I’d be just as honest, but I can’t say for sure.
I learned from folks like George Hesselberg that we get stuff right all the time. That’s a value that came from his mentor and I’m sure it came from someone else all the way back into an even further bygone era. The norms we shared remain in my mind to this day as well as the bonds of friendship we still share today.
FAMILY: This may be a bit more Polly-Anna-ish and more like what Dowd was talking about, but I have to admit, newsrooms and the people I met in them became like a second family to me.
(We used to joke at the Daily Cardinal that we were a family, in that we all drank and hurt one another, but I digress… Besides, the godparents of my kid came from that newsroom, so it couldn’t have been all bad…)
I’ve yet to hear a student come back to campus for a “Reporting Class” reunion or a “J-412 Tenth Anniversary Celebration,” but they come back for student media events. They reconnect with people who chewed the same dirt as they did in the windowless bunker that the university provided as a newsroom, where the coffee pot always burned everything to a crisp and the carpet smelled like wet feet.
They also connect with others from previous generations who have been through the same kinds of things. Just having lived through that experience makes them kindred spirits.
To lose those connective threads seems so sad to me, and I’m not even a people person.
As much as it would be fun to beat up on the guy who somehow turned Twitter into a place that has baffled Stephen King, a more valuable use of our space here might be to turn this into a learning experience for media practitioners across the spectrum.
Thus, let us begin with…
NEWS LESSON 1: When it comes to leads, just tell me what happened.
A friend and colleague sent me an array of leads as a reminder of what can happen when writers get too into themselves…
This shit is remarkable:
Washington Post:
SpaceX’s Starship lifted off the pad in Southern Texas and cleared the launchpad, its first milestone, but then began tumbling as it was preparing for stage separation and the vehicle came apart some four minutes into flight.
CNN:
SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, took off from a launch pad on the coast of South Texas on Thursday at 9:28 a.m. ET, but exploded midair before stage separation.
CBS.com:
SpaceX’s huge Starship rocket, the most powerful ever built, blasted off on an unpiloted maiden flight Thursday and successfully flew for more than two minutes before tumbling out of control and exploding in a cloud of flaming debris.
CNBC.com:
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Thursday launched its Starship rocket for the first time, but fell short of reaching space after exploding in mid-flight. No crew were on board.
Space.com:
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — The most powerful rocket ever built put on quite a show during its debut space launch.
As my friend noted, each lead seems to avoid the fact that a giant missile blew up and created quite a mess for people who were wondering if Musk’s effort would be better or worse than his work with Twitter.
The lesson here is simple. Just tell people what happened and why they should care in your lead. If you feel the need to wax poetic about a massive ship breaking free from the celestial bonds of Earth, go to a poetry slam.
NEWS LESSON 2: Completeness and clarity matter a great deal.
About four minutes after SpaceX‘s gargantuan rocket lifted from its Texas launch pad, it burst into a fireball over the Gulf of Mexico, never reaching space.
Though SpaceX hasn’t shared many details yet about what happened during Starship’s maiden voyage, one fact is known: It was intentionally ordered to explode.
This and several other stories noted that it wasn’t an unexpected explosion, but one deliberately set off by the SpaceX folks because of the risk of falling debris and other similar concerns for people on the ground.
That’s important to know, but it’s also worth noting that the REASON they blew this thing up was because the rocket had started to malfunction around that time. In other words, either way, this thing was not going to be a fully realized launch.
Both of these points are worth making clear right up front on stories that discuss the rocket, although it seemed like half the stories out there were doing some version of a “Ha Ha! Elon Sucks!” story and the other half were doing the “Oh, you simpletons. You do not understand the genius of Elon” stories.
Both are half true, in a way, but neither is clear or complete.
PUBLIC RELATIONS LESSON 1: Manage expectations
Dovetailing nicely with the info above, the first lesson good public relations practitioners learn is how to convey important information of interest to an audience in a transparent and direct way. In this case, that seemed to be lacking.
The follow up stories touch on how this taught people a lot, or how rockets fail a lot before they succeed or how they never really intended this thing to be totally successful. All of these things might be true, but the timing of those pieces is really terrible.
If you manage expectations people have for an event, you can better control the narrative in terms of what people should expect or not expect. For the longest time, people got used to NASA tossing spacecrafts into the heavens with nothing but total success. Musk probably knew (I’m guessing based on what’s coming out now) that this wasn’t going to be that.
Rather than tell people, “Hey, this thing is going to be in the air about as long as it takes to blow $20 in a slot machine at the Las Vegas airport,” he didn’t mention what could happen. Thus, the reaction from pundits and suddenly all of the “we learned stuff” responses sound like trying to polish a turd.
Put it this way: If I go to the mechanic to get my car fixed and he tells me, “It’s going to cost $300 and take two hours,” that’s my resting pulse for expectation. If he comes in at $250 or it takes an hour and a half, I’m going to be thrilled. However, if he tells me it’ll cost $250 and will take an hour and a half, but instead it’s $300 and two hours, I’m going to be upset.
PUBLIC RELATIONS LESSON 2: Don’t give people a reason to mock you.
Perhaps the one thing people will remember most of this mess was the linguistic calisthenics that Musk and crew used to explain the rocket’s demise:
This approach to reality reminds me of the time that I covered the Mifflin Street Block Party, which devolved into fire, arrests and the destruction of a fire truck.
When I called the police to determine if they called a 10-33 (Riot in progress), I was told I shouldn’t call it a riot. I then outlined all of the stuff I saw there: A car burned to a shell, porches ripped to pieces, fires torching the street, kids screaming “f— the pigs” and more before asking, “If it wasn’t a riot, what was it?”
“It was a large, prolonged disturbance,” the officer said before hanging up on me.
A “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is not only jargon, but it’s clearly mock-worthy. I get that you don’t necessarily want to be this blunt in your assessment of the launch, but come on… You might have been better off going with “we had an oopsie” at that point.
If there’s one thing the internet is good at, it’s mockery. The last thing you want to do is softball it in for the folks out there who really enjoy roasting the hell out of you.
In the wake of the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship game, the question of double standards emerged as a major plot point.
During LSU’s 102-85 defeat of Iowa, Tiger star Angel Reese made the “can’t see me” hand gesture toward the Hawkeyes’ Caitlin Clark as a form of trash talking. Clark had made similar gestures throughout the tournament toward opposing players.
In one case it was deemed “confident” and “self-assured.” In another case, people decried the “lack of sportsmanship” and “thuggery.”
If you can’t guess who got which critique, here’s a clue: Clark is white and Reese is Black.
On Sunday, Reese simply gave it back to Clark. Many neutral observers and Clark’s fans were not pleased and played the sportsmanship and class card. Double standards: When we do it, it’s bravado. When you do it, it’s crass. When we play hard, it’s gritty. When you play hard, it’s thuggery.
I saw this this firsthand in the 1980s with John Thompson’s Georgetown team. They were routinely cast as villains and thugs. We saw the same thing with UNLV’s great teams of the 1990s. When UNLV played Duke for the national title in 1990, Duke’s players were cast as “choirboys” while UNLV players were cast as villains and thugs. Then, of course, there was Michigan’s Fab Five which, critics say, introduced hip-hop elements into basketball.
Now that the women’s game has grown and African American women continue to become increasingly prominent, the same stereotypes are emerging: Black women portrayed as rough-and-tumble street fighters, their white counterparts as stalwart, heady competitors.
As a brief reminder here to journalism students, consider the following issues when including descriptors or making word choices in ways you might not initially consider:
WOULD YOU USE THE DESCRIPTOR OF THE SITUATION WAS REVERSED?: One of the key ways to determine fairness in language or description is to turn the tables and see if it still works for you. My favorite example comes from Jim Bouton’s book, “Ball Four,” in which one of his teammates notes that he wouldn’t mind the papers referring to him as “the black first baseman” if only they would refer to his counterpart as “the white first baseman.”
The same is true of descriptions like “the female mayor” or “the woman CEO” and so forth. Feminist scholars have long noted the incongruity in language as to how men and women are described. A few common pairings include:
Women are “pushy” while men are “assertive”
Women are “bossy” while men “take charge”
Women are “stubborn” while men are “persistent”
Calling attention unnecessarily to an attribute that you wouldn’t flip the other way is clearly an indicator that you might want to rethink that descriptor. I can’t remember seeing headlines about “the white quarterback” or “the male company president” and I bet most of you can’t either. Same thing with references to a “straight wedding” or a “cis gender politician.”
I can’t imagine someone calling Caitlin Clark a “thug” for her trash talking, but I know that word showed up in a number of discussions involving Angel Reese. That’s clearly part of the problem.
DOES THE TERM HAVE A LOADED MEANING?: I can’t think of any time I’ve heard someone described as “a looter” or “a rioter” and had a positive reaction to that person. Those terms carry with them some negative baggage. Conversely, I’ve seen an array of meanings ascribed to the term “clowning around” that range from bright and happy to racist.
A few years back, I remember seeing an analysis of the term “unskilled labor.” In a post on this term, someone noted that all labor is skilled. If you took Bill Gates and stuck him with a road construction crew, he would be as lost as can be. If you took Jamie Dimon and put him in charge of a Naperville McDonald’s during lunch rush, he would probably end up with a crowd of really angry people and some severe grease burns. The term “unskilled labor” is meant to diminish the value of what certain people do and thus make it easier to discount them or pay them less.
We could go on for days, but the point is that language matters in how we tell stories and how we frame the characters in them.
You might think, “Gee, Vince, it seems like the only reason you do these odes to your Dad on his birthday is to feature his really bad fashion choices of the 1970s…” Well, you wouldn’t be ENTIRELY wrong about that…
My reporting class inspired me to dig up these words of wisdom from my dad today on his actual birthday.
About six or seven weeks ago, we discussed open records and launched our “Fun with FOIA” assignment, which was relatively simple:
Come up with a story that is predicated on public records of any kind
Create and file an open-records request with the agency responsible for those records
Write a two-page, double-spaced story that incorporates the info you got back and at least two human sources who can discuss the topic in a meaningful way.
This isn’t rocket science and I wasn’t looking for a Watergate story. Find the budget of the student government, figure out what they spend money on and ask the leaders some questions. Pull the contracts used to hire speakers for campus events and see who got paid what and if anything was hinky. Get the total number of parking tickets given on campus, see where the most/least tickets were given and talk to parking services folks about it.
That said, I told them about 832 times that the only truly problematic thing would be if they waited too long to file their open-records request. That would limit the time people on the other end would have to look at your stuff, find the records and get back to you. “Yeah… Yeah… We know…” was the general attitude as they left class that day.
Today, drafts are due and I’m getting emails that start like this:
So, this is honestly my own fault, but I submitted my open records request to the University Police on Monday and for some odd reason I thought they could get to me by Thursday, but they just got back to me today saying they’re so busy with open record requests, so he won’t have done for another 10 days.
And thus came forth advice my father constantly gave me that I then shared with them: “Dammit, you should have done it right away…”
Dad believed in the idea that if we got stuff done when it came up, we wouldn’t end up forgetting about it or getting painted into a corner by circumstance. It’s why we always pack the car for card shows the night before, print off an itinerary for a trip immediately (even if the trip is six months away) and make damned sure to file our taxes right away.
It’s why when I get asked to judge a contest, I try my best to nail it down as soon as I get the assignments. It’s why I respond to emails right after I open them. It’s also why nothing irritates me more than if something slips past me and then I’m behind on it.
Today’s throwback post brings back Dad’s maxims I put together on his birthday a few years back. These still fit perfectly in everything I teach. I also wanted to add these two items that I find myself coming back to every, single day as a journalist and a professor:
Learn to haggle: If there is one life skill students desperately need, it’s to understand how to appropriately value things and negotiate. I learned this when I was about 7 years old at a baseball card show.
I wanted a 1973 Roberto Clemente card, and one dealer had a whole bunch of them for sale. When Dad asked the guy how much one would cost, the dealer pulled out a price guide, and said they were $25 each.
“I’ll give you $10 for one,” Dad replied.
“Look at the book,” the guy said, pushing the guide toward Dad. “They’re booking at $25.”
“Well, I’ll give you $10 for whichever one you want to sell,” Dad replied.
The guy sighed, and said, “Pick whichever one you want. It’s a deal.”
I still couldn’t understand how that all worked, but I waited until we got in the car to ask Dad about it. I mean, the BOOK SAID the card was worth $25. That’s got to be how much you pay, right? It was at that point, Dad said something that sticks with me until this day:
“Something isn’t worth what somebody says it is. It’s worth what someone’s willing to give you for it.”
Not only was that good advice when it came to garage sales, flea markets, baseball cards and auto purchases, it was phenomenal advice when it came to negotiating debts, getting info from sources and prying documents loose from wary record keepers.
Even more, it’s the skill I teach students the most when they get job offers: Here’s how you ask for a better salary, better hours, specific computer systems, more vacation, extra 401K matches and more. Haggling can feel awkward until you get used to it, which is why it’s important to understand how to do it well and to get plenty of practice at it with small stuff.
Like baseball cards.
Live up to your word: The best and worst moments of my life came from this maxim, in that Dad did what he said.
When I was 8, I asked to go to a Milwaukee Brewers game. Dad agreed to take me on the day I had asked, not quite realizing that it was Free Bat Day, and that the team was in the middle of a pennant race. The place would be packed, the traffic would be awful and who knows if they had enough bats to satisfy every kid.
Still, Dad said yes, so we went. It was a heck of a game and I still have that bat somewhere.
Conversely, when I turned 16 and got my driver’s license, Dad told me, “If you get a speeding ticket, you’re done. I don’t want any (bovine excrement). You get a ticket and you give me your keys.”
About a year later, I was flying down a stretch of road notorious for speed traps when I got clocked at 17 over. No warning and no mercy from the officer. I got the ticket.
Dad was making dinner and he asked, “Where the hell were you?” I didn’t say a word. I just put the ticket on the kitchen table, dropped the keys on top of it and that was that for a while. (Eventually, I got my driving privileges back but 32 years later, I’m still smarting from that to the point Amy accuses me of being an elderly woman behind the wheel.)
Dad always said, “If I said yes, it was yes. If I said no, it’s no. A ‘maybe’ means ‘maybe.'”
I try to live by that with my own kid and with my career as well. If I commit to something, whether it’s as pathologically stupid as writing three books at the same time or as easy as keeping my door open during office hours, I do it.
As my reporting class learned this morning when they asked, “Can’t we move the deadline for the FOIA story?”
Nope. It is what it is.
So, on Dad’s birthday, here’s a look back at his previous words of wisdom and what I hope students can learn from them.
Happy Birthday, Dad: 4 valuable things I learned from my father that might help you, too
It might be hard to believe that a guy who dressed like this could have valuable advice, but trust me, he always does.
As my daughter was going stir-crazy the other day, whining loudly about missing her friends, her extracurricular activities and even in-school classes, I told her the one truism I hoped would keep her sane:
“You can’t focus on the things you can’t do because of social distancing. You have to focus on the things you DO get to do. Otherwise, you’ll go batty.”
For me, an introvert with a long-standing aversion to social situations, this has been an easy adage to espouse and obey.
Until today. Today is my dad’s birthday.
Like everyone else in this country, Dad is stuck at home with limited contact to the outside world, for fear of contracting a virus that is decimating people at an incredible rate. While this “wait this out at home” rule is rough on a lot of people, it has to be killing my dad, who earned the family nickname of “No-Line Frank” for his disdain of waiting in line for anything. (It probably isn’t any great shakes for my mom, either, as she’s isolated in the house with him like this for at least another month.)
I wish with all my heart I could jet down I-41 and give him a big hug (and a nice bottle of Drambuie) today. The fact I can’t saddens me to the point of distraction. That said, he would be the first one to tell me it’s fine, not to worry and that I should get back to work.
My parents were and still are instrumental in who I am and what I do in life. In honor of dad’s 76th birthday, here are four “Filak-isms” he taught me that helped make me who I am and likely will help me make it through this pandemic unscathed:
HUSTLE WHILE YOU WAIT: I can’t remember when he first said it to me, but I rely on it almost daily: “The best things in life come to he who hustles while he waits.”
Although Dad later told me he heard this in a Credit Union seminar or something, I still attribute it to him because he not only said it, but he lives it. I often joke that I’m a “human twitch” when it comes to keeping busy, constantly writing books, teaching classes, refinishing furniture and doing almost anything else anybody asks of me.
Compared to my dad, I’m a piker.
I can’t remember the last time I saw him watch a whole ballgame or TV show without getting up and looking for something to do. He might be cleaning out the junk drawer in the dining room or sorting some baseball cards or looking for something in the basement, but he’s constantly on the move. Seeing this always inspired me to find more stuff to do and to keep looking for new opportunities to make the most of my time.
If you’re always hustling, the good things will come your way.
DON’T BRING SHAME ON THE FAMILY: I know I’ve explained this before, but it bears repeating. Dad told me this when I went off to college and decades later, it still rings true. “When you go out there, have fun,” he said. ” But, don’t bring shame on the family. It’s my name, too.”
The sheer tonnage of stupid things I avoided doing in college, simply based on that bit of advice, could stop a speeding locomotive from moving another inch forward. Even now, when I considered doing something, I would imagine the headline “UWO Professor Arrested for (Fill in whatever stupid thing I thought about doing)” and immediately decided against doing that stupid thing.
Whether it was being a success or just avoiding failure, the goal was pretty simple: When Dad saw someone he knew at the grocery store, it would be great if the person didn’t start the conversation with, “Hey, yeah… Heard about your son… Geez… That’s not good…”
YOU ARE NOT AVERAGE: In fifth grade, I came home with five C’s on my report card, much to the dismay of my parents. Dad was less than pleased that I wasn’t living up to my potential, whatever that was, and he pretty much knew full well that I fell short because I wasn’t giving a crap.
We were in the middle of a “silent supper,” thanks to my transgressions, when I finally broke the silence with what I thought would be a pretty good argument for my folks to not be so upset: “I read the report card, and it says that a C is average, so-”
Dad cut me off in a firm tone, “You are NOT average.”
I got the point. I could do better. And I knew it.
From that moment, I didn’t get another C on a report card until I hit my freshman year of college. In that case, it was more of a scheduling mistake than a lack of effort, because I took an introductory zoology course that served as the “weed-out” class for the veterinary medicine program at the U.
It’s always easy to take it easy, but that’s not the right way to do things. I was lucky enough to get a set of tools and the ability to use them in a way that matters. I was also lucky as hell to have parents who wouldn’t let me slide because I was good enough to get by or because other people’s kids were doing something worse.
Once that got stuck in my head, I realized that it’s important to always push beyond average whenever possible.
FINISH THE WORK FIRST, DRINK BEER LATER: Dad always believed in the separation of work and relaxation. He once told me about my grandfather and how he liked to do part of a job and then relax a bit and then go back and do more of it. Dad fell into the mode that my great-grandfather espoused: Finish the work first, drink the beer later.
What I learned from this was not only the importance of a strong work ethic but also the idea that I could find joy in completion of work. Seeing things get checked off a list or looking at a well-done job brought me happiness that could far exceed the joy of a brief respite and the knowledge that I had to do more work.
Even more, the beer always tasted better when I knew I was done for the day.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is a mix of previous content as well as some updated material that hits on the topic at hand. It’s not that I worry about self-plagiarizing, but if you’re anything like me at this point in the semester, being reassured that you’re not actually losing your mind and that you might have seen this before is pretty helpful. — VFF)
In an attempt to help writers fix simple problems that have tended to crop up in the pieces I’ve been grading lately, we’re going to spend this week giving each one a quick look with some examples of things that went wrong and some simple solutions.
Today’s menu item: Attributions
The purpose of an attribution is to attach a source to a statement so the reader can figure out who said it and how much credence to lend that statement. Without attributions, the readers could assume the material is coming from the journalists themselves, and thus lead to all sorts of concerns about opinions and bias.
Let’s jump into this:
WHEN TO ATTRIBUTE: I often tell students I’ve never seen anyone get fired because they attributed too much. That said, there are plenty of instances out there where failing to attribute landed a writer in hot water. (My favorite is the Richard Jewell situation, which we’ve covered here before.)
In short, attribute almost everything. Here are a few exceptions:
The content is a fact, at the level of “water is wet.” (“Wisconsin is a state,” is the kind of statement you don’t need to attribute to an atlas or Google Maps. “Wisconsin is the BEST state,” will require an answer to “says who?”)
You witnessed the actions yourself and are reporting those observations. I tell my kids that if a former student walked into our classroom and beat the hell out of me and they saw it happen, they could write everything they saw without attribution for the student newspaper. That said, if a reporter from the paper showed up after I was beaten bloody and asked, “What happened?” that reporter would need to attribute that information to whomever did the explaining.
ATTRIBUTION STRUCTURE AND PLACEMENT: I’m a massive pain in the keester when it comes to this in my classes and I attribute that to the ancient nuns who taught me grammar with a passion for sentence diagrams. (It also helped that they backed up their play with steel-ruler discipline.)
Attributions should be structured in a noun-verb format:
Mayor Jane Smith said.
Johnson said.
he said.
NOT verb-noun
said Mayor Jane Smith.
said Johnson.
said he.
I get into arguments over this on occasion, including one with a former faculty member that evolved into a tenure-battle/land-war situation. Like most things, I try to explain WHY this is the way it is and it usually works on the kids. (That former faculty member is another story that can’t be told without alcohol and a non-disclosure agreement…)
Here’s my logic:
It’s grammatically sound: In the basic writing courses, we teach students the inherent value of active voice and why it provides advantages over passive voice. “Bill hit Bob” is tighter, stronger and shorter than “Bob was hit by Bill.”
Attributions are basically just tiny sentences, so this same approach applies. What an attribution says in active voice is “Smith said WORDS” while a passive-voice attribution says “These words were said by Smith.”
When you have a choice to go with grammar or run counter to grammar, it’s usually better to go with grammar, unless there is a compelling reason. (Example: Grammar dictates that you use “whom” with the objective case and that you not end a sentence with a preposition, as that leaves it “dangling.” That said, you wouldn’t ever get in a bar fight and yell, “DO YOU KNOW WITH WHOM YOU ARE MESSING?”)
It’s structurally logical: This addresses that previous kind of example, in that you want things to sound normal. For reasons past my understanding, some writers think “said Smith” sounds normal, even though they wouldn’t use that same structure if the attribution required a pronoun instead. (said she or said he)
Also, we don’t do this with other verbs, as it would sound flat-out goofy:
Ran I to the store to pick up a gallon of milk.
Won we first place at the track and field finals.
Proposed he to his girlfriend.
The minute I see that approach taking hold, I’ll buy into “said Smith” and then quickly descend into an underground bunker for the rest of eternity.
It only has one purpose: The point of an attribution is to answer “who says?” That’s it.
The argument I’ve seen over the years is, “Well, if I reverse the noun and the verb, I can add a bunch of information to the attribution, like ‘said Smith, who graduated from Notre Dame in 1949.’ This adds value.”
First of all, it’s an attribution, not the front pocket on your suitcase where you cram all the other crap you forgot to put elsewhere. Second, by stuffing the material in there, your readers might miss it, as we’ve trained them over the years to mentally skip past the attribution and simply acknowledge it’s there.
If you want to put additional content into your story, add it to the paraphrase that introduces the quote and let the attribution just do its simple job.
In terms of where to put the attribution, it’s a pretty simple set of guidelines:
For your paragraphs of paraphrase, put the attribution at the front if the “who” is more important than what they’re saying. If the “what” is more important than the “who,” do the opposite.
For single-sentence direct quotes, follow the same basic rule. For multi-sentence quotes, put the attribution after the first full sentence. This will allow the readers to engage with the quote, but it will tell them who said the information quickly enough to know how much weight they should give that quote.
VERBS OF ATTRIBUTION: As far as verbs of attribution go, not much can compete with “said,” even though it seems every student I have taught has a burning desire to find something else to use. As much as I don’t like blaming educators at other levels for anything (Hell, I’m not going to teach ninth graders without combat pay and a morphine drip…), I remember seeing a poster like this in a classroom while judging a forensics contest and almost immediately broke out in hives:
The rationale behind this approach is that “said is boring, so let’s do something different.” I might also point out that riding inside a car that is driving down the proper side of the street is boring, but that doesn’t mean you should try roof surfing on your roommate’s Kia Sorento while driving 80 mph the wrong way on the interstate just because it’s different.
If you want to write fiction, feel free to give any of verbs things a shot; Nobody’s going to argue with you about an orc “warning” a wizard about something. However, in journalism, you actually have to prove things happened, which is why “said” works wonders.
“Said” has four things going for it:
It is provable: You can demonstrate that someone opened up his or her mouth and let those words fall out of his or her head. You don’t know if that person believes them or feels a certain way about them. You can prove the person said them, especially if you record that person.
It is neutral: If one person “yelled” something and the other person “said” something, one person might appear angry or irrational while the other person appears calm and rational. It shifts the balance of power ever so slightly to that calmer source and thus creates an unintended bias. We have enough trouble in the field these days with people accusing us of being biased without avoiding it in the simplest of ways.
It answers the “says who?” question: Attributions are crucial to helping your readers understand who is making what points within your story. It allows readers to figure out how much weight to give to something within your piece. Simply telling someone who “said” it helps the readers make some decisions in their own minds.
You’re damned right it’s boring: Name the last time that you heard anyone actively discussing verbs of attribution within a story outside of a journalism class or some weird grammar-nerd drum circle. Exactly. “Said” just does the job and goes on with its work. Verbs of attribution are like offensive linemen in football: If they’re doing their job, you don’t notice them at all. When they do something wrong, that’s when they gain attention. “Said” is boring and it is supposed to be. Don’t draw attention to your attributions. Their job isn’t to dazzle the readers.
(The one I’ll never forget was one someone wrote for a yearbook story about a student with a mobility issue: “Bascom Hill is a challenge for anyone,” laughed Geoff Kettling, his dark eyes a’sparklin’. It was quickly switched to “Geoff Kettling said.“)
Let’s look at the three verbs most students tend to use instead of “said” and outline what makes them dicey:
Thinks: This is a pretty common one, in that most people being interviewed are asked to express their opinions on a topic upon which they have given some modicum of thought.
“Principal John Smith thinks the banning of mobile phones in school will lead to improved grades for his students.”
First, unless you have some sort of mutant power, on par with Dr. Charles Xavier, you don’t know what this guy thinks. Mind readers are excused from this lesson, but for the rest of us, we have no idea what he actually thinks.
He might be doing this because he’s tired of bumping into kids in the hallway who don’t look up from their phones during passing period. He might be thinking, “All that charging going on in classrooms is killing our electricity budget. How can I get this to stop?” He might be worried about students taking videos of teachers smoking weed in the faculty lounge or beating the snot out of kids. We don’t know what he’s thinking. We do, however, know what he said:
“Principal John Smith said the banning of mobile phones in school will lead to improved grades for his students.”
Second, and more inconsequentially, you have a weird verb-tense shift when you go from past tense to present with “thinks.” You can’t fix this the way you would fix a “says/said” verb shift by going with “thought,” as that implies he previously held an opinion but has since changed it:
“Principal John Smith thought the banning of mobile phones in school would lead to improved grades for his students, but the latest data reveals a sharp drop in GPA across all grades.”
Believes: This one suffers from much the same issues as “thinks,” in that you can’t demonstrate a clearly held belief in pretty much anything. Just ask all those 1980s televangelists who “believe” in the sanctity of marriage and then they were caught fooling around with the church secretary or some sex worker named “Bubbles” or something.
I use this example in my class each term, where I tell them, “I believe you are the BEST writing for the media class I have ever taught.” They don’t know if I believe that, or if I just professed the same belief to my other writing class. They don’t know if I go into my office and break out the “emergency scotch” and weep for the future of literacy after teaching their class. What they do know is that I said that statement.
You can either use it as a direct quote:
“I believe you are the BEST writing for the media class I have ever taught,” Filak said.
Or, if you really have a passionate love of my believable nature, go with this:
Filak said he believes this is the best writing for the media class he has ever taught.
According to: This is the one I waffle on more than occasionally, with the caveat that it not become a constant within the piece. It also needs to be applied fairly to sources.
This attribution works well for documents, although the term “stated” works just as well:
According to a police report, officers arrived to find the butler trying to capture an increasingly agitated lemur that had already bitten one woman in the face.
Pretty simple and easy, and nobody (other than the one woman) gets hurt. Here’s where it becomes problematic:
According to Bill Smith, Sen. John Jones has run a campaign of falsehoods and negative attacks.
Jones said Smith is upset he’s behind in the polls and is desperate to make up ground.
When one source gets an “according to” and the other gets a “said,” you have a situation in which it sounds like you believe one person and think the other person is just yammering. It comes across as if to say, “According to this twerp, X is true. However, the other person clearly and calmly says something that is actually accurate.”
How do you avoid all of these problems? Stick with said. It’s like Novocaine: Keep applying it and it works every time.
A couple students were in my office Wednesday, concerned that they couldn’t find an internship yet or that internship folks had turned them down. In one case, the place rejected her and then reposted the internship. This is like being told, “I’m sorry I can’t go to the prom with you” just moments before you hear that same person telling everyone around the lunch room, “I really want to go to prom and I’ll literally go with ANYONE!”
More than a few other folks have been stopping by with crises of confidence, so I made the kids a deal: I’d dig out this post for a Throwback Thursday if they promised to read it. It’s a look back about five years ago, but the core of this is still spot-on.
Here’s a look at me living up to my end of the bargain:
Five helpful thoughts as you panic about not having an internship yet
When March turns to April, summer seems only a few short weeks away. For those of us in Wisconsin, that means the snow might finally finish melting and we can finally put away our shovels and salt spreaders for the year. For journalism students everywhere, however, April means moving from “Hey, I applied for this internship” to “Why haven’t I heard back from the internship?” to “GOD, WHY?!? WHAT HAVE I DONE IN LIFE THAT IS SO FOUL AS TO NOT GOTTEN AN INTERNSHIP YET?!?!”
I asked some folks I know who hire interns in the field what thoughts they had about this time of year, working through the hiring process and so forth. I also dug through the old file of rejection letters and such to come up with some advice for those of you who are somewhere between moderate concern and psychotic panic.
The Most Basic Advice:
You aren’t doing yourself or anyone else any good freaking out. The process is going to be the process, so don’t get yourself so wired that you’re tied up in knots and likely to send a horribly embarrassing text or email to a potential employer, begging for information. Cooler heads prevail, so YOU MUST CHILL. As one person who has worked for everything from top 20 circulation newspapers to promotions for the UFC explained:
My favorite quote: Patience is not absence of ambition. #EverybodyChill
This Takes Time
I remember working night desk at the State Journal one night when we were looking to hire a swing-shift reporter. My boss, Teryl, was responsible for reviewing the candidates. It was the end of a hellish night and I had just finished the midnight cop calls and settled in near the scanner to keep an ear out for any breaking news. Teryl sat down and pulled this giant stack of folders out of her desk drawer and dropped them on her desk with that clanging THUD that only half-metal, half-Formica desks can emit. There had to be 50 or more folders there, easy. She picked up the first one and with a heavy sigh, she started going through them. I thought it would take longer for her to get through them than it took for Andy Dufresne to make his way to freedom. I’m sure it felt just about as fun for her as it did for him.
Even now, these things take time and there is a ton of work involved. Even if you are the perfect candidate, it’s going to take a while to dig through the pile to find you. Or as one of the pros I talked to who is currently hiring interns said:
I’m at a very small agency and my colleague and I also have SO many of these things to sift through. We received more than 50 resumes for our one internship, and there’s only two of us to read them through. The process of trying to line up schedules and find a time for interviews is an absolute nightmare. Even once we do that, we’ve usually gone through 2-3 rounds of candidate interviews before we find someone we like. We try to put a dedicated effort into finding someone quickly and it still takes us about 3 weeks per hiring cycle.
You need to have reasonable expectations of how long this will take and understand there are actual human beings on the other end of this process who are likely doing their level best. Your best bet is to check in when you submit your material and find out what their general plan is for contacting people and then add about two weeks to that. Once that time has ended, you should give them another week and then contact them. But only do it once and do it in a, “I know you’re insanely busy but I wanted to check in” way. As a guy who works for Facebook explained to me:
Have the students ask what the typical turnaround times are so they have the right expectations and use the time spent waiting for one internship to apply to 3 more.
That said, if you have important updates, it helps to let the people know about that so you stay at the forefront of their minds in a positive way, according to a top PR pro who has worked for major players all across the country:
I also think that continuous follow up always keeps you ahead of the game. If it means thanking them for their time, sharing a story about the news they heard about the company (recent awards or otherwise) or writing a letter about how they are the ideal candidate and list specific strong reasons why… it goes a long way. I’m currently helping hire our interns for Baird and those are just a couple of things that stand out to our Directors/Managers.
Have a Plan B (and C…)
What might be the perfect internship for you might not make you the perfect candidate for the company. With that in mind, it helps to cultivate multiple options. If you are afraid that you might not get THE internship, keep an eye out and toss your hat in the ring for others that come open. One former newspaper editor who hired interns explained why this is a good idea:
I’d also recommend that students not put all their eggs in one basket when it comes to jobs and internships. Take the time to apply for a variety of internships. At best, you have a few great options to choose from. At worst, you got practice with the application process that will help you for years to come.
Another pro, who has worked in news, PR and university marketing, said not only should you be applying for multiple internships, but you should look for every opportunity to get experience if you get one:
Don’t sit tight waiting for one or two opportunities to pan out. Keep searching and keep applying. And be willing to seek and do work that gets you access to watch and learn, not necessarily do the “intern-version” of the “full-time thing.” Be a clerk. Tackle phones and backstage stuff if it gets you a front row seat. Bottom line: apply, apply and apply some more.
Take Advantage of Bad Situation
It helps to keep your ear to the ground for just-posted internships right about now and here’s why:
Media outlets don’t always have their acts together when it comes to an internship program. Some places will get involved late in the game because they finally got permission to hire or because the money was finally available for the position. This means right about now, another wave of internships might be cresting and it could be yours to ride.
Don’t feel bad about this, but it is possible that other candidates out there are viewed as being better than you are. As you sit at home, in a panicking dervish of anxious hope, those “better candidates” are taking internship offers and planning an awesome summer. Yes, this eliminates a few internship possibilities for you, but it also means that several other places that were banking on the Golden God/Goddess candidate are now looking for their Plan B. In some cases, you might be that Plan B. In other cases, they run out of options that are available and they might re-post the position. This gives you another shot to apply for something you might have missed or bypassed on your first salvo of applications.
(You might not like it if you think your next internship sees you like this, but consider it a chance to prove them wrong.)
I know this all sounds like, “Hey, you might not be all that good, but you might be the best of the really lousy candidates left after all the good kids take the good jobs,” but that’s not the point. Yeah, you can look at this like you’re some kind of damaged goods if you want, but it’s better to think about it this way: You want the internship and the experience that goes with it, so suck it up, check your ego and apply to be someone else’s “good enough” option.
There’s a huge benefit to this: The ceiling on how impressive you can be is really unlimited. You have the ability to prove to them that you are awesome and you probably are better than whoever it was from the Almighty Deity School of Journalism and Perfection that turned them down. Plus, nothing makes someone work harder, stronger and faster than a really big chip on the shoulder.
Don’t Be This Candidate:
You might find yourself wondering “Why?” when it comes to the lack of communication from your potential internship suitors. This is where it helps to go back through your materials. In one case, someone didn’t get the gig because they mis-typed their phone number on their resume and people couldn’t get a hold of her. In another case, the applicant’s package never made it and he was too bashful to check in on the process. Then there are candidates like the ones this pro described:
And for the love of all things holy, please ask them to read their resumes over numerous times for errors, have someone else do it, and then do it again. I just threw out one for calling the Huffington Post the Huntington Post and another for spelling her own school’s name incorrectly.
This is why it pays to edit the hell out of your resume and cover letter before you send it off. (I screwed up and misspelled the name of editor on my cover letter, but he hired me anyway. Conversely, I saw Teryl toss one of the applications away when the person wrote “Dear Mr. Franklin” to her in the salutation. It’s dicey out there.) It also would help to have someone look over it for you, preferably someone whose not just going to say, “Wow! You’re great! Now can we go to the bar?”
If you turned out to be the person who screwed up in one of these ways, it will be in your best interest to figure that out before you have to send stuff out again.
Either bill, if passed, would face immediate court challenges.
(Editor’s note: Turns out, I ended up mixing some of the things from this bill into the post from Monday about that bill, as an article I was referencing touched on both bills. As I was going through it, I didn’t realize there were TWO stupid First Amendment attacks happening in Florida at the same time. I clearly should have known better. I’ve made the edits to the prior post.)
New York Times v. Sullivan is a 1964 Supreme Court case that established the “actual malice” standard that public figures have to prove in order to win a defamation suit. It essentially gives publishers a little leeway in regard to unintentional errors that could end up in story on these folks, thus emboldening journalists to more vigorously pursue investigative reporting that could expose things public officials might not want exposed.
The bill goes much further than this attempt to hobble the press. It makes it clear that the new defamation rules would also apply to any single “utterance on the internet,” which could mean a tweet or a Facebook post written by anyone, or “any one presentation to an audience,” which could include statements made at school board hearings and other public meetings.
In a direct attack on a key aspect of free expression, it says that whenever someone is accused of discriminating against others on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation, that accusation is automatically considered enough to sue for defamation. Any person accused of bigotry based on sexual orientation or gender identity could file a defamation lawsuit and be virtually guaranteed of winning by saying the discrimination was based on personal religious or scientific beliefs. The penalty for calling someone a bigot would be a minimum of $35,000.
My friend noted a conversation with First Amendment advocates, who explained that media outlets have already heard that their libel insurance premiums could skyrocket or that the insurance could be canceled entirely. In my reading of the Times’ analysis, this thing would also likely turn every social media platform in to Libel-palooza, especially give way in which even the most careful among us do or say stuff online that could qualify as defamation.
And if you’ve spent 6 seconds on any social media platform, you know most folks are about as safe and careful as a drunk bomb-diffusing expert.
If you’re thinking, “Hey, this is just in Florida. I live in (fill in a more enlightened state that prizes free expression). Why should I care?” my buddy has a pretty solid answer:
Yeah, this is just Florida, and we’re a hot mess in a dumpster fire. But if these tactics work here, they’ll surely be exported to where you live.
He’s totally right, but also it might not matter where you live if DeSantis pulls this off, because this bill will run the risk of becoming Federal law.
Here’s the obvious path this thing will go:
DeSantis signs this into law.
First Amendment advocates will fight it.
It will weave it’s way through the court system and eventually land in the Supreme Court of the United States.
And that’s the goal: Take your shot while you have the odds in your favor in an attempt to kill something you don’t like and that prevents you from doing things you wouldn’t want other people to see.
This is one situation we all should keep an eye on.
One of the biggest hidden gems in education is the media program at Northwest Missouri State University. The program there has had a ton of success with student media outlets, often securing the top awards available through CMA, ACP and others. The place also boasts great journalism educators, including at least two CMA Hall of Famers, and a ton of great young talent.
This week’s stop along 
