Awkward ’90s Reference

Cleveland Plain Dealer honcho Chris Quinn took time out of his busy schedule to crap all over journalism schools about their views on AI, despite not actually knowing their views on AI

I hope the computer-based journalism helpers Chris Quinn is putting his faith in work better than the Cleveland Plain Dealer website. I tried to buy a subscription to view his diatribe about journalism schools and AI, only to have a spinning wheel of death show up for about a day or so…

THE LEAD: Chris Quinn, the VP of content for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, took a victory lap over the weekend, bragging about how he removed the writing requirements associated with journalism via “AI specialists,” while also telling journalism schools they suck:

Because we want reporters gathering information, these jobs are 100 percent reporting. We have an AI rewrite specialist who turns their material into drafts. We fact-check everything. Editors review it. Reporters get the final say. Humans — not AI — control every step.

By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week. They’re spending it on the street — doing in-person interviews, meeting sources for coffee. That’s where real stories emerge, and they’re returning with more ideas than we can handle.

<SNIP>

Journalism programs are decades behind. Many graduating students have unrealistic expectations. They imagine themselves as long-form magazine storytellers, chasing a romanticized version of journalism that largely never existed.

That’s what they’re taught.

 

DISSECTION TIME, PART I: Let’s look at both Quinn’s arguments as well as take some time to disprove them, starting with his view of students and journalism programs:

The Strawman Student: Quinn’s piece begins with an exemplar of how students suck these days, especially because we teach them poorly at every journalism school in the country:

A college student withdrew from consideration for a reporting role in our newsroom this week because of how we use artificial intelligence.

It reminded me again how college journalism programs are failing to prepare students for the workforce.

I don’t have a reason to doubt Quinn that this kid exists, but I also have no reason to trust him. I’d like to see the withdrawal letter/email/voicemail the kid sent and I’d probably also like to talk to the kid.

See, Chris, sometimes people tell you stuff that isn’t true, like “I really wish I could make it to your party” or “The break up isn’t about you, it’s about me” or “It happens to a lot of guys and it’s not a big deal.”

Maybe this kid didn’t want to work for someone who saw their role in the newsroom as feeding grist into a mill for a robot overlord. Maybe they actually enjoyed writing, so giving up the part of the job they like wasn’t worth it to them. Maybe, and I say this as a huge fan of the sports teams, they didn’t want to move to Cleveland.

Could be a lot of things, but blaming it solely on your AI policy helps you nicely set up your argument that journalism schools suck.

 

The Incorrect Overgeneralizations: The bigger problem here is the leap from this one kid not liking something to all journalism programs failing all of the kids out there all of the time. Even if we pretend that this one alleged kid was so allegedly horrified at the Plain Dealer’s amazing-as-hell AI set up that they had to pull out immediately, it doesn’t follow that all kids in all schools are taught to hate AI. This is called negative social stereotyping.

Even if that feels like a bit of hyperbole, let’s at least agree that not every kid who comes out of a program is the exact same in terms of quality, maturity and expectations.

Also, I think we can agree that not every journalism program is created equal, so while the kids at University A might be using smudge pots to ward off the evil spirits used to power AI, kids at University B might be getting some good data journalism help, transcription services and other goodies, courtesy of AI.

Then again, maybe we can’t agree, given this generalization:

Like many students we’ve spoken with in the past year, this one had been told repeatedly by professors that AI is bad. We heard the same thing at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Cleveland in August. Student after student said it.

Chris, did you bother to dig a bit deeper on this, because there are a few nuances that merit consideration. First, who were these professors? Were they in journalism or were they in departments where they’ve gotten used to grading 500-word essays that AI can now crank out in 18 seconds, thus putting the fear of God into these people?

What kind of AI was under discussion? Traditional AI? Generative AI? Did the professors state that certain AI programs are less helpful than others, or that relying solely on whatever content AI puked up was dangerous from a fact-based standpoint?

Did the professors explain the “black box” and “hallucination” concerns about AI? Did the professors show them example after example after example of how AI completely screwed the pooch, thus trying to help them see that you can’t just turn it loose and hope for the best? 

I’m also curious, given your disdain for journalism programs, where did the amazing Hannah Drown and Molly Walsh garner their educational pedigree that mixed the poli sci, business and non-profit knowledge you desperately want kids to have?

Oh… Yeah…

Given their background, I’m wondering how Hannah and Molly feel about this proud declaration you made:

Fortunately for those of us who know exactly what skills we need in applicants, AI has altered the landscape so dramatically that we don’t need journalism school grads.

We don’t need any damned JOURNALISM GRADUATES… Except, of course, the two we hired to do this work that we’re so proud of…

 

The Erroneous View of J-Schools: I’d like to know how many journalism programs Quinn visited in the past five years. A five-year span would cover the time frame where artificial intelligence would have become relevant enough for schools to start embracing a relatively stable set of AI tools.

I’d put the over/under at about three schools, and I’d advise people to take the under.

There are likely colleges that are shunning AI, but clearly many more are embracing specific aspects of these tools.

CUNY has an entire AI Journalism lab for professionals to come back and learn the ropes. Northeastern University is diving into the research and practical ends of AI with its AI Literacy Lab. The Medill School at Northwestern University has its Knight Lab to work on AI and media. Arizona State University has put a ton of resources into its work on AI and news innovation. University of Northern Colorado built a production course that teaches students how to meld AI and journalism effectively.

Stanford, UCLA, Atlantic International University, Florida and Columbia are just a few of the other schools that have Journalism-based AI courses on the books, and those are just the ones I found on through a cursory search. That’s not even counting all the programs (ours here included) that have infused AI into the current courses we have, so we can demonstrate the value of the tools while we teach caution as well.

(NOTE: If your school or your class does some AI stuff, feel free to pipe up in the comments section. I bet we could really make a run at the record for most comments on the blog.)

I not only teach about artificial intelligence in my classrooms, but I also include chapters on it in my books and provide basic exercises to educators that showcase its strengths and weaknesses.

What we have here is a collection of facts, supported by links to additional information. I’d like to think that’s a bit stronger case than Chris Quinn’s “Old Man Yells at Cloud” approach to generalizing about what’s wrong with journalism schools today.

 

The “Road Less Traveled” Advice: Quinn’s ignorant view on J-school is problematically compounded by his educational suggestions for kids who want to enter his glorious newsroom:

If you’re a student considering journalism, I’d skip that degree. Study political science. Learn technology. Understand how government, businesses and nonprofits work. Take communications law and ethics as electives. Skip much of the rest.

 

Got it. Just like you did back in the day! Right, Chris? Oh… Wait…

I don’t know if he’s going to be on College of Media and Communication Dean David Boardman’s Christmas card list this year, but I’d love to see Boardman’s reaction to this column… 

 

Aside from the “do as I say, not as I did” thing, if I wanted to tank a kid’s future, I’d pretty much tell that kid to do exactly what Quinn is saying here.

Technology changes so rapidly that whatever the kid learned in freshman year would likely be obsolete by graduation. You can learn tools, but it’s important to know the broader ways in which they should be applied to further your skills and connect with your audience. For example, in my day, we didn’t major in Quark XPress. We majored in design, used the tool in conjunction with our broader understanding of the field and then adapted to technology changes.

In addition, there’s a reason the phrase “Why try? Go Poli Sci” is still heard in the halls of many academic institutions. It’s also much more likely to be in the “paper law” as opposed to the “trial law” end of the spectrum. I’m not saying a certificate, minor or even double major in this is field is bad, particularly if you want to take your media skills into the political realm. However, you’re not making it to a newsroom solely on a steady diet of Politics and Genocide or Western European Politics courses.

I’d also like to know where Quinn thinks students are getting their interviewing skills, their social media experience or their general reporting knowledge in this newly formed major he’s promoting here.

Being forced to meet people takes effort, particularly based on how today’s generation of students has grown up in a digital-first, post-pandemic, borderline-anthropophobic world. Research suggests that nearly 45 percent of Gen Z men have never asked someone out on a date in person, so if Quinn is assuming this fresh crop of potential folks can do this without some reporting courses (still a thing) or other forced socialization, I’ve got some unfortunate news for him.

Also, com law might not matter much any more, if what’s happening in the real world is any indication…

 

DISSECTION TIME, PART II:  With that out of the way, let’s pick apart Quinn’s views on artificial intelligence and the glorious way in which it has drastically improved his newsroom:

AI! It’s FANTASTIC! (Usually):  Quinn has gone all-in on AI, which is always dangerous when it comes to a new technology. Actually, it’s usually dangerous in any situation, given that most new ideas suffer a lot of growing pains before they eventually become valuable, but so much less so than what was expected.

Still, he’s a fan:

Artificial intelligence is not bad for newsrooms. It’s the future of them. It already allows us to be faster, more thorough and more comprehensible. It frees time for what matters most: gathering facts and developing stories to serve you.

Anyone entering this field should be immersing themselves in AI.

I’ll buy faster, but I’m not entirely sold on the other descriptors here, given what we’ve seen AI mess up already. Dare I say Quinn is “chasing a romanticized version” of this technological marvel.

AI has fouled up a ton of content in some pretty awkward ways, including calling a guy “useless” in his own obituary, misnaming the city in which an NFL team resides, cliche-festing local sports stories and screwing up an entire development plan in a local news story. That’s not counting the number of times people got tricked by AI sources or generally misled by AI-generated content.

 

Words, Words, Words…: Quinn seems to take an almost perverse level of pride in how much content his staff members can grab and how none of them has to do any actual writing any more:

By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week. They’re spending it on the street — doing in-person interviews, meeting sources for coffee. That’s where real stories emerge, and they’re returning with more ideas than we can handle.

I get that it’s important to do deeper reporting, spend more time with sources and connect with the communities journalists cover. However, the question becomes, “How much of all that good will and strong effort is wasted if you just toss everything in an AI blender and then watch the content move along like you’re “Laverne and Shirley” at the Shotz Brewery?”

Plus, and maybe Quinn doesn’t give a damn, but I’ve found that when I invest a lot in the reporting, I tend to care about the story I want to tell. That usually leads to some stronger, more engaging pieces based on well-crafted writing.

Being a writer isn’t a negative, particularly if you want to write for the benefit of an audience that is interested in what you have to say. I think I’m qualified to say that, given everything I sit down to write has me thinking, “Who would want to read this and what would they want to know?”

I’m not sure if AI has gotten to that point yet, but I know good writers have.

 

Quantity over Quality: I forget what movie it was in, but there was a scene in which prisoners were told, “We’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that all we have for your dinner tonight is horse manure.” When someone asks, “So what’s the good news?” the official replied, “There’s plenty of it.”

Which brings us back to the Plain Dealer’s Bin of AI Content…

A quick look at the list of stories Hannah Drown put together recently provides some sense of the quantity. Each day she appears to be on the job, a handful or more stories with her byline show up. She’s got coverage of events at the Lorain County Junior Vocational School, a UAW strike in the area, a pop-up shop at the Lorain Community College, a school lockout in Elyria and more. The volume is there.

The quality, however, leaves something to be desired.

These are mostly stories that could have easily come from a press release rewrite, featuring a “Hey, come check out this new thing” approach. These lack depth and nuance, not to mention any level of critical thought. The stories have overly long sentences, generally lack flow and are as dry as a popcorn fart.

For all the bragging Quinn does about reporters getting a chance to sit with sources, meet for coffee and chat these people up, most of the content comes straight from documents, not people. A look through more than a dozen of these pieces revealed virtually no direct quotes or specific references to interviews with these salt-of-the-earth individuals.

For example, a story about a school teacher who donated bone marrow to a complete stranger half a world away would seem to be exactly the kind of piece that would engage readers through amazing storytelling. Instead, we get this lead:

LORAIN, Ohio — Valentine’s Day usually arrives with candy hearts and roses, but this year, one of the clearest acts of love connected to the holiday came without flowers at all.

We get no direct information from the teacher about the experience, nothing from the folks at the National Marrow Donor Program talking about the value of the program and nothing from people who have had their lives saved through some of these selfless acts.

The story has zero quotes in it and reads like a “how-to manual” for getting on the bone marrow registry and donating it to someone. Boring doesn’t begin to cover it.

I’m not entirely sure I can blame Drown for this, as it is her job to just shovel content into the front end of the pipeline. It’s also not stated to what degree AI did any work on this (or any other) piece in her clip file, which I’d consider a bit of an ethical concern.

What I can say is that if my name were on these things, I’d want the writing to be a lot better than it is. As we’ve noted before, AI essentially creates an average of EVERYTHING it takes in, regardless of quality, and this definitely feels like “C” writing.

What goes unsaid in Quinn’s magnum opus is that people now have an abundance of media outlets at their disposal that provide vast sums of content. Journalists have to grab people by the eyeballs and hang onto them in a way that distinguishes their work from the noise.

This is where quality writing and keen storytelling come into play and where the generic “held a meeting” leads that AI can churn out will fail.

(FINAL NOTE: I’m sure Quinn would be horrified at the amount of time I spent writing this piece, given his “crank ‘er out” philosophy. I’m fine with it, though, because I believe dedication to one’s craft matters a lot, even if the point is just to tell someone they’re full of crap.)

Four things to know to keep your first media writing class from sucking (A throwback post)

I ran into one of the students from my upcoming media writing class the other day. She’s a graduating senior who’s taking it as an elective for her marketing degree, so I asked what she’d heard about the class and why she wanted to take it.

“I heard it’s hard as hell,” she said. “I also heard it was amusing. I’m taking it because I love to write and I need to write better.”

She then asked if we were doing a lot of writing, to which I obviously replied yes, but with a caveat: “We write a ton, but it’s not like the classes where you’re writing 25-page papers on some obscure topic. In fact, the first assignment you’ll write for a grade is going to be one sentence long, but it’ll take you three class periods to do it.”

Her face turned blank. “That’s a lot of pressure for one sentence. I mean, if I could write more than that, I could probably make it work better…”

“Better for you or better for the people who would want to read it?” I asked her.

Blank again. “Aw…”

And so we start another great semester, remembering a few ways for your students to really get something good out of a class that they probably aren’t really ready to experience:

 

Four things to know to keep your first media writing class from sucking

With the close of the Labor Day weekend, it’s a safe bet that most students reading this will be starting the fall semester or have just started it (apologies to those of you who are on trimesters or who just have a ridiculously early start date). When we start this week, I know I’ll be face to face with another fresh crop of students experiencing their first media writing class and I can already smell the anxiety.

For those of you students in a similar boat, in that you’ll be taking your first media writing or reporting class, here are four things to know from the start so that your experience will be less painful:

Your work will suck for a while: One of the most difficult things about going into media writing is how frustrating it can be for people who have always been good writers. People who struggled to write? They tend to have an easier time with it, even though that sounds counter-intuitive.

Let’s call the rationale behind this the “Michael Jordan Plays Baseball” Theory. In 1993, Michael Jordan had cemented his place as the best basketball player in the world. He had just led the Bulls to a “three-peat” as NBA champions and he won the MVP award in each of those finals. In October of that year, he retired from basketball and decided to try playing baseball. He’s a super star athlete, he’s in his prime and he never stunk at anything, so this shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Wrong.

Jordan played for Double-A Birmingham Barons and to quote Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller, “He couldn’t hit a curve ball with an ironing board.” Eventually, he got his first hit, his first run batted in and so forth. Even though he only hit .202 for the season, his manager (Terry Francona) said that he improved and could have been a major leaguer if he had committed to it. Instead, Jordan went back to basketball, much to the chagrin of everyone who wasn’t a Bulls fan.

The point is, you have always written well, but this is a different kind of writing and you’re going to suck at it for a while. All the things you used to have at your disposal that worked well won’t always fit into this style of writing. The format, the verbiage and the overall approach are all different, so get used to the feeling of falling on your keys for a while.

 

Learn from your screw ups:  I have this conversation at least once a semester:

Student: “I was wondering why I got such a bad grade on this piece.”
Me: “OK. Did my comments on the paper not make sense to you?”
Student: “I didn’t really read those. I just saw my grade and kind of freaked out.”

Look, I love writing, but writing out tons of comments on a story that was so bad it sapped my will to live, only to have the student ignore them all isn’t my idea of a good time. The whole purpose behind instructors writing comments on papers isn’t so that we have some sort of ground to stand on when an annoying student sues us over a grade. The idea is that we want you to learn something, so we tell you what went wrong so you don’t do it again.

As painful as it is to read the bloody mess of red ink that adorns your paper, dig into it. Learn what didn’t work so you don’t do it again. If you still don’t understand what you did wrong after you look your paper over, be proactive and meet with the instructor. Trust me, we love reading well-written papers so the more help we can give you on the front end, the less Advil we’ll need when we have to grade stuff.

 

Care more about the skills than the grade: If you would like to cause your instructor to have a “Scanners” moment every single day, make sure to ask two questions at the end of every class:

  1. “Do you know what my grade is?”
  2. “Is this going to be on the test?”

 

I get that grades matter for some things beyond the classroom: Scholarships, sports eligibility, having mom and dad not disown you… But seriously, once you are done with school, nobody is going to care about your grades, least of all you.

I can remember exactly three grades from my entire academic career:

  1. C-double-minus in penmanship from Mrs. Schutten in third grade. (The rule at that time was that if you got a D, they held you back, and although I was smart enough to pass everything else that year, my penmanship was godawful and she wanted to make absolutely sure I knew that.)
  2. C in Media Law in my junior year of college. (I skipped six weeks of class [long story] and was really, really bad at this whole concept. I prayed out loud for a C to pass during the final. I received applause, much to the chagrin of the instructor.)
  3. A in my first news writing class. (The only reason I remember this is because I wanted so damned badly to impress the instructor that I poured everything I had into that class.)

Beyond that, it’s a long alphabetic blur that ceases to have any value to me. If you focus on just doing stuff to get the grades, you’ll miss out on the skills you need to learn to make yourself marketable once you graduate. Even if you don’t see the point in what you are doing at the time, learn the heck out of the skills and practice them. Case in point:

At the end of the day, the skills will follow you and they will translate from job to job. Nobody, however, is ever going to say to you in a job interview, “So, it looks like you’re a perfect candidate, but let’s talk about this C+ in feature writing…”

Now is the time to care: I’ve told this to students before and it’s the best bit of advice I can possibly give you for any class:

Instead of saying, “I need this class (to graduate, to move on in the major or whatever)!” to your professor after you screwed up your work and you have no hope of getting out alive, say “I need this class (to graduate, to move on in the major or whatever)!” to yourself every day from the beginning of the semester and act accordingly.

Have a great semester and knock ’em dead.

Get the name of the dog and the brand of the beer: Why details matter in journalism.

I have no idea who said it first, but I always attribute my first exposure to the journalism maxim in the headline to the legendary George Hesselberg from the Wisconsin State Journal. It’s become one of those things like, “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out,” where we all heard it from somewhere and it relates to a larger truth about our field. (Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark even wanted to name his book, “Get the Name of the Dog,” so trust me, if you haven’t heard it before, it’s out there.)

It popped up in my mind a couple times this week, particularly after Indiana won the national championship on Monday and a reporter asked coach Curt Cignetti about his reference to cracking open a cold one in celebration:

Aside from giving a massive platform to Upland Brewery in Bloomington, Indiana, and earning himself a lifetime supply of suds to boot, Cignetti helped fill in a detail that would likely make for a great story or 500 the next day.

Despite my father’s theory that the difference between a good beer and a bad beer is three of them, the brands of beer can convey a lot about the person drinking them and how they perceive themselves.

Consider this scene from the original “The Fast and The Furious:”

Rob Cohen, who directed the first film, said he felt Corona had the L.A. vibe he was going for with the film, so he put it in. In spite of not paying a dime for that product placement, Corona ended up with more than $15 million in free advertising throughout the series.

(SIDE NOTE: I’m working on a “Snide Guide to Beer Choice” that falls along the line of the “Bitter Personal Analysis of Your Font Choices” that we did a few years back. We’ll see if it gets there…)

Another reason I thought of that maxim came when I saw this press release from the local fire department:

The lack of a name for the dog isn’t the only problem with this release, as it’s got a number of holes that leave me scratching my head:

How bad is it? We can argue what “heavy” means and what it doesn’t, but I always have trouble when I’m faced with a comparative term instead of a concrete one. Think about it like this: The word “tall” is comparative. Are you tall at 6-foot-1? Well, if you’re in a kindergarten class, you’re a giant. If you’re on an NBA team, you’re a point guard at best.

This is where details matter: If you told me the house was uninhabitable due to that damage, I’d be closer to understanding how heavy it was. If you told me how much damage was done via a financial estimate (The fire caused $150,000 damage.), I’d be closer as well. If you told me the house and its contents were a total loss, I’d be OK as well. However, we lack details to fully understand this.

What else can you tell me about the house? I’ve got a two-story wood-framed dwelling, but that’s it. We tend to measure houses based on size (square footage) or rooms (a four-bedroom, two-bath home). That gives us a size of scope. It’s also important to understand if this was packed among a dozen other homes or by itself.

I did a quick Zillow search to see what I could find and this gave me a better sense of what we’re looking at. Still, we need a bit more help here than, “It was a house. It was on fire.”

The occupants: The first time we hear about them, we hear they weren’t home when this happened. Then, we find out that they apparently were given shelter at Jeff’s on Rugby, which is a local eating establishment. What I don’t know is how many there are, who they are or when they showed up. I also don’t know what’s going to happen to them next.

I understand that not all of this would have likely made any press release from the fire folks, but it is information I would expect to see in a story of any kind on this topic, as these are the details people likely want to know.

To that end, here are a few tips:

Get as many details as you can, sort them out later: I always assumed that a good editor was going to put me through the paces on what I had and what I didn’t have while they read my story. I remember at least one case where Hess himself asked me if I knew the names of the parents of a kid who had passed. I didn’t, and I really should have, so I had to go back out and get them somehow.

In another case, I had someone ask a coroner what was the caliber of the gun used to kill someone on campus. While that might seem prurient or pointless, I wanted to know because some guns make bigger noises than others when fired and supposedly “nobody heard anything” while this incident was taking place.

For all the times we ask really stupid questions like, “Your husband just died in a giant pork processing machine… How do you feel about that?” the least we can do is ask for details that might lead us to better storytelling later.

 

Put yourself in the shoes of the reader: One of the best exercises we do each year is a fire brief, in which we have the class members each write a short piece off of a fire department press release similar to this one. They almost all read exactly like this release.

Then, I’ll ask one of the kids in the class, “Let’s say you go home after class and your roommate says, ‘Hey, your mom was trying to reach you. There was a fire at your house.'” What would you most want to know FIRST?

The answers become obvious:

  • Is anyone dead or hurt?
  • How bad was the fire?
  • What the heck happened?

Then, we go back to the releases and start reading them aloud and they realize they either didn’t include ANY of that stuff or they put it in the wrong spots.

One of the best ways to get journalism done well is to think of the people for whom you are doing it. Start with their needs and interests and work backwards into your reporting.

EXERCISE TIME: Go pull a press release or a story and look for places where you think key details are missing. It could be “How many kids were in the class that won the award?” or “What made it harder to de-ice the roads this time?” It could even be, “So was it a Diet Coke or a Diet Pepsi?” See what’s not there and make a case for reasons you would want those details.

Four Questions To Help Journalism Professors Rethink Finals

I’m sure it really feels like this when taking the exams in some courses, particularly when you forget that just because you didn’t show up for 21 class periods, it doesn’t mean we didn’t talk about anything that day… 

Whoever said this is the “most wonderful time of the year” clearly wasn’t a college student or professor. As the winter semester comes to a crashing conclusion, papers come flying in at the last minute, pleas for extensions clog email in-boxes and exam cheating operations make James Bond plots look simplistic by comparison.

If you could bottle the tension and stress in your average college at this point in the term, you could power every car Elon ever built for the rest of time.

Finals week always bothered me for a number of reasons, which I explained to a student last week:

“Essentially, each class you take is choosing the exact same time to have you complete one of the most difficult and comprehensive parts of the class, thus spreading you incredibly thin and almost guaranteeing you won’t be capable of putting forth your best effort. In addition, each of these parts carry with them an extremely high percentage of your grade, all at a time in which you have the least amount of time or motivation to complete them. Oh, and it’s highly likely you’re either sick or getting sick and you have everyone on earth asking you to tell them when they can expect to see you for the holidays.”

I get that comprehensive finals in a single time period is a tradition, but then again so was throwing a virgin into a volcano for a while. I also understand that these kinds of exams are crucial for certain fields, like nursing. The last thing you want is to be assigned a nurse who tells you, “Oh, yeah, I bombed the final on passing medication to patients, but it was only 10 percent of my grade and I made up for it with some extra discussion points. Now, which of these little blue thingies am I supposed to give you?”

That said, in journalism and other media-related fields, we aren’t in a life-or-death situation and I often wonder why we feel it necessary to back load courses with these monstrous projects, papers and exams. As a result, many years ago, I shifted a few things around when it came to finals in an attempt to address some of the flaws in the system I listed above.

Here are a few questions that led me to certain choices I made, especially in regard to my media writing and reporting courses. I don’t know if they’ll change anyone else’s mind but I’d like to think they’re worth pondering:

 

Should it be a paper, a project or a test? Ask 100 students what they prefer for a final assessment of their work and you’ll get a wide array of answers. Professors tend to break things down into final papers, final projects or final exams, each of which can be dialed in based on the type of class they are teaching and to what degree each method best assesses learning.

And of course there are those of us who do whatever requires us to do the least amount of grading while we’re grading 112,001 other things at that point in the semester.

There are a number of reasons to reconsider whatever it is we’re doing for this grand finale. Term papers used to be a bulwark against cheating on tests, but with AI, that’s no longer the case.

Exams used to give professors more control, but with the broad range of special accommodations available to students, it can feel more variable than ever.

Group projects always seem like a good idea, until the whole process feels like trying to herd cats and there always ends up being one kid who basically has to “LeBron” the whole thing to get it over the finish line.

Given all of this, it’s a pretty good idea to do a few pro/con lists on these options.

 

Does this need to be cumulative? In a lot of cases, tests do need to be a full recounting of the entire semester. However, not every class has that need, and to make a test cumulative actually draws attention away from whatever you were doing in the second half or final third of the course (depending on if you do midterm and final or five-week, 10-week, final exams).

In my media-writing classes, we don’t do cumulative exams, per se, in that if they ask for multiple choice questions, they don’t have to cover the entire pile of content we discussed. Obviously, there is some level of “culmination” going on, in that when they’re writing, it takes into account all the things we learned about writing. I can’t have a kid writing sentences without a verb in them because, “Well, we covered verbs in the first half of class and you said this wasn’t cumulative.”

 

How much should this be worth? When I was an undergrad many years ago, I took a class I absolutely loved on Greek mythology. The professor was engaging, the TAs were great and I still have the text packets in my house somewhere to this day.

What I didn’t love was the final, as it was somewhere in the range of 50-60 percent of the course grade and it was insane. The guy brought in 100 slides for a slide projector and each slide contained a piece of pottery, a sculpture or a mural that depicted some aspect of Greek myth. We had to write a short block of text for each one that identified and explained each myth.

About 100 slides, 120 minutes and several blue books later, I realized that I could itch my right elbow with my right hand, thanks to the massive writing cramps I had just experienced.

To this day, I still see almost no point in doing this to a group of students. A class that covered 16 weeks basically came down to a two-hour block of time for no real reason. Also, the professor had people scouting the place like Secret Service agents, seeking out potential cheaters because so much of the grade relied on this one element.

So there were three inherent problems associated with this approach:

  1. Students could either save or kill their grade with one “Hail Mary” throw to the heavens.
  2. The incentive to cheat was magnified because this thing was worth so much of the grade.
  3. Nothing I was asked to do in that exam proved anything, other than I could write with my hand in excruciating pain.

Once I became a professor, I identified another problem: Me.

For starters, I realized as much as the kids weren’t on their game, thanks to the deluge of work they were facing, neither was I. After digging through a massive mound of exams or papers or whatever, I found that after 85 kids did a specific stupid thing, I was really likely to take out my frustration on the 86th kid who did it as well.

I might have been sharp on the first couple dozen papers while spotting AP errors, but some tired eyes might let a few compound modifier issues slip later. Maybe a spelling issue slipped by on the first couple, but I figured it out later and thus there was an imbalance of fairness.

All of this led me to decide having a mega-final wasn’t really a great idea, so I started cutting back on the percentage of the course value any final project was worth. It made it easier on the kids, who could then dedicate more time to other finals that were significantly overvalued. It also made it easier on me, so that I didn’t feel like I was disarming a bomb with every point I was deducting or adding.

 

What’s the value in the exercise? I have found over the years that students will dislike a lot of things I do. It’s the nature of the beast, particularly when I’m teaching media writing to people who either a) hate writing and don’t want to do it or b) have always been told they are god-like in their writing, only to find out that they aren’t.

Still, in spite of all of the complaints, I’ve rarely gotten students saying what I had them do was unfair or pointless. I’d like to think the reason for that is because I make sure to tell them the point of what they’re doing as they’re doing it.

My reporting kids have called my midterm “The Midterm from Hell,” but they all seem to survive it and they learn something. In this case, they learn how to operate under tight deadline constraints, work around unforeseen problems and generally that journalism is never done, it’s just due. They aren’t thrilled, but they get it.

One of the PR classes I took over had a group project built into it and I thought about scrapping it due to issues of fairness. (Read: I was always the kid who had to “LeBron” the thing at the last minute because I wasn’t going to lose my grade because Beavis McGee decided he wanted to repeatedly clear a six-foot bong  this weekend instead of writing up his part of the project.)

However, in talking to the professor of the class, she explained that group-based work (particularly when forced to work with people you don’t agree with) in PR was crucial to being a functional member of an agency. So, I kept it and explained that to the kids. It seems to have worked, as there was less grumbling than I would have expected.

I tend to think that everything I do in class has a purpose, which is why I hold myself to the standard that I need to tell a student why something is valuable if they ask why they need to do it. If I can’t fully explain why I’m doing what I’m doing, I can’t expect buy in from the students at any level. At that point, it just feels like I’m a kid chasing ants around with a magnifying glass on a sunny day.

So, in the case of an exam, what’s the point? Do I want them memorizing things so they can recite them on the spot? If so, why is that important? Do I want them analyzing a social media post for errors. If so, what can they do with that later in their school or professional careers? Do I want them writing under deadline pressure? If so, how will this improve them as they prepare for life outside of school?

A final exam, paper or project needs to have that “This matters because…” explanation or the whole thing is likely doomed from the start.

 

I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on this or if you have a strategy for finals that goes a different way. Feel free to post in the comments below.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Cliche-mas in journalistic writing (A Throwback Post)

Stop it. Just stop it. And don’t you dare call me a Grinch, either… 

It’s not that I don’t want a Christmas miracle or a white Christmas or a bit of holiday cheer. And if I had but one holiday wish, as I got a kiss under the mistletoe, it would be this:

“Journalists, please stop using cliches.”

With that in mind, here is a throwback post that looks at more than a few of them…

‘Tis the season to kill these 17 holiday cliches that will land you on the naughty list and get you coal in your stocking

The holiday season brings a lot of things to a lot of people, including family, gifts, joy and faith. Unfortunately for journalists, it also brings a ton of horrible, well-worn phrases that sap your readers’ will to live.

I tapped into the hivemind of jaded journos who were nice enough to come up with their least favorite holiday cliches. Avoid these like you avoid the kid in class with a cough, runny nose and pink-eye:

Turkey Day: The event is called Thanksgiving, so give thanks for journalists who don’t use this cliche. In fact, it took almost 300 years for turkey to become a staple of this event, so you might as well call it “Venison Thursday,” if you’re trying to be accurate.

T-Day: Regardless of if you are “turkey perplexed” or not, you’re compounding the problem with the above cliche with simple laziness. That, and you’re really going to create some panic among distracted news viewers in the military.

‘tis the season: According to a few recent stories, ’tis the season for car break-ins, holiday entertaining,  to propose marriage, to get bugs in your kitchen and to enjoy those Equal Employment Opportunity Commission year-end reports!

The White Stuff: Unless you are in a “Weird Al” cover band or running cocaine out of Colombia, you can skip this one.

A white Christmas: The only people who ever enjoyed a white Christmas were bookies, Bing Crosby’s agent and weather forecasters who appear to be on some of “the white stuff.”

Ho-ho-ho: It’s ho-ho-horrible how many pointless uses of this phrase turn up on a simple news search on Google. None of these things are helped by the inclusion of this guttural noise.

On the naughty list: The toys “on the naughty list” in this story “all have some type of hazard that could send a child to the hospital. The majority pose a choking hazard but parents should be aware of strangulation, burns, eye injuries, and more.” Including a cliche diminishes the seriousness of this a bit. Also, don’t use this with crime stories around the holidays: The first person to find a story that says Senate candidate Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. or Kevin Spacey landed “on the naughty list,” please send it to me immediately for evisceration.

Charlie Brown tree: Spoken of as something to avoid. You mean you want to avoid having a tree that demonstrated looks aren’t everything and that tries to capture the true deeper meaning of Christmas? Yep. Can’t have that stuff.

“Christmas starts earlier every year…” : Easter, maybe. Christmas, no. It’s the same time every year. Check your calendar and stop this.

War on Christmas: Be a conscientious objector in this cliched battle, please.

“… found coal in their stockings”: Apply the logic of “on the naughty list” here and you get the right idea. The story on the Air Force getting coal for Christmas after tweeting that Santa wasn’t real could have done without the cliche. Then again, maybe we’d all be better off if the Air Force was right, given the picture included with the story.

Making a list, checking it twice: A all-knowing fat man has a list of people who are naughty and nice and will dole out rewards and punishments accordingly. Sounds cute when it’s Santa, but less so when an editorial is using this to talk about Steve Bannon. Let’s be careful out there…

Grinch: There is probably an inverse relationship between the number of people who try to use this cliche and those who actually get it right. Let’s let John Oliver explain:

Jingle all the way: Nothing warms the heart like an in-depth financial analysis of a multi-national retailer like a random reference to Jingle Bells.

Dashing through the snow: This product pitch isn’t improved by the cliche, but it might help you survive hearing the use of it over and over and over…

It’s beginning to look a lot like…: Well, it apparently looks a lot like Christmas for small businesses, at Honolulu’s city hall, through a $1.5 million investment in lights at a Canadian park, and at a mall in Virginia. It’s also looking a lot like 2006 in the NFC. Oh, and it’s beginning to look a lot like Watergate as well. Get ready with that naughty list and coal, I guess…

The true meaning of…: Nothing says, “I understand and want to engage with my readers” like lecturing them on “the true meaning” of something, whether that is Christmas or a VAD.

Wishing you all the best in this season of cliche…

Vince (The Doctor of Paper)

It’s time for some unpleasant honesty for journalism folks based on the Olivia Nuzzi/Ryan Lizza/RFK Jr. debacle

Believe it or not, this post is still up on Olivia Nuzzi’s X account… 

THE LEAD: As much as I wished this weren’t the case, we aren’t finished learning all the lurid details of the Olivia Nuzzi/Ryan Lizza/RFK Jr. debacle: 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote disgraced political reporter Olivia Nuzzi an outrageously raunchy “poem,” which was dramatically revealed by her ex-fiancé and reporter Ryan Lizza in the second part of his series exposing the secrets of his ethics-challenged ex.

“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,” Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, wrote to Nuzzi in undated texts recounted by Lizza in a piece published on his Substack early Saturday.

The poem was included in Lizza’s second part of his series about the affair between his former fiancee and the current Health and Human Services secretary. The post titled “Part 2: She did it again” is available on Lizza’s Substack.

I’m not linking to it here for three specific reasons:

  1. The piece is behind a paywall and I can’t in good conscience promote this as journalism or something worth spending $10 on. I would rather set fire to a ten dollar bill than pay for whatever the hell is back there.
  2. The teaser paragraphs alone introduced enough “explicit content” that would have my editors at Sage literally having aneurysms.
  3. My mother reads this blog and I don’t know what would be worse if she clicked that link: Having her asking me what certain sexual terms Lizza uses mean or having her tell tell me she completely understood everything and didn’t need a translator.

    Either way, it’d feel like this:

 

THE BACKGROUND: Oh, hell, where to begin?

Nuzzi was booted from her job with New York magazine after her “inappropriate relationship” with RFK Jr. came to light. Nuzzi had written a glowing profile of the Kennedy offspring, while also finding herself infatuated with him to the point of having a long-distance-messaging-with-sexy-photos-but-we-pinky-swear-we-didn’t-bang relationship.

Lizza, Nuzzi’s fiance at the time, who has his own history of icky sex allegations, broke off the engagement and made some very public statements about Nuzzi and this situation.

Both mercifully dropped off the map until this month, when Nuzzi’s “American Canto” book hit the shelves, leading to a “little girl lost” style profile on her by the NY Times. In response to some of the stuff in the book, Lizza took to his Substack to publish a response titled, “Part 1: How I found out.”  In that post, he pulled a “Sixth Sense” twist at the end to reveal his whole “I can’t believe she’s cheating on me” build up wasn’t about RFK, but instead about former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

Meanwhile, Nuzzi is now working for Vanity Fair, and media folks are a-flutter discussing this situation.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: It’s too easy to crap all over Nuzzi, Lizza and everyone else involved in this situation. Right now, this feels like staring at a multiple-vehicle car wreck on the interstate. Instead of taking the easy path, consider the following difficult advice:

 

BASIC ADVICE TO FELLOW EDUCATORS AND MEDIA PROS: We need to be honest with ourselves, the public and our students, even though it really sucks.

Whenever a situation like Nuzzi-gate (as we’re apparently calling it now) pops up, a common refrain that emerges is, “Female journalists don’t sleep with sources.” I know a number of professors, former journalists and current journalists who hate it when this kind of thing happens, because it reinforces thread-bare stereotypes about women and it debases the work quality female journalists have done.

Here’s the problem: Lousy examples exist in almost every field and they create misery for the rest of the folks in that field. I don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s the reality of our surroundings.

Trust me, every time some jagwad professor decides to treat his undergraduates like a sexual charcuterie board, I want to die inside a little. I hate that I find myself second-guessing every interaction I have with students for at least two weeks, wondering if they think I might be “one of those.”

That said, I can’t tell students, “Professors don’t sleep with students,” because despite the ever-present blank stares they give me in class, I know they aren’t completely unaware of reality. I’ve even overheard students I know talking among themselves about skeezy professors hitting on them or their friends.

I also can’t just say, “Well, I don’t do that…” because that’s just really creepy to make them think that I’m thinking that I have to tell them that and too damned specific to make anyone feel better about it. It’s usually why I just shake my head and say, “What the hell is wrong with people?”

In regard to journalism, I’ve met multiple former and current journalists who “engaged in inappropriate sexual relationships” with people they cover. In one case, a local reporter who also worked at a local university was accused of sleeping with someone she had profiled. A friend told me that his wife worked with her years earlier, so I asked what she recalled about the reporter. The response: “Tell Vince she was a whore who occasionally wrote stuff.”

Another friend who worked with this journalist in another newsroom told me the majority of the staff knew about multiple similar indiscretions, so they referred to her by a nickname that merged part of her last name with the word “rabbit.”

In another case, one guy confessed to me that as a student journalist he “accidentally” slept with a student athlete while he was a sports reporter and editor at the student newspaper. The following is my recollection of the conversation:

Him: “Um…” Blank stare. “This is not good, right?”

Me: “Well, I wouldn’t add it to my resume… I don’t get how you “accidentally” slept with her. Did you trip and fall on something?”

Him: “No, I mean I didn’t know she was on the team until just before we… you know…”

Me: “I’ve got so many questions, not the least of which would be, ‘How did her athletic affiliation come up at that exact moment?’ ‘How little did you know about her before you decided to sleep with her that this nugget of information didn’t come up?’ and ‘Did you maybe think about not doing this when you became aware of this situation?'”

It went downhill from there…

I don’t think I’m that special that I knew at least a handful of people who had violated this basic tenet of journalism, so I imagine more than a few other folks reading this have a “Hooo boy…. not good…” story of this nature.

We need to stop pretending that this kind of thing doesn’t happen and be more on point about what we want to say here:

  1. Most journalists do not sleep with sources period, let alone to gain special access for stories. A small number of journalists are bad actors, but to paint all journalists with a wide brush because of them is unfair to those who aren’t.
  2. None of us who don’t violate the rules are thrilled by the people who do, particularly when their actions reinforce negative stereotypes against people who have already had to work harder than they should to make it in the field.
  3. Those of us who take this job seriously are not going to pretend that those people don’t exist, but we are going to make damned sure you know we aren’t like them.

I’m sure there’s a better way to say this, but at least we’re being honest and letting people we aren’t thrilled by this, either.

 

BASIC ADVICE FOR STUDENT JOURNALISTS:  I can’t stress this enough, but for every situation like this, where it seems like the world turns out great by flouting the rules, there are dozens more that are just god-awful disasterbacles that never get a book deal.

Colby Hall of Media-ite made the case that Nuzzi, his DM buddy, really just learned how to play the game based on the way the system has shifted, so we can’t really hold it against her:

The glamorous photo shoots, the Lana Del Rey cosplay with the white Mustang convertible on PCH, the literary ambiguity about Kennedy’s identity in her book, the defiant framing that positions her as a victim bearing witness to power.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: This isn’t tone-deaf. It’s the only move that makes economic sense in 2025.

Nuzzi has correctly read our current media ecosystem. There is no path back to institutional credibility for her—those institutions are dying anyway, and they were never going to reward rule-following in the first place. But there IS a path forward through celebrity, through controversy, through the monetization of scandal itself.

The Vanity Fair job. The book deal. The rehabilitation tour that’s a Klieg light away from what it really wants to be. She’s not trying to rebuild her reputation as a journalist—she’s building a different kind of brand entirely, one where being interesting matters more than being ethical, where attention is the only currency that still spends.

Please don’t buy into that line of thinking. She’s the “it” thing at the moment, but that fades pretty quickly and even if it doesn’t for her, it doesn’t follow it will work for you. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who tried to become a millionaire starting an “Only Fans” account.

As much as it might seem like a great idea to be that rule-breaking, cool-as-hell rebel in the moment, these things don’t end well. As someone who has watched almost every VH1’s “Behind the Music” episode, I can pretty much guarantee short-term career thinking leads to some long-term misery. And unlike video games, you can’t just hit the reset button once things start going bad.

Follow the rules, behave better than the attention-seeking toddler at the grocery store and do the job to the best of your ability. You might not become famous, but that’s likely to be a good thing.

 

BASIC ADVICE TO PROFESSIONAL MEDIA OUTLETS: Watching Vanity Fair hire Nuzzi is like watching pro sports teams picking up troubled players who have talent, arguing that, in their system, the player will thrive. What they fail to realize is that even if the talent is in there somewhere, the human foibles are going to massively undercut it and you’re essentially just buying trouble.

With that in mind, I’m begging you. Stop buying trouble.

First, the juice is rarely ever worth the squeeze. Everyone is out there thinking they are buying the next Hunter S. Thompson. Instead, they’re buying the next Ruth S. Barrett. Hiring people like this has the same internal logic of cashing in your 401K and using it to buy lottery tickets to secure your retirement.

Second, you’ll make my job a lot easier as a professor because I won’t have explain to students that to get their dream job, they should work hard, play by the rules, and then pray they don’t lose out to someone who banged a source and now has 2.3 million followers on Instagram.

I’m having a hard enough time getting them avoid bias in their writing, abide by grammar rules and attribute the hell out of things, what with all the god-awful crap that’s passing journalism these days. I don’t want to have this conversation:

ME: You can’t write a profile story about your best friend. It’s not ethically sound.

STUDENT: So, why can (REPORTER X) sleep with a profile subject and land a job with a six-figure salary?

ME: Go read your AP style book.

Third, you need to understand the “Cockroach Theory of Terrible Behavior.” When you see one cockroach in a house, rest assured it’s not the only one around, like he’s on vacation or something. For every one you see, there are several more just waiting to show up.

I remember being at my college newspaper during an editor election, where one candidate was trying to justify some bad behavior, explaining, “Oh, that was an isolated incident.” Once we retired to debate his candidacy, the one guy piped up with, “I counted 10 or 11 ‘isolated incidents.’ How many does it take to make a trend?”

Vanity Fair is already playing defense on the hiring, as they were “take by surprise” at Lizza’s accusations about Nuzzi’s nuzzling with Sanford. The magazine is “looking at all the facts” in this situation as it decides how the hell it’s going to get out of this situation before another cockroach comes crawling out of the corner.

If you want to see the best of journalism, hire good quality people. Promote and showcase them as what’s worth doing in the field. Let us in the classroom highlight the good work done in the right circumstances.

None of this will stop another Nuzzi situation, but at least you can help us point to this as a cautionary tale and not a smooth career move.

As a scummy weasel whose mother didn’t raise me right, I’d like to offer my support to the loud, rude piggies and terrible reporters out there (A Throwback Post)

President Donald Trump spent part of the last several days living up to his reputation of being “combative” with the media. During an event featuring a Saudi Prince, he told a journalist from ABC how terrible she was, before musing about how the FCC should consider yanking the network’s license to broadcast.

A few days prior, he barked “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy!” at a BBC reporter while she was trying to ask him a question on Air Force One.

The journo-folks in my orbit have poked at this in a lot of ways. Some are arguing the media outlets didn’t do enough to defend these journalists. Some have pointed out that with both journalists being women, this was another case of sexism rearing its ugly head. Some have said it’s another case of “Trump being Trump” so why are we surprised.

Truth be told, if you’ve worked in this field for more than about 20 minutes, you’ve likely found yourself on the end of the ugly stick, with someone swinging it wildly at you.

Even before Trump, politicians were railing against reporters and their work. If you covered education, parents, teachers and school administrators were likely to be upset with something you covered and weren’t afraid of telling you about it. If you spent time in business, entertainment or sports, you probably had a few run-ins with people who didn’t like what you wrote.

In covering crime, I got more than a few irate calls over the years, including one person screaming at me about how we made her son look bad by reporting his role in a shooting. A sentence I’ve never said before came out of my mouth: “Ma’am, it’s not my fault your son was shooting at people in a Taco Bell drive thru.”

I guess part of the umbrage we’re feeling in regard to these current outbursts is because we’d like to expect more out dignity and decorum out of the president of the United States than we got out of an angry mother of some guy who just landed in jail for the umpteenth time, despite her insistence he’s “such a good boy.”

With that in mind, here’s a throwback to a post about the beatings we all seem to take in the media and why it is good reporters stick with it:

 

Scummy weasels and death peddlers: What some people think about journalism (and why we tolerate their ignorance.)

“Your mother didn’t raise you right.”

I forget the context of that comment, but I know a woman yelled it at me over the phone once when I had the temerity to ask her a question about something someone she knew had done that landed that guy in jail. The implication was that I had nothing better to do than make people miserable and that if my mother had raised me properly, I’d know how sleazy I was being at this very moment.

The reason I bring this up is the story that is making the rounds, thanks to Dana Loesch’s speech at the recent CPAC event. Loesch, a National Rifle Association spokesperson, told the room that the mainstream media just loved it when someone went on a massive shooting spree:

“Many in legacy media love mass shootings. You guys love it,” Dana Loesch said Thursday. “Now I’m not saying that you love the tragedy. But I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you and many in the legacy media in the back (of the room).”

As someone who spent a good amount of time in a newsroom and even more time teaching budding journalists, it’s a little hard to swallow that statement. (I’m not alone in that regard, as multiple journalists have called out Loesch for her statements at CPAC.) The point here, however, isn’t to poke at Loesch but rather to let you know that although the statement is a bit more hyperbolic than most of those made about the media, it’s not rare that people think about journalists this way.

Former college basketball coach Bobby Knight turned hating the media into an art form and a cottage industry. Here are 10 of Knight’s most “memorable” soundbites, about half of which involve him fighting with the press. (Number 8 is my favorite, in which he compares journalism to prostitution.)

Knight isn’t the only person to hate the media for being the media. The clip of CNN’s Jim Acosta battling Donald Trump:

And he wasn’t the first president to rip on the media in front of a large group of people:

However, perhaps the greatest diatribe regarding how journalists react to disasters came not from a politician, but rather from musician Don Henley. His 1982 release of “Dirty Laundry” was No. 1 on the charts that year and really picked apart the way in which TV journalists appeared to enjoy “disaster porn.”

Personally, I’ve been called words I’ve been asked to avoid using on the blog. I think “scum” was the most user-friendly word I could include here. I’ve been accused of having vendettas against people for reporting that the caller’s son got involved in a shooting some place. I’ve been told to get a real job. I’m sure if you asked any of your professors who worked in the field, any one of them could tell you similar stories in which people took out their gripes on a journalist or two.

Still, as Allison Sansone noted earlier, you are serving readers who need you to get them information, even if that information is unpleasant. Of all the things I’ve seen that were nauseating, destructive or worse, I’ve never felt particularly happy about them. Sure, the adrenaline is pumping and the anxiety goes through the roof, so I can see how people would think I was “up” a bit while on the scene of something. However, I was never happy to see a dead guy, a fire-scarred woman or a flaming house full of dead dogs (all things I had to witness.).

This field can be a rough one to enter, especially if you enjoy people liking you or your work being positively appreciated on a universal scale. (I remember somebody once remarking about this idea, “If you want to be loved, go plan kids’ birthday parties for a living.” Personally, I find that more terrifying than covering a lot of the stuff I covered.) However, if you read through the responses the reporters gave to Loesch’s statement, you’ll find that they felt the job was worth it and the experiences associated with some of these traumatic events led to a greater sense of self.

I can’t think of many careers that will get you all of that. Even if it means you have to apologize to your mother for what people think of her child-rearing skills.

The Junk Drawer: The Big, Beautiful Edition

Hey! There’s my big, beautiful tape dispenser!

Welcome to this edition of the junk drawer. As we have outlined in previous junk drawer posts, this is a random collection of stuff that is important but didn’t fit anywhere else, much like that drawer in the kitchen of most of our homes.

 

SCORE ONE FOR THE GOOD GUYS

Officials in Marion County, Kansas agreed to pay approximately $3 million dollars to a small local newspaper after it assisted in raiding the paper’s office in 2023. The settlement also included an apology from the county.

We covered this back when the raid happened, but as a brief recap: City and county law enforcement executed a search warrant at the Marion County Record in search of information that a reporter had illegally searched criminal records. The raid was a blatant violation of the First Amendment and led to a series of lawsuits.

Suits against the city and other individuals are ongoing.

 

“QUIET PIGGY” IS GOING TO BE THE NAME OF MY “FASTER PUSSYCAT” COVER BAND:

President Donald Trump went 2-for-2 in reminding me I lack the proper restraint to be a reporter any more. On Tuesday, he went into a tirade against ABC journalist Mary Bruce for asking questions about the release of the Epstein files and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Aside from calling her a “terrible journalist,” he noted that she asked a “horrible, insubordinate and just a terrible question.” I’d argue that’s not possible, in that to be insubordinate, she’d have to be working for him or for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was the target of the question.

On Friday, Trump essentially did more insult in less space when he told BBC reporter Catherine Lucey “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy!” after she asked a question on Air Force One.

In both cases, the journalists and their institutions refused to counter punch, with the BBC issuing a statement about its commitment to “asking questions without fear or favor,” while ABC remained silent.

Neither journalist has made a fuss about the situation, speaking either to their amazing professionalism, the way they’ve gotten used to these temper tantrums or both. If that happened to me, I’d probably be in the middle of a Secret Service-led cavity search due to my lack of decorum.

 

HEY CHATGPT, WRITE A CATCHY SUBHEAD HERE FOR ME BECAUSE I’M AS LAZY AS THIS SOURCE IN THE NEXT SEGMENT:

A former student sent me this one with a note: “This has gotta be up there with your students’ terrible chatgpt emails asking for extra credit and leaving [Enter Professor Name] at the start.”

 

STOP TRYING TO MAKE “FETCH” HAPPEN:

When are people going to get the message that simply repeating a phrase doesn’t make it a thing? President Donald Trump often starts a trend in how he refers to something in a weird way, only to have a bunch of imitators jump on the bandwagon, making it awkward for those of us trying to write about his stuff.

Case in point, his use of “Big, Beautiful” to describe the centerpiece of his current administration’s bill that dealt with tax cuts. He kept it up to the point that everyone, including the IRS’s own website, finds itself having to parrot this line. Now, Texas is in on this thing, as it’s referring to its redistricting attempt in a similar fashion:

“We are running under the lines lawfully passed by the Big Beautiful map and the courts will not thwart the will of Texas voters and their Representatives,” Cain said. “We are confident this temporary court obstruction will be swiftly overcome.”

<SNIP>

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican

“The radical left is once again trying to undermine the will of the people. The Big Beautiful Map was entirely legal and passed for partisan purposes to better represent the political affiliations of Texas. For years, Democrats have engaged in partisan redistricting intended to eliminate Republican representation.”

I’m not commenting on the intent, actions or outcome of either of these things, but I can say I feel for the reporters who have to ask questions using this nomenclature. It sounds either like we’re trying to engage a small child (“Who’s my big, beautiful boy?”) or it’s part of a particularly niche fetish site (“Click Here for Hot Videos of Big, Beautiful Bill!”)

This clearly must stop.

PERHAPS THEY’LL RELOCATE TO NEW JERERSEY:

 

And finally… 

A student who was doing a survey in my Writing for the Media course was chatting with me about a few things when she said she was going to be taking that class next semester.

“People who have taken this class are like, ‘Good luck with that,'” she said.

She then explained that she heard the class is hard, it requires a ton of writing and that a lot of people fail it.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to think about that, so I told the student this:

“Go back to the people who said they failed the class and ask them two questions: “Did you turn in every assignment on time?” and “Did you ask for help when you were confused?” I’d bet my house that the answer to one, if not both, of those questions is ‘No.'”

She also said something that kind of broke my brain a little bit:

“What’s weird is all the people I know who failed your class said they loved it and thought you were a great professor. They said it was really hard but they enjoyed it. It’s usually not what I hear from my friends about a class. It’s usually, ‘I got an A. It was a great class.’ or ‘I failed and the professor was an asshole.'”

So… Thanks? I guess… for whatever that says about me and my teaching acumen.

Damaging Daniels: Do ethics matter any more in showing gruesome visuals? (A throwback post)

The Washington football franchise seems to have the worst luck with the worst injuries for its best quarterbacks. On Sunday night, Jayden Daniels became the latest casualty in the “gruesome” category when a Seahawk defender fell on his left arm and bent it back about 90 degrees the wrong way.

(If you haven’t seen it, you can watch it here.)

It was clear he was in significant pain at first, but it was unclear why, as it seemed to me that it might be a leg injury, given how he fell and how his lower body was posed. Only after a replay did the arm issue become apparent, with an official report calling it a dislocated elbow.

However, that wasn’t the only replay we saw. It seemed like they kept playing it over and over, to the point I woke up the dog when I instinctively screamed, “For the love of God! STOP SHOWING THIS!”

This brought me back to thinking about another similar injury and a post about the ethics of showing stuff like this on TV. However, I’m wondering about the relevance of this kind of discussion these days.

As I’ve frequently told my students, not everyone in the media game plays by the same basic set of rules anymore. The democratization of content collection and dissemination has really changed the way in which we deal with things like this as professionals and as viewers.

In 1987, Budd Dwyer, a public official convicted of bribery, called a press conference the day before he was to be sent to prison and killed himself while some stations carried the event live. Footage of the event exists online, but not of that moment itself.

(I remember using a textbook that showed two photos of Dwyer that we were to debate using for a newspaper’s front page: One with Dwyer holding the gun in both hands, the other with the barrel of the revolver in his mouth. That still messes with me…)

Flash forward almost 40 years and the moment Charlie Kirk was killed, dozens of videos popped up with the entirety of his final moments. Some people added slow motion, while others did zooms. Some even had some sort of sound track of sorts on there. I’m not linking to any of them, but I’m sure you can find them if you want.

That might be the bigger concern: Even as some came down, more went up. The reason was both the cash-grabbing click-baiting end of the deal, along with the basic prurient interests that many people apparently had for seeing a man literally die in front of us.

Thus, the chicken-or-the-egg thing: Is it that we now have more access to more content that allows us to see things, so we go see them? Or is it that we always wanted to see these things and we now have people who are more capable of providing them?

In either case, this throwback post might help spark a discussion or two about how we handle things as professional media folk and what that might mean going forward.

 

Breaking Dak: The ethics of broadcasting injuries in sports

TRIGGER WARNING: There are some graphic videos here of traumatic injuries. Watch at your own discretion. -VFF

—

The outcome of the Dallas Cowboys/New York Giants game Sunday was completely overshadowed by an injury to quarterback Dak Prescott, who sustained a compound fracture and dislocation of his right ankle.

Prescott was scrambling for a first down when his body went one way and a sizeable portion of his lower leg went the other way.

(Here is the video if you want to see it. If you don’t want to watch this, I don’t blame you. My wife, Amy, a nurse who loves to talk about brain surgery over dinner and is an avid watcher of “Doctor Pimple Popper,” was really disturbed when she saw this.)

Tony Romo, who was in the booth doing color commentary for CBS, immediately realized something was horrible, proclaiming, “Oh no… Oh NO!” As a former QB, Romo has been on the turf for Dallas a few times with severe injuries. However, he seemed to almost want to magically wish this one away by saying, “You almost gotta hope it’s a cramp right there…” After about three replays, he knew that wasn’t the case.

As fascinating as this was, much like other things that are odd, chaotic and disturbing, I found myself watching it a few times and yet hating that I could see what had happened.

When it comes to gruesome sports injuries, the question for journalists is, “What is enough coverage?” The answer seems to vary from situation to situation and announcer to announcer.

Take the case of Clint Malarchuk, a goalie for the Buffalo Sabres, who caught a skate to the neck in a 1989 game against the St. Louis Blues. The gash sliced open his jugular vein and slashed through his carotid artery. If not for the presence of Sabres’ athletic trainer Jim Pizzutelli, a former US Army combat medic who served in the Vietnam War, Malarchuk would have likely died that night. 

As blood began hitting the ice, the announcers immediately implored the camera operator to stop showing the injury. Malarchuk actually skated off the ice after he received assistance from Pizzutelli and that was the only other shot of him. No replays, no slow-motion blood gushing. After that, the camera stayed in a distance shot of the ice until everything was cleaned up and play was ready to resume.

Contrast that with the case of former Raiders running back Napoleon McCallum, who sustained a career-ending knee injury on Monday Night Football at the start of the 1994 season. Ken Norton of the San Francisco 49ers hit McCallum low when he crashed into the pile, but McCallum’s cleat stuck in the turf, forcing his knee to buckle backwards at an almost completely right angle.

I remember watching this game on TV and the announcers kept showing it over and over and over again, going in slow motion to show each frame worth of knee distortion. Each time they did it, it was accompanied by an announcer saying, “Oh… You hate to see that” or “You might not want to watch this…” And yet, they kept showing it.

Perhaps the most famous Monday Night Football injury involved Washington Football quarterback Joe Theismann, who saw his career end on the field. Linebacker Lawrence Taylor, who made a career out of having no regard for his own body or that of quarterbacks, snapped Theismann’s leg in half. Immediately, Taylor popped up and started waving for the trainer as he held his head in his hands in disbelief.

As the officials tried to figure out what to do about this mangled man, ABC kept looking for the best possible angle to figure out what had happened, finally finding a reverse angle that will never leave your head if you see it once. To its credit, once ABC got there, the station didn’t show it again.

So, the question remains, “How much is too much?”

There might be an official code that outlines this, but I’m having difficulty finding one. Thus, what you see below is kind of a patchwork of various codes that could provide some guidance:

The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), which deals primarily with broadcast journalism, has a section in its ethical code about accountability  that touches somewhat on this:

Journalism provides enormous benefits to self-governing societies. In the process,it can create inconvenience, discomfort and even distress. Minimizing harm, particularly to vulnerable individuals, should be a consideration in every editorial and ethical decision.

(A similar approach came in this voluntary code of digital broadcasters, which seems to have come from the National Association of Broadcasters.)

The Football Writers Association of America, which deals more with college sports coverage,  lists of elements within its code of ethics to deal with issues happening on the field. Under “Minimize Harm,” it notes the following elements:

  • Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity with children or inexperienced sources or subjects.
  • Be sensitive when seeking or using photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
  • Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.

(For reasons past my understanding, I can’t find the code of ethics for the pro version of these folks. Maybe it’s buried in the “members only” section.)

In contrast, the Society of Professional Journalists, digs into the ethics of the field at length in its code. Along with the minimize harm stuff that was in the other codes, here was an interesting add:

Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity, even if others do.

Obviously “pandering” and “lurid” are in the eye of the beholder, but it does provide the “If your friends all jumped off a bridge, would you?” line of logic on this one.
I always go back to the line I remember hearing at the State Journal, where we employed “The Breakfast Test.” If someone were picking up our paper and reading it over breakfast, would the images (or in some cases EXTREMELY vivid writing) make that person puke in their Cheerios?
 

And, yet, again, this is variable in a lot of ways. Papers up by us have no problem running photos of people who have “cleaned” deer and pose next to the gutted, skinned carcasses hanging from trees. The hunting community is used to that. For a lot of other folks, that’s going to be a breakfast showstopper.

In any case, the unfortunate answer to the question, “How much is too much?” when it comes this kind of coverage is like most ethical or “taste” situations: It depends.

The audience you serve, the expectations they have, the previous things you’ve shown them with or without problem and more come into this. However, even if you don’t have a concrete answer, it helps to discuss this to find ways to understand what to do when you find yourself in a situation like this. The more you can gain collective knowledge in advance, the better prepared you will be to make your choice.

An Open Letter to the Staff of the Indiana Daily Student: Thank you for reminding us of what we used to be

Screenshot of the IDS website, announcing the paper version will print again.

Dear Mia Hilkowitz, Andrew Miller and the rest of the IDS crew,

First and foremost, I want to congratulate you on your success in demanding the press freedoms your university sought to steal from you. It was heartening to see how you refused to back down when they fired your adviser, killed your print run and tried to shut you up. After the uproar that came from every corner of the media world, IU’s leadership finally decided to back off and let you start the presses once again.

As much as I would like to call this a win, it’s clear to anyone with half a brain that this isn’t over by a damned sight and that there are still significant problems with the leadership at the IU Media School. I know you know this and I know you’ll remain vigilant against the next stupid thing these folks try to pull on you. They clearly can’t help themselves, so I hope you know that all the people who have your back now will continue to do so.

But the main reason for this open letter is that I want you to know is how grateful I am for your strength and courage at time in which media operations all around us seem to be folding like cheap tents in the rain and so-called adults are more willing to quietly acquiesce to outrageous demands than to stand up for what’s right.

There is a concept in finance that one reporter told me about called “F— You Money.” It basically meant that some people are so rich, they literally don’t have to care about what anyone thinks and they can do whatever they want, regardless of the cost.

For example, if two people in an auction setting want the same thing, the person with “F— You Money” can radically overpay to get the item, even if doing so makes no sense. Another example would be what a lot of us thought would happen when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post: The paper could courageously cover anyone and everyone because Bezos had “F— You Money,” and he didn’t need to worry about ad revenue or currying political favor.

However, a funny thing happened on the way to fiscal freedom. A lot of people with “F— You Money” decided it would be easier to just give up and pay off whatever loud idiot seemed to want to start a fuss rather than using it to stick up for what was right. It was ABC kicking in $15 million to avoid a lawsuit regarding who was mean to whom in a TV show, YouTube ponying up even more for suspending accounts after the Jan. 6 riots, Paramount paying $16 million for exercising editorial discretion on “60 Minutes” in a way that displeased Donald Trump and more.

Even though a boatload of legal experts said these cases had literally no merit,  these media giants came up small and just settled the cases. They essentially decided it was better to give the mouthy kid in the grocery store the candy they screamed for instead of putting a stop to this once and for all.

This is the reason we owe the IDS staff a debt of gratitude. You did what others refused to do and stood up for what’s right, even though you were at a decided disadvantage in this power dynamic. You chose not to think about all the scary things that might happen if didn’t cow tow to the powers that be. You fought for your rights, even if it meant you might get crushed by the academic behemoth that is the IU Media School, because you couldn’t live with yourselves if you didn’t.

You told the bully, “F— you. You’re not getting my lunch money. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”

The reason so many people came running to your aid and voicing support for you wasn’t just because you are right, which you are. It wasn’t just because what was happening to you is unadulterated bullying, which it is. In so many ways, we appreciate you for one simple fact:

You help us remember who we used to be, so many years ago, and what we wish we could be again.

In all honesty, I don’t miss my sleep-deprived college years of subsisting on ramen and cheap beer. I also don’t miss the rundown apartments, the anxiety-driven dating scene or cobbling together several part-time jobs to make ends meet. What I do miss, however, is the courage that all of those experiences seemed to embolden in me, a courage I feel I lost somewhere along the way to middle age.

When I was in college, I was working at the Daily Cardinal student newspaper, trying to dig the place out of $137,700 in debt with nothing but a few bucks in the checking account and a gung-ho iguana’s attitude about my odds. We did some truly adorably naive things, like asking banks for loans against future advertising sales, negotiating debts for pennies on the dollar and sending out hundreds of billing statements with a “we think this is right” letter attached.

Some of those things worked, while other failed, but we were as unrelenting as a toothache and as stubborn as an ink spot on white carpeting. As time went on, we won more than we lost, after we kind of figured out how the game itself worked. Basically, we realized that the adult on the other end of whatever we were trying to do had a job that came with a boss who had bigger bosses and nobody wanted to get in trouble. It was much easier for that person to just go along with us, make some concessions, spin it for their boss and move on.

Now, I am that adult in so many ways and so are so many of us out there. For every journalist who quits because a newsroom situation is untenable, there are dozens more who stay put because the mortgage isn’t going to pay itself. For every journalist who quits because their bosses are bowing to outside pressure that is forcing content changes, there are dozens more who know how hard it is to get another job these days, especially when you’re too old to be young, but not old enough to retire. For every adviser like Jim Rodenbush who is willing to lose a job rather than sell out their student media operation, there are many folks who would try to massage the situation in an effort to find “peace with honor” and avoid getting canned.

(SIDE NOTE: Rodenbush is suing the university over his termination and I’m pulling for him all the way. If I were running things at IU, I’d pay the man rather than have all of the blatant illegality and stupidity that happened here laid bare in the public. Then again, if I were running things at IU, this situation wouldn’t have happened in the first place…) 

I don’t know if I’m the only one who does this, but sometimes I look at myself and think, “This is a heck of a good life you’ve built here. Don’t screw it up.” I love so much of what I do and what I’ve been lucky enough to accomplish, that it feels like any risk of upsetting that apple cart might not be worth it, even if I know I’m right or even if I see something wrong happening.

The cliche of how “with age comes wisdom,” is a hollow platitude that gives us a pass when we decide not to put ourselves on the line and call out wrongdoing. The winds of time erode our certainty of purpose and wear away our willingness to fight. We learn to self-censor, rather than be censored. We bite our tongues, nod along and keep the trains running on time. It’s easier that way and guarantees less of a personal cost.

You folks at the IDS are special because you don’t just fight the fights you can win. You fight the fights that need to be fought, regardless of outcome. You understand absolute right and absolute wrong, and refuse to convince yourself that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze when it comes to standing up for what matters. You say, “I know what’s happening here. I can’t stand by and let it happen. This is the hill I’m willing to die on if that’s what it takes to fix this situation.”

When people like me see this, we can’t help but rush right in and do our best to help. We admire the hell out of your courage and wonder if we were ever that young and that brave, or if it was just a hazy bit of self-mythologizing that puts us in your company. We are grateful to see that what we really liked about ourselves back then is alive and well in this oft-maligned generation of students.

We do this for you, because we support you, but we also do it because you give us something much more important in return. You help us reach back to a time where we didn’t politely apologize and then go stand in the corner, awaiting our punishment. You help us remember that the best of us isn’t gone for good. It’s just waiting for the inspiration you provide.

Thanks for this. It means more than you know.

With admiration,

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

Seven Simple Questions that Help Answer the Question: “Should I Go To Grad School?” (A throwback post)

As a lot of students around here are signing up for their final semester’s worth of classes, we’ve been hearing the “Should I consider grad school?” question a lot more often. In some cases, it’s about trying to extend the life of a college student, while in others, it’s based on fear of the unknown.

As I’ve said a million times before, if you want a good example of how to find yourself entering and exiting grad school, don’t look at me. That said, I have managed to pull together a number of good thoughts on the topic based on stuff that did or didn’t work out for me or others. Thus, the theme of today’s throwback post.

Hope these will help someone in your area.

 

How to answer the question “Should I go to Grad School?” when your journalism students ask it

The question in the headline has come up a lot recently, both on the Filak Furlough Tour and from my own students. The way some folks talk about grad school, it sounds like a way to delay life a bit more, or at least push back some of those student loans. For others, it’s an opportunity to become part of a cadre of lifelong learners, who will some day become the “sage of the stage” themselves at a fine institution of higher learning. Reality, as is usually the situation, will vary on a case by case basis.

As I have told my students repeatedly about so many things, you don’t want to look at me for an example when it comes to making a decision about grad school.

At the time, I had about a year’s experience under my belt as a part-time night desk reporter at the Wisconsin State Journal. When I asked if that position could become a full-time job, the answer was less than encouraging. Even more, every job that I wanted to apply for required about three years of newsroom experience.

The job market stunk and I had one actual offer from a newspaper in Kirksville, Missouri, which would have paid me less than I was making as a cashier and grease monkey back home at the Mobil station. Even worse, the paper was terrible, the publisher was chain-smoking during my interview and the job came with no insurance benefits.

At the time, if you kept up with school and didn’t stop being a full-time student, you could stay on your parents’ insurance until you were 25. Also, my boss at the State Journal offered to kind of weld two part-time positions together and give me nearly full-time hours, but not the benefits or a true salary. Add that with the potential to teach a college class, already knowing the area and figuring that I’d finish a master’s in two years, I went for it. It turned out fine in the end, but to explain the whole process requires several beers and a non-disclosure agreement.

Based on what I’ve seen others do over the years, here are some helpful questions you might want to consider if you’re thinking of grad school or to ask anyone who asks if they should consider this path:

ARE YOU CHANGING FIELDS? This is the easiest one to figure out. If you got your degree in journalism, but you took a class in computer coding, psychology or biomedical engineering and found your muse, grad school makes sense. The goal of any form of education that you are going to pay ridiculous money for is to teach you something of value that you can use somehow. Usually that means it helps you get a job. I wouldn’t hire a welder to do journalism or a journalist to do welding, so making sure you have field-specific education makes sense.

IS THERE A SPECIALTY YOU DIDN’T GET IN YOUR UNDERGRAD? In some cases, you find that you want to really dig into a specific area of a field. A “regular” journalism degree might include one class on graphic design or 3D rendering or something that really piques your interest and you only have a base-level understanding of that topic. Going to a different place for grad school where they specialize in that might make a lot of sense. I often make the case that students who go here and find that they really like design or graphic arts in media might do well to get a master’s in that area at Ball State, which has a TON of great profs and resources in this area.

IS THERE A FINANCIAL BENEFIT TO THE EXTRA DEGREE? The question of if a higher-level degree helps or hurts a candidate varies widely based on the field and the employer. However, if there is a clear-cut financial value to getting this upper-level degree, it makes sense to bite the bullet now and go for it.

Case in point, when my mom was teaching, salary bumps were determined in “steps” and “lanes.” If I recall correctly, each step was based on years of experience while the lanes were determined by level of education. Hopping into a higher-ed “lane” got you more money faster. Mom still had to take credits to keep up with something else related to her contract, but she never got a master’s, despite probably having more credits than I have now with a Ph.D. She mentioned more than once if she had just gone for it earlier in her career, the master’s would have really turbocharged her earning power.

If you know that’s the case, or if your company is paying for it in hopes of paying you more when you get it, go for the grad gusto.

DO YOU WANT TO TEACH COLLEGE AT SOME POINT? When I got my master’s it meant I could teach at a college or university in my area of expertise. Many of my family members were teachers and I thought I would like to be like them and help people learn, so the master’s was a smart call. That said, my boss in Missouri told me that the Ph.D. was basically the “union card” for getting a stable, tenure-worthy job, so if I wanted to do this for the rest of my life, I probably should bite the bullet and get the doctorate done.

Today, master’s degrees are fine for both adjunct teaching and a lot of universities have opened up teaching faculty roles that don’t require the full collection of alphabet soup after your name. That said, the master’s is the “you must be at least this tall to ride the ride” measurement, so if standing in front of a room trying to explain the difference between “farther” and “further” or why you spell the word “lead” L-E-D-E, grad school makes sense.

ARE YOU RUNNING TO SOMETHING OR AWAY FROM SOMETHING? This gets a bit deeper on the personal end, but it’s an important question to ask. I often ask this of the kids who come back to see me when they’re about 25 and they say something like, “I think I’m going to grad school” or “I think I should change jobs” or “Do you think the circus is hiring?” When a quarter-life crisis hits, a massive change in life seems like the best idea, which is why I ask them this question.

Change bothers me a lot, just because of who I am and how I feel about it. That said, I know some changes are better than others. I can also attest to the importance of understanding WHY you’re changing something, which comes down to the question above. If you are running toward something (pay raise, new educational opportunities) and the grad school question comes up, that is a good change. If you’re running away from something (I don’t want to be an adult, I’m scared of getting a job that I’ll hate) and the grad school question comes up, it’s probably not a great idea.

It never hurts to ask, “Why are you considering doing this?” and then try to figure out which way you’re running.

ARE YOU GAINING MOMENTUM OR BURNING YOURSELF TO A CRISP? When I was growing up, taking a break anywhere before the completion of all of your schooling was considered verboten. The thinking was, “If you don’t go straight from high school to college (or college to master’s or whatever), you’re never going to go back.” And for a lot of people I know, that turned out to be true.

That said, concepts like “a gap year” never really existed as a positive opportunity to plan and recharge. The “keep moving ahead” approach also conflated the idea of continual motion with positive outcomes.

I truly believe in momentum, and if you don’t, go watch this recap of the 1993 Bills/Oilers game. Thus, if you’re in the zone when it comes to studying, learning and knocking out homework, great. Keep rolling. I also believe in the concept of burnout, so if school to this point has turned you into a charcoal briquette, pouring more work on top of yourself for meager/no pay while adding to your student loan debt and living in what passes for student housing these days makes no sense.

WHAT IS THE FLIP SIDE OF THE GRAD SCHOOL COIN? Instead of saying “Should I go to grad school?” consider asking “What will I do if I DON’T go to grad school?” In other words, what’s the other side of the coin on this one.

I’m a big fan of pro-con lists in making big life decisions and I’m also a big fan of not getting myopic on a choice being either/or. It’s not “grad school or no grad school” but rather “grad school or (OTHER PLAN).” In approaching it this way, you can figure out what else might be out there and avoid thinking of grad school as the only lifeboat off the Titanic.

I’m sure there are many other good questions to ask, but these should comfortably get you out of the “deer in the headlights” mode and toward making a solid decision, or helping someone else make a solid decision.