Awkward ’90s Reference

Filak Furlough Tour Update: Hanging out with Morgan State University

The Filak Furlough Tour took a stop at Morgan State University, where we covered a couple of really great topics in two classes. Milton Kent, the professor there, was extremely nice to me after I screwed up the name of his student newspaper in a post I wrote a while back, so I wanted to make it up to him and his crew as best I could.

In one class, we talked about some reporting and writing stuff while in the other, we talked about editing, fact checking and such. It was such a great time that I forgot to grab a screen shot photo for this.

 

Oh, well. You’ll have to take my word that I actually wore a different shirt.

Onward…

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY – Baltimore, Maryland

THE TOPIC:  We went with a lot of Q and A in  the first class, and we’ve kind of touched on a lot of that already, so we’re going with  the second class a bit more, with the idea of how to edit and what to do.

THE BASICS: There are a couple key things that really help me when I need to edit something.  The first one is particularly helpful when I am trying to edit something I wrote.

Write, get the heck away from it, come back,  put on my “editor’s hat” and then go to work.

Editing right after you write something doesn’t tend to work that well in a lot of cases, particularly because you figure if you wrote it,  you probably figured it was right in the first place. It’s also hard to edit right after you wrote it, at least it is for me,  because my  mind kind of  “fills in” stuff that’s not there because I knew what I meant when I wrote it. That makes it harder to do a true word-by-word edit.

Getting away from the piece for a while can help you mentally reboot and come back at it with a fresh set of eyes. I also like to pretend a bit that this came from someone else, so I can be like, “OK, what the fresh hell is this?” Like most things when you’re working with writing and editing, you find little ways to make things  work for you. Once you find them, stick with them.

A couple other tips I liked to use:

ASSUME EVERYTHING IS WRONG:  One of the easiest ways to get something wrong is to assume everything is right and then  only check on things  that appear wrong. It’s a pretty  standard thing  editors who are strapped for time do. Editors who work with high-end pros a lot also tend to go this route, because  you expect stuff to be right if the person is a high-end pro.

Me? I work with a lot of students and I’ve read a lot of things that, while outlandish, tend to be true. I’ve also read stuff that seemed to be logical, only to find the kids made it up. This kind of weird confluence of experiences has put me in t he position where I just assume everything is wrong and I  have to go about proving it to be accurate.

For example, if a source said,  “I got arrested in  New York in  2004 for a string of burglaries and got sent to Smithton State Prison for 10 years. While I was there, more than 20 people got killed in prisoner on  prisoner violence.” I’ve got a lot to look at:

  • Can I prove the guy got  arrested and for what charges?
  • Can I prove the time and place of the arrest and conviction?
  • Can I  prove he went where he said he went and for that amount of time?
  • Can I  prove people got killed there and if so, can I prove the number of deaths?

The same thing is true of simple things like name spellings,  ages, job titles and more. Assume it’s wrong and prove it right.

SINS OF OMISSION ARE VENIAL, SINS OF COMMISSION CAN BE MORTAL: Going along with what we talked about above, if I can’t prove something is right, I’m probably not going to  use it.  This isn’t always possible.  I love going back to this argument in Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights,  Big City” where the main character (a fact-checker at a magazine) has a discussion with a notoriously sloppy writer:

“Where did you get this about the French government owning a controlling interest in Paramount Pictures?” you say.

“Don’t they? Well, shit. Run a line through that.”

“Your next three paragraphs depend on it.”

“Damn. Who told me that?”

In many cases, however, it’s easy enough to either check the fact and prove it so  you can  keep it in or  check the fact and disprove it so you can cut it. If you can’t do either, it’s better to leave the thing out than to  be wrong.

In writing, we talk about sins of omission and how they can undercut a piece. That’s true, but those sins,  to borrow from my Catholic upbringing, are  venial.  You can be forgiven for not being as complete as you need to be. If you screw up because  you guess wrong, those sins are mortal and you can pretty much kill a piece (or even your  career).

WHEN YOU  SCREW UP, ADMIT IT: Mistakes will happen. I think I make about 353,532 a day, and that’s when I’m only awake for 12 hours. The ones  you put  into the public sphere, however, can really damage your reputation among your peers and your audience.

The one thing I did when I talked to Milton Kent’s class was to apologize for screwing up the name of the school’s publication. I’d already fixed it on the blog weeks earlier and I made an email apology to Milton, but I wanted to let the kids know I was sorry as well. The goal was simple: Be a decent example.

It’s hard to feel OK about screwing up and it’s even harder to fess up when you make a mistake, but people tend to trust you more when you are honest and open about errors. Like most hockey goalies, even the best editors occasionally let one slip past  them. There’s no shame in raising one’s hand and saying, “That’s  on me.”

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: What do you think of  the situation with Hasan Minhaj and The New Yorker’s fact check of his comedy? He told some broader truths and after the  piece questioned  his accuracy, he did a video where he “brought the receipts” for what he said in his act. What’s your take on all this?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME (plus an update): (When  the student  asked me this, I’d read the New Yorker piece, seen some response pieces and heard the Bill Maher bit on this concept of “emotional truth.” I had not actually seen Minhaj’s response video, which I did explain to the class. After watching it,  I might have changed a couple things (which I’ll touch on after the main answer), but overall, I think the answer itself stands up.)

It felt kind of strange to me that a writer at The New Yorker would spend this kind of reporting capital on fact-checking a comedic routine. There did seem to be some problems with what he said in his comedy and the ramifications of those statements for other people.

(In one  part of his comedy that was examined by the writer, Minhaj mentions that he tried to take a white girl to the prom, only to be turned away at her doorstep because her family didn’t want her in prom pictures with a “brown boy.” According to the story the girl (now woman) and her family caught a lot of online harassment for this, even though it didn’t happen in that way, and she ended up marrying  another “brown boy” later in life. )

When you  make up stuff and it negatively impacts  real people, that’s not good, even if you’re doing it for comedic effect. Minhaj is operating in a world of comedy that’s different from the past days, as comedy and fact have become blurred. That means there is a greater risk when  you  bend the truth or play to broader issues with made-up examples.

Comics have always made up some parts of their act. The late Rodney Dangerfield notoriously made jokes about his wife cheating on him. (“When I come home, the parrot says, ‘Quick! Out the window!'” would be one of those.) While “Fat Albert” in Bill Cosby’s routine was based on a real person, there’s no real proof of people like “Mushmouth” or “Dumb Donald” existing. Richard Pryor, while turning significantly terrible aspects of his life into true comedy, did add elements to his comedy that didn’t exist or were untruthful.

(I’m not linking to any of Pryor’s stuff here, as I don’t want my editors at SAGE to have a heart attack. Speaking of which, one of Pryor’s go-to  bits was about how his father died, which is both truth and fiction. If  you look it up on YouTube, listen with headphones and don’t say I didn’t warn you…)

That said, those tweaks didn’t create significant negative impact for real people. If people had spray painted “WHORE!” on Dangerfield’s wife’s car or she got kicked out of her ladies at church because of his jokes, yeah, that’s something he’d need to answer for. If something terrible happened to “Fat Albert” because of Cosby’s comedy or significant harm happened because of Pryor’s tweaks to the truth,  the same thing applies.

Here were two things that stuck  out with  me about the Minhaj situation:

First, I’m not doubting that he experienced negative things like the ones he mentioned in his comedy  specials. The racism he discusses has been well documented in far too many facets of life for this to be viewed as just lies for the sake of a laugh. (Just like Pryor’s routine about being pulled over  by the cops because someone “looked just like you” probably didn’t happen the way he said it in his routine, I have no doubt he and others experienced that kind of thing and that it was terrible.)

Using humor to draw attention to social inequality and similar issues has merits. I think Minhaj just “punched up” a few of his real examples to make the comedy better while trying to make a bigger point. (I often joke about 12 years of Catholic school and getting battered about by nuns.  We did experience some significant smacking around and some emotional trauma from more than a few people, but it wasn’t all nuns and it wasn’t all the time.) Comedy creates awareness in some significant ways.

Second, I think that doing a deep dive on Minhaj just felt a little shady. There are hundreds of comics out there  talking about “real things” that weren’t 100 percent verified. For the sake of the exercise, go through this Jeff Foxworthy routine about his “Cousin Sherry’s Wedding.”

I have no idea of Foxworthy has a cousin named Sherry. If he does, I have no idea if she actually had a “hurry up wedding” in his Uncle Wayne’s backyard. I also don’t know if she was 8 months pregnant when she got married or, as his mother supposedly said, “That’s the same dress her mother got married in.” I found it funny, regardless.

But we could take apart that routine or a dozen others about his family (“The Clampetts go to Maui” is a classic for this kind of analysis) in the same way The New Yorker went after Minhaj if we wanted. Dare I say, we probably wouldn’t, which probably points toward the racial inequity Minhaj was trying to raise more than anything else.

POST SCRIPT: After I got done with the class, I went to find the video the student referenced that I hadn’t seen. Minhaj does a 21-minute video where he picks apart the article and explains  himself. He does apologize if he led anyone astray with his comedy, which I think is fair. I also think he’s probably more accurate than the New Yorker gave him credit for being. He “brought the receipts” in the form of emails, texts and other supporting evidence.

In most cases, he’s more right than wrong and where he did bend the truth, he made some solid explanations for why he did so. He also pointed to some of the spots where the article’s writer made choices that put a decided slant on how he was coming across. He’s not “emotional truthing” this thing to death, making claims that are untrue but feel like they should be. He realized some of the stuff he said could be a bit further out than maybe he intended initially, but he probably never figured someone would fact check him within an inch of his life.

If nothing else for me, this demonstrated the key principle I always try to push to my students: Before you make a decision, get all the facts you can.

 

 

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

It’s a weird thing seeing the cartoon version of yourself posted all over the place…

The Filak Furlough Tour landed in Ames, Iowa for a couple fun days of teaching classes and working with student journalists. This one was particularly neat for me because the first journalism teacher I ever had went here. Steve Lorenzo used to regale us with stories about his “sophomore year at Iowa State” when he would work for “The Daily.”

I remember one point where Steve did his “Back in (YEAR) when I was a sophomore at Iowa State…” thing and I chimed in with “Yeah, Steve, back in (YEAR) when I was in third grade…” I thought it was funny at the time because he was 30 and I was 19, but I have since gotten my “You Old” comeuppance, as students are now the same age as my kid…

Ugh. Let’s get on with Part II

IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY – AMES, IOWA

Scientists aren’t sure what this represents…

THE TOPIC: Hanging out with the students at The Daily and learning about how they do student media.

THE BASICS: Student media has and will always have a spot in my heart. I loved working at the student media outlets like The Daily Cardinal and the Badger Yearbook when I was in school. I also really loved working with the kids at Mizzou, Ball State and UWO as an adviser, editor and whatever else. Students who take on student media have this thing about them that just makes me want to do everything I can to help them out.

(They also have a thing about them that makes Amy want to feed them constantly. We’ve done more than a few chili suppers, holiday dinners and other such “Eat! Eat!” events where we shovel food at them like it’s going out of style.)

The students asked a lot of good questions about how to find stories, how to make sure they’re covering the campus adequately and how to improve writing. The one thing that they asked that really hit home with me was this: How do you recruit and retain staff members?

Trying to find people to work at the various student media outlets I’ve worked with has been like trying to find volunteers muck out Port-A-Potties. They either refuse to come to work, agree and then bail or they try a little and leave. In most cases, students tell me they have too much other stuff to do, they don’t have the time in general or they “don’t plan to work for a newspaper. (That last one makes me crazy.)

Here are the best bits of advice I could come up with for the students there:

LOOK FOR SKILLS, NOT BODIES: In a lot of cases, we do the same thing we always do when it comes to recruiting: We go to the intro writing class, tell the kids there they need clips to get a job/internship and that we’re having a meeting that night. That can work in some cases but not most.

What we really should be looking for are skills that can benefit the newspaper and thus the readership, not people who seem to be majoring in the right field. So, start going to the places where those skills live.

You want better editorial cartoons? Check out the art department and see who has drawing classes you could talk to. Same thing is true if you want some different angles on photography.

You want some political coverage? Hey, poli sci people seem to grow on trees around most campuses. Everyone thinks they’re going to be the next political voice of a generation, so let’s see if they can make it work. This might be a great spot for coverage of the local student government, columns that deal with local politics or even a podcast that could give people a chance to hear about some topics they might otherwise miss.

Speaking of podcasts, see if there are people with interests in a field that would be willing to do one or two for publication on your site. Back when podcasting was really new, we had a couple kids who majored in science areas (I can’t remember what that major was, nor can I remember how we ended up with science kids in the newsroom… It might have been a fever dream…). They wanted to do a weekly podcast, so we let them. Turned out to be one of the better elements of our digital presence.

Think about the computer science or information services people who love computers for improvements to your digital end. Design folks might find an interest in reworking your color palettes or your home page structure. See who’s out there and bring them in.

LOOK FOR PROFESSORS WHO CAN BRIBE KIDS: One of the best bribes in the world is extra credit. I think I could probably solve world hunger if I had access to a big enough class and enough thirst for extra credit in it. Use that to your advantage.

Talk to professors in the media departments to see if they’d be willing to offer extra credit for various things that would benefit the newsroom. That could be getting a story they wrote for class published, working a copy desk shift for credit in an editing class, doing a ride along with sales reps for an ad/marketing class or a dozen other things. If so, you have a great opportunity to get some extra stuff for your publication while simultaneously getting fresh blood into your newsroom.

Sure, maybe those people only do one thing and leave, but you at least get a chance to convince them to stay. Even more, if the bug does bite them, you’ll have a staffer for quite some time.

SHARE YOUR PASSION: In going through this whole thing with the staff, I asked a bunch of them, “Why did you come to the Daily in the first place?” Most of them gave the standard answers: I needed clips, I wanted experience, It looks good on a resume etc.

Then I asked the second question: “OK, so why are you still here?” That one took a bit longer.

My point was this: If you came here for those clips and that experience, you have that already. A number of kids were there for several years. A couple actually had other media gigs they were working in the pro scene while still working at the Daily. If the goal was to get the goods, you are done. Leave. Move on.

The answer that they eventually came up with was the one that they didn’t think about every day but was as much of a part of them as their own hearts: They fell in love with this place and the people and even though there were days they’d rather eat ground glass than track down the head of student government for a stupid quote about a stupid thing, they found this place to be their home. They got a lot more out of this than just a line on a resume.

THAT is what you need to imbue in the newbies if you want them to come in and stay for a while. If you can connect with people when they come in, make them see what makes the place tick, help them understand what this place is beyond just a bunch of old desks and a whiteboard full of inside jokes, you’ll get them and they’ll hang around much longer than those who don’t see it.

It’s OK to love the place. Show them that and they’ll love it too.

ONE LAST THING:

I made a bat for the journalism school as part of the Furlough Tour Gift package and the people there really seemed to love it. They asked me to put the Jack Trice logo on it. If you don’t know who that is, well, I didn’t either but in learning about him, I was in awe. I was thrilled that they liked it:

When we passed it around the newsroom, I explained how and why the bat thing came to be. The EIC was really interested so I told him if he emailed me and asked for something specific, I’d do it. When I got back, I had the request:

Hello, it is Andrew Harrington from the Iowa State Daily. Thank you again for coming in to visit the Iowa State Daily, we learned a lot and had a great time.

People were extremely entertained by the bat that was brought in, and I was wondering if there was a chance we could get a bat with our logo on it sent to us?

Once again I appreciate it, and let me know either way.

Andrew Harrington

It wasn’t as hard as the mule from UCM, but it was a bit of a challenge. Still, I think it turned out OK. I asked if they wanted a slogan on it as well. I loved what they asked for:

NEXT WEEK: More stops…

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

The best advice ever when it comes to getting an interview from an Emmy-award winning journalist. (A Throwback post)

As we start the unit on interviewing in my classes, a lot of students are getting nervous about talking to people. I like to blame it on a lot of things like COVID’s push to make everything a distance discussion, this generation’s over-reliance on digital communication and a general sense of fear that people will say no.

Truth be told, I was always fearful of calling people up or walking up to people for basic interviews. Strangely enough, I never had a problem walking past a burning building or stepping over something dead to ask a firefighter or a cop, “So, what happened here?” I think the adrenaline of the moment helped push me past my socially awkward nature.

In any case, getting what you need often comes down to knowing who can give it to you. Bothering people for an interview, a set of data or even a ride in a nuclear sub can be arduous, but when it comes to making it happen, this throwback post has some pretty good advice:

 

“Don’t Take No From Someone Who Isn’t Empowered To Say Yes”

My friend Allison used the quote in the headline this weekend when we were teaching her daughter/my goddaughter how to negotiate for better prices at a flea market in South Haven, Michigan. It turned out to be a golden bit of advice she learned from Peter Greenberg, a Emmy-award-winning journalist who was talking to the students at our old college newspaper.

Here’s the story as relayed by Allison (Greenberg himself recalled this story during a guest appearance on the “Destination Everywhere” Podcast):

Greenberg was explaining how to get an important story and how to persist when people didn’t want to be helpful.

He wanted access to a nuclear attack sub as part of a story he was working on. This was in the late 1980s when this was happening, which happened to be when we were still in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, so letting a journalist wander around a nuclear sub was laughable at best.

Greenberg kept poking at Naval officials for access, each one basically telling him, “There is no way this is happening.” At one point he asked, “OK, if this COULD be done, who would be the one person who could allow it to happen?” It turned out to be the commander-in-chief in the Pacific, stationed in Pearl Harbor.

Greenberg got the Navy to agree to give him the meeting, which was supposed to be kind of a 10-minute, “we had a meeting” meeting. Instead, Greenberg noticed a photo of a ship on the admiral’s wall and Greenberg knew a lot about that particular ship. Instead of talking about sub access, they started talking about the boat. By the time the 10 minutes had ended, the admiral invited Greenberg to lunch and eventually granted him the permission he sought.

“Don’t take ‘No’ from someone who isn’t empowered to say ‘Yes,’” he told the group.

At the heart of his story were three key things that can be helpful to you as a journalist:

TAKE A SHOT: When Greenberg kept hearing “no,” he asked for a meeting that the people essentially told him wasn’t going to lead anywhere. In the podcast mentioned earlier in this post, Greenberg said the people setting up the meeting for him basically asked him why he’d want to fly all the way to Pearl Harbor just to hear “no” from one more person. He figured he had nothing at this point, so he might as well take a shot in person with the one person who could get him what he needed. What was the worst thing that could happen? He might have no story and a case of jet lag and that’s about it.

If the story is important enough to you, you need to take a shot at it before deciding it’s not going to happen. You never know what you might get if you give up before you give it a chance to succeed.

FIND COMMON GROUND: The thing that made this work was a bit of serendipity. If the admiral had a picture of a sunset, a poster of Porsche or a velvet Elvis on his wall, Greenberg might have not found his in. However, as he explained in the podcast, he realized he needed a connection and he found it:

They gave me a ten-minute appointment at 9:00 in the morning on a Monday. I flew up on a Saturday. I walked in to see him. He could care less about me. I was told to have a meeting. He didn’t want to be there. It was an office the size of Grand Central Station. Everybody was in their dress whites. They didn’t want me to be there. It was like a courtesy call, give him a commemorative coin and get him out.

This is the difference. You seek out common ground and I knew that I had maybe fifteen seconds to figure out what the common ground was. I got lucky because behind his desk was a photograph of a boat and it turned out I knew the boat well.

I said to him, “Is that a Bertram 31?” He said, “Damn straight.” I said, “That’s the best boat they ever built.” He said, “You’re not kidding?” I said, “Let me guess. When you make a hard right turn, the engine cavitates and the water pump overflows?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Here’s how you fix it. You’re going to do a bypass on the impeller.”

We start talking like that and ten minutes later, the officer is going to say, “Admiral, your time is up.” He looked at me and said, “Do you got lunch plans?” I said, “I’m all yours.”

<SNIP>

That’s called chutzpah and luck.

If I’d walked into his office for that ten-minute meeting, he’s like, “Can I go on a sub?” “Get the hell out of here.”

You want to look for ways to connect with a source during an interview. That’s why doing it in person is often so valuable. You can look around and see things that they have around them to help you size up your subject. Starting with a discussion about a picture or a plaque or even a baseball card they have on display can get you an “in” that makes them see you as a kindred spirit as opposed to a pain the butt.

GO TO WHO CAN SAY YES: I think I’m going to use that quote with every interviewing class for as long as I live now, in that it perfectly captures what we should be doing when it comes to getting key information.

“Don’t take ‘No’ from someone who isn’t empowered to say ‘Yes’” is simple, direct and yet amazingly mind-blowing, as it dawns on me that I’ve probably failed in this regard myriad times in my journalism career and my daily life.

When you want permission for something, you need to go to the person who can grant it. Unfortunately, there are often underlings, minions and other pencil-pushers who get put in your path and try to dissuade you from getting that permission. If it’s important enough for you to pursue that permission, get past those people and go find the person who is empowered to grant it.

Like many things, this can be taken too far or in the wrong way. I am in no way saying you should become the snotty person who is holding up the line at the store, loudly proclaiming, “I need to speak to your manager!” because the bananas are ringing up at 39 cents per pound when the sign clearly said 36 cents per pound. However, I am saying most folks take the first “no” as a reason to give up far too easily.

Find the person empowered to say yes and see what that person says. If it’s still “no” at least you’ll know that nobody else is getting your story. If it’s “yes,” you got what you came here to get.

Three tips to help you think harder about your word choices as a journalist

(EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re back for the year, applying the new model for the blog with the Wednesday post being about writing and/or reporting. If you missed Mass Com Monday, you can find it here. Please continue to  send suggestions for improvement  or lists of things you need covered here. — VFF)

 

Students have often told me that when they are writing a story and they hit a lazy patch, a dumb phrase or something else that doesn’t make for good copy, they hear my voice in their heads, barking at them to fix it.

I, too, have a voice like that in my head and it belongs to Cliff Behnke, the former managing editor of the Wisconsin State Journal. Even today, decades since I last saddled up at a terminal in that newsroom, Cliff still scares the hell out of me.

He had the ability to parse words in such a way that made you feel horribly inadequate for not seeing your failings before he did. I can still remember the first experience I had where he did this. I had written a caption for a photo that noted there were “89 different model railroad train layouts” at the expo center.

Cliff made the point that, of course they’re different. Could I imagine if there were 89 of them and they were ALL IDENTICAL? So why bother with “different?”

That kind of insight became a big part of my writing, not just in shedding the word “different” (another one of Cliff’s peeves was “new” as in “They built a new school.” Has anyone ever built an OLD school?), but also in learning to challenge every word I wrote, and more than a few of them that I read. Take this headline from Deadspin for example:

Sexual assault is a horrible, terrible, absolutely no-good thing, so do we need the word “disturbing” to describe the details? I really went through pretty much every iteration of any potential detail I could think of to find one that wouldn’t fit in the realm of disturbing. I came up empty.

The headline could have used any one of a dozen other relatively meaningless words that could draw in a reader. For example, the writer could have gone with “shocking” details that might involve some really weird stuff this idiot tried as compared to the more banal details like he reeked of Polo and drove a Tesla. At least in that case, we wouldn’t have a “new/different” kind of situation here.

With that in mind, here are a couple hints on how to challenge your word choices in journalistic writing:

Addition by subtraction: In the case of “new” or “different” or “disturbing,” you find that the word really doesn’t add anything by being there. No  one would think they built an old school, had 89  identical model railroad layouts or had some fun and exciting details about a sexual assault. Thus, feel free to eliminate the word.  Occasionally, when I challenge a word in this  fashion, I go back to this scene from “A Few Good Men:”

“I felt his life might be in danger…”

“Grave danger?”

“Is there another kind?”

If you lack the internal level of sarcasm to make this work on a daily basis, I’m sure you have a  friend, colleague or definitely a professor of journalism who can help you sharpen that part of your personality.

 

I do not think that word means what you think it means:  Looking up words is always a good idea,  as not every definition fits the intended meaning. I’m sure one of my students would like to have back about two years of his music reviews in which he kept using “penultimate” to mean “super-extra-ultimate” when it really means “second to last.”

However, I’m even looking at words that people tend to use interchangeably that can add opinion or shift the truth of an issue in an unforeseen way. Consider the words “change” and “improve.”

Both can be true,  but they don’t mean the same thing, even if people involved in a situation kind of wish they did:

“Mayor John Smith said the construction will change the traffic flow along Interstate 21.”

“Mayor John Smith said the construction will improve the traffic flow along Interstate 21.”

An improvement always presupposes change. That said, a change CAN be, but isn’t NECESSARILY an improvement. EXAMPLE:

CHANGE 1: Your landlord has installed a set of handrails on your staircase to make it easier and  safer for you to get into the house. 

CHANGE 2: Your landlord has removed the steps from your house and replaced the lawn with a moat full of starving alligators.

Clearly, both change your housing situation, but only one is an improvement.Keep an eye on words that couch reality like “development,” “benefit” and other such things that really need a look to see if they’re really just a “change” kind of thing.

 

Go back to the Holy Trinity: Most of the reason we get into a jam in writing is because we don’t have that solid noun-verb-object core that makes for the start of a strong sentence. If you can start with those three elements, most sentences will dramatically improve.

Even more, the quality of each element can eliminate the need for those ineffective descriptors that we’ve discussed above.  In the Deadspin headline you get “Details emerge from complaint” as your noun, verb and object elements. “Emerge” makes it sound like something out of a sewer-monster horror movie at best. “Details” couldn’t be more vague if you tried.

Stronger focus on the noun-verb-object structure could really make for a stronger headline:

Texans’ minority owner sexually assaulted women through groping, digital penetration, court complaint states

If that feels too forward, you could go with something a little less active and a little more tame:

Texans’ minority owner accused of sexual assaults, including digital penetration and groping a woman through her underwear

Think about how concrete your noun can be and how vigorous your verb can be. In some cases, if you have to go with a weaker verb, adding clarity and value to the noun and the object can draw the readers into the piece.

An open letter to Kathleen McElroy: Forget about Texas A&M. Come to UW-Oshkosh.

Please consider these words of wisdom… If it would bring you here to UWO, Dr. McElroy, I would gladly perform the entirety of any scene from “Cool as Ice” for you every day, simply for your amusement.

 

Dear Dr. McElroy,

Even though we have never met, I have been following your situation from afar and find it depressingly untenable. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be recruited, lauded and praised by an institution you love and admire, only to have that place fold up on you like a cheap card table when the wind started blowing in another direction. I also can’t imagine what it’s like now trying to figure out where to go in life: You basically told your previous employer you were leaving, only to now realize you CAN’T leave for this other job.

The interim dean at A&M, who apparently pointed out to you that you are “a Black woman who worked at The New York Times,” (both of which he seemingly considered negatives somehow when he made that statement) has resigned his position in the administration over this cluster-mess.  University President M. Katherine Banks, who professed astonishment and ignorance of all the changes to your position,  has “retired immediately” because the “negative press has become a distraction.” (Right. The PRESS is the problem, not the not-so-thinly-veiled racism, the shameful backpedaling or the generally terrible way the school handled this situation.)

This has to be twice as painful for you, as TAMU is your alma mater and that really seemed to be a driving force for you, based on what I read. (For me, I’d be pretty OK if I went back to one of my degree-granting institutions. The other one? I’d rather you stabbed me in the face with a live cattle prod than send me there for a faculty slot.)

This would be a comedy of errors if it weren’t so sad and tragic.

With that in mind, I’d like to offer you this plea: Drop those zeroes and get with the heroes here at UW-Oshkosh. We would LOVE to have you, and I personally would love to spend as much time learning from you as humanly possible.

Here’s the best case I can offer you for such a career move:

Your governor is treating DEI like it’s an STI, signing a bill that would close all offices at universities that he deemed “anti-white.” He’s also anti-tenure, anti-education and looks like a terrible 1980s televangelist to a really creepy degree.

Our governor is a former state superintendent of schools, who favors public education and improving the lives of school children throughout the state. He also pulled off one of the smoothest line-item veto moves in history, to increase public education spending for the next 400 years.

The person who was going to be your boss at A&M had a history of doing some truly dumb things with student media, including trying to overstep her position and kill the print edition of your amazing student newspaper, The Battalion.  She then rationalized her decision to go against the wishes of pretty much everyone in this situation with the immortal line of “I’m not a professor of journalism, I don’t understand exactly why [print media] is important to the field.”

The person at UWO who would be your boss has been pretty darned good to journalism and student media. When a bunch of little… um… student government people demanded my head as the adviser of the student newspaper, he stepped in and kept the idiots at bay. He was also instrumental in our fundraising drive and even gave money out of his own pocket to help out.

In addition, our offices are in the newest academic building on campus, right down the hall from our African American studies department. “Doc” Simpson is an amazing leader of that department and Dr. Denae Powell is one of the coolest people I know. (If you like to laugh, we enjoy sharing a lot of “guess what a student just said/did” stories as we pass each other’s office on a daily basis.)

We’re a fun, small, collegial bunch and we take care of each other. We don’t silo up into “news” versus “PR” or whatever, and we really do our best to help each other and all of “our kids” that enter the program. Based on what I’ve read, that sounds like it would be right up your alley.

I grant you we aren’t perfect: We get 10 feet of snow every year, it takes a while to learn how to pass  farming equipment on our highways and you can’t breathe within six inches of the Illinois border without being forced to pay a toll. We also have our share of knotheads who treat higher education as if it’s some sort of a Communist plot, which might not sound like much of an improvement over your current situation.

I also grant you that I don’t have fiat power in terms of offering you a job, but I’m a hell of a persistent cuss when it comes to getting important things done, so let’s figure that one out when we get there. I just think you’re too important and valuable to waste on an institution that’s treating you this way.

Feel free to shoot me a note via the contact form here if you’re interested in taking a chance on the Harvard of the Fox Valley.

Sincerely,

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

A deeper look at a “Requiem for the Newsroom:” What we really lose as journalists when we lose that shared space and time

Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times last weekend poured one out for the old-time newsroom:

I’m mystified when I hear that so many of our 20-something news assistants prefer to work from home. At that age, I would have had a hard time finding mentors or friends or boyfriends if I hadn’t been in the newsroom, and I never could have latched onto so many breaking stories if I hadn’t raised my hand and said, “I’ll go.”

Mary McGrory, the liberal lioness columnist, never would have gotten to know me at The Star, so I never would have gotten invitations from her years later like this one: “Let’s go see Yasir Arafat at the White House and go shopping!”

As Mayer recalled, when a big story broke at The Star: “You could see history happening. People would cluster over a reporter’s desk, pile into the boss’s office, and sometimes break into incredibly loud fights. There were weirdos in newsrooms, and fabulous role models occasionally, and the spirit of being part of a motley entourage. Now, it’s just you and the little cursor on your screen.”

Dowd’s column toasts a lot of the things that I loved about newsrooms: The weird quirkiness of working with a group of people just this side of the cantina scene from “Star Wars,” the post-work drink/cuss sessions, the adrenaline pulsing through the entire building when a major story was in the works.

All of these things were fun, although I often wonder if most of them would exist today in our sterile, HR-driven, “watch these videos on (fill in the topic of the day that people fear getting sued over) so we can say we told you not to do X” environment. A veteran reporter once told me about his time as a newsroom cub when he got to know the veteran cops reporter. The woman, a rarity at that time, used to bring a six-pack of Pabst to the police station to loosen the tongues the cops she knew. She also carried a two-shot Derringer in her purse.

(I’d be more skeptical, except the source is one of the best journalists I’ve ever met. I’m still not good enough to carry that guy’s typewriter. Oh, and at one point when I complained of a headache and asked if he had something to ease the pain, he directed me to one of his desk drawers, which contained a fifth of some rot-gut vodka.)

Although it’s easy to look at the past with rose-colored glasses, I’m sure the newsrooms from “back in the day” weren’t all that great for women, people of color, non-Christians and other folks along those lines. However, the concept of a newsroom, that central junction point for people and ideas to germinate, remains essential to journalism for a number of reasons:

SIMPLE CONNECTIONS: As much as the internet connects us, it also allows us to be isolated in ways not possible in the newsroom of old. Yes, we can look up much more information online than we could get from a grouchy old copy editor who memorized the AP style guide and still remembers who won the mayoral run-off election back in 1963.

That said, I know that when I was working on a story that crossed news and sports boundaries, for example, I could walk 10 feet across the room to one of the sports folks and ask a couple questions about how they would approach a specific aspect of the story. The same was true when one of them needed some help on a story that involved an aspect of crime.

When I needed more context for a photo for which I had to write a caption, I could duck back into the photo bubble and ask the shooter what caught their eye. When the shooter had some information that mattered to the captions, I often got a visit at my desk. (I could always tell when something was important to Joe Jackson, one of my favorite photo folks, because he’d quietly place his hand softly on my shoulder before saying, “When I was taking this shot, I was seeing/thinking/feeling…” It made my job much easier and it helped me to better understand what to look for in quality photos.)

Years later, as an adviser, I knew that if I was in the newsroom, the kids would ask me to look at a layout or check a headline. They’d also yell, “Hey, Vince, is (X) a real word?” and I could yell back, “Not unless the dictionary’s changed in the last 5 minutes.” I also knew that they wouldn’t bother to call my house or email me to get those answers if I hadn’t been there.

 

COLLECTIVE WISDOM: Again, not to harp on how technology has changed us, but knowledge and wisdom aren’t the same thing. By merely being around good people who were doing their jobs well, I was better able to improve my own craft.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my desk at the State Journal was jammed up against the one Pat Simms occupied, putting me in the perfect position to basically get smarter through osmosis. I could hear how she used strong questions to quash BS answers before they could get started. I listened to how she worked a source until she was sure she had the best version of whatever the story was from that person. I also learned how to turn a story around quickly, with limited time and even less flab.

Spending time near editors like Phil Glende and Teryl Franklin (to name only a few) gave me a sense of how to find holes in a story and how to fix them if the reporter couldn’t. I watched the copy desk clean the copy thoroughly and quickly by figuring out who could do what the best and making sure that person got that specific job. In a lot of ways, watching the pros operate in person was like watching an orchestra perform live. (Some days it looked like Cirque du Soleil being performed with chainsaws on an oil-slicked linoleum floor, to be fair.)

It’s not the same when it’s not live.

 

SOCIAL NORMS: One of the best journal articles I ever read for my doctoral program was Warren Breed’s 1955 study of social norming within a newsroom. Breed examined the ways in which knowledge and practice was shared among those in a newsroom and found that journalists tended to eschew formal documents or written policies. Instead, they shared information one to another as a way of training younger generations to behave as those before them had.

Reflecting on his seminal study more than 40 years later, Breed recalled how he was writing about a parade of some kind and an older journalist advised him to hype up the patriotism. The vet mentioned that he should start with something about the bands playing and the flags flying. Breed did as he had been advised and was later praised for his effort. A few years later, he found himself doling out similar advice to a novice writer, who also led his story with the image of flags waving and bands performing.

The idea can seem a little problematic in some ways, especially if you realize that this can really narrow the view of what makes for “news” or how to “do news right.” However, a lot of the norms that I picked up in the newsroom meant a lot in terms of imbuing me with some important lessons.

For example, it’s easy to blow off a deadline (or a demanding editor, who is steaming over your inability to make a deadline) if you’re in your home 50 miles from the editor in question. However, when I watched a person blow a deadline by five minutes and then saw that five minutes turn into 10 more at the editor’s desk and 15 more at the copy desk, I saw the chain reaction associated with that failure. In addition, I knew when an editor was circling my desk like a shark, I stepped on the gas pedal a little harder in banging out whatever I was working on.

Even more, a lot of social norms that matter more now than ever get passed down from our mentors in a one-on-one situation. I know that journalistic malfeasance has happened as long as journalism has been around, but I know that feeling a stronger collective “we” made any one person less likely to take the easy way out. I can’t imagine having to see Teryl every day if I had faked a source, got caught and had to live with it in that newsroom. A random editor halfway across the country that I never met? I’d like to think I’d be just as honest, but I can’t say for sure.

I learned from folks like George Hesselberg that we get stuff right all the time. That’s a value that came from his mentor and I’m sure it came from someone else all the way back into an even further bygone era. The norms we shared remain in my mind to this day as well as the bonds of friendship we still share today.

 

FAMILY: This may be a bit more Polly-Anna-ish and more like what Dowd was talking about, but I have to admit, newsrooms and the people I met in them became like a second family to me.

(We used to joke at the Daily Cardinal that we were a family, in that we all drank and hurt one another, but I digress… Besides, the godparents of my kid came from that newsroom, so it couldn’t have been all bad…)

I’ve yet to hear a student come back to campus for a “Reporting Class” reunion or a “J-412 Tenth Anniversary Celebration,” but they come back for student media events. They reconnect with people who chewed the same dirt as they did in the windowless bunker that the university provided as a newsroom, where the coffee pot always burned everything to a crisp and the carpet smelled like wet feet.

They also connect with others from previous generations who have been through the same kinds of things. Just having lived through that experience makes them kindred spirits.

To lose those connective threads seems so sad to me, and I’m not even a people person.

 

Confidence or Thuggery? A quick look at avoiding double-standards in journalism writing

In the wake of the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship game, the question of double standards emerged as a major plot point.

During LSU’s 102-85 defeat of Iowa, Tiger star Angel Reese made the “can’t see me” hand gesture toward the Hawkeyes’ Caitlin Clark as a form of trash talking. Clark had made similar gestures throughout the tournament toward opposing players.

In one case it was deemed “confident” and “self-assured.” In another case, people decried the “lack of sportsmanship” and “thuggery.”

If you can’t guess who got which critique, here’s a clue: Clark is white and Reese is Black.

William Rhoden, a distinguished author and sports journalist, broke down the entirety of this situation on Andscape, drawing on prior examples of this throughout athletics:

On Sunday, Reese simply gave it back to Clark. Many neutral observers and Clark’s fans were not pleased and played the sportsmanship and class card. Double standards: When we do it, it’s bravado. When you do it, it’s crass. When we play hard, it’s gritty. When you play hard, it’s thuggery.

I saw this this firsthand in the 1980s with John Thompson’s Georgetown team. They were routinely cast as villains and thugs. We saw the same thing with UNLV’s great teams of the 1990s. When UNLV played Duke for the national title in 1990, Duke’s players were cast as “choirboys” while UNLV players were cast as villains and thugs. Then, of course, there was Michigan’s Fab Five which, critics say, introduced hip-hop elements into basketball.

Now that the women’s game has grown and African American women continue to become increasingly prominent, the same stereotypes are emerging: Black women portrayed as rough-and-tumble street fighters, their white counterparts as stalwart, heady competitors.

And let’s not even get into the whole history of Don Imus and his “nappy-headed hos” review of the Rutgers women’s basketball team…

We’ve talked about this kind of thing at length a few years back when stories had framed women based on their gender identity first and their accomplishments as an afterthought. We also touched on the issue of race and framing of athletes back when Brian Flores launched his discrimination suit against the NFL.

As a brief reminder here to journalism students, consider the following issues when including descriptors or making word choices in ways you might not initially consider:

WOULD YOU USE THE DESCRIPTOR OF THE SITUATION WAS REVERSED?: One of the key ways to determine fairness in language or description is to turn the tables and see if it still works for you. My favorite example comes from Jim Bouton’s book, “Ball Four,” in which one of his teammates notes that he wouldn’t mind the papers referring to him as “the black first baseman” if only they would refer to his counterpart as “the white first baseman.”

The same is true of descriptions like “the female mayor” or “the woman CEO” and so forth. Feminist scholars have long noted the incongruity in language as to how men and women are described. A few common pairings include:

    • Women are “pushy” while men are “assertive”
    • Women are “bossy” while men “take charge”
    • Women are “stubborn” while men are “persistent”

Calling attention unnecessarily to an attribute that you wouldn’t flip the other way is clearly an indicator that you might want to rethink that descriptor. I can’t remember seeing headlines about “the white quarterback” or “the male company president” and I bet most of you can’t either. Same thing with references to a “straight wedding” or a “cis gender politician.”

I can’t imagine someone calling Caitlin Clark a “thug” for her trash talking, but I know that word showed up in a number of discussions involving Angel Reese. That’s clearly part of the problem.

 

DOES THE TERM HAVE A LOADED MEANING?: I can’t think of any time I’ve heard someone described as “a looter” or “a rioter” and had a positive reaction to that person. Those terms carry with them some negative baggage.  Conversely, I’ve seen an array of meanings ascribed to the term “clowning around” that range from bright and happy to racist.

A few years back, I remember seeing an analysis of the term “unskilled labor.” In a post on this term, someone noted that all labor is skilled. If you took Bill Gates and stuck him with a road construction crew, he would be as lost as can be. If you took Jamie Dimon and put him in charge of a Naperville McDonald’s during lunch rush, he would probably end up with a crowd of really angry people and some severe grease burns. The term “unskilled labor” is meant to diminish the value of what certain people do and thus make it easier to discount them or pay them less.

We could go on for days, but the point is that language matters in how we tell stories and how we frame the characters in them.

More words of wisdom from Dad on his birthday (A Throwback Post).

You might think, “Gee, Vince, it seems like the only reason you do these odes to your Dad on his birthday is to feature his really bad fashion choices of the 1970s…” Well, you wouldn’t be ENTIRELY wrong about that…

My reporting class inspired me to dig up these words of wisdom from my dad today on his actual birthday.

About six or seven weeks ago, we discussed open records and launched our “Fun with FOIA” assignment, which was relatively simple:

  • Come up with a story that is predicated on public records of any kind
  • Create and file an open-records request with the agency responsible for those records
  • Write a two-page, double-spaced story that incorporates the info you got back and at least two human sources who can discuss the topic in a meaningful way.

This isn’t rocket science and I wasn’t looking for a Watergate story. Find the budget of the student government, figure out what they spend money on and ask the leaders some questions. Pull the contracts used to hire speakers for campus events and see who got paid what and if anything was hinky. Get the total number of parking tickets given on campus, see where the most/least tickets were given and talk to parking services folks about it.

That said, I told them about 832 times that the only truly problematic thing would be if they waited too long to file their open-records request. That would limit the time people on the other end would have to look at your stuff, find the records and get back to you. “Yeah… Yeah… We know…” was the general attitude as they left class that day.

Today, drafts are due and I’m getting emails that start like this:

So, this is honestly my own fault, but I submitted my open records request to the University Police on Monday and for some odd reason I thought they could get to me by Thursday, but they just got back to me today saying they’re so busy with open record requests, so he won’t have done for another 10 days.

And thus came forth advice my father constantly gave me that I then shared with them: “Dammit, you should have done it right away…”

Dad believed in the idea that if we got stuff done when it came up, we wouldn’t end up forgetting about it or getting painted into a corner by circumstance. It’s why we always pack the car for card shows the night before, print off an itinerary for a trip immediately (even if the trip is six months away) and make damned sure to file our taxes right away.

It’s why when I get asked to judge a contest, I try my best to nail it down as soon as I get the assignments. It’s why I respond to emails right after I open them. It’s also why nothing irritates me more than if something slips past me and then I’m behind on it.

Today’s throwback post brings back Dad’s maxims I put together on his birthday a few years back. These still fit perfectly in everything I teach. I also wanted to add these two items that I find myself coming back to every, single day as a journalist and a professor:

Learn to haggle: If there is one life skill students desperately need, it’s to understand how to appropriately value things and negotiate. I learned this when I was about 7 years old at a baseball card show.

I wanted a 1973 Roberto Clemente card, and one dealer had a whole bunch of them for sale. When Dad asked the guy how much one would cost, the dealer pulled out a price guide, and said they were $25 each.

“I’ll give you $10 for one,” Dad replied.

“Look at the book,” the guy said, pushing the guide toward Dad. “They’re booking at $25.”

“Well, I’ll give you $10 for whichever one you want to sell,” Dad replied.

The guy sighed, and said, “Pick whichever one you want. It’s a deal.”

I still couldn’t understand how that all worked, but I waited until we got in the car to ask Dad about it. I mean, the BOOK SAID the card was worth $25. That’s got to be how much you pay, right? It was at that point, Dad said something that sticks with me until this day:

“Something isn’t worth what somebody says it is. It’s worth what someone’s willing to give you for it.”

Not only was that good advice when it came to garage sales, flea markets, baseball cards and auto purchases, it was phenomenal advice when it came to negotiating debts, getting info from sources and prying documents loose from wary record keepers.

Even more, it’s the skill I teach students the most when they get job offers: Here’s how you ask for a better salary, better hours, specific computer systems, more vacation, extra 401K matches and more. Haggling can feel awkward until you get used to it, which is why it’s important to understand how to do it well and to get plenty of practice at it with small stuff.

Like baseball cards.

Live up to your word: The best and worst moments of my life came from this maxim, in that Dad did what he said.

When I was 8, I asked to go to a Milwaukee Brewers game. Dad agreed to take me on the day I had asked, not quite realizing that it was Free Bat Day, and that the team was in the middle of a pennant race. The place would be packed, the traffic would be awful and who knows if they had enough bats to satisfy every kid.

Still, Dad said yes, so we went. It was a heck of a game and I still have that bat somewhere.

Conversely, when I turned 16 and got my driver’s license, Dad told me, “If you get a speeding ticket, you’re done. I don’t want any (bovine excrement). You get a ticket and you give me your keys.”

About a year later, I was flying down a stretch of road notorious for speed traps when I got clocked at 17 over. No warning and no mercy from the officer. I got the ticket.

Dad was making dinner and he asked, “Where the hell were you?” I didn’t say a word. I just put the ticket on the kitchen table, dropped the keys on top of it and that was that for a while. (Eventually, I got my driving privileges back but 32 years later, I’m still smarting from that to the point Amy accuses me of being an elderly woman behind the wheel.)

Dad always said, “If I said yes, it was yes. If I said no, it’s no. A ‘maybe’ means ‘maybe.'”

I try to live by that with my own kid and with my career as well. If I commit to something, whether it’s as pathologically stupid as writing three books at the same time or as easy as keeping my door open during office hours, I do it.

As my reporting class learned this morning when they asked, “Can’t we move the deadline for the FOIA story?”

Nope. It is what it is.

So, on Dad’s birthday, here’s a look back at his previous words of wisdom and what I hope students can learn from them.

 

Happy Birthday, Dad: 4 valuable things I learned from my father that might help you, too

DadSuit

It might be hard to believe that a guy who dressed like this could have valuable advice, but trust me, he always does.

As my daughter was going stir-crazy the other day, whining loudly about missing her friends, her extracurricular activities and even in-school classes, I told her the one truism I hoped would keep her sane:

“You can’t focus on the things you can’t do because of social distancing. You have to focus on the things you DO get to do. Otherwise, you’ll go batty.”

For me, an introvert with a long-standing aversion to social situations, this has been an easy adage to espouse and obey.

Until today. Today is my dad’s birthday.

Like everyone else in this country, Dad is stuck at home with limited contact to the outside world, for fear of contracting a virus that is decimating people at an incredible rate. While this “wait this out at home” rule is rough on a lot of people, it has to be killing my dad, who earned the family nickname of “No-Line Frank” for his disdain of waiting in line for anything. (It probably isn’t any great shakes for my mom, either, as she’s isolated in the house with him like this for at least another month.)

I wish with all my heart I could jet down I-41 and give him a big hug (and a nice bottle of Drambuie) today. The fact I can’t saddens me to the point of distraction. That said, he would be the first one to tell me it’s fine, not to worry and that I should get back to work.

My parents were and still are instrumental in who I am and what I do in life. In honor of dad’s 76th birthday, here are four “Filak-isms” he taught me that helped make me who I am and likely will help me make it through this pandemic unscathed:

HUSTLE WHILE YOU WAIT: I can’t remember when he first said it to me, but I rely on it almost daily: “The best things in life come to he who hustles while he waits.”

Although Dad later told me he heard this in a Credit Union seminar or something, I still attribute it to him because he not only said it, but he lives it. I often joke that I’m a “human twitch” when it comes to keeping busy, constantly writing books, teaching classes, refinishing furniture and doing almost anything else anybody asks of me.

Compared to my dad, I’m a piker.

I can’t remember the last time I saw him watch a whole ballgame or TV show without getting up and looking for something to do. He might be cleaning out the junk drawer in the dining room or sorting some baseball cards or looking for something in the basement, but he’s constantly on the move. Seeing this always inspired me to find more stuff to do and to keep looking for new opportunities to make the most of my time.

If you’re always hustling, the good things will come your way.

 

DON’T BRING SHAME ON THE FAMILY: I know I’ve explained this before, but it bears repeating. Dad told me this when I went off to college and decades later, it still rings true. “When you go out there, have fun,” he said. ” But, don’t bring shame on the family. It’s my name, too.”

The sheer tonnage of stupid things I avoided doing in college, simply based on that bit of advice, could stop a speeding locomotive from moving another inch forward. Even now, when I considered doing something, I would imagine the headline “UWO Professor Arrested for (Fill in whatever stupid thing I thought about doing)” and immediately decided against doing that stupid thing.

Whether it was being a success or just avoiding failure, the goal was pretty simple: When Dad saw someone he knew at the grocery store, it would be great if the person didn’t start the conversation with, “Hey, yeah… Heard about your son… Geez… That’s not good…”

 

YOU ARE NOT AVERAGE: In fifth grade, I came home with five C’s on my report card, much to the dismay of my parents. Dad was less than pleased that I wasn’t living up to my potential, whatever that was, and he pretty much knew full well that I fell short because I wasn’t giving a crap.

We were in the middle of a “silent supper,” thanks to my transgressions, when I finally broke the silence with what I thought would be a pretty good argument for my folks to not be so upset: “I read the report card, and it says that a C is average, so-”

Dad cut me off in a firm tone, “You are NOT average.”

I got the point. I could do better. And I knew it.

From that moment, I didn’t get another C on a report card until I hit my freshman year of college. In that case, it was more of a scheduling mistake than a lack of effort, because I took an introductory zoology course that served as the “weed-out” class for the veterinary medicine program at the U.

It’s always easy to take it easy, but that’s not the right way to do things. I was lucky enough to get a set of tools and the ability to use them in a way that matters. I was also lucky as hell to have parents who wouldn’t let me slide because I was good enough to get by or because other people’s kids were doing something worse.

Once that got stuck in my head, I realized that it’s important to always push beyond average whenever possible.

 

FINISH THE WORK FIRST, DRINK BEER LATER: Dad always believed in the separation of work and relaxation. He once told me about my grandfather and how he liked to do part of a job and then relax a bit and then go back and do more of it. Dad fell into the mode that my great-grandfather espoused: Finish the work first, drink the beer later.

What I learned from this was not only the importance of a strong work ethic but also the idea that I could find joy in completion of work. Seeing things get checked off a list or looking at a well-done job brought me happiness that could far exceed the joy of a brief respite and the knowledge that I had to do more work.

Even more, the beer always tasted better when I knew I was done for the day.

Thanks for everything, Pop. I love you.

Dad

 

 

 

Simple solutions for frequent writing problems: How and where to attribute

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is a mix of previous content as well as some updated material that hits on the topic at hand. It’s not that I worry about self-plagiarizing, but if you’re anything like me at this point in the semester, being reassured that you’re not actually losing your mind and that you might have seen this before is pretty helpful. — VFF)

In an attempt to help writers fix simple problems that have tended to crop up in the pieces I’ve been grading lately, we’re going to spend this week giving each one a quick look with some examples of things that went wrong and some simple solutions.

Today’s menu item: Attributions

The purpose of an attribution is to attach a source to a statement so the reader can figure out who said it and how much credence to lend that statement. Without attributions, the readers could assume the material is coming from the journalists themselves, and thus lead to all sorts of concerns about opinions and bias.

Let’s jump into this:

WHEN TO ATTRIBUTE: I often tell students I’ve never seen anyone get fired because they attributed too much. That said, there are plenty of instances out there where failing to attribute landed a writer in hot water. (My favorite is the Richard Jewell situation, which we’ve covered here before.)

In short, attribute almost everything. Here are a few exceptions:

  • The content is a fact, at the level of “water is wet.” (“Wisconsin is a state,” is the kind of statement you don’t need to attribute to an atlas or Google Maps. “Wisconsin is the BEST state,” will require an answer to “says who?”)
  • You witnessed the actions yourself and are reporting those observations. I tell my kids that if a former student walked into our classroom and beat the hell out of me and they saw it happen, they could write everything they saw without attribution for the student newspaper. That said, if a reporter from the paper showed up after I was beaten bloody and asked, “What happened?” that reporter would need to attribute that information to whomever did the explaining.

ATTRIBUTION STRUCTURE AND PLACEMENT: I’m a massive pain in the keester when it comes to this in my classes and I attribute that to the ancient nuns who taught me grammar with a passion for sentence diagrams. (It also helped that they backed up their play with steel-ruler discipline.)

Attributions should be structured in a noun-verb format:

  • Mayor Jane Smith said.
  • Johnson said.
  • he said.

NOT verb-noun

  • said Mayor Jane Smith.
  • said Johnson.
  • said he.

I get into arguments over this on occasion, including one with a former faculty member that evolved into a tenure-battle/land-war situation. Like most things, I try to explain WHY this is the way it is and it usually works on the kids. (That former faculty member is another story that can’t be told without alcohol and a non-disclosure agreement…)

Here’s my logic:

It’s grammatically sound: In the basic writing courses, we teach students the inherent value of active voice and why it provides advantages over passive voice. “Bill hit Bob” is tighter, stronger and shorter than “Bob was hit by Bill.”

Attributions are basically just tiny sentences, so this same approach applies. What an attribution says in active voice is “Smith said WORDS” while a passive-voice attribution says “These words were said by Smith.”

When you have a choice to go with grammar or run counter to grammar, it’s usually better to go with grammar, unless there is a compelling reason. (Example: Grammar dictates that you use “whom” with the objective case and that you not end a sentence with a preposition, as that leaves it “dangling.” That said, you wouldn’t ever get in a bar fight and yell, “DO YOU KNOW WITH WHOM YOU ARE MESSING?”)

It’s structurally logical: This addresses that previous kind of example, in that you want things to sound normal. For reasons past my understanding, some writers think “said Smith” sounds normal, even though they wouldn’t use that same structure if the attribution required a pronoun instead. (said she or said he)

Also, we don’t do this with other verbs, as it would sound flat-out goofy:

  • Ran I to the store to pick up a gallon of milk.
  • Won we first place at the track and field finals.
  • Proposed he to his girlfriend.

The minute I see that approach taking hold, I’ll buy into “said Smith” and then quickly descend into an underground bunker for the rest of eternity.

It only has one purpose: The point of an attribution is to answer “who says?” That’s it.

The argument I’ve seen over the years is, “Well, if I reverse the noun and the verb, I can add a bunch of information to the attribution, like ‘said Smith, who graduated from Notre Dame in 1949.’ This adds value.”

First of all, it’s an attribution, not the front pocket on your suitcase where you cram all the other crap you forgot to put elsewhere. Second, by stuffing the material in there, your readers might miss it, as we’ve trained them over the years to mentally skip past the attribution and simply acknowledge it’s there.

If you want to put additional content into your story, add it to the paraphrase that introduces the quote and let the attribution just do its simple job.

In terms of where to put the attribution, it’s a pretty simple set of guidelines:

  • For your paragraphs of paraphrase, put the attribution at the front if the “who” is more important than what they’re saying. If the “what” is more important than the “who,” do the opposite.
  • For single-sentence direct quotes, follow the same basic rule. For multi-sentence quotes, put the attribution after the first full sentence. This will allow the readers to engage with the quote, but it will tell them who said the information quickly enough to know how much weight they should give that quote.

VERBS OF ATTRIBUTION: As far as verbs of attribution go, not much can compete with “said,” even though it seems every student I have taught has a burning desire to find something else to use. As much as I don’t like blaming educators at other levels for anything (Hell, I’m not going to teach ninth graders without combat pay and a morphine drip…), I remember seeing a poster like this in a classroom while judging a forensics contest and almost immediately broke out in hives:

SaidIsDead

The rationale behind this approach is that “said is boring, so let’s do something different.” I might also point out that riding inside a car that is driving down the proper side of the street is boring, but that doesn’t mean you should try roof surfing on your roommate’s Kia Sorento while driving 80 mph the wrong way on the interstate just because it’s different.

If you want to write fiction, feel free to give any of verbs things a shot; Nobody’s going to argue with you about an orc “warning” a wizard about something. However, in journalism,  you actually have to prove things happened, which is why “said” works wonders.

“Said” has four things going for it:

  1. It is provable: You can demonstrate that someone opened up his or her mouth and let those words fall out of his or her head. You don’t know if that person believes them or feels a certain way about them. You can prove the person said them, especially if you record that person.
  2. It is neutral: If one person “yelled” something and the other person “said” something, one person might appear angry or irrational while the other person appears calm and rational. It shifts the balance of power ever so slightly to that calmer source and thus creates an unintended bias. We have enough trouble in the field these days with people accusing us of being biased without avoiding it in the simplest of ways.
  3. It answers the “says who?” question: Attributions are crucial to helping your readers understand who is making what points within your story. It allows readers to figure out how much weight to give to something within your piece. Simply telling someone who “said” it helps the readers make some decisions in their own minds.
  4. You’re damned right it’s boring: Name the last time that you heard anyone actively discussing verbs of attribution within a story outside of a journalism class or some weird grammar-nerd drum circle. Exactly. “Said” just does the job and goes on with its work. Verbs of attribution are like offensive linemen in football: If they’re doing their job, you don’t notice them at all. When they do something wrong, that’s when they gain attention. “Said” is boring and it is supposed to be. Don’t draw attention to your attributions. Their job isn’t to dazzle the readers.
    (The one I’ll never forget was one someone wrote for a yearbook story about a student with a mobility issue: “Bascom Hill is a challenge for anyone,” laughed Geoff Kettling, his dark eyes a’sparklin’. It was quickly switched to “Geoff Kettling said.“)

Let’s look at the three verbs most students tend to use instead of “said” and outline what makes them dicey:

Thinks: This is a pretty common one, in that most people being interviewed are asked to express their opinions on a topic upon which they have given some modicum of thought.

“Principal John Smith thinks the banning of mobile phones in school will lead to improved grades for his students.”

First, unless you have some sort of mutant power, on par with Dr. Charles Xavier, you don’t know what this guy thinks. Mind readers are excused from this lesson, but for the rest of us, we have no idea what he actually thinks.

He might be doing this because he’s tired of bumping into kids in the hallway who don’t look up from their phones during passing period. He might be thinking, “All that charging going on in classrooms is killing our electricity budget. How can I get this to stop?” He might be worried about students taking videos of teachers smoking weed in the faculty lounge or beating the snot out of kids. We don’t know what he’s thinking. We do, however, know what he said:

“Principal John Smith said the banning of mobile phones in school will lead to improved grades for his students.”

Second, and more inconsequentially, you have a weird verb-tense shift when you go from past tense to present with “thinks.” You can’t fix this the way you would fix a “says/said” verb shift by going with “thought,” as that implies he previously held an opinion but has since changed it:

“Principal John Smith thought the banning of mobile phones in school would lead to improved grades for his students, but the latest data reveals a sharp drop in GPA across all grades.”

 

Believes: This one suffers from much the same issues as “thinks,” in that you can’t demonstrate a clearly held belief in pretty much anything. Just ask all those 1980s televangelists who “believe” in the sanctity of marriage and then they were caught fooling around with the church secretary or some sex worker named “Bubbles” or something.

I use this example in my class each term, where I tell them, “I believe you are the BEST writing for the media class I have ever taught.” They don’t know if I believe that, or if I just professed the same belief to my other writing class. They don’t know if I go into my office and break out the “emergency scotch” and weep for the future of literacy after teaching their class. What they do know is that I said that statement.

You can either use it as a direct quote:

“I believe you are the BEST writing for the media class I have ever taught,” Filak said.

Or, if you really have a passionate love of my believable nature, go with this:

Filak said he believes this is the best writing for the media class he has ever taught.

 

According to: This is the one I waffle on more than occasionally, with the caveat that it not become a constant within the piece. It also needs to be applied fairly to sources.

This attribution works well for documents, although the term “stated” works just as well:

According to a police report, officers arrived to find the butler trying to capture an increasingly agitated lemur that had already bitten one woman in the face.

Pretty simple and easy, and nobody (other than the one woman) gets hurt. Here’s where it becomes problematic:

According to Bill Smith, Sen. John Jones has run a campaign of falsehoods and negative attacks.

Jones said Smith is upset he’s behind in the polls and is desperate to make up ground.

When one source gets an “according to” and the other gets a “said,” you have a situation in which it sounds like you believe one person and think the other person is just yammering. It comes across as if to say, “According to this twerp, X is true. However, the other person clearly and calmly says something that is actually accurate.”

How do you avoid all of these problems? Stick with said. It’s like Novocaine: Keep applying it and it works every time.

If you are panicking about not having a journalism internship, read this. (A Throwback Post)

A couple students were in my office Wednesday, concerned that they couldn’t find an internship yet or that internship folks had turned them down. In one case, the place rejected her and then reposted the internship. This is like being told, “I’m sorry I can’t go to the prom with you” just moments before you hear that same person telling everyone around the lunch room, “I really want to go to prom and I’ll literally go with ANYONE!”

More than a few other folks have been stopping by with crises of confidence, so I made the kids a deal: I’d dig out this post for a Throwback Thursday if they promised to read it. It’s a look back about five years ago, but the core of this is still spot-on.

Here’s a look at me living up to my end of the bargain:

Five helpful thoughts as you panic about not having an internship yet

When March turns to April, summer seems only a few short weeks away. For those of us in Wisconsin, that means the snow might finally finish melting and we can finally put away our shovels and salt spreaders for the year. For journalism students everywhere, however, April means moving from “Hey, I applied for this internship” to “Why haven’t I heard back from the internship?” to “GOD, WHY?!?  WHAT HAVE I DONE IN LIFE THAT IS SO FOUL AS TO NOT GOTTEN AN INTERNSHIP YET?!?!”

I asked some folks I know who hire interns in the field what thoughts they had about this time of year, working through the hiring process and so forth. I also dug through the old file of rejection letters and such to come up with some advice for those of you who are somewhere between moderate concern and psychotic panic.

The Most Basic Advice:

 

You aren’t doing yourself or anyone else any good freaking out. The process is going to be the process, so don’t get yourself so wired that you’re tied up in knots and likely to send a horribly embarrassing text or email to a potential employer, begging for information. Cooler heads prevail, so YOU MUST CHILL. As one person who has worked for everything from top 20 circulation newspapers to promotions for the UFC explained:

My favorite quote: Patience is not absence of ambition. #EverybodyChill

This Takes Time

I remember working night desk at the State Journal one night when we were looking to hire a swing-shift reporter. My boss, Teryl, was responsible for reviewing the candidates. It was the end of a hellish night and I had just finished the midnight cop calls and settled in near the scanner to keep an ear out for any breaking news. Teryl sat down and pulled this giant stack of folders out of her desk drawer and dropped them on her desk with that clanging THUD that only half-metal, half-Formica desks can emit. There had to be 50 or more folders there, easy. She picked up the first one and with a heavy sigh, she started going through them. I thought it would take longer for her to get through them than it took for Andy Dufresne to make his way to freedom. I’m sure it felt just about as fun for her as it did for him.

Even now, these things take time and there is a ton of work involved. Even if you are the perfect candidate, it’s going to take a while to dig through the pile to find you. Or as one of the pros I talked to who is currently hiring interns said:

I’m at a very small agency and my colleague and I also have SO many of these things to sift through. We received more than 50 resumes for our one internship, and there’s only two of us to read them through. The process of trying to line up schedules and find a time for interviews is an absolute nightmare. Even once we do that, we’ve usually gone through 2-3 rounds of candidate interviews before we find someone we like. We try to put a dedicated effort into finding someone quickly and it still takes us about 3 weeks per hiring cycle.

You need to have reasonable expectations of how long this will take and understand there are actual human beings on the other end of this process who are likely doing their level best. Your best bet is to check in when you submit your material and find out what their general plan is for contacting people and then add about two weeks to that. Once that time has ended, you should give them another week and then contact them. But only do it once and do it in a, “I know you’re insanely busy but I wanted to check in” way. As a guy who works for Facebook explained to me:

Have the students ask what the typical turnaround times are so they have the right expectations and use the time spent waiting for one internship to apply to 3 more.

That said, if you have important updates, it helps to let the people know about that so you stay at the forefront of their minds in a positive way, according to a top PR pro who has worked for major players all across the country:

I also think that continuous follow up always keeps you ahead of the game. If it means thanking them for their time, sharing a story about the news they heard about the company (recent awards or otherwise) or writing a letter about how they are the ideal candidate and list specific strong reasons why… it goes a long way. I’m currently helping hire our interns for Baird and those are just a couple of things that stand out to our Directors/Managers.

Have a Plan B (and C…)

What might be the perfect internship for you might not make you the perfect candidate for the company. With that in mind, it helps to cultivate multiple options. If you are afraid that you might not get THE internship, keep an eye out and toss your hat in the ring for others that come open. One former newspaper editor who hired interns explained why this is a good idea:

I’d also recommend that students not put all their eggs in one basket when it comes to jobs and internships. Take the time to apply for a variety of internships. At best, you have a few great options to choose from. At worst, you got practice with the application process that will help you for years to come.

Another pro, who has worked in news, PR and university marketing, said not only should you be applying for multiple internships, but you should look for every opportunity to get experience if you get one:

Don’t sit tight waiting for one or two opportunities to pan out. Keep searching and keep applying. And be willing to seek and do work that gets you access to watch and learn, not necessarily do the “intern-version” of the “full-time thing.” Be a clerk. Tackle phones and backstage stuff if it gets you a front row seat. Bottom line: apply, apply and apply some more.

Take Advantage of Bad Situation

It helps to keep your ear to the ground for just-posted internships right about now and here’s why:

  1. Media outlets don’t always have their acts together when it comes to an internship program. Some places will get involved late in the game because they finally got permission to hire or because the money was finally available for the position. This means right about now, another wave of internships might be cresting and it could be yours to ride.
  2. Don’t feel bad about this, but it is possible that other candidates out there are viewed as being better than you are. As you sit at home, in a panicking dervish of anxious hope, those “better candidates” are taking internship offers and planning an awesome summer. Yes, this eliminates a few internship possibilities for you, but it also means that several other places that were banking on the Golden God/Goddess candidate are now looking for their Plan B. In some cases, you might be that Plan B. In other cases, they run out of options that are available and they might re-post the position. This gives you another shot to apply for something you might have missed or bypassed on your first salvo of applications.

    (You might not like it if you think your next internship sees you like this, but consider it a chance to prove them wrong.)

I know this all sounds like, “Hey, you might not be all that good, but you might be the best of the really lousy candidates left after all the good kids take the good jobs,” but that’s not the point. Yeah, you can look at this like you’re some kind of damaged goods if you want, but it’s better to think about it this way: You want the internship and the experience that goes with it, so suck it up, check your ego and apply to be someone else’s “good enough” option.

There’s a huge benefit to this: The ceiling on how impressive you can be is really unlimited. You have the ability to prove to them that you are awesome and you probably are better than whoever it was from the Almighty Deity School of Journalism and Perfection that turned them down. Plus, nothing makes someone work harder, stronger and faster than a really big chip on the shoulder.

Don’t Be This Candidate:

You might find yourself wondering “Why?” when it comes to the lack of communication from your potential internship suitors. This is where it helps to go back through your materials. In one case, someone didn’t get the gig because they mis-typed their phone number on their resume and people couldn’t get a hold of her. In another case, the applicant’s package never made it and he was too bashful to check in on the process. Then there are candidates like the ones this pro described:

And for the love of all things holy, please ask them to read their resumes over numerous times for errors, have someone else do it, and then do it again. I just threw out one for calling the Huffington Post the Huntington Post and another for spelling her own school’s name incorrectly.

This is why it pays to edit the hell out of your resume and cover letter before you send it off. (I screwed up and misspelled the name of editor on my cover letter, but he hired me anyway. Conversely, I saw Teryl toss one of the applications away when the person wrote “Dear Mr. Franklin” to her in the salutation. It’s dicey out there.) It also would help to have someone look over it for you, preferably someone whose not just going to say, “Wow! You’re great! Now can we go to the bar?”

If you turned out to be the person who screwed up in one of these ways, it will be in your best interest to figure that out before you have to send stuff out again.