If you missed Wednesday’s post, we spent a good amount of time talking about what motivates (or deters) students in their use of generative artificial intelligence when it comes to coursework. You can take a look at the ideas behind the motivational theories and how they apply to this issue, but I know the big question is the simple one:
“What can I, as an instructor, do to make them want to do their own work instead of relying on AI to churn out a word salad of content they send in at the last minute?”
This might be the most Pollyanna answer you get all day, but here we go:
“Let’s ask them.”
And this is where I need your help.
I built a Google doc that has two simple questions on it:
What kinds of writing assignments do you (or would you) use programs like ChatGPT to do the work for you? What reasons do you have for using the program instead of doing the work independently? (e.g. “I ran out of time,” “I was bored by the work,” “The work was too hard.”) Please expand on your answer as much as you would like.
What would motivate you to NOT use generative AI programs like ChatGPT to do your written work for you? In other words, what makes you more willing or able to do the work independently? (e.g. “It would be cheating.” “I’m afraid of getting punished.” “I like what I’m asked to do.”) Please expand as much on your answer as you would like.
(UPDATE: Based on the request of a colleague, I added one more: In what ways have you used AI to facilitate your independent work? How do you wish teachers would allow AI as the tool it could be?)
It collects no private data, it doesn’t require them to log into Google to do it and I’ll have no idea where any of this came from. It’s simply two short answer questions meant to figure out WHY they do (or don’t do) something so we can look for potential solutions based on the research people have done on things like motivation and task completions.
If you have to (or want to) offer extra credit for this, I put a “code phrase” on the completion page you can ask them to give to you.
I’m going to let this run for a couple weeks and see what we get. If we get responses enough to make some soup out of this, I’ll put together something to share with you all a couple weeks after that.
In the meantime, hang in there and keep the faith. We got your back.
A print of artist Phil Hands’ cartoon on free speech hangs on the wall of my office, with a nice message from this incredibly talented person. I think this message matters now more than ever.
Zoom in: Tensions at Columbia bubbled over last week after university president Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to disband a pro-Palestinian encampment at the center of campus.
The University of Michigan said it would draft a new policy on punishable disruptive behavior following a pro-Palestinian protest at its convocation.
The University of Southern California canceled its valedictorian’s commencement speech, citing safety concerns that the student called a “campaign of racist hatred.”
Stanford University banned overnight camping in February to end an encampment populated by dueling pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli tents, citing student safety, extreme weather and rodents.
FIRST-AMENDMENT BASICS: The First Amendment to the Constitution allows for freedom of expression in a number of ways, including speech, press and assembly. State actors (meaning public officials, public organizations or otherwise government-ish people or groups) cannot step in and deny these rights without some exceptional circumstances.
The law requires a risk of “imminent lawless action” or “clear and present danger” to exist for the government prohibit these kinds of expressions. Examples of this kind of risk include things like inciting a crowd to destroy property or chanting “We are going to kill the chancellor” during a march. That’s why yelling “Mike Pence is a traitor” isn’t the same as yelling “Hang Mike Pence” during the Jan. 6 incident in Washington, D.C.
In some cases, the law can allow for restrictions based on the time, place and manner of the expression, but it also states that the restrictions must be content neutral. In other words, if the mayor of your town refuses to allow a “Pro-Vegetable” march at 5 a.m. because it would be disruptive to the sleeping habits of the citizens, that mayor can’t then allow a “Pro-Beef” march to occur at 5 a.m.
KEY FREAKOUT POINT: This is what happens when the vaguely educated (Congress) asks questions of the overly educated (Ivy League university administrators) and fear is a driving force in the discussion.
Congress, trying to make a point, asked if “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated the campus speech codes and neither of these esteemed educators could find a coherent answer. (As these are both private institutions, they get more leeway about what can and can’t happen on their campus than do public institutions. More on that later.)
What happened next was what always happens next at a time like this: More administrators get called to answer similar questions under a totally disingenuous guise by people who have no interest other than “pwning” these folks.
Thus, to avoid being the next university egghead on the chopping block, these folks force everything 180-degrees in the opposite direction, to the point where saying “bless you” is somehow a hanging offense. Fear drives the silencing of certain voices that people worry might not be as popular as others. The goal is to “run clock” for a while, in hopes that everything will just calm down once the kids find a new TikTok challenge or something.
Words are scary, particularly when you are being accused of certain things. Nobody likes being accused of antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism and other such things. Certain words carry with them a permanent stain, and that can be terrifying enough to make people do or not do certain things. I often think back to this clip from “Apt Pupil” in that regard:
REALITY CHECK: As much as it would be great if we could all just get along about everything, that’s not the way life works. This is why we have laws in place to deal with what can and can’t happen when people feel the need to disagree.
The law is clear on how speech and assembly work: Unless you can demonstrate that whatever these people are saying or wherever they are going will lead to lawless action, they have the right to say what they want to say and go where they want to go. The law isn’t here to protect popular speech, but ALL speech.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Everyone has a level at which they think a line should be drawn when it comes to speech being problematic, but quite literally, the cure for bad speech isn’t speech suppression. It’s MORE speech. It’s also been clear that there are always risks that unpopular speech may lead to violence, but we have laws to deal with that violence once it actually occurs. Stopping speech because it might end poorly has the same internal logic as the traffic cop who pulls over the Corvette driver because the car “looks like it could go fast.”
The administrators of these schools need to have stronger intestinal fortitude when it comes to supporting free speech, even if it’s going to be wildly unpopular or allow some senator from Bumbledirt, Wyoming to call them all sorts of names on the Senate floor.
Yes, it sucks when you have to deal with difficult situations, but standing for principles is supposed to be administrators’ resting pulse. If you think having people say mean stuff about you on Twitter/X is rough, read this piece by David Goldberger, a Jewish attorney who represented the Nazis in the Skokie case. Members of Jewish Defense League showed up at Goldberger’s office with baseball bats trying to beat the hell out of him. The rabbi at his parents’ synagogue gave a speech denouncing Goldberger personally for taking the case. He was threatened and called a self-loathing Jew for his troubles and yet in retrospect, he remains as stalwart in his beliefs as ever:
To this day, I have no doubt that the ACLU’s commitment to equal rights for all is a backbone of our democracy — no matter how offensive our clients are. Chipping away at this commitment will open the door to the erosion of the First Amendment as a bulwark against rule by tyrants.
In short, if you want your free speech, you have to be willing to stand up for everyone else’s speech as well.
THE RATIONALE: TikTok has more than 170 million U.S. users and government officials are worried that the Chinese government could access these users’ data via the app and create threats to national security. Both ByteDance and the Chinese government have downplayed these worries, but experts in the fields of international relations and technology have said pretty much any Chinese tech company operates under “a cloud of suspicion.”
CATCHING UP: If you are somehow completely unaware of TikTok, or have been kind of doing the “Oh, yeah, TikTok” thing when your kids or grandkids talk about it, here’s what the NY Times calls “The Basic Human Explanation of TikTok.”
WHY PEOPLE ARE FREAKING OUT: This is a simple one to explain: Habit and money.
In terms of habit, you have 170 million people in the U.S., spending an average of between 58 minutes per day and 95 minutes a day on this thing, depending on how you slice the data. If you look at any data set, you’ll notice some lighter and heavier users, but the scarier thing is the increase of usage in terms of overall users and overall use. In 2019, users averaged about 27 minutes a day and there were only about 27 million U.S. users.
Cigarettes would have been proud of that kind of habit formation…
As for money, this thing is a goldmine for ByteDance, which has seen exponential growth in less than five years. Selling it would be financially unwise, especially if it’s forced to do so, as nothing drives down a price like every buyer know you’re over a barrel and HAVE TO sell.
WHY MEDIA PEOPLE SHOULDN’T BE FREAKING OUT: As news journalists, PR professionals and advertising folks, we tend to see a lot of media shifting on a regular basis. If we wanted our lives to be nothing but smooth sailing and stable situations, we’d have taken a job in something less stressful, like defusing land mines. The point is, we’ve seen a lot of changes to the media landscape, let alone the social media landscape, over the course of our careers, so if the ban happens, we’re actually in pretty good shape to deal with it.
One of my students did a great localization story for our reporting class on this issue, and she talked to people who run a Digital Marketing Clinic at UWO about a potential ban. The people there had already expected this and had worked with clients to avoid any messaging interruptions a ban would cause. In addition, the director of the organization gave two really good bits of advice that most of us follow:
Diversify your approach to reaching your audience so that one platform can’t hold you hostage.
Build up your own platforms and connect with your audience through things you control
I imagine that most other quality organizations and agencies that connect people to audiences through media channels have also approached life in this fashion.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: This situation isn’t likely to end up with a ban because everyone is making too much money for that to happen. If TikTok weren’t so profitable, ByteDance wouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep it. If advertisers and influencers weren’t making a living on this thing, they’d be less worried about it going away. This is going to be like a game of “Chicken” for the next couple months until some sort of compromise is hammered out. What that is remains to be seen, but nobody kills the golden goose if they’re smart enough to realize it’s got a lot more golden eggs to lay.
Even if TikTok gets banned, life on social media will adapt and progress as it always has. Over the course of multiple textbooks in which I’ve had to incorporate social media trends, I’ve seen the landscape radically change in terms of platform supremacy. Each time I do an update, I save the social media chapter for the very, very end and then pray to St. Jude that nothing insane happens between me sending the chapter and the book hitting the press.
Here’s the perfect example: When I wrote “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing,” I had to pitch two sample chapters and the folks at Sage told me to make one of them the social media chapter. I protested, arguing that stuff was changing so quickly, it would likely need a massive overhaul before the book would press. They argued that if I didn’t SHOW potential adopters a full social media chapter they wouldn’t believe it was going to be there, and thus show less interested in the book. So, I wrote up what was “cutting-edge stuff” at the time, only to have to fully rewrite the chapter FOUR TIMES between that draft and the final version.
We were ON THE PRESS when Twitter decided to move from 140 characters to 280 characters, sending me into a panicking dervish of phone calls and emails. We ended up having to pull the book back and have me patch holes in the social media chapter to fix that.
Fast forward three years and the number of platforms that were in that first edition that were laughably absent from that second edition included:
YikYak
Storify
Vine
Periscope
Ping
Google Buzz
Meerkat
Digg
And that doesn’t include the stuff that changed, like Twitter shifting to more content, Instagram Reels and other such things. Each time I go to revise an edition, I find myself looking at the social media chapter like when I look back at photos of my childhood in which my parents dressed me in the worst the 1970s had to offer: “Holy cow… I totally forgot about that…”
When Twitter became X and then became an Elon-Musk-fever-dream-hellscape, other stuff like BlueSky and Threads emerged in an attempt to fill the void. When Vine died, everyone wondered where we’d get our 10-second videos of fun. TikTok answered that question. As is the case with most of social media, products will continue to enter the arena with a goal of meeting users’ needs in a way that previous products haven’t or have ceased to do.
DISCUSSION STARTER: Of all the arguments people are making about a potential TikTok ban, which one makes the most sense to you? Is it an issue of free speech? Is it a financial concern about lost revenue for content creators? Is it an issue of governmental overreach? Is it the “keep your paws off my stuff” point of view? Or is there something else? (Or, if you favor a ban, why?)
My chair at UWO had this and another newspaper framed on the wall of his office until he retired. Of all the things he’d seen at the L.A. Times and N.Y. Times, this was the topic he looked at on a daily basis.
THE LEAD: O.J. Simpson, a former NFL running back, convicted felon and focal point of a double-murder acquittal, died last week at age 76. In 1995, he was found not guilty of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman, but was later found civilly liable for their deaths.
MAJOR CAVEAT NUMBER 1: I’m not using this post to re-litigate anything related to the trial(s), his subsequent legal issues or the issues related to race, fame, justice or social structure in society. The goal here is to try to place Simpson and those moments into some sort of context for a generation of students for whom Simpson is as timely as the Teapot Dome Scandal and show them why the trial resonates to today.
MAJOR CAVEAT NUMBER 2: If you think there are additional pieces missing that fit that paradigm I’m using in Caveat Number 1, please feel free to put them in the comments below.
Now… On with the show…
BASIC O.J. BACKGROUND: Simpson was a star NFL running back for the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers. He became the first player to rush for 2,000 yards in a season and was inducted into the hall of fame in 1985. His professional life extended beyond football, as he did acting work in television and film, as well as serving as a football broadcaster. Above all else, he was a sought-after celebrity endorser, having done commercials for a variety of products and services, particularly at a time in which people of color did not receive many opportunities in this area. Simpson himself often noted his ability to “transcend race,” as he would say, “I’m not Black. I’m O.J.”
BASIC BACKGROUND ON THE MURDER TRIAL: On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death at Brown Simpson’s condominium. Simpson became the focal point of the investigation. On June 17, Simpson was charged with the killings and was supposed to turn himself in to police, but that didn’t happen. In one of the most famous low-speed car chases in history, Simpson rode in the back seat of a white Ford Bronco as his friend Al Cowlings drove down the freeway, pursued by a dozen squad cars.
The trial spanned 11 months in which the prosecution presented evidence of Simpson’s guilt, including blood found in his car, a bloody glove found near the scene, shoes Simpson was known to wear and more. The “Dream Team” defense often hammered the evidence as being tainted or mishandled. In addition, the defense lawyers presented a significant narrative that both specific racist officers and a racist criminal justice system framed Simpson for this crime, which they stated he did not commit.
On Oct. 3, 1995, the jury returned a not guilty verdict against Simpson in both killings.
THE FRAMES OF O.J.: The media coverage of his cases related to those deaths was among the most intense of anything before or since. The issue was framed in a variety of ways, depending on the media lens used to view it and the underlying personal experiences that shaped people’s lives. Some frames were of a man who beat the justice system due to his fame and personal wealth. Others framed it as an issue of a racist criminal justice system, once again trying to railroad a person of color. Still others framed it as another case in which domestic violence was overshadowed by other frames, demonstrating once again that women were second-class citizens.
WHY SHOULD STUDENTS WHO WEREN’T EVEN BORN AT THAT POINT CARE: In a lot of ways, the Simpson trial was a “you had to be there” thing for a generation of people. It’s the same way that people of my parents’ age talked about the protests of the 1960s and my grandparents’ generation talked about the Great Depression. No matter how much you learn about the topic after the fact, it’s not the same thing. That said, there are key things that this case did that impact current media students to this day:
Fame as an interest element: Simpson’s fame was obviously a key element to what made this case as big as it was. (As Chris Rock famously said in one of his comedy routines, “If O.J. drove a bus, he wouldn’t even be O.J. He’d be Orenthal the bus-driving murderer.”) That said, the spotlight of the trial shifted people into that “name-recognition lead” zone of media coverage. Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden, Mark Fuhrman, Judge Lance Ito, Kato Kaelin, Robert Kardashian, Alan Dershowitz, Johnnie Cochran and more became household names. (Even 30 years after the trial, those names came to mind immediately for me.) Marcia Clark could cure cancer and Lance Ito could do a country album that knocks Taylor Swift out of the top spot of the charts, but their obituaries will still lead with the O.J. trial. Fame is something we still pay attention to, but what makes someone famous both then (during a pre-digital revolution) and now (in the age of internet stars) is something to consider.
Real-time broadcast coverage launches the “true crime” obsession: Other cases had allowed cameras and video coverage before, and even a few famous ones had drawn national attention, like the Pamela Smart case. However, just like MySpace and Friendster predated Facebook, these precursors to the Simpson trial couldn’t hold a candle to the overall coverage this received on a day-in, day-out basis. For almost a year, the country was transfixed. If ever there was a “Patient Zero” for court cases as television drama and true crime becoming a prominent form of entertainment, this was it.
Opinions become news: Broadcasters having an opinion was nothing new, but this case became a benchmark for what we constantly see today when it comes to “big news.” As Alex Weprin noted in the Hollywood Reporter, this trial basically established the formula for journalists using bluster to become famous and media networks using opinionated blather to draw viewers. It’s often easier to give an opinion about something than it is to do research, conduct interviews and rely on facts, which is why we see so much more opinion than we do in-depth journalism. However, as is usually the case, we need to keep our eye on the ball when it comes to providing our audiences valuable content instead of junk food.
The Race Card: Throughout the trial, the prosecutors accused the defense of “playing The Race Card” to overcome what they saw as obvious factual information. The defense argued that you couldn’t talk about anything in this case without talking about race, particularly in relationship to the racist history of the criminal justice system. Det. Mark Fuhrman’s testimony was particularly on point here, in that he repeatedly denied having any racial animus, only to be confronted with recordings of himself using “the N-word” repeatedly. Coverage of the verdict showed a divided America: White people watching were stunned or enraged at the verdict while Black people were shown celebrating. The analysis of this issue to this day remains a case of how race shaped the overarching views of society and how it still does. Journalists to this day need to understand the underpinnings of social and cultural history as it relates to the people and communities they cover. As much as it’s easy to grab a “Side A” and “Side B” and be done, that’s not going to work in situations where these long-festering wounds exist. (SIDE NOTE: I remember working on the student newspaper as the city editor when the verdict broke. I mentioned to a friend of mine who is Black that it seemed pretty obvious to me that he did it, in spite of the verdict. He responded, “Well, it was pretty obvious to me that Rodney King got his ass kicked by a bunch of cops, but that didn’t go our way, either.”)
The Ratings Monster: Media outlets have always measured things like circulation, audience share, market share and so forth in an attempt to track how well they are “grabbing eyeballs.” However, the Simpson case was like mainlining adrenaline in terms of how to get people to watch. According to ratings data, more than 150 million people watched the verdict live. To put that in perspective, that’s approximately EIGHT TIMES as many people who watched the Women’s NCAA championship game this year. The problem with getting a high that big is that you spend a lot of time chasing it in all the wrong ways. The question of what is good for our audience and what they are willing to watch/read to help us make our numbers look good has become a divergent one.
DISCUSSION STARTER: Take a look at how the obituaries of O.J. Simpson frame him. In terms of content ordering, where are the various elements of his life mentioned and do you agree with their overall approach? Which ones do you feel do the best job of telling the story in a solid, journalistic fashion and which ones do you think veer too much into opinion and hyperbole? What other issues do you see covered as part of his death and do you see them as being more or less relevant than they might have been at the time of his murder trial?
A quick example of how a free AI program can make something ridiculous look like a religious oil painting. The prompt? “Jesus Christ Rides A Unicorn.” (And, yes, based on the background here, apparently there is a unicorn for you in heaven, if you behave yourself…)
The White House on Thursday morning released its first government-wide policy aimed at mitigating the risks of artificial intelligence (AI), requiring agencies to take further action to report the use of AI and address risks the technology may pose.
Federal agencies will be required to designate a chief AI officer, report how they use AI and add safeguards as part of the White House memo.
The policies include a requirement that governmental offices list what they use AI for, how important it is and to what degree those uses create “safety-impacting and rights-impacting” risks. It is completely unclear if these regulations will do anything, helpful OR harmful, as we continue to muddle through life with AI programs.
ISSUES WITH AI: You can’t throw a rock at anything these days without it likely hitting something to do with AI. Or maybe even something generated with AI.
As is the case with most technological advances, the early days of generative AI are becoming an insane wild west, in which their appear to be no limits to what people can do with it. As the law tries to catch up and corral this chaos, a lot of things are happening in the public regarding that people have trouble coming to grips with.
Catherine, Princess of Wales, was out of the public eye, leading to wild speculation as to what happened to her. In an attempt to quell the concerns, the Royal Family released a family photo, which was later determined to be an AI concoction. She then filmed a video spot, in which she revealed she was dealing with a cancer diagnosis. Naturally, this is now under AI suspicion.
The situation has become even worse for non-famous folks, as schools are now grappling with AI being used to create nude deep-fake photos of kids and teachers. That’s right: Some kid at your school could grab one of your photos from a social media post and do something sexually disgusting with it for their own gratification without your knowledge. As a parent, that terrifies me. As the ugliest bald Wookie in Wisconsin, I feel relatively safe.
SO WHY NOT BAN IT? The AI genie is already out of the bottle, so a ban is unlikely to work, even if we wanted to do so. As experts in the field note, not only has AI been around for a long time, but we have gotten used to what it can do for us:
It automates tasks: If you like the idea of having a spellchecker, a digital calculator and a computer program that can build lines of code in a hurry, you want to keep AI around for a while. The artificial intelligence model is basically one in which machines do things that were once only thought of as being capable in the human mind. A full ban removes all that and trying to draw a specific line between important function and disgusting crap isn’t easy.
It personalizes content: The whole reason you get what you want online and why those “suggested purchases” actually are things you’d buy comes down to AI. The systems get to “know us” and then find ways of matching us with other things we might like. (In writing that sentence, I’m both amazed and profoundly creeped out…) Who you connect with online, what suggestions you get for places to eat and what cute puppies are available for adoption in your area often comes down to AI’s understanding of you.
It expands our knowledge: AI can do things we can only imagine, which gives us the chance to figure out all sorts of answers to problems that were once beyond our reach. Sure, medical advances and such might be a bit further away even with AI, but people in the field of electrical work are already seeing amazing opportunities.
These and other opportunities are on the horizon, so long as we can get people to stop making nude photos of each other for a few minutes and do something useful with this tech.
DISCUSSION STARTER: How aware are you of what generative AI can do? Have you experimented with any of the image creators or text creators out there? What has your experience been, in terms of quality and outcomes?
What kinds of limits do you think are necessary for people to co-exist with AI content? How would you go about enforcing them within the confines of the laws of the land as they stand now?
THE LEAD: When your school ponies up fines related to campus safety that total more than those associated with Larry Nassar and Jerry Sandusky combined, you know something has gone horribly wrong.
Liberty University has agreed to pay an unprecedented $14 million fine for the Christian school’s failure to disclose information about crimes on its campus and for its treatment of sexual assault survivors, the U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday.
The fine is by far the largest ever levied under the Clery Act, a law that requires colleges and universities that receive federal funding to collect data on campus crime and notify students of threats. Schools must disseminate an annual security report that includes crime reports and information on efforts to improve campus safety.
BACKGROUND: According to the Clery Center, “The Clery Act requires colleges and universities to report campus crime data, support victims of violence, and publicly outline the policies and procedures they have put into place to improve campus safety.” The act was named for Jeanne Clery, a Lehigh University student who was raped and murdered on campus in 1986. Clery’s parents sued the institution, arguing that had the family known of the university’s record on violent crime, Jeanne Clery never would have attended the school.
Each year, colleges and universities that participate in the federal financial aid program have to report data related to violent crimes on and around the campus. That report has to be publicly available , and instances of non-compliance can lead to fines from the US Department of Education.
Liberty University has long pitched itself as a safe place and had the data to back it up. That’s because it often either under-covered the cases of sexual assault or trying to nudge folks to not really think of sexual assault as being sexual assault:
Federal investigators cited a case in which a woman reported being raped, with the attacker telling her he had a knife, the final program review stated.
Liberty’s investigator “unfounded this case based on a claim that the ‘victim indicates that she consented to the sexual act,’” the final program review stated. “In point of fact, the victim’s own statement merely indicated that she ‘gave in’ in an attempt to get away from the perpetrator.”
RANDOM SIDE NOTE: Just for the hell of it, I went to the website for The Liberty Champion, the student newspaper at Liberty University, to see what kind of coverage this situation got.
None. As in, zero.
The most recent mention of “Clery Act” found through a search of the site is from 2019. Checks for things like “fine,” “$14 million” and “rape” brought back no results attached to this situation. That said, there were some nice stories about the women’s hockey team, an open house to kick of Women’s History Month and the 40th anniversary of The Champion.
If anyone ever asks why a free and unfettered student press matters on campus, consider this the mic-drop answer you’ve been looking for.
WHY THIS MATTERS TO YOU: If you are involved with Liberty University or are you a person who supports sexual assault survivors, the answer is pretty obvious. If you are looking for an answer beyond that, it lies in the underlying concept of the Clery Act and the gap between what the data should tell us and actually does tell us.
One of the inherent flaws to data of any kind is based in who collects the data, for what purpose and with what intention in mind. The goal of the Clery Act was to force universities to disclose all violent and property crime so that people could get a good look at a campus to determine its level of safety.
No university is going to see an uptick of enrollment if they look like a haven for murders, rapists and thieves, so it isn’t in the best interest of universities to be overly expansive in how they approach this data. Even if they’re not actively doing the “Nope, she enjoyed it. Can’t be rape” crap that Liberty was accused of doing, there is still some significant leeway in how universities shave the data. What counts as “nearby” campus is in the eye of the beholder, as does “student” housing.
This isn’t to say that many universities actively game the system when it comes to the Clery report. However, it’s important to look at the data in comparison to what local police reports, campus news reports and other media coverage has showcased during that period of time to make sure the pieces match up before considering the data to be gospel.
EXERCISE TIME: If your school falls under the Clery Act, find a copy of the most recent three years of reported data. (The degree to which this is easy or hard might make for a story in and of itself.)
Pick through the data to notice any specific trends or shifts in the numbers. In some campuses, the most violent crimes like rape and murder will see huge percentage gains or losses over one or two incidents. In other cases, a particular type of crime might have a consistent set of high or low numbers that merit examining.
Also, dig back through your campus media outlets to see about any coverage related to some of the higher-level crimes from the data. To what degree does the media coverage mirror the data?
When I teach my media writing students about press release writing, we often stop at the line “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” and have a discussion.
I’ve heard from some pros that this kind of thing isn’t needed any more, and I’ve heard from other pros that it’s still a standard item, even as its value slides toward the realm of ending a press release with “-30-” or “###”
In keeping it on there, I make the argument that I’d rather show them something that only half of the world is doing and they can cut it out if they work for the other half. In addition, they may need to replace that line with an embargo statement in some cases.
An embargoed press release is meant to benefit both the PR practitioners and the reporters covering their clients’ activities. In some cases, practitioners want to give reporters a running start at an event or announcement, but don’t want the reporters to make that information public before the practitioners do. To that end, the practitioners provide material that they note has an “embargo” on it until a specific time or date. This article on LinkedIn does a pretty good job of outlining the basics of the embargo process and the rationale for it.
Embargoes of this nature tend to be based in professional courtesy (or what people used to call a “gentlemen’s agreement”) in that the PR professionals have no legal say over what the reporters do with this stuff or when. That said, if you’re the reporter who screws over someone by publishing embargoed material before its time, you will likely be on the outs with the PR folks who offered you this courtesy and you might screw it up for everyone else.
Here are some thoughts that might help make this process work the way it should:
SHARE EXPECTATIONS: Professor Sue Robinson of UW-Madison makes a great point about this in the Isthmus article: If both sides aren’t understanding each other, this isn’t going to work.
Like most traditions, people often lose track of how they work or why they start. When there were only a handful of news outlets and everyone kind of came up through the ranks the same way, these traditions were more likely to be shared and understood. Today, everyone can be a publisher and not everyone gets the same level of “education” about how certain things work.
I make a similar argument in my books about the concept of “off the record” and how that works. In most cases, people don’t have a firm grasp of what it means or how it works, so there can be confusion and anger when things go south. When we all know what the rules are, we’re more likely to play by them if the rules make sense. That leads us to point two…
DON’T GET “EMBARGO-HAPPY:” Like any other tool, if you use it for the wrong reasons or rely on it too much, it’s not going to be effective. One of the reporters in the Isthmus story noted that people seem to be embargoing everything lately, which makes it kind of a meaningless element of the press release.
Think of an embargo as a NEED item, based on timing. For example, when the governor is going to give the State of the State address, it makes sense to share the text of the speech early so reporters can work on deadline stories. It also makes sense put an embargo on it, as the governor would probably like to tell people what he thinks about the State of the State before the news media does.
That said, every appearance the governor makes at a local Taco Bell doesn’t require a full press brigade and an embargo. If you want to tell the press something, then announce it. If you don’t, don’t. If you feel like you have to hold something back and let them show up to figure it out, that can work, too. However, a constant stream of embargoes isn’t going to work out well for anyone.
DEAL WITH TRUST ACCORDINGLY: In the media realm, trust and credibility are our only true currency. These things aren’t like boomerangs, in that if you throw them away, they don’t come back. If someone knowingly screws you over, they’ve blown their bank account and you don’t have to extend them any additional line of credit at the Bank of Journalistic Trust.
If a reporter breaks faith and fails to see this as a problem, PR practitioners have no reason to trust them. That’s not bias. That’s common sense. If both sides agree to Point One and Point Two, this shouldn’t be hard to manage. However, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It’s also a good way to end up in the unemployment line in a situation like this, so treat people the way they have demonstrated they should be treated.
I know that there are a solid number of you out there who actually abide by the request in this post most of the time. That said, that number appears to be dwindling significantly recently, so I need to make this plea.
I’ve always believed that as a professor, I owe it to you to try to explain things so that you can understand them. I also believe that if I don’t actually SAY something in explicit terms, it’s my fault when you screw up. If I do my best to lay it out, like I’m trying to teach a dog how to do calculus, and you still screw up, well, then, that’s on you.
I felt the need to put this post together after the first half of a semester that had me utterly vexed and befuddled at the current state of my courses. This isn’t a typical semester in which I have a couple kids who skip class constantly, a few others who fake their way around a few things and some dumb-ass behavior that makes me question the functionality of at least one student’s frontal lobes. There will always be one kid who shows up late so often I swear they’ll be late for their own funeral.
And it isn’t about the life events that get in the way for all of us. I still get the “I’m sick” emails or the notes about emergency surgeries and funerals. That happens all the time and, honestly, any professor who doesn’t understand this is someone I don’t want to know.
No, this appears to be a pandemic level of “I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit-itis” that has hit in a way I’ve never seen before on the college level. I had students miss deadlines for quizzes, writing assignments and even exams. Students were given days and even weeks to meet those goals, only to let the deadlines go by like a knee-buckling curve ball.
This isn’t just affecting my intro-level students, as several folks who are in their senior year have forgotten about midterms. The excuses are of the “I have no excuses, but let me fix this anyway” variety, with a steady stream of “I was unaware” emails, which appeared strange to me, given that I’d posted the information in the syllabus, flagged the deadline in the LMS and spoken repeatedly about it in class.
I keep thinking that these folks are suffering from whatever the hell Guy Pearce had in “Memento” and I’m strongly considering bring tattoo kits to class:
This also isn’t just affecting the students here at UWO, as I asked the hivemind of educators I trust if they’ve seen this as well. It turns out this is hitting states across the country, even those that haven’t recently legalized weed or consider a pub crawl to be a national holiday. A constant stream of attempting to spoon-feed students review questions, examples, instructions and extended deadlines has not proven to be a panacea for this situation.
Some educators speculate that this might be some sort of “long COVID” impact, with the idea that college students who spent their formative years merely trying to survive what we all assumed was the end of days weren’t properly prepared for self-reliance in their education. Others wondered if students felt their college efforts lacked value, given the high number of good-paying jobs that are currently available, sans a college degree. Still others pondered about the effects of artificial intelligence, as students looked for easier ways to get out of work. My sister-in-law, who teaches dance, had this insight:
“People are just lazy. We have a new generation of stupid on our hands.”
The cause and the cure are outside of my scope of knowledge, as I’m really not that kind of doctor. That said, please consider the following advice, as you move forward into the second half of the semester. Some of this may seem like it’s stuff you heard in second grade, but that’s probably because we need to dive that far back into the realm of education to properly reboot a few folks:
GIVE A SHIT: This is really the core of everything I’m going to say below, but again it bears repeating. If the way in which my 8 a.m. class tends to listen, I might have to say this six or seven more time before we’re done here.
I have told students over the years that the one thing I absolutely cannot teach them is how to care about a course. I can teach the basics of all sorts of rudimentary journalism skills and quite a few higher-level elements at that. I can teach students how to be tough, or brave, or nosy, or a dozen other “soft skills” that can aid them in their work.
The one thing I can’t make them do is “wanna.” If you don’t “wanna,” I can’t help you.
I get that not every course is your muse and that every class is not an Academy-Award-winning performance on the part of your instructor, but I know that a lot of us are really trying to make a difference. However, if you don’t care, it doesn’t matter.
And, if you don’t care, you should probably think about why you’re sitting in that classroom, spending a boatload of money that you’ll spend decades of your life paying back.
READ DIRECTIONS: When I was growing up, we were inundated with ads for a program called RIF: Reading Is Fundamental. The idea was that if you couldn’t read, you probably weren’t going anywhere in life:
This is really true in college, as you should be somewhere further along in your personal literacy than the crew of kids surrounding a relatively young Ed Asner here. Reading directions is a fantastic way of figuring out how much content you have to write, how many citations you need to include or even when something is due.
It might not be as much fun as if we did the directions in a TikTok, but when the Feds block this app for fear that the Chinese government is using it to figure out how stupid we all are, those literacy skills might come in handy.
PAY ATTENTION: College professors often have difficulty when we see you on laptops and tablets during class, because we’d love to pretend that you’re using these items to take copious notes and add deadlines to your calendars. However, when we call on you to verbally add your thoughts to the topic under discussion and your head pops up like a prairie dog getting electroshock therapy, you kind of give up the game.
Look, I get that we’re boring, despite how hard we work. I also know that not everything will apply to any one student in class. That said, you are PAYING for this. It’s like buying entry to the Golden Corral buffet and then quietly sipping a water in the corner. If that’s all you’re doing, why the hell did you come here?
Paying attention in class is a great way to actually learn stuff. This is particularly true if you are opposed to reading directions. I’m a big fan of both, but you need to do one or the other in order to survive in college. Neither of these things is asking too much or should come as a massive shock to you. We showed you the library, the classrooms and even professors’ offices during your campus tour: Books and lectures were not hidden from you.
Unless, of course, you were on your phone the whole time…
STOP PSEUDO-APOLOGIZING: I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve gotten that start with “I’m sorry” and then follow that up with a detailed outline of some easily avoidable screw up. I finally went and looked up what an apology actually entails and this is what I’ve found:
The Three A’s of Apologies
Acknowledgement. Acknowledge the situation and say you are sorry for what happened.
Acceptance. Hold yourself accountable and work to rectify the situation.
Amends. Talk about what you will do and start working on corrective measures.
What I’ve come to realize is that most of the apologies I get had none of those elements to them.
You’re not really sorry, in the idea that you are acknowledging the situation. Hell, some of you wouldn’t realize you’ve been hit by a bus until your phone told you as much or your Apple Watch stopped tracking your pulse. You just don’t like the negative outcome of what occurred and you want some way out of it.
You aren’t really accepting anything. Some of the emails I get say that the sender “will accept whatever punishment” I have in mind, but quickly following that up with “but I would really like it if (Fill in way of getting away with screwing up here).”
Also, I’m looking for amends. Maybe the sacrifice of a fatted calf would be a bit much, but some actual contrition and showing up on time for at least a week or two would help.
DON’T LIE: Journalists deal with weasels for most of our lives. This is why we have such great BS detectors and why we love nailing liars to the wall. In most cases, the lies students tell are so frickin’ unnecessary that they boggle the mind.
Case in point: I had a student tell me last week that she was going to miss class because she was sick. Totally fine, as they get two skips the whole term, and I don’t care what they’re for. I even go out of my way to say, “Look, if you want to tell me, ‘I got totally ‘faced last night and I reek of vomit and vodka sweat, so I’m skipping,’ I’m fine with that.”
However, when I got home, I found out from my kid that she met one of my students, who was applying for a job at the Olive Garden where Zoe works. It was my bed-ridden sickly waif who couldn’t make it to class, because it turned out her interview for the job was at that time.
The same thing applies to using AI to write your papers. We read enough college writing to know when something comes from a college student and when something comes from a computerized dictionary that spasms content. We also know that nobody writes to EXACTLY 500 words, so stop telling AI to write you a 500-word paper on a given topic.
I have worked ridiculously hard to be an empathetic ally to my students, so when I’m doing that and you lie to me, it makes me want to bring down a raging storm of hellfire upon you.
QUIT WASTING OUR TIME: After all of this, if you STILL can’t find it in your heart and soul to give a shit, that’s fine. Just stop wasting our time.
Believe it or not, some of your colleagues out there are desperate for help. They are applying for internships and jobs, but need help with resumes and cover letters. They are trying to bend their brains around this new form of writing that will be the foundation upon which a lot of their work after college will depend. They actually mean it when they stop by the office and start the conversation with, “Sorry to bother you, but…”
Every time you turn in some AI bullshit, you make us waste time determining how you cheated and filling out paperwork to have you penalized somehow. Every time you skip a class because “OMG earleeeee,” you make us waste time catching you up. Every time you blow a deadline and beg for forgiveness, you make us waste time taking a moral index of ourselves to see if we should bend a rule and help you out.
That’s time we could be spending on people who actually and honestly need our help and want to do the work. You’re not just annoying us, but you are actively depriving other people of an education they paid for and value.
If you can’t get to the point where you’re going to become one of those people, fine, just don’t make the rest of us suffer because of it.
I would tell you to just go work at Olive Garden, because I know they’re hiring, but something tells me their standards are probably higher than those we have here at the U.
During the salad days of the 1980s and 1990s, Fidler foresaw a world in which newspapers would be cut free from the strictures of print and digital media would make everything easier to access. Content would come more quickly, sharing would take place more easily and everyone would benefit from being more fully informed. He was pretty close, except for, of course, that last part.
It’s hard to take him to task for not foreseeing dank memes and cat TikToks.
Streitfeld notes that not every aspect of journalism has died quietly in pulp-based pages, but the essential content that is “news” appears to be the last passenger on the Titanic:
The slow crash of newspapers and magazines would be of limited interest save for one thing: Traditional media had at its core the exalted and difficult mission of communicating information about the world. From investigative reports on government to coverage of local politicians, the news served to make all the institutions and individuals covered a bit more transparent and, possibly, more honest.
The advice columns, movie reviews, recipes, stock data, weather report and just about everything else in newspapers moved easily online — except the news itself. Local and regional coverage had a hard time establishing itself as a paying proposition.
WHAT HAPPENED? If you want to know HOW and WHY traditional media is dying, put three drinks into your average journalist and make sure the kids are out of earshot before you ask the question. A few of the answers are both easy and complex:
Traditional media drastically underestimated/didn’t think hard enough about the impact digital media would have in the world.
Media outlets and owners misinterpreted the reason why ad money flowed to them so freely, only to find out too late that ads are all about buying eyeballs, not supporting an important public endeavor.
The once-private newspaper industry went public, with shareholder value being a driver of budget cuts and staff slashing.
These are just a couple things in that realm, but the bigger issue isn’t how the newspapers themselves came to land on the endangered species list, but rather why it is that local and regional news content hasn’t made a successful leap to the digital marketplace. Here are a couple possible reasons:
People are no longer as strongly tied to geographic areas as they once were, making local or regional news seem less important in their lives.
Journalists who once had a stranglehold on what people saw and read incorrectly assumed that what the journalists saw as valuable mattered to the readers and viewers out there. With more options now, the “I write, you read” model isn’t as steadfast as it once was.
News isn’t as sexy as other things that captures the public’s attention, and there are plenty more “junk food” options out there. The readers who once got a well-balanced meal from a newspaper now can just grab whatever fun or weird stuff they want like a kid in a candy store.
The fractured nature of our society has readers seeking out content that is supportive of their opinions and positions, rather than looking for a balanced source of information. (I can’t tell you the number of times when I’d write about an issue featuring X and Y positions, only to have X tell me that I was biased toward Y and Y tell me the opposite.)
News was never financially viable. Being so is important these days.
News hasn’t changed. We have.
That last one hit me when I was looking for a definition of news and found things like “reports of current events” and “information about important happenings” and “formal reports of events considered likely to be significant to the target audience.”
By these definitions, Taylor Swift winning Time’s “Person of the Year” award is news. It’s current, it’s a report, it’s information and it’s likely to be significant to a target audience. Traditional journalists might not LIKE that this is the case, but that doesn’t make it any less on point.
DISCUSSION STARTER: If there is one thing I think can pull a “Mia Wallace/Pulp Fiction” moment for news, it would be going back to the most basic human driver: Self-interest. If we can do a better job of telling people not just what is happening, but also WHY it matters to THEM personally in a much, much better way than we do, news has a chance.
Case in point: A few years back, our school’s foundation and fundraising arm was in trouble and was looking at a potential bankruptcy. I walked into my 8 a.m. reporting class and asked the students what they thought of all this.
Blank stares.
“How many of you are on a scholarship here?” I asked. Everyone of them raised a hand.
“OK, so WHERE do you think that money is being kept?” I asked.
The blank stared turned to terrified looks. When I gave them a break in the middle of the class, they all immediately started googling the name of their scholarship and the foundation’s role in it.
This requires us to know our audience extremely well and put in the extra work of constantly explaining “this matters because…” but in considering the alternative, it’s probably worth the effort.
With the Super Bowl and awards season in the air, we decided to take a look back at a post about a movie launch during a previous Super Bowl. The “based on a true story” thing is still happening quite a bit these days, from “The Boys in the Boat” to “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” As much as I love the stories, I find myself occasionally wondering to what degree things were fluffed up a bit for dramatic purposes.
Here’s a peek back at the last time we dug into this:
Based on a true story = We made up some stuff
Amazon spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $14 million during the Super Bowl for a minute-long teaser trailer of “Air,” a movie that tells the story of how Nike came to land Michael Jordan as a client. The Ben Affleck/Matt Damon flick follows a familiar trend these days, as it is “inspired by true events,” which is just a fancy way of saying, “We made up a bunch of stuff.”
Movies like “Elvis,” “Blonde,” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” have seen varying levels of post-hoc fact checking that call into question certain parts of the films, with film buffs rebuffing these concerns as mere “dramatization of controversial and contested historical events.” Still, these situations are small potatoes when compared to how some films and limited series have taken liberties with reality.
“Winning Time,” HBO’s look at the late 1970s/early 1980s rise of the L.A. Lakers, created massive amounts of controversy with the way in which it played fast and loose with the truth. Given the relatively recent era in which the events took place, the degree to which sports information is retained and a quality text from which to draw, it seemed almost purposeful that the series got so many things factually wrong, including places, dates, opponents and scores. This isn’t even accounting for how the athletes, including Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar , publicly denounced the way in which they were portrayed.
Even more, Jerry West and his legal team have demanded an apology and retraction for the way in which the series portrayed the Laker legend, noting that the producers engaged in “legal malice.”
The New York Times did a deep dive on the cottage industry that has streaming services building mini-series around actual events, but then jazzing up reality to make life seem cooler than it was. The piece cites West’s portrayal as a “rage-aholic” as one of the more egregious cases of taking liberties with reality. It also points out that Linda Fairstein, the prosecutor in the “Central Park Five” case, is currently engaged in a lawsuit against HBO for its portrayal of her in the series “When They See Us.”
The defamation attorneys the Times quoted made it clear that these cases aren’t always easy to win, because the First Amendment does provide folks with the ability to create fiction based on true people. However, there are limits to this kind of thing:
Sometimes disclaimers are enough to protect a studio from legal liability, especially if they are prominently displayed in the opening credits and offer detail of what has been fictionalized — beyond a generic acknowledgment such as “based on real events,” legal experts say. The First Amendment offers broad protections for expressive works like film and television productions that depict real people by their real names.
But if someone can convincingly claim that he or she was harmed by what screenwriters made up, that is grounds for a strong defamation suit, said Jean-Paul Jassy, a lawyer who works on media and First Amendment cases in Los Angeles.
“A disclaimer is not a silver bullet,” he said.
This is in some ways akin to the way courts have afforded opinion pieces and reviews protection under the fair comment privilege. This allows writers to provide “pure opinion” that cannot be proven true or false without fear of falling afoul of defamation laws. That said, merely stating something is opinion isn’t a silver bullet either.
If you say, “In my opinion, Vince Filak is a lousy professor,” it falls into that opinion realm. It’s stated as such and there’s no way to define “lousy” so that a court could determine if I fit that definition or not. Plus, in defamation suits, the plaintiff (in this case, me) would have to show harm: Did I get fired? Did my classes shrink to the point I had to teach Medieval Basketweaving to maintain the course load in my contract? Did a group of random professors follow me around and mock me to the point I needed therapy? Probably not, so I’m not going anywhere with this.
However, if you say, “In my opinion, Vince Filak stabbed a student in the face with a fork during his 8 a.m. Writing for the Media Class on Feb. 20,” now you’re in trouble. It’s not an opinion, for starters, as we can prove it either happened or didn’t happen. It’s accusing me of a crime, which furthers my case. Plus, if that thing gains steam, I’m likely to get fired.
Writers, editors, producers and directors have always taken SOME liberties with reality when it comes to how they portray real people in fictional or semi-fictional stories. What makes this recent set of efforts more concerning is the degree to which they are bending the truth and the ways in which the fictionalization has the ability to warp public perception of real people in some harmful ways.
As for me, I’m looking forward to “Air” for the bad 1980s clothing and the Affleck/Damon banter that most of their collaborations pull off quite well. I’m also looking to see if anything gets dinged on a fact check, especially because, as anyone with any experience with Michael Jordan will tell you, he’ll take it personally.
Milwaukee’s NBC affiliate TV station stirred up some ill feelings after marketing an opportunity to local Black-owned businesses to appear on a morning program during Black History Month, but only if they were willing to pay $1,000.
WTMJ-TV sent marketing emails to several Black business owners in the area offering an opportunity to appear on “The Morning Blend,” TMJ4’s daily lifestyle program, which airs weekdays at 9 a.m.
Despite looking and acting like a local news program, “The Morning Blend” is actually a sponsored-content program and part of the larger Scripps media brand. It appears in some form or other on stations in Las Vegas, Tampa and Milwaukee, each of which Scripps owns. The sponsored-content format is not unique to Scripps, and means you basically pay to play: If you are willing to cough up some cash, you can get a five-minute spot to promote basically anything.
If you don’t believe me, here’s the back end of a segment John Oliver did on “Last Week Tonight,” in which he bought space on sponsored-content programs in three media markets to promote “The Venus Veil.”
(If you want to watch the entire segment, which outlines how this works, why it’s a huge problem and how major media lines are being blurred, you can click the link below. That said, I have to warn you that there’s a great amount of F-bombs, a weird George Clooney segment and allegations of a man engaging in sexual relations with a ham.
To be fair, he’s always been weird, but the pandemic was going on when Oliver filmed this and that really pushed ALL of us into the exponentially weirdness zone…
The station manager at WTMJ tried to explain away the controversy of honoring people by asking them to pay to be honored with the same level of specificity and success as my kid does in explaining why her room is always a disaster zone:
TMJ4’s station manager, Gregg Schraufnagel, told the Journal Sentinel that “The Morning Blend” is a lifestyle program, not part of the news division, and that it is common for content to be sponsored on the program. “That’s always been the format of the show,” he said.
“The Morning Blend” has been on the air for 18 years.
Schraufnagel declined to get into the specific details of show’s makeup, how many of its segments are sponsored, its typical practices for reaching out to possible guests, or whether the program has charged for Black History Month segments in the past. “Things are evolving all the time,” he said.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: This entire situation has the comic-tragic vibe of a 1980s sit-com, in that so many things went wrong to make this as terrible as it is.
Start with sponsored content. It’s ubiquitous in the field and has been around for decades, if not longer, if you want to count things like advertorials and infomercials. Even the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s own website features it. In this case, right next to the story about WTMJ’s sponsored content:
As John Oliver notes, the lines here get really blurry, particularly when it feels like news and this stuff is all of equal value. The traditional commercial breaks in news or the display advertising in newspapers and websites were much more obviously promotional when compared to this stuff. As consumers tuned out these forms of advertising, marketers looked for ways to play a game of “here comes the airplane” with consumers. The pay-to-play world of ads has essentially borrowed other storytelling formats to make this happen.
That said, to average consumers, this can feel a bit like finding out that Santa is just a guy from your dad’s work who can really rock a white beard. You get used to these trusted local figures who tell you that something is good or something is fun and you believe it. To find that the whole program would sell you a fake Nazi-era sex blanket for the right price can really shatter your world view.
The second key problem here is everything about this pitch.
It starts off with a weirdly stylized Black History Month logo, that I can’t find anywhere else but here. It applies the colors of the month as well, although I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that nobody who built that logo could explain what those colors actually mean.
I get that they’re the hosts, but the photo of Molly Fay and Tiffany Ogle just does not work with this pitch. These folks in those poses seems to say, “Check out what confident white people can do for you!”
The pitch for Black History Month says how important it is for Morning Blend to feature black businesses as the show wants to “promote diversity” and “foster inclusivity,” a sentiment only slightly undercut by the “but only if you have $1,000 to spare” closing paragraph.
The second half of the pitch is essentially the same thing they’d send to ANYBODY at ANY POINT in the year, as this is the entire proposition of sponsored content: Come here, pay us money, we’ll have a positive chat and you’ll get air time plus a video clip to promote the hell out of yourself. This isn’t tied to Black History Month alone, nor is there some sort of “Black History Month Discount” for Black-owned businesses. These businesses could do the same thing around Juneteenth Day celebrations, MLK Day or Kwanzaa if they wanted. Hell, they could do it on St. Patrick’s Day or Casimir Pulaski’s birthday if they wanted.
When approaching certain topics, it always pays to be much more self-aware than this. I don’t know what it’s like to be anything but me, so I have limited knowledge of how best approach topics related to race, gender and ethnicity. That’s why I usually a) reach out to people I know who have insights before I do something like this, b) try to be more specific than general when I approach topics outside my area of expertise and c) know that I have a far greater chance of failing than succeeding in a truly massive way, so I need to be really, really careful. I don’t see that here at all. In fact, I’d bet that this thing gets a one-paragraph swap out at the bottom of the first column for every target audience the marketing department pitches.
EXERCISE TIME: Find a sponsored content segment and analyze it for its approach to the topic. Look for ways in which you would approach it differently if you were a reporter and trying to present this for a true news feature story.
