Dynamics of Media Writing

ASU’s use of AI to build classes from faculty Canvas course materials has instructors saying “WTF?” (A Throwback Post)

THE LEAD: You can call it “experimental AI” or “educational innovation,” but where I’m from, we call this “theft…”

Arizona State University soft launched a web app earlier this month that allows anyone, for $5 per month, to create an apparently unlimited number of customized “learning modules” using artificial intelligence. The AI chatbot, called Atom, uses online instructional materials from ASU professors to create a course that’s tailored to the goals, interests and skill level of the user. After asking a handful of questions and processing for about five minutes, Atom debuts a personalized course that includes readings, quizzes and videos from a half dozen experts at ASU.

But several professors whose content Atom pulls from were surprised to learn that their materials—including video lectures, slide decks and online assignments—were being perused, clipped and repackaged for these short online course modules. The faculty wasn’t told anything about the app, ASU Atomic, they said.

(SIDE NOTE: I so DESPERATELY want to use a video clip here from “Ted 2” that smack talks Arizona State right now, given how stupid this situation is, but I think the editors at Sage might pop a brain bleed. The tamest thing said in that exchange was, “Do you say Arizona State University or just HPV-U?” Anyway… I digress…)

BACKGROUND: The university is doing everything to both say that tapping the braintrust of the faculty through this AI thing is the greatest thing on earth while also telling faculty this is just experimental and there’s no real concern here.

As with most things administrators SWEAR aren’t problems, the faculty members refuse to buy this bull-pucky:

As is the case for many AI chatbots still in their infancy, Atom gets things wrong. In the module it designed for Hanlon, it included clips from an old lecture he gave focused on the work and career of 20th-century literary theorist Cleanth Brooks. Throughout the course it called the critic “Client” Brooks.

<SNIP>

Ostling is worried that Atomic “will start being used widely, and I have content on my Canvas shelves that would be very inappropriate to show up without context in a course,” he said. “Not only do I think the students will be poorly served because they might learn things that aren’t true, but it could potentially get me in trouble.”

I’m feeling this as well, given that I often have students interview other students for classroom-only exercises that get posted to Canvas. So, for example, a student talking about their experience at the local Pub Crawl might not be all that thrilled if that info becomes part of a database of content for everyone to see.

Even more, I have to occasionally create “alternative timeline scenarios” for the students. For example, to have my students write an “announcement press release,” I make up the scenario that our current chancellor resigned a while back, the university did a search and today is announcing the hiring of the next chancellor. It’s a logical scenario that would be something students might be expected to do as PR practitioners (hiring news release) and it forces them to focus on what to include in a short space.

However, I obviously have made up the name of the person we hired as well as that person’s background and accomplishments. If AI slurps it up and treats it as gospel, that’s not going to be good for anyone involved.

This all led me to today’s throwback post about our system trying to steal faculty content for what I would assume could be a situation like this. Even if the Universities of Wisconsin folks double-pinky promise not to turn my work into AI slop, I still don’t want them co-opting my life’s work for all the reasons listed below.

I did a check on how this is going and the board of regents hasn’t passed this yet, but I’m always leery of summer months, as that’s a great time for universities to pass these “take out the trash” bills, because nobody’s looking.

 

The Universities of Wisconsin System is trying to steal faculty’s copyright rights to educational material. Please help fight this stupid power grab.

(The system says, “We would never look to diminish your rights or take your hard-earned work away from you.” What the system actually does is more accurately depicted in the scene above.)

THE SHORT, SHORT VERSION: The Universities of Wisconsin System is trying to rewrite its copyright policy and assign itself the rights to the educational work and scholarly materials faculty create. If this goes through, faculty who have spent years building and improving their courses could get the shaft and I have no idea if I’ll be able to share stuff that I’ve always shared with you.

If you think this is as stupid as I do, please email system President Jay Rothman at president@wisconsin.edu and tell him not to let this policy pass.

(UPDATE: Rothman is no longer the president, but that email address will still get you where you need to go.)

THE LONGER, MORE NUANCED VERSION: Here’s a deep dive on the way the system is trying to recreate its copyright policy in a way that disenfranchises its faculty:

THE LEAD: The Universities of Wisconsin has decided to rewrite its rules involving intellectual property, giving the system total ownership over pretty much everything faculty create:

The UW System is proposing a new copyright policy that professors say would eliminate faculty ownership of instructional materials. The revisions are stoking alarm among professors statewide who say such a move would cheapen higher education into a mass-produced commodity.

“This policy change is nothing less than a drastic redefinition of the employment contract, one that represents a massive seizing of our intellectual property on a grand scale,” professors from nine of the 13 UW campuses wrote in a recent letter to UW System President Jay Rothman. “It would allow any UW campuses to fire any employee and nonetheless continue teaching their courses in perpetuity with no obligation to continue paying the employee for their work.”

Aside from owning faculty syllabi, lecture notes and exam materials, UW would also have ownership rights over the scholarship faculty create:

A draft of the new policy, obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, would eliminate existing copyright language and replace it with the assertion that UW System holds ownership of both “institutional work” and “scholarly work.”

<SNIP>

“Scholarly work” includes most of what professors produce, such as lecture notes, course materials, journal articles and books. The UW System transfers copyright ownership to the author, as is customary in higher education, but notes that it “reserves” the right to use the works for purposes “consistent with its educational mission and academic norms.”

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Given that I’ve got about a dozen textbooks in the field, I edit a journal that needs scholarly work to keep it running, I spent seven years crafting hundreds of blog posts and that I’ve built a ton of courses over my nearly 30 years of teaching, this was basically my calm, metered reaction:

beaker from the muppet show is screaming with the words time to freakout above him

I’ve already sent a copy of the proposal to Sage for its team of lawyers to go over, so I’m hopeful that I receive an answer along the lines of, “Calm down… Have a Diet Coke… This isn’t going to destroy what you’ve spent decades creating…”

In the meantime, let’s lay out how stupid and problematic this is:

The quality of your courses depend on the people you’re pissing off:  We essentially went through this in my media-writing class today and a collection of sophomores and juniors understood it, so I’m hoping it might make sense to the Board of Regents.

I proposed the following scenario to one kid in the class: Let’s say you turned in a really good story as an assignment for this class. In fact, I thought it was so good, I took your name off of it, put my name on it and submitted it to the local paper. The paper then paid me $50 for the story.

I then asked the kid, “So, given that every time you turn in something good, I’m going to take it, put my name on it and make money from it, how likely are you to put forth your best effort in this class?”

The kid said, “There’s no way I’m going to do anything good for you anymore.”

Right. So, let’s play that out here: If every time I work REALLY hard on making good stuff for my class, the U is just going to claim it as its own, why would I bother to do anything more than the bare minimum to make my class work?

I guess you could make the argument that pride in our work and a desire to make things better for our students could inspire us to do great things, even in the face of a naked power grab by the system, but if you’re going to treat us like mercenaries, we’re going to behave that way.

This will stifle innovation, limit interest in developing new courses and create a general sense of animosity among faculty. It will also likely inspire professors to find new ways to hide stuff from the administration folks, as one person on social media suggested to me:

This stuff isn’t a product, but rather a process: Inherent to the system’s argument is the basic premise of work product: You built this stuff while you were employed by us and required to do so. Therefore, since we paid you for this, the stuff is ours.

That works in the private sector, where we’re tasked with specific outcomes and granted special provisions to create this kind of work product. For example, I know that when I worked at the Wisconsin State Journal, I wrote a lot of articles that the paper published. Implicit in my employment agreement was the premise that I was acting on behalf of the paper, writing things that the paper tasked me to write and publishing those things in a copyrighted publication. They own that stuff and I’m cool with that. I don’t think I’m ever going to want to republish a weather story I wrote in 1996, and if I did something cool I wanted to show my students, that’s acceptable use.

However, when it comes to my media-writing class, I didn’t get hired to write lecture notes and syllabi for that class. In fact, what I wrote was a tweaked version of something I’d been working on for decades. I’d drafted some of this conceptual stuff when I was working at UW-Madison, improved upon it when I was at Mizzou, reconfigured it at Ball State and then adapted it here. This isn’t like you hired me to bake a cake for your birthday. This is a tree I’ve been growing and tending for years and years.

 

The material might not be UW’s to steal: Even if you don’t buy the argument above, the instructors might not own the material they’re using in the first place.

Textbook publishers aren’t just sending out desk copies of a dead-tree books and telling fledgling professors, “Vaya con Dios.” They actually build a ton of back-end stuff into the educational packages they provide these days, which includes a lot of the stuff the system is trying to get its grubby little paws on.

I know for my books at Sage, we have sample syllabi, PowerPoint slides for lectures, notes for instructors, exercises and test banks crammed with questions. I might even be forgetting some of the stuff we provide.

(Shameless Plug: Sage really is amazing when it comes to this kind of stuff. If you ever need a book, check these folks out first, especially if you need some help with the shaping and molding of the entire class experience.)

These things are available to instructors because Sage built them to go along with the authors’ textbooks. The professors can use them as they are, add stuff, cut stuff or otherwise tweak what they receive. That said, it’s not theirs to sell or give away. Sage holds the copyright for this stuff and I imagine Sage and the other book publishers who pour a ton of time and resources into building these things would be more than a bit peeved if the UW System tried to claim it as its own.

 

The Coy and Vance Duke Theory of Education: When I was a kid, I loved “The Dukes of Hazzard” television show, which ran every Friday for about seven or eight years. The show involved two cousins, Bo and Luke Duke, getting into scrapes with the corrupt law enforcement of Hazzard County and doing amazing car chases in their 1969 Dodge Charger. Along with patriarch Uncle Jesse Duke and the lovely cousin Daisy Duke, the boys were “makin’ their way, the only way they know how,” to quote the theme song.

It was a simple show that drew a good audience and it seemed to work well. However, around the fifth season, John Schneider and Tom Wopat (who played Bo and Luke, respectively) got into a contract dispute with the studio over salaries. Rather than pay them and move on with life, the studio had the idea in its head that the car (the General Lee) was actually the star of the show, so it didn’t matter who was driving it and that they didn’t need these two pretty boys at all.

Enter new cousins: Coy and Vance Duke.

If ever there was a knock-off of a brand name, this was it. Like the original Duke Boys, one was blonde, one was brunette. They essentially wore the same wardrobe, had the same catch phrases and did the same insane driving stuff. That said, the ratings took a dump and after one season, Bo and Luke “returned from driving the NASCAR circuit” and Coy and Vance ended up fading from memory.

What the universities are doing here is essentially the same kind of thing. They figure, “Well, hell, if we have the notes, the syllabus and the PowerPoint slides, we don’t really need the professor who created them at the front of the room.” These folks assume that once we decide to leave, retire or whatever, they can just plug in an adjunct at a fraction of the cost and things will run like a Swiss watch.  And that’s not just me being paranoid, as other folks see it as well:

I pretty much know my notes aren’t going to be helpful to other people as I wrote them based on a lot of my experiences in the field. Notes like (BUS FIRE STORY GOES HERE) or (EXPLAIN DRUG DEALER SHOT THING) probably won’t work for a random Coy or Vance they bring in to teach my class after they decide they don’t need me anymore.

 

HERE’S WHY YOU SHOULD CARE: One of the biggest reasons I’m worried about this is because it impacts what I can do with my materials. That’s also the main reason why I think you should care about it, too.

I never took this job to get rich and I certainly don’t like the idea of coming across like Daffy Duck when he found the treasure room:

However, when I know stuff is mine to do with as I please, that tends to benefit a lot of other people as well. Whenever someone shoots me an email and says, “Hey, how do you organize your class?” I’m always happy to give them a copy of my syllabus. When someone needs an assignment I’ve built, I’m glad to share it with them or on the blog.

When we went into COVID lock down, I basically dumped everything I ever did that I thought would help people into the Corona Hotline section of the blog for free. All those goodies remain there to this day, so feel free to help yourself.

If this policy passes, I might not be as free to offer that kind of generosity any more, and that would really tick me off.

Kash Money: FBI Director Patel sues the Atlantic over claims he’s a drunk (and what journalism students should learn from this situation)

Although this isn’t a great look for a guy accused of drinking to excess, the author of the Atlantic article on Kash Patel stated that this is among the least worrisome moments of his time as FBI director.

THE LEAD: Kash Patel is looking for cash money to the tune of about $250 million, after the Atlantic ran an article accusing him of being too drunk too frequently to run the FBI :

The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, sued The Atlantic on Monday, accusing it of defamation over an article that claimed his excessive drinking and unexplained absences were putting his job in jeopardy.

The article, under the headline “The FBI Director Is MIA,” was published on Friday and detailed Mr. Patel’s behavior in his role leading the Federal Bureau of Investigation, citing more than two dozen anonymous sources. The author, Sarah Fitzpatrick, wrote that Mr. Patel’s conduct had “often alarmed officials at the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice.” The article said he “has also earned a reputation for acting impulsively during high-stakes investigations.”

Mr. Patel denied the claims in a statement to The Atlantic, which the article included.

THE BACKGROUND: Sarah Fitzpatrick’s article focuses on a string of incidents in which a long list of unnamed sources note that Patel was exhibiting all the textbook signs of an entitled frat boy. These allegations included:

  • He was drunk and missing a lot of work because of it.
  • He was drunk at his favorite local bar while hanging out with co-workers.
  • He frequently jetted off to Las Vegas, where he got plastered at another favorite hangout.
  • People had to rework his schedule to avoid early morning meetings because Patel was sleeping off the action from the night before.
  • He was too messed up to do his job when people tried to reach him, or they just couldn’t reach him at all.
  • He bragged about things that weren’t true, including misinforming the public about the capture of the Brown University shooter.

The White House issued a statement with a blanket denial of these allegations and Patel himself was quoted as saying, “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook.”

 

IT’S ALREADY FIRST AMENDMENT 1, PATEL 0 IN DEFAMATION SUITS:  A judge has already tossed out one of Patel’s attempts at cowing the media based on allegations of defamation:

A federal judge in Texas has tossed a defamation suit brought by FBI Director Kash Patel against former FBI assistant director-turned-MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi.

Patel had sued Figliuzzi over comments he made on “Morning Joe” about the FBI director’s evening activities.

“Yeah, well, reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building,” Figliuzzi said on the show last year.

<SNIP>

U.S. District Judge George Hanks Jr. (wrote) “Figliuzzi’s statement, when taken in context, cannot have been perceived by a person of ordinary intelligence as stating actual facts about Patel.”

“A person of reasonable intelligence and learning would not have taken his statement literally: that Dir. Patel has actually spent more hours physically in a nightclub than he has spent physically in his office building,” the judge added.

I’m glad about the verdict, but given what we’re seeing these days in terms of “reasonable intelligence and learning” out there, I’m worried where that bar will be set in the future.

 

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE AS A JOURNALISM STUDENT: This article and Patel’s suit provide a pretty interesting look at how defamation (or libel) tends to work or not work, as well as an opportunity to look into building stories like this. Here are some key issues:

UNNAMED SOURCES: This whole story is built on the backs of sources that Fitzpatrick did not name in the article. That is ALWAYS a huge risk in journalism for a variety of reasons. Source credibility comes into question, issues of people having axes to grind show up, sources who eventually get IDed might backtrack and leave you holding the bag… The list is pretty long and the dangers are pretty strong.

The things that make this a little more stable than many of the other stories that show up with an unnamed source along with a wing and a prayer are:

A) The volume of sources. Fitzpatrick is stacking people like cord wood in this thing, noting as many as a dozen people have corroborated the things she’s putting into her piece. If that is accurate, and I have no substantive reason to doubt it, that means this story has some stronger legs to stand on than most.

B) I go back to a conversation I had with my friend Allison, who covered the Chicagoland Catholic church molestation scandals of the early 2000s. I used to ask her how she knew for sure that the priests in her stories were serial pedophiles. The information she gathered came from the accusers, usually years or decades later, and was almost impossible to back up with documents or other “official source” content that I had gotten used to using in my own work.

Her answer was simple: She did a ton of digging, verified in every way she could and then she published the content and waited. In almost every case, if she published one or two accusations, she immediately heard from at least three or four other people who told her the same things had happened to them.

Cue the update from Fitzpatrick after her story ran:

“My response is that I stand by every single word of this report,” she said. “We were very diligent. We were very careful. It went through multiple levels of editing, review, care.

“And I think one of the things that has been most gratifying, after – immediately after the story published was, I have been inundated by additional sourcing going up to the highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work, providing additional corroborating information.”

The only way Fitzpatrick was going to get this story was by providing anonymity to her sources, so she took a risk. That said, it wasn’t a foolish risk, which is something to keep in mind when someone says, “Hey, I have a story for you, but you can’t use my name…”

 

A HIGH BAR TO CLEAR: As a public figure, Patel has to demonstrate that the Atlantic engaged in actual malice, as opposed to mere negligence, and that’s a pretty tough thing to do. As the folks at Poynter point out:

Can Patel actually be successful in his suit? Sure, anything is possible, but it’s unlikely.

During an appearance on CNN, Brian Stelter, CNN’s media reporter, said, “Actual malice is the very high legal standard that public figures have to prove in order to win a defamation suit. They have to prove that The Atlantic knew these claims were false or had a reckless disregard for the truth.”

This kind of goes back to the first point in a way: When you only have one anonymous/unnamed source, there’s a huge risk you are buying the Brooklyn Bridge and you should know better. When you have a dozen or more people telling you the exact same thing, it’s going to be hard to prove a vast conspiracy among those folks and the reporter, with them all knowingly trying to frame you for something.

It also merits pointing out that what makes for a public figure or not isn’t always easy, so it’s important to think about the stories you’re writing that might cast aspersions. Patel is obviously public, but if you’re writing a similar “too drunk to work” story about the school librarian or a local business owner, if things go south, this might be a concern.

 

GETTING SLAPP-ED AROUND: We have discussed the concept of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPP, suits here before. The John Oliver/Bob Murray Suit was one of my favorite versions of SLAPP suits, primarily because not only was it so blatantly obviously meant to silence criticism, but also because it allowed me to use the name “Mr. Nutterbutter” in my textbooks.

As fun as this was, not every SLAPP suit involves two giant bankrolls fighting it out in court. In one case in Georgia, a prominent family sued a grocery worker with what was clearly a case of SLAPP. In another case, an Iowa newspaper almost went bankrupt defending itself against a libel suit that smacked of SLAPP. In that situation, a police officer sued the paper for accurately reporting his inappropriate relationships with teenage girls.

This brings to bear an unfortunate point: Just because you’re right, it doesn’t mean some yahoo won’t sue you to make your life miserable. What’s important to know before you go after a story is to what degree your media outlet will support you, to what degree you can accurately defend your work and to what degree you think the juice is worth the squeeze. Then, you can decide how to move forward.

In Patel’s case, it was obvious he would be coming after the Atlantic, and it was obvious the Atlantic had a big enough war chest to fight back. That said, these kinds of suits can create a chilling effect on quality journalists who want to do important work. It’s not supposed to happen in a society in which the First Amendment provides us with some of the best support in the world, but we do have to deal with the reality of our surroundings.

 

Good Night, Dan Bice. You were truly an inspirational investigative journalist.

The headline from his home paper says it all. 

THE LEAD: This one really stings if you spent any time at all in Milwaukee:

A veteran political reporter, (Dan) Bice could conjure a politician’s personal phone number in seconds and never feared knocking on the door of someone he was trying to reach.

Bice, who worked for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for 33 years, died from complications of esophageal cancer on April 21, his birthday.

He had just turned 62.

 

THE BACKSTORY: I know my mother absolutely loved reading Dan Bice’s stuff and I found his relentless digging to be the kind of reporting every newspaper desperately needed. His most recent iteration of his investigative impulses ran as a column titled, “No Quarter,” which I always took to mean that he didn’t play favorites when it came to his desire to dig. Republican, Democrat, Whig, Federalist, whatever… If you did some shady stuff and he found out, he was coming for you.

I still use him as an example of how a great journalist gets inside information and how the PR machines of various organizations and departments feared him. In one case, he was banned from attending certain police press conferences, as the chief feared Bice would ask about allegations of an affair the man later admitted to having.

I also was really grateful that he was willing to help out almost anyone who had questions or concerns about journalism, including me. One of my earliest posts looked at his battle with then-Sheriff David Clarke. Bice asked Clarke about a $226,000 taxpayer-funded bill related to Clarke’s request for security around his home. Clark responded in true Clarke fashion, noting Bice and “the horse he rode in on” should go do something to themselves that is anatomically impossible.

After the post had gotten around and Bice even “liked” it on Facebook, I took a shot and emailed him some questions about his experiences with these kinds of situations. He was recovering from pneumonia, but still was willing to email me some thoughts that I could share with up-and-coming journalism students.

Here is that post, and it’s just as relevant and helpful today as it was almost 10 years ago.

Bice had posted about his cancer situation a while back and it was one of those, “Man, I hope he beats it, not just for him, but for all of us” kind of deals.

Given what we are seeing these days that passes for journalism, as well as the way in which just screaming at each other seems to pay better, I doubt we’ll see many more people as dedicated and driven as Dan Bice.

 

 

I Scream, You Scream, but When Stephen A. Smith Screams, He Makes $40M A Year: Understanding how our “hot-take culture” took hold of us

This is perhaps the most informative and honest look at what journalism has become and why it has become more and more difficult to have students do quality journalism when screaming stupid thoughts at other people is a much more lucrative option:

 

Joon Lee’s piece tapped into a few things that most of us already knew:

  • Our society has gotten less civil and but exponentially louder and less informed.
  • It’s cheaper and more lucrative to have two idiots screaming at each other on TV than it is to invest in quality journalism based on clarity an nuance.
  • If something works at a small level, people will inevitably increase the frequency and intensity of it until the speakers essentially go to 11.

Beyond that, however, here were some really fascinating things (and I use “fascinating” to cover over a multitude of emotional states I had watching this, ranging from “feeling informed” to “wanted to vomit through my ears.”):

  • The walk through the history of how ESPN built this culture of hot takes showcased the way in which the spike in the ratings from Skip Bayless screaming at people eventually moved us from debate to hot take.
  • The honesty Lee provides about his experiences in being a guest on one of these shows. After Stephen A. Smith made some pretty racist comments about Shohei Ohtani not speaking English, Lee got asked to step in and present some information about the impact of Ohtani and racism on the Asian American community. His points were great, but what people on social media most commented on was how he got Smith, who never apologizes for anything, to apologize. It was then he realized the content was secondary to the battle.
  • Lee was also honest about how he felt the pull of the hot-take gig, in that it brought him more into the public eye, helped spike up his social media presence, led to raises at work and other such things. In short, he understood why people would do this, even as he wasn’t really that fond of doing it.
  • Stephen A. Smith’s overall earnings was reported here to be about $40 million per year, which helped me understand why every sports kid I teach wants to be like him. I also realized I should have started screaming at people for no real reason much, much earlier in my life…
  • How sports set the table for this, but how it has now poisoned almost every area of our lives, including politics. I remember when Biden snapped at Trump at one of their Election 2020 debates and suddenly, “Will You Shut Up, Man?” T-shirts were for sale before the event ended. I’ve yet to see a nuanced policy discussion show up on a fridge magnet or bumper sticker, but still…

DISCUSSION STARTER: The video gives us a lot of depth and context as to the how and why of this situation, but it doesn’t really provide a lot of relief for those of us hoping we can somehow get out of this mess.

I guess the questions to get the discussion going could include, “Should we worry about this at all, given that people seem to like this stuff?” and “If we need to stop it, how can we get people addicted to better content than what amounts to a mix between a schoolyard punch-fest and cockfighting?”

 

A Look at the Dianna Russini and Mike Vrabel Situation: When Sources and Journalists Get Too Close, Bad Things Happen (An Unfortunately Repetitive Throwback Post)

A reporter and a source getting way too close for ethical comfort. Also, for all the times people have told me that sources and journalists NEVER hook up like this, I keep seeing a lot of sources and journalists hooking up like this… 

 

THE LEAD: Here we go again….

Longtime NFL reporter Dianna Russini has resigned from her role as a senior insider with The Athletic, according to the Associated Press. Her departure comes amid an investigation by The Athletic into Russini’s conduct and her relationship with Patriots coach Mike Vrabel. In photos published by Page Six last week, the two were seen spending time together at the Ambiente resort in Sedona, Ariz. ahead of the NFL’s annual owners meetings in Phoenix last month.

In her resignation announcement, Russini made the case that this was a set of cherry-picked images that took a totally innocent vacation involving multiple people and turned it into a tryst of some sort. Rather than actually showcase that, she said she refused to dignify the story and resigned instead:

“Moreover, this media frenzy is hurtling forward without regard for the review process The Athletic is trying to complete,” she continued. “It continues to escalate, fueled by repeated leaks, and I have no interest in submitting to a public inquiry that has already caused far more damage than I am willing to accept. Rather than allowing this to continue, I have decided to step aside now—before my current contract expires on June 30. I do so not because I accept the narrative that has been constructed around this episode, but because I refuse to lend it further oxygen or to let it define me or my career.”

That statement has the same effect as trying to put out a fire with gasoline. As a journalist, she has GOT to know that if ANY of her sources made a similar statement, she’d crawl so far up their rear end, they could taste her hairspray.

DOCTOR OF PAPER FLASHBACK: We’ve only covered this topic about a dozen times on the blog, ranging from the look at the Ali Watkins/James Wolfe situation at the New York Times to Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr.’s eeew-fest.

If there’s one common thread among these situations, it almost always mentions three things:

  • Who was or wasn’t engaged/married in whatever entanglement is going on
  • Any age gap between the male and female participants (This time its about seven years, which isn’t bad when you’re 50 and 43, or at least it’s not this. In most situations like this, we get an ancient guy and a woman 20-50 years younger)
  • A loud and immediate statement of support for the journalist that ages like milk in the sun.

(This case has yet to be fully explored, so it’s unclear if this is more of a “Kathy Scruggs” situation of unfounded sexual accusations or a full-on “Nuzzi-gate” situation that will be used in an emergency when syrup of ipecac is not available. The Athletic says it will continue its investigation to find out what happened, which it had to do regardless of Russini’s employment status if it wanted to have any credibility in journalism.)

What’s ridiculous is that in trying to pull a single “Throwback Thursday” post together, I found myself with almost too many examples of how gender, media, ethics and entanglements led to bad outcomes. Thus, here are some links to previous posts that might have some value to consider:

I’m sure I have more of these things somewhere, but let’s say that this is enough as a starter pack for “How not to make it in journalism.”

Have a good weekend.

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

 

The Joke’s on You: Three reasons why student media outlets should never, ever publish April Fools’ editions (or similar pranks)

I built this about 15 years ago for the cover of a student media helpers guide for a high school news conference. Other than a few language tweaks, I don’t think much has changed…

 

THE LEAD: Humor is a personal, acquired taste that is hard to tap into on a broad scale, something the students at UNC’s Daily Tarheel learned the hard way this month:

On April Fools’ Day, the paper published a series of satirical articles, including one with a subheadline that said the paper had rebranded as The Daily Woke Heel. Others read “UNC brings back DEI—for whites,” and “A new way forward for the Dean Dome: a two-stadium solution.” Another, published on the website, said “Satire: Trump orders ALE in Chapel Hill to be replaced with ICE agents.”

The jokes did not go over well with some students, and the paper’s editor in chief immediately issued an apology. She wrote that the paper heard students’ “critiques and outrage.” She added, the paper’s “insensitive decisions and oversights” were “made by a newsroom and leadership team that undoubtedly exist in positions of power and privilege on this campus.”

JOKE’S ON YOU: Every April Fools’ Day, I thank the Lord I’m no longer a student newspaper adviser. When I was one, I found myself begging, pleading, cajoling and griping in hopes of keeping the students from making a colossal error in judgement by thinking they were funny.

To be fair, it wasn’t always just the April Fools’ Edition that led to problems and UNC is not alone in the “Oh… So, THAT happened” moments of dumbassery that have advisers going gray and bald before our time and strongly reconsidering truck-driving school.

One year, we did a bracket for “Bar-ch Madness,” in which we listed off the top 16 best places to get hammered around campus. The chancellor wasn’t pleased at our idea of promoting problematic drinking, but he was even less enthusiastic about us including one of the freshman dorms as a “dark horse” candidate.

Year-end issues are also a major concern, as students are usually either burnt to a crisp or at that punch-drunk level of euphoria that comes with nearing the end of the year. In one case, the student newspaper at the University of Utah reminded us that using drop-caps in design isn’t always just an aesthetic choice:

If you noticed the “more” in the headline and wondered if the other staffers’ columns had a more dignified and direct approach… well… not quite…

I could spend days showcasing stuff like this but as the opening graphic seeks to demonstrate, but that would be hypocritical at best. It isn’t like we were so great back in “my day” and now “these damned kids” are somehow sullying the greatness that was present back when typewriters clicked in newsrooms and everyone wore their Sunday best to cover the news.

(One piece I cannot find from “my day” ran here at Oshkosh, in which the staff photoshopped the chancellor’s head onto the famous Demi Moore pregnancy photo. He was not amused, I’m told.)

Instead, here are three reasons that might help prevent the next disaster, which is already on the clock, if that graphic is right:

YOU ARE NOT THAT FUNNY: Humor is one of the greatest talents in the world, in that to make someone laugh can be among the most amazing feelings we have as humans. Someone once explained that if you can tap into something funny, you force people to have an involuntary response to it that creates true joy within them.

Taking that talent and honing it takes years, and even then, it requires a deft touch and a lot of failure. When Richard Pryor died, his family found thousands of reels of tape in his home that provided a timeline of his efforts work-shopping his act.

He’d be at one club one night, trying to see if this bit would land or if tweaking this accent would improve the audience reaction. It took him days, weeks, months and sometimes years to tweak and improve little things that led to those epic, uproarious moments on stage.

If a guy with that level of talent and skill had to work that hard for that long to make even half of his stuff work, what are the chances that a group of college students, trying this on the fly is going to pull it off on the first pass?

As much as I have laughed in newsrooms over the years for a variety of reasons, I can assure you, nobody I’ve met is good enough to pull off humor on a mass-media scale like this. Trying it publicly is going to lead to more harm than good.

 

HUMOR IS A PERSONAL TASTE: If you don’t believe me, listen to the following comedians:

  • Richard Pryor
  • Taylor Tomlinson
  • Sam Kinison
  • Ali Wong
  • Jeff Foxworthy
  • Nikki Glazer

At least one of them will probably make you laugh and at least one of them will likely offend the hell out of you. Some of them are throwing out bits that you can completely relate to while others are likely not landing a single joke for you. Some feel too tame while others are dropping more F-bombs and slurs than a drunk Boston sports fan after watching an ESPN Hot Take show that gives the Patriots no shot at the playoffs this year.

Newsroom humor, in particular, is a special kind of humor. It’s a mix of sarcasm, mortician’s humor, snark and insult comedy. It’s also full of inside jokes and other things that make people still laugh 20 years after they’ve graduated. I’ve seen newsrooms post weird things on the walls, engage in meme-battles and develop quote books as survival-level defense mechanisms.

(To this day, I’m still somewhat scarred by the humor fight that happened at Ball State between my features desk and my design desk. It started when someone in design left a presentation for a class open, and someone on features stuck some weird images into the design kid’s PowerPoint.

The design kid then stuck a photo of a morbidly obese female adult film actress on the side of the monitor at the features desk. The features kid then responded by essentially iron-gluing an inappropriate image to the side of the design computer, something nobody noticed until the head of the Indianapolis Star came down with my boss for a tour of the newsroom.

The guy paused while visiting the design pod and then asked no one in particular, “Hey… Is that monkey blowing itself?”)

The point is, humor is in the eye of the beholder and few people outside of newsrooms really are beholding what we behold in there. If you want to amuse yourself, turn the place into your own little den of wiener jokes, dank memes and memorable quotes. Just keep it out of the paper (and the public eye in general).

 

YOU NEED TO TREASURE YOUR CREDIBILITY: Student journalists take on all the risks associated with journalism at any level. They can be attacked, threatened or arrested, and many already have been subjected to these measures.

They can be sued for any one of a dozen reasons, including libel and invasion of privacy. They also suffer the same insults and mistreatment all journalists receive for merely doing their job.

The one thing that makes it suck so much more is that they are often treated as second-class citizens in the field, even by those folks who should know better. I’ve heard of numerous examples of student journalists being told by professors and even professional media operatives that they’re “just playing journalist.”

Like they broke out a “Fisher Price ‘My First Reporter'” kit and asked Nana for an interview about her chocolate-chip cookies or something.

As student journalists, you have to fight so much harder to be taken seriously. You have to defend your work more vigorously than “professional” journalists when you break stories that upset people.

You also have those same “professionals” trying to swipe your stories, bogart your sources or otherwise treat you like some sort of minor-league baseball affiliate that they can raid when the “big team” needs something.

You earn your credibility a grain of sand at a time, knowing that any mistake can wash the whole sandcastle away and force you to start over. It’s so damned important, as it truly is the coin of the realm.

Doing “humor” like the things we showcased here is like dousing your reputation with gasoline and lighting a match, just to watch it burn.

And you’re not just burning down your own house, you’re making it impossible for the next generation to live there or even build on the ashes. Sources (particularly professors) have long memories.

Don’t give them a reason to think poorly of you if you can help it.

 

How to write the best obituary possible (A Throwback Post)

My reporting class today took a look at obituary writing, and I knew I wanted them to write something about the experience. Rather than having them write either a mock obit on a fake person or (perhaps more awkwardly) writing their own obituary, I asked them to simply tell me what they learned that they felt would be most important to remember when they eventually had to write an obituary.

Here were some of the more interesting ones:

“You have to be able to balance fact-based reporting with some of the aspects of a feature. Being accurate to the public record while being respectful of the memories that are being shared by the deceased’s loved ones can be tricky to do, but it is essential to writing a proper obituary.”

 

“Being overly flowery with word choice is not going to improve a poorly researched story.”

 

“It’s not just about having the facts right and accurately describing someone’s life. It’s also about getting the right vibes and the human elements of why that person matters and the impact they had.”

 

“I learned that when writing you want to focus on the life of the individual more than the death. This is important because you are not writing obituaries like a true crime story, but rather as a way for people to potentially connect to the fact that they knew this person, and also as a way for people close to the deceased individual to grieve in a manner that allows them joy.”

 

“I think it is important to understand and recognize when writing obituaries because it serves as a reminder to the journalist each time they are tasked with writing one, and don’t forget their human side when honing into their journalist side.”

 

With that in mind, here’s a throwback post that talks about the bigger issues in writing obits that we covered in the class today. Hope it helps.

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 Anchoring Bias, The Leak and The Scoop: Why First Is Often Considered Best

(I acknowledge that this phrase is trademarked to Ricky Bobby Inc.)

Since the beginning of competitive media, immediacy has been a core value for all practitioners. As much as it was about “leaking” information to a source to get your position out ahead of competitors or finding the “scoop” to make you and your outlet look great, bigger things are actually at stake in terms of credibility.

Anchoring bias is a psychological theory that states people will always compare all subsequent information they received to the first piece of information they see. In simplest terms, the first piece of information “anchors” one’s opinion of a topic to a point of view or a sense of reality, with everything else simply relating to that concept.

For example, Dad and I were doing a card show this weekend, where we sell sports stuff and generally enjoy just hanging out together. Like most weekends, people come to the table and offer to sell us some of their old cards or memorabilia. The problem we usually have is that the people have “done some research” (read: I checked eBay for the highest priced version of whatever it is I have) and then ask us to buy their stuff.

I can explain until I’m blue in the face that the price on eBay is an “asking” not a “someone paid this amount” price or that the 1951 Mickey Mantle online is in perfect condition while the one they have looks like it was run over by a lawn mower, but it never seems to matter. They are stuck on that price, which rarely leads to a fruitful negotiation. They then try the same thing with a dozen other dealers and are continually disappointed with the outcome.

Anchor bias has a strong hold on people’s minds, which is why being the first voice people hear is crucial in several fields. Let’s take a quick walk through them:

PUBLIC RELATIONS: Messaging is always crucial in public relations, and it’s usually vital to get that message out first. For starters, if news reporter are trying to tell a story and nobody is talking, they’ll listen to those folks who are. That gets you a foot in the door that waiting around won’t.

In crisis communication, good practitioners have adopted the 15-20-60-90 rule, which states that within 15 minutes of a crisis, the organization needs to acknowledge the situation and begin communicating. The faster you get out there, the more your voice will be considered the anchor.

KEY DANGER POINT: When you wait too long and someone else gets to set the agenda and establish the anchor position, you will end up not only playing from behind, but also look like you’re lying. If you are reacting to someone else’s statements, you’re caught in a crouch and you might not be able to convince people what really happened.

Here’s a great scene from the movie “School Ties,” in which one of the students at a prestigious boarding school has cheated, but the students are told they must determine who it was:

 

In stepping up to say that he saw David cheat, Dillon established the anchor point. After that, it becomes a debate. Had it gone the other way, the arguments that followed would have been much different. If you care to know how it all ends, you can watch it here.

Get out front so you can tell people your side of things while they’re still open to new ideas instead of being anchored to whatever they heard from someone more willing to step up and say their peace.

NEWS FOLKS: Being first has been the gold standard for news people since the concept of a scoop began. I can honestly tell you from experience, being first felt great (only when I was right, however, so accuracy remains a bellwether for what we do here.

Research has found that when people find a source of information that fulfills their informational needs, they’ll keep going back to that source as they build a habit of content consumption. If you can get to something important first, you can demonstrate your value to the readers and viewers. You can also outdo the competition by becoming their “go-to” source of information.

This is why you need to establish sources in the field that will trust you and seek you out as a vessel of content. If you can prove to enough people in enough places that what you do is good, fair and helpful, you’ll become that person who gets the text, email or phone call with the latest information. If you prove the opposite, you’ll be out in the cold.

KEY DANGER POINT (Part I): Being first is great, but even anchors can get pulled up when faced with a torrent of opposing forces. People are likely to believe you as the anchor, but you have to be RIGHT above all else. Otherwise, you might win the battle and lose the war, having them trust you until they literally can’t anymore on this one story and then deciding they need to find a better source going forward.

I’ve told people for years that I’d rather be slower and right than fast and wrong. Fast and right is obviously what we’re shooting for here, but in the end, if you don’t have the goods, don’t make a move.

KEY DANGER POINT (Part II): Keep an eye on how you approach your stories based on what information you got first or which source you interviewed first. If the anchor bias works for the audience in terms of the first piece of information being considered gospel, you are likely to find the same thing happening in your reporting.

For example, let’s say that a developer wants to build a set of apartments for lower-middle-class people in your town. A local environmental agency is opposed to it because the folks there say it will damage a fragile ecosystem in a nearby lake and will also contribute traffic and garbage to the area. A local politician is in favor of it because it will bring much needed homes to his district, along with a strong tax base to help keep the city coffers filled. A local activist is opposing the building, saying the politician and the builder are cutting backroom deals to make money for themselves, while screwing over renters and taxpayers.

When you reach out to contact these people, how much will you be relying on what the first person to respond has to say to you? If the activist gets back to you, will the story shift to one of public corruption? If the developer responds first, will it be about housing for people who usually get priced out of the market? What about the other two?

I can honestly say that there have been times when I contacted a couple sources for comment on a story and I trusted the person who got back to me last the least. In some cases, it even shifted my questions: “I just heard from Alderperson Smith that this is nothing but a financial scam meant to benefit you. What do you have to say in response?” (read: I think you’re a weasel, but I’ll let you try to weasel out of it if you think you can…)

Coming to a story with an open mind is always a good thing, but it can’t just stop at that starting point. It needs to continue throughout the reporting and writing process to give everyone a fair shake.

 

A plea for sportswriters on Opening Day: Avoid cliches and just tell me what happened (A throwback post)

Some of the cards from my 1968 Topps Game insert set. Picking through them, I built the best line up I could imagine. Hank Aaron is out of position at short, although he did come up through the Negro League and Minor Leagues at short before switching to the outfield. I can’t even begin to imagine what this line up would cost today…

With the start of the baseball season today, I dug around and found one of my earlier posts about sports journalism that I thought could use a repeat for Throwback Thursday. Between what I’m already seeing in sports stories for baseball and what my students were writing for “March Madness” leads, I’m pleading once again for sportswriters to write for the audience and not for themselves.

If they don’t, at least I’ll get a few fresh examples for the “bad leads” file that could power at least a dozen lectures at this point.

 

Writing sports leads that don’t suck: Avoid cliches. Rely on facts. Tell me what happened and why I care.

Newer sportswriters tend to go one of two ways when confronted with writing a lead:

  1. This was the most sensational, inspirational, celebrational, muppetational event in all of human history! The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ? Yeah, take a back seat to this 0-0 soccer game between the Northeast West South-Central State Barbers and the Our Lady of Perpetual Motion Twitchers!
  2. Fill in flat cliche here. That is all.

While we’ve talked about the problems with hyperbole and the need to rely on facts before, a) we haven’t talked about it much in sports and b) the bigger problem in sports tends to be the latter issue. Sports lend themselves to cliche more than any other area of journalism and they do nothing good but bury the actual lead.

Case in point (and a minor plug for our school): The UW-Oshkosh men’s basketball team earned its first trip to the NCAA Final Four. It had been more than 15 years since the Titans even made the Sweet 16. Here are some things to consider as “important” that took place on Saturday night:

  • The team made its first Final Four game in school history.
  • The underdog Titans defeated the No. 9 team in the country on its home court.
  • Ben Boots scored a career-high 36 points to help the team win.
  • One of the reason Boots scored so many is because senior guard Charlie Noone was tossed out/fouled out after catching a technical foul for his fifth foul of the game in the middle of the second half. Noone was a career 1,000-point scorer, a big deal at this level.
  • Down 6 points with 1:45 to go in the game, Boots hit two key threes to knot the score.
  • The game went into overtime, the second time this season a clash between these teams went into overtime. (The previous one was a double-OT game.)
  • Refs called 45 fouls, costing Augustana two of its key big men.

In short, there is no shortage of amazing things you could use for a lead. Here is what the local newspaper posted as its lead:

ROCK ISLAND, Ill. – History was made by the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh men’s basketball team Saturday night.

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Three quick things here:

  1. The lead is a cliche and a bad one at that. History is ALWAYS made. You reading this blog post is technically making history.
  2. The lead is written in passive voice. The cliche of “Titans make history” wasn’t even active.
  3. HOW the Titans made history is probably something people would like to know in the lead. What did they do? Did the coach murder a referee after a bad call? Did the whole team lose its uniforms and play the game in clown costumes borrowed from the circus? Did the team steal basketball powers a la “Space Jam” to win a game? Did they lose by more points than any team ever? Good grief…

When it comes to writing a sports lead, here are three key things to remember:

  1. Rely on the facts and tell me what happened: You don’t have to sell me on something being amazing. Just tell me what happened that was factual and yet cool and let me figure it out for myself. If the authors had woven in any of the components listed in bullets above, they would have had a great lead.
  2. Don’t assume people will read beyond the lead: Deadwood in the lead is a death knell for a story. The second paragraph is better and the head and deck include key information. However, you can’t rely on other components of the story to save you when you write a lousy lead. It’s like telling the cop who pulled you over for speeding how everyone else was driving faster: It doesn’t make you any less guilty.
  3. Remember your audience: Write for your readers, as in people who probably didn’t attend the game. If you went home after watching that game and your roommate asked, “Hey, how was the game?” what would you tell your roommate? “We won! We’re in the Final Four!” Would you ever imagine walking into your apartment and announcing, “History was made!” in response to that question? Probably not.

The Popularity and Perils of the Police Blotter

The Oshkosh PD police blotter is not only a bit more pedestrian than many other departments, but it almost needs a Rosetta Stone to translate it…

THE LEAD: The Wyoming Tribune Eagle ended its publishing of the police blotter as news this month, noting that despite people’s interest in the material, the ethical and legal concerns were just too risky:

People love the police blotter, because it includes tiny nuggets of drama, intrigue and joy. For instance, in Gillette, Wyoming, cars get “cheesed,” meaning people will cover them with slices of American cheese. Who doesn’t love reading about a good cheesing?

But along with the weird and wacky things that show up in a police blotter are numerous inaccuracies that follow people for life.

“There’s a lot of problems with blotters in general,” Secrest told me. “An initial charge can change really easily. They can up the charge, they can lower it, they can dismiss it entirely. Things can get challenged pretty quickly. Also, people can be acquitted.”

COP TALK 101: For those uninitiated in crime news, the blotter is a list of all the incidents law enforcement officials within a department deal with in a day. It usually lists a mix of things, including the time of the incident, the name of the person involved, the place where the incident occurred, the date of birth of the person involved and any criminal charges associated with the situation.

The blotter only represents what the law enforcement officials are doing at the front end of a situation, not the resolution of the case or any changes made later that day (or week or month).

So, for example, let’s say I’m driving to the aluminum recycling place to turn in some beer cans when I hit an icy patch on the road and skid into the ditch. The cop sees beer cans all over my car, notices that I totaled my vehicle and wants to check me for drunk driving. However, I’m too woozy and messed up from the crash to do field sobriety and the ambulance takes me to the hospital, where instead of a breath test, they do a blood draw.

The officer might list Operating While Intoxicated as an expected charge, pending the results of the blood test. So, it goes into the the blotter as an OWI. However, it turns out I’m as sober as a judge, so the charges eventually get dismissed.

If all the paper is doing is publishing the blotter info and not really following up, that can lead to several problems, like one noted in Poynter’s story on the Wyoming situation:

Although the staff received some pushback when they announced the change, “now that it’s gone it doesn’t seem to be missed,” Secrest said. “Also, this week we had a man call us and tell us that his booking sheet incorrectly designated his charge as a felony and our publishing of that, prior to this policy, caused him to lose his job. We will be able to correct that once he provides the court document confirming the charge. But that was published about 10 days before this policy took place. It felt like a good reminder of why we did this.”

A CHECK OF THE INTEREST ELEMENTS: One of the things we always talk about is balancing people’s right to know something versus people’s right to be left alone. A key way we do this is looking at the FOCII elements (Fame, Oddity, Conflict, Immediacy and Impact) to figure out if we should be doing something or not.

The blanket publication of the blotter tends not to showcase any of these elements other than Immediacy, but as we note in the book, Immediacy always has to be tempered against accuracy. In short, fast and wrong is worse than slow and right.

That said, the Oddity element often shows up in the blotter, which means checking it for information still merits value. The Fame element can also come into play, as people who are well known often end up on the wrong side of the law.

Here are two examples I remember from working with the crime beat:

At UW Oshkosh, the Advance-Titan used to run blotter items under the heading of “Busted!” In looking at the revelations put forth by the Wyoming paper regarding accuracy, that probably wasn’t the best of titles.

In one case, Busted! featured a brief bit of news in which two students were caught having sex in the middle of the day behind the giant UW-OSHKOSH sign on the main drag of campus. When the officer began to write the students up for this tryst, the guy begged the cop not to do this, because he said he knew it would end up in Busted! and thus his girlfriend would find out about his “extra-curricular activities.”

At another place and time, we had a blotter item that really tickled our irony meter. A local radio personality who went by the moniker “The Altar Boy” got busted for OWI. He apparently also gave the cops a bit of a rough time in arguing with them over the bust, noting he was someone of great import.

The folks in Wyoming noted that in cases like these, obviously, the information would be covered, but done so in a more complete way. Meanwhile, minor incidents involving regular folks would not make the paper.

DISCUSSION TIME: Does your media outlet have a blotter section of some kind and how popular is it? What kinds of things do you think are fair game and what feels like a bridge too far? Also, how would you feel if the minor indiscretion you committed in college suddenly became something anyone could find on the first page of a Google search? A lot of student newsrooms have struggled with balancing this, so it’d make for an interesting classroom discussion.

When it comes to getting quotes, go buy flowers instead of buying flour

When it comes to quotes, consider the difference between how you buy flowers and how you buy flour. Also, imagine them sitting in a nice vase…

In media writing courses, we talk about quotes being the spice that zips up the story or the sparkly diamond that draws the attention of the reader. However, not all quotes actually do this, because simply slapping quotation marks around a pedestrian set of words doesn’t get the job done.

PR practitioners tend to write press releases that have at least one block quote in them, with some releases being nothing but one giant “statement from X Person” quote. News writers tend to build the bodies of their stories with at least a few paraphrase-quote pairings that are meant to give readers varying views of a topic and a wide array of people a chance to speak. In a lot of cases, those quotes are either relatively pointless or they offer little in the way of quality.

How is it that so many people are proud, happy and thrilled to be there in EVERY PRESS RELEASE, ALL OF THE TIME, even when the writer can craft the quote for the person being quoted? How is it that reporters who get to interview sources also manage to come back with such “meh” quotes from sources who really SHOULD be so proud, happy and thrilled that they can’t shut up about their subject?

Here are the reasons why:

People are afraid to do anything different, lest they offend someone: The phrase, “It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it,” is usually where most people want to be when the chips are down.

To that end, it’s a lot easier to do a bland, mediocre quote than to state something important with your name attached to it. Interview subjects with experience tend to lapse into cliches to avoid really upsetting people, while the press release quotes also tend to play to the middle of boring to avoid controversy.

 

Writers aren’t as creative as they need to be: One of the things that differentiates PR from news is the concept of quoting sources. If there’s one area where I’ve seen people have the MOST difficulty in making the shift, it’s here.

News requires you to go out, find someone and get something out of their mouth in a word-for-word format. PR in many cases allows for practitioners to write up something on behalf of the client and then just get a “sign off” on it.

Even though you CAN do this, it doesn’t always follow that you SHOULD, primarily for the reason we’re noting here: You don’t know enough about your source, the topic or the non-data stuff to really come up with that whiz-bang quote that will make the difference here.

The same thing can be true of news writers, who don’t put enough time into their research to ask questions that probe or engage the source. If you ask a generic question, you tend to get a generic answer.

 

Writers aren’t pushing for quality: I can’t tell you how many times I was told to “get a quote” for a story. It was basically like this scene from “The Paper” where Michael Keaton just wants “something:”

I say this as a fellow sinner who often was on the hook for getting a quote, any quote I could from any source, just so that we could say we quoted someone. However, it seems like “get a quote” is a general resting pulse for how we do business.

With those things in mind, here are a few ideas on how to get better stuff:

Don’t shop for flour. Shop for flowers: In the middle of pierogi season at our house, Amy often sends me out for supplies, the most common of which was flour. The direction was simple: “Go to the store and get a bag of flour.” I dutifully comply by driving to the closest place I could and grabbing a five or 10 pound bag off the shelf that resembled the bag she had just emptied.

When I got sent into the field as a journalist, I often felt that was how I was supposed to get quotes. It was like “Go to the store and get a bag of flour.” OK, if that’s all I’m doing, all I care about is going there, picking something off the shelf and coming home.

That’s part of the problem with quotes: You don’t just want something off the shelf.

Instead of shopping for flour, think about shopping for flowers for someone you love. Think about what it is that makes that bouquet special, beautiful and different for them. Think about how you want the reaction to be when they see it. Think about doing more than grabbing whatever is convenient.

 

Research better beforehand to ask better questions: As we’ve said here repeatedly, the key to everything good we do in journalism is in the preparation. The more work we do at the front end of the process, the better things will be at the back end of the process.

One of the reasons PR quotes are so “meh” is that practitioners don’t dig into the topic or the organization to find things that make it special. When all we have to work off of is a baseline understanding of the concept, which usually comes from a buzzword-laden mission statement, we’re operating in Generic-ville.

The benefit of doing the research before crafting that quote is to make it feel genuine and informed. In adding special touches based on detailed information you found, you not only have a better chance of making your source sound good, but you also have a much better chance of drawing a reporter’s attention.

In the case of reporters and practitioners who rely on interviewing, the research ahead of time can help you shape more pointed and engaging questions that will elicit stronger responses. When you ask that, “So what can you tell me about X?” question, the source will lapse into their “greatest hits album” answer, with all the generic info and cliches. If you can ask something that shows you’ve invested time and energy in the question, you’re likely to get that source to be more engaged.

 

Change the source’s perspective: Most of the time, the sources we interview either play to us as media practitioners or play to a perceived audience of peers. Those quotes tend to be more jargon laden or otherwise disengaged, and they usually don’t do much for an actual audience that will eventually read their quotes.

Put the source in a different state of mind, based on your full understanding of who you see as the readership. Try asking a question like, “So how would you explain this to a worker on the assembly line?” or “What would you say to a parent in the school district about X?” or even “Could you explain this to me like you are talking to a child?”

In shifting the perspective of the source in terms of understanding the audience, you can get them to shuffle the deck a bit and deal you a better hand. I’m a particular fan of the “child” quote when I’m talking to a source who is clearly exceptionally well-versed on their subject, to the point of assuming everyone else knows as much as they do.

I also like the idea of thinking about who else might be a source in my story to shape the questions. For example, if I’m talking to a product seller, I like to ask them to shift focus to being a product consumer. If they’re a superintendent, I like to get them to shift to think like a parent, a teacher, a custodian or a kid.

In getting them to move, they tend to get out of the rut where cliches live and give me something different.