Dynamics of Media Writing

The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s AI department co-opted a staffer’s byline for a story. Head Honcho Chris Quinn still thinks AI is our salvation.

Actual footage of what happened at The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s AI desk this week… 

THE LEAD: The Cleveland Plain Dealer has apparently engineered a new form of AI that not only creates crappy content, but also finds a way to place the blame on an uninvolved human reporter:

A journalist has accused Cleveland.com — the online home of The Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper — of publishing an article under her byline without her consent, knowledge, or approval. The article was generated by the “Cleveland.com Express Desk,” which “uses AI tools to assist in producing content” that the newspaper claims is “reviewed and edited by staff.”

The supposed writer, Kaitlin Durbin, was not thrilled about having her employer slap her byline on whatever the hell Cleveland.com’s robot overlords had decided to create:

The paper didn’t pull the rather banal article, but instead pulled Durbin’s byline which was like saying, “Hey, remember how we said AI wasn’t going to hurt the newsroom? Well… Um… Look! It’s a picture of a guy in a suit made of Bluey’s hide!”

(SIDE NOTE, PART I: This story could have used some actual reporting, as this literally reads like a press release that was copied and pasted into the paper. Also, anytime someone says they are quitting  a job for “personal reasons,” I tend to believe that there’s something less benign happening that is just SCREAMING for someone to dig into it. )

DYNAMICS OF WRITING FLASHBACK: This whole thing would not be half as delicious as it is, if it weren’t for Plain Dealer Head Honcho Chris Quinn’s sermons from the Mount about AI being all that and a bag of chips.

You might remember we covered this back in February, where Quinn was so “Team AI,” you would have thought it were a “Twilight” character competing for Bella Swan’s affections. He also was nice enough to tell all of us in education that we were old, stubborn cusses who refused to see how great AI is and how much we are harming our students.

Well, at least when our kids turn in their papers, they actually have their own names on them…

(SIDE NOTE PART II: The clip I desperately want to use here to express my feelings about this whole situation comes from the opening of “Another 48 Hours,” when Nick Nolte is questioned by internal affairs after he shoots a guy and accidentally blows up a race track. The people at Sage would have a full on aneurysm if I posted it, so instead, I’m linking to this clip, while also telling you that it’s number nine on the top 10 quotes. Watch at your discretion.)

IT’S “ONE TO GROW ON” TIME: As much as I doubt Chris Quinn will read this, I still think it’s worth the rest of us to dig in and learn something from this situation. Here are the best  “One To Grow On” moments I can pull out of this:

You can’t let automation make you lazy: One of the biggest risks of automation is that the humans supposedly overseeing it tend to pay less attention to the details. When we had to look up every word instead of relying on spellcheck, we tended to edit more carefully and thus avoid headlines that proclaimed the opening of a “pubic library” or one like this:

Generative AI moves that risk even higher, because a) it’s capable of doing more complex stuff for us than traditional AI, b) We’re not as familiar with its risks and c) We don’t know how best to backstop it yet.

This means we need to be MORE diligent with this stuff, not less.

 

What is the true Cost vs. Value of AI?: In his magnum opus, singing the praises of AI, Quinn explained how reporters will benefit from all the time AI could save them, so they could do other more important things. (Apparently, in this case, it saved the reporter enough time to go on a honeymoon without actually having to file the story she supposedly wrote…)

He also opined on how the readers will benefit from better overall coverage and how the world will benefit because people are now part of an “energized electorate” that will engage like never before.

The idea of saving time, energy and resources sounds great in terms of value, but what about the cost associated with ticking off a reporter who is publicly wondering aloud if the paper thinks it owns her soul?

Some portion of your newsroom probably thinks you’re already selling them out for a sack of magic beans and the promise of fourth-quarter profits for the hedge funds that own the place. Now, I imagine they’re less likely to believe that “AI is your friend” and more likely to think “The T-800 is coming for your job and your soul…”

Also, what about the cost associated with the loss of readership confidence in ALL of your work now? Before, it might have been, “OK, don’t trust anything with that AI Buzzword byline on it, but we know Kaitlyn and she’s solid.” Now it’s “OK, did the person we thought wrote the story actually write the story, or was it even a person at all?”

Trust and credibility have always been built a grain at a time when it comes to the media’s relationship with the public, and it’s always been destroyed in an instant when someone makes a short-sighted decision to cut corners.

AI can do a lot, but it can’t change that.

 

You’re a journalist, not a cult leader: One of the biggest problems here was Quinn’s “nothing to see here” response when the byline situation broke:

After this story was published, Quinn told Futurism that the byline blunder was “a simple mistake, the result of a miscommunication between a couple of editors.”

“It was corrected as soon as we learned of it from the Tweet,” Quinn continued, adding that he’s “written extensively about our policies, practices and controls regarding AI content in my From the Editor columns this year” and directing us to a post containing links to his statements on Cleveland.com’s AI policies. “If you’re looking for information about us, it’s all there,” said Quinn. “I have nothing to add.”

Back when he first was telling everyone who would listen that AI was not going to be a problem, he was singing this tune:

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

If that’s true, where did this story come from? Clearly the reporter given the initial credit (Durbin) didn’t write it, and apparently neither did anyone else, as there’s no byline on it now. Also, way to throw those human editors under the bus, just to make sure no one was thinking about the AI’s role in this screw-up.

Guys like this remind me of the line, “Often wrong, never in doubt,” and as bad as that normally is, it’s really disturbing to see it from the editor of a major media outlet.

Journalists are supposed to play the skeptic, hedge their bets, play with caution and find balance. It keeps us out of trouble and allows us to see things as they are, not as we would like them to be. It also allows us to fess up when we’re wrong, something that (oddly enough) inspires confidence in the people we serve.

If Chris Quinn wants to talk up the positives and crap all over people who point out the negatives, that’s fine, but do it as a PR guy for an AI firm or as the prophet for some sort of futuristic tech cult.

Journalists don’t have the luxury of arrogant presumption.

Starting the school year with lessons from 5-year-olds

In starting another new year of teaching, I’m always on the lookout for things that will inspire me enough to inspire my students. This year, I found it by dealing with my 5-year-old nieces, Abby and Sophia. Spending time with the twins gave me some key insights as to how best to challenge my own students. Hope some of these things might help you along as well:

REMEMBER TO WONDER: The best part about being a little kid, at least in my book, is that everything seems new and amazing in some of the best ways possible. Little kids wonder about stuff all the time, whether it’s how the refrigerator keeps stuff cold, or why nature deals some of us a bad hand. Here’s a conversation between Abby and me regarding the latter issue:

Her: “Uncle Cake! Why you have no hair?”

Me: “Well, I’m older than you, sweetie…”

Her: “Uncle Cake, my daddy’s old and he has hair. What happened?”

I wasn’t about to explain hereditary cruelty to the kid, but it was one of many conversations that had me thinking and laughing all at the same time, simply because one of the twins wanted to know something that literally had never occurred to me to consider.

Most of us used to wonder about stuff like this and we had no compunction about sharing it with others. However, as we got older, we started keeping our questions to ourselves, for fear of how we’d look in front of our peers or because we just didn’t care anymore.

Reporting, in a lot of ways, is all about wonder. It could be a simple thing like, “Why is there only one type of ketchup, while there are dozens of mustard varieties?” to “Who is really keeping an eye on airplane usage?” Go back to that little 5-year-old in your brain and let the wonder take you places.

 

RULES MATTER: We were over at my brother-in-law’s place swimming one day this summer, when Abby decided to be the lifeguard of the pool. She used her pretend binoculars to watch all of us, which was kind of cute until I apparently violated the rule against using a squirt gun against the lifeguard:

Her: “UNCLE CAKE! NO! YOU GET A TIMEOUT!”

Me: “You didn’t say squirting people was bad. You were squirting people before you became a lifeguard!”

Her: “You should know better. You go to timeout.”

It dawned on me how much of what I was covering last year, ranging from an April Fools’ edition that really ticked people off to the whole Russini/Vrabel “inside with the insider” thing, came down people needing to follow rules and behave with common sense. The old line of “I’d rather beg for forgiveness than ask for permission,” sounds kind of cool, until you realize you probably aren’t getting forgiven and are more likely to be fired for whatever it is you did.

 

SIX – SEVEN: I learned a long time ago that students tend to remember what I tell them, even if they remember it ass-backwards or for the wrong reasons. I thought about this when Sophia was showing me how she could count to ten using fingers.

We started with the pinkie on one hand with one, moving all the way through the thumb. I then raised my index finger and said, “And six…”

She replied by patiently putting her hand on mine and correcting me:

“No, Uncle Cake,” she said. “That is seven.” She then wiggled my thumb, “THIS is six.”

And thus it shall always be, from here into eternity…

Rest assured, I do know how to count to six, but I also was not taught that each finger had a specific purpose. I suppose I could have corrected her, but I’d prefer that she gets her counting down and that eventually she learns that each finger can represent a counting digit from a more credible source.

Remember that whole thing about rules? Sometimes they learn the rule to the point of being problematic. I’m thinking more about explaining the WHY they have to follow the rules, what the purpose of those rules are and how to understand what matters about those rules.

 

BE PERSISTENT: Most of what we do as journalists is about getting people to do things that are for the betterment of all, even when those people don’t want to do them. It might be getting them to share open records, provide an interview on a difficult topic or ratting someone out for doing shady stuff.

I’ve noticed that a lot of my students tend to give up after one or two emails, instead of really going after something like a dog chasing a car. I have also noticed that the twins are more than up to a challenge when it comes to getting something they want.

Case in point, when Amy visits, they always want her to stay over for the night. No matter what she says as to why she can’t do it, they’ve got a rebuttal.

“I don’t have a bed here.”

“You can sleep with us!”

“I have to work tomorrow.”

“We can wake you up extra early so you can drive home!”

“Uncle Cake is waiting for me at home and he misses me.”

“We’ll miss you more!”

In a lot of cases, Amy has to leave, but on more than one occasion, they wore her down. (To be fair, there are two of them and they have the energy of the Energizer Bunny on meth.) They’re never rude and don’t resort to tantrums. They’re just persistent to the point of running you out of excuses.

I don’t know what it is that makes the rest of us run out of steam so much faster (other than the Energizer Bunny meth thing) but I do know we can push harder to get more when we really want to. I’m thinking that’s going to be the goal of my reporting kids this year: Be persistent.

Hypocrisy, Thy Name is “Insider:” A Deeper Look at The Athletic’s Postmortem on The Dianna Russini/Mike Vrabel Scandal

THE LEAD: From the “Oh, really? Ya THINK?!?” Department…

An internal investigation by The Athletic found that the relationship between Dianna Russini, its former senior N.F.L. reporter, and Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the New England Patriots, was a “clear violation” of the company’s standards.

In a report released Thursday detailing findings of its monthslong investigation, The Athletic said that the relationship gave the appearance of a conflict of interest and Ms. Russini should have revealed it to the company.

CATCHING UP: As I think everyone short of the Beaver County Tidbit has reported earlier this year, Russini and Vrabel had photos of them published that made it clear there was more than a “source/reporter” relationship going on.

Russini first vigorously defended herself against these allegations, saying everything was taken out of context and she wasn’t going to dignify this non-story with a response.

Dianna Russini’s PR team making it clear that there’s nothing to this story….

Meanwhile, Vrabel made a vague mea culpa, complete with his decision to attend counseling because… um… you got me on this one.

RANDOM SIDE NOTE: Can I have her job? According to a story written after the relationship became public, Russini was making bank:

Ms. Russini was not just any reporter. The Athletic paid her an annual salary of close to $800,000, according to a former manager who had knowledge of her salary negotiation. This would have made her one of the highest-paid journalists at the Times Company.

She apparently filed somewhere north of 900 stories during her three years at the publication, along with appearing on podcasts, doing videos and more, so I’m not saying she didn’t work at her job, but damn… At what my kids are telling me they’re making coming out of college, we could staff a decent-sized newsroom out here for what The Athletic was paying the self-described “straight-up MILF.”

HYPOCRISY, THY NAME IS INSIDER: First things first for the journalism kids out there: Don’t have any kind of snuggly relationships of any kind with any source if you are a reporter.

If you somehow managed to find yourself with a potentially risky situation (as I once did in getting engaged to a city council rep, even though I didn’t cover city council as my beat), disclose the relationship ASAP and then figure out if the juice is worth the squeeze depending on the rules of your gig and the level of interest you have in your significant other.

But here’s the one question nobody seems OK with asking at any of these major media outlets:

Was the Vrabel situation worse than anything else “insiders” are doing?

I get that Americans are always going to clutch their pearls when sex-like-stuff becomes public and I know that women (particularly women covering sports) are constantly treated less favorably than men.

But let’s not pretend sports “insiders” are anything more than glorified PR agents that get paid way too much and get away with way more than they should.

In the same timeline in which the Russini-Vrabel was being feverishly dissected by journalists, fellow “insider” Jay Glazer was pouring back the suds with coaches at a pool party he has apparently hosted for the past 18 years.

The reporters tsk-tsking Russini used footage of this party to show that Vrabel wasn’t present, apparently because he was out “running the offense” with Russini or something. Apparently, it was fine for Glazer to set up a day-drinking session with the people he covers, and no one has tried to put a stop to an event older than the incoming college freshman.

Glazer has gotten in deep with all sorts of players and teams, including serving as an MMA trainer for several players. He also once got away with this:

I often recall Walter Cronkite demanding that LBJ let him sign a bill… 

As we noted when Adam Schefter wasn’t behaving like a paragon of journalistic virtue, the “insider” culture that has consumed sports journalism is overflowing with hypocrisy and self-promotion.

The “insiders” pretend to be journalists when they want to break stories, but pretend not to be when they want to break journalistic rules. Charissa Thompson tried to play this angle a few years back, when she said she “made up” quotes as a sideline reporter, only to try to walk it back.

Even without the whole “Oh my stars! She might have touched his manly virtue!” stuff, Russini seemed a bit ethically compromised by the spoils of stardom. She apparently bragged about hanging out with the who’s who of the NFL, and even trying to use a coach to get her out of a speeding ticket.

Other sports reporters, whose livelihoods depend on scoops and staying ahead of the pack, see what the “insiders” do and how well they are treated, so they figure if that’s the game, let’s go play it.

This is why we get more and more “anonymous sources” for less and less important content. It’s why we see more grandstanding and brand building from the “big names” in the media instead of following the same rules  everyone else has to.  It’s why we see people pushing the edge of the envelope in what is acceptable to cover and how much of a jagwad they feel comfortable being in covering it.

It’s also why when sports and news meet, sometimes some a reporter will take a corner or two too quickly and end up getting sued back to the Stone Age.

Professional sports loves themselves some PR, and basically, that’s what they get when they pick out their favorite mouthpieces and spoon feed them content they want to have in the public.

So, let’s stop pretending that Glazer, Schefter and dozens of other “reporters” who start every sentence with “The general manager told me exclusively that…” haven’t sold their journalistic souls for heavy bank and easier scoops.

They might not be pulling tongue with a coach in a hot tub, but they’re no less ethically compromised than someone in a romantic relationship with a source.

Catching up with a former student got me to see how best to help future students

I spent part of this week catching up with a former student who has a job most of my current students would give multiple limbs to obtain: beat writer for the Green Bay Packers. The view he has of sports, his job and the importance of learning really inspired this post, so I’m hoping I do him justice.

When students around here discuss their desire to enter the world of sports journalism, they tend to focus on a variety of surface-level interests: Getting to cover games, getting to know players, seeing how the league works, publishing columns that offer opinions on the team and so forth.

In teaching sports journalism students over the years, they have often expressed a sense of connectivity to their team as well, much to my chagrin. In presenting the students with a fictional ethics scenario regarding the arrest of a football player from their school, they often declined to publish information about the situation because they say it will “hurt our team.” They’ve also noted that most of their readers would be upset that this story could create problems for “our player” or undercut “our chances” to win.

(In grading these, I’d often push back by asking, “What about your readers who think you’re playing favorites for an athlete in a way you wouldn’t for them?” or “What about your readers who aren’t fans of the team and think you’re picking sides against them?” I rarely got a substantive answer to those questions.)

Other students have complained about having to take on different assignments, such as open records, crime coverage, deep-dives and more. “I’m never going to have to know this stuff,” they’ll say, as they groused about stories that required them to look at the impact of vaccination rates on dorm dwellers, the difference between robbery and burglary or how a budget works.

In discussing this stuff with my former student a bit, he talked about all the random topics he’s had to learn about while covering college and pro sports, which led me to this list of things that can benefit ALL student journalism folks:

 

BECOME A LIFELONG LEARNER: If there’s one thing I’m REALLY worried about in terms of artificial intelligence, it’s that people will become less interested in learning things. If the AI can do something difficult for you, it’s a lot easier to let that happen and do something less taxing that you enjoy.

One of the things my former student mentioned was how he had to learn how the criminal justice system worked when athletes were accused of crimes. He also had to learn about medical conditions like CTE when former players found themselves dealing with brain damage later in life. He learned how to understand issues related to city construction and planning/zoning while seeing stadiums being discussed or construction projects related to athletics coming to fruition.

In each case, he found himself not only being nosy (a great journalism trait) but interested in learning the key aspects of each area so that he could clearly and fully explain what was going on for his readers. I also got the sense from him that learning those things made him feel more confident in his writing and less likely to become bored with the grind of the “pre-game/game/post-game” story treadmill.

Trying to inspire lifelong learning in some students can be like trying to teach a seal to play the cello, but it’s worth it when it actually pans out. Not only are students more likely to build a better knowledge base from which to write, but they’re also more likely to benefit the readers by going beyond the basics.

 

EXPLAIN “WHY” MORE: One of the stories he wrote that I still use to this day was from his summer as a sports editor at the student newspaper. As we were preparing for a final issue, an open-records request response came in, dumping dozens of emails on the sports desk that talked about the tension between a coach and the university. I distinctly remember the look on his face when that happened: it was like he’d seen a ghost coming after him with a chainsaw.

We printed off all the emails and started highlighting dates, people and specific chunks of text that ran counter to the standing narrative the U had put out, which was that everything was fine. In the end, he published a great story that really capped the summer nicely.

In chatting about it a little the other day, the former student mentioned how grateful he was that I was working with him on it and how I was explaining not just WHAT we were looking for or writing, but WHY we were doing it. He also was able to see WHY we decided to file that open-records request, as the resulting story showcased how open-record requests could reveal truths that some people had been hiding.

I have found that over time a gap has continued to widen on both ends of my teaching spectrum: I tend to think that things I have taught multiple times have a patently obvious rationale behind them, so explaining “why” seems redundant. Meanwhile, students every year seem to have less and less awareness of the entirety of things around them, thus making them less and less likely to understand why certain things matter the way they do. Each year, I try to recalibrate my end of the deal and lean in harder on explaining the “why,” both because it tends to help them better understand what I’m teaching and because if they understand the “why,” they tend to internalize it and have stronger buy in.

 

BREAK DOWN THEIR ABSOLUTISM: I don’t know if I’m the only one seeing this, but I’ve noticed that students in more recent semesters tend to either default to “I don’t know” when asked a question or they lock in on an answer and will defend it to the death, even when it’s completely wrong.

I’m not talking about questions like, “Is Donald Trump a good president?” or “Is the food on campus any good?” where strong opinions can emerge. I’m talking about things that are factually right or wrong like “Sylvester Stallone won a Golden Globe award” or “You can’t lose 50 pounds this weekend by eating a special brand of gummies infused with mystic herbs.”

I blame a lot of this on social media, not just because it perpetuates a lot of stupid content that is flat-out wrong, but also because the algorithms and such tend to reward louder, more confident, absolutist idiots. It’s always the “TOTAL PROOF THAT SELENA GOMEZ IS SECRETLY DATING A MARTIAN THAT ONLY AN IDIOT WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND OR SUPPORT!!!!” posts that do better than things with nuance and focus. Everyone is an expert, even though experts are among the most likely people a) not to be yammering on TikTok and b) to tell you that almost nothing is 100% certain.

Over the past few years, I’ve felt like I’m deprogramming ex-cult members in trying to get students to see beyond their self-assured sense of reality as they try to engage in journalism. As much as the recent political and social world has pushed us as journalists to not be objective and balanced, I think we need to actually push harder in that direction in regard to teaching students to report with a balance, but publish based on fact-checked accurate information.

A student once asked how I could do something like this with all the “bad people” in the world. I explained that every interview I did for a story, I tried to keep the door open in my mind to see what that person had to tell me. In some cases, that door was wide open, like when I would interview a fire chief about a fire or when I’d interview a nun about church safety.

In other cases, that door was hard to keep open, even a little crack, but I did it. In one case, I had to interview a guy who claimed to be the Grand Dragon of the Wisconsin KKK about his intent to stage a march on the Capitol for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. All I really wanted to know was if the guy had a parade permit, as it was essential for attempting this act. The door was open a crack with the idea that he might tell me, “Yes, and here’s why a march is protected speech and here’s the inherent value of what we’re doing.” The first six seconds of the interview slammed that door shut when he used words I won’t repeat here, but the point is, even in the most likely scenario in which I could ABSOLUTELY say, “This guy is a chucklehead,” I gave it a shot.

 

GO WHERE THE STORY TAKES YOU: In talking with the former student, we hit on a piece he did about football and brain damage.

“That was the longest time I ever spent on a story,” he said, noting it took at least a year or so. The funny thing? When he got the initial call from one source about the topic of the NFL denying an old player benefits, he figured the story would take about two days.

A lot of students have a preconceived notion of where they think a story is going to go, which can be a good thing if that’s based on significant research. Still, good stories can have a lot of twists and turns to them, so keeping an open mind (see the above point) can really help those stories develop into what they actually are, as opposed to what we might want them to be. Those stories also tend to benefit the readers more, as they reveal things that they hadn’t previously considered.

 

Some great interviewing tips from the folks running “The Interview” and an Exercise Opportunity

If there’s one common thread among all of my media classes, it’s the fear of doing interviews. Students in the earliest media-writing classes and the senior-level seminars will confess that they feel they don’t know how to do interviews, that they don’t feel they do them well or that they feel exceptional levels of anxiety while engaging in interviews.

In discussing this, some educators and writers consider this a generational thing: “Kids these days” tend to do everything digitally, so the idea of talking to someone with their mouth (in person no less!) is out of their comfort zone. I’ll disagree with that to the extent that I have had those same levels of anxiety and concerns about interviewing whenever I’ve done journalism. In the 1990s, I remember calling people for interviews and praying that they didn’t pick up the phone so I could leave a message and move on. I also remember more than once punching in six of the seven digits of a phone number, only to hang up and go for a soda.

I’ll agree with the larger point, though, in that we don’t do interviews enough, especially in person, to become proficient at them. After all, if you want to be good at anything (playing an instrument, shooting free throws), practice improves the performance. That said, the line “PERFECT practice makes perfect” really nails the key concept here: The better effort we put into each attempt, the better we will become.

Observing people who perform a task excellently is also a great way to learn how to better yourself at that task, which is where the New York Times podcast “The Interview” comes into play. The podcast/YouTube channel began a little more than two years ago and has already amassed more than 250 videos. David Marchese and Lulu Garcia-Navarro have extended discussions with all sorts of people, ranging from actors and musicians to political figures and economic experts. 

In this brief clip, the journalists discuss the things that they think makes for a great interview:

 

In terms of outcomes, absolutely, but in terms of how to get to that point, the videos themselves reveal a lot of value for anyone hoping to better themselves at this skill. Here are a few things to watch for and then adopt into your own efforts:

PREPARE LIKE IT’S THE FINAL EXAM FROM HELL: If you think about going to take a test, when are you most anxious? It’s likely when you feel like you don’t know the material and the test is in a subject you feel isn’t your best. Conversely, when you have prepped like heck for an exam in an area you know well, it’s like, “OK, stop talking and give me the damned test so I can rock this thing.”

Same basic principle applies here.

In reviewing a lot of the interviews, it’s clear the journalists have not only done their homework, but they’ve also read the book, studied the review notes and worked through some practice exercises before they got to the interview. They know all the nuts and bolts stuff about the source that they need to know before they get there and they’re often able to surprise the source with insights.

Case in point, this interview Garcia-Navarro conducts with actor and comedian Robby Hoffman walks through multiple areas of Hoffman’s life that are well-known: Growing up poor, being part of the Jewish community, taking on comedy and more. However, Garcia-Navarro touches on a key turn in Hoffman’s life when the family moved to Florida for a brief time, which leads to this exchange:

It’s not about trying to have a “gotcha” question, but rather demonstrating that you have a full view of the subject and that you left no stone unturned in trying to find out what you can. Not only will this make you feel more grounded in your interviews, but this kind of granular level research prep might even impress your subject.

CONNECT BUT REMAIN OBJECTIVE: In a number of the interviews, the journalists have some small talk prior to the recording to put the subjects at ease. They also tend to do the interviews in a place where the subject feels comfortable (a home, an office etc.). All of this is about attempting to find ways to connect with the subject and make the process feel less like an oral exam and more like an opportunity to learn some things in a relaxed (or semi-relaxed) environment.

The thing I like most about these journalists is that they are engaging and personable without trying to fawn all over the subjects they interview. They ask both simple questions as well as difficult, complex ones from a position of objectivity.

The Scott Pelley interview is the one that really drew me into the series and I have to say that Garcia-Navarro does a good job of digging into everything from the current state of CBS news to the precipitating incident that led to Pelley’s firing. She didn’t try to commiserate with him in the “Hey, I’m a journalist, you’re a journalist, we’re cool…” kind of way.

In a number of cases, she presses him on what appears to be either his naivete or ignorance in regard to how he remained incredulous that crap-talking his bosses in a staff meeting to the face would lead to his firing. When he shifts into the “Hey, ’60 Minutes’ had a lot of weird stuff happen back over my 37 years,’ discussion, she focuses him on the present. 

There is nothing wrong with having a sense of empathy and humanity in any interview, but it shouldn’t obscure reality or limit your ability to press a source when pressing is required. Always remember, you can be friendly, but you’re not friends.

ACTIVE LISTENING AND SHIFTING GEARS: The journalists have a series of questions they plan to ask over the course of the interview, but you can tell they take pride in paying attention to what the source is saying, thus giving them both a better connection with the source and giving them opportunities to learn more.

I often joke that when introductory journalism students come to my office for their five-question interview about me, they clearly are viewing me as nothing more than a slab of talking meat that helps them fulfill a course requirement. I’ve often been asked the, “Why did you come to UWO?” question and just once I’d like to say, “Well, our kid was getting older and we wanted her to have the “grandparents experience” my wife and I had, so being closer to home was good. Besides, I knew they didn’t conduct background checks, so those six students I murdered and buried in a cornfield outside Muncie, Indiana wouldn’t be a problem…”

I often imagine the student then saying, “OK, great. So, what do you like best about being here?”

Watch this clip of Marchese interviewing actor and author Lena Dunham and you can see how active listening opened a door that otherwise would have likely remained closed:

In listening to Dunham describe herself as a “slip of a person,” Marchese becomes interested in digging a little deeper on that concept. Not only does he look to Dunham for more information, but he also uses her own words to guide the discussion. All of this is part of active listening and it leads to both better answers and also better connections with the subjects.

GO BACK FOR MORE: One of the better elements of this series is that it’s really two parts: The big interview in person and then a follow-up interview to clean up some things or to allow for some rumination on the questions and answers. In a lot of those second interviews, the subjects feel more confident in their answers and also have had an opportunity to really think twice about what they said.

There isn’t a sense of “Wait don’t tell people I said that” but rather a “I’m not sure I said what I wanted to” or “I thought more about it and want to add something” or “I really find myself reflecting on that part of the discussion.” All of these elements lead to some good additional content and the reflections can help create stronger bonds between the journalist and the subject for future conversations.

EXERCISE TIME: Pick one of the videos from “The Interview” channel and watch it at least once. Instead of looking at the interview subject’s responses, look at some of the techniques the interviewer uses to connect with the source, garner information, engage in active listening and more. Also, if the interviewer hits a sour note (source reacts poorly to a question, source won’t answer the question etc.), how does the interviewer react to this? Write up some of your findings along with some thoughts on how you can use these techniques to improve your own interviews.

Indiana University Releases Its “IU Media School Task Force Report” Five Months After The Media School Ran Roughshod Over Student Media’s Rights

(A brief-and-yet-way-too-accurate explanation of how IU got into this mess in the first place.)

 

THE LEAD: Indiana University released its “IU Media School Task Force Report” late last week after a five-month process of determining how best to preserve student journalists’ rights while providing the various media outlets with governance and financial support.

The task force and subsequent report came after IU fired Indiana Daily Student adviser Jim Rodenbush in October when he refused to violate the students’ First Amendment rights. Shortly thereafter, the Media School tried to kill the still-profitable print version of the IDS, for reasons that still remain pathologically stupid.

CATCHING UP WITH THIS DISASTERBACLE: After Rodenbush was fired, he filed a wrongful termination suit against the university. As that was unfolding, the students at the IDS were prohibited from printing a paper for homecoming, as the university didn’t want any news in it because, God forbid, the alumni returning for homecoming might think something unpleasant might actually occur in Bloomington.

Not only did the kids run a full online edition of the paper, but the student media folks at Purdue University kicked in with a major assist. The folks at The Exponent printed the IDS on their presses for free and then drove the copies down to Bloomington to be publicly distributed. For a perfect cherry on top, the front page contained nothing but news of the shady stuff IU was doing to the IDS in terms of censorship.

More recently, things have turned around for Rodenbush, as he got a professorial gig at Western Kentucky University:

I have no idea what this is in the photo, but I pray its a mascot of some kind for WKU or a melting wax statue of IU Dean David Tolchinsky performing his “Stayin’ Alive” dance.

Meanwhile, the IDS staffers continue to do quality journalism on everything from drug overdoses in the area to the media report itself. 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: I was recently told I’d been getting overly long in my posts, so let’s keep this one short:

  • The report talks a good game, but let’s see what the media school does in its “refine and implement” stage. We’ve got a long, documented history of the administration here being somewhere between “completely inept” and “ignorantly nefarious” when it comes to student media. I tend to believe that the proof in the pudding is in the eating and IU’s media school brain trust has been serving up a lot of syrup of ipecac pudding lately.

 

  • Even if this whole thing comes out as fine as wine going forward, it doesn’t undo the damage done to the people involved here. Jim Rodenbush lost a job, an income and probably a lot of sleep as a result of this. His life was upended because of this, and just because we media folks know he’s a hero, it doesn’t mean this is OK. The staff at the IDS had to fight a fight they weren’t supposed to be in, all while doing the paper and school, which is more than plenty to cause burnout. Advertisers got shook, distribution people had to consider the impact of this and more. Fixing the future doesn’t un-mess the past.

 

  • The administration of the IU Media School needs to be held to account for every ham-handed thing they’ve done to this point involving student media. We were talking about the concept of “actual malice” today in class, in which people are held to account for libel when they know they’re doing something wrong and yet they do it anyway. I can’t think of a more apropos term to describe what’s been going on here in regard to the administrative action as it relates to the IDS.
    If you are in driver’s seat, you get the ticket for driving recklessly. Same basic concept applies here. Everyone on EARTH seemed to be telling these people, “Stop. What you’re doing here is wrong” and they didn’t seem to really care. If we don’t want to have another mess like this one, IU needs to mete out some punitive measures to make them care about the results of their actions.

 

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)