Dynamics of Media Writing

Journalism, Journalism Education and Generative AI (Part III: The Human Factor)

Screenshots from "New Girl"

If we could translate this into Latin, I think we’d have a replacement for the journalist’s motto.

Since AI isn’t going away any time soon, journalists and journalism educators are in a bit of a bind when it comes to how best to use it or to help students use it appropriately. This week, we’re doing a three-part series on the blog this week that take that “overhead” view of generative AI from three key angles:

You can click on the links above for either of the first two parts. The final part is below and a lot more complicated: The human factor.

As we’ve noted before, generative AI is a tool. As such, it can be used for good things or bad ones, based on the person using it and why they’re using it. Let’s consider a few aspects of human nature that can help make AI a useful friend or a mortal enemy:

 

WHAT’S MY MOTIVATION?: One of the luckiest breaks I ever caught in life was getting into a psych course on human motivation as part of my doctoral program. It not only hooked me up with Kennon Sheldon, a professor with an incredible history of publishing important psychological studies, but it also helped me to better view how people choose to act or not act based on motivating factors.

One of the aspects of self-determination theory (SDT) we looked at was the spectrum of motivating factors that influence people. As it is a continuum, it has a wide array of motivational forces, but scholars have identified four key “stopping points” along the spectrum that capture specific forms of motivation:

  • Extrinsic: You are motivated by an outside force to do something that you otherwise wouldn’t want to do. An example of this might be when your parents told you to clean your room or you would be grounded for the weekend.
  • Introjected: You are motivated to do something through coercive actions of others, such as guilt or shame. An example of this might be skipping a concert you want to attend so you can visit an elderly relative in a nursing home because your parents told you, “Well, she probably doesn’t have much longer to live and I KNOW how hard it would be for you to live with yourself if you didn’t at least see her a few more times.”
  • Internalized: You are motivated by finding value in the outcome of an activity, even if the activity itself isn’t all that enjoyable. An example of this would be a nursing student studying really hard for the NCLEX test. They don’t like the idea of the test, but are motivated by their desire to become a nurse, which requires them to pass this test.
  • Intrinsic: You are motivated by the natural joy of the activity. This is the purest and best form of motivation. An example of this would be Amy and her approach to knitting. She never seems to care if she finishes a project, but rather she enjoys the act of knitting as well as the joy she gets from trying new patterns, new yarn and new needles.

In looking at this, it’s a pretty safe bet that most of what students do for classes in a lot of cases comes down to extrinsic motivation, as they are required to write essays, do assignments and take tests because someone else is forcing them to do it. (Insert your favorite joke about Gen Ed classes here.)

When forced to do something, people will take the easiest way out possible, which is where generative AI comes in. If the only goal is to “get through” whatever someone is forcing you to do, you’re going to let AI take the wheel and just get it done. This is particularly true for those 800-person pit classes, where students figure they have a pretty good shot of getting away with it.

Helping students find motivation to do things that will benefit them in both the short term (pass this class) and the long term (get a better career) will be enough to move them toward a more self-motivated state.

This leads into the second human issue…

 

THIS MATTERS BECAUSE: We have found that people are more likely to value things if they have an understanding as to why these things are supposedly important. In short, “Why do I have to do this?” A key part of motivational research is what is called autonomy support: If you can give people choices or at least explain why they have to do something and that a choice isn’t possible, they tend to adopt the motivation as their own and do better at it.

When you give them a “Because I’m a PARENT, that’s why!” answer, well, they tend to really hate it and extrinsic motivation rears is ugly head.

I had this discussion/argument with people from our history department. The university was cutting several requirements that were making it difficult for kids to graduate on time and/or with multiple majors/minors/certificates.

One of the “forced classes” was a history one, and I overheard the history folks talking about the situation. One person thought it was a good thing, because maybe the kids would then find history on their own and choose it for a minor. A senior faculty member argued this would be a disaster because, “The kids will NEVER choose us.”

I nosed my way into the conversation and asked to what degree they explained the value of their specific classes to students who were taking them. The senior faculty member was offended: “How could you ask such a thing? Do you think history DOESN’T have value?”

Um… No… but if that’s how you approach your classes, I understand why the kids might feel that way.

The more I kept trying to explain that if you want the students to value something, you have to tell them why they should value it, the more I seemingly upset this man. Apparently, in his way of thinking, history is so damned important and he was such an expert-level vessel for this knowledge that there was no need to provide a rationale for the coursework he put forth. At the end, I left him with this:

“I know that kids can take my class because they want to or because they are forced to. Either way, I make sure to tell everyone what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and what value it has to them in moving forward in their lives. They may still dislike the thing I’m making them do, or they may disagree with my assessment of the situation, but they at least understand the ‘why’ and that tends to make them more willing to do the work than to try to weasel their way out of it.”

Understanding what motivates people to do (or not do) things can help us figure out how to help them use AI without abusing AI. Help them understand why they need to do an assignment, or understand a form of writing or complete a task and they’ll likely find a way to buy into your argument.

If we CAN’T show them a “why” answer, maybe that says more about what we’re doing wrong as educators than what is wrong with “kids today.” Is that 10-page paper really helpful to the kid, or are you just so used to grading them that it would be an inconvenience to you to change? Is the textbook you are using a good one, or do you not want to revamp your whole class and redo all of your lectures, so you stick with what you have? Is the kid really losing out on some major life skill or element of citizenry if they let AI take the wheel on an assignment, or is there a better way to make AI part of the process?

Logic has a lot to say about helping people find value in what they need to do and becoming motivated to do the right thing. Unfortunately, logic isn’t always in driving the bus, which leads to the last element…

 

PEOPLE ARE BASIC:  We can talk about this from a variety of angles, but the long and short of it is that humans are base-level creatures in a lot of ways.

Our minds are geared to be “cognitive misers,” which is why we find ourselves in mental ruts and often relying on stereotypes to make sense of the world around us.

We are social animals, which leads us to social dominance behaviors that tend to have some folks trying to assert their high value over other, “less valuable” individuals within the collective. If you don’t believe me, hang out for three hours in a middle school classroom and get back to me.

We’re also driven by some baser instincts in regard to our physiological needs. Or, to quote Jeff Foxworthy, a lot of people would like to get a beer and see something naked. (Pretty much every technological development related to media in the past 50 years has in some way gotten either a significant start or a major boost due to that base-level drive for naked stuff.)

Generative AI takes these base-level human drives and supercharges them in a way that other forms of technology haven’t. Whether it’s trying to prove dominance, trying to be lazy or trying to a pervert, AI puts it all and more at the fingertips of the worst among us.

AI chatbots have been linked to false claims of harassment by political figures in New York. Why would anyone think to do a prompt for the chatbot that included the term “sexual harassment?” There’s not a good argument in here, other than some idiot saying, “Hey, y’know what would be HILARIOUS? Ruining someone’s life!” (Here’s a link to a trailer for “The Anti-Social Network” that pretty much encapsulates the whole process by which general dumbassery becomes a toxic weapon when added to a digital platform.)

This is why you have stories like this one about a MIDDLE SCHOOL in California, where students were using AI to turn images of their friends into nude pictures. Or like this one about the students at a CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL using AI to create naked photos of their peers. Y’know, just like Jesus would have done to Mary Magdalene, if he had the technology…

Even pedophiles are getting in on the act, which is the start of a sentence that never ends well…

As with most things in the world, the worst among us will use AI to do some godawful stuff. I’m not sure we can avoid that, but we do have a need to instill in the other 90% of the world the reasons NOT to be like those folks.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Every time I think of what AI could be used to do and what it’s ACTUALLY being used for, I go back to this scene from “Idiocracy.”

The issue remaining for journalists and journalism educators is how do we go about making AI the tool in the toolbox it can be while avoiding the perils of a society that is slowly riding a Dumpster fire to hell.

The question we need to answer is this: What kind of coherent argument can we, as journalism instructors, make to the students who are in our class that it is in their overall best interest to do the work we assign them instead of letting a machine do it for them? And, how can we present that argument in a way that they will understand it, agree with it and motivate themselves to abide by it, in the face of the human frailties we’ve discussed earlier?

I don’t have an answer for this, but if you figure it out, please post the answer below.

 

 

Journalism, Journalism Education and Generative AI (Part II: The Perils of Generative AI)

Thinking is hard But you get used to it De motivation, us,demotivation posters,auto

Since AI isn’t going away any time soon, journalists and journalism educators are in a bit of a bind when it comes to how best to use it or to help students use it appropriately. This week, we’re doing a three-part series on the blog this week that take that “overhead” view of generative AI from three key angles:

    • The tools
    • The potential perils
    • The human angle

We covered the tools in Monday’s post, so if you missed it, you can catch it here.

As for today, let’s consider the perils of generative AI:

WE LOSE SELF-SUFFICIENCY: I will never disparage the concept of technological advances. Microwaves have allowed me to feed myself from college up to this morning without burning down my humble abode. Seat warmers have kept my rear end from flash-freezing to those leather-ish seats of the Subaru on most winter mornings in Wisconsin. The implementation of whatever stretchy stuff they’re making blue jeans out of these days has allowed me to keep fooling myself that my size hasn’t changed over the past five years.

Even as a journalist, I’m grateful that recorders have allowed me to significantly reduce the scrawl and shorthand I used to use while interviewing folks. Google has made it exponentially easier to ease my paranoia when I write something and then think, “Wait… are you SURE that’s right?” Even better still, I am entirely grateful that I no longer have to hold a piece of correction paper in between my teeth while banging out a story on an IBM Selectric typewriter, as I did back in high school.

The problem is that when we become overly reliant on technology, we are at the mercy of its functionality and lack the ability to cope when it fails. I’m not even talking about that “everything will cease to exist” failure. I’m talking about basic stuff that used to be common sense until computers just did the work for us.

(The analogy I immediately think of is my dad paying at a fast-food restaurant with cash. The kid punches in the total and it’s like $11.28. Then, Dad will say, “OK, here, let me give you three pennies to make it easier” after the kid assumes Dad’s just giving him a $20. Watching this kid try to do the math in his head because of those three frickin’ pennies is enough to make you weep for the future of humanity.)

Back when I was in doctoral school, the stats professor I had for my analysis of variance class made us do all the statistical calculations for an ANOVA by hand. This took forever and a day and ate up about 10 pages of notebook paper for each one. When we bitterly complained that we’d be using a computer to do this in a fraction of the time, he’d tell us, “Yes, but if you don’t know how to do each step, you’ll never know why it works the way it does. You’ll also never know if the computer is right or not.” As annoying as it was, I can still just look at an ANOVA result and figure out if I punched something in wrong, thanks to Dr. Osterlind.

There has always been an effort-free default option for everything, even back when you were learning to tie your shoes. If mom or dad was in a hurry, they’d say, “Here. Let me do that.” OK, fine, but if they never let you learn how to do it for yourself, you’d be totally screwed at this point. (Or into cowboy boots, shower shoes and a lot of velcro.) Some level of self-sufficiency has to be built into the process.

 

WE DON’T KNOW WHAT’S IN THE AI “BOX:” One of the biggest complaints I get about my intro to writing class, other than I keep having it at 8 a.m., is that I make the students buy the print edition of the AP Stylebook and read the whole thing. Random assignments and quizzes are part of the check-in approach I take to seeing how well this is working.

Students find out that for about the same amount of money, they can buy a digital version that provides them with a search-engine function, so they want that one instead. I tell them, “Once you move into the upper-level classes, that’s an option. Until then, you’re reading the damned book in print.”

My rationale is pretty basic: If you don’t know what you’re looking for and you don’t know if it’s in there, you’re at a disadvantage when it comes to finding it. Thus, if you read the book, you get a handle on the things that AP gets all hot and bothered about and thus you are making mental notes about the kinds of things you should look up. At that point, a search function is your friend, not a game of “Wheel of Fortune.”

Generative AI is pretty much the same thing: If you don’t know what’s in the “box,” you have no idea what to expect will come out of it.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I entered a simple prompt that I figured a student in an entry-level civics class might toss in to avoid writing a short, basic essay:

“Write 200 words on how to deter criminal behavior”
Here is what ChatGPT came up with:

Deterring criminal behavior involves a multi-faceted approach that addresses the root causes of crime, enforces strong laws, and promotes a sense of community responsibility. Here are some key strategies to achieve this:

  1. Education and Awareness: By investing in education and awareness programs, communities can help individuals make informed decisions, reducing the appeal of criminal activities. Teaching ethical values and social responsibility from a young age can create a culture where crime is less likely to occur.
  2. Economic Opportunities: High unemployment and poverty are strongly correlated with crime rates. Providing meaningful employment opportunities and vocational training can reduce the incentive for individuals to engage in criminal activities.
  3. Strong Law Enforcement: A robust and fair law enforcement system is crucial. Visible policing, quick response to criminal activities, and the consistent application of justice can act as a deterrent to would-be offenders.
  4. Community Engagement: Encouraging community involvement in safety and crime prevention fosters a sense of ownership and shared responsibility. Neighborhood watch programs, for example, can help deter crime by creating a community that looks out for each other.
  5. Rehabilitation and Support: Implementing effective rehabilitation programs for offenders reduces recidivism. Offering support services like counseling, education, and job placement helps former offenders reintegrate into society, lowering the chances of repeat offenses.

By combining these strategies, communities can effectively deter criminal behavior and create a safer environment for everyone.

I have no idea where this all came from or why it went this way in terms of answering the question. I don’t know from which sources of information it drew its inspiration or how it decided to approach the topic in this fashion. I also have no idea if there are better or worse answers in there.
If all I know is that I wanted an answer to turn in for an assignment, all I know is that ChatGPT provided me with this answer.
As someone who has looked at various resources and looked into this topic before, I find it interesting that when prompted in this nature, chatbot made a couple key choices:

This leads to another primary concern associated with generative AI…

 

BIAS IN, BIAS OUT: The way AI platforms are trained is by exposing them to tons of content from a vast array of sources in which it kind of picks out a “prototype” of each element it can ascertain from what it has “seen.” The problem with that is the more mainstream content is likely to dominate while the less mainstream content is likely to get shoved aside.

In addition, just because something is shown or written about in a certain way, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it should be a representation of a larger thing. This is how stereotypes are built and reinforced. Consider the following image creations based on several prompts:

A server at a restaurant:

A criminal in court:

 

A basketball player passing a ball:

 

A boss of a company at a podium:

(In the future, you will all be ruled by this one white dude. To be fair, the iStock paid generator did slightly better, but not great.)

 

I tried these prompts with multiple AI generators and these were pretty much the standard fare. Notice we’ve got all fit and relatively attractive looking people in here. The servers are all young and female. The criminals aren’t white, and neither are the basketball players. (To say nothing of the fact only one of them is passing and one of them has two basketballs for some reason.) Bosses are predominantly male and in at least in one set of responses all white and young.

Authors T.J. Thomson and Ryan J. Thomas at The Conversation found similar problems in an assessment of AI, noting that the image generators demonstrated biases from racism and sexism to ageism and classism. As more and more people continue to generate content, this kind of things is only going to continue to build on itself until we’ve got a really stereotypical and myopic view of a lot of how society looks.

 

DIMINISHED CRITICAL THINKING: Most of what journalism requires of us is to be nosy and to dig into topics that are of interest to us and our audience. When we’re doing our work, if something goes wrong, or a source messes us over or we encounter a strange plot twist, we figure out how to improvise, adapt and overcome. In a broader parlance, the whole driving force behind this job is critical thinking and problem solving.

The risk of relying on AI for too much is that we can cognitively atrophy and find ourselves in a journalistic rut. This already happens in some cases, as I’ve seen with stories written about my own institution. When we decided to do a reorganization, the university announced which plan was going to be favored and the local paper did a piece on the topic. The entire thing was basically direct lifts from the press release statement and several other response statements issued about the topic. No deeper examination, no interviews with the stakeholders and no other content than what was provided.

I’ve also seen it where people decide that rather than look for sources to react to important topics, they’ll scan social media and do screenshots of some of the loudest voices out there. It’s like, “Don’t strain yourself reaching beyond your keyboard, buddy. Let’s not try to do some actual work here…”

Students already tell me things like, “I can’t get a quote in here from (NAME) because they didn’t email me back!” To which I follow up with a few basic concepts like emailing again, picking up the phone and calling the person or even going to someone’s office and talking to them. This isn’t Woodward and Bernstein sorting through library punch cards or something. This is “Can-You-Fog-A-Mirror-level” journalism stuff. If I had a dime for every “You mean I should call them… on the phone?” response I got, I wouldn’t need this job.

If the AI tools can help aid in your critical thinking by challenging you to think about things differently, or to consider options outside of your personal experiences, that’s great. If they tell you to stop thinking for yourself, that’s a bad sign.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE:  As much as I’m worried about kids getting lazy, that’s nothing new, really. When students figured out that the Encyclopedia Britannica could do a better job of explaining what an iguana is, they copied it straight out of the book. When students realized the kid next to them studied harder for the exam than they did, they “dropped their pencil” a few times and took their time leaning over to pick it up. When students realized they could punch search terms into a computer and get an answer better than the one they came up with, they found the copy and paste keys. Generative AI is just the next stage of this process and we’ll all eventually catch on and catch up.

What really bothers me about AI is when it basically becomes a black box.

I don’t have to fully understand how everything I use on a daily basis works, but I do feel better when I have a general grasp of a situation. For example, I might not be able to fix the pump on our well, but when I see smoke coming out of it and we have no water in the house, I can surmise what’s going on and call a plumber. If the plumber comes out and can tell me what happened, I can pretty much follow along. I’m fine with that.

What I’m not fine with is “heavy mystery time” in which we have no idea what a major piece of our lives is doing and people have an increasingly difficult time explaining it to even other people who work in that field. The reason is that it’s hard to trust things that can’t be explained, and even more, it’s hard to believe they will benefit people other than their creators.

I go back to this clip from “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” which chronicles the rise and death spiral of Enron. Financial expert Jim Chanos didn’t buy the bull that Enron was putting out and when he asked the analysts to explain how Enron was making its money in a clear and coherent fashion, he got the “black box” speech:

In other words, trust us… It’s fine… Until it’s not.

NEXT TIME: Why can’t we have nice AI things? Because people are… well… human.

 

 

Journalism, Journalism Education and Generative AI (Part I: The Tools For Your Toolbox)

One of the cool things about doing “mechanic stuff” is that parts manufacturers and tool companies would give you stickers for your toolbox when you purchased their wares. Enjoy an AI version of an AI toolbox. (via Pixlr)

After I posted about the need to smack around students who used AI to do their work, a colleague asked a really important question:

(P)lease allow me to respectfully play devil’s advocate here. AI is here to stay. We are not going to manage to get rid of it in our lives and in our classrooms. Students will keep using it no matter how many drums we beat for them not to. So, why don’t we instead embrace it and start teaching them how to properly use AI – responsibly and ethically? We can turn this into a tool for all. A friend, not a foe.

She’s definitely right in that AI isn’t going away and people will use it no matter what we say, something the folks at Arizona State University’s student newspaper learned the hard way last week. The State Press retracted 24 articles a reporter had written after staffers discovered the pieces were the work of generative AI.

It’s worth noting here that ASU is actively partnering with OpenAI to help students on campus see the ways in which generative AI could be used responsibly and ethically. That’s not to pin the blame on the university for the State Press situation, but rather to demonstrate that even with efforts to properly train and guide students, you’ll usually run into a chucklehead or two.

To take a look at AI from more of an “overhead” view, we’re doing a three-part series on the blog over the next week that will look at it from three key angles:

    • The tools
    • The potential perils
    • The human angle

Let’s start with the tools:

HOW GENERATIVE AI WORKS: According to technology experts, generative AI models take large, complex pieces of information and break them down into simple elements that the AI system can retain easily and replicate on demand. The technology is essentially “trained” by introducing it to millions and millions of pieces of content, which it uses to make sense of concepts and then generate new material.

AI scholars at MIT have noted that this approach is not new, in that computers have done these kinds of things on data sets and science hypotheses for decades. What is occurring now is just an outgrowth those early efforts, with computers consuming vast amounts of written and visual material, breaking it down into simple pieces and then recreating new things based on the “rules” it learned during its examination of the content.

This is also how humans learn, as we learn how to write in the inverted pyramid format or paint a picture in the style of one of the great artists, like Picasso or Renoir. Theoretically, what makes this different is that humans are taught other things like morals and ethics (as well as societal norms) that serve as kind of a traffic signal for what they “should” or “shouldn’t” do, as opposed to just what they “can” or “can’t” do, based on the requirements of a prompt.

 

AI TOOLS THAT CAN BENEFIT YOU AS A JOURNALIST: Of all the analogies I’ve used over the years, the concept of putting “tools in your toolbox” has been the most frequent one. As much as it seems reductive, I like to think of each talent I have, skill I develop or lesson I learn as a tool I’m putting in a toolbox for later use.

In terms of AI, there are tons of great tools out there that can benefit you as a journalist, as they can automate mundane tasks, prompt you to think of things you otherwise wouldn’t and generally make life easier on you. Consider these options:

TRANSCRIPTION: One of the most time-consuming things journalists deal with is taking audio interviews and turning them into useful text for stories. AI has made transcription services both readily available and reasonably accurate. Tools of this kind, such as VG’s Jojo and Otter.ai, use algorithms to decipher speech patterns, pick through background noise and convert sound to text.

IMAGE GENERATORS: These tools have been the source of great fun for people who want to see what kinds of strange combinations of elements they can pair and how the image generator will display their humorous whims. However, AI image generators can assist journalists who are covering serious topics.

Newsrooms have long used photo illustrations and artists renderings to accompany stories in which more traditional means of capturing visual content isn’t possible. Image generators, like Image Creator from Microsoft and versions of DALL-E from OpenAI, can use text prompts from users to generate a wide array of potential visuals. As is always the case in journalism, any kind of illustration or created work should be labeled as such.

RESEARCH: In journalism, good writing is predicated on good reporting, which means we need to dig around a lot. Finding basic facts can be easy through current search engines like Google and Bing, but several companies are constructing AI tools that will allow investigative journalists to do significant deep dives in a fraction of the time. Google introduced Pinpoint in 2024, which is meant to help journalists and other researchers dig through vast quantities of documents to find specific content within the collection. Google states that a Pinpoint collection can contain up to 200,000 documents, including written text, images and audio files.

Other AI tools, like Artifact, which was recently purchased by Yahoo, can be used to create quick summaries of articles and files for you to give you a general sense if the piece is worth digging into more deeply or if it doesn’t fit your specific needs.

FACT CHECKING: The journalistic fact-checking motto has always been, “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out.” Thanks to advances in AI, that might be a lot easier than it used to be. Tools like Chequeado’s Chequeabot are capable of taking factual statements and comparing them to vast repositories of knowledge to determine the accuracy of those statements. These tools can help assess the validity of data-based statements through to public declarations that governmental officials make, in a quicker and more accurate fashion.

WRITING: A number of media organizations have attempted to use chatbots and other similar AI tools to write content for publication, with varying levels of results. Gannett attempted to automate some of its sports coverage, only to stop once it was clear the readers weren’t thrilled by the results. Sports Illustrated even went so far as to create AI staffers to augment their site, something they quickly pulled back from once the situation was discovered. This approach to using some of these content generators is often where problems occur and society at large tends to freak out. That said, it’s important to know how these tools work and that they can be exceptionally helpful. Tools like Writesonic, Notion AI and Text Blaze can assist you in restating material in new and innovative ways, offering suggestions as to how to approach a new topic and assisting you in search-engine optimization efforts. The key here is that these tools are meant to “assist” you, not do all the writing for you.

These are just some of the tools and options out there for you as a journalist. The Society for Professional Journalists maintains a giant list of similar tools for your consideration here.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: I’ve gone back and forth how best to approach AI, because, like so many other tools we use in life, it has both stated purposes and potentially problematic misuse options.

A hammer is a great tool and you can build a lot of cool stuff with it, but you can also use it to bash in someone’s head. The same concept is true of a knife: You can teach a kid to use a knife carefully and responsibly to help make dinner, while simultaneously explaining that, no, you can’t stick it into your sibling’s head because they took the last Mountain Dew out of the fridge.

(I suppose we could also argue that AI might be more like cocaine: We can’t teach you to “responsibly” use it and in merely introducing it to you, the risks outweigh the rewards. I don’t like that analogy, but given what people have been doing with AI, it perhaps merits a deeper look.)

What AI really lacks at this point that most tools have are things like an instruction manual and set of safety features to prevent unintended disasters. The instruction manuals tell you what each switch or button does on a tool and also how to avoid doing something pathologically stupid. The safety features also limit you in some ways, like putting a guard over a table saw’s blade or having a fuse blow instead of letting the whole thing catch fire. AI feels more like those sci-fi movies, where a human discovers a piece of alien technology and is just kind of winging it.

The other thing that makes AI more dangerous than other tools is that we don’t have learned masters under which we can apprentice, like we would in learning to use other tools. When I started working at the garage as a teen, I had a guy there who knew how to use every tool in the place. He helped me on everything from the basics, like which cars used SAE tools and which ones needed metric ones, to the big safety things, like how to prevent a tire machine from taking off my head with a giant iron bar. Here, we’re all relative newbies and as much as I like the idea of learning from my mistakes, I’d prefer to know if something is going to take my head off before I start playing with it.

NEXT TIME: The significant concerns associated with AI technology.

 

Recalling Jim Lehrer’s rules of journalism as the Trump trial gets underway (A Throwback Post)

The breathless coverage of every post, sketch and fart of the Trump trial in New York has cable news in a lather these days. Without cameras being allowed in the courtroom, but still having all sorts of time to fill, television has seemingly turned everything about this thing into the Zapruder film. In his return to “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart used his Monday opening to castigate these folks for their approach to “news” in this situation:

 

Stewart has long said he’s not a news journalist, so it might be easy to dismiss his critique as arrogance mixed with humor. That’s why we dug out today’s throwback post from four years ago, when Jim Lehrer died to make the same case for us.

Below is a brief tribute to Lehrer upon his death as well as a recap of his “rules” that really should guide our work in a time in which it seems like every shiny object can distract us and minutia can rule the news cycle.

 

Jim Lehrer’s rules matter now more than ever

Jim Lehrer, a journalist’s journalist to the core, died Thursday (Jan. 23, 2020) at the age of 85. He spent decades of his life covering politics, corporations, international affairs and more, and yet had the none of the pretense associated with the greatness he encountered or the epic stories he conveyed:

Jim was calm and careful in moments of crisis, as demonstrated by his coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

“I’m Jim Lehrer. Terrorists used hijacked airliners to kill Americans on this, September 11, 2001,” Jim reported on national television. “Another day of infamy for the United States of America.”’

Lehrer essentially retired about a decade ago, and he did his work on public television, so it’s likely few folks under a certain age would remember much about him. Truth be told, he was really just a name and a standard to me for much of my life: A symbol of straightforward reporting and a talent to which one should aspire in the field.

However, among the many obituaries written on this titan of news, I came across Jim Lehrer’s Rules, guiding principles he used that can and should continue to influence generations of media students to come. (The world in general would probably be a nicer place, too, if non-media folks kept an eye on these things as well.)

These may seem quaint in the era of “Screaming Head” journalism, opinion-as-fact reporting, “sources say” coverage and a general sense that members of the general public have the IQ of a salad bar. However, with very limited quibbling, I could clearly defend each of these as something worth striving toward in our field.

Jim Lehrer’s Rules

  1. Do nothing I cannot defend.
  2. Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.
  3. Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.
  4. Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am.
  5. Assume the same about all people on whom I report.
  6. Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise.
  7. Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label everything
  8. Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should be allowed to attack another anonymously.
  9. “I am not in the entertainment business.”

Earth to Universities: You can’t like free expression only when it’s expression you like

A print of artist Phil Hands’ cartoon on free speech hangs on the wall of my office, with a nice message from this incredibly talented person. I think this message matters now more than ever.

THE LEAD: Universities are pushing back on speech and assembly efforts in the wake of pro-Palestine protests on campuses throughout the country. Both on campuses and at the federal level, concerns regarding antisemitism and Islamophobia have led to inquires and crackdowns.

Zoom in: Tensions at Columbia bubbled over last week after university president Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to disband a pro-Palestinian encampment at the center of campus.

  • The University of Michigan said it would draft a new policy on punishable disruptive behavior following a pro-Palestinian protest at its convocation.
  • The University of Southern California canceled its valedictorian’s commencement speech, citing safety concerns that the student called a “campaign of racist hatred.”
  • Stanford University banned overnight camping in February to end an encampment populated by dueling pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli tents, citing student safety, extreme weather and rodents.

FIRST-AMENDMENT BASICS: The First Amendment to the Constitution allows for freedom of expression in a number of ways, including speech, press and assembly. State actors (meaning public officials, public organizations or otherwise government-ish people or groups) cannot step in and deny these rights without some exceptional circumstances.

The law requires a risk of “imminent lawless action” or “clear and present danger” to exist for the government prohibit these kinds of expressions. Examples of this kind of risk include things like inciting a crowd to destroy property or chanting “We are going to kill the chancellor” during a march. That’s why yelling “Mike Pence is a traitor” isn’t the same as yelling “Hang Mike Pence” during the Jan. 6 incident in Washington, D.C.

In some cases, the law can allow for restrictions based on the time, place and manner of the expression, but it also states that the restrictions must be content neutral. In other words, if the mayor of your town refuses to allow a “Pro-Vegetable” march at 5 a.m. because it would be disruptive to the sleeping habits of the citizens, that mayor can’t then allow a “Pro-Beef” march to occur at 5 a.m.

For a more complete view, check out this great primer at the Freedom Forum.

KEY FREAKOUT POINT: This is what happens when the vaguely educated (Congress) asks questions of the overly educated (Ivy League university administrators) and fear is a driving force in the discussion.

Back in November, the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania resigned after they reacted to questions of campus antisemitism the way my dog does when I present her with a physics textbook.

Congress, trying to make a point, asked if “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated the campus speech codes and neither of these esteemed educators could find a coherent answer. (As these are both private institutions, they get more leeway about what can and can’t happen on their campus than do public institutions. More on that later.)

What happened next was what always happens next at a time like this: More administrators get called to answer similar questions under a totally disingenuous guise by people who have no interest other than “pwning” these folks.

Thus, to avoid being the next university egghead on the chopping block, these folks force everything 180-degrees in the opposite direction, to the point where saying “bless you” is somehow a hanging offense. Fear drives the silencing of certain voices that people worry might not be as popular as others. The goal is to “run clock” for a while, in hopes that everything will just calm down once the kids find a new TikTok challenge or something.

Words are scary, particularly when you are being accused of certain things. Nobody likes being accused of antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism and other such things. Certain words carry with them a permanent stain, and that can be terrifying enough to make people do or not do certain things. I often think back to this clip from “Apt Pupil” in that regard:

 

REALITY CHECK: As much as it would be great if we could all just get along about everything, that’s not the way life works. This is why we have laws in place to deal with what can and can’t happen when people feel the need to disagree.

The law is clear on how speech and assembly work: Unless you can demonstrate that whatever these people are saying or wherever they are going will lead to lawless action, they have the right to say what they want to say and go where they want to go. The law isn’t here to protect popular speech, but ALL speech.

This is why, as much as it can infuriate folks that a group of Nazis can march through a predominantly Jewish part of Illinois, or that a group of “religious” folks can show up with signs at a military funeral proclaiming “Thank God for dead soldiers,” speech can’t be suppressed for being repulsive alone.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression explicitly explains why even calls for the genocide of a particular group remain protected under the First Amendment.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Everyone has a level at which they think a line should be drawn when it comes to speech being problematic, but quite literally, the cure for bad speech isn’t speech suppression. It’s MORE speech. It’s also been clear that there are always risks that unpopular speech may lead to violence, but we have laws to deal with that violence once it actually occurs. Stopping speech because it might end poorly has the same internal logic as the traffic cop who pulls over the Corvette driver because the car “looks like it could go fast.”

The administrators of these schools need to have stronger intestinal fortitude when it comes to supporting free speech, even if it’s going to be wildly unpopular or allow some senator from Bumbledirt, Wyoming to call them all sorts of names on the Senate floor.

Yes, it sucks when you have to deal with difficult situations, but standing for principles is supposed to be administrators’ resting pulse. If you think having people say mean stuff about you on Twitter/X is rough, read this piece by David Goldberger, a Jewish attorney who represented the Nazis in the Skokie case. Members of Jewish Defense League showed up at Goldberger’s office with baseball bats trying to beat the hell out of him. The rabbi at his parents’ synagogue gave a speech denouncing Goldberger personally for taking the case.  He was threatened and called a self-loathing Jew for his troubles and yet in retrospect, he remains as stalwart in his beliefs as ever:

To this day, I have no doubt that the ACLU’s commitment to equal rights for all is a backbone of our democracy — no matter how offensive our clients are. Chipping away at this commitment will open the door to the erosion of the First Amendment as a bulwark against rule by tyrants.

In short, if you want your free speech, you have to be willing to stand up for everyone else’s speech as well.

A PROMISING POST-SCRIPT: As I was finishing this off, a friend forwarded this article about how student journalists on these campuses are not only covering the situation, but taking strong editorial stances in favor of free speech.

As we always say in student media, “Leave it to the kids to lead the way.”

 

Volleyball court overrules Supreme Court: Learning audience-centricity through the eyes of a child

I’ve had some interesting back-and-forths with folks online about what journalism is or what journalists should be doing. For some people, if we’re not engaging every day in watchdog journalism that demonstrates a seriousness to the craft, we’re failing.

For others, it’s about how to get out of a rut where we seem to be telling the same story to an increasingly disinterested audience. Important content gets lost among the random string of click-bait and cat TikToks, they argued, because people don’t “get it” when it comes to the value of news.

For me, everything goes back to the basic rules of audience-centricity and storytelling. A great story will grab and hold readers when it is told well by skilled craftspeople in media.

When it comes to audience-centricity, it comes back to answering two questions:

  1. What happened?
  2. Why should I (as the reader) care?

The problem with professors and journalists in that regard is that we sometimes fail to connect on these basic elements, something that came through to me in a story I recently retold.

As part of my job at UW-Oshkosh, I get to be a Team Fellow for our volleyball team. The gig is great: I volunteer to serve as a homework helper, a college-range life coach and basically an ear for anything the athletes feel they need that they can’t get from the other resources available to them on campus. Some times, like last week, I end up helping out by talking to recruits they bring around, which is where this story kind of starts.

I know almost nothing about volleyball, even after seven years of trying, but the kid who was being recruited was a libero, so I told the kid the one story about a libero that I knew.

When Zoe was in grade school, she wanted to play volleyball. The sport, generally speaking, is dominated by giants who play above the net on offense and defense, so my lilliputian child was going to be at a disadvantage, something she found completely deflating.

Around that time, I took her to a UWO game and she got to watch Rachel Gardner, the team’s fireplug of a libero. She was having an amazing game, throwing her body all over the place with reckless abandon.

Rachel Gardner, my kid’s volleyball hero.

“Do you see Rachel out there?” I asked Zoe.

“Yes,” Zoe said. “She’s the BEST PLAYER on the court!”

“What else?”

“She’s small like me!”

After the game, the team did an autograph and meet-and-greet session with the fans. I’d run into Rachel earlier that week and explained the whole “Zoe is short” situation and told her how much she’d love a picture after the game. Rachel said she’d love to.

When Rachel saw us in line, she asked, “Are you Zoe? Come on around in back here!”

Rachel gave her a big hug, we took a couple pictures and we essentially made my kid smile for a week.

Later that month, my mom, Amy and Zoe went to the American Writers Museum in Chicago to hear Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor do a reading of her book and sign copies of her children’s book for kids. Only children were allowed to meet the justice and get pictures, which Zoe was more than happy to do. It was an amazing night for everyone involved.

An impressive resume, no doubt, but did she average more than 5 digs per set her senior year?

Fast forward to the next holiday gathering of our family where we were all talking about the cool things we’d gotten to do over the past year. I then told Zoe, “Why don’t you tell everyone about the really cool experience you had recently?”

“Yeah!” she said. “I got to meet RACHEL GARDNER! She’s a libero on the volleyball team, and she’s small like me and she’s -”

I interrupted, “Um… I meant the time you and nana and mama went to Chicago for that reading…”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “There was a judge lady who was nice. Anyway, Rachel gave me a hug and we took a picture…” And on and on it went.

In thinking about it from an adult’s perspective, meeting one of the nine people responsible for our nation’s highest legal opinions would have been an epic moment. Even more, Justice Sotomayor was the first Latina appointed to the Supreme Court and only the third woman to ever hold a spot on it.

To my kid, she was just a “nice judge lady.” Now, on the other hand, Rachel Gardner was something to truly behold: A small, tough, amazing student athlete who gave Zoe something to which she could aspire. In short (sorry for the pun), it was so much easier for her to grasp the “what happened” (I met Rachel Gardner, volleyball superstar) and why it mattered (She’s doing something I care about in a way that I can’t right now, but I could if I worked hard enough).

In conceptualizing audience-centricity through the eyes of a child, you learn to figure out that what WE as journalists think is SUPPOSED to be important isn’t always what IS important to the audience we serve. Learning to meet the audience where it lives is crucial in making sure we connect with the readers and viewers in a relevant and useful way.

Even more, it puts a larger impetus on us as media professionals to better explain the answer to that second question. I don’t know if telling Zoe everything this incredible woman did in terms of shattering glass ceilings and shaping juris prudence would have helped the justice measure up to a libero in her eyes. That said, I think it might have helped her think about Sonia Sotomayor as a bit more than a “nice judge lady.”

Even if she couldn’t outdo Rachel Gardner.

5 Basic Rules For Writing Opinion Pieces That Will Keep You From Coming Across Like An Arrogant Chucklehead

There are many ways to convince people to come around to your way of thinking when you are writing a column. You can offer facts, you can present solid analogies or you can find ways to empathize with your readers.

In reading through a lot of contest entries, from both college and professional publications, I’ve found there appears to be a little less of those options and a little more hostility lately.

Consider the following opening to a column I read as part of a contest I judged over the break. I pulled the name of the paper and the byline in an attempt to avoid publicly shaming the author:

Over the past few weeks, I have written several columns talking about things like the “Barbie” movie and Taylor Swift. Some of you may be begging for something that’s a little less surface level, and I hear you.

Unfortunately for you, I make the rules here, and I will once again be talking about something shallow. You want something different on the opinion page? Join (PAPER’S NAME) and write your own column.

 

I feel bathed in the warmth of the writer after that, and I’m just desperate to hear what comes next…

 

Another piece opened with this salvo:

I don’t care what you do. I don’t care if you eat at (RESTAURANT). I don’t care if you shop at (STORE). I don’t care if you wear (ITEM OF CLOTHING). I don’t care if you listen to (ARTIST).

 

Right… Just like your mom doesn’t care if you ever call on her birthday…

Truth be told, opinion writing is part art, part science and even the best columnists swing and miss. I know that because George Hesselberg, who spent decades at the Wisconsin State Journal writing amazing columns in ways I will never come close to, said that even he remembers writing “a few stinkers.”

George also noted, “Everyone thinks it is easy. It isn’t.”

If you are college student  in an opinion-writing class or student media columnist who is DESPERATE to become the next big-name column writer, consider these rules to help you along:

 

Rule 1- You’re not writing for yourself.

The first and worst mistake most columnists write is that something happens to them and they feel that they need to share it with the world.

When you feel this urge, back away from the keyboard, go take a nap and come back to writing when this urge has passed.

Column writing is not group therapy. The goal in giving you a column isn’t to help with your self esteem and make you glad you shared. The goal of a column is to engage the readers and give THEM something to think about, something to learn or something to do.

In other words, it’s not about you. It’s about them. If what you’re writing doesn’t have a direct tie to the audience or doesn’t in some way involve your readers, you’ve failed before you get off the starting line.

 

Rule 2 – Know your audience

Getting to know the people for whom you write means first learning rule #1. Once you realize that you need to write for somebody else, you need to figure out who they are. Don’t assume they are “all exactly like me,” which is what one particularly arrogant columnist told me. Even if she were very similar to many people, she can’t assume that they all share her issues and concerns.

Markets defined in various ways. You have geographic interests (what’s going on around campus this weekend), demographic interests (what can you do if you’re under 21; what’s the college scene look like) and psychographics (interests, activities etc.). If you can figure out what your audience is, where it is and what it likes/dislikes, you’ve got a pretty good handle on to whom you are speaking with your columns.

 

Rule 3 – Stay local

Great columnists for “national media outlets” get a pass to write whatever they want in many cases. I’m not saying it’s a good idea, but it’s what they do. The reason is that they’ve done this job long enough and well enough to have sources on these big issues and thus they can serve as an influencer of opinions.

That’s not most of us or our publication. Think of it like the scene from Bull Durham where they discover fungus on Tim Robbins’ shower shoes.

If the purpose of a column is to reach an audience and get them to do something, chances are you’ll have much better success in doing this if you look around you and talk about things happening in your own backyard.

Yes, you want to write about why the NFL should avoid a lockout or why Joe Biden should annex Puerto Rico, but remember rule 1. You’re not writing for you. You’re writing for your readers. The chances are pretty good that our president isn’t going to hold a press briefing today and say, “My fellow Americans, I had committed to a hands-off approach in relation to the fighting in Ukraine. However, in reading Carl Smith’s column in the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh’s Advance-Titan, I have learned the errors of my ways…”

You can, however, influence local policy. The best column ever from that perspective was a scathing piece on why the university suddenly started charging a “cup fee” for water at the student eateries. The university had no real answer. Prices hadn’t changed, water was still plentiful and they just figured no one would notice or care. They were wrong and they changed back after the editorial and subsequent online uproar about it.

Seems small and insignificant, but it was something the readers cared about. Thus it mattered.

 

Rule 4 – Don’t become part of the noise

When it comes “the big issues,” there are going to be about 20 percent of the people who will agree with you, 20 percent who don’t agree with you and the middle 60 percent who will say, “Well, I don’t care. I’m going to TikTok.” Unless you have something particularly important to add to the discussion, don’t just add to the noise on these things.

Issues like abortion, gun control and more are important and tough issues. However, piping in with “Here’s MY take on this…” adds nothing to the sum of human knowledge. It also violates rule number 1. If you’ve got something that REALLY adds to the discussion or some way of REALLY tying it to your audience in a way that most mainstream media don’t, that’s fine.

Here’s what I’m talking about: I have a thing against movie reviews in college papers. I can get this stuff online from 1,002 other sources, so why would I read it here and care about what you think?

Well, I was critiquing a paper from a religious based school and I noted that they did movie reviews, but from a very audience-centric angle: They talked about issues of sex and violence in the films and to what degree people of their faith would find these acceptable or not. That’s something the folks at Rotten Tomatoes aren’t going to hit on and that made it valuable to their readers.

Same thing with “the big issues.” If they’re building a massive memorial wall to something in Washington, D.C. and you’re in Idaho, you’re probably not adding much to the discussion. However, if the issue of gun control comes up and your campus has just made it legal to carry a concealed weapon on campus, you’ve got a reason to write.

 

Rule 5 – Don’t write beyond your own level of competence

Wanting to do something and being able to do something are two completely different things. When my kid was 3, she wanted to go ice skating so I took her. Half way through, she was skittering toward the speed skaters and my wife wasn’t fast enough to catch up with her. I was going to be the hero, so I skated fast, and caught up. The kid cut in front of me and it was either maul my own kid or take a header. I took the header and wound up with a bleeding black eye that swelled shut and a shoulder injury that took six months of physical therapy to overcome.

The point is, I went beyond what I was competent enough to handle. And I paid the price.

If you don’t know what you are talking about, don’t talk about it. If you have an interest in something, research the hell out of it before you write about it. Don’t just look for things that support your point or things that seem like they’re in your area.

A columnist is supposed to be an expert on a topic, so make yourself that expert before you go after that topic. You’re not just trying to talk about something. You’re trying to convince people of something. Your charm isn’t enough to make that happen.

Get by with a little help from your friends: Exercises and examples and more from the Corona Hotline (A throwback post)

It’s hard to fathom that it was four years ago when “Hey, this virus thing is getting serious” became “EVERYONE GO HOME NOW!” I vividly remember sitting in my 8 a.m. reporting class and prepping the kids for their 24-hour midterm. One student asked, “So what happens if they close us down?”

“Look, folks, I know this place is really slow on the uptake, but if they were going to shut us down, they’d have done it by now,” I said.

I went back to my office after class and found the “We’re all shutting down, going digital and figuring out the rest of this after Spring Break” email.  (Cue everyone I know freaking out about how to do this and what assignments would still work and more…)

Things may not feel as chaotic now, but just in case you’re looking for an exercise to help kids with AP, a story assignment to weave into a class or anything else that might be of value, here’s today’s throwback post where we introduced the “Corona Hotline” page on the blog.

The link in the post is still active and I’ll still happily update it if anyone needs anything else, assignment-wise.

Hope you all are having a great spring break or getting ready to take one!

 

Resources for Journalism Professors Teaching Writing and Reporting Classes Online, Thanks to The Coronavirus

SelfIsolate

I’ve been preparing for this moment my whole life. I just didn’t know it…

As promised, today the blog is launching some help for those of you running media-writing, reporting, news-writing and other similar classes. I’ve created a “Corona Hotline” page that you can go to for a clearing house of all sorts of stuff that you can use for distance learning.

One of the benefits of teaching media-writing classes is that I am limited in how much “reporting” I can force on the students, so a number of these exercises are canned writing pieces that lack a need for additional work. I also did some cleaning on them so that they’re more universal and less “UWO-centric.”

As I get deeper into my own class build, I’ll toss more stuff up here. If you have anything you want me to share, hit me up with it through the contact page. I’ll also be posting some teaching stuff here and there, along with links to student media outlets that are still grinding away during the crisis.

As always, we’re from the internet and we’re here to help.

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

Press Releases and Embargoes: Understanding the basics and three ways to make sure they function as they should

When I teach my media writing students about press release writing, we often stop at the line “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” and have a discussion.

I’ve heard from some pros that this kind of thing isn’t needed any more, and I’ve heard from other pros that it’s still a standard item, even as its value slides toward the realm of ending a press release with “-30-” or “###”

In keeping it on there, I make the argument that I’d rather show them something that only half of the world is doing  and they can cut it out if they work for the other half. In addition, they may need to replace that line with an embargo statement in some cases.

An embargoed press release is meant to benefit both the PR practitioners and the reporters covering their clients’ activities. In some cases, practitioners want to give reporters a running start at an event or announcement, but don’t want the reporters to make that information public before the practitioners do. To that end, the practitioners provide material that they note has an “embargo” on it until a specific time or date. This article on LinkedIn does a pretty good job of outlining the basics of the embargo process and the rationale for it.

Embargoes of this nature tend to be based in professional courtesy (or what people used to call a “gentlemen’s agreement”) in that the PR professionals have no legal say over what the reporters do with this stuff or when. That said, if you’re the reporter who screws over someone by publishing embargoed material before its time, you will likely be on the outs with the PR folks who offered you this courtesy and you might screw it up for everyone else.

A situation like this came to light in Wisconsin, in which the governor’s press office embargoed some stuff, only to find that some journalists published or shared it in defiance of the embargo. This piece in the Isthmus does a great job of looking at what happened and how expectations related to embargoes aren’t always universal.

Here are some thoughts that might help make this process work the way it should:

SHARE EXPECTATIONS: Professor Sue Robinson of UW-Madison makes a great point about this in the Isthmus article: If both sides aren’t understanding each other, this isn’t going to work.

Like most traditions, people often lose track of how they work or why they start. When there were only a handful of news outlets and everyone kind of came up through the ranks the same way, these traditions were more likely to be shared and understood. Today, everyone can be a publisher and not everyone gets the same level of “education” about how certain things work.

I make a similar argument in my books about the concept of “off the record” and how that works. In most cases, people don’t have a firm grasp of what it means or how it works, so there can be confusion and anger when things go south. When we all know what the rules are, we’re more likely to play by them if the rules make sense. That leads us to point two…

DON’T GET “EMBARGO-HAPPY:” Like any other tool, if you use it for the wrong reasons or rely on it too much, it’s not going to be effective. One of the reporters in the Isthmus story noted that people seem to be embargoing everything lately, which makes it kind of a meaningless element of the press release.

Think of an embargo as a NEED item, based on timing. For example, when the governor is going to give the State of the State address, it makes sense to share the text of the speech early so reporters can work on deadline stories. It also makes sense put an embargo on it, as the governor would probably like to tell people what he thinks about the State of the State before the news media does.

That said, every appearance the governor makes at a local Taco Bell doesn’t require a full press brigade and an embargo. If you want to tell the press something, then announce it. If you don’t, don’t. If you feel like you have to hold something back and let them show up to figure it out, that can work, too. However, a constant stream of embargoes isn’t going to work out well for anyone.

DEAL WITH TRUST ACCORDINGLY: In the media realm, trust and credibility are our only true currency. These things aren’t like boomerangs, in that if you throw them away, they don’t come back. If someone knowingly screws you over, they’ve blown their bank account and you don’t have to extend them any additional line of credit at the Bank of Journalistic Trust.

I’m not a huge fan of playing favorites, as it can lead to lousy journalism based on fealty to the wrong principles (namely, sucking up to people and dodging the tough stuff to get on people’s good side). That said, there is no rule out there that says PR professionals HAVE TO give everyone a cookie.

If a reporter breaks faith and fails to see this as a problem, PR practitioners have no reason to trust them. That’s not bias. That’s common sense. If both sides agree to Point One and Point Two, this shouldn’t be hard to manage. However, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It’s also a good way to end up in the unemployment line in a situation like this, so treat people the way they have demonstrated they should be treated.

An open letter to college students: Please learn to give a shit

Dear students,

I know that there are a solid number of you out there who actually abide by the request in this post most of the time. That said, that number appears to be dwindling significantly recently, so I need to make this plea.

I’ve always believed that as a professor, I owe it to you to try to explain things so that you can understand them. I also believe that if I don’t actually SAY something in explicit terms, it’s my fault when you screw up. If I do my best to lay it out, like I’m trying to teach a dog how to do calculus, and you still screw up, well, then, that’s on you.

I felt the need to put this post together after the first half of a semester that had me utterly vexed and befuddled at the current state of my courses. This isn’t a typical semester in which I have a couple kids who skip class constantly, a few others who fake their way around a few things and some dumb-ass behavior that makes me question the functionality of at least one student’s frontal lobes. There will always be one kid who shows up late so often I swear they’ll be late for their own funeral.

And it isn’t about the life events that get in the way for all of us. I still get the “I’m sick” emails or the notes about emergency surgeries and funerals. That happens all the time and, honestly, any professor who doesn’t understand this is someone I don’t want to know.

No, this appears to be a pandemic level of “I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit-itis” that has hit in a way I’ve never seen before on the college level. I had students miss deadlines for quizzes, writing assignments and even exams. Students were given days and even weeks to meet those goals, only to let the deadlines go by like a knee-buckling curve ball.

This isn’t just affecting my intro-level students, as several folks who are in their senior year have forgotten about midterms. The excuses are of the “I have no excuses, but let me fix this anyway” variety, with a steady stream of “I was unaware” emails, which appeared strange to me, given that I’d posted the information in the syllabus, flagged the deadline in the LMS and spoken repeatedly about it in class.

I keep thinking that these folks are suffering from whatever the hell Guy Pearce had in “Memento” and I’m strongly considering bring tattoo kits to class:

This also isn’t just affecting the students here at UWO, as I asked the hivemind of educators I trust if they’ve seen this as well. It turns out this is hitting states across the country, even those that haven’t recently legalized weed or consider a pub crawl to be a national holiday. A constant stream of attempting to spoon-feed students review questions, examples, instructions and extended deadlines has not proven to be a panacea for this situation.

Some educators speculate that this might be some sort of “long COVID” impact, with the idea that college students who spent their formative years merely trying to survive what we all assumed was the end of days weren’t properly prepared for self-reliance in their education. Others wondered if students felt their college efforts lacked value, given the high number of good-paying jobs that are currently available, sans a college degree. Still others pondered about the effects of artificial intelligence, as students looked for easier ways to get out of work. My sister-in-law, who teaches dance, had this insight:

“People are just lazy. We have a new generation of stupid on our hands.”

The cause and the cure are outside of my scope of knowledge, as I’m really not that kind of doctor. That said, please consider the following advice, as you move forward into the second half of the semester. Some of this may seem like it’s stuff you heard in second grade, but that’s probably because we need to dive that far back into the realm of education to properly reboot a few folks:

GIVE A SHIT: This is really the core of everything I’m going to say below, but again it bears repeating. If the way in which my 8 a.m. class tends to listen, I might have to say this six or seven more time before we’re done here.

I have told students over the years that the one thing I absolutely cannot teach them is how to care about a course. I can teach the basics of all sorts of rudimentary journalism skills and quite a few higher-level elements at that. I can teach students how to be tough, or brave, or nosy, or a dozen other “soft skills” that can aid them in their work.

The one thing I can’t make them do is “wanna.” If you don’t “wanna,” I can’t help you.

I get that not every course is your muse and that every class is not an Academy-Award-winning performance on the part of your instructor, but I know that a lot of us are really trying to make a difference. However, if you don’t care, it doesn’t matter.

And, if you don’t care, you should probably think about why you’re sitting in that classroom, spending a boatload of money that you’ll spend decades of your life paying back.

READ DIRECTIONS: When I was growing up, we were inundated with ads for a program called RIF: Reading Is Fundamental. The idea was that if you couldn’t read, you probably weren’t going anywhere in life:

This is really true in college, as you should be somewhere further along in your personal literacy than the crew of kids surrounding a relatively young Ed Asner here. Reading directions is a fantastic way of figuring out how much content you have to write, how many citations you need to include or even when something is due.

It might not be as much fun as if we did the directions in a TikTok, but when the Feds block this app for fear that the Chinese government is using it to figure out how stupid we all are, those literacy skills might come in handy.

PAY ATTENTION: College professors often have difficulty when we see you on laptops and tablets during class, because we’d love to pretend that you’re using these items to take copious notes and add deadlines to your calendars. However, when we call on you to verbally add your thoughts to the topic under discussion and your head pops up like a prairie dog getting electroshock therapy, you kind of give up the game.

Look, I get that we’re boring, despite how hard we work. I also know that not everything will apply to any one student in class. That said, you are PAYING for this. It’s like buying entry to the Golden Corral buffet and then quietly sipping a water in the corner. If that’s all you’re doing, why the hell did you come here?

Paying attention in class is a great way to actually learn stuff. This is particularly true if you are opposed to reading directions. I’m a big fan of both, but you need to do one or the other in order to survive in college. Neither of these things is asking too much or should come as a massive shock to you. We showed you the library, the classrooms and even professors’ offices during your campus tour: Books and lectures were not hidden from you.

Unless, of course, you were on your phone the whole time…

STOP PSEUDO-APOLOGIZING: I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve gotten that start with “I’m sorry” and then follow that up with a detailed outline of some easily avoidable screw up. I finally went and looked up what an apology actually entails and this is what I’ve found:

The Three A’s of Apologies
  • Acknowledgement. Acknowledge the situation and say you are sorry for what happened.
  • Acceptance. Hold yourself accountable and work to rectify the situation.
  • Amends. Talk about what you will do and start working on corrective measures.

What I’ve come to realize is that most of the apologies I get had none of those elements to them.

You’re not really sorry, in the idea that you are acknowledging the situation. Hell, some of you wouldn’t realize you’ve been hit by a bus until your phone told you as much or your Apple Watch stopped tracking your pulse. You just don’t like the negative outcome of what occurred and you want some way out of it.

You aren’t really accepting anything. Some of the emails I get say that the sender “will accept whatever punishment” I have in mind, but quickly following that up with “but I would really like it if (Fill in way of getting away with screwing up here).”

Also, I’m looking for amends. Maybe the sacrifice of a fatted calf would be a bit much, but some actual contrition and showing up on time for at least a week or two would help.

DON’T LIE: Journalists deal with weasels for most of our lives. This is why we have such great BS detectors and why we love nailing liars to the wall. In most cases, the lies students tell are so frickin’ unnecessary that they boggle the mind.

Case in point: I had a student tell me last week that she was going to miss class because she was sick. Totally fine, as they get two skips the whole term, and I don’t care what they’re for. I even go out of my way to say, “Look, if you want to tell me, ‘I got totally ‘faced last night and I reek of vomit and vodka sweat, so I’m skipping,’ I’m fine with that.”

However, when I got home, I found out from my kid that she met one of my students, who was applying for a job at the Olive Garden where Zoe works. It was my bed-ridden sickly waif who couldn’t make it to class, because it turned out her interview for the job was at that time.

The same thing applies to using AI to write your papers. We read enough college writing to know when something comes from a college student and when something comes from a computerized dictionary that spasms content. We also know that nobody writes to EXACTLY 500 words, so stop telling AI to write you a 500-word paper on a given topic.

I have worked ridiculously hard to be an empathetic ally to my students, so when I’m doing that and you lie to me, it makes me want to bring down a raging storm of hellfire upon you.

QUIT WASTING OUR TIME: After all of this, if you STILL can’t find it in your heart and soul to give a shit, that’s fine. Just stop wasting our time.

Believe it or not, some of your colleagues out there are desperate for help. They are applying for internships and jobs, but need help with resumes and cover letters. They are trying to bend their brains around this new form of writing that will be the foundation upon which a lot of their work after college will depend. They actually mean it when they stop by the office and start the conversation with, “Sorry to bother you, but…”

Every time you turn in some AI bullshit, you make us waste time determining how you cheated and filling out paperwork to have you penalized somehow. Every time you skip a class because “OMG earleeeee,” you make us waste time catching you up. Every time you blow a deadline and beg for forgiveness, you make us waste time taking a moral index of ourselves to see if we should bend a rule and help you out.

That’s time we could be spending on people who actually and honestly need our help and want to do the work. You’re not just annoying us, but you are actively depriving other people of an education they paid for and value.

If you can’t get to the point where you’re going to become one of those people, fine, just don’t make the rest of us suffer because of it.

I would tell you to just go work at Olive Garden, because I know they’re hiring, but something tells me their standards are probably higher than those we have here at the U.

Sincerely,

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

 

How to trim flabby sentences and improve your media writing (A Throwback Post)

When I ask students each year what is one thing they want to get out of the Writing for the Media course they are forced to take, they usually respond with some version of, “I need to make my writing more direct and shorter.”

I attribute their inability to write short, tight sentences to the way in which schools train them to write in general. It’s always about “making” the page requirement: “I need to write a five-page paper” or “I have to do a 10-page essay” or something like that. The goal is to GET to the required length, like they’re trying to be tall enough to ride a roller coaster.

“Your rambling, BS-laden essay on the Council of Trent must be at least this long to receive a passing grade…”

With that in mind, here are a few thoughts from this throwback post on tightening up sentences and improving them at the same time.

Take a breath: Four key ways to tighten and shorten your sentences

Following up on Tuesday’s post about good leads, one thing we didn’t discuss was lead length. This is primarily because we were looking into narrative leads, which often go multiple paragraphs before hitting a nutgraf, which sets up the rest of the piece.

A standard news lead should sit between 25 and 35 words and cover the majority of the 5W’s and 1H. It should also capture the readers’ attention and clearly explain what happened as well as why it matters.

Here is a lead that violates those elements in multiple ways:

When convicted bank robber Luis Marty Narvaez walked into the Far East Side Madison branch of Chase Bank on the afternoon of March 1, 24-year-old Charles Daehling was just weeks into his position as an armed, undercover security guard working without a state license and under contract to an unlicensed and now-defunct Nebraska security firm.

The story, which you can find here, attempts to unpack a bizarre incident in which a unlicensed security guard shot a would-be bank robber. The lead is 55 words, doesn’t tell me what the story is going to include and loses me among a wash of proper nouns and random facts.

Subsequent sentences in the story have similar issues. Here are several examples of sentences that go on way too long:

Narvaez’s head and face were covered with a black cap and black mask as he briskly stepped to a window where a teller was already helping a customer, stuck a bag under the window and demanded money but never displayed a weapon, according to a 124-page Madison police report and video surveillance footage of the incident.

<SNIP>

Daehling didn’t think giving Narvaez a verbal warning before opening fire “would have been appropriate” once he realized a robbery was taking place, because Narvaez and the female customer were close enough that he worried Narvaez could have taken her hostage, the police report says.

<SNIP>

Daehling also told police he thought about trying to provide Narvaez with medical attention after the shooting but “given that he didn’t know whether the suspect was armed, the fact that he had his hands inside his hoodie pockets and the fact that he was the only one in the bank armed and with two customers, he believed that it would be better to make sure that he covered the male suspect with his firearm, until police arrived.”

<SNIP>

Mark Warren, Strategos senior vice president and director of training, said his company no longer subcontracts with Bobbi Randall Inc. but that such subcontracting arrangements are common in the private security industry because no one particular security company can be licensed to work in every state.

<SNIP>

Chase Bank, which started using off-duty Madison police officers to provide security at the branch shortly after the Narvaez shooting, declined to say whether it has any minimal training requirements for security guards who work at its branches, or to answer any other questions about how Daehling came to work at the branch.

Those five sentences occur before the second subhead of the story. The shortest is 45 words and the longest is 78, or more than twice the length of the most a lead should be. Body copy sentences tend to be slightly shorter than the lead when done well, but at the very least, they shouldn’t make you feel like a sugar-addled toddler is telling you about his day.

To help you prevent run-on sentences like these, consider a few tips:

  • Start with the core: Both books argue the value of building a sentence from the core out, instead of from the front to the back. In other words, you want to identify the noun, the verb and the object of the sentence and build outward from that point in concentric rings of information. If you can’t find the NVO core without a searchlight and a posse, you probably have a pretty weak sentence. The NVO core should tell you what it is the sentence wants to explain to the readers. Find it in each of your sentences and then augment it with additional, valuable information.

 

  • Read it aloud: If you count words, you can usually hit the mark for a solid sentence that doesn’t wander too much. That said, the word “a” and the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” each count as a single word, so math is only going to get you so far. A good idea to help you figure out if a sentence is too long (or too heavy, as we discussed in the basic writing sections) is to take a normal, human breath and read it out loud. If you do this and you start to feel tight in your chest when you finish, you might need to make a few trims. If you run out of air before the  end of the sentence, it’s almost certainly going to be too long.

SIDE NOTE 1:When I say a “normal, human breath” I mean the kind of breath you take when you assume you can take another one relatively soon, not a “the Titanic is going under and we need to stay alive” breath.

SIDE NOTE 2: It doesn’t behoove you to cheat at this. I had a student in my class one year who was on the university’s swim team and had the lung capacity of a blue whale. She would read these enormous sentences aloud in one breath and then exhale all her extra oxygen to prove a point. OK, Freya, you got me, but that’s not helping.

 

  • Write once, edit twice: Once you write the sentence, don’t assume it works fine. Go back through with your critical editor’s hat on and dig into this thing. Strip out extra words that don’t add value. Look to see if you cranked up the prepositional-phrase machine and let it run roughshod all over your work. Determine if you are making one, solid point in the sentence or if you’re trying to do three things at once. Find the noun-verb-object core and make sure each piece of the sentence applies to that core. If not, you can always pull it out into a second sentence. Once you do all this, go back and do another fine-tuning edit to clean up any problems that remain or errors you might have introduced.

 

  • Ask yourself, “Would I read this if I didn’t write this?” for each sentence: As we discussed multiple times, you aren’t writing for yourself. You need to write for your readers, so keep them in mind when you write each sentence. If the sentence doesn’t make sense to them or isn’t valuable to them, you have failed at your job. Go back and make the necessary fixes to help your readers get the most out of your work.