The Dartmouth Provost Used AI To Write His Opinion Pieces. When The Student Newspaper Called Him Out, He Replied With An AI-Written Statement (A Throwback Post)

The topper of the amazing story done by The Dartmouth on the AI use of their provost.

THE LEAD: The next time your professor tells you, “If you just let AI do all your writing for you, you’ll never be able to get a job,” you can now respond with, “Well, I could be the provost of Dartmouth…”

An investigation by The Dartmouth of academic articles and opinion pieces published by Provost Santiago Schnell in 2026 found a median “AI-written” text percentage of 96% using artificial intelligence detector Pangram.

Pangram — which was found to have a “near-zero error rate” by an October 2025 University of Chicago audit — uses a large language model neural network which is trained to recognize differences between separate datasets of human-written documents and AI-generated content, according to the company’s website.

The student journalists at Dartmouth University did an amazingly strong deep dive into this topic, relying on both the most accurate AI-detection program available and some strong reporting beyond that. This wasn’t a quick-hit piece on one thing Schnell wrote, but rather a comprehensive look at his work before and after AI chatbots became widely available.

In addition, they sought and received a comment from Schnell about their findings, but didn’t just give him a pass. Instead, they took each of his claims (it was for grammar only… AI picks on people who have ESL concerns… etc.) and debunked each one of them.

And as if that weren’t enough to make the point, they also found this:

In an email statement to The Dartmouth on Sept. 18, Schnell wrote that he uses artificial intelligence for “language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization and making writing processes more efficient,” but “review[s] the final text and take[s] responsibility for its content.”

“I develop ideas and arguments, conduct the research, evaluate the evidence and sources, determine the structure, prepare drafts and decide what appears in the final text,” Schnell wrote. “I regard these technologies as assistive tools. They do not identify the problem, design the research project, guarantee the validity of research results, interpretations, citations, conclusions or substitute for my research, intellectual judgment or authorship.”

Schnell’s Sept. 18 email statement to The Dartmouth was itself “100% AI-written,” according to a Pangram test.

I imagine next time, the Dartmouth students will want to do a sit down interview with this guy, just to see if he’s capable of doing so…

Given this kind of stuff is now everywhere, even places we generally would expect to be a little more honest, here’s a throwback post that talks about how best to avoid AI fake-outs and keep yourself out of trouble.

How AI “expert sources” have duped journalists and four tips on how to avoid being the next victim

Meet Elizabeth Hubbell, a 25-year-old skin-care expert who is willing to be a great source for your next story on anything makeup or skin-care related. She’s actually completely fabricated. Her picture came from an AI generation site and her name is a combination of my car (Betsy) and a baseball player whose card I had laying around (Carl Hubbell). Careful. It’s dangerous out there…

When it comes to doing interviews, I always tell students they need to do them in person. In response, they often look at me like I’m asking them to use a teletype machine or some semaphore flags. It’s easier, faster and more convenient for both parties if they can do a text, a chat or an email interview, the students say.

I argue that the face-to-face interview allows for a deeper connection for profile and feature pieces. This approach also can prevent sources in news stories from weaseling out of answers they could otherwise work through via several drafts of an email. Plus, if I spend some time in the source’s environment, I can probably find a personal effect that could give us something to talk about, like a family photo, a kid’s drawing or a sports item. At the very least, it’ll help with scene setting.

Apparently, there’s another good reason for my approach these days: Your easy-to-access, extremely helpful, expert source might be AI:

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, anyone can generate comment, on any subject, in an instant.

It is a technology that appears to have fuelled a rise in expert commentators who have appeared widely in national newspapers but who are either not real, not what they seem to be or at the very least have CVs which do not justify their wide exposure in major newsbrands.

The rise in dubious commentators has been fuelled by companies that charge the PR industry in order to share quotes via email with journalists who have submitted requests for comment.

Journalist Rob Waugh found that in a number of cases, digital outlets were mass-generating content from these supposed experts, giving everyone from news journalists to PR practitioners the exact the quote or information they needed on a wide array of topics. However, when challenged to engage more deeply regarding who they are or what they have done in life, the “sources” suddenly had difficulty:

She has been quoted in Fortune talking about “loud budgeting” and by Business.com talking about the best countries in which to obtain a business education (both sites are based in the US).

A profile on Academized describes her as a “biochemist and science educator”. The same byline picture also crops up on a publisher called Leaddev, for someone called Sara Sparrow. Rebecca Leigh has written for DrBicuspid.com about how to write a business plan for your dental practice where she is described as a writer for Management Essay and Lija Help (two online writing services).

When challenged via email to do something that would be difficult to do with AI image-generating software (send an image of herself with her hand in front of her face) or prove that she was an environment expert, Rebecca stopped communicating.

One AI source, “Barbara Santini,” was particularly prolific in the volume and array of topics she could cover for journalists. Waugh found this roster of publications that had included Santini quotes:

She has been quoted in The Guardian talking about the benefits of walking (paid content), in Newsweek talking about white lies, Marie Claire talking about the meaning of money, the Daily Mirror talking about the benefits of sleeping with your dog, in The Sun talking about sexual positions, Pop Sugar talking about astrology, and Mail Online talking about how often to change your pillow.

Santini was recently quoted in a BBC article examining the lifelike responses of AI to Rorschach tests used by some psychologists saying: “If an AI’s response resembles a human’s, it’s not because it sees the same thing but it’s because its training data mirrors our collective visual culture.”

Despite her ability to be all knowing and wise, Santini apparently couldn’t receive phone calls, a relatively easy giveaway that the “person” on the other end is AI. Waugh also found other examples of journalists who were getting taken for a ride by an AI source, including one case where the non-human pitched a sob story about breast cancer survival:

“Seeing my scarred chest in the mirror was a constant reminder of what I had lost,” Kimberly Shaw, 30, told me in an emotional email.

She had contacted me through Help a Reporter Out, a service used by journalists to find sources. I cover skincare and had been using the site to find people for a story about concealing acne scars with tattoos.

<SNIP>

Shaw’s experience may not have been relevant to my acne story, but it tapped into the same feelings of empowerment and control I wanted to explore. Thinking she could inspire a powerful new piece, I emailed her back.

But after days of back-and-forth conversations, something in Shaw’s emails began to feel a little off. After idly wondering to my boyfriend whether she could be a fake, he suggested that I run the emails through a text checker for artificial intelligence.

The result was unequivocal: Shaw’s emails had been machine-generated. I’d been interviewing an AI the entire time.

As a result of Waugh’s story, a number of these information clearinghouses have tried to cull their ranks of AI “experts” while the deceived publications have retooled or removed the stories with fake people in them. Although the founder of one of these “expert mills” blamed much of the situation on “lazy journalists,” he kind of gave up the game a bit when it came to explaining why these platforms don’t prevent the frauds from gaining access in the first place:

Darryl Willcox, who founded ResponseSource in 1997 and sold it in 2018, says that the simplicity and speed of platforms like ResponseSource is key to their appeal and that attempts to add authentication risk slowing down the system.

Willcox said: “The other factor which complicates things a little bit is that these platforms are quite an open system. Once a journalist makes a request they can be forwarded around organisations, and sometimes between them, and often PR agencies are acting for multiple parties, and they will be forwarded onto their many clients.”

In other words, “If we slowed down to make sure things were accurate, we wouldn’t be as appealing as we want to be.” Eeesh.

So what can you to to avoid quoting a fake person? The overarching theme is basically, “Don’t be a lazy journalist,” but here are a few more specific tips:

TRUST, BUT VERIFY: The old Russian proverb really comes into play here and for good reason. I often say that paranoia is my best friend and has kept me out of a ton of problems. To that larger point, not only did I click on every link I could find in Waugh’s story, I also Googled the hell out of Waugh himself. Why? I imagined that it would be the most epic “Punk’d” moment on Earth if the media world was flocking to this story about AI screwing with journalists, only to find out that Rob Waugh was also an AI fake. I found LinkedIn, X, Bluesky, media staff pages and at least a dozen photos. I wouldn’t bet the house on the fact he’s real, but I’d probably bet the lawn tractor.

This can be harder in situations like the one involving the cancer scammer, as regular people tend not to have as big of a social media presence or digital footprint. That said, even regular people under the age of retirement should have left a few breadcrumbs out there for you to find.

KICK THE TIRES: If you can’t find the person clearly through a digital search, feel free to play a little game of 20 Questions to see if you can get some things ironed out. Experts who have kicked the tires on a few bots can offer you specific ways to ask questions that will tend to ferret out fakers. The author in the cancer-scam story revealed that asking for specific photos based on prior conversations can be helpful as well.

I learned about this kind of thing in trying to defeat scams when it came to buying sports memorabilia. When unknown sellers offered either exactly what I wanted when I couldn’t find it anywhere else or provided me with a ridiculously low price for something I knew should cost more, the pros who had been around the block a few times suggested I ask the seller to “coin the image.”

What this meant was that I wanted the person to take a picture of the item with a coin (usually asking for either heads or tails, or maybe even a specific coin) so I could tell they had the item and weren’t messing with me. Turned out, that advice helped me dodge a bullet or two. As weird as it might seem, asking someone to take a picture with their left hand raised or holding a quarter with “heads” showing might help you avoid a problem.

MEET IN PERSON: Again, this is the most obvious one to suggest. If you meet a person, in person, it’s a pretty safe bet that you can consider them real. The rest of the stuff (Are they the expert they claim to be? Did they really do what they say they did? Do they actually have cancer?) remains a risk without substantial additional reporting, but at least you’ll know they exist.

If that can’t happen for legitimate reasons (the person lives too far away etc.), look for other ways to get some human connection with the source. That could be a Zoom/Teams/Whatever video chat or an actual phone call at an actual phone number. In the cases where the frauds proliferated, it was pretty clear that the only connection between the source and the journalist was through a keyboard. That’s especially dangerous when you don’t have a prior relationship with a source.

WHEN IN DOUBT, DO WITHOUT: At the end of the day, there is no journalistic rule that says you have to use a source, a quote or a “fact” just because you have it. If you don’t feel comfortable with how a source is providing you with information or you aren’t 100% sure this person is a person, it’s better to leave that source out of your story than it is to run the risk of getting bamboozled.

If you say, “Well, the whole story will fall apart without this one source and I can’t get anyone else to provide me with this information,” maybe that’s more revealing than anything else we’ve said here.

For Stanford, DEI stands for “Don’t Edit It”: University uses AI to add a Black student to its Dining Advertising

(The Stanford Review at Stanford University showcased the original photo and the “diversified” image the school used in its advertising.)

THE LEAD: If at first you can’t make your campus look diverse, let AI do it for you:

Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises recently used AI to change the races of the students it included in its advertisements. AI was also used to noticeably slim down and alter students’ faces.

On his journey to campus, Stanford student Billy Ramirez ’27 was sent an image he recalled a Stanford photographer taking. Upon closer examination, he noticed that he had been removed from the photo and replaced by a AI-generated black woman.

On top of the swap out of Ramirez, the AI apparently decided the Asian lady could stand to lose a few pounds and that the white kid needed a better haircut.

And we wonder where young people get their issues…

DOCTOR OF PAPER FLASHBACK: Not to get too “old man shouting at cloud” about this, but back in the day at the University of Wisconsin Madison, administrators didn’t need AI to improve diversity.

They used Photoshop:

MADISON, Wis., Sept. 24 (AP) — The University of Wisconsin at Madison has acknowledged altering a publicity photograph to add a black face to a crowd of white football fans, a step the college says it took to present an image of diversity.

The university said last week that it had digitally altered the cover of its fall admissions brochure to include a black senior, Diallo Shabazz, who says he has never even attended a football game at the university. The mistake was brought to light after a sharp-eyed staff member at the student newspaper, The Daily Cardinal, noticed that Mr. Shabazz’s face seemed to be lighted differently from the other students’.

(“You think anyone will notice we stuck a random black guy’s head in there?” “Nah… Print that thing!”)

Back then, it became such a viral thing (back before we really knew what viral was) that The Onion even took a shot at this stupidity:

DISCUSSION STARTER: What is your general feeling about using AI to alter reality, especially in a way like Stanford did? You could easily argue that people were being lazy, in that I’m sure they could have found a photo that represented the diversity mix the folks there wanted. You could also argue that this is deceptive, which calls into question every OTHER thing the folks present as fact. There are also a ton of other ways you can look at this, so have at it.

Six Important Things That Got Lost In The Story Of The SIU-Edwardsville Communication Director Who Filed A Police Report Against The Editor of The Student Newspaper

Student media and university officials tend to have relationships that range from somewhat cordial to downright vitriolic. This makes sense in a relatively adversarial system, in which the goal of the university is to present itself in the most positive light possible, while the goal of the student journalists is to present reality, regardless of how it makes the university look.

In the case of The Alestle at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, the relationship has devolved to the point in which a member of the school’s PR team filed a police report against the paper’s editor, claiming harassment via one line in an email. This is on top of a PR official saying her unfettered ability to sit in on interviews between student reporters and university personnel is “non-negotiable.” And those are just the most recent clashes over what is and isn’t acceptable under the First Amendment.

If you are behind on the story, there has been a TON of good reporting that can catch you up here:

A local media outlet, The Riverbender, provides some of the basics information as well as some key background.
The Chronicle of Higher Education covered the story, which includes links to letters administrators sent to staff, complaining about The Alestle.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch did a deep dive on the years-long battle between the paper and the administration. Columnist Tony Messenger also took a look at the situation (I think you need to be a subscriber to read this, unless all of his columns are literally one line long…)
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has been involved in this for a while as well, and some key information, including a letter sent to the administration, can be found here.
The Student Press Law Center co-wrote the letter noted above, and has also been covering this issue.
llinois State Representative Katie Stuart also entered the fray, issuing a statement of support and clarity about the situation.
The Alestle staff, which I’m sure would rather be COVERING the news than BEING the news, is also keeping readers in the loop on campus about the fight going on here, as well as doing some other amazing coverage at the same time.

The headlines of the story capture both the oddity and impact of this story: A clash over the First Amendment rights of student journalists ends up with an administrator essentially calling the cops on the editor, claiming harassment. What is getting overlooked however, reveals a bigger set of problems for the students, the university and even press freedom in general.

I exchanged a series of emails with The Aleste’s editor-in-chief, Dylan Hembrough and also conducted a phone interview with him, exchanged a series of emails with SIUE Director of Communications Nicole Franklin and did some deep dives into the background of this beef.

Rather than rehash what a lot of superior journalists have already reported, here are a few important things that are getting lost in the coverage of this story:

THIS ISN’T A ONE-TIME PROBLEM: A number of articles look at this moment as a singular incident, but it’s not. Although neither party could put a specific date on the start of the conflict, Hembrough, pointed to a story he wrote, regarding the university’s policy that resident assistants (RAs) were not allowed to talk to student media.

As the story made the rounds, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) caught wind of it and eventually wrote a letter to SIUE, explaining how the university couldn’t clamp down on students’ free speech rights if they were to speak as individuals, not university representatives. In response, the university noted The Aleste’s story was inaccurate, but did not elaborate on why it was wrong or what clarifications they had provided to student workers about media interactions.

According to the FIRE website, the case remains active in the organization’s files.

Hembrough has been EIC for the past three years and said that he’s outlasted three head spokespeople, each of whom has been less than thrilled/cooperative when it comes to The Alestle, so clearly this isn’t a one-time problem.

THIS ISN’T AN ALESTLE-ONLY PROBLEM: FIRE keeps track of everything related to free-speech/expression and hasn’t found a lot great to say about SIUE. FIRE has labeled the institution as “red,” which means it has at least one policy that is exceptionally problematic in relation to free speech on campus. Here’s the general report card that outlines its ranking in free speech:

(To be fair to SIUE, UW-Madison is ranked 61 and still has a grade of D, even though it’s a bastion of liberalism that has the reputation of “Two’s company, three’s a protest.” Probably the more telling thing is SIUE’s ranking of 243 out of 261 colleges and universities. Private institutions like Notre Dame and Marquette University rank better and they’re technically ALLOWED to do more suppression than SIUE if they felt like it.)

In addition, the school settled a free-speech lawsuit in 2023 with former student Maggie DeJong, who argued the university violated her First Amendment rights. According to the suit, DeJong wore a “Back the Blue” hat to class as a way to show her support of police and counter speech related to “defunding the police.”

After several discussions with professors and administrators, a university official issued a no-contact order between DeJong and several classmates, an action the suit called viewpoint discrimination. In the settlement, the school paid DeJong $80,000 and agreed to revise policies related to issues like this in the future.

In 2018, College Republicans sued the school over a free-speech policy that literally restricted free speech to 0.0013% of the total campus footprint. Even worse, the policy regarding that tiny “Speech Zone” required that the university approve the “free speech” offered in that space at least two days in advance if the planned speech was expected to be fluffy and happy speech. If the speech could be more “controversial,” students needed to get the permission 90 days in advance.

What makes something “controversial” under that policy? That was at the sole discretion of the school. The school settled for $10K in legal fees and a promise to redo the policy.

Long story short, it’s not just a liberal thing or a student media thing. SIUE just seems like a place that treats free speech like it’s a cockroach problem that won’t go away.

WHO GETS TO CALL THEMSELVES JOURNALISTS?: The two key media reps for SIUE during this situation, Franklin and Executive Director Paula Bridges, have leaned heavily on their status as former journalists with decades of journalism experience while condemning The Alestle.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Bridges has left her position at SIUE as of Sept. 16, according to an article on The Alestle website. Links to her staff pages at SIUE are now dead and she has not updated her LinkedIn profile with new career information as of this writing.)

Franklin made her bona fides known during an interview with the Edwardsville Intelligencer:

So as I navigated a career that straddled 30 years in television news and more than 25 as an indie filmmaker some would agree my work exemplifies a Black woman’s joy. I’ll take it. My desire to pursue communications in college in reference to broadcast media was what I saw as the only degree that made sense at the time.”

<SNIP>

“That’s an interesting question because I came to this role after working 30 years in news television as a video editor/engineer and more than 25 years as an independent filmmaker.

Bridges also calls herself a journalist on her LinkedIn page, noting experience in both print and broadcast. In the letter she wrote slamming The Alestle, she doubled down on that statement:

As a journalist with more than 30 years of experience with newspapers, news radio, magazines, and broadcast television, I will always defend First Amendment rights and freedom of the press. I also recognize the important obligation that accompanies the power to publish: verify facts before publication and correct errors when they occur.

I concluded my reporting career as an Emmy Award-winning news anchor, and served across various sectors including municipal government, public safety, the judiciary, and education. I am writing an open letter to our university community because I am deeply troubled by the direction and disposition of The Alestle as an exercise of journalism.

In digging into both of their backgrounds, it’s unclear to me how the math works and also how those experiences directly relate to any First Amendment support.

For Franklin, she lists the following items:

The big one, where she spent 17 years was a bit confusing, but in digging into her resume, it was a little clearer:

This was mostly production work, as opposed to news gathering or journalistic content creation. In addition the other two places where she worked that are categorized as “news” are basically morning programs where little in the way of hard-hitting news occurs. And again, I’d imagine she wasn’t responsible for the news reporting as a video editor.

In terms of Bridges, the experience brag is nowhere nearly commensurate with the resume she publicly shares. That “30 years” she opens her letter with really comes down to about eight or nine years of broadcast journalism at the anchor desk:

That’s actual experience in journalism, no doubt, even if it ended before a lot of The Alestle staffers were in grade school. Outside of that, however, her professional life has been on the PR side of the fence for numerous public institutions:

Add all that up and you more than double her time in journalism, not to mention it’s the most recent 17 years of her career, give or take. That’s not to criticize those jobs, as I teach students every day who want to take gigs like that, but I’d argue that those careers are more about reputation management and positive front-facing work as opposed to what news reporters do.

Also, given those positions, I’d wager a dollar to a doughnut that Hembrough and his crew have done more investigative, deep-dive, digging-around, according-to-Hoyle journalism stuff in the past three years than these two folks have done at any of their stops.

BELIEVE WHOMEVER YOU WANT, BUT CHECK THE RECEIPTS FIRST: In most cases like this, one side puts out a list of issues it has about free speech or conflict and the other side goes silent. If you look back at the multi-part series we did here in Indiana University’s fight with the Indiana Daily Student, I tried to get comments from at least five people in administration and the only response I got was a set of links to previous statements that didn’t answer my questions.

In this situation, both Hembrough and Franklin have been active in presenting their cases to the media. As is the case with most mainstream media stories, space is limited and reporters want to play fair, so they grab a quote from each and move on.

In the case of Hembrough, the quotes mostly discuss the way in which the admin has been dumping all over the paper in public without having the facts right. In the case of Franklin, the quotes mostly present a case of the students making mistakes and not correcting them, all while arguing she’s totally in favor of free speech.

For example, Franklin made what appears to be a completely reasonable statement in an email to me:

This has never been about free speech or freedom of the press. SIUE has a long history of sponsoring The Alestle and training student journalists, and that commitment has not wavered.

The real issue is the lack of journalistic principles of objectivity, truthfulness, and accuracy. Calling for accuracy is not interference. The Alestle has repeatedly published information that is inaccurate and, despite requests for corrections, has been slow or unwilling to make them.

That comment sounds fair, in that being accurate and following journalistic principles should be at the core of what student media does. When I asked Hembrough about those allegations, he did more than comment.

He brought the receipts to prove stuff.

In this timeline of links, rebuttals and clarifications, he names names, documents dates and shows his work. In picking through this over the last week, I could easily see how some of the comments Franklin had made in various comments were either inaccurate or in service of the university’s narrative.

He also had emails to support his statements that Franklin had been presented with information about her presence at interviews being a First Amendment violation, as well as her reactions, such as her statement that her presence was “non-negotiable.”

And as Hembrough said, “There are only so many ways you can slice the word non-negotiable.”

When it comes down to it, journalists are supposed to be objective, but we’re also supposed to be fans of reality. In other words, if one person says it’s raining and one person says it’s sunny, we aren’t supposed to just report both equally.

We’re supposed to look out the window and figure out who’s right, which is why checking those receipts is really important.

IT’S HARD TO SQUARE THE CIRCLE ON SIUE’S FIRST AMENDMENT TALK: What keeps coming up most in these discussions is the First Amendment and how it either is or isn’t being violated in this situation. In an email Franklin sent me, she noted:

Our position is straightforward: the University has a legitimate interest in ensuring that information it provides to the public is objective, truthful, accurate, and that factual errors concerning the University are identified and, where appropriate, corrected. That interest does not conflict with our commitment to free speech and free press.

Based on what I’ve seen of the coverage on this, the timeline Hembrough provided and my digging into the background on SIUE, the reporting is meeting those goals, with errors generally being corrected in what is a reasonable time period.

I’m uncertain as to how the university is parsing “truthful” versus “accurate” and it’s also interesting that the lack of objectivity seems to be focused on stories that don’t paint the university in the best light.

Setting those issues aside, experts in media law at multiple organizations have stated their concerns regarding the way in which the actions of SIUE’s PR folks are problematic in relation to the First Amendment rights of The Alestle staff. The response from the system’s lawyer doesn’t directly address the concerns.

If you’re really committed to the First Amendment, it means you have to support press freedom that is unfettered by governmental overreach, both direct and indirect. When experts in that field are telling you, point blank, you are in violation of the letter and spirit of that law, it might be time to reconsider your actions.

If sources are really concerned about accuracy, have them record the interview instead of having Franklin sit in. It’s a fair trade, in that both sides have a complete record of what happened and no governmental agent is there to potentially chill the exchange of information.

(SIDE NOTE: I emailed a couple people who have covered this story and a couple journalists who cover SIUE on the regular to ask one basic question: Does Franklin make a point of sitting in on your interviews as well? I’m trying to figure out if this is an Alestle-only thing or not. If anyone responds, I’ll add it here.)

Speaking of chilling, filing a police report against a student journalist feels an awful lot like a brush-back pitch. In our interview, Hembrough told me he got the email during class and his anxiety immediately kicked into overdrive:

I was pretty jarred. I’ll tell you that. So I got the email on Wednesday morning. I was in the middle of class, and I had to step out for about half an hour because I started to panic.

<SNIP>

I had been managing mentally pretty well up until that morning. I had to take some of my emergency medicine to avert the panic attack, which thankfully it kicked in just in time. But I still missed a decent chunk of class.

Actions like these don’t tend to send a message that someone is totally in favor of free speech. If you’re really and fully committed to the freedom of the press, you need to let it ride at all times, not just when you’re happy with what the press is doing.

SIUE IS BULLYING ITS OWN STUDENTS: In my interview with Hembrough, he was talking about the juxtaposition of the allegations that he harassed Franklin and the way in which the school has been treating The Alestle:

If that’s harassment, then what are they doing to us by sending a letter to every student and faculty and staff member on this campus, calling us liars and bad mouthing us to these national organizations?

Bullying their own students really is what it comes down to.

When we read stories about university administrators attacking student media, it’s often hard to remember that the student journalists actually CHOSE to be at the institutions that are attacking them. In many legal ways, they are like any other journalists who are gathering information and telling stories. However, they are also tuition-paying members of the larger university community.

Every university marketing campaign I’ve ever seen is filled with platitudes about how the school will be this fantastic place for its students, complete with career prep, academic inquiry and personal growth.

I’ve yet to see an asterisk on any of that marketing material that says, “Unless you are a student journalist who ticks us off, at which point, buckle your chinstrap.”

How to break through with good breaking news coverage

When you absolutely, positively need to break an important story…

I spent part of the summer critiquing student news media outlets and judging student media contests, something that often helps me see what is going on in the universe of universities. Some things never change (parking problems, dorm food debacles, roommate dysfunction) while other things definitely show me the nuance and distinctiveness among various schools.

A category that kept showing up on my plate was “breaking news,” mainly because that category tended to have a lot of entries, thus other volunteers avoided it like the plague, and I spent my formative journalism years running after anything that caught fire, got shot or otherwise went to hell in a speedboat.

As strange as it seemed to me, there wasn’t a lot of consistency in terms of what qualified as “breaking news” or what made a breaking-news story worthy of submission. Everything from county fairs to shootings ended up here, with lengths ranging from “undersized haiku” to “plus-sized Iliad.” Sufficient to say, all of this made it difficult to pick winners, particularly when trying to compare them.

With all that in mind, here are some things that came to mind as I was reading through some of the offerings:

AN EVENT ISN’T (NORMALLY) BREAKING NEWS: The concept behind “breaking” news really started with radio broadcasting in the 1930s. It was predicated on the idea was that something so important and unexpected had happened, it merited breaking into whatever was currently on air to alert the public about that important thing. With that in mind, if you’re going to call something breaking, you need to showcase two things:

How something is exceptionally important, exceeding the importance of the regular stuff you were covering.
How it was unexpected, either in terms of no one foreseeing it happening or something that was expected to happen a certain way going off the rails.

In most cases, this means event stories don’t really meet those primary requirements. For example, a group of people planning an annual “walk a mile in her shoes” march to support sexual-assault awareness isn’t a breaking news piece unless something unexpected happens. If it goes off the way it should, it’s an event and that’s about it.

That’s not to say anything that doesn’t involve a shooting or a fire can’t be a breaking news story. An unplanned walkout of school students to protest how the district is banning books could be a breaking news event, as could a planned walkout that started peacefully enough before the kids started throwing flaming books at cars in the faculty parking lot.

If everyone knows this is happening for weeks in advance, so much so the administration sanctions it and the PTA brings bottled water and snacks, you’re not “breaking” much of anything.

GRAB ME QUICK, HOLD ME TIGHT: In a lot of contest entries I reviewed, I felt that a lot of people were abiding by the “longer is better” philosophy when it came to what made the cut. I get that this makes a lot of sense in feature categories, profile categories and in-depth/investigative categories, as deeper pieces with more nuance and description need the room to breathe. (To be fair, even some of those could use a little pruning.)

What really made the difference with the breaking stories, however, was how quickly the lead grabbed me and how tightly written the rest of the piece was. I knew something had made the first cut and probably the final pile if I read a lead and instinctively blurted out, “Oh my God!”

When I found myself scrolling to the end of the story and not skipping a word before I hit the requisite ads for “5 tricks to relieve back pain your doctor won’t tell you” and “You’ll never guess what your favorite teen idol got busted for now!” I knew it was a tight, strong read.

If you’re truly “breaking” the news, you need to tell people right away what happened and why they care. If you want to think about it in relation to the old broadcast standard, you’re essentially saying, “Here is something so important, we need to stop what you like enough to be currently watching/hearing and point you to this new thing.” To that end, when you aren’t producing content like that, you need to return people to their previously scheduled programming.

(SIDE NOTE: The one real thing we tend to “break into” programming for these days is weather, which makes a lot of sense, as an impending tornado or damaging storm is something people NEED to know about NOW, so they can go to safety. However, the local weather folks seem like they start channeling Norma Desmond from “Sunset Boulevard” the minute they get on the air.

It takes everything I have not to start laughing when they cut into a Brewers game and spend the next 30 minutes repeating 30 seconds worth of information, only stopping to say, “We KNOW we’re interrupting the Brewers game, but you need to listen to us NOW!” Meanwhile, my dad is practically chewing on the remote control as these weather barons are waiting for Mr. DeMille to give them a close up.)

Breaking news doesn’t have to be long, but it does have to pound the heck out of the content in a non-stop fashion. Even if in an early unfolding report you have to add information based on observation or other “filler” elements, once you get to a true breaking situation, trim out any random garbage that doesn’t keep a grip on the readers’ eyeballs and you’ll have a winner.

TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW AND WHAT YOU DON’T: The best stories answer all the questions readers have in a clear and complete fashion. The next time that happens in a breaking news event will be the first time it ever happened.

That’s not a dig on reporters or media outlets, as it’s the nature of the beast: When something unexpected happens, everyone is trying to figure things out at the same time, so there will naturally be a dearth of information and a ton of holes in stories.

The best breaking news tells the audience everything the reporter knows about the situation, but it also tells the audience what they DON’T know as well. That can feel counterintuitive sometimes, because it’s like answering questions on a final exam with, “You got me! Good one! I have no idea.”

However, I know that when I was reading stories, I had questions that kept popping up in my head. Maybe it was the journalist in me, but sometimes I was thinking, “Did they try to call (SOURCE X)?” or “Was (DOCUMENT Y) available?” Other times, I saw holes in stories like, “Did the police catch the robber?” or “When can people move back in now that the flooding is receding?”

I’m sure a few folks forgot to ask those questions or gather those facts, but I bet even more of the journalists asked about the stuff I had wondered about, but nobody had an answer, or a source refused to comment.

Putting in those bits of information can help the readers see what you did to provide them with the most complete story. That not only helps fill some holes they see, but it also gives them more confidence in the rest of the story, as it becomes clear that you did the job as well as the job could be done.

The objects people own can help us tell the best stories if we take the time to ask about them

About 15 years ago, I was riding in a taxi at 4:30 in the morning with a driver who was yammering a million miles per minute in a dialect best described as “Swamp People on Uppers.”

He was telling me about the heat index and how I was lucky to be leaving Columbia, Missouri before sun up. He was telling me about his home somewhere in Louisiana, which he left because of some reason he couldn’t adequately explain in our short drive.

He was talking about a story he heard on the radio about a woman in Philadelphia being hit in the face by a five-pound fish, a situation he said likely occurred when an eagle dropped its lake-drawn quarry into a nearby tree.

Suddenly he stopped, and in clear, crisp English said, “Hey, you wanna buy a watch?”

Then, he was off to the races again, explaining that a drunk flagged him down around 3 a.m. and asked for a ride home and how he wasn’t going to give the guy a ride, but the guy promised him a big tip and then they got to his house and you know what? “That sumbitch didn’t have no money on him.”

So… The guy hands over a watch to hold until he could go into his house and get money, but then he disappeared into the house and wouldn’t answer the door no matter how loudly the driver knocked…

Each time the driver pitched me the watch, the value went up: It started as a $100, based on what the guy saw online. Then it was a, swear to God, $150 watch. By the time we got to our highway off ramp, it was a $250 timepiece, but the hell did he need a watch for? He didn’t ever wear a watch and besides, he had his wife to tell him how damned late he was… All he needed was to sell it so he could cover his fare and not get in trouble with the bosses…

And on and on and on it went.

When we got to the airport, I had stifled the laughter as long as I could, but I still had to ask, “OK, so how much was the fare?”

“It was 25 goddaddanged dollars!” he told me. “And I mean this watch… You know how much this thing is worth?”

At that point, I forked over my fare, a tip and an additional $25 for the watch. It wasn’t so much that I was buying the watch, but instead, I bought the story. And the story attached to that object was worth so much more than the object itself.

When it comes to writing, you can find a lot of value in understanding stories and how objects can lead to those things. Objects themselves are pretty much static and plain, but the things they evoke in us can make for some fascinating stories. Good reporters can ask questions about those items to tap into something beneath the surface of a source. Good writers can then use those revelations to better paint word pictures for the audience.

For example, when I’m doing a profile, I look to see if there’s something very clearly important to a person in their office, their home, their car or more. Sometimes, it’s simple like hand-drawn crayon-colored pictures taped to a wall, showcasing that they’re a “mommy” or “daddy” first and a powerful CEO second.

(I once mentioned in a lecture that occasionally I’ll spot a piece of jewelry on someone that seems to feel particularly important. Almost instinctively, a young lady in the room reached up and touched a pendant hanging on her necklace. It turned out, that was the last gift her grandmother had given her, and it serves as a sentimental reminder of a relative.)

I have found that you can learn a lot about people based on certain objects and asking about those items. I figured this out when I first started doing furniture restoration and friends would put me in touch with people torn between selling and refinishing a piece.

I’d ask a simple question, “Tell me about your (chair/table/hutch/whatever).”

If they started to tell me that it was maple or walnut, or that it was such-and-such brand from such-and-such era, I’d likely offer to buy the piece. I’d then refinish it and either keep it or sell it.

If they started with, “Oh, this was my grandma’s chair,” or “This was mom and dad’s kitchen table, and we always had our holiday dinners on it,” I’d convince them to get it restored, do it for whatever they could afford and return it to them in the best shape possible.

In one case, I’d donated a “gift certificate” for refinishing to a fundraiser for a local boy who was experiencing some significant health challenges. I promised that the winner of the silent auction could have any piece done that they wanted (as long as it wasn’t a piano or something I couldn’t move).

The family that won it asked to have their oak kitchen table redone, and it had really seen better days. The finish was all worn off, it had glass rings permeating the wood and the thing had an ungodly wobble to it. As I was loading it into the car, the mom of the family said her daughter had a request. The daughter was in her early 20s and she seemed embarrassed that her mom was making a fuss, but I asked what she wanted.

“Do you see these cigarette burns?” she asked, pointing to several spots on the well-worn table top. “Can you save them? Her grandfather used to smoke at the table and she said she’d be sad if they were all gone.”

So, that’s exactly what I did, leaving those little “character” remarks behind because the sentimental reminder was worth more than perfection to these people.

As a reporter, look to the objects that are interesting or distinctive in some meaningful way and see what a source can tell you about it. In some cases, a vase is just a vase or a ring is just a ring, but it never hurts to ask. In many cases, you will open the door to something well beyond what you could have imagined.

ONE FINAL NOTE: Sometimes objects can help explain something about the subject of a piece or typify an aspect of a personality that otherwise would be inexplicable.

For me, the best example is this ashtray:

I picked this up at an estate sale a few years back, and it’s nothing special. I think I paid five bucks for it and it’s advertising a relatively obscure beer company overseas.

However, the process of getting it and keeping it reveals a lot about me. (At least that’s what Amy said, and she didn’t really say it in a good way…)

I was wandering around the sale when I spotted this on the ground and nobody else was near it or me. When I picked it up, a woman who runs an antique store and was hoarding things in a pile 30 feet away screams, “THAT’S MINE! I WAS GETTING THAT!”

I looked at the guy who was running the place and he kind of just shrugged, so as I went to buy it, she was making all sorts of passive aggressive comments about how I “stole” from her and how I should know how “unethical” I was being. As I was leaving, she asked the guy about furniture restoration and buying restored pieces, and he mentioned I had done some and was good, so she asked for my number.

Peace with honor, I thought, so when she texted me asking about furniture I’d done, I sent pictures and offered to sell her some things. To which she responded, “I might consider that if you give me back my ashtray.”

So, before I deleted her number and blocked her, I calmly texted back that if I were ever to be so broke that I starved to death and was forced to be buried in a debtor’s field, I would be buried with that frickin’ ashtray before I ever gave it to her for any reason.

The basics of lead-writing: Tell me what happened. (A Throwback Post)

During the first media-writing class I teach each semester, I tell the students, “The first thing you will write for a grade in this class will be one sentence long and it’ll take you three class periods to do it.”

The students usually give me either an incredulous or smirking look that says, “Dude… Do you THINK you’re teaching the slow class? There’s no way it’ll take that long.”

And then it does, with some of them even thinking about reconsidering their major.

The problem I’ve found over the years is that students are trained to write to page counts that forced them to fluff up their work to meet the required length. Whether it’s two pages or 10 pages, they need to add stuff to get there.

Our field requires precision, clarity and focus. Get to the point and get done.

To that end, we’re doing a lead-writing throwback Thursday post to help showcase the ways in which leads go wrong and how best to fix them. Enjoy!

Just tell me what happened: Lead writing 101

The lead is the most important thing you will ever write in a story. It’s supposed to grab your readers by the eyeballs and drag them into the guts of your story. It’s supposed to explain who did what to whom in a clear and concise fashion. It’s also supposed to be between 25 and 35 words, lest it get wild and unruly. This is one of those skills you need to work on constantly, even if you are a pro.

Consider a few of the following leads and what went horribly wrong with them:

Lead 1: It’s the most sensational, inspirational, celebrational, muppetational…

Hyperbole is the art of creating overblown excitement for no real reason. A straw man approach is the ability to set up a weak argument or premise that no one has stated so you can refute it and establish your point of view. If you put both of them in a lead, you have something like this story’s opening:

Delivering wheelchairs to disabled kids across the country from Bozeman may sound like a pipe dream, but it’s exactly what ROC Wheels does.

I don’t know much about Bozeman, Montana, but I’m guessing its entire populous doesn’t stay awake at night aspiring to deliver wheelchairs to people. Also, who says this aspiration would likely go unmet if my supposition in the previous sentence were incorrect? What is this “On Bozeman, Montana’s Waterfront?”

The author has overstated her point, and that’s just one problem with this lead. Here are two others:

The story isn’t about ROC’s past. It’s about the launch of a new program involving veterans building and delivering chairs as part of a therapeutic activity. Thus, the lead is buried in the second sentence.
The origin of the term “pipe dream” relates to the smoking of an opium pipe and the wild visions this activity evoked in people. Eeesh.

This is a clear case of what happens when a writer tries to do too much with a lead. Just tell me what’s going on and why I care: Veterans will build and deliver wheelchairs, an activity that helps the recipients as well as the veterans.

Lead 2: How can we bore people with a story about sex?

Question: How can a lead about sex toys be bad?

Answer: Like this.

Zach Smith had sex toys delivered to him at Ohio State‘s football headquarters in 2015, according to an online report Friday, raising more questions about the former assistant coach’s conduct while employed there just as the university prepares to conclude its investigation of the program and head coach Urban Meyer.

This 50-word monstrosity manages to pour a ton of random facts into the mind of the reader, like that scene in “A Clockwork Orange.” Even more, the lead skipped several other elements of the report that were far more likely to grab the readers’ attention:

He spent more than $2,200 on this stuff, including on items named “WildmanT ball lifter red, candyman men’s jock suspenders (and) PetitQ open slit bikini brief,” none of which are the most offensive items he purchased. Plus, that’s almost twice what I spent on my first car…
His lawyer threatened the reporter over the publication of these documents and refused to engage in the premise that this was a legitimate story.
Smith apparently had a “photography hobby” of sorts, namely that he took shots of his genitalia while at work, including multiple photos believed to have been taken at the White House during a celebration of the team’s national championship.

I’m not saying you should always go with salacious details in a lead. The point is that if you pick a key element of a situation like this for the lead, don’t lose the thread as you try to weave in six other plot lines. This is a sports story, not a “Grey’s Anatomy” episode.

LEAD 3: Something happened! Oh… you wanted more?

Here’s the lead on a story about a county conducting alcohol-compliance checks where you learn nothing more than what I just told you:

ENID, Okla. — Garfield County Sheriff’s Office and PreventionWorkz partnered earlier this month to conduct alcohol-compliance checks throughout the county.

This is a version of the standard “held a meeting” or “gave a speech” lead. It often shows up in sports reporting as well where someone will explain that Team X played Team Y on Friday or something. The problem with every version of this lead is that it fails to tell the readers the outcome of something. Instead, it simple explains that something happened. In this case, the writer could have focused on a number of things:

In the 25 random checks, four places sold alcohol to the underage person, down from eight sales in March.
In all of the cases, the clerks checked the person’s ID, but the four sales came from reading the ID wrong.
Of the four sales, one person had sold to a minor and been cited at least once before.

There’s also some information about upcoming legal changes that will require sellers to take a course in IDing people and such. Finally, the story noted that the authorities look to hit 100 percent compliance, but it never mentions if that ever happens. In any case, telling me an alcohol check happened isn’t telling me much of anything as a reader.

Lead 4: Here’s your lead. Guess the story:

Quote leads are always difficult for readers, because they lack context. Try this one:

“There is not a man under the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”

It’s a great line from a great man: Frederick Douglass uttered it in his 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” However, dropping it up at the front of a story doesn’t make it a lead.

Whether the quote comes from a source in the story, a movie, a poem, a song lyric or a famous person, as is the case here, the reader will likely be unable to determine the point of the piece. Quote leads are always dicey for exactly this reason: It feels like you were dropped into the middle of someone else’s conversation at a party.

By the way, you can find the whole story here and see how close you were to guessing the point of it, based on that lead.

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.

Dynamics of Writing

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Dynamics of News Reporting & Writing