Dynamics of News Reporting & Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Three quick things here:

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

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

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

The Popularity and Perils of the Police Blotter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the reasons why:

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

How to harness self-interest in service of improving story structure (A Throwback Post)

One of the hardest things to get my students to do is to work in the inverted pyramid. I don’t think I’m alone in this, given a) most of the stories they’ve read over the years are chronological instead of driven by descending order of importance and b) most of them tend to write expansive term papers for other classes, in which the focus is predetermined and being lengthy is rewarded.

To get them better focused, I often leverage the concept of self-interest: “Instead of thinking about what you, the writer, wants to tell me, the reader, consider thinking about what you would want to know most if you were reading this and then write it in a way that would best meet those needs.”

Sometimes, like this week, we have to go even more basic than that, which brings me to this week’s throwback post about our fire brief exercise. It’s amazing how quickly their viewpoint shifts when I have them thinking about their home being on fire instead of writing about a fire that happened elsewhere. I hope this will help you help your students find focus as well.

 

The Self-Interest Gap: Learning how to care less about what you want to write and more about what the audience wants to know

Self-interest is perhaps the one commonality humans share these days and it can be summed up in a simple question: “What’s in it for me?”

When you are on the “receiver” end of the process, it’s something we understand very easily. We know almost instinctively what is of value to us and what we care about right away. That said, when we put on the “sender” hat, we tend to focus more on what we want to tell people, forgetting that those people have their own set of interests we should be focused on.

Case in point, I asked the students to write a brief based on a press release about a fire. Here are the opening lines of a few of those briefs:

  • Firefighters responded to an engulfed single-story house shortly after 6 p.m. Sunday…
  • Boone County Firefighters responded to a call of a Sturgeon house fire…
  • Sunday evening, Boone County Firefighters responded to a call at 6pm on an electrical house fire…
  • A structure fire occurred at 520 S. Ogden in Sturgeon on the evening of Sunday…
  • Boone County Firefighters responded to a home engulfed in black smoke…

What we learn essentially in these things is either:

  1. Firefighters responded to a fire.
  2. A fire occurred somewhere.

If you were on the “receiver” end of the information, how much of this stuff would you care about? Of course the firefighters responded to the fire. That’s what they do. Also, fires occur everywhere from giant farm fields to the burn barrel in my yard. However, as a “sender” we tend to ignore that until we are forced to switch perspectives.

In thinking about this issue, I posed a question to the students meant to tap into that idea of self-interest: “Let’s say you get home after class and your roommate says, ‘Hey, your mom was trying to reach you. There was a fire at your house…’ What would be the first thing you would want to know?

Answers came quickly and easily:

  1. Is everyone OK?
  2. How bad was the fire?
  3. What happened out there?

In this case, a good response might be:

“The fire destroyed the house, but nobody got hurt.”

That’s the core of a good lead, with a strong focus on what matters most (big ticket item) and what people cared about most (answer to the first two sentences). When it’s your mom or your house, you have specific interests that a good source of information will attend to. If you can take that perspective and play on the audience’s self-interest, you can have a much sharper focus when it comes to telling the story directly and clearly.

You can call ‘This is How a Child Dies of Measles’ an act of ‘creative non-fiction,’ but where I’m from, we call it ‘lying’

The opening of the story about “your children” and “your” experience watching one of them die from the measles.

DISCUSSION STARTER: This is a good opportunity to have students read the story, “This is How a Child Dies of Measles,” before digging into this post to see how they feel about the approach, particularly if they are unaware of the truth of the story.

(The story is behind a paywall, so you might need to get creative to gain full access to it. Some school libraries have it on file, while some of you might have your own subscription. Maybe it’s even worth it to pay the $1 for six months thing and then cancel after the class. Just a head’s up in case you hadn’t planned for this.)

We did this a couple times over the years in my features classes, where they read the standard “almost journalism” stories of “Hack Heaven,” “Jimmy’s World” and “A Rape on Campus.”

Once they read through it and you make the reveal, a discussion about their thoughts, their concerns and maybe their willingness to do or not do something like this could be good. Then, if they want to pick through the blog post and argue with me, that could be fun, too.

 

THE LEAD: The story, “This is How a Child Dies of Measles,” by The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig has gained significant attention for the way in which it walks the readers through a child contracting the measles and eventually dying of it.

The problem? It’s fiction.

When I initially read Bruenig’s story, I was stunned: An Atlantic staff writer’s unvaccinated child had died of measles in the 2020s, and now she was writing about it? At the end of Bruenig’s piece, though, there’s an editor’s note: “This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.” That was the point when I sent a gift link to my mom group: “as far as I can tell this piece is fiction. What do we think about this choice? I am very conflicted!!!” My conflict stemmed from my concern that, though the piece was heavily researched, it was not a true story.

 

THE BACKGROUND: The story is written in second person and provides excruciatingly detailed information about everything from the way in which the illness can be passed among children, to the scene-setting elements of propping a kid up on a couch to watch “Bluey.”

Each paragraph provides the reader with a more and more desperate sense of inevitability in terms of “your” children suffering from to something we thought we had eradicated.

Given your son’s fever, runny nose, and evident discomfort, you feel a grim sense of resignation when his measles test comes back positive. You are, however, alarmed when you discover there’s nothing his doctors can do about it. Had he been seen by a doctor within 72 hours of his first exposure, they could have given him a prophylactic dose of the MMR vaccine to protect him from infection. But it’s too late for that now.

(SIDE NOTE: Few writing approaches are more jarring and risky than the use of second person. That’s true when it comes to simple things like, “UWO is hosting a blood drive and you should donate,” but even more so with big, complicated stories. 

I love Jay McInerney’s work from soup to nuts, but his novel “Bright Lights, Big City” is a massively painful read for me because “you” are the main character and “you” are doing stuff that, quite frankly, I can’t really imagine “me” doing, not the least of which is referring to a woman as “the sexual equivalent of fast food.”)

The finality of the piece is like one of those “Friday the 13th” movies: Just when you think this is all over, the terrifying specter rises again to finish off its victim:

For roughly eight years, you will believe that your family made it through this crisis without suffering a tragedy…

As the neurologist examines the results, she will note the presence of Radermecker complexes: periodic spikes in electrical activity that correlate with the muscle spasms that have become disruptive. She will order a test of his cerebrospinal fluid to confirm what she suspects: The measles never really left your son. Instead, the virus mutated and spread through the synapses between his brain cells, steadily damaging brain tissue long after he seemed to recover.

You will be sitting down in an exam room when the neurologist delivers the diagnosis of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a rare measles complication that leads to irreversible degeneration of the brain. There are treatments but no cure, the neurologist will tell you. She tells you that your son will continue to lose brain function as time passes, resulting in seizures, severe dementia, and, in a matter of two or three years, death.

After all that, you get kind of a semi-disclaimer that doesn’t exactly disabuse of you of the notion that this is real:

This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.

THE AUTHOR EXPLAINS: In a Q and A with the folks from the Nieman Lab, Bruenig walks through her approach to the topic and her decisions that led to the piece. She then makes kind of a sweeping statement about the greater good she feels she is doing with this fact-based fiction:

Owen: Where do you expect this piece to be shared and who do you expect to read it? Do you think people who choose not to vaccinate their kids will read it, and if so, how will they come across it? Have you heard any reactions from readers so far?

 

Bruenig: I have heard from several readers, one of whom had a heartbreaking experience with measles involving a family friend who died of the virus. People have been generally very encouraging! I have no doubt that there are a lot of people out there who are unhappy with the story or reject its premises, and they are entitled to their interpretations. I get it.
But my job is to report the truth about the world — and I use all kinds of literary, and narrative devices to do that. I do it because telling the truth is important in its own right, whether or not anyone finds it persuasive.

 

A FEW OF THE 932 REASONS THIS APPROACH WAS A BAD IDEA: First, let me say, I’m a huge fan of vaccines. Got all of mine, my kid got all of hers, my wife is a nurse who gets shot up like a dart board every year… This isn’t about the ethics or efficacy of vaccines, but rather the ethics and efficacy of this kind of journalism.

 

First Problem – Deception: Journalism is about fact-based reporting, which this piece has, but it’s also about providing information to the audience in an honest and trustworthy fashion. When we deceive the public, even if it’s for a good cause, we destroy the credibility we need to survive.

 

Bruenig says she’s reporting “the truth about the world,” which to me sounds both self-aggrandizing and disingenuous. She did rely on the facts as they related to the illness and she did draw from experts to understand how the illness works. However, and it bears repeating, WHAT SHE WROTE ABSOLUTELY DID NOT HAPPEN TO A KID IN THIS WAY.

 

This reminds me of when politicians would tell stories about “regular folk” who brought up dire concerns or who were traumatized by something specific. When journalists couldn’t find that “regular Joe Farmer” who lost everything thanks to a terrible government plan or that “regular Jane Business Owner” who had to give up her life savings to keep her staff paid, the politicians would always backtrack it and say it was an “amalgamation” of the stories they’d heard over the years.

 

In other words, they were lying, but hey… it’s the bigger picture that counts!

 

Then there’s this weird thing Chuck Schumer did, creating a fictional family based on the types of people he felt he represented:

 

 

I mean, yes, those kinds of people exist, and yes, those kinds of concerns are real, but again, you can’t just Frankenstein a bunch of pieces of people together and call it good.

Also, the supposed “disclaimer” doesn’t come right out and say, “This didn’t happen to one kid, but rather is a collection of all of the terrible stuff that can happen to an unvaccinated kid.” It’s almost like the author is trying to avoid accusations of writing fiction while doing as little as possible to make it clear that this literally did not happen.

When we are deceptive, we end up doing more harm than good. As I made the point in an earlier post, when my students read stories like “Jimmy’s World” and “A Rape on Campus,” they were angry, hurt, scared and otherwise emotionally wrought. When it came to light that Jimmy didn’t happen and that the attack on Jackie did not happen, they were really, really ticked off. They also felt less likely to trust the pieces they would read in the future.

As much as I prefer “non-denominational skepticism,” I definitely don’t want to prod it along with some borderline fraud.

Second Problem – Hyperbole: This comes back to the whole amalgamation of potential impacts issue, and how piling it all on to this one hypothetical kid is really overkill.

A number of the things she lists as symptoms of measles happen in many cases, ranging from the spots and fever to the cough and pain. However, when we get to the areas of pneumonia, we’re down to about 6 percent of all cases that end up here. Even more, the degenerative brain disorder that flares up years later happens to about 1 in 1,000 measles victims. In justifying the conclusion where “this is how your kid eventually dies,” Bruenig said:

I wanted to highlight this complication specifically because I sense that there’s widespread belief among anti-vax parents that since most healthy children will survive a measles infection, there are no important long-term consequences. But that’s simply not the case. Measles can seriously damage the body, and in rare and tragic cases, can result in death many years after the symptoms pass.

OK, but that’s a massive outlier for this disease and, again, that’s on top of the 83 other things that could or couldn’t happen that you saddled “your child” with in this story.

It would be like me stating, “I laid in the hospital, facing the grim specter of death. As the pain shot from my gallbladder, time ticked away in the day, each moment a chance I might die. Surgery, hours away, I pondered what would happen when my light was extinguished by an organ I’d long forgotten I had.”

Well, yes, I was in the hospital and yes, that gallbladder hurt like hellfire. And yes, if a person’s gallbladder ruptures, there is a chance the person goes septic and dies. However, that’s somewhere between 2 and 11 percent of all cases. I could make the argument that it was for the larger good that I painted this hyperbolic picture, hoping people will take gallbladder attacks seriously. However, I think most people would just say I was being a drama queen.

Third Problem – Laziness: I wholeheartedly believe in telling stories in journalism for the greater good of society. I also know there are an unfortunate number of children who have died after contracting measles. Telling a story about these deaths might inspire people to vaccinate, to change their minds about the severity of the illness or otherwise impact a broader discussion on the topic.

So, don’t be lazy. Go find an ACTUAL story of a measles death that happened to a REAL kid and tell that story.

Here’s one that even involves that rare illness that killed Bruenig’s hypothetical child:

That’s not to say you need to tell the story in this kind of staid news format. You can do more of the narrative work, using the parental recall, photos, medical records and expert interviews to paint a more vivid picture.

Strong interviews with the parents of a child can give you that emotional angst of anxiety, fear and despair. Spending time looking at photos can give you the “favorite blanket” and “watching Bluey” details that paint a picture in the readers’ minds. The experts can walk you through the files so you can describe in detail how each cough wracked the child with pain or how the fever created a mix of burning and chills that couldn’t be sated.

This takes a ton of work. You have to find a case where a kid died, you have to find parents willing to talk, you have to find experts who understand what happened to the kid and you have to spend time gathering granular-level elements through observation. Doing this also puts the reporter at risk of some significant emotional trauma, as they relive the death of a child in such a gut-wrenching way.

So, I can kind of see how it’s more appealing to just go to a handful of experts who can give you the clinical stuff and then just whip together a “Hypothetical ‘You’ Mom” character to tug at the emotional heartstrings of the readers, without fully acknowledging that’s what you did.

However, if you want the reward of the tough story, you really have to take the risks associated with the tough story. Doing it this way only codifies the certainty of people who don’t already believe you and undercuts your standing with people who do.

“He put himself in that situation:” The reason why people can justify the shooting death of Alex Pretti

In reading through the articles and posts related to Saturday’s shooting death of Alex Pretti in Minnesota, I forgot the most basic rule associated with the internet:

“Don’t read the comments.”

However, in digging into the comments and hopping amongst media bubbles, I found a few trends in terms of people who usually support the Second Amendment and the right to carry and how they squared the circle involving Pretti’s death:

  • Pretti was threatening the officers with a gun, and the officers had the right to defend themselves.
  • Pretti put himself in harm’s way as a purposeful instigator, thus leading to his untimely death.
  • Pretti had the right to carry and the right to record their actions, BUT when he chose to interfere with law enforcement, he forced the officers’ hand in terms of use of force.

(There are tons of other claims, including one weird-as-hell, AI-photo with Pretti wearing a female body suit made of tattoos and a set of curled horns, but this trio is among the most common.)

If you are asking the question right now of, “How in the hell can people believe this stuff, when we can all see the DAMNED VIDEO?” I have an answer that starts with some research I did about 20 years ago that reflected this dichotomy perfectly.

A few of the front pages that I still have from these two shooting deaths. I was the adviser for the Ball State Daily News in the early 2000s.

THE HISTORY: During my first year at Ball State University as the student media adviser for the Daily News, the campus had a number of students who died in some shocking ways. The two at the heart of this discussion are Michael McKinney and Karl Harford.

In November 2003, McKinney was  21-year-old student at BSU. He spent a Saturday night drinking with friends at some near-campus bars and had planned to stay at one of those friends’ homes, rather than driving home that night.

In his inebriated state, he went to the wrong home and banged on the back door to get let in. The home owner called 9-1-1 to report this person trying to force their way into her home and Ball State police officer Robert Duplain responded. Duplain was 24 years old and had been on the force for 7 months. He had not yet attended the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy when this incident occurred.

Duplain entered the fenced backyard of the home through the only access point and confronted McKinney, who attempted to flee. Duplain shot several times, hitting McKinney with four rounds and killing him.

Subsequent investigations found no wrong-doing on the part of Duplain, who returned to the force briefly before resigning.

Less than six months after that shooting, on March 6, 2004, 20-year-old Ball State student Karl Harford was found shot to death in his car, which was abandoned on the city’s east side.

Police investigations determined that Harford was at a campus party when he offered three individuals a ride home. Experts later stated that Harford had a blood alcohol content of 0.16, which would be twice the legal limit for driving and would have likely impaired his judgment. One of the men had a gun, which he used to force Harford to drive to an abandoned building. The three men forced Harford to his knees, robbed him of $2 and shot him to death. The trio then stuffed his body into the backseat of the car and fled.

Police eventually arrested Brandon Patterson, 18, Damien Blaine Sanders, 21, and a 14-year-old juvenile in connection with the killings. Patterson and Sanders had previous interactions with law enforcement that involved incidents of car theft and gun possession. Patterson pleaded guilty to a “robbery resulting in severe bodily injury” charge and was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Sanders pleaded guilty to robbery and murder and received 85 years. The 14-year-old was held for 15 months in a juvenile facility and subsequently released.

THE RESPONSES: The Daily News covered both shootings extensively and the online coverage drew readership that was disproportionately large in comparison to all other stories the paper had posted at that time. In addition, the comment sections under the stories for these pieces were extremely active.

Many of the responses to the McKinney story had people offering sympathy to Duplain as well as McKinney. People were saying things like, “Rest in Peace, Mikey,” but also things like, “I feel bad for that officer who has to live with this for the rest of his life.” Others noted how this was a “senseless tragedy.”

What I remember most, however, was the way in which a good number of posters were trying to hang some, if not all, of the blame on McKinney. People had commented that he was “way too drunk” and that “he put himself in that situation.” Some people speculated that he had something in his hand that could have been mistaken as a gun. Others noted that he “rushed” at Duplain, leaving the officer no choice but to fire his weapon.

Things kept getting uglier as time went on, with people saying negative things about McKinney and even how he was raised. I still remember one post that McKinney’s sister, Rosie, put on one of the stories, begging people to just stop this, as her parents were seeing all of these negative statements. The posters then turned on her.

In the case of Harford, the commenting was much more cut and dried. Harford was the victim and “those cold-blooded murderers should pay.” Rarely did any of the comments deviate from this pattern and the few that did were quickly shouted down by other posters.

THE STUDY: In all honesty, these shootings devastated the Ball State community, and I know my heart just bled for these families who lost these children. As is the case with most things, when I am in a state of difficulty, I tend to dig into the topic and do some writing (thanatology researchers call this “instrumental grieving), so I looked into doing a study. My buddy Pritch and I decided to look at why it was people reacted so differently to these killings via their online media posts.

I won’t bore you with the details of the study, but if you want to download it and read it, you can grab it here.

Sufficient to say, the statistical data bore out the general vibe we sensed: People in the Harford postings were much more dichotomous in where they placed sympathy (Harford, his family, his friends) and where they placed blame (Patterson, Sanders and the 14-year-old). Meanwhile, the sympathy and blame were much more spread in the case of the the McKinney posters who were much more willing to blame McKinney for his own demise while also feeling sympathy for Duplain.

The “why” came to us from two areas of research: Human cognitive processing and the way in which news stories (especially crime stories) tend to follow “scripts.”

The Harford situation fit a stereotypical news-as-script pattern to a T: White kid, trying to do a good thing, meets with criminal black element that is his undoing. Police find the evil-doers who are subsequently punished.

The McKinney situation doesn’t do that. McKinney was a white kid who got shot by a white cop. Nobody was arrested and nobody eventually was punished for it.

For the people reading this story, there was suddenly a cognitive disconnect: Good white people don’t get killed by white cops for no reason. Also, deaths like this need some form of resolution, in which blame and punishment are effectively assigned. This situation didn’t fit into the expected patterns of action, so people desperately sought SOMETHING the rationalize why this happened.

(NOTE: We couldn’t code for race, but a number of people did mention their own race in posts and it was almost entirely a white audience. We did see that amplification of  both the racial element between the situations as well as finding it easier to sympathize with Duplain as as well. We had a whole section on that, but any academic will tell you, a lot gets cut on the way to publication, thanks to anonymous reviewers.)

When something terrible happens and it doesn’t fit the patterns pre-established in people’s minds, they need to make sense of it and that usually means they bend reality to fit their assumptions:

O’Sullivan and Durso (1984) found that when information being processed ran counter to the established understanding of how a situation was supposed to unfold, individuals did not alter their perception of what should be happening. Instead, they attempted to cognitively reposition the new information to make it congruent with the prior script.

Goleman’s (1985) work also shows that when individuals are faced with an anxiety-provoking alteration to their standard scripts, they actively seek ways to block information or rationalize it in a manner that allows them to return to their comfort zone.

In short, people aren’t going to change their minds when something like this happens. They’re going to change reality to fit what they believe.

BACK TO PRETTI: In bringing this around full circle, a lot more of what people who want to rationalize Pretti’s death are saying starts to make sense. In this world view at least a few of these things are held as fact:

  • Law enforcement officers are the “good guys.”
  • People have a legal right to safely carry guns, as per the Second Amendment.
  • White people and U.S. citizens = good, Non-white and non-citizens = bad

So, when you have a white, citizen who is legally carrying a fire arm that gets killed by law enforcement officials, now what? The thinking has to start shifting the reality.

Just like McKinney, Pretti must have done something wrong to provoke the shooting.

Just like McKinney, Pretti shouldn’t have been there in the first place, so it’s really on him.

Just like Duplain, these officers clearly had to act defensively because they had a reasonable fear of what this individual might do.

The more I read the Pretti coverage, the more I found myself finding parallels to what happened with McKinney.

  • In both cases, stories trying to find “more dirt” on the victim hit the press: A recent story on Pretti said he had previously scuffled with the feds, leading to a broken rib. (DHS says it has no record of this.) A story after McKinney’s death said he had previous encounters with police, including one leading to a charge being filed against him. (That turned out to be a ticket he received for trying to steal a STOP sign for his room.)
  • In both cases, the families were pleading with people to stop smearing their kids. The NY Times presented this piece quoting those who knew Pretti, while I remember what Rosie McKinney went through in regard to the postings about her brother.
  • In both cases, the official narrative painted the shooters as having absolutely no choice but to respond in the way they did.

Even more, as evidence continues/continued to come out in cases like these, people continue to find ways to bend the reality to fit their narrative. For example, a preliminary DHS investigation did not state that Pretti “brandished” his weapon, directly conflicting with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s original statements. However, that hasn’t stopped people from pressing the point in comment sections that Pretti put himself in harm’s way or that the officers had no choice but to shoot.

Then, there are people like this guy at NewsMax who are stretching reality a little more.

This is why no matter which side of the issue continues to gain ground, there will still be people with a strong attachment to seeing things the way that best fits their prior beliefs. Expecting something different is to expect human nature to change.

Random Journalistic Thoughts After The Shooting Death of Alex Pretti

(The front page of the AP online story about the memorial to Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed in Minnesota on Saturday morning.)

One of the first things I tell student media practitioners whenever a major event hits is not to just be part of the noise. If you have something unique to say in a way that matters to your specific audience, do so. If not, you are just as likely to be subtracting from the sum of human knowledge as you are in adding to it.

The death of Alex Pretti on the frozen streets of Minnesota brings out in me so many more thoughts and emotions than I can honestly and fairly express right now, so I’m doing my best to follow the credo I outlined above. Please know it doesn’t mean I am not feeling what so many others have already said, written, shown or expressed.

What comes below are the bits and bites of my thoughts as a journalism professor, former media adviser and citizen of these United States that might be helpful to you in your classrooms and student newsrooms today as you discuss the killing and the coverage:

 

JOURNALISTS (OF ALL KIND) ARE MY HEROES: They say that journalism is the first draft of history, and the work these folks in Minnesota are doing is absolutely incredible, given the great personal risk people are apparently faced with at this point and time.

The television coverage has been both deep and restrained in terms of saying only what is known, but also not sugarcoating things. That this is so well done is doubly impressive given that it’s happening on a weekend.

When most media outlets hit the “weekend shift,” you end up with a lineup of a recent grad anchoring the desk, providing whatever the regular staff canned up on Friday along with a lite-brite on some Saturday Festival. Add that to an intern holding down the wire desk, some rando doing the weather and an overly excited 14-year-old doing sports, and it’s a recipe for disaster if something really big happens. The networks out there managed to “scramble the bombers” and get everyone doing big work in difficult circumstances and trying times.

In particular, KARE 11 has always been a top-flight news organization that demonstrated the ability to cover all of the things involving the Twin Cities and beyond, and this situation is no exception. Here’s the lineup of stories that KARE has covered since the shooting.

On the front lines has been Jana Shortal, an accomplished broadcast journalist with several decades on the job. She not only covered the scene, but then returned to the studio having been pepper-sprayed (or whatever the hell they’re using) while trying to comply with officers’ commands:

(SIDE NOTE: The woman in the middle is Lauren Leamanczyk, who is featured as one of the media pros in the “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” textbook. She’s also one of my former students, which is another mind-boggling part of this whole thing for me.)

I’m always a fan of student media and the folks at the Minnesota Daily also made sure these moments of history were captured to inform the present and remind the future of what has happened here. The photography, the stories, the videos and the relentless pursuit of information has been exceptionally impressive.

Above all else, the citizen journalists, who would likely count Pretti as one of their own, put their lives on the line to gather the videos that have showcased exactly what happened during this situations and others like it.

High-end media outlets like the Wall Street Journal have the capability to stitch together frames from a dozen or more videos to showcase exactly what happened here or in the shooting of Renee Good. However, they wouldn’t have those videos without the brave souls who availed themselves of their First Amendment rights at a time in which individual rights seem to be less and less inalienable.

 

DON’T BE AFRAID TO POKE A SOURCE: Just because a source is saying something, it doesn’t follow that they are making sense or answering a question. Far too often, we fall into the “get a quote” mode when it comes to doing our work, like we’re checking off a chore or picking up a dozen eggs at the grocery store. This is where the concept of active listening comes into play. If you are merely focused on getting the information from the source, and not really listening to that information in real time, you aren’t going to get what your audience needs.

Here is a perfect example of a journalist poking back at a source. Dana Bash had Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino on air for a 20-minute interview, in which she was trying to get answers to a few basic questions regarding the shooting. Far too often, situations like this escalate like one of those stupid sports talking head shows, with two people screaming at each other. 

In this case, Bash was respectful and focused. She admitted missteps in her own language while still pushing Bovino to actually answer a question. Literally, any question:

She did make points that a) what Bovino was saying was not what she was seeing, b) she might not have been privy to the same type/volume of evidence Bovino had as a law-enforcement officer and c) she would be willing to accept Bovino’s statements if he could provide proof they were accurate.

This is the essence of journalism: Report, question, verify, disseminate.

 

CHECK YOUR SOURCES: In listening to the press conferences and press appearances of Bovino and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, it is clear they have a common approach and shared vision of what happened in this shooting. That doesn’t mean they should be quoted with impunity. 

In the case of Bovino, his version of ICE and DHS situations has repeatedly been called into question by those who were present at certain events. In one case, a federal judge in a civil suit found that Bovino’s statements related to ICE actions in Chicago were “evasive” and “not credible,” adding Bovino was “outright lying” about his actions. In regard his comments regarding the Pretti situation, Bovino stated the presence of federal officers was related to a “violent, illegal alien” in the area, something that Minnesota’s Department of Corrections has strongly disputed.

Noem has frequently been accused of misrepresenting reality in terms of deportations and crime. The numbers related to how many people have been captured during her tenure, what crimes the have committed and how successful and welcomed ICE agents have been strongly contradicted through even some cursory reporting. Also, a civil court filing in this case includes testimony from two witnesses who dispute Bovino and Noem’s statements, including one deposition by the “woman in pink” who was literally feet away from Pretti during the shooting.

Saying a politician has lied is kind of a “Dog Bites Man” story, but in the case of both of these situations, it’s a bit more. If it’s any indication, Minnesota’s Department of Corrections felt these folks were so wrong so often, the DOC launched a website for the “combating of DHS misinformation.”

This is also a perfect point to remind everyone why “said” is my best friend. I don’t know what these two people think, believe or know about this situation, nor would I feel comfortable stating the things they have said as unattributed facts. However, putting out there that Noem or Bovino “said” certain things and letting my audience compare that to their own reality is exactly why I cherish attributions with “said” on them.

 

DEALING WITH LANGUAGE CHOICES: The way in which people are trying to frame this situation comes down a lot to the language choices we’re seeing out there. This is also why parroting a source (in non-quote format) is a bad idea.

Bovino referred to Pretti as the “suspect” in the situation, a term that implies someone sought for a crime and isn’t usually used to refer to someone shot multiple times on the ground by law enforcement officials. When Bash referred to Pretti as a “victim,” Bovino attempted to invert that term to apply to the border patrol officers, who he deemed “victims” of whatever he thought Pretti was doing.

Language coming out of the administration has included the term “illegal” and “alien” to refer to the individual the officers sought that day, which, again, paints a picture different from terms like “migrants” or “immigrants.”

Whatever terms you choose to use in situations like this, you’re going to be shaping how people look at a situation, so you want to both follow AP style when applicable and also make sure you are remaining neutral

Beyond that, you want to make sure your terms are correct. For example, I’ve read stories that refer to the federal law enforcement officers as “ICE” and “Border Patrol.” Officers in these groups are both housed under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, but the terms that describe them are not interchangeable. A good primer on who does what and how they differ can be found here.

A number of opinion pieces, social media posts and so forth have referred to the shooting death of Pretti with a variety of terms, including “assassination,” “execution” and “murder.” Each of these terms is defined specifically, both in law and in journalistic style, so no matter how you feel about what happened, you need to take care in using these terms.

Here’s AP’s version of what’s what:

If we consider AP style our rule book, we need to follow the rules, even when we don’t like them.

Finally with language, there is something to be said about how people say things so that something can be factually accurate while also being deliberately misleading. Here’s an example of a statement from Noem’s press conference:

“An individual approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.”

There are two facts in that sentence that are accurate, at least to a reasonable degree:

  • Pretti, the “individual,” approached a scene with U.S. Border Patrol officers at it.
  • Pretti was armed with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.

However, putting them together in this way could lead a reasonable person to think that Pretti approached a group of officers with his gun present in a way that threatened the officers. Noem later used the term “brandished” the gun, although every attempt to get Bovino to provide proof of such a thing led to a dead end.

The point here is why we don’t a) take things people say at face value without proving them for ourselves and b) don’t extrapolate beyond what people tell us. I often tell students that if a police officer says something like “alcohol was believed to be a factor in the crash” or “the driver was operating while under the influence,” you don’t want to say the person was a “drunk driver” as those are two different things. The driver might not have been legally drunk or the driver might have been baked out of their mind on weed.

 

NOBODY KNOWS NOTHING: I keep going back to that saying because I remember how reporting on crimes and disasters was always a random lottery of “will I have to write a correction tomorrow?” moments. As much effort as journalists put into getting things right, nobody really has any idea of what we will find out as this continues to unfold. It also doesn’t help now that anyone with a phone and an internet connection can say anything they want with absolute certainty, regardless of its veracity, and we all get to hear it.

“Nobody knows nothing” has always been true, as new witnesses could emerge, more video could show up, interviews with the agents have yet to be completed and more. Hell, we’re still trying to figure out if Babe Ruth really called his shot in the World Series almost 100 years later, so I have no doubt that things are going to evolve here.

I also have no doubt that various groups involved in any situation have their own motives for releasing or withholding information from the public. To that end, a lot of what we learn will be based less on the totality of information, but rather the totality of AVAILABLE information.

This is why we need reporters, not stenographers, in the media today. Good journalists will always find a way to pry loose a fact, debunk a statement filled with “bovine excrement” or get a source to finally explain what’s what. When they do, we all tend to be better for it.

Get the name of the dog and the brand of the beer: Why details matter in journalism.

I have no idea who said it first, but I always attribute my first exposure to the journalism maxim in the headline to the legendary George Hesselberg from the Wisconsin State Journal. It’s become one of those things like, “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out,” where we all heard it from somewhere and it relates to a larger truth about our field. (Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark even wanted to name his book, “Get the Name of the Dog,” so trust me, if you haven’t heard it before, it’s out there.)

It popped up in my mind a couple times this week, particularly after Indiana won the national championship on Monday and a reporter asked coach Curt Cignetti about his reference to cracking open a cold one in celebration:

Aside from giving a massive platform to Upland Brewery in Bloomington, Indiana, and earning himself a lifetime supply of suds to boot, Cignetti helped fill in a detail that would likely make for a great story or 500 the next day.

Despite my father’s theory that the difference between a good beer and a bad beer is three of them, the brands of beer can convey a lot about the person drinking them and how they perceive themselves.

Consider this scene from the original “The Fast and The Furious:”

Rob Cohen, who directed the first film, said he felt Corona had the L.A. vibe he was going for with the film, so he put it in. In spite of not paying a dime for that product placement, Corona ended up with more than $15 million in free advertising throughout the series.

(SIDE NOTE: I’m working on a “Snide Guide to Beer Choice” that falls along the line of the “Bitter Personal Analysis of Your Font Choices” that we did a few years back. We’ll see if it gets there…)

Another reason I thought of that maxim came when I saw this press release from the local fire department:

The lack of a name for the dog isn’t the only problem with this release, as it’s got a number of holes that leave me scratching my head:

How bad is it? We can argue what “heavy” means and what it doesn’t, but I always have trouble when I’m faced with a comparative term instead of a concrete one. Think about it like this: The word “tall” is comparative. Are you tall at 6-foot-1? Well, if you’re in a kindergarten class, you’re a giant. If you’re on an NBA team, you’re a point guard at best.

This is where details matter: If you told me the house was uninhabitable due to that damage, I’d be closer to understanding how heavy it was. If you told me how much damage was done via a financial estimate (The fire caused $150,000 damage.), I’d be closer as well. If you told me the house and its contents were a total loss, I’d be OK as well. However, we lack details to fully understand this.

What else can you tell me about the house? I’ve got a two-story wood-framed dwelling, but that’s it. We tend to measure houses based on size (square footage) or rooms (a four-bedroom, two-bath home). That gives us a size of scope. It’s also important to understand if this was packed among a dozen other homes or by itself.

I did a quick Zillow search to see what I could find and this gave me a better sense of what we’re looking at. Still, we need a bit more help here than, “It was a house. It was on fire.”

The occupants: The first time we hear about them, we hear they weren’t home when this happened. Then, we find out that they apparently were given shelter at Jeff’s on Rugby, which is a local eating establishment. What I don’t know is how many there are, who they are or when they showed up. I also don’t know what’s going to happen to them next.

I understand that not all of this would have likely made any press release from the fire folks, but it is information I would expect to see in a story of any kind on this topic, as these are the details people likely want to know.

To that end, here are a few tips:

Get as many details as you can, sort them out later: I always assumed that a good editor was going to put me through the paces on what I had and what I didn’t have while they read my story. I remember at least one case where Hess himself asked me if I knew the names of the parents of a kid who had passed. I didn’t, and I really should have, so I had to go back out and get them somehow.

In another case, I had someone ask a coroner what was the caliber of the gun used to kill someone on campus. While that might seem prurient or pointless, I wanted to know because some guns make bigger noises than others when fired and supposedly “nobody heard anything” while this incident was taking place.

For all the times we ask really stupid questions like, “Your husband just died in a giant pork processing machine… How do you feel about that?” the least we can do is ask for details that might lead us to better storytelling later.

 

Put yourself in the shoes of the reader: One of the best exercises we do each year is a fire brief, in which we have the class members each write a short piece off of a fire department press release similar to this one. They almost all read exactly like this release.

Then, I’ll ask one of the kids in the class, “Let’s say you go home after class and your roommate says, ‘Hey, your mom was trying to reach you. There was a fire at your house.'” What would you most want to know FIRST?

The answers become obvious:

  • Is anyone dead or hurt?
  • How bad was the fire?
  • What the heck happened?

Then, we go back to the releases and start reading them aloud and they realize they either didn’t include ANY of that stuff or they put it in the wrong spots.

One of the best ways to get journalism done well is to think of the people for whom you are doing it. Start with their needs and interests and work backwards into your reporting.

EXERCISE TIME: Go pull a press release or a story and look for places where you think key details are missing. It could be “How many kids were in the class that won the award?” or “What made it harder to de-ice the roads this time?” It could even be, “So was it a Diet Coke or a Diet Pepsi?” See what’s not there and make a case for reasons you would want those details.

Want to be a better journalism professor this year? Learn how to weld

It’s not “stacked dimes” as they say in welding, but I was ridiculously proud of my first weld under Gene’s guidance. I need to figure out how to get this into my next textbook, somehow… 

If the headline seems a little click-baity for you, I totally get it, but hang with me for a bit here, and I promise this will make sense.

If welding isn’t your idea of a good time (or if you’re already a master welder on top of your professorial gig), the same thing can apply to any one of a number of skills that fit the following parameters:

It must be something you actually care about doing and doing well. For me, I not only wanted to learn to weld because I thought it was an amazing skill that seemed interesting, but I needed to learn how to do it to get my classic Mustang back into shape. Half the front end started rotting out somewhere in the past 15 years I’ve owned it and I can’t really afford to have someone go through it and rebuild it at about $175 an hour. Thus, I NEED this skill and I have to do it well.

It reminds me of my first stats class in my doctoral program: I’m in an undergrad pit class with a few master’s students thrown in for good measure. It’s at 8 a.m. and members of the men’s basketball team and one-third of the football team are there, barely paying attention. I’m writing things down like I’m getting a list of instructions on how to disarm a bomb I’m sitting on top of.

The difference was in value: They didn’t care about the topic and just needed a passing grade to survive. For me, I HAD TO HAVE this skill if I was ever going to get my Ph.D.  That’s the level of “care” I’m talking about here.

 

It must have an actual, tangible outcome that can be measured in terms of quality and accuracy. I spent the past 20 years or so learning how to refinish furniture. The tangible outcome was the beat up dresser or mangled table that I restored to something more useful and less ugly. The same thing is true of a task like knitting or sewing: You can have beautifully made clothes or things that look like your cat was playing with a ball of yarn or string.

Like most skills, practice can improve the outcome, which is something that can be measured either concretely (the outcome of a statistical analysis) or with an eyeballing of the item (the table looks nice, great or amazing). You need to pick something where tasks lead to outcomes and those outcomes can easily range from poor to perfect.

 

THE BACKSTORY ON ALL THIS: When I went to start the Mustang up this summer, I realized that the battery tray under the hood had rusted to the point where the battery was actually going to fall through a hole in the car. As I started trying to disassemble that part of the car, I realized this was all constructed with spot welds in the factory.

In short, I had to drill out all the welds, pry the metal pieces apart and then weld a new piece into place.

By the time I got into it, I realized there were a lot more pieces that needed to be replaced if this car was going to survive, so I couldn’t just get someone to come over and weld one piece for me. I needed to learn how to weld myself or else this was never getting done.

The tech out here offers great programs, but they tend to teach the classes when I’m at work. Furthermore, I’m told that most of that welding is meant for thick steel, like building car frames or working on giant pipes and stuff. I needed to learn how to do thin sheet metal welding.

The internet is always helpful, but it wasn’t enough in this case, so I put out a plea to folks around me via Facebook for a welding instructor. I offered to pay whatever they wanted for an afternoon or two, explaining I knew my way around tools, but had no welding experience.

This is Gene. He totally rules.

A nice guy named Gene agreed to help out. He was probably about 10-15 years younger than I was and he had learned welding by doing it with his dad. He picked up his certifications later, adding tools to his toolbox, but he retained that simple, “Watch, understand, now do” approach from his dad’s tutelage.

So, one rainy Saturday in August, Gene came over to my garage and helped me learn the basics of welding, which are pretty inconsequential for most of you here. That said, here are the things I picked up from that experience that I honestly think might be helpful for improving (or maintaining a high standard of) teaching:

Remember what it’s like to be afraid

When I decided I was going to make the leap into welding, I picked up what I thought was a decent used welder, some safety gear and a welding station. It then sat in the garage for more than two months as I read every book and watched every “expert” on YouTube to figure out what to do.

The truth of the matter was, I was scared.

The fear definitely came from at least one video titled something like “Five ways to kill yourself by making a mistake while welding.” However, it was deeper than that, in that I wanted to be good at it, the advice on how to get good was so varied and everything about this process seemed foreign to me.

When was the last time you were honestly afraid of being terrible at something important to you? How hard was it for you to attempt doing that thing? Also, if you were in a room full of other people that you automatically assumed were better at this thing than you are, how tense and awkward are you feeling?

Even when it was just Gene and me, I had trouble pulling the trigger on the welder. He never gave me any sense he’d make fun of me or tell me how bad I was at this, but I still didn’t want to be the guy who he talks about when he meets up with his buddies later and says, “If you think YOU wasted your day, lemme tell you about…”

As much as we say we can all remember being a student in class or being at the beginning of our journey as journalists, it’s a whole different thing to actually be AT that point. Furthermore, maybe we were better at journalism than these kids perceive themselves to be, so it’s gotta be even worse at that point.

 

There is a difference between a rule and a preference

Various areas of education have specific rules to them that are unbreakable, while other areas have malleable rules, strongly suggested approaches and nuanced levels of preference. As I have aged in this field, I’ve found that the more I lean toward teaching the latter, students tend to crave the former.

As a welding student, I could understand why: Rules provide certainty. Rules lead to specific outcomes. Rules are easier than nuance.

In short, rules rule.

In watching all of the welding videos, I went looking for rules. There were rules as to how to set up my welding helmet so I could see my arc, but not go blind. There were rules as to how big of a hole I should drill in sheet metal to make the appropriate plug weld. There were rules as to the type of wire to use, the settings on the welder, the way to prepare the metal for welding and more.

The problem? All of these rules that each welder told me ran contrary to what every other welder told me. All of which left me more confused and upset when I would try to replicate their work and end up with really miserable results.

Gene was great because he helped me see that a lot of what these guys were calling “rules” were just preferences based on how they had learned or what they felt was best. Even more, breaking any of those rules wouldn’t leave me blind and on fire with giant holes blown through the sides of my car.

The only rules that really mattered, he explained, came down to looking for specific things that happened and reacting accordingly. When the wire sticks to your weld, you’re too far away. When you blow a hole in the metal, you have your settings too high. Start dark on the helmet and move up until you can see but it doesn’t feel overwhelming.

I know that a lot of folks like to lay down a lot of rules with rubrics and scales and “do-this, not-that” requirements, and that can help in some cases. However, I also know that as a student, I started feeling trapped by the rules, especially those that didn’t really work out all that well.

My goal for this year has been to stick with only the rules that are absolute, don’t-break-them-or-else-level rules. The personal preferences, I’m going to explain and moderate with the idea of making sure they hang onto the big things and stop freaking out about everything else.

 

Explain “how” and “why” a lot

Expertise provides you with a sense of internal logic that allows you to accomplish tasks easily and seamlessly without a lot of thought going into them.

In furniture restoration, it can be picking what grit of sanding disks I use to remove layers of age and crud. In the pinball world, it’s tracking circuits through a diagram to determine which ones aren’t making contact. In journalism, it’s knowing which words to use, in which circumstances, to best tell the story that needs to be told.

The problem for most of us is that we’ve attained the level of expertise in our field, so much so, that we don’t always slow down to explain ourselves to the students. What is natural for the professor needs to be learned in a high-detail way for the student.

Almost from the beginning, Gene was preemptively offering me “how” and “why” answers about the settings on the machine, the pattern he used in “stacking dimes” on a particular weld and how best to move the puddle along. That not only made me feel more confident, but it also helped me feel comfortable asking additional “how” and “why” questions on things that still confused me.

Students, generally, don’t want to ask questions because they fear looking stupid, or because they assume if no one else is asking a question, nobody else must have that question. When those questions are about how something works or why we approach a concept in a certain way, it’s crucial to make sure they get answered one way or the other.

If you’re waiting for a student to ask a question, you’re likely waiting on the corner for a bus that had its route cancelled, so it’s really helpful to proactive in getting the “hows” and “whys” covered.

 

Encouragement makes all the difference

Contrary to all the click-bait ads I’d received on social media since mentioning an interest in welding, I knew I wasn’t going to be a master welder in one day. I also knew I had tried a few things before Gene agreed to teach me and they looked like absolute garbage to me.

What Gene did, which is something I have to constantly remind myself to do in a classroom, is provide encouraging feedback.

He looked at my earliest attempts and was able to tell me what was wrong with them, in terms of the settings on the machine and the speed of my welding. However, he also pointed out the things I should keep doing, as they were promising first efforts.

“You’re balancing it right,” he told me as he referenced the gun. “You’ve also got a good angle when you’re dragging.”

When I did my welds with him, he was quick to offer encouraging pointers. It wasn’t, “This part is good, this part is bad,” but rather  “Can you see how much cleaner this one is than your last one? That’s great!” He also helped me understand why my welder wouldn’t produce the immaculate welds I was seeing online.

“You’re using flux-core wire,” he told me. “Those guys aren’t showing you that. They’re using a gas set up, which is always going to have less spatter. You aren’t spattering any more than anyone else using flux.”

As a struggling student, all I wanted to know was that I didn’t suck and that I wasn’t a lost cause. When I applied that thought process to lead writing or inverted-pyramid briefs, I realized that even just a “Hey, good verb choice there!” could make a huge difference.

The thing I realized about Gene’s encouragement was that when he was ready to leave, I not only felt like I COULD do some welding on my own, but I WANTED to persist in the activity. I had an excitement about trying things to make them better and wanting to send him pictures of what I had done. It wasn’t about impressing Gene, but rather showing him what he had brought out of me and thanking him for it.

If I can do that for one or two kids this year, I’ll call it a win.

Have a great start to the semester!

Vince (a.k.a. the guy who loves to weld now)

My first four-side pipe weld. That sucker isn’t coming apart any time soon. Gene said it looked amazing, which makes it even better. 

Blog Post No. 1,000: A Bit of Heartfelt Gratitude to Sage

When Sage had me start this blog eight years ago to promote my reporting book, I did so under two strict conditions:

  1. I had total control over the content. They couldn’t demand, require or censor anything I decided to post here.
  2. This was not going to be a “rah-rah site” that just pimped out my books or blindly praised the company that published them.

With those two things in mind, I decided to dedicate the 1000th post of this blog to the company that changed my life 12 years ago and that has my loyalty for as long as they’re willing to have it. Please consider this an honest, heart-felt endorsement. 

My bookshelf the day I got my very first copy of my very first book for Sage. At the time, I couldn’t believe I had three titles with my name on them, and one with my name only on it. 

 

I can still see the strange confluence of events that happened at an AEJMC convention in Washington, D.C. that really altered the trajectory of my life and led me down a path that has made me ridiculously happy as a teacher, a writer and a colleague.

I was a few years into what seemed to be a terrible professional decision to come home to Wisconsin and teach at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. I had given up a job where people loved me, I had a sparse teaching load and I advised one of the best college newspapers in the country for a position that required me to give up rank, take a pay cut and work with at least one “colleague” who had publicly expressed disdain for my hiring.

(Another colleague told me that in the meeting where my hiring was announce, at a pay level that was a 25 percent cut from where I was coming, mind you, this individual stated, “For that kind of money, we could have gotten someone good.” Eeesh.)

The biggest problem I was facing was teaching basic media writing to students across a wide array of disciplines, including advertising, public relations, print-style news, broadcast, interactive web management and more. My background in news was seen as a bias and the books I could offer as texts basically crapped all over everything that wasn’t a newspaper reporting job. Thus, I set out to find a text that would make for a more equitable discussion of media while still imbuing students with the core elements of media writing that most news-writing texts professed.

Matt Byrnie, who was an acquisitions editor staffing the Sage booth at AEJ that year, asked me to sketch out a concept for a book like the one I needed and then meet with him later in the conference. Despite having my name on two books already at that point in time, I had no idea what to do here. That said, in the middle of an interminable panel session, I found a bit of hotel stationary and started scratching out a few concepts. The idea wasn’t necessarily WHAT needed to be taught, but rather HOW to approach this concept.

The rough sketch of what I pitched to Matt Byrnie still hangs in front of me every day in the office. It reminds me of what I promised I’d do and how important it felt to do it well at that point.

After our meeting, Matt seemed enthused, but I’d been there before with people in publishing: At first they’re all excited and then they ghost you like you owe them money. Still, I reached out to Matt and pitched the book. He not only agreed to do this one, but he also had me pitch a second book at that point as well.

He hung in there with me as I fumbled about the process of meeting the needs of his production team while I tried to stick as close as I could to the “rules of the road” I built on that bit of scratch paper. He was enthusiastic and supportive, kind and decent. He made me feel like what I was doing mattered, not just because it could sell X units for a corporate overlord, but because he thought it could add value to the field.

If it had all started and stopped with Matt showing faith in me, I would be fine with Sage, but not nearly as loyal as I am. Shortly before “Dynamics of Media Writing” launched, Matt reached out to me and told me he had been promoted and that my book would now be in the hands of some Terri person I’d never met. I lost my mind, thinking, “Here we go again. I’m totally screwed.”

Instead, Terri turned out to be every bit the partner Matt was. So was the person who followed her when she left the field, and so was the next person after that person got promoted. And on and on it went. Each editor I worked with from Janae to Lily to Anna to Charles and more gave me the sense that I was the most important thing in the world at that moment and that they’d do anything to help me get where I thought my work should go.

They encouraged me to try new things like the blog, guesting on podcasts, doing videos and more. They also provided financial support to keep the lights on at the blog, professional support to make sure the podcasts didn’t sound stupid and strong editors to make my videos look a lot less like a guy filming a hostage video in Saw’s kill room.

They also supported me in some of my more insane ideas, even as I’m sure they had to endure a few moments like this in explaining me to their bosses. When I decided to wear a bulletproof vest around for a week and write about it on the blog, they didn’t try to talk me out of it.

When I referred to promotional efforts as “book pimping,” they winced, but didn’t tell me to knock it off. When I decided to take the 11-day forced vacation from UWO and turn it into a John-Oliver-esque “furlough tour” complete with T-shirts to commemorate the event, Sage not only supported it, but they bought T-shirts for their staffers.

The person who bought the shirts for her team was Staci Wittek, probably the best person I’ve ever had the privilege of working with at any level, anywhere. Staci’s official title is Senior Product Specialist, Communication and Media Studies at SAGE Publications, but that doesn’t come close to what she has done for me (and I’m sure many others) who have books under her watchful marketing eye.

She’s had me do videos for her reps to explain the book, reach out to potential leads on behalf of reps, build additional resources for people who need them and more. She’s also so willing to do pretty much any ridiculous promotional idea that comes rolling out of the junk drawer that is my brain.

Without Staci, none of my books would have succeeded because she put so much work, energy and faith into what I’ve built. She’s the difference-maker, like Michael Jordan was with the Bulls.

The reps for Sage stop by my office for a chat every time they’re on campus. It’s always, “What can I do for you, Vince?” not “Here’s how you need to help me sell your stuff.” We laugh about various things, share stories and get to know each other. It really does have that family vibe, a rarity in a day and age where corporate culture and survival of the fittest seem to rule the roost.

Every time I part company with someone from Sage, I always say the same thing: “Thanks for everything, and if you ever need anything, just tell me what it is and you’ll get it.” It’s the same thing I say to my students, my colleagues and everyone else who matters to me in life.

And by the way, here’s that same bookshelf, 10 years later…

The books in Chinese and Arabic are two translations of one of my textbooks. You have to take my word for it, as I had to take someone else’s word for it. If you read either language, and it turns out they’re actually “Mein Kampf” or something, please tell me so I can fix this…

Thanks for everything, Sage folks. I look forward to the next great adventure.

Most sincerely,

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