Dynamics of News Reporting & Writing

An 8-minute video primer on Artificial Intelligence, its impact on media writers and the ethical concerns it raises for media folks

One of the biggest things I’ve tried to get across on this blog is that it’s here to help media students and professors. (If it helps other people, hey, I’m glad that works out as well…) The other big thing I’ve tried to get across is that if you need something, all you have to do is ask and I’ll probably get it done.

Case in point, a professor down in Texas and I were chatting about the “Exploring Mass Communication” textbook we’d sent her and some other issues, when she emailed me this:

I do have a question for you: Do you have any recorded lectures or videos where you talk about AI in journalism? I would love to take a look and see if I can incorporate it into my class. My current class size is 220, and the classroom is not very adaptable to an interactive Zoom call, which is why I wanted to see if I could use a pre-recorded video. I also teach an online version of this class which is just as large, and the video would be very helpful.

I reached out to Sage and asked if we could do a more “production-savvy” video than just me recording this in the pinball man cave at my house, and they were totally enthusiastic. We got it done for her with two weeks to spare and it worked well.

The nicest thing is that Sage sent me a copy, so I uploaded it to YouTube and here it is if you want to use it:

 

(I hate the fact I keep looking down, but this is what happens when your script glitches on the screen and you have to use the printed backup…)

If it’s helpful, let me know. Also, if YOU want something for any of your classes that fit into whatever area of expertise I supposedly have, feel free to hit me up here. I don’t care if you’re using my books or not. I just like helping people.

Have a great rest of your day!

Become media literate as you learn how to separate fact from crap (A Throwback Post)

(Back when I was a kid, fake news was easier to spot, thanks to World News Weekly, the National Enquirer and, of course, Weird Al’s favorite publication: Midnight Star.)

As we are essentially revamping our entire university, one of the things several of us are pining for in the new gen-ed curriculum is a media-literacy course. We’re not going to get it, but that’s another story…

The importance of media literacy really came home to me when my kid started getting all of her news from a) TikTok, b) other kids who watched TikTok and c) the parents of those kids who read nothing but partisan-hack websites. At one point, she was telling me a story about a police officer whose daughter was killed by a burglar or something, and the cop waited until the guy was done with his prison term before killing the burglar’s entire family in front of him, but leaving the burglar to live.

“Where the hell did you hear that?” I asked, incredulously.

“I saw it on TikTok,” she said.

“You mean you saw a news reporter talking about this on TikTok?” I asked.

“Oh. No. There was this guy doing a short video where he talked about how that happened,” she said.

I punched a few relatively obvious terms into a search engine and found this was total crap. So was the next weird story she told me, and the next weird one and the one after that. At that point, I had a request for her:

“The next time you hear something or see something that doesn’t seem normal while watching your Toks or whatever they’re called, before you freak out about it, come see me and I’ll check it out for you.”

That evolved from me checking things for her to her learning to ask some pointed questions about what she was seeing before coming to see me. She’s now working on figuring out how best to separate fact from crap.

This situation helped inspire today’s Throwback Thursday post, where I return to a three-part series I did on “Fake News” a few years back and how it works. Most of the moving pieces in there are still legit.

In addition, I’ll be doing a video podcast with the folks at Sage later today, so if you’d like access to that once it’s done, feel free to hit me up here and I’ll add you to “Vicky’s Magical List of Cool People” and we’ll hook you up.

In the mean time, enjoy the post below.

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Fake News 101: What can we do to fight fake news?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the last part of a three-part series. If you missed Part I and Part II, you can find them through the links. -VFF

The term “fake news” gets thrown around the way the word “internet” used to be thrown around: Everyone is using it, dealing with it and thinking it’s something it’s actually not. For the sake of this post, we’re going to define “fake news” as content posted that the authors know to be false with the intent of fooling readers into believing it to be real.

If you think about it that way, the questions that come into focus are simple even as their answers are complex:

  • Who posts this kind of content and why do they do it?
  • Why do we believe the stuff, especially the really outlandish stuff?
  • What can we do to stop its spread or at least its impact?

This is the last part of a three-part series discussing each of these questions in hopes of helping you get a stronger handle on this topic. Today’s post looks at how we can out-think a situation in which fake news is likely to mess with us:

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Fake news has become a prevalent part of people’s daily media consumption and it shows no sign of slowing down any time soon. The ability for people to make money from splashy, fraudulent headlines and slanted, fake stories ensure that journalists will continue to face an uphill battle as we try to inform people and keep them from being snowed.

The New York Times walked through one such situation in which an Austin, Texas, businessman with a handful of Twitter followers sparked a viral fervor in about 48 hours.

The day after the 2016 presidential election, Eric Tucker posted several photos of buses gathered near a hotel and stated that, “Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses (sic) they came in.”

Tucker turned out to be wrong, as the buses were connected to a software company that held a conference in town that week. However, the tweet was shared more than 16,000 times, leading to coverage on multiple blogs and websites. Even the president-elect tweeted about how “unfair” the busing in of protesters was

Local news outlets began poking at the story to find out what was going on. Coach USA, the company that owned the buses, had to put out a statement that its fleet had no connection to any anti-Trump protests. Tableau, the software company that hired the buses, also made a statement to local media outlets to claim credit for the buses. Snopes, an internet fact-checking site, stated the busing of protesters was untrue. However, the tweet continued to generate a massive amount of attention. Tucker eventually found out he was wrong and labeled his work as such, but the spread of the falsehood far exceeded anything a correction could hope to refute.

In the middle of this mess, Tucker received multiple inquiries about how he knew the buses carried anti-Trump protesters and how he verified his information. In the Times article, he was quoted as saying, “I’m also a very busy businessman and I don’t have time to fact-check everything that I put out there, especially when I don’t think it’s going out there for wide consumption.” (emphasis added for the sake of pointing out the line that made me slam my head into my desk repeatedly)

As journalists, our job is to both avoid getting duped but also to help other people see the importance of being right before they share information.

The first issue to address is our ability to spot the fake news. We’ve talked about this before on the blog, even offering folks a free copy of this poster if they wanted a big one for a classroom or newsroom:

Beyond those basics, we need to look at how we think about news overall. As part of her work with the Power Shift Project for the Freedom Forum Institute, critical-thinking expert Jill Geissler has developed a list of things that critical thinkers do. Here are a few of those items that will help you avoid the snares of fake news and help teach others how to keep themselves out of trouble:

  • Check for biases, including your own: We talked about this in the previous post when we discussed the idea of self-confirming biases and how they can lead people to believe things that aren’t accurate. It is this predisposition to being biased in favor of something (or against something else) that leads us to want to find things that support our own way of thinking. To avoid adding to the chorus of inaccuracy, stop and think about how bias may play a role in your likelihood to believe in something.
  • Dig beyond the surface: This is where journalists tend to separate themselves from private citizens in terms of critical thought. The motto of “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out,” perfectly captures our desire to find the root of all information and the accuracy of it. Digging into something can be as simple as finding the key source of a statement like Tucker’s, or it can be as complex as building data sets to refute a politician’s statement about who donated to his campaign. The goal in digging is to make sure that when you do decide to share information or publish articles (or even retweet something), you feel as confident as you can that the information is accurate.
  • Identify stakeholders: Journalists have a long tradition of figuring out what Side A thinks and why and what Side B thinks and why. To identify stakeholders in today’s era of fake news, it goes beyond that and requires deeper digging. As mentioned we discussed in the first post of the series, the stakeholders of fake-news farms have a simple reason for creating false news: money. The people who share and reshare the content on certain websites can also be driven by financial desires, but in some cases, it’s about gaining popularity, promoting an ideological agenda or just being a dink.
    When you dig into a topic, you want to identify a wide variety of potential stakeholders, including people who are directly involved with making something happen. That said, always keep an eye on those folks who have a way of benefiting or losing from the actions of others.
  • Consider alternatives: One of the questions someone asked Tucker after his anti-Trump-protest tweet went viral was whether there could be another explanation for the buses being in Austin. His response was that he considered that briefly but discarded it quickly.
    As journalists, we want to do more than skip past plausible explanations for things that don’t support our presuppositions. The goal each time we ply our trade is to tell the audience an accurate story, so in many cases, we need to pick through plausible alternatives to what we are telling them and figure out to what degree they could be accurate. Seeing the buses, a critical thinker would wonder why they were there. It was plausible they hauled protesters from out of state, but it could be equally plausible that they brought people in for a multi-level-marketing company rally or a Coach USA convention where everyone brought their own bus. A quick call to the bus company or the hotels nearby would have helped cut this guesswork off at the pass.

In terms of “fixing” others who find themselves enamored by fake news, this can be both problematic and infuriating, especially for journalists who make this their living. It would be like us walking into their place of work and telling them, “See how you’re running this machine? It’s totally wrong. I read this thing on the internet and you’re just lying and faking stuff. Now, let me turn some knobs and buttons because I know better than you do…”

Here are some things experts have found that can be helpful to keep in mind when trying to deal with people who don’t want to hear what we have to say in regard to fake news. Not all of these will work perfectly or even well, but they are more successful than our tradition of trying to bludgeon people to death with information from Snopes:

Nobody reacts well to being told “You’re Wrong.” The instinct we have as people is to address peace with peace and war with war. It’s a lizard-brain thing, but when someone says with absolute certainty that Hillary Clinton is running a child sex-slave ring out of a pizza joint, we want to respond with absolute certainty that the speaker has a two-digit IQ. Immediately both sides dig in and nothing gets done.

One techniques psychologists have found helpful in breaking people of their beliefs in inaccurate or dangerous things is to engage the person with questions about the material, the source and the information in a way that is non-threatening. So instead of saying, “What a bunch of crap that is” try, “I hadn’t seen that on any of my regular news sites. Where did you see that?” It starts a dialogue that allows the person to operate without heightened defenses and starts to allow the person to unwrap the situation on his or her own terms. Continued questions will move that person away from the certainty, allowing for potential self-correction later.

Fights like this are emotional, not rational. When we say, “You’re wrong,” to someone invested enough in a topic to discuss it in a public or semi-public setting, what we are trying to say is, “As a journalist, I work in this area and there are a number of things that trouble me enough about this to doubt it’s accurate. I just want to help you see what I see.” What the person hears is, “You, not just this information, but you personally and your position on whatever topic you’re trying to support with this nonsense are wrong.”

In explaining how to talk to people about fake news, Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft, explained it this way:

“We’re human and driven by emotion,” says Wardle. When you reject someone’s views on contentious political issues such as gun violence or abortion, you’re challenging their identity.

To prevent this from happening, a good way to reach out is through perspective-taking actions. It shows that you understand their core beliefs, which you acknowledge they are entitled to, but that this information they are using to support those beliefs needs to be better.

It could be something like, “Grandpa, I know you don’t like Hillary Clinton, and you’ve said that a number of times over the past 30 years. I don’t agree with you on her, but I understand that’s how you feel about her.”

Then, provide grandpa with the information that will show why it is that this story about her colonizing Mars with stem-cell embryos to build a colony of liberals on welfare who will plant trees in every coal mine in America isn’t the best way to help other people see why he hates HRC.

Understand that certain people are targets. People who are older and less technologically savvy are the targets for the fake-news farms we talked about throughout the series. The reasons are pretty obvious, once you stop and think about it:

  • Older people tend to have more money, more civic engagement, more free time, and less experience with technology.
  • Older people are often more at risk for certain things, such as the pandemic noted in the article linked above. This means they’re more likely to search out information to protect themselves, but again, are less likely to know where to go.
  • People who are less technologically savvy tend to have lower education or socio-economic status, which puts them into a position of limited nuance. Research on everything from color choices to informational outcomes dictates they prefer thing that are simple, common and familiar. Absolutism in black and white fits that bill.

Above all else, many people who are older tend to trust the media because they spent much of their lives with media they could trust. Newspapers and Walter Cronkite gave them the straight story.

The story that will always resonate for me was the time I came home from college and stopped over to see my grandmother for our family’s traditional Friday night gathering. She was upset and confused because she read in the Cudahy Reminder (the local newspaper) that there was going to be a fish fry at the Kelly Senior Center that night at 5 p.m.

When she went there, there was no fish fry.

The more I tried to explain to her that it might be a mistake or that the paper might have screwed up, the worse it got. In her mind, if the Cudahy Reminder said there was going to be a fish fry at the Kelly Center on Friday at 5 p.m., well, then, dammit, there was GOING TO BE a fish fry at the Kelly Center at 5 p.m.

On the flip side, people with less education or lower socio-economic status, regardless of age, are less likely to trust the media. Therefore, whenever they get a story that tells them everyone out there at NBC and CBS with their fancy suits and their big studios have been lying to them, they’ll buy into whatever “inside scoop” the fake news folks will tell them.

And, again, nobody, lest of all people who feel like they are marginalized or like they’re starting to lose their grip on reality, want to hear from people they know, “You’re wrong.”

To help folks in this position, organizations like the New York Times are working to develop programs meant to inoculate certain groups against fake news. They not only provide information in a way that speaks to them at their level of understanding (whatever it may be), but it comes to them based on their choice to engage. In short, it allows them to decide how and when to challenge their own assumptions.

 

PICK THE HILL YOU’RE WILLING TO DIE ON: As we’ve discussed before, there are certain things that really matter and we’re willing to give it all to that discussion. We’ll fight it out, regardless of the odds or the enemy, because it really matters a great deal. In other words, we have decided this is a hill we’re willing to die on.

When it comes to trying to disabuse people we know about the facts associated with fake news, it can feel like we’re ready to die on every hill, every day and in every conversation. Facts are our stock and trade, so to abuse them in this fashion can feel an awful lot like someone just told us we have the ugliest baby they’ve ever seen.

However, experts agree that, despite our best efforts, we’re not going to change hearts and minds in most cases. Too many people are too far down the rabbit hole to pull them back out. If that’s the case, consider how much energy you want to put into this. If the answer is, “This is annoying, but its not the hill I’m willing to die on,” then the best answer is to diffuse the situation with a statement that shows you’re unwilling to engage:

“Uncle Jim, I understand you think Joe Biden is on a super cocktail of Ritalin, PCP and Bang energy drink to keep him alive during the debates, but I don’t, and nothing either of us is going to say is going to matter much here, so I really don’t want to talk about it.”

 

Former UW La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow loses his tenured professor position after UW Board of Regents decides porn is icky

I know this shouldn’t be my primary concern, but a) is it accurate to call him “chancellor” in the headline and b) is porn-making chancellor properly hyphenated as a compound modifier. If I had to guess, I’d say a = no, but b = yes.

ED NOTE: As was the case when we covered this in December, I apologize in advance for any double entendres. It is almost impossible to write this without hearing a 12-year-old boy in my head laughing, despite my best efforts to avoid such concerns.

Also, Monday, we’ll have a Q and A with one of the First Amendment attorneys at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the organization that has helped Joe Gow get legal representation.

THE LEAD: Joe Gow, the former University of Wisconsin La Crosse chancellor who was removed from his position after his bosses realized he was making porn videos in his spare time, was fired from his tenure position at the university as well on Friday.

The regents voted unanimously to terminate Gow. Deliberations were made in a closed session away from the public for about half an hour.

In December, university officials discovered Gow had produced and starred in pornographic content across the web in videos and self-authored books he published under a pseudonym. He was fired as chancellor and recommended to be stripped of his tenure.

Besides his future with UW, Gow has also lost $300,000 in accrued medical benefits. Before his June hearing, Gow said he was planning on using the benefits for more than a decade of coverage into his retirement.

 

THE BACKGROUND: We covered this situation here back when Gow lost his role as chancellor when the porn first came to light back in December.

Long story short, the regents removed him after they found out he was making porn. Gow stated he never used university materials, services or anything related to his job as he and his wife made the adult videos. That said, the role of chancellor was basically “You serve at the pleasure of the regents,” so he got yanked.

Still, like most administrators, he had what are called “retreat rights,” which meant he had the right to go back and teach in the department to which his expertise is tied. Thus, the regents had to figure out how to rid themselves of Gow and the baggage his hobby carried without breaking the law or violating his rights as an employed, tenured professor.

 

NEXT STEPS: Gow is out of a job but he is strongly considering legal action against the university. Gow noted he thinks this could go to the Supreme Court, as previous cases involving unpopular but totally legal speech have in the past few decades.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE:  The university and the UW system have been stacking sandbags on this one to try to find anything they can fire him for, other than what they are actually firing him for.

There have been accusations of refusing to cooperate with an investigation into his activities, perhaps violating the UW technology policies, engaging in “unethical and potentially illegal conduct” and engaging in activities that would harm his ability to be an effective teacher.

What they really want to say is “This makes us all uncomfortable. Joe did icky stuff, so he needs to go away.”

The problem with what they want to say is that it violates the First Amendment. I always go back to the simplest explanation I have for the First Amendment: It’s not meant to protect expression people like. It’s meant to protect expression people DON’T like.

I’ve also spent more than a little time thinking about the question, “How much of my soul does the university have the right to own?” I mean, sure, there’s the time in class and the time with the kids outside of class and the time in my office and the time publishing and the … Eh… You get the idea.

However, what happens when the university decides that whatever expression I want to engage in or someone else on faculty wants to engage it is considered too uncomfortable for words?

I’m quite certain my friends in the LGBTQ+ community who are of a certain age and worked at public universities found themselves a bit wary of what their private lives would mean for their public jobs. If we kept along that more conservative line of thinking, what would it take for a university to find that two people of the sexual orientation being together as a couple made for a firing offense today?

Conversely, I also know that opinions on certain things tend to change over time, so what seems OK at the moment, might lead to concerns in the future. For a while, there was this massive trend of everyone getting Chinese symbols tattooed on themselves as a form of expression and few people thought twice about it. (One of my students at the time, however, did say that his father, who was fluent in the language, would not write out such symbols for people as it was a cultural concern.)

Today, cultural appropriation is a concern and rightly so, could there be a risk to a professor at a public institution who has these permanent markings in a visible place if enough people make noise about it? I don’t know, but I like living in a world where the First Amendment says, “You can be upset, but you can’t punish someone for expression that is offensive.”

The phrases “objective journalism” and “sexting relationship with a source” rarely co-exist

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but when you Google a person’s name and EVERYTHING comes back related to one story, it’s rarely going to be a good day for that person.

THE LEAD: It’s stories like this that give me a brain aneurysm:

New York magazine on Thursday said its Washington correspondent, Olivia Nuzzi, is on leave after learning the star journalist had allegedly engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a reporting subject. That person is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to people familiar with the matter.

“Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures,” a spokesperson for New York magazine said in a statement in response to questions from Status.

A BASIC LOOK: Nuzzi met Kennedy in person once, according to published reports, as she worked on a profile that ran in November 2023. Kennedy is married to actress Cheryl Hines while Nuzzi was engaged to Politico chief Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza, but the two recently called off the engagement.

A variety of news outlets chipped in bits and bites of this story, but they all generally agree on the fact this wasn’t a physical affair. It included some tawdry banter, full-on sexting and/or Nuzzi sending nude photos to Kennedy. Word of the nudes and texts got back to the bosses at New York Magazine, and Nuzzi eventually confirmed the gist of the situation.

She is currently on leave from the magazine as a result of this situation.

POST-TRAUMATIC JOURNALISM FLASHBACK: I’m not naming names, as the last thing I want to do is dredge up the past or be accused of internet shaming. However, this isn’t the first case of a reporter and a source ending up in a compromising position of this nature. If you don’t believe me, just Google “Reporter source romantic affair” and you’ll find more than a few of these situations have made the news outside of the RFK Jr./Nuzzi situation.

The one that comes back to my mind happened in Milwaukee when a reporter for a local publication wrote a profile about a high-ranking law-enforcement official while simultaneously slipping into a relationship with the person.

This situation was a full-on affair of a physical nature that was eventually nudged into the public eye by other local journalists. I remember the editor of the reporter’s publication standing up for that person in public, only to back off later after finding out things were much more involved than the editor thought at the time.

As this whole thing went into full Dumpster-fire mode, I just kept thinking, “This is not going to look good on a resume…”

THINGS I DON”T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT: You can feel however you want to feel about certain elements of these kind of situations, or this one in particular. As a journalism professor and journalist, here are the things that I don’t give a damn about that are getting reported with breathless pearl-clutching in the press:

  • The age difference: She’s 31, he’s 70. Yes, he’s technically old enough to be her grandfather and no, I don’t want to think about that, either. However, from a journalistic ethics perspective, I couldn’t give a damn. (I seem to recall the Milwaukee situation being a case in which one of the people involved was about twice the age of the other person. Still don’t care.) Whether they were born within nanoseconds of each other, or if they have an age gap that makes the one between J. Howard Marshall and Anna Nicole Smith look tiny by comparison does not make this ethically better or worse. As long as they were both above the age of consent, it’s not an issue. As long as they were source and reporter, that’s the issue.
  • Relationship status: He is married and she was engaged. Personally, I wouldn’t be all that thrilled to find out that Amy was trotting around on me. Also, I know If were doing something like this, I’d come home to find her with a meat cleaver and a shovel, sitting calmly in her chair as she practiced her alibi. However personally sketchy or morally repugnant you might or might not find the concept of breaking the bonds of commitment, it’s neither here nor there for me when it comes to the ethics of this situation.
  • The “level” of the affair: Maybe I missed it somewhere in the SPJ Code of Ethics, or I just haven’t come across one at a yard sale yet, but I don’t think journalists have some sort of “conversion chart” for what is an “acceptable affair” with a source. (“If they only got to second base, and they’re not the subject of a profile….”) There’s a pretty clear line that anyone with a brain has in regard to the difference between being friendly with a source (“So, how are your kids doing in soccer this year?”) and crossing that line into an affair (“So, are your kids still at soccer? Can I come over?”) I know that everyone has their version of that line, but I’m guessing the phrase “sent nudes” would garner general agreement that a line got crossed.

SO WHAT DOES MATTER IN THIS CASE?: For me, it’s a pretty short list, but here we go…

Reporters shouldn’t engage in sexual (or sexually adjacent) conduct with sources: As we’ve reported here, it’s a well-debunked trope that all women in journalists trade sex with sources for information. That doesn’t mean that a) cases in which reporters of all genders having sexually inappropriate relationships with sources of all genders don’t exist and b) it’s wrong, no matter who started it, when it started, how it started, where it started, why it started or what level of sex stuff is involved.

This breaks the ethical code journalists ascribe to in a clear and basic way, as the SPJ code clearly states:

Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.

Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.

No, it doesn’t say, “Thou shalt not have a naughty-time tussle with a source,” but it’s still pretty clear.

Look, I get that journalism is a particularly weird field in which we get really close to a lot of people, and that we’re all damaged in a lot of ways that don’t really lend themselves to finding normal human relationships on the regular. I also know that it’s nearly impossible to spend any time in journalism without running a risk of a conflict of interest.

I had two: In the first case, I became engaged to a city council rep after a relatively brief period of dating. I wasn’t covering the city council, but I still disclosed it to the editor and got it out there. (Oddly enough, I told him on a Friday night and on Monday, I was sent to cover the city council for the first time in my career. When I protested, reminding him of the situation, he told me he had no one else available and, “Just don’t quote her.”) That relationship ended a short time after that situation, so it didn’t become an issue again.

The second was when Amy and I were married and in Missouri. I was the crime editor and she had gotten a job as a police dispatcher at the university police department. We both disclosed and it was fine, in that dispatchers rarely ended up speaking to the media, and I wasn’t about to lean on her for information about anything at MUPD.

That said, there were more than a few nights when she’d come home and want to unburden herself about a ridiculously terrible day, only to stop and say, “Wait, you’re not a journalist now. You’re my husband… Spousal privilege applies.” I didn’t break the faith, but, man… that was tough some days.

The point is: It’s not like this is some uncharted territory or arcane rule we’ve never heard of. That said, “knowing” and “knowing better” are apparently two different things, and “caution” should remain a watch word when we feel the line between source and friend (or more) start to blur.

If A Former President Tells You An Undocumented Immigrant Ate Someone’s Dog, Go Check It Out (A throwback post)

Based on the concerns raised in Tuesday’s presidential debate, we felt it was important to let people know we’ve got an eye on our dog.

If you didn’t watch the presidential debate Tuesday, or you haven’t been withing 5 feet of any device that generates memes lately, the headline on this blog post might seem like a MadLibs game gone wrong, or the start of my slow slide into dementia.

That said, during an actual debate between two people who actually would like to run this country, one of them made the claim that undocumented immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are stealing people’s pets and eating them:

If you aren’t part of what I would most politely call the “tinfoil hat brigade,” you might have been as confused as I was when Trump started going down this rabbit hole. In looking around online now, apparently there have been a collection of randomly stupid social media posts, unsubstantiated allegations at public meetings and out-of-context photos from around Ohio that are trying to link the increase in the Haitian population there with a “pets-as-food” narrative.

I have to say that the most impressive moment of that debate, from a journalism perspective, was when David Muir responded to Trump’s claims by stating the network had reached out to the city manager of Springfield, Ohio to fact check this situation. Muir noted that the city manager found no credible evidence of any of this happening. That meant Muir and his colleagues did a couple things we should all aspire to do as journalists:

  1. Research the hell out of your topic before any big event: The fact that ABC was plugged in enough to all the random weirdness surrounding the “dude ate my dog” theory and other topics demonstrates they were researching well enough to know they needed to be ready for something like this. The economy, abortion rights, the border? Sure, those were slam-dunk topics they needed to know like the back of their hand. Pet eating in Ohio? That was special-level research.
  2. Go to a credible source for fact checking: If you watch the video, Muir notes ABC talked to the city manager, an official source who was acting in an official capacity, who told the network this was total BS. Trump then flails back with an argument I would expect to hear from a grade-schooler about “people on television” saying that someone “took my dog for food.” I’ll believe the guy whose job it is to take the “hey, my neighbor ate my dog” complaints over the “people on television” whoever they are…
  3. No matter how certain you are about something, go check it out:  In an earlier post on fact-checking, I explained that one of the best ways to look at your work is to assume everything about it is wrong. Then, you should go out and try to prove yourself right. What we usually do is assume we’re right unless something shows up that proves us wrong, which can lead to a much higher likelihood of us committing a fact error. No matter how stupid, outlandish or otherwise weird something is, if you’re going to include it or omit it from a story, you need to go check it out.

Today’s throwback post honors this concept with one of the most well-known maxims in journalism: If your mother says she loves you, go check it out.

 

 

 

If your mother says she loves you, go check it out (or why making sure you’re sure matters).

Iphonetext

The adage in journalism regarding verification is: “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out.” The idea is that you need to make sure things are right before you publish them. You also want to verify the source of the information before you get yourself into trouble.

This issue popped up again this week after former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci had exchanged several emails with a person he thought to be former Chief of Staff Reince Prebus. It turns out, the messages came from a prankster, who baited Scaramucci into an “email battle:”

“At no stage have you acted in a way that’s even remotely classy, yet you believe that’s the standard by which everyone should behave towards you?” read the email to Scaramucci from a “mail.com” account.

Scaramucci, apparently unaware the email was a hoax, responded with indignation.

“You know what you did. We all do. Even today. But rest assured we were prepared. A Man would apologize,” Scaramucci wrote.

The prankster, now aware that he had deceived the beleaguered Scaramucci, went in for the kill.

“I can’t believe you are questioning my ethics! The so called ‘Mooch’, who can’t even manage his first week in the White House without leaving upset in his wake,” the fake Priebus wrote. “I have nothing to apologize for.”

Scaramucci shot back with a veiled threat to destroy Priebus Shakespearean-style.

“Read Shakespeare. Particularly Othello. You are right there. My family is fine by the way and will thrive. I know what you did. No more replies from me,” the actual Scaramucci.

“Othello” is a tragedy in which the main character is tricked into killing his wife Desdemona after his confidante convinces him that she has been unfaithful.

As the article points out, Scaramucci isn’t the first person to be suckered by a prank. Other members of the government had been similarly duped via email. In terms of prank calls, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker found himself once speaking with a person pretending to be billionaire David Koch, discussing ways to attack protesters and destroy liberals.   (The prankster told his side of the story on Politico.)

News journalists have also been caught short when it comes to making sure they’re sure about the sources and information they receive. In 2013, KTVU-TV in San Francisco had what it thought was a big scoop on the Asiana Flight 214 crash: The names of the captain and crew. However, the information turned out to be not only a hoax, but an intentionally racist set of names:

Three people were fired and a fourth resigned for health reasons in the wake of this error. In digging into this, it turned out that the NTSB found the source of the names to be a “summer intern” who thought this would be funny. In its own investigation, the station found that nobody asked the source at the NTSB for his name or title. The station issued an apology, as did the NTSB.

It’s easy to laugh at these incidents or to marvel at how dumb somebody was to buy into this stuff. However, we used to say around my house, “There, but by the grace of God, go I.” In other words, you could be next.

So here are three simple tips to help you avoid these problems:

  1. Verify, verify, verify: If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Look up information on various sites, ask a source for other people who can augment/confirm the information and make sure you feel confident in your content before you publish.
  2. If you aren’t sure, back away: It is always better to be late on something than it is to be wrong. It’s also better to let a random email or a text go without a response than to get sucked in and pay the price later. Some of these are easy, like when a Nigerian Prince promises you untold riches if you would just transfer your bank account number to him. Some are harder: When’s the last time you made sure it was your friend texting you about a “crazy night” and not his mom or dad doing some snooping? We just assume we know the actual source. That can be dangerous, so back off if you’re not sure.
  3. Kick it around the room: One of the best reasons why newsrooms, PR offices and ad agencies exist is to gather collective knowledge in one place. Sure, with technology now, it’s easy for everyone to work “off site” but keeping people in a single physical spot can make it easier to have someone look over your shoulder and see if something you just got “smells right.” Take advantage of other people around you and don’t go at it alone.

Just tell me what happened: The difference between writing for yourself and your audience

Packers announcer Ray Scott was known for his exceptional brevity in calling the game, telling you just what you needed to know and not making the call about him or his ego. We need more media folk like Ray Scott.

 

When it comes to perfect writing for media, I tend to love the Associated Press and its approach to sports. Here’s a look at a game I cared about:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — — No. 9 hitter Brayan Rocchio drove in four runs and the Cleveland Guardians beat Kansas City 7-1 Tuesday night, extending the Royals’ losing streak to a season-high seven.

Kansas City was held to two runs or fewer for the fifth straight game and managed just four hits. The Royals’ losing streak is its longest since a 10-game skid from June 5-16 last year.

Since tying Cleveland for the AL Central lead on Aug. 27, the Royals (76-65) have dropped 5 1/2 games behind the Guardians (80-59), who have won five of six. Kansas City maintained a 4 1/2-game lead for the final AL wild card.

The lead is both simple and yet multi-faceted: I know who won (Guardians), when they won (Tuesday night), how they won (7-1), the crucial reason why the won (Brayan Rocchio drove in four runs) and the overall impact of the event (Royals lost seven in a row, which isn’t great if you’re making a run at the playoffs).

The second paragraph covers the losing streak and its historical sense of perspective. The third tells me what the impact on the playoffs is (Guardians up 5.5 games thanks to a winning streak; Royals still in the mix with a 4.5 lead for the last wildcard.)

Here’s a look at how MLB.com went after the same story:

KANSAS CITY — Tanner Bibee has proven time and time again he can pitch in the biggest moments — it’s why he’d be Cleveland’s ace for this postseason. Tuesday was no different.

The Royals loaded the bases with nobody out in the sixth trailing by two runs, but the Guardians stuck with the 25-year-old right hander to get out of the jam in this crucial AL Central matchup — and he did just that.

The lead drops me in the middle of a weird, unattributed moment. Who says he’s “proven time and time again” how great he is? He’s 11-6, which is fine, but we’re not talking Dennis McLain or Bob Gibson in 1968. We also get a weird em-dash thing, followed by an empty phrase used by poor writers: “X was no different.” (If it’s all the same, why are we writing about it? If it’s different, you don’t have to tell me that, as oddity is an interest element.)

The second paragraph again relies on weird punctuation and another empty phrase: “He did just that.”

Then there’s the third paragraph, which has the feeling of a sugared up 4-year-old telling me about his day:

Bibee kept Cleveland’s lead, allowing just one run to come home on a sac fly, to squash Kansas City’s best scoring chance of the game and lead the Guardians to a 7-1 win on Tuesday at Kauffman Stadium. Cleveland, now just a half-game behind Baltimore for the best record in the American League, moved to 4 1/2 games over Minnesota, which lost to the Rays on Tuesday, and 5 1/2 games over the Royals for first place in the division.

You get 80 words (38 and 42 word sentences) of everything you’d want to know in a pile. The second sentence has TEN prepositions, which makes it read like we’re singing this.

This isn’t to pick on anyone or say that one way of doing this is always right and the other is always wrong. In the comparative, you can see a few things that will improve your writing overall:

WRITE FOR THE AUDIENCE, NOT FOR YOURSELF: One of the things that most writers have difficulty with is considering the needs of the audience over their own interest in writing. Sometimes, it’s because we fall in love with the sound of our own voice, while in other cases, we forget that the audience doesn’t know what we know.

In the case of a ballgame, it’s pretty easy to blow off the score or the “where/when” stuff because you just experienced it. You know where you are, what time you were there and who won. That’s great for you, but your readers are still in the dark on the thing they most want to know. I know that when I go online to grab info about games, the first thing I’m thinking is, “I hope the Guardians won.” I’m definitely not thinking, “I wonder what gimmicky approach the writer is going to take this time.”

Think about it this way: If you didn’t know anything about the game, and you only had 20 seconds to live, what would you hope someone would tell you about it before you die.

 

NOUN-VERB-OBJECT IS YOUR HOLY TRINITY: As is the case with most overwritten sentences, we lack for a strong noun-verb-object core at its center. Each sentence should have a basic premise that starts with “Who did what to whom/what?” If we can nail that down, we end up in great shape. If not, we end up building our sentences on a foundation of sand rather than concrete.

Look at the lead of the first sentence and you see two sets of almost perfect NVO constructions:

  • Rocchio drove in runs
  • Guardians beat Kansas City

Now look at the lead of the second sentence and try to find that same NVO core. Go ahead… I’ll wait… (finishes laundry, grocery shopping, resurfacing the driveway…) Got it yet? OK… I’ll check back tomorrow.

If you can’t nail down the main assertion of a sentence in an NVO core, you probably have both structural and focal problems.

 

SHOW, DON’T TELL: In the case of the first chunk of text, I get a lot of clarity because the writer SHOWS me how things happened (Rocchio drove in four runs, Royals drop in the standings due to seven-game losing streak).

In the case of the second chunk of text, I get a lot more TELLING (vague telling at that) in terms of what’s going on with the pitcher. I have no idea how he got out of that bases-loaded jam or how many runs scored while the writer is waxing poetic in the second paragraph. I also have no idea what makes Bibee that “go-to guy.” Instead I get punch-phrases like “he did just that” and “Tuesday was no different.”

If you find yourself resorting to cliches, empty phrases or other “Boom Goes the Dynamite” moments, step away from the keyboard and let your adrenal gland relax a bit. Then, show me what’s going on without telling me.

 

I Guess I’ll Never Run Out of Current Examples of Mass Shootings (A Throwback Post)

I had another Throwback Thursday post on the launch pad, ready to go, when news about Apalachee High School in Georgia broke:

Four people were killed by gunfire at a high school in northern Georgia on Wednesday, the state’s bureau of investigation said, sending schools across the region into lockdown just over a month after the end of summer vacation.

President Biden called the shooting — the deadliest episode of school violence in Georgia history — “another horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear our communities apart.”

I remember once thinking about how certain events were touchstones for certain generations. There were things like the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, the Miracle on Ice and more. I remember thinking the Columbine shooting would be one of those eternal events, as nothing like it could ever really happen again at that level.

Shows what I know…

As was the case when I was writing the original post below, I’m in the middle of two revisions to two textbooks and I’m constantly looking for fresh examples of things like a social media influencer running afoul of the FTC, a famous person doing something stupid and public relations efforts that were massively successful, with varying levels of results. That said, I’m never at a loss for something having to do with either defamation or a mass shooting.

The saddest thing is that I’ve actually already DONE one of these shooting posts on a Throwback Thursday. That was when 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley used a handgun to kill four and wound seven others at Michigan’s Oxford High School.

I can’t remember if I wove the Crumbley example into a textbook, as the timing might not have fit my deadlines, but I know that whatever emerges in Georgia will likely make the cut for at least one of these upcoming texts.

I am devastated and saddened beyond all belief, but unfortunately not surprised.

As was the case in 2017 when I originally wrote this:

 

The horrifying revisions of my textbooks: Chapter by chapter, shooting by shooting

The first draft of what would become the “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” featured a sample chapter written in 2008, discussing at length the Virginia Tech shooting. I was pitching a reporting book to another publisher when the rep for that company asked for two chapters that could help her sell the book to her acquisitions committee.

Kelly Furnas, then the adviser at the student newspaper at VT, had done a session at a student media conference about his newsroom’s efforts in the wake of the attack. I knew Kelly through friends and helped book him for that session. I also was able to talk to him after the session for this chapter, assuming that the magnitude of this event would never be equaled.

It turned out I was wrong about that, much to my continuing dismay.

The arguments of when is the right time to discuss broader issues are beginning to emerge in the wake of Monday’s attack in Las Vegas. So are the calls for all sorts of regulations, restrictions, restructuring and more. It is hard to see the carnage wrought upon the citizens of this country and remain dispassionate or above the fray when it comes to the continually evolving topic of attacks like this one.

As a reporter and then an editor and then an adviser, I always believed in the simplest of ideas when it came to covering something like this:

  • Show, don’t tell.
  • Provide facts and let them speak for themselves.
  • Don’t try to oversell it.
  • Just let the readers know what happened.

This blog isn’t a podium or a pulpit, nor will I use it to advance whatever agenda or whatever “side” some displeased readers would disparagingly note I must be on as a professor, a journalist or whatever other label was convenient.

That said, it struck me tonight as I thought about the morning post that the two books featured here, “Dynamics of Media Writing” and “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing,” catalog the expansive nature of violent outbursts, here and abroad. Even more, they do so in a way that shows me something exceedingly painful: My continual endeavors to update these volumes in a meaningful way as they relate to these horrific events is an ongoing, losing effort.

After a few years of discussions, the book in which the Virginia Tech shooting story was included did not come to fruition. The proposal was scuttled when the publisher decided to “go another way,” corporate-speak for “we didn’t really think this was worth the time.”

About three years after that happened, I met a rep from SAGE while at a journalism convention. I was looking for a book to use in my writing across media class, while Matt was trying to convince me to write one instead. In writing the pitch, I built two chapters for him, one of which was on social media. I included a reference to the Aurora, Colorado shooting, in which a gunman shot up a theater during the midnight showing of the Batman film, “The Dark Knight Rises.” The point there was not to show the magnitude of the attack, but rather what can happen when people are inept at social media: The hashtag used (#aurora) to keep people abreast of the unfolding situation was co-opted by a fashion boutique to promote the Aurora dress.

After reviewing the pitch and the chapters, Matt came to the conclusion that I really had two books: one for general media writing and one for news reporting, so he signed me to both. This was 2014 and I had already written several chapters for each book. Almost by accident, I had layered in references to additional shootings.

In my initial discussion of the importance of geographic referents in the audience-centricity chapter, I tried to explain how a reference to a “Cudahy man” who had killed six people at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin drove me to a fit of anxiety. My mother taught grade school and middle school in that town for 40-odd years at the time, so I feared some level of connection between Mom and a monster. (As it turned out, there was none as he had moved to the area more recently. In addition, the whole explanation was overly complicated, so I cut it during one of the draft chapters.)

In the reporting book, I referenced the Charlie Hebdo attack in my discussion of hashtags. In the media writing book, I included a reference to Sandy Hook in discussing magnitude. In a law chapter for one of them, I discussed the Boston Marathon Bombing and the “Bag Men” cover that essentially libeled two guys who just happened to be at event.

At one point, I added and cut references to the Northern Illinois shooting, in which a grad student killed five and injured 17. I knew the DeKalb area, as my grandfather had been a police chief there for years and I had interviewed for a job there about four years before the shooting. The adviser at that student paper was also a friend of mine at the time.

I remember thinking when I cut it that it was because it hadn’t been “big enough” for people to easily recall it. It galls me to think that five dead and 17 wounded could be prefaced by the modifier “only.” Unfortunately, it was accurate: Sunday’s attack in Las Vegas had fatalities ten times that one and injuries scores and scores beyond that attack.

Somehow, and I honestly don’t know how this happened, I was between edits or editions of both books when the Pulse nightclub shooting happened in 2016. I could find no reference to this in any draft chapters and it defies logic that the murder of 49 people somehow slipped past me or didn’t make the cut in one of these books.

However, in finalizing the Reporting book, I ended up coming back around to the story Kelly Furnas told me all those years ago. I was building a section on obituaries and realized I never actually published the story he told me about how his staff wrote literally dozens of obituaries for a single issue of the paper. He had long left VT, but I found him and got his permission to finally publish this incredible explanation as to how his extremely green reporters gritted their teeth and met this challenge.

That book is currently in press and is already out of date as a result of the attack in Las Vegas. However, the Media Writing book is in the completed draft phase of a second edition, so this information will likely supplant some previous horrifying event and make the cut. At the very least, I’m going to include the Jack Sins incident to outline the importance of fact checking, even when it feels almost slimy to do so.

In looking back, it’s not so much the number of these incidents or the magnitude of them that disturbs me in an inexplicable way. Rather, it’s that I have recounted these events not by impacted memory but rather a search through my hard drive, using key terms like “shooting,” “dead,” “killed” and “attacked.”

Each time I added one of these “recent events,” it was fresh, clear and horrifying. As I review them now, it is more like looking through a photo album that provided refreshed glimpses and renewed recollections of vague people and places.

Each incident wasn’t so much of a “I’ll never forget” moment as a “Oh, now I remember” one.

What happens when police use AI to draft their incident reports?

(We’re not quite here yet, but it’s a little disconcerting how I keep finding parallels between RoboCop and reality. Also, that Kurtwood Smith was somehow less threatening here than in “That ’70s Show.”)

THE LEAD: Some police organizations are experimenting with AI, in which ChatBots are writing the first drafts of their situation reports based on what the officers’ body cameras capture.

“They become police officers because they want to do police work, and spending half their day doing data entry is just a tedious part of the job that they hate,” said Axon’s founder and CEO Rick Smith, describing the new AI product — called Draft One — as having the “most positive reaction” of any product the company has introduced.

“Now, there’s certainly concerns,” Smith added. In particular, he said district attorneys prosecuting a criminal case want to be sure that police officers — not solely an AI chatbot — are responsible for authoring their reports because they may have to testify in court about what they witnessed.

“They never want to get an officer on the stand who says, well, ‘The AI wrote that, I didn’t,’” Smith said.

The pilot programs have found that the reports that once took 30-45 minutes to draft can be done in a matter of seconds. To kind of hedge their bets on the issue of how much they should be leaning on the technology, some departments are using the AI on misdemeanors and petty crime.

Aside from the idea that the computer might be doing the officers’ “homework” for them, legal scholars and civil-rights activists are concerned about the impact this could have on society as a whole:

“I am concerned that automation and the ease of the technology would cause police officers to be sort of less careful with their writing,” said Ferguson, a law professor at American University working on what’s expected to be the first law review article on the emerging technology.

Ferguson said a police report is important in determining whether an officer’s suspicion “justifies someone’s loss of liberty.” It’s sometimes the only testimony a judge sees, especially for misdemeanor crimes.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Accuracy and legality lead the list of my concerns here. At one point in the article, the officer notes that the AI included a detail he didn’t remember hearing. That could be the AI capturing something real or it could be fabricating something that the officer then kind of adopted as true.

Experts and users have found AI can engage in “hallucinations” where it presents something untrue as fact. It’s kind of funny when AI tells us that the downfall of Western Civilization began when the coach refused to put Uncle Rico in at quarterback in the ’82 finals. It’s less funny when it tells a court of law that you threatened a cop who pulled you over for speeding.

The officers interviewed for the story mention that they’ve become more verbal in their interactions with the public, which allows the body camera to capture that information and thus improve the AI report.

In this kind of case, it feels more like transcription than creation, which seems safer, but who knows. What would be beneficial for reporters in cases like this would be to get the AI-based reports and the officer’s body-cam footage to do a side-by-side comparison.

Legally speaking, I would be curious to know what levels of access journalists could have to the AI version of a report as well as the final version of a report. Police reports and court documents are public records, but some internal memos and drafts of public items can occasionally be considered off limits. In addition, it’s technically not being created by a public figure, but it’s the ramblings of a computer program. Who can have access to what, when and where and how is interesting here.

It’s also interesting to see how well these things hold up in court compared to other reports, witness testimony and so forth. As with anything new, there’s going to be a learning curve and development issues, with the older technology probably still being better.

When we first started seeing automobiles, they could barely break into double digits in terms of their mph speed. Meanwhile, horses could literally and figuratively run circles around them. As time went on, cars clearly became the faster mode of transportation, but it took a while. It’ll be interesting to see how many lawyers start asking questions like, “So, Officer Smith, did you write the initial report of this or did you rely on artificial intelligence to do it for you?” and then showing off all the stupid things AI has written to undermine AI’s credibility.

The folks in the article who distrust the AI process have noted concerns about racial targeting and other such issues in terms of bias against people traditionally mistreated by legal wrangling. We have seen AI generate some of those kinds of biased reports here, and it is a valid concern. I would probably go a step beyond this, only to say that I’d be really concerned in general for anyone who is being accused of criminal activity while the police are working the kinks out on this system. The article notes that the crimes are generally “low level” but that doesn’t make me feel much better if I’m on the other end of an AI disaster.

 

A look back at threats and violence against journalists we know in the wake of the Robert Telles verdict. (A Throwback Post)

Jeff German’s page remains on the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s website more than two years after he was killed. A jury convicted Robert Telles of stabbing German to death over stories Telles found critical of him.

A former Las Vegas official was convicted Wednesday of murdering a journalist who wrote accurate stories about the official’s bad acts while in office.

Robert Telles, an administrator at the Clark County Public Administrator’s office, lost his bid to retain his position in 2022, due in part to Jeff German’s stories of Telles’ inappropriate acts while in office. Telles stalked German at his home and stabbed the 69-year-old man to death, the jury concluded:

The prosecution has indicated it won’t pursue the death penalty. The jury, which said it found the murder to be “willful, deliberate and premeditated,” is set to hear further evidence before deciding on a sentence. Telles could get life in prison without parole, life with the possibility of parole after 20 years, or 50 years in prison with a chance at parole after 20 years. The use of a deadly weapon may also add to the sentence.

“He took the life of an individual who was simply doing his job,” prosecutor Christopher Hamner said at closing arguments.

District Attorney Steve Wolfson said the verdict sent a message that attacks against members of the media won’t be tolerated.

In reading this story, I recalled a post we did more than five years ago where the hivemind folks recalled some of their scariest moments on the job. Threats, violence and intimidation were part of what they tolerated to do nothing but tell their audiences relevant and valuable information. Here’s a look back at what these folks endured and what we still face as journalists today:

 

“I slept with a baseball bat under my bed:” Journalists share stories of being threatened and attacked.

Rage against “the media” is a common form of expression among people who have the same difficulty in differentiating between “fake news” and “factual stuff they don’t like” as they do “their ass” and “a hole in the ground.”

One of the things that many people forget is that “the media” is actually full of real people who go to work every day. Moms and dads. Sons and daughters. Friends, loved ones and more.

For these people, and those people who care about them, hatred of the media is not an abstract concept. The anger they face is palpable. The threats they receive cause fear. As we noted a while back, we all feel the pain when a journalist is attacked or a newsroom is the site of a shooting.

And all of this takes its toll.

Lori Bentley Law, a broadcast journalist at KNBC, wrote a piece that Poynter featured, titled, “Taking the Leap: Why I’m leaving TV news after 24 years.” Of all the things she mentioned, this one stuck with me:

I’m a happy, positive, optimistic person. I don’t want to be immersed in sadness every day. I don’t ever again want a cute little girl in pigtails to look up at me and say, “We hate you.” I don’t want to hear “Fake News” shouted at me anymore. Or to be flipped off while driving my news van. Or worse yet, to have the passenger in the vehicle pacing me hang their naked butt out the window and defecate. Yes. That happened.

(Law posted her original piece and made her decision even before CNN received a pipe bomb, one of at least a dozen explosive devices sent through the mail to people and organizations throughout the country. Then people like this emerged:)

Bomber
(Yet one more moment where I think, “What the hell is wrong with people?”)

 

I often tell my students stories of how I had been called a “vulture” and a “scumbag” and worse. I remember one person who told me, “Your mother didn’t raise you right!” Another one, for some reason, told me that he was “gonna get my cousin and we’ll be over to take care of this.” I forget why he was so upset, and I still have no idea why the guy was getting his cousin, but I doubt his relative was a conflict counselor.

The other screaming fits kind of blur into a mess of random anger. Occasionally, I was fearful when I went to shootings or other things and people would tell me to “get the (expletive) out” of their neighborhood. However, most of the time, I was covering late-night crime, so the presence of the police tended to make me feel a bit safer.

In this age of the media being dubbed “the enemy of the American people,” I wondered how bad things are now or what others had faced during their time in the field. I asked the hivemind for any recollections they had of incidents involving angry people, threats or worse.

These are their stories:

The local crank is a constant job hazard for journalists. Between the conspiracy theories related to the clues in the crossword  and the allegations of biased coverage of the local dog show, some people have a lot of issues to work through. One former student encountered a particularly virulent crank with some serious issues:

At a small-town newspaper in Ohio we had a guy who would get mad about articles we wrote, photocopy pages of our newspaper, write profanity on the copies then mail them to us…

My boss actually got a restraining order against the guy because he was stalking her. He liked to slowly drive past her house and glare at her and her family. Following some court hearings and visits by the police, the letters stopped coming, but he’d still curse at me when he saw me covering an event. When I knew he was around I sometimes would have a recorder ready to go so I could record him if he ever threatened me.

This went on for about seven-and-a-half years, beginning in 2010, until the guy died earlier this year.

That same guy also sent an email to our web editor once requesting a full body photo of a high school volleyball player, which was pretty creepy. He loved going to high school sporting events, especially high school girls games.

According to my boss, a teenage girl from another school also had a restraining order against the guy. He apparently printed photos of the girl, action shots from sports and senior portraits, and mailed them to her, requesting she autograph them and send them back to him.

 

Aside from the generally creepy people, journalists tend to take the most abuse from people who feel they’ve been unfair. A media instructor who covered local politics shared the kind of story people have seen an unfortunate amount lately:

I was threatened by a political candidate a few years ago while working at our local paper. I called him to get his reaction to losing the election, and one of his supporters answered the phone pretending to be the winning opponent. It was obnoxious. I told one of our editors what had happened, and he took to Twitter. The losing candidate called me the next day threatening me (I took it as a physical threat) and promising to exclude me from any news tips he might have — and he had a lot, he claimed.

 

In some cases, it’s not even the topic of a story who gets angry with the media. A general assignment and sports reporter once came face to face with the family members of a man convicted of a crime:

Closest call came when friends of a defendant charged with killing his friend in a drunk driving crash recognized me one night while I was out with friends watching a band … started with stares, then to whispers and pointing, then to getting in my face to confront me … luckily, had more friends than they did so the issue was quickly calmed down.

 

A good friend of mine who broke the news of a “Spotlight” -like molestation scandal in the Chicagoland area found herself targeted by the leaders of her own faith:

Torrents of abuse while covering the Catholic Church sex scandal, including being screamed at by a nun (who was basing her rage on being lied to by her bishop, who she probably couldn’t yell at, so) and the now-deceased Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago once shouted at me that a story was unfair in front of an entire congregation.

She also found herself threatened physically for criticizing another “holy man” in the paper:

Our newsroom in Elgin got shot at (we never knew if it was deliberate or just that we worked in a gang territory in dispute). I wrote something semi-critical of Saint Ronald Reagan after he died and a guy called my editor and threatened to kick HIS ass once he was done with mine.

 

Being blamed for the problems of others is common in the media. I remember once telling a woman on the phone who called to scream at me about a story, “Ma’am, it’s not my fault your son was involved in a shoot out at a Taco Bell Drive Thru.”

Usually, it’s just someone screaming on the phone about a DUI report or something, but for a former student of mine, the “blame game” was much worse:

I covered the lengthy trial of a dermatologist who was accused by about 16 women of abusing his position to sexually assault them. It was already going to be a high-profile case because he was a doctor, one of the most sacred positions of trust. Every time I’ve covered a courts story involving a physician there’s been hordes of satisfied patients who come out of the woodwork to blame the messenger (me, or the media in general) — I’m assuming because that’s easier than acknowledging you put complete trust in someone who is flawed.

Anyway, this trial went to a whole other level of crazy after the doctor alleged he was being unfairly targeted because he previously had a one-night-stand with the female district attorney (she adamantly denied it), and that she was trying to put him behind bars only because she was a spurned ex-lover. The trial, unsurprisingly with so many accusers, didn’t go his way. And on the last day his adult son walked out onto the freeway and stepped in front of a semi-truck to commit suicide…

In a newsletter to the hundreds of patients still supporting him, which he forwarded to other media outlets, he singled me out as causing his son to commit suicide. The case ended up lingering over more than a year as he appealed, and he repeated the accusation over and over again over that time.

It would have bothered me if it wasn’t so batshit crazy. But then again that was nearly 10 years ago and I’m still thinking about it, so maybe he did deliver a few blows to my reporter psyche.

 

A publisher of a Midwestern paper, who also teaches courses in journalism, said she received blame after covering a football coach and his abuse of players:

I was working as a sports editor at a small market newspaper in the early 2000s. I had to be escorted to and from the office by law enforcement for almost a month after a coach threatened my life following stories I wrote about him assaulting players in the locker room after a tough loss. I was outside the locker room and heard it happening and got it on tape and many of his players came forward and went on record. He was fired and of course, it was all my fault.

That journalist also received some sexist and violent threats more recently:

Last year, I had the mayor of the town I own the newspaper in call my husband and scream at him to “manage his bitch of a wife.” I published a story with his quotes about how the city was knowingly dumping raw sewage into a local creek. Later… our farm (was) vandalized.

 

People can clearly get angry when you report things they don’t want you to cover. A good friend said he once found himself almost being a punching bag for an angry young man whose house had caught fire:

One time in the early to mid-2000s, I was covering a house fire, and the teenage/young adult son of a man presumed to be inside got right in my face and threatened to beat the daylights out of me (pretty sure that’s not the phrasing he used) because I had no business being there. Turns out the dad was fine, and I’m sure the kid was upset because he thought his dad was dead, but I really felt like I was a millisecond away from taking a right cross to the head.

 

And that wasn’t even the scariest situation in which he found himself:

There was a period of time when I slept with a baseball bat under my bed, and I remember that was directly connected to some kind of threat I received while on the cop beat — but I really don’t remember exactly what it was. Kind of funny that this sort of thing happens regularly enough that I can’t even recall why I was sleeping with a defensive weapon nearby …

 

Of all the stories shared among the hivemind, this one was the most terrifying. A journalist recalled an incident that happened to him as a student editor at his college newspaper. A reporter began looking into what he thought was a fairly pedestrian story about a professor. The professor didn’t like the story idea and posted a screed on a website, which led to the whole story blowing up on a national level:

A fan of the professor’s work (unaffiliated with the university as far as I can tell) started sending death threats via Twitter and Facebook to me, some of which was wildly anti-Semitic.

I frankly didn’t know about them until after Public Safety contacted me to warn me about the posts. After months of online harassment and my multiple meetings by phone or in person with law enforcement, he showed up on campus one day looking for me.

He even found and entered the school newspaper office, but luckily I was in class across campus at the time. Public Safety at the school detained him, interrogated him and told him to never return.

I’ve never heard from him since.

Four potential story ideas for student journalists heading back to school

QUICK REMINDER: I’m trying to gather information for folks about what students use AI for and what would make them avoid using it to cheat in class. If you are interested in helping out by reaching out to your students, here’s the link to the survey again:

https://forms.gle/WH9nzpHNT2XbMX5KA

Now, on with the show…

With the start of the semester, it can be a bit tough to get back into the swing of things in terms of coming up with some good fodder for the student media outlets out there. Here are four things that came to mind as I was trying (and failing) to come up with something more profound to launch the blog this year:

COVID COMEBACK: According to the Centers for Disease Control, COVID is making a big comeback, with several new variants getting into the act. When we first faced this mess back in 2020, we were isolating like it was a zombie apocalypse and washing our mail before opening it. Today, it’s treated less like the start of the apocalypse and more as a potential annoyance.

That said, what are the policies your school is rolling out for this? Is COVID now covered under traditional illness policies your school has? Is it still a “get out of class for a week” card? What alerts have the schools enacted regarding shared on-campus housing, dealing with workers who have diminished immune systems and more? Your school’s approach might be nothing and it should be something, or it might be a whole lot more than it needs to be.

FAFSA FAILURES: The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, better known as FAFSA, hit more than a few snags this year thanks to an “improvement” to the online application system. What that meant was hotly debated in the spring and the summer, but now we should be able to see what the actual impact is.

A recent national survey found that the freshmen classes are smaller than expected, with fewer overall financial aid applications  and less diversity in their populations. The individual impact obviously varies from school to school, so it would be a good idea to pull the FAFSA data for your school for the past five years and see where things sit today. Anecdotes will also help if you can find people who took an unintended gap year due to these problems or people who otherwise monitor the enrollment situation at your school.

HOT HOT HOT: Regardless of where you live, late August and early September are ungodly hot, compared to other times of the year. It’s also the time in which students are expected to move back to campus, leading to potential health and housing issues.

A number of news outlets in Minnesota, Wisconsin and other normally not that hot states have done the “it’s hot as hell but they’re moving kids into the dorms” stories, so there’s always a good follow up on that kind of thing. It’d be interesting to see about any medical calls (Hey, dads aren’t going to let some BS heat index stop them from hauling a freezer up 15 flights of stairs…) during the move in as well as any follow up about lack of A/C in student housing. It’s also probably not a bad thing to check on off-campus housing with landlords not keeping the air on or otherwise making the places inhabitable.

HOUSING HELL: The cost of housing in the country has become a focal point of everything from news articles to the presidential campaigns. In many cases, the focus tends to be on single-dwelling homes and hedge-fund maneuvers to corner the market on rental units in big cities. That said, every campus has its own challenges when it comes to housing space and getting students put into it.

I remember a few old stories about the dorms (residence halls, excuse me…) being booked beyond capacity, forcing some students to live in shared spaces until at least a few kids dropped out of school or got kicked out for trying to grow weed on the roof of the com building. Then there is this story out of Madison, Wisconsin that says the housing available to students is well outside their price range. (Paywall. Sorry. But Kim is a great reporter and pretty much the sole reason I’m shelling out whatever I’m shelling out to keep a subscription to the State Journal these days.)

What’s the situation out by you? Do they need to build more residence halls or have Silicon Valley billionaires bought every scrap of land around Northeast West South-Central University to corner the housing market? Also, what kind of living situations are people dealing with these days due to these pricing situations? (I’m always amazed when a student tells me they’re sharing a four-bedroom, one bath home with seven other people. I have no idea how that works…)

Hope this helps! Have a great start to the semester!

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

Help me help you figure out why students use AI to do their work and what it would take to get them to stop

help me help you | HELP ME, HELP YOU! | image tagged in help me help you | made w/ Imgflip meme maker

If you missed Wednesday’s post, we spent a good amount of time talking about what motivates (or deters) students in their use of generative artificial intelligence when it comes to coursework. You can take a look at the ideas behind the motivational theories and how they apply to this issue, but I know the big question is the simple one:

“What can I, as an instructor, do to make them want to do their own work instead of relying on AI to churn out a word salad of content they send in at the last minute?”

This might be the most Pollyanna answer you get all day, but here we go:

“Let’s ask them.”

And this is where I need your help.

I built a Google doc that has two simple questions on it:

  • What kinds of writing assignments do you (or would you) use programs like ChatGPT to do the work for you? What reasons do you have for using the program instead of doing the work independently? (e.g. “I ran out of time,” “I was bored by the work,” “The work was too hard.”) Please expand on your answer as much as you would like.
  • What would motivate you to NOT use generative AI programs like ChatGPT to do your written work for you? In other words, what makes you more willing or able to do the work independently? (e.g. “It would be cheating.” “I’m afraid of getting punished.” “I like what I’m asked to do.”) Please expand as much on your answer as you would like.

(UPDATE: Based on the request of a colleague, I added one more: In what ways have you used AI to facilitate your independent work? How do you wish teachers would allow AI as the tool it could be?)

It collects no private data, it doesn’t require them to log into Google to do it and I’ll have no idea where any of this came from. It’s simply two short answer questions meant to figure out WHY they do (or don’t do) something so we can look for potential solutions based on the research people have done on things like motivation and task completions.

If you want to help me help you, here’s the link:

https://forms.gle/WH9nzpHNT2XbMX5KA

If you have to (or want to) offer extra credit for this, I put a “code phrase” on the completion page you can ask them to give to you.

I’m going to let this run for a couple weeks and see what we get. If we get responses enough to make some soup out of this, I’ll put together something to share with you all a couple weeks after that.

In the meantime, hang in there and keep the faith. We got your back.

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