Exercises

“It’s not a riot. It’s a large, prolonged disturbance.” Working through fact-checks and BS-checks (A Throwback Post)

When it comes to fact checking and BS detecting, I often tell students about a story I wrote involving the Mifflin Street Block Party about 30 years ago. The party got way out of hand late at night, with students setting bonfires in the middle of the street and even burning a car. When firefighters arrived to extinguish the blazes, the party participants repelled them with bottles, rocks, cans and anything else they could throw.

With the fire truck damaged and the firefighters outnumbered, the police eventually went in with riot gear and battled for control of the scene, as the party folks chanted, “F— THE PIGS!” at the top of their lungs.

The next day, I’m talking to the public information officer from Madison PD and I ask if, since it was the first time they donned riot gear since the Vietnam War, if they called out a 10-33, Riot In Progress.

“Don’t you dare call this a riot,” he told me.

I then explained I’d seen what had happened and the carnage that was left behind, so if it’s not a riot, what was it?

“It was a large, prolonged disturbance,” he told me before hanging up.

We are apparently entering another period of Jedi Mind Trick 101, in which people in power are telling the media, “Don’t call this a war. It’s not a war.” Therefore, I thought it might be a good time to pull this post the fact-checking exercise along with it out for another run.

Journalism 101: Facts matter, so don’t feel bad about forcing people to get them right

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THE LEAD: In a blinding flash of the obvious, the Washington Post reported that politicians don’t like being told they’re wrong about things via a journalistic fact check. In other “water is wet” news, Donald Trump and his campaign seem particularly outraged by the temerity of journalists who actually researched topics and can prove he’s full of beans from time to time:

Trump nearly backed out of an August interview with a group of Black journalists after learning they planned to fact-check his claims. The following month, he and his allies repeatedly complained about the fact-checking that occurred during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, berating journalists and news executives in the middle of the televised debate.

And this month, Trump declined to sit down for an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” because he objected to the show’s practice of fact-checking, according to the show.

<SNIP>

The moves are the latest example of Trump’s long-held resistance to being called to account for his falsehoods, which have formed the bedrock of his political message for years. Just in recent weeks, for example, Trump has seized on fabricated tales of migrants eating pets and Venezuelan gangs overtaking cities in pushing his anti-immigration message as he seeks a second term in office.

THE BACKGROUND: The joke I always go back to is the familiar one of, “How can you tell when a politician is lying? Their lips are moving.” The idea that politicians fabricate situations is not a new one. Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations…” and Mark Sanford’s “hiking on the Appalachian trail” are some of the more infamous ones, as they intended to cover over embarrassing personal failings and limit political fall out.

Even more, politicians invent people they saw, they met and they heard, all in the service of some anecdote about salt-of-the-earth farmers getting the shaft, military leaders praising their brilliance or other similar moments of self-aggrandizing puffery. And of course there is the myth-making that surrounds some politicians, like George Washington’s cherry tree or Reagan’s trickle-down economics…

As far as this election is going, Tim Walz was fact-checked on his claims about his service, his presence in China during the Tiananmen Square protests and his family’s use of IVF services, each of which resulted in some disparities. Kamala Harris is also ringing up a few “false” ratings from Politifact on some of her claims regarding illegal drugs and her own previous political efforts.

Still, most of this is piddly stuff compared to what Trump does on a daily basis, both in terms of frequency and intensity. If Walz’s “carried weapons of war” statement is a leak in the truth boat, Trump is continually bashing the Titanic into the iceberg and flooding every compartment.

WHY DO WE CARE AS JOURNALISTS: Despite what the former president of the United States things, facts have a definition:  things that are known or proved to be true. The job of a journalist is to get the facts and report them, so that people can make informed decisions on important things in their lives. If you strip away everything else from journalism, that’s the beating heart at its core.

Telling journalists you will only talk to them if they promise not to fact check you is like telling me, “You can come to our party, but only if you promise to not be a bald, middle-aged white guy.” It’s what I am, so that’s going to be a bit hard to square that circle.

People rely on facts to have a shared understanding of reality, so that society can function. It’s why when we bring a shirt to the check out kid and that shirt is priced $19.99 plus tax, we understand it’s probably going to cost about $21 or $22, give or take your part of the country. If the kid says, “That price is fake news. You owe me $150 and can’t leave until you do,” that breaks the whole “shared understanding of reality” thing.

For years, journalists have been telling people, “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.” Somewhere along the way (I blame the internet), it actually became, “Pick your own facts and then be outraged when someone disagrees with you.”

EXERCISE TIME: Pick out a TikTok on any hot topic that’s going on today (politics, Diddy trial etc.) and write down whatever statements these people are declaring to be facts. Then, go fact check them against

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.

UPDATE TIME: Another AP style poster, big bin of exercises and information about the second edition of “Exploring Mass Communication”

With a bunch of folk already heading back to school, it seemed like a good time to boot up the blog and get back to the weekly schedule. Then, my body said, “Hey, what would it be like if you coughed so hard, you blew a blood vessel in one of your eyes?” To that end, the blog might be spotty until further notice, but I’m working on it…

Let’s kick it off with some free goodies that might be useful this year:

EXERCISES ABOUND: A few months back, I put together a bin of random exercises that I thought might be helpful to folks. They included everything from in-class writing pieces to some AI-oriented activities.

As a lot of folks might not have been teaching a class that needed them last term, or this might be the first time you found the blog, here’s a link to the previous post on that topic and the directions on how to get the bin of goodies.

Speaking of helpful…

A NEW VERSION OF THE AP STYLE POSTER: One of the other asks from previous semesters was a giant “cheat-sheet poster” of AP style stuff that most people tended to look up quite often. Sage did a fantastic job of building something out, but it got a great improvement over the break.

Jean Norman, professor of emerging media and journalism at Weber State University, hit me up with a new version that she had tinkered with to make it more helpful for more people:

I’ve been working on my spring classes and am incorporating your AP Style poster into them. I am grateful for all the work that went into it. You may be aware that the federal government is requiring all online work to be accessible starting in April. So I ran this through the accessibility checks and fixed the issues on that front.

I am attaching the accessible version. You will notice that some of the subheads are now black instead of white. That is for contrast and readability. I thought you might want this version to share for those with online classes.

Jean’s reboot can be found here for download. Thanks again, Jean, for improving on this situation and helping me help other folks.

Speaking of improvements…

HELP ME HELP YOU IN “EXPLORING MASS COMMUNICATION” EDITION #2: I got an email over the break from my main man, Charles, over at Sage, who let me know that “Exploring Mass Communication” is a go for a second edition. I honestly can’t thank you all enough for putting faith in me and my stuff, let alone taking the time to revamp your classes to fit my odd whimsical approach to content provision.

With that in mind, I’ve got the giant post-it note set up for the second edition, which will definitely include a stand-alone chapter on artificial intelligence.

The wall was looking naked for a while there…

HOWEVER, there is still plenty of room to add, subtract, multiply and divide, so I’m looking to anyone out there who is using the book, considering the book, thinking about the concepts of books in general or who just wants to add their two cents to the mix:

  • What do you like that we should keep in the book?
  • What is missing that needs to be added to the book?
  • What did you think was a colossal waste of time in the book?
  • How can we improve the book? (Caveat: I have no say over the cost of this thing, but I have actively pushed for it to be cheaper than whatever else is out there.)

In short, help me help you so this book can be exactly what you would want it to be.

And finally, if you or someone you know is a Wisconsin high school journalist, here’s a cool thing for them:

An intern from the  Wisconsin Chapter of JEA hit me up with an ask to share this with anyone I knew who might be a good candidate. I figured you all knew more people than I did, so let’s start with the blog and move on from there.

In looking at the WisJEA board, I realized at least two of the people on it are former students, as is the intern who asked me for help promoting this. They are all amazing people, in spite of somehow being connected to me.

For more information on this great opportunity, you can click here.

 

Exercise Time: How did your media frame the ending of the shutdown?

(There’s not a lot of gray area in how Jon Stewart framed this, but you might find more nuance in the other media you consume…)

The government shutdown began its bureaucratic crawl toward completion this week, after eight non-Republicans in the senate joined the Republicans in approving a continuing resolution to keep the lights on here in the U.S.

The shutdown has been the longest work stoppage of its kind in the history of the federal government and it’s interesting to see how various media outlets have chosen to explain this.

As we discussed earlier, framing is a practice in which media outlets emphasize or de-emphasize various aspects of a situation to paint a picture for an audience. For example, a football game in which one team has an overwhelming lead, only to lose late in the contest could be framed as either an amazing comeback or an epic choke job.

Today’s exercise is a simple one: How did the media you consume frame the end of the shutdown? Some obvious approaches include Republican victory and Democratic caving, but there are more and more “think” pieces rolling out recently that look for a “silver lining” on this issue.

Find five or six stories on various media sites and look for stories about the shutdown. What do you see as the prominent issues emphasized in each of these? Do they match your personal viewpoint on this issue or not? What benefits and drawbacks do you see for each frame presented here?

Once you’re done, it’d be a good time for a class discussion about this.

As Promised, Here is Dr. Vinnie’s Bin of Journalism Exercises, Complete with AI Toys

It might not be as cool as opening Marcellus Wallace’s case, but I hope this pile of exercises will still make you as happy as Vincent and Jules.

 

As many of you are starting back to school, I figured I’d break radio silence with some goods I promised to deliver by the end of the summer. Back in May, I asked what kinds of things you needed from me and you were all nice enough to hit me with some ideas. Some were really concrete (“These kids need stuff to learn how to write a #%^#ing lead.”) while others were more nuanced (“They need to play with AI, but in a way that helps them see what it can and can’t do. I have no idea how that would work, though…”)

I’ve put together a bin of stuff that tries to cover the gamut of needs, while offering you choices as to how to apply the exercises in your own schools and for your own needs. Think of each of the files as kind of a Swiss Army knife of opportunities that you can use as you see fit.

It should go without saying that the content is either made up or fictionalized versions of stuff that actually happened, so don’t freak out if you see something and think, “Oh my lord! What hath hell wrought!”

Here’s a brief overview:

Breaking News/Ongoing Situation Stuff: A couple files contain information that is divided into several stages of release. The idea is that, just like a breaking news story, or an ongoing event, information is important compared to other information you receive.

It’s meant to mirror the “King of the Mountain” exercise approach we blogged about some time ago, with newer information forcing students to reconsider what’s most important in updating their content and giving them the critical thinking skills needed to do so.

There is also a straight-up crime story with some quotable material for you to play with.

Raw Materials Folder: There is a collection of nothing but interviews on topics that seemed relatively universal (Fires, Campus Illnesses, thought on Gen Ed classes, TikTok etc.) that students did over the years. I stripped out all the names/identifying features for this and left you with some red text where you can insert names that reflect your student body, places your students would know and so forth.

There is also a couple city council stories that are god awful that I rebuilt from local newspapers with name changes, area changes and so forth. Those can be helpful if you want them to work on revising bad copy or with some of the AI stuff we’ll talk about later.

Standard Story Stuff: I’ve put together a list of standard stories that we all tend to write in various types of journalism (breaking news, meeting/speech/news conference, localization etc.) with some suggestions regarding length and source count.

If it’s more of a reporting class, obviously, you can send them out to do stuff, but I included these for the media-writing folk who might not have students ready to go the full “Lois Lane” out there. These can meld nicely with some of the stuff in the raw material folder.

I also tossed in a “canned game story” for people who need to take a shot at sports writing before they cover a game. It includes stats, scores and post-game interview quotes that can be used to build a solid game recap on a pretty fun game.

AI Fun: I build several AI exercises that allow the students to see how AI can be really helpful and where it can fall short. It includes a trial run for them at something I did for the blog over the summer, involving interview questions. A couple of them also can be used on the raw material files to have AI build a story either before or after they do. This can show them how AI might or might not get the gist of what is important in a story.

HOW DO YOU GET THIS STUFF:

In normal times, I’d just post it here, but between AI and overly industrious students, I’m a little leery of just leaving a pile of stuff on the open web. So, to give you the goodies while protecting the pile a bit, here’s what you do:

Hit me up via the contact form on the blog, which is linked here. Just tell me your name, your school, your email address and anything else you think is important. I’ll then send you the unlock for the folders and you can go hog wild.

It’s all freebie and you can do whatever you want with it for your class. If you run into a better way to use this stuff, or have an idea you want to share, I’d appreciate it. Also, I don’t care if you’re using any of my books or not, so this isn’t an exclusive party for adopters. I just like helping people.

Have a great start to the semester. We’ll be back full time next week after Labor Day.

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

 

 

Tell me what media-writing and journalism exercises your kids need and I’ll build them for you

So, so pretty… And no, I was not inspired by “Wicked” when I approved this. Unless you would adopt it because of that, in which case, I’ll have you know I always sing “Defying Gravity” before I come to work.

With the fourth edition of “Dynamics of Media Writing” set to debut in August, and with the third edition of “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” having just published, it seemed like a good time to add some extra value to the books.

The biggest need people tend to express in reviewing textbooks is the need for more exercises. A friend hit me with an email about that just the other week:

Really hoping to find a text that offers enough exercises so we don’t have to require an exercise book.

I get it and that’s one of the reasons why we shifted from the exercise books that accompanied the texts to the blog approach. Kids pay a lot of money for school, so if we can give them everything they need for less, hey, I’m a big fan.

That said, asking for more exercises is a lot like when Amy says, “What are you thinking about for dinner?” I usually have no idea, as she often asks this right after we eat a huge breakfast, and I’m more of a “eat whatever is near me when I’m hungry” type of guy.

So, to better guide the focus of my summer work that will include both learning how to weld sheet metal and creating some more exercises for you all, I need some help. I also figure it’s a good time to ask this now, as most of you have just finished a semester, so the “Holy hell, do these kids need more practice doing XYZ” angst is likely fresh in your minds.

Either post at the end of this post or shoot me a message through the “Contact” page and answer the following questions:

1) What topics are most in need of exercises for your kids? Look at the chapters in either or both books and see what things I’ve written about that your students struggle with the most. That could be broader topics like grammar or interviewing, or it could be more specific things like how to write an obituary or a press release.

2) What format of exercise is most likely going to help you meet those needs? I tend to categorize these things into a few basic areas:

  • Memory Exercises: Think multiple choice, true false, pick the right word, matching game etc. This is when you want them to know what FOCII stands for or which ethical paradigm is reflected in the phrase “justice is blind.”
  • Explainer Exercises: Think short answer or mini-essays where they have to tell you what they were thinking about and why. That could be something like, “Explain the difference between AI and generative AI” or “List five things that are wrong with this lead.”
  • Just Do It Exercises: Think about things where the rubber meets the road and the kid actually has to create something that demonstrates competency at the task. It could be building a press release out of a collection of facts, rewriting a meeting story to better fit the inverted-pyramid format or using press releases to write leads.

Hit me up with this and I’ll add your needs to the pile. Once I get the pile built, I’ll share with the class.

 

An Awesome AP Style Exercise That Will Get Your Kids Moving

I’m always a fan of people who have creative ways of helping students learn important tasks. That’s why I’m a mega-fan of Kameron Lunon of McNeese State University, who hit me up with an email back in 2021:

I wanted your thoughts on something. I’ve created (a series of AP rules and items) with the intention of taping them to students backs and they have to 1). Figure out who/what they are, but then 2). they have to pair themselves with their rule. After they’ve been paired, 3). The other students have to ask questions and try and figure out what the other students are.

I thought this was one of the coolest ways ever to do AP style, get students thinking creatively and helping them to remember key style rules. Kameron and I batted a few emails and texts back and forth about his plan to implement this. He also mentioned he’d video recorded it and would share it when it was edited.

As is the case with most things in journalism that lack deadlines, we both kind of lost track of time until last week, when he shared the final product with me. It’s absolutely worth the 12 minutes of watch time:

 

Kameron was nice enough to put together a quick walk-through for anyone interested in replicating the activity.

(Thanks again, Kameron! If anyone else out there has anything cool you’d like to share with the blog readers, just hit me up.)

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

It’s the first sentence of your story, not a clown car: Learn to make choices in your leads

 

The goal of good lead writing is to tell people two basic things:

  1. What happened?
  2. Why do I, as the reader, care about this?

While many leads fail to do one or both of these when they don’t include enough information, some leads do almost the same thing when they give the readers too much stuff all at once.

Here’s one about the death of a former NBA player who became an incredible businessman:

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA sixth man who rose from modest means to forge one of the most successful post-playing business careers of any professional athlete, becoming a billionaire philanthropist and, recently, a minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks team for which he once played, died Tuesday after suffering a medical emergency during an event in Louisville, Kentucky.

This 58-word monstrosity gives me way too much information and I find myself struggling to keep up with everything the writer is trying to say. The writer decides not to make any choices about what to keep in the lead and what to relegate to lower paragraphs, thus making this a difficult read.

Let’s take a look at how you can avoid this kind of problem when you have a lot of things happening and they might all seem lead-worthy.

First, let’s lay out all of the facts in the “One Piece at a Time” approach to this lead:

  • Junior Bridgeman died Tuesday.
  • He suffered a medical emergency while at an event in Louisville.
  • He was an NBA player.
  • He won the Sixth Man of the Year award.
  • He was born of modest means.
  • He had a successful post-player business empire.
  • He became a billionaire.
  • He was a philanthropist.
  • He was a minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks. (meaning he wasn’t the main owner, for folks who are unfamiliar with concept)

That’s a heck of a lot of stuff, even when you consider that it doesn’t include at least one thing most obituary-style stories like this tend to have (age of the deceased). That means we need to make decisions.

Second, start off with the most direct Noun-Verb-Object kind of approach we can take here to what matters most:

Junior Bridgeman died after a medical emergency.

We have a good noun, a solid verb and a solid prepositional phrase with a crucial object of the preposition that tells us how he died (at least somewhat).

 

Third, start looking for ways that you can condense some of the statements above, removing redundant elements or reshaping them in a more direct way.

For example, we basically say he was rich three ways:

  • Successful business empire
  • Billionaire
  • Team owner

Maybe there’s a way to either eliminate one of those or to recraft the sentence to shrink up what is there to tighten the sentence:

Junior Bridgeman, a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, died after a medical emergency.

We also say he was an NBA player in two ways:

  • Former Sixth Man of the Year
  • He played for the Bucks

We could rework that to both of those things into this as well with some tightening and structuring:

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA Sixth Man of the Year  who became a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks after his playing days ended, died after a medical emergency.

I’m at 32 words here, so if I’m going to add anything else, I’m probably going to need to make some changes. Let’s see what we add and what we cut:

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA Sixth Man of the Year  who became a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks after his playing days ended, died Tuesday in Louisville, Kentucky, after a medical emergency.

If we add the where and the when, we’re at 36. We could go one of two ways to make a cut here. We could remove the phrase “after his playing days ended” if we think it’s obvious that he didn’t become those things before or during his playing days. We could also cut the award and replace it with “player,” which would swap five words for one. We could do both if we wanted to find a way to weave his age in.

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA player who later became a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, died Tuesday at 71 after a medical emergency in Louisville, Kentucky.

This gets us to 30 words, adds in the age and allows for development later. We could swap out the age and put back the Sixth Man of the Year award, if we felt it was more valuable to the audience than his age. I’m also not a huge fan of three prepositional phrases in a row, as that starts to make this a little sing-songy. It’s a judgment call at this point. Either way, we basically have a congruent amount of information to the original lead in half the space.

The one thing to remember about lead writing is that there’s nothing wrong with pour out all the info you have into a sentence, but you then have to go back and make decisions. In most cases, the writing of the lead is in the editing, so make sure to give your lead those additional looks that can make the difference between one that’s tight and right and one that’s bloated and confusing.

EXERCISE TIME: Find a lead in a publication that you read that goes way over that 35-word limit. (The longer the better) and use this approach to get it under control. If you need to use other elements from the story to do so, feel free to dig into the body of the piece a little bit.

Then, see what other people think about your changes and be able to justify your actions as you go along.

 

Time to Dissect the Super Bowl Ads for Audience-Centricity and Interest Elements

One major tradition surrounding the Super Bowl, other than complaining that whatever it was was the worst half-time show ever, is a deep dive into the commercials. Countless ad orgs, commentators, marketing pros and other folks will spend hours upon hours making bests and worsts lists. In any given year, there will be the ads that tug on heart strings, ads that are flat out ridiculous, ads that insult at least three demographic groups and ads that leave us wondering, “OK, what the heck was that?”

Rather than go the traditional way here, let’s make some sense of the ads from the perspective of how media content is supposed to work.

  1. Define and understand your audience well enough to provide content that caters to the people in it.
  2. Use specific interest elements to pique and hold the audience members’ attention.

Here is a link to a pretty good running tally of all the ads:

 

Go through the ads and find the one that you like (or hate) the most and start to analyze based on the key points above:

Audience: Break down the demographics based on who tends to watch the Super Bowl, according to a reliable source you can find online. Then, see what segment of that broader chunk is most likely the target of this ad from that perspective. Then, move into the psychographic elements that you think are at the core of what the target audience members most likely ascribe to in their lives. In short, what values, feelings, connections and more is the ad you picked trying to tap into.

(As for the third element we outline in the book, it’s highly unlikely the geographic element will play a role here, but if you find something, go for it.)

Then, move into the next phase by assessing the interest elements that draw the attention of audience members:

  • Fame
  • Oddity
  • Conflict
  • Immediacy
  • Impact

As we often note, you won’t be able to catch all five of these in most cases. At least one should be present in any media content. See how many you can find and then assess if those elements are being successfully tapped.

Some of the goals of the ads will work or won’t work because the people making the ads didn’t correctly match elements like “fame” or “impact” with what the target audience knows or understands. (I bring this up, as Amy and I were watching part of the half-time show and when someone came out to sing with Kendrick Lamar, we both asked, “OK, who the heck is that?” We eventually asked our cooler, hipper sister-in-law, who was nice enough not to shame us as part of the process…)

See what you can come up with as part of this analysis, particularly if you thought any given ad really worked or really flopped.

At the very least, it’s a good excuse to watch some videos in class today.

 

X-odus: A look at how and why people are fleeing the former Twitter platform and how Bluesky and Threads are gaining ground

New home, same sarcasm! Come join me at Bluesky.

THE LEAD: Social media users and microbloggers found their tipping point when it came to the way in which X (formerly Twitter) was turning into a hell-scape. In the wake of the election, millions of users have shut down their X accounts and moved to one of several other sites that offered relatively the same services as X, but without the trolling and content manipulation.

One of the sites seeing a massive influx of users was Bluesky, a Twitter clone that was developed in part by former Twitter master Jack Dorsey:

Bluesky, a fledgling social media platform, reported Thursday that 1 million users had signed up in a single day. Some frustrated X users appear to have flocked to the newer network in recent weeks.

Bluesky, which began as an internal project by then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019, was invitation-only until it opened to the public in February. Since 2021, it has been an independent company with Jay Graber as its CEO.

It currently has about 18 million users. Graber posted Friday that the platform is growing by 10,000 users every 10 to 15 minutes.

While Bluesky remains small compared to established online spaces, it has emerged as an alternative for those looking for a different mood and less influenced by X owner Elon Musk, a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump.

BACKGROUND: Alternatives like Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon and others have existed on the fringes of microblogging sites for several years, but never managed to gain traction. Twitter/X had the benefit of being one of the earliest sites of this nature, which meant that most people interested in this form of social media had developed significant followings there.

Data on how many people use X on a daily basis varies, but current figures place the general usage between 300 million and 500 million users overall. Thus, while Bluesky seems to be booming at this point, 19 million users is still just a drop in the bucket compared to Elon’s Army. It’s not even a drop in the bucket compared to Threads, which stated it has about 275 million users.

It’s unclear as to how many users have left X since the election of Donald Trump, with whom X owner Elon Musk has aligned himself. While the argument that X has become too toxic and conspiratorial is an oft-stated reason for leaving, the massive exodus also tended to coincide with Musk’s update to the service agreement:

A new terms of service document, which took effect on Nov. 15, allows Musk to use tweets, photos and videos — even from private accounts — to train Grok, the platform’s AI bot.

“You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) analyze text and other information you provide … for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type,” the terms say under the section about users’ rights.

They also stipulate that users’ content may be modified or adapted for other media.

Users will not be paid for their content, which could end up in the hands of other companies, organizations or individuals.

The company will not monitor posts for truthfulness.

“You may be exposed to Content that might be offensive, harmful, inaccurate or otherwise inappropriate, or in some cases, postings that have been mislabeled or are otherwise deceptive,” the terms say. “All Content is the sole responsibility of the person who originated such Content.”

Yeah… It’s kind of like this:

 

 SHAMELESS PLUG TIME:  I shut down my X account, so come follow me at Bluesky.

If you are moved/moving to Bluesky, post your addy down in the comments or send it to me via the Contact Page and I’ll build us a starter kit.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE:Social media has always been a shifting landscape in which almost anything can (and usually does) happen. Over the past 15-20 years, there have been very few platforms that have remained a standard bearer for this form of communication. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter were kind of the Fab Four in that regard.

Loyalty has been a big part of why these remained constants, although the owners of these sites have been accused of anti-competitive practices that basically kill the competition before it can grow legs. In other cases, the competing efforts fell flat because they lacked the infrastructure, vision or audience to keep up with the Joneses.

I’ve been watching social media for years, in large part because I’ve been writing books that have chapters on it and I hate looking dated or stupid. When I first had to write the draft of the “Dynamics of Media Writing,” the folks at Sage had me write the social media chapter first as part of the “pitch” they wanted to send to potential adopters.

I protested, arguing that it would be old and dated by the time it went to press, but they said they needed it as an example of what made the book current and fresh, so I did it.

From the first draft of that chapter until the day we published, I ended up rewriting the chapter completely FOUR TIMES. That didn’t count the last-second adjustments to things like Twitter moving from 140 characters to 280 characters and the death of a random platform or two.

What makes this particular situation so depressing is that Elon Musk doesn’t give a damn about this situation, or at least he’s doing a great job of pretending he doesn’t.

When advertisers were jumping ship in late 2023, Musk told them in a very public interview to “go fuck yourself.” If that’s what he had to say to people who were paying him millions, I doubt he’s worried about me and my 630 followers on X.

That said, this is exactly how social media is supposed to operate, based on its underlying paradigm: Platforms that cater to the audience interests and needs tend to thrive, while those that decide to do it “their way” regardless of what the audience wants tend to dry up and blow away.

If ever there was an example of how NOT to keep an eye on audience centricity, X is probably it.

EXERCISE TIME: Take a look back at the graveyard of social media platforms that no longer exist and see how, when and why they tended to go belly up. In analyzing those examples, how do you see some of these newly popular sites doing in terms of thriving or dying? What other opportunities might exist in the wake of the X exodus?

Journalism 101: Facts matter, so don’t feel bad about forcing people to get them right

Screenshot

THE LEAD: In a blinding flash of the obvious, the Washington Post reported that politicians don’t like being told they’re wrong about things via a journalistic fact check. In other “water is wet” news, Donald Trump and his campaign seem particularly outraged by the temerity of journalists who actually researched topics and can prove he’s full of beans from time to time:

Trump nearly backed out of an August interview with a group of Black journalists after learning they planned to fact-check his claims. The following month, he and his allies repeatedly complained about the fact-checking that occurred during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, berating journalists and news executives in the middle of the televised debate.

And this month, Trump declined to sit down for an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” because he objected to the show’s practice of fact-checking, according to the show.

<SNIP>

The moves are the latest example of Trump’s long-held resistance to being called to account for his falsehoods, which have formed the bedrock of his political message for years. Just in recent weeks, for example, Trump has seized on fabricated tales of migrants eating pets and Venezuelan gangs overtaking cities in pushing his anti-immigration message as he seeks a second term in office.

THE BACKGROUND: The joke I always go back to is the familiar one of, “How can you tell when a politician is lying? Their lips are moving.” The idea that politicians fabricate situations is not a new one. Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations…” and Mark Sanford’s “hiking on the Appalachian trail” are some of the more infamous ones, as they intended to cover over embarrassing personal failings and limit political fall out.

Even more, politicians invent people they saw, they met and they heard, all in the service of some anecdote about salt-of-the-earth farmers getting the shaft, military leaders praising their brilliance or other similar moments of self-aggrandizing puffery. And of course there is the myth-making that surrounds some politicians, like George Washington’s cherry tree or Reagan’s trickle-down economics…

As far as this election is going, Tim Walz was fact-checked on his claims about his service, his presence in China during the Tiananmen Square protests and his family’s use of IVF services, each of which resulted in some disparities. Kamala Harris is also ringing up a few “false” ratings from Politifact on some of her claims regarding illegal drugs and her own previous political efforts.

Still, most of this is piddly stuff compared to what Trump does on a daily basis, both in terms of frequency and intensity. If Walz’s “carried weapons of war” statement is a leak in the truth boat, Trump is continually bashing the Titanic into the iceberg and flooding every compartment.

WHY DO WE CARE AS JOURNALISTS: Despite what the former president of the United States things, facts have a definition:  things that are known or proved to be true. The job of a journalist is to get the facts and report them, so that people can make informed decisions on important things in their lives. If you strip away everything else from journalism, that’s the beating heart at its core.

Telling journalists you will only talk to them if they promise not to fact check you is like telling me, “You can come to our party, but only if you promise to not be a bald, middle-aged white guy.” It’s what I am, so that’s going to be a bit hard to square that circle.

People rely on facts to have a shared understanding of reality, so that society can function. It’s why when we bring a shirt to the check out kid and that shirt is priced $19.99 plus tax, we understand it’s probably going to cost about $21 or $22, give or take your part of the country. If the kid says, “That price is fake news. You owe me $150 and can’t leave until you do,” that breaks the whole “shared understanding of reality” thing.

For years, journalists have been telling people, “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.” Somewhere along the way (I blame the internet), it actually became, “Pick your own facts and then be outraged when someone disagrees with you.”

EXERCISE TIME: Pick out a TikTok on any hot topic that’s going on today (politics, Diddy trial etc.) and write down whatever statements these people are declaring to be facts. Then, go fact check them against

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