Exercises

Liberty University, an “unprecedented” fine and why student journalists should spend some time examining their own campus Clery Report

THE LEAD: When your school ponies up fines related to campus safety that total more than those associated with Larry Nassar and Jerry Sandusky combined, you know something has gone horribly wrong.

Liberty University has agreed to pay an unprecedented $14 million fine for the Christian school’s failure to disclose information about crimes on its campus and for its treatment of sexual assault survivors, the U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday.

The fine is by far the largest ever levied under the Clery Act, a law that requires colleges and universities that receive federal funding to collect data on campus crime and notify students of threats. Schools must disseminate an annual security report that includes crime reports and information on efforts to improve campus safety.

BACKGROUND: According to the Clery Center, “The Clery Act requires colleges and universities to report campus crime data, support victims of violence, and publicly outline the policies and procedures they have put into place to improve campus safety.” The act was named for Jeanne Clery, a Lehigh University student who was raped and murdered on campus in 1986. Clery’s parents sued the institution, arguing that had the family known of the university’s record on violent crime, Jeanne Clery never would have attended the school.

Each year, colleges and universities that participate in the federal financial aid program have to report data related to violent crimes on and around the campus. That report has to be publicly available , and instances of non-compliance can lead to fines from the US Department of Education.

Liberty University has long pitched itself as a safe place and had the data to back it up. That’s because it often either under-covered the cases of sexual assault or trying to nudge folks to not really think of sexual assault as being sexual assault:

Federal investigators cited a case in which a woman reported being raped, with the attacker telling her he had a knife, the final program review stated.

Liberty’s investigator “unfounded this case based on a claim that the ‘victim indicates that she consented to the sexual act,’” the final program review stated. “In point of fact, the victim’s own statement merely indicated that she ‘gave in’ in an attempt to get away from the perpetrator.”

 

RANDOM SIDE NOTE: Just for the hell of it, I went to the website for The Liberty Champion, the student newspaper at Liberty University, to see what kind of coverage this situation got.

None. As in, zero.

 

 

The most recent mention of “Clery Act” found through a search of the site is from 2019. Checks for things like “fine,” “$14 million” and “rape” brought back no results attached to this situation. That said, there were some nice stories about the women’s hockey team, an open house to kick of Women’s History Month and the 40th anniversary of The Champion.

If anyone ever asks why a free and unfettered student press matters on campus, consider this the mic-drop answer you’ve been looking for.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO YOU: If you are involved with Liberty University or are you a person who supports sexual assault survivors, the answer is pretty obvious. If you are looking for an answer beyond that, it lies in the underlying concept of the Clery Act and the gap between what the data should tell us and actually does tell us.

One of the inherent flaws to data of any kind is based in who collects the data, for what purpose and with what intention in mind. The goal of the Clery Act was to force universities to disclose all violent and property crime so that people could get a good look at a campus to determine its level of safety.

No university is going to see an uptick of enrollment if they look like a haven for murders, rapists and thieves, so it isn’t in the best interest of universities to be overly expansive in how they approach this data. Even if they’re not actively doing the “Nope, she enjoyed it. Can’t be rape” crap that Liberty was accused of doing, there is still some significant leeway in how universities shave the data. What counts as “nearby” campus is in the eye of the beholder, as does “student” housing.

This isn’t to say that many universities actively game the system when it comes to the Clery report. However, it’s important to look at the data in comparison to what local police reports, campus news reports and other media coverage has showcased during that period of time to make sure the pieces match up before considering the data to be gospel.

EXERCISE TIME: If your school falls under the Clery Act, find a copy of the most recent three years of reported data. (The degree to which this is easy or hard might make for a story in and of itself.)

Pick through the data to notice any specific trends or shifts in the numbers. In some campuses, the most violent crimes like rape and murder will see huge percentage gains or losses over one or two incidents. In other cases, a particular type of crime might have a consistent set of high or low numbers that merit examining.

Also, dig back through your campus media outlets to see about any coverage related to some of the higher-level crimes from the data. To what degree does the media coverage mirror the data?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

SelfIsolate

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the male equivalent of “mistress” (or how does the media frame people who aren’t straight, white men)?

Today’s “Mass Com Monday” post takes a look at the idea of how the choices journalists make in their work can shape the way we see a person, an event or a concept. Broadly speaking, the idea of inclusion or exclusion of content to paint a specific picture is known as framing, a theory most journalism students learn about.

For example, let’s look at like Sunday’s Broncos/Commanders game: The Broncos led 21-3 early in the game. The Commanders scored enough points to take a 35-24 lead. The Broncos then scored twice to make the final score 35-33, after they failed in an attempt at a two-point conversion with no time left on the clock.

This could be framed as an epic comeback if you want to look at it from the point of view of the Commanders. It could be framed as an epic collapse if you looked at it from the Broncos side of the deal. You could also frame it based on the final play (Commanders held on to win/Broncos failed to complete the job and lost).

Framing isn’t always about picking a side, but in most cases, it’s about how the media can shape our view of thing, including bigger topics like race, gender and other social issues. Let’s look at one example of that:

In a long social media thread a friend had running about the trial of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a commenter noted how the Washington Post chose to lead a story on the prosecution’s most important witness:

Two women WaPo reporters crafted this lede:

AUSTIN — The star witness swept into the Texas Capitol on Wednesday, red coat and flashy Balenciaga-emblazoned handbag tucked under her arms, her white sheath, red lipstick and signature platinum pixie all a dramatic contrast from the somber-suited individuals who have testified for the past week in the historic impeachment trial of state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The star witness was Laura Olson, person who prosecutors said had an extended affair with Paxton. What she would bring to the table in terms of supporting the case against Paxton was unclear and eventually she was cut loose from having to testify.

What is clear, based on the thread and a general reading of how Olson has been portrayed, is that there is a heavy emphasis on her appearance. Her fashion and her physical being (sweeping in, being flashy etc.) are front and center.

It’s fair to say that this kind of framing wouldn’t be something you’d see in a description of a man in a situation like this.

Or as I put it, I’d hate to see how these esteemed journalists would have described me in that situation:

“The star witness awkwardly shuffled into court with the confidence of a drunk doing a field sobriety test, clad in a wardrobe likely abandoned outside a Goodwill by a homeless elf, his head shaped like a decaying russet potato with a horse shoe of graying mane around a shiny bald top that gave him the look of a cue ball wearing a hula skirt, a dramatic contrast to the other witnesses who clearly own mirrors and possess a sense of dignity…”

The authors also make some interesting choices on what to include, such as this tidbit about her shoes:

Olson arrived with her attorney in the morning, entering the Capitol rotunda and ducking into a restroom where she traded red, kitten-heel mules for tan pumps.

Wait! WAIT! Who is the fashion designer associated with these amazing pieces of footware? Were they Manolos? Louboutins? And did she go into a stall or was this done near the sink? Come ON, Washington Post! Are you committed to serious journalistic digging or not here?

And let’s look  at  how the authors framed her compare to how they framed Paxton in the realm of non-essential clauses: (I bolded certain spots for emphasis and clarity.)

 Paxton, a three-term incumbent reelected last year, has been among the state’s most prominent allies of former president Donald Trump. 

<SNIP>

According to her LinkedIn profile, which she took down earlier this year, the four-times-divorced mother of two previously worked as district director for Sen. Donna Campbell (R) in San Antonio.

(Question: How many kids does Ken Paxton have? You wouldn’t know from this  story. Or this one. Or this one. Or a dozen others. That said, he has four kids and two grandkids, in case you think that matters.)

And then toss this in:

Paxton has not been seen in the Senate chamber since he entered a not guilty plea on day one, though his wife of more than 35 years, Sen. Angela Paxton, has been ever-present.

The picture being painted here is this: Married, thrice-elected civil servant is accused of philandering with a mother of two who apparently can’t keep a man.

This is not the only article that focuses more on what Olson looks like than what she might have to say in Paxton’s impeachment trial. Here’s one where they really dig into the clothing choice, as well as the way her high heels click-clack around the Capitol. Maybe that’s why she made the strategic move to the tan pumps…

One other thing that came up in this discussion of the Olson/Paxton situation was how Olson was described as a “mistress.” The question came up: “Is there even a male equivalent for this term, which seems to admonish her as a man-stealing home-wrecker?” As much as we had trying to make a term (“man-stress” and “side-weiner” were two I particularly enjoyed contributing), we couldn’t find one. That says something about the framing and the English language…

The point is, when we see content like this, we have our views on people like Olson shaped in one way while we have our views of people like Paxton shaped another. That’s not to say a story should never describe someone’s appearance or clothing or that all people should be treated exactly the same. What this is saying is to examine how we treat people in the media and if there is inequitable treatment based that unfairly shifts the frame.

In writing, we talked about this before on the blog, and these lessons merit a second look. As consumers, however, it really pays to pay attention to these issues as well and how they frame our views.

EXERCISE TIME: Read some stories on topics that interest you and look for specific frames that you think shape how a reader would perceive a person, event or outcome. Also keep an eye out for stories that frame individuals based on issues of race, gender, social status, sexual orientation or other similar elements. What do these frames present and do you feel they are fair?

Also, can you imagine framing people of a different group in a similar way? For example, would a man’s clothing be described in as intricate detail as a woman’s was in an article? Or would a story on a rich person focus as much on their single-parent household as a story on a poorer person does? Are there words that apply only to one group and not another, like the term “mistress?”

Do you know the way to Inexperienced Bay, Wisconsin? (And why we’re still not fully ready for AI journalism)

I could have sworn this was a joke, but it looks more like Microsoft’s attempt at AI journalism:

(I did the screenshot because I swear this is going away when someone figures it out…)

In case you need translation, the “writer” was referring to the “Green Bay Packers,” apparently assuming the word “green” to be a synonym for “inexperienced” instead of the color/proper noun. It’s also interesting that Jaquan Brisker is apparently playing “security,” as his listed role is “safety.” In football parlance, that’s the player who is the farthest back on the field as a last line of defense against an offensive score, not Paul Blart, Mall Cop.

The “author” also had a few other moments of comedy gold:

Final season, the Bears had the worst document within the league at 3-14, and it earned them the highest decide in April’s draft.

(Translation: Last year, the Bears had the worst record in the league at 3-14, earning them the top pick in the April draft.)

That commerce netted them DJ Moore, who has been one of many recreation’s extra productive large receivers over the previous couple of years…

(Translation: That trade got them DJ Moor, who has been one of the game’s most productive big time receivers…)

Aside from the terrible use of a thesaurus, the “writer” manages to string together some truly godawful sentences that are either nonsense or just run-on messes. The conclusion of the piece captures all that is wrong while giving me a new “phrasing” moment that I’m sure I’ll be using in regular conversation:

However regardless of how a lot Inexperienced Bay and Chicago might battle, their rivalry will at all times be a spark of pleasure for his or her respective fanbases.

EXERCISE TIME: If you’d like your own “spark of pleasure,” dig around on this site (or any other AI disasterbacle of a website) and pick an article for translation. Not only will it help you better understand what’s wrong with AI, but it will also help you sharpen your own writing through word choice and improved clarity.

(h/t to Jason McMahon of the Madison area ink-stained wretches for posting the original.)

Lead Writing 101: Start with the “holy trinity” and move outward

Today’s coverage of the earthquake that decimated Turkey provides an opportunity to discuss some lead-writing basics

Here is a lead from CNN (and a second paragraph) that demonstrates how passive voice and weak structure can undermine a lead:

More than 1,500 people have died and rescuers are racing to pull survivors from beneath the rubble after a devastating earthquake ripped through Turkey and Syria, leaving destruction and debris on each side of the border.

One of the strongest earthquakes to hit the region in a century shook residents from their beds at around 4 a.m. on Monday, sending tremors as far away as Lebanon and Israel.

The lead has potential, but it’s buried (no pun intended) in the middle of the sentence (earthquake ripped through Turkey and Syria). The other problems come in here:

    • Two sets of passive voice/helping verbs kick off the lead (have died; are racing)
    • Redundancies (rubble, destruction, debris)
    • Lack of context (a lot of earthquakes do damage. What makes this one special?)
    • Missing the “when” aspect

With that in mind, let’s go back to the basics of lead writing:

    • Tell me what happened
    • Tell me why I, as a reader, should care (usually done by focusing on the FOCII interest elements)

Then, let’s apply the “core-out” approach, starting with the “holy trinity” of noun-verb-object

    • Earthquake kills people

Add in the next layer, which is probably going to add impact details and focus on the “where” and “when”

    • An earthquake killed at least 1,500 people between Turkey and Syria on Monday morning

Look for things that add value in terms of impact and oddity. We have impact (1,500 people), but the oddity factor could be helpful in providing context:

    • One of the strongest earthquakes to hit the Turkey-Syria region in more than a century killed at least 1,500 people Monday morning.
      (NOTE: I have no idea how the folks at CNN are defining “one of” or “the region,” so I’m a little hamstrung with this lead. If I had the core info about this, the descriptors would be tighter and clearer than “Turkey-Syria region.”)

Then polish out some additional elements regarding the continuing efforts on the ground:

    • One of the strongest earthquakes to hit the Turkey-Syria region in more than a century killed at least 1,500 people Monday morning, as rescue workers continued digging through rubble to free survivors.

Perhaps not the greatest lead of all time, but it gives you a few key interest elements (Oddity, Immediacy, Impact), it works in active voice (earthquake kills people) and it has a goodly amount of the 5W’s and 1H.

EXERCISE OPPORTUNITY: Have your students pull a story on the earthquake (or if something else is happening in your area that has a lot of coverage and interest) and see how well the author did at nailing an active-voice, N-V-O lead. Then, have the students rewrite it, working from that core NVO and moving outward. It would also help to share the leads among the class, with the students explaining what they did and why they did it. It could also be helpful to have them explain why they think their work is better than the original piece.

 

Police accuse Bryan Kohberger of killing four in Idaho, while news outlets allow random acquaintances to accuse him of being weird and mean

(EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re still on break for a few weeks, but for those of you who go back early and are looking for a timely topic in a reporting class, this seemed to have some potential.  We’ll return to the regular posting schedule in late January. — VFF)

In the race to fill in some important personal details about the man accused of killing four college students in Idaho, a few news outlets seem willing to let almost anyone step up to the microphone and call Bryan Kohberger an asshat:

Consider what ABC, a national media outlet, just did:

  • It relied on a first-name-only source, who was apparently interviewed over the phone, to provide “new details” about this guy.
  • It relied on “Thomas,” a former childhood friend, to provide key insights on a guy who is now 28 years old.
  • It then gave us the major insight that Kohberger was “mean” as a kid and apparently put “Thomas” into a headlock at some point.

The New York Times, which at least gave Thomas a last name, did similar digging into his life and strung together a series of random anecdotes that, when placed in the context of a guy accused of quadruple homicide, sound downright damning:

Jack Baylis, who became friends with Mr. Kohberger in eighth grade, said Mr. Kohberger had long been fascinated with why people acted the way they did and had seemed to enjoy his job as a security guard for the Pleasant Valley School District, where he worked for several years until 2021.

The last time Mr. Baylis saw Mr. Kohberger was in 2021, when they shot airsoft guns together in the Poconos. At the time, Mr. Baylis said, Mr. Kohberger drove a white Hyundai Elantra, the same model of car that the police in Moscow said had been spotted near the Idaho victims’ home on the night of the attacks.

Hmmm… the “he liked being a security guard and did gun stuff” accusation… where have we seen this kind of reporting before… Oh yeah! Now I remember!

Also, Hyundai sold more than 650,000 Elantras of the 2011-13 model that Kohberger drove, and a goodly number of them were probably white…

The Times then set about painting a picture of him through facts that essentially say, “Here’s some random crap we found. Feel free to make it feel as chilling as you want…”

At Washington State, Mr. Kohberger was continuing with his studies, his classmates said. B.K. Norton, who was in the same graduate program as Mr. Kohberger, said his quiet, intense demeanor had made some classmates uncomfortable.

That’s right… he was quiet… You have to watch out for the quiet ones… Especially the quiet ones that get loud and argue…

The fellow student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared that speaking publicly could jeopardize his safety, described Mr. Kohberger as the black sheep of the class, often taking contrarian viewpoints and sometimes getting into arguments with his peers, particularly women.

The classmate recalled one instance in which Mr. Kohberger began explaining a somewhat elementary criminology concept to a fellow doctoral student, who then accused him of “mansplaining.” A heated back-and-forth ensued and the doctoral student eventually stormed out of the classroom, he said.

Look, I love the people I went through the doctoral program with at Mizzou and still stay in touch with many of them more than 20 years later. That said, there were more than a few occasions in which we were spending all day, everyday with each other and it got to a point where I’m sure at least one or more of us felt like throwing a chair at one or more of the rest of us.

I probably even “mansplained” something, long before we had a term for that and just referred it as “being a dink.”

That said, students also had some key insights regarding Kohberger:

Mr. Kohberger was also a teaching assistant in a criminal law class during the fall semester, said Hayden Stinchfield, 20, one of the students in that class. He said that Mr. Kohberger often cast his eyes down while addressing the students, giving the impression that he was uncomfortable.

TA fails to make eye contact. How did investigators miss this? Also, why didn’t they study his pattern of grading for clues that he was likely to murder four people?

Students said Mr. Kohberger had a strong grasp of the subject matter but was a harsh grader, giving extensive critiques of assignments and then defending the lower marks when students complained as a group. Later in the fall, roughly around the time of the killings, Mr. Stinchfield said Mr. Kohberger seemed to start giving better grades, and the assignments that once had his feedback scrawled across every paragraph began coming back clean.

Apparently when you have just killed four people, it makes you less judgmental of your students, so A’s for everyone! It also apparently makes you “chattier” according to a fellow doctoral student that the New York Post managed to locate:

“Bryan seemed like he was on the knife’s edge between exhaustion and worn out and at the time it was extremely difficult to tell which was which,” he told the outlet.

But Kohberger’s behavior changed markedly after he allegedly killed Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and her boyfriend Ethan Chapin, 20, on Nov. 13 in their off-campus home in Moscow, Idaho, Roberts said.

“He did seem to get a little chattier going into the later parts of the term,” the fellow criminal justice doctoral student told NewsNation.

“On the knife’s edge…” Even for the Post that was a bit much.

Still, this pales in comparison to the breathless game of “Six Degrees of Serial Killer Weirdness” that News Nation played in this report:

So, let me see if I follow this: You interviewed serial killer Dennis Rader’s daughter about her thoughts on Kohberger because Kohberger took undergrad classes from a professor who wrote extensively about her dad? Her insights include that she has no idea if Kohberger actually contacted her father, was influenced by her father, admired her father or  otherwise thought twice about her father.

We could spend days here going through the incredibly insightful coverage from myriad news outlets that have managed to track down Kohberger’s dentist from first grade who always knew he was a bad seed because he failed to floss twice a day. Instead, consider this a reminder of the “the duty to report isn’t the same as the duty to publish” mantra journalists should rely upon when deciding how best to tell a story.

The giant pile of “friends,” “colleagues” and other people who showed up in news reports with tidbits about how Kohberger wasn’t the greatest guy they ever met can seem damning when presented in the context of his arrest on suspicion of killing four people. However, if you go back and watch “Judging Jewell,” you can see a similar pattern of storytelling and anecdote stacking. This is not to say Kohberger is innocent, but it’s not the job of journalists to say he’s guilty, either.

Here’s a good classroom exercise: Go through your own past and pick out several facts that if applied to a story about you being accused of a significant crime would look damning even if they aren’t. For example, here’s mine:

I’m sure I could go on, but I’m already worried about running into myself in a dark alley somewhere…

A Lame-Show Game Show: The good and the bad of “playing the ‘Feud” as a class exercise

I tried a new exercise with my freelancing class on Thursday. It wasn’t an unmitigated disaster, but there were a few things that I would have done differently that might help you if you wanted to take a shot at this.

The lesson was on what people who hire freelance writers across all disciplines say they MOST wanted from the freelancers they hire. I’d looked through a couple books and about two dozen of the “Top 5 things” listicles that populate the internet to see if I could find any themes. The stuff broke down into three basic categories:

  1. Stuff they wanted to see in the product itself.
  2. Personality traits or personal habits they wanted in people they hire.
  3. Work-product failures or personal habits that made people unworthy of hiring.

So, I built several lists of these, based on what was most common in the lists and books and turned it into a “Family Feud” -style game show. Answers were assigned point values. The team with the most points won 10 extra credit points.

Since we didn’t have a buzzer, we flipped a coin to see who would answer first and decide if they wanted to “play” or “pass.” When someone guessed something wrong, I gave them an “X” like in the show, but wrote it on the board to discuss later in the lesson. The other team could “steal” the bank as was the case in the show after three wrong answers.

As you can see in these photos, they were clearly thrilled to be doing this:

After the “show” was over, we did the lecture and some of what they picked ended up being right on the money, which meant that they had a general sense of what people expected of them as freelancers. The ones they missed seemed obvious to me, but I also was the one who made the questions.

In the post-hoc analysis of this event, here are some things that went right and some things that went wrong:

THE GOOD:

  1. I didn’t try to get cute: I did not do the weird, lecherous Richard Dawson thing of kissing everything that moved, the hyperactive impression of Ray Combs or try to impersonate Steve Harvey, lest I get sent to HR for sensitivity training. I just did “weird me” which was more than enough weird for them.
  2. I incentivized play: They got a little more into it when they realized they were playing for something of value.
  3. I had a singular theme for the event that matched the lesson: This wasn’t a game for a game’s sake. It blended nicely into the rest of what we were doing that day.

THE BAD:

  1. The categories weren’t concrete enough: A number of times, students guessed answers that were valid in the broader sense (stuff people want) but didn’t fit the exact theme. For example, they guessed “deadline” multiple times, but it only fit in one of the categories. That told me I didn’t describe what I wanted to see clearly enough to make it work.
  2. We hadn’t touched on the theme yet: It’s hard to guess answers for something you don’t know anything about. Maybe next time, I’d have them scout around online before the class for things that people wanted or hated in regard to freelance hires so they’d have some grounding in this concept. In any case, they had a confusion about them that wasn’t normal in that class.
  3. Practice: I should have worked on my script more and practiced it a few times. I figured I could wing it. I was wrong.
  4. It was damned early: I teach almost exclusively 8 a.m. classes, meaning that in most cases, these people need a defibrillator to stay alive during my lectures. Trying to be  all “Up With People” on them first thing in the morning didn’t work out all that great. In the future, they politely suggested, I might want to do some lecture stuff from 8-9 and then after their usual break, do the game while they’ve had time to caffeinate and come to life.

In the end, it could have been worse, but I know it could have been better. If you have more questions on how I did this, feel free to reach out. If you have suggestions on how to improve it, I’m all ears.

Four things journalism professors wish we could get students to understand as soon as humanly possible

Kermit Freaking Out GIF - Kermit FreakingOut Crazy GIFs

(“Professor… I’m kind of freaking out just a little bit right now…”)

Around this time of year, I’m getting four distinct types of panicked contact from students, and it usually breaks down along the “year in school” divides:

  • SENIORS: “I’m sorry I’m bothering you…” followed by concerns about everything from graduation to a class assignment to how to find a job.
  • JUNIORS: “I don’t know what I’m doing with (ASSIGNMENT) and I don’t know why I have to do this… I’m going into (FILL IN FIELD WHERE THEY WILL TOTALLY NEED THIS BUT THEY DON’T KNOW IT YET).”
  • SOPHOMORES: “I’ve always been told I’m a great writer, but I’m not doing really well in your class and I’m worried I’m going into the wrong field.”
  • FRESHMEN: “I’m really worried about my grade in this class…”

Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, these questions show up with predictable levels of certainty each year about now. It would be so much easier if we could just answer all of them, all at once, right up front and let the students get the message clearly.

With that in mind, here are the four things that could answer all of those questions, in advance, and make all of our lives easier:

YOU ARE NEVER A BOTHER WHEN YOU ARE ASKING FOR HELP: I wish I had a dollar for every email, phone call, D2L message or personal interaction I had with a student that began with them saying, “I’m sorry to bother you, but…”

I’d buy the Cleveland baseball team and stock the thing with every decent player in the league.

I think that students worry about bothering us because they’re trained to think that we’re really important or that whatever we’re doing is more important than they are. The truth is, for most of us, anyway, we really enjoy working with them to make their work better. We also enjoy helping them get to that “light bulb comes on” moment where they figure out whatever had been a struggle for so long. We also enjoy getting to know them as more than a name on a grade sheet.

And, if they don’t believe all of that, here’s one that’s kind of self-serving: The more we help you up front, the better your piece will be in the end and the less time we will spend grading the thing.

In terms of helping you with “life stuff?” Heck, that’s what we LIVE for. It feels great to know that whatever we did in our interactions with you made you feel comfortable enough to ask us for help in some of those big life decisions. Plus, we probably have gone through this stuff before, or at least helped other students go through it, so we know how to succeed at it.

So, show up at office hours. Email us. Just randomly stick your head in the door when you see it’s open.

Trust me. You’re never a bother.

WE HAVE A GOOD REASON FOR WHATEVER WE’RE DOING, SO TRUST US AND PLAY ALONG: At the beginning of each semester, my students tend to think that I’m old, cranky and addled and to be fair, I actually deserve this.

When I was 19, I took a class with a guy who thought he was “hip” even though he was “middle-aged” and he kept referencing his glory days in college days. Finally, I’d kind of had it, so when he said, “Back in (YEAR) when I was a sophomore at Iowa State…” I cut him off with, “Yeah, Steve, back in (YEAR) when I was in third grade…”

That wasn’t very bright, and God’s been punishing me ever since.

How else can you explain my reference to One Direction being met with, “Oh, Dr. Filak! You like the oldies too?”

So, I get it. We’re old, cranky, addled and we probably think that newspapers are going to last forever. We have nothing to teach you and those stupid grammar exercises aren’t going to help, let alone that story about covering the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand or whatever story it was we were telling the other day…

Guess what? Most of us still actually know stuff and can help you get where you want to go if you’ll just give it a shot. The key in this field is that there are several bedrock principles that really haven’t changed over time: Be accurate, get to the point, tell people what they need to know and be clear. There are ways to make that happen that you don’t know because you aren’t as old as dirt and haven’t done it so many times you could practically write an armed robbery brief in your sleep.

We have these tools and we know these things because we’ve been around a lot and we’ve done them an awful lot. We’re not trying to torture you with pointless activities because we receive 30 free steaks for every student we piss off. We’re not trying to fill your head with an ideology so we can create an army of drones who will do as we see fit in the world of media. (Hell, I can’t even make the DOG do what I want, and I have access to all the Pupperonis in the world…)

The next time you think we’re being unreasonable, take one of two approaches:

  1. Treat us like you treat your grandfather at Thanksgiving and play along like this is all new and you are totally interested. “No, Grandpa, you didn’t tell me about the time you struck out Babe Ruth in a minor-league game… What was that like?” Then, actually listen and see if there’s something there you might have dismissed the 148 other times you heard the story.
  2. Ask why you have to do this, but do it in a way where you actually want to know the answer, as opposed to the long drawn out “WHHHHHHYYYYYY?!?!” that is usually followed by that “ugghhh” noise you make to show displeasure. If your professor is worth their salt, they’ll have an answer that will help you make sense of this. If not, well… OK… Let’s hope that doesn’t happen…

In most cases, we’ve built the class with a purpose in mind: To make our students better at stuff. Everything builds toward that, whether you see it or not.

YOU WILL NOT BE PERFECT AT THIS, OR ANYTHING ELSE IN LIFE, RIGHT AWAY: The first writing assignment my media-writing class does is one sentence long: A lead rewrite. When I introduce it to them, I tell them, “This is going to take three class periods to complete and you’re probably still going to struggle with it.”

I then get the stares that say, “Exactly how stupid do you think we are? What kind of student takes three class periods to write one frickin’ sentence?”

The answer: All of them.

I watch as they try to wrangle nouns and verbs like they’re grabbing a fistful of Jell-O. I see them write a sentence only to delete the thing one character at a time, stabbing the “delete” button like they’re firing bullets into the screen. I smile when the “I’m a natural writer” kid tells me, “Nailed it” and then realizes when we read it over that it’s missing at least three W’s and the H.

When they finally do get the lead to vaguely function, they often tell me, “This is way harder than I thought. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a journalist.”

Every professor in this profession knows the response to that statement: “It gets easier the more you do it. You just need to practice. You also have to understand it’ll never be perfect.”

I don’t know why students expect to be perfect at things on the first pass. I’m sure I could devolve into some old-guy, get-off-my-lawn, damned-kids-and-their-hippity-hoppity-music tirade if I felt up to it, but it really wouldn’t be accurate. What I do know is that nothing I’ve ever written has been perfect, no matter how much time I poured into it or how long other people have looked at it.

I have the best editorial pit crew in the business at SAGE and we go over everything at least a dozen times and we STILL aren’t perfect. Every edition, I’m rewriting things with the “What the hell is this crap?” thought rolling through my head. Every proof that comes through, we find another “Good grief, that could have been really bad!” mistake.

And we do this for a living.

If there’s one thing I want my students to understand before they leave here, it’s that nothing they ever write will be perfect. Also, nothing they ever do in life will be perfect. It’s admirable to pursue perfection, with the goal of making something as good as it can be for the betterment of society. However, if you let perfection get in the way of the possible or relatively decent, you’re wasting your time and your talent frozen in fear.

Do the best you can each time. It’ll keep getting better.

NO ONE IN THIS FIELD CARES ABOUT YOUR GPA, SO STOP OBSESSING ABOUT IT: Journalism is a “What can you do for me?” field, not a “My college rank was X” field or a “Do you know who my father is?” field. The skills you build and hone, the talents you develop and apply and the general ability to get the job done is what people who hire you will care about.

In almost 25 years of teaching, I have heard of exactly two cases in which a student went to a job interview and someone asked about their GPA. (In one case, I knew the editor and when I called to ask about this, he said, “Yeah, that was stupid. I kind of blanked on what I wanted to ask, so I went there.” The other was from a reporter at a paper who must have been all of 22.5 years old and asked it in the tone of, “Yeah? So what do you bench, bro?”)

The best students I’ve taught and sent into the field were not always the “A” students. In fact, a lot of “C” kids did really well for themselves for a number of reasons:

  1. They got C’s because they were never in class because they were pouring their lives into student media.
  2. They got their butts kicked by an assignment or three and used that to motivate themselves to figure out what went wrong.
  3. They weren’t “test” people, but rather “make it work” people. If you needed a story done in five minutes, those folks could do it. If you wanted a ScanTron test completed, it was like Kryptonite to Superman.

I’m not saying grades aren’t important, nor am I saying that getting an A makes you some kind of Pointdexter. What I am saying is that if you’re sitting outside of my office every day, noting that you’ve calculated your grade in the class down to the .00001 place and if I were to just round it a little, it could get you that A- you need to keep close to a 3.8… Well… You’re obsessing about the bark that’s on a tree and ignoring the fact you’re in a forest.

Exercise time: Kin ewe spell batter then Donald Trump’s legal teem?

In the “Dynamics of Media Writing” book, one of the best pieces of advice comes from Kate Morgan, the director of communications in the division of student affairs at the University of Notre Dame:

“There isn’t a job I can think of that doesn’t involve writing in some capacity. Take emails. If a vendor emails me a quote with spelling and grammatical errors, my level of faith in his ability to adequately meet my needs diminishes significantly. Perhaps this makes me a snob, but that’s not my problem. I’m not going to lower my expectations just because someone else is too lazy to write a complete sentence. Given my level of experience in this industry thus far, I’m almost positive I’m not the only one who feels this way.”

Although I haven’t checked in with Kate since former President Donald Trump’s legal team filed its response to the article of impeachment levied against him, I’m guessing she probably would have fired this group of knuckleheads after Tuesday’s disaster:

The defense team for former President Donald Trump’s impending impeachment trial was widely mocked Tuesday for issuing a response to the House of Representatives’ article of impeachment that contained both spelling and—according to critics—legal mistakes.

One spelling error that sparked a flurry of comments on Twitter came in the very beginning of Trump’s response, which is addressed to the “The Honorable, the Members of the Unites States Senate.”

Trump’s legal teams (plural) over the years have often had trouble with spelling. In one case, former attorney Sidney Powell misspelled the word “district” twice as well as the word “superior” in an Arizona filing with the state’s highest court.

It’s not only Trump’s team that seems to be having word trouble these days, as I’m looking forward to many more misstatements like this:

Still, I guess if I were paying these folks, I’d want someone to go beyond firing up a spell check and hitting “ignore” 50 times like a sophomore business major whose friends are waiting on him to file a paper so they can go hit a house party.

With that in mind, here’s a good exercise for your copy-editing folk:

Here’s a link to a PDF of the filing. Have your students download it and copy edit the heck out of it. What might also be instructive is to determine how many things are misspelled (as in “Suprior” instead of “Superior”) and how many things are wrong words (as in “erection” instead of “insurrection” or “Unites” instead of “United”). This might drive home the lesson of why it is we should run a spell check on anything before we submit it but also that spell check alone won’t save you from looking stupid.

The “king of the mountain” lead and brief writing exercise

Lead writing is one of the more difficult tasks for beginning journalists to master. I would guess that it’s because it involves two things we’ve not really trained students to do in recent years: Think critically and make choices.

In most of their education, they are told to look for right answers, understand X because it’s going to be on the test and read content that is cast in chronological format. Now, we’re telling them there are no right answers, just better and worse ones. We’re saying, “There is no test. Just write the content well.” We tell them, “Put things together in descending order of importance, not the order in which things happened.”

With that in mind, I built an exercise that forces them to look for things that matter most, make smart choices and then justify those choices. The idea is to reinforce that something being important at one point might cease to be as important later. It’s to give them content that has them weighing its overall value in relation to other pieces of content.

I called this the “King of the Mountain” exercise, based on a game we played during the winter back when I was in grade school. The school would plow the parking lot of all the snow, creating a giant mountain of icy, slippery goodness. One kid would climb to the top of the pile and declare himself (usually it was guys, as the girls were smart enough to avoid this stupid ritual) “King of the Mountain.”

Who wouldn’t want to scramble up this thing to get knocked butt over tea kettle down the other side? These are the kinds of games you play in a state that has winter eight months out of the year.

Immediately, a half dozen or more other kids would start scrambling up the sides of the snow pile, trying to knock that kid off the top and claim the “throne.” Wrestling moves were common, punches were often thrown and more than a few drops of blood were shed, as each challenger tried to hold the top as long as possible.

The remainder of the day was spent arguing over who held the peak the longest or why they were the best.

This exercise essentially follows that pattern: There are four sets of factual statements that you can release to the students regarding a car accident near campus. You release the first set of facts to the students and have them write either a lead or a four-paragraph brief. They can then discuss what they selected for the top of the piece and why it was the best or most important thing for that lead or for the top couple paragraphs of the brief.

After that, you release the second set off facts and tell them, to rework anything they want in their lead/brief based on this new information. They can use both sets of facts in their rewrite.

And thus the process continues through upwards of four sets of facts, each getting more detailed and more enlightening.

If this works the way it should, the students should see how certain things become more important than other things and how looking for value in content can improve their approach to writing and reporting. Additionally, it can provide them with the understanding of why we keep bothering people for more information after we have gotten our initial set of basic facts.

I’ve linked it here, so feel free to grab it and use it as you see fit. I also dumped a link on the Corona Hotline page. I left a few spots open for you to fill in days or campus names etc. I also encourage you to change names, times, addresses and more to fit the “vibe” or “feel” of your audience. It’s in Word, so go for it.

Hope this helps!

 

Well, allow me to retort: The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel counters Sen. Ron Johnson’s “unhinged” tirade with a series of well-timed footnotes

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel took aim at several of Wisconsin’s political figures after they supported former President Donald Trump’s allegations of wide-spread voter fraud, even after the Jan. 6 attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol. The paper’s editorial called for the removal or resignation of Sen. Ron Johnson, Rep. Tom Tiffany and Rep. Scott Fitzgerald for giving “aid and comfort to an insurrection.”

The editorial clearly peeved Johnson, who requested space within the paper to respond to this call for his ouster. This painted the paper into a potentially untenable corner. The options appeared to be:

A) Give Johnson space in the paper to write about his views, knowing full well that Johnson will roll out an insane series of conspiracy theories, misstatements and other content unburdened with the need to be accurate. In doing so, the Journal-Sentinel basically elevates his lies via their platform and undermines its initial editorial.

B) Refuse him the space, thus allowing him to go on every right-wing TV show, radio show, podcast, blog and puppet show to complain about the bias of the media and how the paper has violated his First Amendment rights in the most egregious way possible. (In case you were asleep when they taught press freedom, that’s clearly not true, but hey, neither is about 93% of what Johnson says…) In other words, the Journal-Sentinel would give him more attention and a bigger stage by denying him.

So what do you do? Apparently, the people at the paper were watching the movie “Speed” when they made this decision:

(Side note: I would really have rather used a clip from “Pulp Fiction,” where Samuel L. Jackson confronts Brett over his poor decision-making in regard to Marcellus Wallace. Alas, I think I used up all the cussing I’m allowed for the year in yesterday’s post, so Keanu it is. Still, I worked the main line into the headline, so I guess it’s almost like a win…)

Here’s the preamble to Johnson’s diatribe:

Editor’s note: After the Editorial Board called on Sen. Ron Johnson to either resign or be expelled from office for his role in spreading disinformation about the presidential election, the senator asked for space to respond. We are providing him that courtesy today. We also are taking the rare step of footnoting Johnson’s commentary to provide additional context so that readers have a fuller understanding of the senator’s actions.

In other words, “You can say whatever you want, but we’re not going to let you get away with lying to people on our pages without putting up a fight.”

Fact checking a politician isn’t a new thing, as PolitiFact has done this thousands of times over the years. It’s also not a new thing for a publication or website to call out misstatements or general fiction, something Snopes does on everything from whether Trump had a “Diet Coke button” in the Oval Office to whether a drunken man lost his genitals after attempting to have sex with a snowman.

However, in most of these cases, the reality check was presented in a post-hoc approach, giving people the right to say what they wanted and then cleaning up the mess with a later piece. The approach here is like lawyers getting the right to object repeatedly during a deposition, casting doubt on claims immediately upon their statement.

Journalists and academics have debated the approach taken here because it is so extraordinary, something the paper acknowledged right up front. So here are a couple questions that might make for good class conversation (or for the non-school folk who read the blog, a great argument over a beer, provided that takes place in a socially distanced environment while wearing masks):

  1. What do you think of the approach the paper took with Johnson’s editorial?
  2. Should the paper have gone with a traditional “Option A” or “Option B” noted above?
  3. Did the paper have an obligation to tell Johnson about its “extraordinary” approach before running it? (Perhaps thinking of this another way, should the paper have given Johnson a chance to spike his piece rather than let it run as it did?)
  4. What are some other options you’d like to see the paper take, rather than this one, if you disagree with the approach?