Filak-isms

Starting the school year with lessons from 5-year-olds

In starting another new year of teaching, I’m always on the lookout for things that will inspire me enough to inspire my students. This year, I found it by dealing with my 5-year-old nieces, Abby and Sophia. Spending time with the twins gave me some key insights as to how best to challenge my own students. Hope some of these things might help you along as well:

REMEMBER TO WONDER: The best part about being a little kid, at least in my book, is that everything seems new and amazing in some of the best ways possible. Little kids wonder about stuff all the time, whether it’s how the refrigerator keeps stuff cold, or why nature deals some of us a bad hand. Here’s a conversation between Abby and me regarding the latter issue:

Her: “Uncle Cake! Why you have no hair?”

Me: “Well, I’m older than you, sweetie…”

Her: “Uncle Cake, my daddy’s old and he has hair. What happened?”

I wasn’t about to explain hereditary cruelty to the kid, but it was one of many conversations that had me thinking and laughing all at the same time, simply because one of the twins wanted to know something that literally had never occurred to me to consider.

Most of us used to wonder about stuff like this and we had no compunction about sharing it with others. However, as we got older, we started keeping our questions to ourselves, for fear of how we’d look in front of our peers or because we just didn’t care anymore.

Reporting, in a lot of ways, is all about wonder. It could be a simple thing like, “Why is there only one type of ketchup, while there are dozens of mustard varieties?” to “Who is really keeping an eye on airplane usage?” Go back to that little 5-year-old in your brain and let the wonder take you places.

 

RULES MATTER: We were over at my brother-in-law’s place swimming one day this summer, when Abby decided to be the lifeguard of the pool. She used her pretend binoculars to watch all of us, which was kind of cute until I apparently violated the rule against using a squirt gun against the lifeguard:

Her: “UNCLE CAKE! NO! YOU GET A TIMEOUT!”

Me: “You didn’t say squirting people was bad. You were squirting people before you became a lifeguard!”

Her: “You should know better. You go to timeout.”

It dawned on me how much of what I was covering last year, ranging from an April Fools’ edition that really ticked people off to the whole Russini/Vrabel “inside with the insider” thing, came down people needing to follow rules and behave with common sense. The old line of “I’d rather beg for forgiveness than ask for permission,” sounds kind of cool, until you realize you probably aren’t getting forgiven and are more likely to be fired for whatever it is you did.

 

SIX – SEVEN: I learned a long time ago that students tend to remember what I tell them, even if they remember it ass-backwards or for the wrong reasons. I thought about this when Sophia was showing me how she could count to ten using fingers.

We started with the pinkie on one hand with one, moving all the way through the thumb. I then raised my index finger and said, “And six…”

She replied by patiently putting her hand on mine and correcting me:

“No, Uncle Cake,” she said. “That is seven.” She then wiggled my thumb, “THIS is six.”

And thus it shall always be, from here into eternity…

Rest assured, I do know how to count to six, but I also was not taught that each finger had a specific purpose. I suppose I could have corrected her, but I’d prefer that she gets her counting down and that eventually she learns that each finger can represent a counting digit from a more credible source.

Remember that whole thing about rules? Sometimes they learn the rule to the point of being problematic. I’m thinking more about explaining the WHY they have to follow the rules, what the purpose of those rules are and how to understand what matters about those rules.

 

BE PERSISTENT: Most of what we do as journalists is about getting people to do things that are for the betterment of all, even when those people don’t want to do them. It might be getting them to share open records, provide an interview on a difficult topic or ratting someone out for doing shady stuff.

I’ve noticed that a lot of my students tend to give up after one or two emails, instead of really going after something like a dog chasing a car. I have also noticed that the twins are more than up to a challenge when it comes to getting something they want.

Case in point, when Amy visits, they always want her to stay over for the night. No matter what she says as to why she can’t do it, they’ve got a rebuttal.

“I don’t have a bed here.”

“You can sleep with us!”

“I have to work tomorrow.”

“We can wake you up extra early so you can drive home!”

“Uncle Cake is waiting for me at home and he misses me.”

“We’ll miss you more!”

In a lot of cases, Amy has to leave, but on more than one occasion, they wore her down. (To be fair, there are two of them and they have the energy of the Energizer Bunny on meth.) They’re never rude and don’t resort to tantrums. They’re just persistent to the point of running you out of excuses.

I don’t know what it is that makes the rest of us run out of steam so much faster (other than the Energizer Bunny meth thing) but I do know we can push harder to get more when we really want to. I’m thinking that’s going to be the goal of my reporting kids this year: Be persistent.

What employers will likely ask you at a job interview and how to avoid killing your chances with your answers (A Throwback Post)

A former student stopped by to visit a little bit ago to get some help in assessing a couple job opportunities. He’d been out of school for about six months and been looking for a decent landing spot, all while avoiding the LinkedIn recruiters who found him “perfect” for an opportunity that was clearly a Ponzi scheme.

In our discussion, one thing he mentioned that stuck with me was, “I really wish they had taught me how to do a job interview while I was here.” I immediately wrote that down and taped it up next to my computer to remind me that I needed to add this skill to my upcoming “Life 101” course in the fall.

The issue of interviewing also hit my desk the other day when LinkedIn’s Andrew Seaman posted some valuable advice on what companies are looking for out of job interviews these days. (His “Get Hired” series is one of those things every student should sign up for, even if he doesn’t always focus on their particular field. He’s got great advice and great resources.)

A lot of this is what a lot of us intuitively teach our students, but the clarity comes from the structure and analogies in here. To add to his medley of advice, please consider this throwback post that gives students some good advice on the topic as well.

 

Four questions you will likely get asked at a media job interview and how to avoid killing your chances with your answers

With Thanksgiving around the corner, a number of you out there are headed toward that awkward moment at the family dinner in which some relative asks, “So… You graduate next month… You got a job yet?”

The fear of unemployment after college is not without merit, regardless of when you graduate (or graduated) and how well (or poorly) the economy is rolling along. The job-seeking process is filled with awkwardness, anxiety and anguish, a situation I have frequently compared to a bad dating experience.

During that process, a number of things can make or break you. Some of those things are out of your control:

  • You lack the experience or expertise for the position.
  • The company is looking for something else other than what you provide.
  • Some chucklehead on the committee makes a stupid-yet-compelling argument that knocks you out of the pool.
  • A ringer ends up in the pool for some reason and thus you find yourself competing against someone like Bob Woodward for a night GA job at the Beaver County Tidbit.

One thing that is mostly within your control, however, is the initial interview phase of the process, in which your potential future co-workers ask you a string of random inquiries based on whatever HR approved for them. We are currently going through this kind of thing here at the U, where we are searching for a colleague in the journalism department, so I’ve gotten kind of a refresher on the questions and answers that work and that don’t.

To help you along in this narrow way, here are a few questions you might hear in that initial phone/Zoom call, what the questions are trying to ascertain and how to answer (or not answer) them:

 

“What do you know about (NAME OF ORGANIZATION)?”

What they want to know: This is usually the warm-up question outside of “Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?” The goal here is simple: They want to find out if you did any research between when you discovered the job and this phone/Zoom interview. If you are going into a journalism-related field, you damned well better have done some research on this before you get there. Nothing says, “I’m going to be a lousy reporter/editor/PR practitioner/marketer” like the answer, “Oh… I know you have a job opening!”

The Answer: Don’t turn this thing into a 1950s Chamber of Commerce film that includes every tidbit you can find on Wikipedia.

Instead, look for key things associated with the organization itself. In most cases, place post information that matters to them on the “About Us” section of their website. Dig around in there for some elements that can form the broad strokes of your answer. Then, do a decent Google search on the organization, and rely on trade press or recent news pieces. This is where you can find if the agency just won some major award or if the newspaper is currently digging into something particularly shady. Highlight those elements as well, as they show you are looking into not just what they are, but also what they are doing/have done that is impressive.

Finally, look for ways to integrate yourself or your interests into the answer. This will help the interviewer start to imagine you as part of the organization’s story. It can be something like, “I know that you just won the IRE prize for investigative reporting. That series of trash collectors selling rat meat to unsuspecting grocery stores was amazing and I’ve always had a strong interest in big projects like that. I’d love to work with Bill and Sue on their next investigation.”

WHAT NOT TO DO: There are many ways you can screw this up, but here are the two basic ones:

  1. Don’t do any research and spitball it, hoping for the best. This is usually something people figure out right away and that will almost immediately place you on the “reject” pile. If they think your answer to a question is BS, they’re likely to start wondering what else you BS-ed along the way.
  2. Confuse the place with some other place you are applying for a job. It feels like the “I, Ross, take thee Rachel” moment from “Friends” for the people on the other end of that interview.

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

What they want to know: Of all the possible interview questions, this one has always felt like the stupidest one to me. I wish I had the gumption to answer in one of two ways:

  1. “Probably stuck here, doing an interview with a job candidate and asking that stupid question of them.”
  2. “If I knew the future in any meaningful way, I’d be buying lottery tickets, not applying for this job.”

That said, what they actually want to know is if you have any kind of longer-term plan for your life and to what degree you see yourself growing and developing in their organization. Nobody wants to hire someone with no direction or sense of growth potential. To that end, you need to have a way to deal with this question without killing your chances of getting the job.

THE ANSWER: Demonstrate that you see yourself as both present at the organization and growing through your work at it. This can be something like, “I see myself doing both (THING YOU’RE BEING HIRED FOR) and (THING THAT IS SOMEWHAT ASPIRATIONAL, YET ATTAINABLE).” In the case of a reporter, it could be covering the daily grind of political stuff at the city council while doing more open-records reporting. In PR it could be cranking out press releases for clients while looking to develop a more involved strategy for clients across multiple platforms.

Another key here is to show value in areas that are beginning to develop. Five to eight years ago, that would be talking about social media and helping to draw eyeballs to your work by establishing a dominant presence on certain platforms. (Come to think of it, that’s still what we’re hearing people say, so maybe stick with that…) Look at the job description and look at what other jobs in the field are demanding and you’ll be able to paint a picture of someone who helps this organization stay on the “cutting edge” while retaining “bedrock tenets of the field.”

WHAT NOT TO DO: First, don’t give either of the answers I listed above. Second, don’t get too basic or aspirational in your answer.

If you go with the “I’m going to be here doing this job to the best of my ability” answer, they see you as a pedestrian hire who will literally do exactly what is asked of you and nothing more.

While that can kill your chances, the aspirational answer will kill them even faster: “I see myself working for (BIG NAME ORGANIZATION) in (BIG NAME CITY) where I’m doing (BIG DEAL STUFF).” Nothing says to a potential employer who is NOT a “big name” that they shouldn’t hire you more than the answer that essentially lets them know you see them as a stepping stone to something better.

Even if the organization knows it’s not a desirable career endpoint and even if you know you want to get in, get experience and get out, this is not the time to make those goals clear. It would be like during that slow dance at prom, when your date asks, “Do you think about us in the future?” and you answer with, “Sure. I figure I get laid tonight, probably date you throughout the next month until graduation. Then, I’m going off to college, where I promise we’ll keep up a long-distance thing until I find a better and hotter option in my res hall.”

“What do you see as your greatest strength and your greatest weakness?”

WHAT THEY WANT TO KNOW: They are trying to figure out if you are in any way self-aware and be honest about it. That said, there are red flags in the honesty that you don’t want to raise (see the prom example above). They want to know how well you know yourself to determine if you actually can do the things you say you can do. They also want a sense of “fit” when it comes to personality and social skill, most of which will be related to this answer.

The Answer: You need to be ready for this one, as I think it’s a keyboard macro that every HR rep has set up on their computer for job interviews. (Control-Alt-DUH, is probably the key combination.) Look for strengths that reflect their needs and your resume, while avoiding the generics. “Hard worker” and “team player” shouldn’t be the core of your argument here. That said, you can demonstrate your value here if you pair something they desperately want with something you excel at in a way in which they can see you in the position.

For example, if on the job ad, the company lists something like “Must be able to work under tight deadlines,” you could say something like, “I think my greatest strength is how well I work quickly under pressure. I spent three years on the night desk at the Smithton Daily Crier, and I had to turn around a lot of late-breaking news, without a lot of information, and make sure it was totally accurate. That experience is something I’ve carried over to my other jobs such as… ” and away you go.

As for the negative, look for negatives that can be trained out of you like, “I haven’t worked in a (large/medium/small) office like yours before, so I know I’d have to do some adjusting” work well, as do things that point to growth like, “I’m not as experienced as people who have been doing this for 10/20/50 years, so I know I have a lot to learn.”

WHAT NOT TO DO: You need to avoid things that overshadow everything else you have said, make you look like psychotic or can’t be fixed over time. In short, you don’t want people to remember you as “That candidate who said they bite their toenails in the break room” person or something. You also don’t want something where people can fear what you’ll be like at work, such as “I’m so competitive when it comes to stories, I’d stab a coworker in the neck to get a scoop.” Remember, your goal is to become an enticing option, not a cautionary tale.

“Do you have any questions for us?”

What they want to know: This always seems like a throw-away question because, in most cases, it comes at the end of the interview and it flips the interview on its head, giving you control of the dice. This question is only partially for you, in that you can get a few things clarified. However, it’s also for them, trying to determine what things matter to you above all else, as well as if you are still interested in this job going forward.

The Answer: You need a couple questions that demonstrate your interest in the position in a meaningful and productive way like, “I noticed you tend to work in teams when it comes to advertising strategies. Would I be integrated into one of your current teams or is there a process for new hires to become part of a newly built team?” That shows a) you know about their processes, b) you have an interest in working there, even after they asked you the previous three questions and more and c) you want them to see you becoming part of the organization.

You can also ask clarifying questions that allow them to expand on things, like, “You mentioned that this job would require me to do daily stories and in-depth pieces. What kind of balance would you want from me in this regard to help best serve the needs of the paper and the readers?” This shows the same kinds of things as above, while also showing that you were listening to them during the interview instead of just waiting to speak.

Other good questions include things like, “What is the time table for the rest of the search?” or “When might I hear from you again regarding the position?” These are simple, but show interest.

WHAT NOT TO DO:   This is always up for debate, given the situation, but here are a few things that I know tend to turn me off in a phone interview:

  1. Salary questions: It’s not that you SHOULDN’T ask this, but I’d argue that if you are on a phone/Zoom interview, it’s probably not the right place for this one. You will obviously want to know the answer to this, but that’s more of an in-person interview question. At this point, they’re still weeding people out, and anything that shatters the illusion that you are just a wonderful person whose sole purpose is to do fantastic things as part of their organization runs a risk here.
  2. “Serial Killer” questions: At this point, they are still trying to figure out if they like you or not, so questions that open a weird line of questioning can undo a lot of the good you’ve done. Things like, “The ad mentions a background check. Does that look into things that might have happened overseas?” suddenly have me thinking you buried a dead hooker in the sands of Cairo or something. When it comes to prepping out your questions, look at them the same way you read headlines to make sure you aren’t unduly worrying your potential employer. Have a friend or trusted adviser read them over as well for any “vibe” concerns.
  3. No questions: If you have no questions, come up with at least a few that will reinforce your awesomeness and how wonderful of a fit you would be in the job. Not asking questions can be somewhat of a turnoff for people.

That’s the best I’ve got. Hope it helps!

Indiana University Releases Its “IU Media School Task Force Report” Five Months After The Media School Ran Roughshod Over Student Media’s Rights

(A brief-and-yet-way-too-accurate explanation of how IU got into this mess in the first place.)

 

THE LEAD: Indiana University released its “IU Media School Task Force Report” late last week after a five-month process of determining how best to preserve student journalists’ rights while providing the various media outlets with governance and financial support.

The task force and subsequent report came after IU fired Indiana Daily Student adviser Jim Rodenbush in October when he refused to violate the students’ First Amendment rights. Shortly thereafter, the Media School tried to kill the still-profitable print version of the IDS, for reasons that still remain pathologically stupid.

CATCHING UP WITH THIS DISASTERBACLE: After Rodenbush was fired, he filed a wrongful termination suit against the university. As that was unfolding, the students at the IDS were prohibited from printing a paper for homecoming, as the university didn’t want any news in it because, God forbid, the alumni returning for homecoming might think something unpleasant might actually occur in Bloomington.

Not only did the kids run a full online edition of the paper, but the student media folks at Purdue University kicked in with a major assist. The folks at The Exponent printed the IDS on their presses for free and then drove the copies down to Bloomington to be publicly distributed. For a perfect cherry on top, the front page contained nothing but news of the shady stuff IU was doing to the IDS in terms of censorship.

More recently, things have turned around for Rodenbush, as he got a professorial gig at Western Kentucky University:

I have no idea what this is in the photo, but I pray its a mascot of some kind for WKU or a melting wax statue of IU Dean David Tolchinsky performing his “Stayin’ Alive” dance.

Meanwhile, the IDS staffers continue to do quality journalism on everything from drug overdoses in the area to the media report itself. 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: I was recently told I’d been getting overly long in my posts, so let’s keep this one short:

  • The report talks a good game, but let’s see what the media school does in its “refine and implement” stage. We’ve got a long, documented history of the administration here being somewhere between “completely inept” and “ignorantly nefarious” when it comes to student media. I tend to believe that the proof in the pudding is in the eating and IU’s media school brain trust has been serving up a lot of syrup of ipecac pudding lately.

 

  • Even if this whole thing comes out as fine as wine going forward, it doesn’t undo the damage done to the people involved here. Jim Rodenbush lost a job, an income and probably a lot of sleep as a result of this. His life was upended because of this, and just because we media folks know he’s a hero, it doesn’t mean this is OK. The staff at the IDS had to fight a fight they weren’t supposed to be in, all while doing the paper and school, which is more than plenty to cause burnout. Advertisers got shook, distribution people had to consider the impact of this and more. Fixing the future doesn’t un-mess the past.

 

  • The administration of the IU Media School needs to be held to account for every ham-handed thing they’ve done to this point involving student media. We were talking about the concept of “actual malice” today in class, in which people are held to account for libel when they know they’re doing something wrong and yet they do it anyway. I can’t think of a more apropos term to describe what’s been going on here in regard to the administrative action as it relates to the IDS.
    If you are in driver’s seat, you get the ticket for driving recklessly. Same basic concept applies here. Everyone on EARTH seemed to be telling these people, “Stop. What you’re doing here is wrong” and they didn’t seem to really care. If we don’t want to have another mess like this one, IU needs to mete out some punitive measures to make them care about the results of their actions.

 

ASU’s use of AI to build classes from faculty Canvas course materials has instructors saying “WTF?” (A Throwback Post)

THE LEAD: You can call it “experimental AI” or “educational innovation,” but where I’m from, we call this “theft…”

Arizona State University soft launched a web app earlier this month that allows anyone, for $5 per month, to create an apparently unlimited number of customized “learning modules” using artificial intelligence. The AI chatbot, called Atom, uses online instructional materials from ASU professors to create a course that’s tailored to the goals, interests and skill level of the user. After asking a handful of questions and processing for about five minutes, Atom debuts a personalized course that includes readings, quizzes and videos from a half dozen experts at ASU.

But several professors whose content Atom pulls from were surprised to learn that their materials—including video lectures, slide decks and online assignments—were being perused, clipped and repackaged for these short online course modules. The faculty wasn’t told anything about the app, ASU Atomic, they said.

(SIDE NOTE: I so DESPERATELY want to use a video clip here from “Ted 2” that smack talks Arizona State right now, given how stupid this situation is, but I think the editors at Sage might pop a brain bleed. The tamest thing said in that exchange was, “Do you say Arizona State University or just HPV-U?” Anyway… I digress…)

BACKGROUND: The university is doing everything to both say that tapping the braintrust of the faculty through this AI thing is the greatest thing on earth while also telling faculty this is just experimental and there’s no real concern here.

As with most things administrators SWEAR aren’t problems, the faculty members refuse to buy this bull-pucky:

As is the case for many AI chatbots still in their infancy, Atom gets things wrong. In the module it designed for Hanlon, it included clips from an old lecture he gave focused on the work and career of 20th-century literary theorist Cleanth Brooks. Throughout the course it called the critic “Client” Brooks.

<SNIP>

Ostling is worried that Atomic “will start being used widely, and I have content on my Canvas shelves that would be very inappropriate to show up without context in a course,” he said. “Not only do I think the students will be poorly served because they might learn things that aren’t true, but it could potentially get me in trouble.”

I’m feeling this as well, given that I often have students interview other students for classroom-only exercises that get posted to Canvas. So, for example, a student talking about their experience at the local Pub Crawl might not be all that thrilled if that info becomes part of a database of content for everyone to see.

Even more, I have to occasionally create “alternative timeline scenarios” for the students. For example, to have my students write an “announcement press release,” I make up the scenario that our current chancellor resigned a while back, the university did a search and today is announcing the hiring of the next chancellor. It’s a logical scenario that would be something students might be expected to do as PR practitioners (hiring news release) and it forces them to focus on what to include in a short space.

However, I obviously have made up the name of the person we hired as well as that person’s background and accomplishments. If AI slurps it up and treats it as gospel, that’s not going to be good for anyone involved.

This all led me to today’s throwback post about our system trying to steal faculty content for what I would assume could be a situation like this. Even if the Universities of Wisconsin folks double-pinky promise not to turn my work into AI slop, I still don’t want them co-opting my life’s work for all the reasons listed below.

I did a check on how this is going and the board of regents hasn’t passed this yet, but I’m always leery of summer months, as that’s a great time for universities to pass these “take out the trash” bills, because nobody’s looking.

 

The Universities of Wisconsin System is trying to steal faculty’s copyright rights to educational material. Please help fight this stupid power grab.

(The system says, “We would never look to diminish your rights or take your hard-earned work away from you.” What the system actually does is more accurately depicted in the scene above.)

THE SHORT, SHORT VERSION: The Universities of Wisconsin System is trying to rewrite its copyright policy and assign itself the rights to the educational work and scholarly materials faculty create. If this goes through, faculty who have spent years building and improving their courses could get the shaft and I have no idea if I’ll be able to share stuff that I’ve always shared with you.

If you think this is as stupid as I do, please email system President Jay Rothman at president@wisconsin.edu and tell him not to let this policy pass.

(UPDATE: Rothman is no longer the president, but that email address will still get you where you need to go.)

THE LONGER, MORE NUANCED VERSION: Here’s a deep dive on the way the system is trying to recreate its copyright policy in a way that disenfranchises its faculty:

THE LEAD: The Universities of Wisconsin has decided to rewrite its rules involving intellectual property, giving the system total ownership over pretty much everything faculty create:

The UW System is proposing a new copyright policy that professors say would eliminate faculty ownership of instructional materials. The revisions are stoking alarm among professors statewide who say such a move would cheapen higher education into a mass-produced commodity.

“This policy change is nothing less than a drastic redefinition of the employment contract, one that represents a massive seizing of our intellectual property on a grand scale,” professors from nine of the 13 UW campuses wrote in a recent letter to UW System President Jay Rothman. “It would allow any UW campuses to fire any employee and nonetheless continue teaching their courses in perpetuity with no obligation to continue paying the employee for their work.”

Aside from owning faculty syllabi, lecture notes and exam materials, UW would also have ownership rights over the scholarship faculty create:

A draft of the new policy, obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, would eliminate existing copyright language and replace it with the assertion that UW System holds ownership of both “institutional work” and “scholarly work.”

<SNIP>

“Scholarly work” includes most of what professors produce, such as lecture notes, course materials, journal articles and books. The UW System transfers copyright ownership to the author, as is customary in higher education, but notes that it “reserves” the right to use the works for purposes “consistent with its educational mission and academic norms.”

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Given that I’ve got about a dozen textbooks in the field, I edit a journal that needs scholarly work to keep it running, I spent seven years crafting hundreds of blog posts and that I’ve built a ton of courses over my nearly 30 years of teaching, this was basically my calm, metered reaction:

beaker from the muppet show is screaming with the words time to freakout above him

I’ve already sent a copy of the proposal to Sage for its team of lawyers to go over, so I’m hopeful that I receive an answer along the lines of, “Calm down… Have a Diet Coke… This isn’t going to destroy what you’ve spent decades creating…”

In the meantime, let’s lay out how stupid and problematic this is:

The quality of your courses depend on the people you’re pissing off:  We essentially went through this in my media-writing class today and a collection of sophomores and juniors understood it, so I’m hoping it might make sense to the Board of Regents.

I proposed the following scenario to one kid in the class: Let’s say you turned in a really good story as an assignment for this class. In fact, I thought it was so good, I took your name off of it, put my name on it and submitted it to the local paper. The paper then paid me $50 for the story.

I then asked the kid, “So, given that every time you turn in something good, I’m going to take it, put my name on it and make money from it, how likely are you to put forth your best effort in this class?”

The kid said, “There’s no way I’m going to do anything good for you anymore.”

Right. So, let’s play that out here: If every time I work REALLY hard on making good stuff for my class, the U is just going to claim it as its own, why would I bother to do anything more than the bare minimum to make my class work?

I guess you could make the argument that pride in our work and a desire to make things better for our students could inspire us to do great things, even in the face of a naked power grab by the system, but if you’re going to treat us like mercenaries, we’re going to behave that way.

This will stifle innovation, limit interest in developing new courses and create a general sense of animosity among faculty. It will also likely inspire professors to find new ways to hide stuff from the administration folks, as one person on social media suggested to me:

This stuff isn’t a product, but rather a process: Inherent to the system’s argument is the basic premise of work product: You built this stuff while you were employed by us and required to do so. Therefore, since we paid you for this, the stuff is ours.

That works in the private sector, where we’re tasked with specific outcomes and granted special provisions to create this kind of work product. For example, I know that when I worked at the Wisconsin State Journal, I wrote a lot of articles that the paper published. Implicit in my employment agreement was the premise that I was acting on behalf of the paper, writing things that the paper tasked me to write and publishing those things in a copyrighted publication. They own that stuff and I’m cool with that. I don’t think I’m ever going to want to republish a weather story I wrote in 1996, and if I did something cool I wanted to show my students, that’s acceptable use.

However, when it comes to my media-writing class, I didn’t get hired to write lecture notes and syllabi for that class. In fact, what I wrote was a tweaked version of something I’d been working on for decades. I’d drafted some of this conceptual stuff when I was working at UW-Madison, improved upon it when I was at Mizzou, reconfigured it at Ball State and then adapted it here. This isn’t like you hired me to bake a cake for your birthday. This is a tree I’ve been growing and tending for years and years.

 

The material might not be UW’s to steal: Even if you don’t buy the argument above, the instructors might not own the material they’re using in the first place.

Textbook publishers aren’t just sending out desk copies of a dead-tree books and telling fledgling professors, “Vaya con Dios.” They actually build a ton of back-end stuff into the educational packages they provide these days, which includes a lot of the stuff the system is trying to get its grubby little paws on.

I know for my books at Sage, we have sample syllabi, PowerPoint slides for lectures, notes for instructors, exercises and test banks crammed with questions. I might even be forgetting some of the stuff we provide.

(Shameless Plug: Sage really is amazing when it comes to this kind of stuff. If you ever need a book, check these folks out first, especially if you need some help with the shaping and molding of the entire class experience.)

These things are available to instructors because Sage built them to go along with the authors’ textbooks. The professors can use them as they are, add stuff, cut stuff or otherwise tweak what they receive. That said, it’s not theirs to sell or give away. Sage holds the copyright for this stuff and I imagine Sage and the other book publishers who pour a ton of time and resources into building these things would be more than a bit peeved if the UW System tried to claim it as its own.

 

The Coy and Vance Duke Theory of Education: When I was a kid, I loved “The Dukes of Hazzard” television show, which ran every Friday for about seven or eight years. The show involved two cousins, Bo and Luke Duke, getting into scrapes with the corrupt law enforcement of Hazzard County and doing amazing car chases in their 1969 Dodge Charger. Along with patriarch Uncle Jesse Duke and the lovely cousin Daisy Duke, the boys were “makin’ their way, the only way they know how,” to quote the theme song.

It was a simple show that drew a good audience and it seemed to work well. However, around the fifth season, John Schneider and Tom Wopat (who played Bo and Luke, respectively) got into a contract dispute with the studio over salaries. Rather than pay them and move on with life, the studio had the idea in its head that the car (the General Lee) was actually the star of the show, so it didn’t matter who was driving it and that they didn’t need these two pretty boys at all.

Enter new cousins: Coy and Vance Duke.

If ever there was a knock-off of a brand name, this was it. Like the original Duke Boys, one was blonde, one was brunette. They essentially wore the same wardrobe, had the same catch phrases and did the same insane driving stuff. That said, the ratings took a dump and after one season, Bo and Luke “returned from driving the NASCAR circuit” and Coy and Vance ended up fading from memory.

What the universities are doing here is essentially the same kind of thing. They figure, “Well, hell, if we have the notes, the syllabus and the PowerPoint slides, we don’t really need the professor who created them at the front of the room.” These folks assume that once we decide to leave, retire or whatever, they can just plug in an adjunct at a fraction of the cost and things will run like a Swiss watch.  And that’s not just me being paranoid, as other folks see it as well:

I pretty much know my notes aren’t going to be helpful to other people as I wrote them based on a lot of my experiences in the field. Notes like (BUS FIRE STORY GOES HERE) or (EXPLAIN DRUG DEALER SHOT THING) probably won’t work for a random Coy or Vance they bring in to teach my class after they decide they don’t need me anymore.

 

HERE’S WHY YOU SHOULD CARE: One of the biggest reasons I’m worried about this is because it impacts what I can do with my materials. That’s also the main reason why I think you should care about it, too.

I never took this job to get rich and I certainly don’t like the idea of coming across like Daffy Duck when he found the treasure room:

However, when I know stuff is mine to do with as I please, that tends to benefit a lot of other people as well. Whenever someone shoots me an email and says, “Hey, how do you organize your class?” I’m always happy to give them a copy of my syllabus. When someone needs an assignment I’ve built, I’m glad to share it with them or on the blog.

When we went into COVID lock down, I basically dumped everything I ever did that I thought would help people into the Corona Hotline section of the blog for free. All those goodies remain there to this day, so feel free to help yourself.

If this policy passes, I might not be as free to offer that kind of generosity any more, and that would really tick me off.

An Open Challenge for Writers of “Graduating Staffer Says Goodbye” Columns in Student Newspapers

(Depending on your view, the senior goodbye columns that tend to populate student newspapers this time of year are fine or an abomination against the basic tenets of journalism. Or, in some cases, both.)

 

One of the best resources online for student media stuff, student journalism and generally keeping up with anything related to journalism at the college level is Barbara Allen’s College Journalism Newsletter.

(Thanks to some recent sponsorship, she’s taken down the paywall, but as a continuing paying customer, I have to say, I get far more out of her wisdom than I pay for.)

Allen’s look at student media this week included her thoughts on the traditional “senior columns” that graduating student media staffers write in the final issue of the paper:

I always have a complicated reaction when I read them, but this semester, something finally became clear.

The curmudgeon in me: “What value do these columns have to the community or audiences?” The momma bear: “What’s the harm in these hardworking students finally just having a few column inches of fun?”

What finally struck me this year has been hiding in plain sight all along: These columns provide incredible insights into precisely why students value student media.

<SNIP>

My call to action for you this week, whether you’re running a student newsroom or lecturing to classrooms or running an entire journalism department: What about your student media program is revealed when you read between the lines of these student farewell columns? And how can you synthesize that information for future recruitment, talking points, mentoring and classroom lessons?

I’ll get to that last paragraph in a subsequent post, but today I wanted to commiserate a bit with Allen over her “maybe yes/maybe no” vibe when it comes to these kinds of things.

I also want to offer your students a chance to kick my ass all over the place.

Personally, I have no problem with these “goodbye” columns. The students who write them work for little to no money, work way too many hours not to be in violation of some sort of forced servitude law, get constantly beaten up in the world of public opinion for minor errors and generally have a decent portion of the soul eroded through this “extra-curricular activity.” If they want a chunk of newspaper space or a spot on the website to say their peace, I’m a big fan.

However, I’ll challenge the group of students building theirs right now to do them better than the seniors have in the past. If they do, I’ll feature their pieces on the blog. I’ll also gladly submit to any reasonable request they have of me (public decency and libel laws still apply. Oh, and I’m not writing your senior thesis for you…)

Here are the three points of this challenge:

STOP BEING SO PREDICTABLE: If there’s one thing that drives me nuts about these things is that they are so generic, I could write them in my sleep. It took all of about 20 minutes to create this “Madlibs” version of the typical senior goodbye column:

If you really learned so much at the paper over the course of your college career, consider demonstrating it by doing something engaging and special. At the very least, make your piece somehow different from the other six “goodbye” pieces that are running right next to yours in the paper.

Prove you’re better than the script of a B-movie horror flick and do something that doesn’t have the words “generic” and “cliche” written all over it.

 

ESCAPE FROM PERSONAL PRONOUN HELL: It isn’t easy to write a piece about yourself without being self-referential. That said, as much as this piece is for you, it’s also for other people, so try to find a way to cut back on the uses of “I” and “me” and “my” in here.

On a lark, I pulled the first three paragraphs of the last three of these “send off” pieces available on various student media outlets. Self-referential pronouns (I, me, my etc.) accounted for about 12-14% of all words used there.

It’s not always easy to cut back on these, and there’s no shame in being personally reflective in a piece like this. However, when you sound like Donald Trump writing his autobiography while on a meth bender, you really need to reconsider your approach to all this.

 

MAKE YOUR MEMORIES MEMORABLE (IN A GOOD WAY): As we mentioned in a previous post, a set of “goodbye columns” can be memorable for all the wrong reasons. What we’re talking about here is leaving behind something wonderfully memorable.

As someone who writes a ton of copy for various platforms, I’ll be the first to admit that not every day is filled with brilliance and not every missive should win a Pulitzer. Some pieces are good, others are like the “get me over fastball” that just has to be in the strike zone somewhere and at least a few are wince-worthy duds. It’s the normal curve of writing a lot.

However, you only get one shot at this. It’s your staff goodbye, your senior “bon voyage,” your one golden moment in the sun. Make it something epic and special in a way that the rest of us can feel it, too.

One of the best things that can be said of a well-reported and deftly written obituary is that people who read it learn about someone in whose death they wished they’d gotten to know in life. That is the thing the piece you are writing right now should provide for your readers.

Sure, the people who know you best will get a lot out of the stories you tell and the memories you share, but people who DON’T know you should find themselves enamored with your tales and desperate to connect with this newsroom you describe.

Give this thing one good swing and make it count. I can’t wait to see it.

 

 

The Joke’s on You: Three reasons why student media outlets should never, ever publish April Fools’ editions (or similar pranks)

I built this about 15 years ago for the cover of a student media helpers guide for a high school news conference. Other than a few language tweaks, I don’t think much has changed…

 

THE LEAD: Humor is a personal, acquired taste that is hard to tap into on a broad scale, something the students at UNC’s Daily Tarheel learned the hard way this month:

On April Fools’ Day, the paper published a series of satirical articles, including one with a subheadline that said the paper had rebranded as The Daily Woke Heel. Others read “UNC brings back DEI—for whites,” and “A new way forward for the Dean Dome: a two-stadium solution.” Another, published on the website, said “Satire: Trump orders ALE in Chapel Hill to be replaced with ICE agents.”

The jokes did not go over well with some students, and the paper’s editor in chief immediately issued an apology. She wrote that the paper heard students’ “critiques and outrage.” She added, the paper’s “insensitive decisions and oversights” were “made by a newsroom and leadership team that undoubtedly exist in positions of power and privilege on this campus.”

JOKE’S ON YOU: Every April Fools’ Day, I thank the Lord I’m no longer a student newspaper adviser. When I was one, I found myself begging, pleading, cajoling and griping in hopes of keeping the students from making a colossal error in judgement by thinking they were funny.

To be fair, it wasn’t always just the April Fools’ Edition that led to problems and UNC is not alone in the “Oh… So, THAT happened” moments of dumbassery that have advisers going gray and bald before our time and strongly reconsidering truck-driving school.

One year, we did a bracket for “Bar-ch Madness,” in which we listed off the top 16 best places to get hammered around campus. The chancellor wasn’t pleased at our idea of promoting problematic drinking, but he was even less enthusiastic about us including one of the freshman dorms as a “dark horse” candidate.

Year-end issues are also a major concern, as students are usually either burnt to a crisp or at that punch-drunk level of euphoria that comes with nearing the end of the year. In one case, the student newspaper at the University of Utah reminded us that using drop-caps in design isn’t always just an aesthetic choice:

If you noticed the “more” in the headline and wondered if the other staffers’ columns had a more dignified and direct approach… well… not quite…

I could spend days showcasing stuff like this but as the opening graphic seeks to demonstrate, but that would be hypocritical at best. It isn’t like we were so great back in “my day” and now “these damned kids” are somehow sullying the greatness that was present back when typewriters clicked in newsrooms and everyone wore their Sunday best to cover the news.

(One piece I cannot find from “my day” ran here at Oshkosh, in which the staff photoshopped the chancellor’s head onto the famous Demi Moore pregnancy photo. He was not amused, I’m told.)

Instead, here are three reasons that might help prevent the next disaster, which is already on the clock, if that graphic is right:

YOU ARE NOT THAT FUNNY: Humor is one of the greatest talents in the world, in that to make someone laugh can be among the most amazing feelings we have as humans. Someone once explained that if you can tap into something funny, you force people to have an involuntary response to it that creates true joy within them.

Taking that talent and honing it takes years, and even then, it requires a deft touch and a lot of failure. When Richard Pryor died, his family found thousands of reels of tape in his home that provided a timeline of his efforts work-shopping his act.

He’d be at one club one night, trying to see if this bit would land or if tweaking this accent would improve the audience reaction. It took him days, weeks, months and sometimes years to tweak and improve little things that led to those epic, uproarious moments on stage.

If a guy with that level of talent and skill had to work that hard for that long to make even half of his stuff work, what are the chances that a group of college students, trying this on the fly is going to pull it off on the first pass?

As much as I have laughed in newsrooms over the years for a variety of reasons, I can assure you, nobody I’ve met is good enough to pull off humor on a mass-media scale like this. Trying it publicly is going to lead to more harm than good.

 

HUMOR IS A PERSONAL TASTE: If you don’t believe me, listen to the following comedians:

  • Richard Pryor
  • Taylor Tomlinson
  • Sam Kinison
  • Ali Wong
  • Jeff Foxworthy
  • Nikki Glazer

At least one of them will probably make you laugh and at least one of them will likely offend the hell out of you. Some of them are throwing out bits that you can completely relate to while others are likely not landing a single joke for you. Some feel too tame while others are dropping more F-bombs and slurs than a drunk Boston sports fan after watching an ESPN Hot Take show that gives the Patriots no shot at the playoffs this year.

Newsroom humor, in particular, is a special kind of humor. It’s a mix of sarcasm, mortician’s humor, snark and insult comedy. It’s also full of inside jokes and other things that make people still laugh 20 years after they’ve graduated. I’ve seen newsrooms post weird things on the walls, engage in meme-battles and develop quote books as survival-level defense mechanisms.

(To this day, I’m still somewhat scarred by the humor fight that happened at Ball State between my features desk and my design desk. It started when someone in design left a presentation for a class open, and someone on features stuck some weird images into the design kid’s PowerPoint.

The design kid then stuck a photo of a morbidly obese female adult film actress on the side of the monitor at the features desk. The features kid then responded by essentially iron-gluing an inappropriate image to the side of the design computer, something nobody noticed until the head of the Indianapolis Star came down with my boss for a tour of the newsroom.

The guy paused while visiting the design pod and then asked no one in particular, “Hey… Is that monkey blowing itself?”)

The point is, humor is in the eye of the beholder and few people outside of newsrooms really are beholding what we behold in there. If you want to amuse yourself, turn the place into your own little den of wiener jokes, dank memes and memorable quotes. Just keep it out of the paper (and the public eye in general).

 

YOU NEED TO TREASURE YOUR CREDIBILITY: Student journalists take on all the risks associated with journalism at any level. They can be attacked, threatened or arrested, and many already have been subjected to these measures.

They can be sued for any one of a dozen reasons, including libel and invasion of privacy. They also suffer the same insults and mistreatment all journalists receive for merely doing their job.

The one thing that makes it suck so much more is that they are often treated as second-class citizens in the field, even by those folks who should know better. I’ve heard of numerous examples of student journalists being told by professors and even professional media operatives that they’re “just playing journalist.”

Like they broke out a “Fisher Price ‘My First Reporter'” kit and asked Nana for an interview about her chocolate-chip cookies or something.

As student journalists, you have to fight so much harder to be taken seriously. You have to defend your work more vigorously than “professional” journalists when you break stories that upset people.

You also have those same “professionals” trying to swipe your stories, bogart your sources or otherwise treat you like some sort of minor-league baseball affiliate that they can raid when the “big team” needs something.

You earn your credibility a grain of sand at a time, knowing that any mistake can wash the whole sandcastle away and force you to start over. It’s so damned important, as it truly is the coin of the realm.

Doing “humor” like the things we showcased here is like dousing your reputation with gasoline and lighting a match, just to watch it burn.

And you’re not just burning down your own house, you’re making it impossible for the next generation to live there or even build on the ashes. Sources (particularly professors) have long memories.

Don’t give them a reason to think poorly of you if you can help it.

 

Help me help you help your students: Exploring Mass Com is up for a second edition

“It’s a real book!” and it’s aging, so let’s get the next edition rolling with your help.

 

The good folks at Sage took time out of their busy Tuesday to reach out with a conference call and tell me that my latest textbook was something of an anomaly. “Exploring Mass Communication” was closing in on Year Three in the market and most first editions tend not to do particularly well, they explained. That makes it a tough sell to the powers that be when authors and editors want to pitch for a second edition.

(I lived that experience once with another publisher. The book was not popular enough to merit an improved second edition, while still selling well enough for them to not sell me back the rights to shop it elsewhere. It took 11 years for me to get another bite at the apple, and that was after 10 years of begging…)

In the case of “Exploring Mass Com,” Sage was all gung-ho about getting a second edition to market to make sure it stayed both relevant and popular. The folks set me up Tuesday with a production team and a timeline, meaning we’ll have the next edition of the book out the door by January 2028.

I can’t thank you all enough for the help you’ve given me over the years, both in suggesting content and in adopting my books. Without you all, I’m basically producing exceptionally expensive coffee coasters and door stops. I’m always grateful when someone puts their faith in me and my work to take a chance on something I’ve done and I always want to let folks know that. I also want to make sure I’m meeting expectations.

WHAT WE ARE DOING ALREADY: 

The next edition of the book is in revision mode and we’ve already got a few updates planned for it that should help keep up with current events:

The AI Chapter: One of the first things I pitched was adding a new chapter on artificial intelligence and its impact on media. When I started working on this book about 112 years ago, we weren’t at a point where we were still confusing AI and VR and other bits of alphabet soup. Now, obviously, things have changed.

We’ll go with the same pattern in the chapter as those that were in the first edition: A little historical backstory, a look at the important pioneers, a deep dive into its impact on us as media consumers and a look at the careers that exist now, thanks to growth in the field. We’ll also have some exercises and other goodies to make the chapter appear like it’s been there the whole time.

Law Chapter: A lot has happened in terms of what the law says and what the courts have done in regard to media folks and their rights. We’ll be digging into new cases, adding examples and providing folks with a clearer view of the world of both paper law and trial law.

Data and Example Updates: Each chapter will get a refresh as far as the facts and figures related to the topic at hand. This will help shape discussions in class with a little more “spruced up” data as well as the ability to draw from relevant time frames for the students. No matter what we do in textbooks, examples and data tend to get old fast. With that in mind, we’ll hang on until the last minute to plug in those pieces and give you the freshest look at what the world looks like.

Increased and Improved Visuals: When we started the first edition, we had a certain amount of money set aside for photo and graphic permissions. As I have no idea what anything costs, other than Mustang parts, broken pinball machines and 1956 Topps Baseball Cards, Sage kind of “translated” that amount for me into the number of images we could buy with it and how that would break down across the chapters.

However, a funny thing happened to Mustang parts, pinball machines, baseball cards and photo permission costs between when I agreed to do the book and when we actually had to buy the permissions: Costs went through the roof. However, no one bothered to tell me or my editor that until we were already in production.

At one point, a permissions editor reached out and told me, “You know you’ve used about a third of your budget already and we’re only on Chapter 2…”

Nope. Didn’t know that. So we had to make do.

This time, however, we know what kind of hand we’re playing with from the jump and unless the Strait of Hormuz impacts the cost of photos, we should be able to better estimate things and get you some more and improved visuals.

 

WHAT I NEED FROM YOU ALL:

One of the best parts about running the blog is that I actually get to hear from people who have seen my stuff and have some suggestions for help. In one case, a professor has been sending me emailed notes about what he’s doing with each of my chapters and what he hopes I might integrate into the next edition. Rest assured, I’m definitely looking into each and every suggestion to see what I can do to make the book more of “your book” than “my book.”

That said, I could use even more help from a wider array of folks, so here’s the pitch: I need a couple favors.

FAVOR ONE: TELL ME WHAT TO FIX, CUT OR LEAVE. I’ve heard from folks over the years who tell me, “Y’know, your book would be great, if only you had X.” For those people, I try my best to do something with the blog to patch that perceived hole, as by the time they notice something is missing, the book is already in production.

I’ve also heard the, “Why did you get rid of X? I loved that thing!” The reason is usually either a) the concept aged out of being useful or b) someone else told me to kill it and I couldn’t think of a reason to argue.

So, if you’re using “Exploring Mass Com,” or have looked at it but gone elsewhere because of any reason whatsoever, please tell me what you like, what you hate and what I need to do to make this better. You can post on comments below or reach out through the Contact Page.

Any feedback is helpful feedback, so please don’t be shy.

FAVOR TWO: TAKE THE CHAPTERS FOR A SPIN: Every time I pitch a book or pitch a revision, the chapters I write go through a vigorous vetting process that involves experts in the field like you all. Sage has a running list of people who have volunteered to critique chapters when I have them ready for a looksee and they provide me with a lot of great feedback.

If you want to make an impact on how the book looks, this is the best place to start in a lot of ways. Sage provides you with the chapters and a brief survey about what you think. (I think they give you like a ham sandwich and a recognition in the preface of the book, but it also counts for service in a lot of places, people have told me. In my way of thinking, it’s a heck of a lot better than serving on the Committee for Determining Committee Assignments for Committee Work or something…)

If you’re interested, hit me up as well and I’ll get you on my pal Charles’ List of Awesomeness, and he’ll reach out when the time comes.

 

Thanks again for all your help with all of my books and for trusting that my weird way of communicating will somehow make sense to your students.

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

Good Night, George Kennedy. My life would never have been what it is without you.

George Kennedy as I remember him most: Giving me a look that said, “Fair enough.”

George Kennedy, the former managing editor of the Columbia Missourian, longtime faculty member at Mizzou and legend of journalism education, died Friday after more than a decade of battling Parkinson’s.

Daryl is not alone in this, given how many people have already shared memories of George as well as the speed at which this information spread among those people who knew George.

One of the many difficulties with getting older is that I find myself losing mentors and heroes who helped me become the person I am. Of all those losses, this one really cuts me to my core.

I loved Susie Brandscheid.

I feared Cliff Behnke.

I admired Pat Simms.

But I wanted to be George Kennedy, even though our first conversation led me to believe I’d never spend one day working for him.

I was finishing my master’s degree in Wisconsin when I applied for a city editor position at the Columbia Missourian. I had about three years of part-time work on the State Journal city desk and about a year and a half of teaching experience.

I didn’t even realize that I was applying at Mizzou (God’s personal journalism school), in that the ad called it “the University of Missouri-Columbia,” which I took to mean a branch campus or something.

When I got there, it dawned on me these were the big dogs. George Kennedy would be my boss, the same George Kennedy who helped write the textbook that introduced me to journalism and the same textbook from which I was currently teaching.

My interview with George was a lunch date at Glenn’s restaurant, a few blocks from the Missourian office. On our walk over there, I was chattering away like methed up monkey, trying desperately to engage the man. He remained silent until we got to the restaurant.

He sat down and said two things: He turned to the waitress and said, “I’d like iced tea, please,” and then turned to me and said, “I have four people up for this job and everyone is more qualified than you are.”

I didn’t flinch, probably out of a youthful lack of self-awareness, and responded, “Maybe so, but none of them will work harder for you than I will.”

I still have no idea what possessed this man, who was doing important journalism before I was born, to hire a 23-year-old kid to run his night city desk, but from that point on, my sole goal was to prove he didn’t make a mistake.

Over the next few years, I learned more from George about journalism and life than I did from all of my degrees combined. So much of what George meant and the impact he had on me came from little moments that still make me laugh:

– We had misspelled the name of a soccer club in the paper, only to misspell it in a different way in the correction. Since all corrections had to run in my section, I asked if he wanted us to take another stab at it:

“No, I think we’ve done more than enough damage at this point.”

– We had one particularly terrible day, where it seemed everything in the paper was screwed up in some way. At the afternoon meeting, George let us know:

“Not only did we not manage to add to the sum of human knowledge today, I think we actually managed to subtract from it.”

– My first winter we got about a seven-inch snowstorm that managed to shut down the entire city for about a week. When I complained about Columbia’s ineptitude when it came to snow removal, he put it in perspective:

“Vince, you moved to Baptist country. They believe God put the snow there and God will take it away when He is ready.”

However, when I sat down to really think about the bigger things I learned from George, I came up with a handful of life lessons that shaped who I am and that continue to guide how I teach my students today:

 

INSPIRE CONFIDENCE IN THOSE WHO NEED IT MOST: One of the comments a friend left on my social media post about George’s death captured the essence of his leadership in one sentence:

“He believed in me before I did.”

That was never more true for me the night in October 2000, when we got a late-night call about a plane that crashed somewhere south of St. Louis. A rumor began to circulate that Gov. Mel Carnahan was aboard and had died in the crash..

I was dragging reporters in to make calls and confirm the rumor so we could put something together for a front-page story. The copy desk was redesigning the front on the fly, even though no one was sure we’d have the goods to run the story.

We had a midnight deadline and right around 10:45, I got a phone call from George.

“So, it sounds like you’ve got a pretty interesting night there…” he began.

He asked what we had and I filled him in on everything we were doing before asking him the obvious question: “Are you coming in?”

I figured he’d want to captain the ship, making sure that we made the right calls about what to run and how to state what we knew. I also figured he would want to keep the situation from going off the rails if things got out of hand and we had to redo the paper yet again. To this day, his answer stunned me:

“Why? I’ve got you.” And then he hung up.

I was 26 years old and had about two years of experience running a night city desk. George knew more about covering stuff like this than I’d ever know. This was probably the most important story we would have in the paper for years to come, and if we screwed it up, we’d be the cautionary tale for all journalism students going forward.

And yet, George never hesitated about putting the ball in my hands and telling me, “Go win this thing.”

From that moment on, I realized that inspiring confidence in others was the greatest gift a teacher could give. Every day, I sit with kids who are frustrated with their inability to get a job, get an internship, complete a project or even write a single sentence. They feel lost and incapable. They feel scared that they won’t get where they desperately want to go.

My job at that point is to do for them what George did for me: Give them the confidence that they need to accomplish these things on their own.

 

IN PUBLIC, PRAISE INDIVIDUALLY AND CRITICIZE COLLECTIVELY: Each day, students waited anxiously for George’s critique, titled “Second Guesses.” They’d look to the cork boards in the office for the print out or check their email repeatedly in anticipation of what George had to say.

In each edition, certain names got published in all caps, meaning those folks did something really good. It might have been a great story, a fantastic photo or an amazing graphic. A particular copy-desker might get a nod for a great headline or some deft editing.

That praise was more incredible than experiencing a first kiss for so many people. Students I taught, many now in their 40s, noted they still have printouts of “Second Guesses” tucked away somewhere in a file. Some have clipped out the paragraph that mentioned them and keep it taped to a computer monitor or pinned to an office wall.

(The students weren’t alone in their love of “Second Guesses.” I would model my night notes after George’s critiques and nothing made me feel better than when he would literally take my entire night note and use it as the basis for that day’s edition.

He’d start with something about how great the paper was and then say, “Here’s Vince, explaining how we managed to pull this off:” or something like that. Years later, when I had to do daily critiques, I realized he probably did this because a good night note essentially gave him a day off, but I still cherished the times he considered my words as worthy of subbing in for his.)

Not everything in those critiques was praise, however, as we screwed up a lot over the years. That said, never once did George lambaste anyone by name for their mistakes. It was always, “We need to do better” or “We shouldn’t have made this mistake” or “We can NEVER let this happen again.”

To his way of thinking, the “we” wasn’t providing cover for one bad actor. The “we” was really a “we” in that it wasn’t just the kid who made the mistake: It was the line editor who didn’t ask enough questions to improve the story. It was the copy-desker who didn’t catch the error. It was the designer who didn’t notice the mistake when we proofed the page. And George essentially included himself in that “we,” as he likely felt he probably should have done or said something somewhere along the line to prevent that mistake.

I found that I wanted to work for that kind of person and I really aspired to be that kind of person when I was in the critiquing seat. That approach always made me want to work even harder to make sure “we” got it right as often as possible.

 

NEVER BE AFRAID TO RECONSIDER YOUR POSITION: Despite the feelings most of us had about his omnipotence, George was always willing to hear opposing opinions and reconsider his own.

Case in point, we were chasing a story about who would be the next police chief in Columbia late one night. What we knew was that the city manager was going to make a public announcement the next day and that the new chief would be with him. We had four candidates, two of whom hadn’t heard from the city manager for months, one who said he wasn’t aware of the press conference and one who said he couldn’t talk that night, but would “gladly speak after the press conference.”

We basically connected all the dots we had, stopping short of declaring the one guy as the police chief, something George called us out for in “Second Guesses.” He felt we were trying to be cute about the situation instead of telling people what seemed patently obvious.

I went to see him after the critique published and I made the case that we didn’t have the final piece of the story for certain, so I’d rather be a bit soft than turn out to be wrong. At the time, there were a number of “Person holds press conference to announce what we brilliant media people know to be true, only for us to be totally wrong” stories happening. I explained I didn’t want to be one of those, nor did I want to teach the kids that a guess and a prayer was quality journalism.

George heard me out and then did this thing he always did when he was thinking about something: His tongue would touch the middle of his mustache and then he’d kind of pull his bottom lip in a bit as he furrowed his brow.

“Fair enough,” he said, using a phrase that was a trademark of his.

Another situation like this happened when George was on vacation. It was early in the summer term where a) the students are usually not as abundant or skilled because so many of them are off at internships and b) the students haven’t been trained enough to know how to “8-2” a phone yet, let alone cover major news.

However, in a small town nearby, two sheriff’s deputies were shot to death as part of a daring jailbreak that failed to break a guy out of jail. The deputies were well-known members of the community, the shooters were on the lam and the town was in a state of devastation. I made the decision to “flood the zone,” sending at least four reporters and a photographer to that area to get as many stories as we could about this.

The kids came back with great content about the town, the incident, the deputies and more. I think we took over most of the front page and a ton of space inside, where our coverage rivaled both the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star.

When George got back, I asked him what he thought about our approach and he told me he wouldn’t poured as much time and resources into that story, given where it happened and what our circulation area was. “That said,” he added. “I’m glad that you did.”

Too often, people in a position like George’s feel like they need to be an oracle or something, never wrong and never questioned. To be fair, George had an incredible batting average when it came to being right about stuff, but he wasn’t perfect and he knew it.

George taught me that it’s OK to be wrong and that when you are, it’s important to shift your thinking if you want to retain the respect of the people around you.

 

PLANT THE SEEDS AND WATCH THEM GROW: Perhaps the greatest gift George ever gave any of us was the ability to grow and develop in our own ways. That kind of selflessness is a rarity in the world of academia, to be sure.

Of all the stories people are sharing online after learning of George’s passing, the common thread is of how he influenced them by essentially helping them become the best version of themselves.

When George once asked me where I wanted to be in 10 years, I told him, “I want your job.” He got this kind of bemused look on his face, not because he thought I was incapable of growing into that kind of position, but because he didn’t want me to become George Kennedy 2.0.

He wanted me to become Vince Filak, 1.0.

George impacted the lives of thousands upon thousands of students by essentially planting seeds: He took what we were, put us in the best possible position to succeed, nurtured us until we could stand on our own and then let us become what we were destined to be. For that, I know I owe him a debt of gratitude, and I’m sure many others do as well.

George might not agree with that, but if he took a moment, he might say, “Fair enough.”

Please Share Your “Peak Chutzpah” Moments With Me

A few years back, I asked a question of my friends who were most familiar with Yiddish terms to find out if the word “chutzpah” could take a modifier or if it was singular in its description. For example, the words “unique” and “destroyed” can’t get any more or less special.

“Unique” means one of a kind, so something either is or isn’t unique. It can’t be “somewhat unique” or “supremely unique.” Same thing with “destroyed,” as it means the end of something’s existence. It can’t be “partially destroyed” or “completely destroyed.”

I never got an answer to this, so I coined the term “peak chutzpah” for those moments where someone has an immense amount of gall to ask for something, but also has a stunning lack of social awareness.

The purest example I had of “peak chutzpah” came from a young woman in my media writing class who skipped out on a writing and editing session and subsequently failed an assignment in a way she wouldn’t have if she had shown up. She then went to “Rate My Professor” and wrote a screed about me, including details that clearly identified her in it.

About an hour later, I got a LinkedIn request from her, with hopes I could help with some reference letters.

The reason I bring it up today is that I finally managed to get back into the office after Winter Storm Elsa dropped nearly two and a half feet of snow in my yard. The snow was drifting so high, I actually broke the plow on our ATV trying to clear it and had to hire a guy with a massive plow truck to make a path in our driveway.

He got stuck, although he managed to eventually get it done.

Our weather forecaster was way too excited about all of this… But he wasn’t wrong.

In between battles with the weather, I was working to help students get ready for their final writing assignment that was going to be critiqued and edited in today’s class. The roads were finally passable, so I got in extra early to build this stuff for them, only to get this email from a student:

Goodmorning Professor, I will kt make it to class. I worked till 2am and I am exhausted. Can you record today’s lecture?

I don’t know if this qualifies as “peak chutzpah,” but the person who wrote it could use a little help in editing and AP style.

With Spring Break near, despite the 15-foot piles of snow outside that seem to argue otherwise, I’d love to hear your best student chutzpah stories. I could use the boost and I’m sure we could all use a laugh.

Feel free to post below or hit me up on the contact page.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth threaten media for not being polite, kind lapdogs

This is a photo of me at a high school journalism workshop, apparently trying to explain something that I hope isn’t what it looks like I’m trying to explain. If I can handle this photo of me existing, Pete Hegseth can handle whatever the hell photos they’re taking of him these days.

THE LEAD: The folks in the government are getting grumpy about the way the media is treating them to the point of threatening and banning outlets and coverage they don’t like.

Federal Communication Commission head Brendan Carr said he wants the coverage of the Iraq war to be more “patriotic,” lest the stations within his dominion see their licenses yanked:

The chair of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has threatened to revoke broadcasters’ licences after US President Donald Trump criticised their coverage of the US-Israel war with Iran.

Brendan Carr told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that broadcasters’ licences were not a “property right” and warned they can be revoked if stations did not serve the public interest.

Carr’s threat came after he accused broadcasters of “running hoaxes and news distortions”, saying they can still “correct course” before their licence renewals.

Some Democratic lawmakers called Carr’s comments unconstitutional. The FCC issues licences to individual broadcast stations, but does not license TV networks.

In a “hold my beer” moment, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went one step further, barring photo journalists from his Pentagon briefings for not making him look pretty enough:

The Defense Department has barred press photographers from briefings on the ongoing U.S.-Israeli military conflict with Iran after they published photos of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that his staff deemed “unflattering,” according to two people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

I FEEL PETTY, OH SO PETTY: The media and the government have long had an adversarial relationship, with many political figures badmouthing and blaming on the fourth estate for whatever ails them. We’ve had politicians literally beating up reporters as well, with one “bodyslamming” a journalist in Montana, and yet still winning the election anyway.

This isn’t the standard fare of one saber-rattling chucklehead with limited power and an unlimited ego. This is the head of the FCC basically issuing a mob threat, which Democrats immediately rebuked him for making. Even Republicans who generally view the media as somewhere between a swamp rat and the crud that grows on your teeth when you forget to brush for two days are not having it:

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Sunday rebuked Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr’s threats to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over TV networks’ news coverage.

“I am a big supporter of the First Amendment,” Johnson said on Fox News’s “The Sunday Briefing.” “I do not like the heavy-handed government, no matter who is wielding it. … I would rather the federal government stay out of the private sector as much as possible.”

“The federal government’s role is to protect our freedoms — protect our constitutional rights,” the Wisconsin Republican added.

Johnson is my senator and I can’t remember the last time I fully agreed with him on anything, so to have us both on the same page might be as rare as seeing Jesus riding a unicorn. (You’re welcome…) Johnson’s essential position of, “I might not like what you are saying, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it,” is good to see, given that too few people tend to think about how life might look if the shoe were on the other foot.

The backlash against Hegseth isn’t as loud or strong, but the underlying concern of controlling the media shouldn’t be any less alarming. As much as his staff is now backtracking and claiming there’s a “space and fairness” issue driving this, I tend to believe the first report a little more for obvious reasons.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Let’s start with Hegseth because it’s easier. I’m a guy who has had his picture taken at a number of podium-based events and I swear to God, I never look good. I either look like I’m gesturing in hope of winning a game of Charades or my mouth is in some sort of position that looks like I’m eating rotten food or about to spit on someone. I’m also old and bald with bad neck hair, so that’s not helping anything either.

So, from that perspective, I can honestly say: Grow up, dude.

You were once on TV and you considered yourself a journalist, so it’s not like you don’t get the idea of how freedom of expression works. I can pretty much imagine the general outrage you’d put forth if a Democratic administration had tried to crack down on whatever you were doing on Fox News. For you to punk slap the media over a couple photographs you didn’t like when this photo of you exists seems a bit stupid:

As for Brendan Carr, his lack of understanding and his use of threats makes more sense. Carr got a bachelor’s in government before getting a law degree. He was a private practice attorney before being brought into the governmental machine in 2012. He never worked in the media, nor is his expertise in that field.

Carr reminds me of a number of school district attorneys and college counsel-folk I’ve dealt with over the years when school media got censored. They had this vibe like, “I’m a lawyer, thus I know everything and I’m way smarter than anyone else in the room.”

I remember one case in which I had to keep correcting a school lawyer about cases he claimed supported his position. Finally, I outlined several reasons he was wrong before turning to the superintendent and saying, “Ma’am, with all due respect, you’re getting terrible legal advice and likely overpaying for it.”

When governmental people come from the business or legal world, they fail to understand that they don’t have as much free reign as they used to. Being “in charge” back there meant they had unfettered power over anyone or anything within their fiefdom. In the government, we have rules and laws that constrain people from acting on their stupidest instincts.

The Junk Drawer: Hump Day Edition

Is the weekend maybe hiding in here somewhere?

In the middle of the week during the middle of the semester, it’s a bit of a drag for students and professors. With that in mind, here are a few things that might amuse you all, spark some discussions or generally make it feel like the weekend isn’t so far away:

FLORIDA’S VERSION OF “WHO WORE IT BETTER?”

You know you’re a journalist when the first question you have after reading this headline isn’t, “What the hell was wrong with this woman?” but rather “How did the manatee get into a bikini?”

In the world of misplaced modifiers, I think this one is the gold standard.

Speaking of “What the hell is wrong with people…

STOP, THINK, THEN POST: Dan O’Donnell, a conservative talk show host out here in Wisconsin used the occasion of the Iran attacks to call for the death of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz:

O’Donnell later apologized for his posts and took them down, but there are still copies of this floating all over the internet. It’s also not great optics, given Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman were killed in July, in an attack deemed politically motivated.

This serves as one more reminder that stupidity is bad, but amplifying it on social media is worse.

GLAD WE GOT THAT NAILED DOWN: Stories based on opinions, particularly those that can’t be supported or refuted, don’t usually do much for me, but I have to admit this one grabbed me:

The former star of “Growing Pains” and long-time evangelist for Christianity has done a lot for publicizing his faith and reaching out to others to help them find Jesus. That said, I’m wondering where he got the inside scoop on the existence of hell.

I’m also going to argue that if he doesn’t believe in “eternal conscious torment,” he never had a nun for a teacher like I did. Sr. Mary Kenneth still haunts me in my dreams some times…

Speaking of living rent-free in someone’s head…

EVERY TIME A STUDENT REMEMBERS SOMETHING YOU TEACH THEM, AN ANGEL GETS ITS WINGS: I teach a lot of 8 a.m. required classes for sophomores, so I’m never exactly sure how much the students learn from me or how much they think about what I’ve taught them.

That’s why when a student not only remembers what I taught them, but also reaches out to say that they found an example of it in the wild, it just warms my grinchy little heart:

Hi professor, I saw this on Facebook and just thought it was so coincidental that we worked on a draft lead about a case just like this I thought I’d share with you. I think they wrote this terribly:

I’d have to agree with the kid, given that we don’t find out about a dead body until halfway through the piece. I’m also somewhat disturbed by the phrase “a working fire.” As opposed to what? An unemployed fire?

And finally…

SUITABLE FOR FRAMING: Some students wait until week 12 of a 14-week term to start trying to act right in class. At that point, they realize they’re totally screwed, as the math won’t allow them to pass, so they beg for extra credit.

I usually post this on my door right about the time I get that first request:

Feel free to borrow that.

Have a great day.

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