Hard-nosed Journalism

A Sarcastic List of Serious Writing Rules We Need as Media Writers

(It’s important that you get key information in a timely fashion, for obvious reasons, so enjoy the list.)

 

One of the best things I get to do as a former media adviser and college professor is judge media contests. Between the pros, the college ranks and the high school pubs, I find myself deluged in content on a regular basis. It’s a ton of fun to see what’s going on all over the place, what makes for news in various corners of the country and how certain things are relatively universal across all levels of media writing.

I have to say, and I really believe this, the hardest part of the job is picking and then ranking the winners. It doesn’t matter if it’s just one winner or a top ten, it always seems like there just aren’t enough awards to go around. A lot of good folks are doing some good work all the time.

That said, I also run into a relatively large swath of copy that has me shaking my head a bit. Regardless of experience level, the size of the publication or the purpose of the piece, writers can be uncannily consistent in some really godawful ways.

With that in mind, I’ve built a running list of rules based on the bad, the awkward and the generally problematic writing I’ve been seeing lately. My hope is that it helps break a few bad habits, so folks can make next year’s judging even harder:

If you only have one source, it’s not a story. It’s a soliloquy.

Adding a dozen adverbs to an event story doesn’t transform it into a feature piece.

If you have to tell me, “When asked about XYZ…” in a story, you need to have another place in the story where you tell me, “In a spontaneous outburst of information somehow relevant to this story…”

The key to making a story better isn’t just making it longer.

If a kid from the 1980s could follow your concluding line with, “And that’s one to grow on!” pick a new closing.

Apparently, nobody is a typical professor, a typical administrator, a typical minister, a typical politician or a typical sophomore, so skip telling the reader that in your profiles and just explain who this person is.

Instead of thinking about what you want to write, think about what you would want to know if someone else were writing the story. Then, structure your story accordingly.

Unless you can prove you checked in with every human being on Earth, avoid generalizations like “nobody,” “no one,” “everybody” and “everyone.”

Put extra effort into your opening, whether it is a news lead or a feature opening. If you don’t grab the readers in the first 10 seconds, it won’t matter how awesome the rest of your story is, because they won’t see it.

An expansive vocabulary isn’t meant for you to show off. It’s meant for you to use the exact right words to better inform your readers in a way they can understand.

What you write won’t be perfect on the first pass. If you think so, save a copy for later and try to disprove your assumption with subsequent efforts.

Don’t try to tell me and sell me in your writing. Show me through facts, sources and descriptions and let me come to my own conclusions. You’re a journalist, not a MLM owner.

If you have to explain four things to me before I can understand a fifth thing, that fifth thing better be able to cure cancer.

If you wouldn’t read it, don’t write it.

“Can You Libel a Disaster?” (And several other questions that came to mind after The Atlantic gave Ruth Shalit Barrett $1 Million)

Ruth Shalit Barrett received more than $1 million after suing The Atlantic for defamation, based on its approach to retracting this story. For that kind of money, they must have said this is a photo of Barrett drowning a couple dozen kids in a pool laced with electrical lines. 

THE LEAD: When in doubt, sue somebody, because it apparently works:

The Atlantic quietly agreed to pay more than $1 million early this summer to settle a lawsuit by the writer Ruth Shalit Barrett, who had accused the magazine of defamation after it took the rare step of retracting an article she had written and replacing it with an editor’s note, according to a person with knowledge of the settlement.

Ms. Barrett, who wrote an article about youth sports in wealthy areas as a freelancer for The Atlantic in 2020, sued the publication and one of its editors in January 2022. She said the outlet had smeared her reputation and asked for $1 million in damages.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER FLASHBACK: I was working on another post over the weekend when I noticed a post I wrote several years ago about Barrett’s article and subsequent lawsuit was getting heavy traffic for no apparent reason. A quick Google search of her name helped me figure it out.

At the time, I figured there was NO WAY this thing was going anywhere. The strength of my prediction powers is also why I suck at Fantasy Football.

 

THE DETAILS: Barrett wrote a story about niche sports that rich parents were pushing their kids to enter, in hopes of gaining an edge when the kids applied to Ivy League schools. The story had a number of problems, including an anonymous source that wasn’t that anonymous, the creation of a kid out of thin air, the exaggeration of an injury to a kid during a fencing match and more.

Eric Wemple of the Washington Post dug into this story and started finding more and more things that didn’t make sense, something the editors of The Atlantic also began to notice. At some point, they decided, “Screw it, we can’t save the patient” and retracted the story with a lengthy editor’s note about the story and Barrett’s history in media.

As a result, Barrett filed the suit, arguing that the note defamed her in several ways. She asked for it to be rewritten and that she be given the story’s publishing rights. The two sides went to arbitration, leading to some edits to the note and a lot of cash.

 

A FEW QUESTIONS: In reading this over and over again, I found myself asking several rhetorical questions, one of which was, “Can I sue Sage for no good reason with the hopes that they give me a squillion dollars to go away for a while?”  While the answer to that one marinates in your mind, here are a couple others:

CAN YOU LIBEL A DISASTER? I’m not calling Barrett a disaster for obvious reasons, not the least of which is I don’t have a million bucks I want to throw away. I’m more or less wondering how we started with a story so bad that it required a full retraction and ended with a pay day of this nature.

The publication stated it was aware of her history of not quite exhibiting the best level of judgment in regard to journalistic integrity. Wemple dug a bit deeper into her life and found more than a few clinkers along the way, including problems with the story on these weird sports. The fact checkers were lied to in at least two cases, with one source being encouraged to lie. (The original note said “at least one” while the new note says “one,” a distinction without merit from a language position. Also, who told you it was “only” one? The person you initially found was involved in all the lying and encouraging others to lie, so… um…)

Courts have ruled on a number of occasions that certain people and situations are “libel-proof,” in that nothing further can be done to harm their reputation. In addition, courts have stated that libel doesn’t apply if only “incremental harm” can be demonstrated. In the former, the courts basically say that someone or something is so bad, any statement that might be libelous toward any other person or group won’t qualify as libel. In the latter, it’s like a person in prison for 10 counts of murder sues you for reporting that they have a dozen unpaid parking tickets.

In looping back to this situation, I fail to see how the changes to the note or the statements regarding Barrett improved the situation to the point of avoiding libel. The distinctions in here feel to me like the quote in “Great Balls of Fire!” when someone yells at Jerry Lee Lewis that  he married his 12 year old cousin, Myra, to which she retorts, “Second cousin, twice removed!” Oh. Well.

The question of how bad was the defamation in relation to what was already out there has me pondering what level of reputation she recouped as a result of the suit. In short, do people who thought poorly of her now think better of her after this? Or did people who thought better of her before the retraction think worse of her AFTER that retraction?

Or did the big check just make things better?

 

WHEN DID GP GO MIA? I seem to remember a time, not so long ago, when people did things on “GP” or “general principle.” In other words, it was standing up for the right side of something or holding someone to account for something, even if it would be easier to just throw in the towel.

Case in point, my parents told me when I first got my license that if I got a speeding ticket, I’d lose my right to drive for a protracted period of time. No muss, no fuss, no BS. Just put the keys on the table. Sure enough, when I was 17, I was ticketed for speeding along a stretch of road that was a notorious speed trap. I walked into the house, put the ticket on the table, dropped the keys on top of it and that was that for a while.

What my parents DIDN’T foresee was that I was involved in about 912 activities that required me to be at various locations at night and on weekends. It would have been far easier for them to just give me back the keys and let me drive myself. However, Mom and Dad dug in and ended up driving me to and from all those things until the predetermined punishment time had ended. It was inconvenient for them, but they decided the principle of the thing mattered. I learned a lot from that and have since avoided speeding tickets, although now that I’ve said that, I’m sure I’m getting nailed on the way home.

The larger point is: When did we stop fighting just because the fights were hard? We’ve recently had the “60 Minutes” lawsuit, the ABC lawsuit, and several other lawsuits that have the “Fourth Estate” folding like a cheap cardboard box in a rainstorm. It’s like, “It’s cheaper and easier to just pay people to go away.” Well, that’s like paying protection money to the mob, assuming it’s a one-time thing.

It’s not just the news business, but it seems like we fold up everywhere: A kid threatens us, we change a grade. A social media “influencer” pulls focus onto a post we made, we take it down and apologize. Don’t even get me started about what the kids are doing in the ice cream aisle at Walmart these days. What happened to standing on principle?

There are times where I go into a situation knowing full well I’m going to lose and there are other times, where the risks are pretty damned high that I will. Still, there’s something that says, “No. You aren’t folding. You’re gonna play this hand out, because you can’t live with yourself if you don’t.”

I feel this moment so deeply

I understand that money is a predominant factor in pretty much everything in the world today and I know that it’s easy to say what I would or wouldn’t do when it’s not my money to spend. That said, I think back to the people I admire the hell out of in this business, who would never have acquiesced as easily as it seems like so many people are so willing to do.

Charlie Kirk, shooting deaths and trying to find a way forward. (A Throwback Post)

The death of Charlie Kirk, a political activist and leader of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, led to a number of expected outcomes when it came to social media and public expression. Some mourned the loss of the 31-year-old, noting that this brand of political violence is never the answer to disagreements. Others pointed to Kirk’s own words about guns, especially the time he noted that gun deaths in the United States were “worth it” if it meant we got to keep the right to bear arms.

Photos of Kirk and his family have also circulated, bringing home the message that two little kids will never see their father again.

As the shooter has not been captured as of this writing, the speculation about motive continues to be a hotly contested issue. Depending on which rabbit hole you enter, this is either a deranged liberal attempting to silence a strong, conservative voice or part of a larger conspiracy to martyr him to the causes that continue to move the country closer and closer to a fascist state.

(It also didn’t escape my notice that a school shooting in Colorado basically flew under most of the media’s radar Wednesday. Part of it, I’m sure, was Kirk’s fame and the pull of that story. The other part, sadly, was that not only have we grown numb to this idea, but that “only” three people were critically wounding, including the shooter, who died later that day.)

As much as I disliked Kirk and his message, I remain appalled at his death. I have always believed, and continue to do so, that the answer to speech you don’t like isn’t censorship or violence, but more speech. That said, this message isn’t where my brain found itself going as I started to think about all of this today.

When several friends and family members were talking about who could have shot him, the idea of a “liberal with a gun” seemed a bit too farfetched for a few folks. For me, I found myself hearing UWO professor and mass shooting survivor Joe Peterson in my head. When we spoke for my “First-Person Target” series, he mentioned how there was a social media group called something like Liberal Gun Owners. He laughed at that, explaining that there are a lot of liberals who own guns out there, so it’s not really a flex to start a group like this.

When my wife asked me how I couldn’t be absolutely terrified of what all of this means, particularly as our daughter fears that we are sliding toward becoming Gilead, it was Tracy Everbach’s words that spoke to me when as she reflected on how she could be shot at any moment by one of her students: “I’ve chosen not to be afraid.”

Today’s throwback post looks at the reflection piece I did a few years after the series ran. I think a number of the points are more relevant now than ever. If you’d like to read the whole series, I’ve linked to it here. (Warning: It’s a massive slog, and I say this as the person who wrote it.) I remain grateful to the people who gave of themselves and their time to help me learn lessons that I wish no longer were relevant in society today.

 

Four things I learned about the mass-shootings debate after wearing a bulletproof vest for a week

TeachingVest

Nearly three years ago, I decided to live in a bulletproof vest for a week as part of a journalism project to find out about guns, fear, mass shootings and more. (Photo by T.R. Gleason)

Over the past two weeks, the country has suffered two mass shootings: A gunman killed 10 people at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado and another killed eight people at three spas in Atlanta, Georgia.

News coverage of these events have examined the motives, the shooters and the “next steps” elements of this in a way that has become all too common in the United States. For me to do so here would be redundant at best, so feel free to Google these incidents and read all about the various elements of these crimes.

A few years back, in the wake of several mass shootings, I decided to take on a project where I dug into things that went beyond what you read in the horse-race coverage after a mass shooting or the political grandstanding that comes with gun-related violence of this nature. Instead of going out to people we normally talk to in the wake of these events, I wanted to talk to people who had specific angles on the various facets of the issue and then just shut up and listen to them.

The project that had been rattling around in my head for three years. After one of my friends noted that her university had become a concealed-carry campus, she expressed concern about what this meant for her safety. After several colleagues weighed in on potential ways to deal with the situation, all to no avail, I made a simple suggestion:

“Wear Kevlar.”

In other words, if you couldn’t play offense, play defense. A bulletproof vest might get people talking about the issue in a different way. She didn’t go that route, but I thought it was worth taking a chance. What followed was a week of personal participation reporting, several months of reporting and eventually a six-part series I called “First-Person Target.”

Here is the link to the main site for that project and all six pieces if you are interested.

After these more recent shootings, I went back and reread what I wrote during that time and found a few minor epiphanies that I thought might be worth sharing. I wanted to note that these are only my opinions based on looking back at what I wrote back then. I wish I had better answers to the bigger questions, but here’s what little I do have:

 

FEAR IS A COMMON THREAD: We often talk about guns as an issue of Constitutional rights or personal freedom or safety. What we don’t talk about, but is embedded in all of these topics and more is the concept of fear.

On a basic level, we do talk about the fear of someone deciding to unleash an internal fury upon a group of unsuspecting people in a seemingly random act of violence. I doubt people who entered a spa or a grocery store earlier this month in Georgia or Colorado thought to themselves, “I’m putting myself in harm’s way by going to this place right now.”

However, once these killers opened fire, many more of us now think about how it could happen to us at any time, in any place. For most of us, the fear will eventually subside when the story is no longer leading the nightly news or filling our news feeds with updates. Then, when the next attack occurs, our fears will be stoked once again.

Beyond that, however, I found that fear is at the heart of every action or lack thereof regarding the gun issue. People who dislike armed citizens fear the havoc guns can create. People who arm themselves do so for fear of not being able to protect themselves. People who oppose legislation that would limit access to firearms fear losing rights they see as sacrosanct. People who could propose legislation to limit access to guns fear the backlash from gun owners and lobbying groups as a result of trying to move the needle.

When I tried to get this project off the ground, fear was right at the forefront. I asked the UWO police chief if he knew where I could borrow a bulletproof vest to wear. He offered me instead a dose of reality:

Vince,

I’m sure you could purchase a vest for yourself, however I do not know of any police outfitter that would loan out this type of equipment.  In fact, if you started inquiring about borrowing a vest it could cause some concern from these vendors on your motives. As you stated people have a heightened awareness because of these mass casualty events.  Sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you.

When I sought people associated with firearms to help me understand a topic I really lacked knowledge in, I found fear as well. When I asked the folks in my community for someone to talk to about sales and gun registration and so forth, they all pointed me to one person in Omro, who owned a gun shop. I reached out to him and got an initial response, but after that, all I got was silence.

In talking to other people who knew this guy, the answer was simple and common: “He’s afraid to talk about this.”

Of all the people I talked to during my project, only one really told me they acknowledged the fear that comes from all of this, and it was Tracy Everbach, the professorial colleague of mine from the University of North Texas whose initial concerns helped spawn the project:

“I don’t spend a lot of time wondering if someone in my classroom is carrying a gun anymore or thinking, ‘Are they going to pull it out and shoot you with that?’”

“It’s just a personal thing to me,” she added. “I’ve chosen not to be afraid of it. I figure I’m as likely to have that happen as a car accident or whatever. Anything can happen to anyone at any time.”

 

WE ARE NOT SIDES OF A COIN, BUT FACETS OF A GEM: Journalism always talks about getting “both sides” of a story, as a way of avoiding bias. If someone is pro-X, we need to find someone who is anti-X. When we do, we quote them both and we’re done.

While some stories, like those on sporting events, do follow that pattern, most stories are much more complex than that. Even more, the people behind those stories are far more complex than many of us care to know.

When I started this project, I didn’t want archetypes or the “usual suspects.” I didn’t want a press release from the head of the NRA that spoke in platitudes. I didn’t want a “thoughts and prayers” statement from a politician. I didn’t want to collect soundbites that I could repeat in my sleep and move on.

I wanted real people who could help me understand their lives and interests and positions without fear of judgment or reprisal. I wanted to look into the heart of the issue through their window and see what they saw, whether I agreed with what they were seeing or not.

What I found is that reality isn’t what we see playing out in the wake of shootings on the news or at protests or elsewhere. I didn’t find “gun people” and “anti-gun people,” but rather people that saw their lives intersect with firearms in a variety of ways and how those intersections shaped them in some fashion.

UWO police officer Chance Duenkel carries a gun every day as part of his job, and yet knows that the weapon and his protective gear might not keep him safe in certain situations. In referring to a fallen officer he knew, he explained:

“He had all the equipment, he had the experience dealing with these types of firearms and weapons calls and the cards, unfortunately, weren’t in his favor.”

Nate Nelson, who trains people how to use firearms safely and is an avid hunter, carries a gun as well. He knows better than most the importance of training, safety and respect for weapons of this kind as well as the ramifications of choosing to carry one:

“If you draw that gun you’re probably going to spend six figures in legal defense,” he said. “People need to take that portion seriously on top of the fact of you might end up taking somebody’s life and it might be the assailant that’s bothering you or it might be somebody else that’s innocent because of where those bullets go beyond that.”

Joseph Peterson, a professor at UWO, owns a gun and works with the FBI to help people better understand mass shootings. Peterson was wounded when a gunman entered his classroom at Northern Illinois University in 2008 and opened fire. The shooter killed six and wounded 17 more.

Peterson spent time  learning a great deal about guns and what he refers to as “gun culture,” and found both the fallacies associated with the law and the nuanced nature of people with whom he interacted:

“Gun laws don’t prevent anything,” he said. “Absolutely. Laws don’t prevent anything. It’s that most people agree with them and people agree not to break them. Safety comes from having more good people than bad people.”

<SNIP>

“I think I’ve been in this kind of journey that I’ve been trying to put myself through on this,” he added. “In learning more about gun culture, learning more about firearms and learning to appreciate them for what they are, demystified a bit, I’m learning that there is a lot more middle ground covered. It’s the extreme views that muddy these waters and that’s what’s keeping things from getting done.”

 

LISTENING VERSUS WAITING TO TALK: During one interview, a source (I can’t remember who said it) stopping abruptly to tell me that they found themselves talking way more than they ever have on the topic. The reason, the person explained, was that I hadn’t said almost anything during the interview.

A similar thing happened when I was talking to Nate Nelson. At one point, about a half hour in, he asked, “Are you getting what you wanted from this?”

My answer was honest: “I really didn’t have anything I wanted to get. I just wanted to listen.”

In many cases, we know what we “want to get” from a source. We have questions that need answers and quotes that need to be gathered. I have done it dozens of times, asking the “How do you feel about X?” question to get the “I’m proud, happy and thrilled” answer. I don’t say this with any great level of pride in my reporting acumen, but rather to explain that experienced reporters and experienced sources know how to do the dance.

In this case, I went the completely opposite way. I had questions, sure, but they were more of a “Tell me a story” variety than a “Give me an answer” form. I also came in with as much of a blank slate as I possibly could. My goal wasn’t to poke back at people, but rather just hear what they wanted to tell me. Could they have been blowing smoke up my rear end? Sure, but that goes back to the earlier point about whom I chose and whom I avoided.

In several interviews, I got the sense that the people with whom I spoke weren’t used to people who listened. They were used to people who were waiting to talk.

I understand that passions can be loud and strong around life-and-death issues and that not everyone had the luxury I had in trying to just sit back and let information envelop me. However, when we aren’t listening, we are simply waiting to tell the other people why they’re wrong, and that’s not going to get us anywhere anyway.

In listening, I got to hear important points that made a lot of sense:

  • If people are going to say that mental health concerns are more to blame than guns for mass shootings, they need to be willing to put forth the money, research and resources to deal with that. They also need to be willing to look beyond that issue if this issue becomes a definitive red herring in the issue of mass shootings.
  • We’re often looking at the wrong thing when it comes to guns and death. Although the mass shootings draw the most attention and an ever-increasing body count continues to work people into a media frenzy, guns do far more damage in far less public ways. Gun statistics demonstrate that more than half of the gun deaths in the United States are suicides. Homicides account for another third of those deaths, with the majority of the deaths coming at the hands of people who knew their attackers, as in the case of domestic violence. Less than one-fifth of one percent of the gun deaths in the U.S. come from mass shootings.
  • People who don’t know a lot about guns actually talk the most about guns. Joe Peterson mentioned in an interview that shortly after the NIU shooting, he found himself talking a lot about the topic of guns and mass shootings while knowing much about either. He then did the academic thing and really researched the topic like a scholar would: Open the aperture on the lens, see the full picture and come to some provable conclusions. Nate Nelson mentioned that people get freaked out by the AR-15 because of its look and misunderstandings about the reason the gun is preferred in some legitimate circles. He noted the light weight and limited recoil make it valuable for hunters like his son. I also dug around after our interview to find that he was right about its role in mass shootings: Most mass shootings were committed with weapons OTHER than an AR-15. (For example the shooter at Virginia Tech killed 32 people with a pair of handguns. The shooter at NIU employed a shotgun and a handgun as well.) However, if all you see are social media posts, memes and news clips, you might be left with the impression that banning the AR-15 would solve all of our shooting problems.

I figured out a lot more along the way as well and I find myself pushing back at a lot of things I might have otherwise accepted as gospel before this project. I also figured out that I can understand a lot of things people believe without completely agreeing with them, and vice versa.

WE SUSTAIN MENTAL SCARS THAT NEVER COMPLETELY FADE: Of all the things I heard in doing this project, the one that stuck with me the most came from Chase Cook, a reporter at the Annapolis Capital Gazette. In 2018, a man with a long-standing feud against the paper came to the newsroom armed with a shotgun. He killed six of Cook’s colleagues.

Cook was off that day, but upon hearing of the attack, he went to the office where he began to report on the events of the day. The work of Cook and the fellow survivors earned national honors and praise, including a spot as Time’s “People of the Year.”

As the incident faded from the collective consciousness, Cook continued to deal with the aftermath of his experiences.

“I have a hard time in movie theaters now,” he said. “I get anxious when the lights go out, which is a bummer because I love going to the movies. I think about it a lot when I’m in really crowded places… That fear factor has kind of permeated through everything. I’m at work, I’m in danger. I’m at school, I’m in danger. I’m at church, I’m in danger. I have to convince myself that I’m not because while mass shootings are a problem in the country and they’re up, they’re still a rare crime.”

I haven’t spoken to Cook for at least a year now, but I often think about him when a shooting occurs. I wonder if he reads the news coverage. I wonder if he’s been able to enjoy movies again. I wonder if he is OK.

In talking to Kelly Furnas, the former adviser of the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech, I found he also had residual mental scars after dealing with a mass shooting. He mentioned to me simple things, like noticing how certain door handles were replaced because the campus shooter had chained the doors of a building to prevent escape. He mentioned trying to be more aware of certain things but not letting fear dominate his life.

As a newshound of sorts, however, he also found difficulty when it came to reading about each subsequent shooting that occurred in the U.S.:

“Quite frankly when I hear about a mass shooting I read the headline and I mention it to my wife and that’s about it,” he added. “That’s about all I can handle at this point. It’s obviously overwhelmingly sad and it’s frustrating and it makes you angry and upset but it’s also just like not where my energy can be. I think every single time that happens I think back to my students and what they went through and maybe that’s part of it.”

Joe Peterson, who was wounded in a mass shooting, talked about therapy and life changes and other major issues he dealt with. He also discussed minor things like seeking out exits in movie theaters and not being able to sit with his back to the door at a restaurant for a long time. In explaining his experiences, he told me that a lot of those personal difficulties were shared among people who had gone through situations like he had:

“With every one of these tragedies there are more and more survivors,” he said. “We are all members of a club we don’t want to be a member of and we don’t want any more members in it.”

If there was a single thing I think everyone I spoke with would agree on, it would be that.

The “No Comment” Culture and its impact on society

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THE LEAD: Ghosting someone may be awkwardly bad form in dating relationships, but it’s a significantly bigger problem when sources do it to journalists. Jim Malewitz of Wisconsin Watch provided some solid examples of why “no comment” can harm the very folks politicians and other public officials are meant to serve:

It’s hard to address homelessness — or any complex challenge — if we don’t even know where leaders stand.

Unfortunately, independent journalists are growing accustomed to being ignored. In a trend spanning multiple levels of government and political parties, public officials are increasingly avoiding answering inconvenient questions about matters of public concern. They’re sending generic statements instead of agreeing to interviews that are more likely to yield clarity. That’s if they respond at all.

<SNIP>

Such tactics are less harmful to journalists than they are to constituents. We ask questions on behalf of the public — not to satisfy our own curiosities. Ignoring us is ignoring the public.

THE “NO COMMENT” CULTURE: The popular quote (often attributed to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Mark Twain) about keeping your mouth shut does have some merit: “It is better to remain silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” It’s also a lot more dangerous these to say anything that might be construed as… well… anything, thanks to the rage machine that is social media.

Off-the-cuff comments can lead to significant public shaming, as was the case when a press aide for the White House dismissed John McCain’s opposition to a nominee by saying, “It doesn’t matter. He’s dying anyway.” 

When people make public comments as part of longer interviews, it turns out that a lot of the public will, gosh, hold them to those comments. When he was a candidate for governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker stated that he planned to create 250,000 new jobs in his first term. When people who can do math and understand money figured out this was impossible, Walker tried to back off by saying he was more generally talking about improving work opportunities and making Wisconsin a better place to be for employers. Still, that 250K number hung on him like a millstone.

Public relations practitioners, spokespeople and other “handlers” have done significant work to help people who actually need to say something offer blanket statements through press releases or social media accounts while not really answering any questions or opening them up to public scrutiny. All of this has created kind of a “no comment zone” even when people do offer comments.

DOCTOR OF PAPER FLASHBACK: Perhaps one of my favorite stories ever written here in Oshkosh was one a student of mine cobbled together using almost nothing but “no comment” comments. When a professor was escorted out of a classroom on the first day and then replaced by a long-term sub, students wondered why. Administrators and various other officials figured if they just pulled an “ostrich move” they could prevent the story from getting out. They were wrong.

PLEA TO PR PEOPLE: If you want the media to take your clients seriously, put some actual time into coming up with some sort of statement that doesn’t look like you downed four Monster Energy drinks and started typing buzzwords.

Think about what you can say (in short, what you know), what you can’t say (what you don’t know or are legally prohibited from saying) and what you want to say (things you can say that you prefer to have the public understand). Then, filter that through the concept of audience-centricity: What would the people this journalist is trying to serve want to know from us that we can tell them and that is (at least) mutually beneficial.

Make those statements less of the “we’re proud, happy and thrilled” variety, as people tend to think you’re hiding something. Make them more of a “here’s something of value that matters to you as best as we can tell it to you.”

PLEA TO NEWS PEOPLE: I’ve been out of the game for a while, but I seem to remember a time where we wrote stories based on talking to people with our mouths. I know that it’s easier to wait for everyone to “issue a statement” and then dig through some people’s social media posts for “reactions” and build something out of that.

The question I have, however, is: how does that actually help the audience?

In most cases those statements (see the PR thing above) are as boring as bug turds and as polished as a gem. They give you nothing other than to say you got a statement. (I’d also plead for journalists to not let political hacks pontificate as part of their quotes, taking shots across the aisle, but that’s another plea for another time.)

If these people aren’t talking to you, try listing off all of the stuff that literally tells the readers, “Smith’s statement did not answer X, Y and Z, or P, D and Q.” I understand shame is no longer a real concept these days, but let’s give it the college try.

PLEA TO OFFICIAL SOURCES: Don’t be wussies.

(Regular people who are thrust into the media realm through no fault of their own are exempt from this criticism, as they are inexperienced in working with the media and often dealing with something serious. Those folks deserve our respect and our patience.)

If you are in the public eye and serving the public trust, answering to the public you serve is part of the gig. Yes, using your own social media is part of that, but journalists are meant to serve as a conduit between you and the public that needs to know stuff.

How can we trust you to be operating in our best interest if you run and hide under the bed every time a media operative who is not predisposed to kissing your ass shows up to ask you to justify your actions? If you can’t handle the heat of an impertinent questions, how can we trust you to handle the budget, the school board, state law or federal actions? If you feel you aren’t good at working with the media, OK, but then go learn how to do it.

I’ll be much better for everyone involved if you participate in the process.

 

A Mob Shakedown, Chump Change or An Affront to The Foundations of The Country: Framing Paramount’s $16M Settlement With President Trump

This interview, which literally and figuratively did absolutely nothing to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, was at the core of a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit President Donald Trump filed against “60 Minutes.” 

THE LEAD: Paramount agreed late Tuesday to pay $16 million to settle President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview on “60 Minutes” that Trump deemed fraudulent and deceptive.

Trump sued Paramount in November for $10 billion, claiming the editing of the interview created “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of the 2024 election toward Harris.

Experts had long noted that the suit was frivolous and that Trump had a better shot of quarterbacking the Cleveland Browns to a Super Bowl title this year than he did of winning this case. Still, the parent company of “60 Minutes” took the settlement route, as a corporate sale of several billion dollars seemed to be at risk if it didn’t:

Many lawyers had dismissed Mr. Trump’s lawsuit as baseless and believed that CBS would have ultimately prevailed in court, in part because the network did not report anything factually inaccurate, and the First Amendment gives publishers wide leeway to determine how to present information.

But Shari Redstone, the chair and controlling shareholder of Paramount, told her board that she favored exploring a settlement with Mr. Trump. Some executives at the company viewed the president’s lawsuit as a potential hurdle to completing a multibillion-dollar sale of the company to the Hollywood studio Skydance, which requires the Trump administration’s approval.

After weeks of negotiations with a mediator, lawyers for Paramount and Mr. Trump worked through the weekend to reach a deal ahead of a court deadline that would have required both sides to begin producing internal documents for discovery, according to two people familiar with the negotiations.

FRAMING THE OUTCOME: We talked about Framing Theory a few months back, but for a brief recap, the idea is that how the media chooses to focus on an issue can shape how people in general will look at that issue. In this case, here are three I’ve seen pop up:

The Mob Shakedown: In most good gangster movies and TV shows, a scene emerges that showcases how to threaten someone without actually threatening them. It’s a pure demonstration of the power the “Don,” the “boss” or the “enforcer” has: Force someone to do something they don’t want to do out of pure fear of what otherwise might happen.

The shakedown scene usually starts with the gangster offering “friendship” or “protection” for a business owner, explaining that the world is a dangerous place and that a lot of bad things can happen. So, for a small percentage of the owner’s finances, this gangster will keep those bad things at bay.

If the owner protests, the gangster tends to get a little more specific while still being vague, offering “God forbid” scenarios like how a mysterious fire could burn the business to the ground or how a random act of violence could lead to the owner being hospitalized for serious injuries. However, fortunately, a payment to this “ambassador of goodwill” can pretty much eliminate those possibilities:

(This was the best “shakedown” scene I could find from any TV show or movie that a) didn’t use enough F-bombs to destroy an underground nuclear bunker, b) use other pejorative language regarding someone’s race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or pet preference and c) didn’t actually use the violence that was suggested earlier in the clip. Still, it’s not pure enough for totally virgin ears, so watch at your discretion.)

In the Paramount case, the company had a multi-billion-dollar deal waiting in the wings, but it needed “the Don’s” blessing to go through and a lot of terrible things can happen to a deal if, God forbid, the FCC decided to look reeeeeeealllly closely at it. I mean, who knows what might happen to all that money? If Paramount lost that deal just because of a little misunderstanding it could make right with this “60 Minutes” thing? Hey… I’m just saying…

Of course, the Trump administration definitely wasn’t doing that:

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has said the president’s lawsuit against Paramount was not linked to the F.C.C.’s review of the company’s merger with Skydance. Paramount has also said the two issues were unrelated.

Right. And the business owner got that black eye and broken arm after “accidentally” falling down a flight of stairs before coming to the conclusion that protection money is a small price to pay for proper piece of mind.

 

Chump Change: If you look at some of the more successful campaigns to get money out of people, they tend to be the ones that appear to be the least taxing or consequential. Case in point, each year, my alma mater (or maters) send me a pledge card, asking for a “gift” of between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. Those always go right in the trash without a second thought.

That said, I have a hard time recalling the last time I refused to “round up” at the grocery store, the hardware store or anywhere else for whatever charity the business was repping at the time. It’s like, “Hell, I’m already $132.47 into the Kroeger Family at this point. What’s another 53 cents for a good cause?”

In addition, I’ve seen people drop a few coins in a parking lot and refuse to pick them up, folks at rummage sales drop the “and XX cents” on a customer’s total and other similar maneuvers that basically just round off a relatively insignificant amount of cash.

Thus, the concept of “chump change.”

I personally have a hard time thinking about $16 million as “chump change,” but everything in life is relative, as noted in this clip from “The Social Network:”

I suppose if I’m looking at it from the perspective of a multi-billion-dollar company that wants to make several billion dollars on a deal, giving up $16 million isn’t a lot to make things happen. I also suppose that if a collections company told me I owed $1,000 to a creditor, but I could pay it off today for $1.60, I’d probably avoid the argument and fork over the cash. (Trust me on this one: The comparative math is solid.)

To Paramount, this is the cost of doing business. It’s rounding up at the register to move things along. It’s chump change.

 

An Affront to The Foundations of The Country:  After the news broke about the Paramount capitulation, it might have felt like time stood still for a few minutes. That’s probably because when Edward R. Murrow, Katherine Graham, Walter Cronkite, Ben Bradlee and David Brinkley (among other journalists) started simultaneously started spinning in their graves, the Earth found itself dealing with that “Superman The Movie” trick:

We’ve discussed SLAPP suits here before, where people with virtually no case whatsoever sue for a ton of money to get people to back off. In many of those cases, the defendants lack the sufficient means to truly stand their ground and fight back on behalf of truth, justice and the American way, so they knuckle under.

In this situation, Paramount had the funds, the legal might and the legal precedents to stand up for all the mom and pop media operations (whatever of those are left) and tell the president where to put his suit. Paramount also had the opportunity to stand up for the free press and free speech rights that have defined the country for generations.

It’s something Graham and Bradlee did before when a president came at them. It’s something Murrow did in a time in which a demagogue rattled this country to its core. It’s something so many other journalists and journalism operations have done in big and small ways to reassure us all that our rights are not a “when it’s convenient to people in power” thing.

But a funny thing happened on the way to our current predicament. News outlets are now part of larger conglomerates with larger concerns. TV news always lost money, relative to other programming, but it was seen as part of the deal: You give us quality news, we let you use the public airwaves. Newspapers use to make money and hold sway over larger groups of people. Furthermore, they weren’t part of a collective that also did entertainment programming, sold time shares, controlled real estate and answered to shareholders. Their concern was doing the news well and defending their right to do it.

For Paramount, “60 Minutes” is a “property” of the company, just like all the other stuff they put on TV. If an episode of “School Spirits” pissed off enough people to prevent a multi-billion-dollar deal from happening, they’d kill it or edit it or pay off someone, too. Cost of doing business. That’s the company’s view. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

However, when one company lets the powerful dictate the news based on threats like this suit, it undermines the strength of those First Amendment rights for everyone else.

Goodnight, Cliff Behnke. There will never be another one like you.

I bogarted this photo of Cliff from the obit. I’d argue “fair use,” but I probably wouldn’t argue it with Cliff.

 

Cliff Behnke, the former managing editor of the Wisconsin State Journal and generational journalist, died Sunday in Madison at the age of 80.

The irony of this piece is that it’s impossible to explain Cliff without resorting to cliches, a writing failure the man himself disdained.

Cliff despised lazy writing and wasn’t above telling writers how much redundancies, passive voice and unneeded descriptors displeased him. However, if there is one thing anyone who worked under him knew he hated most, it was cliches, so much so that the concept led his obituary this week:

 

 

Spring never sprung under Cliff Behnke’s watch.

“White stuff” didn’t fall in winter, and no reporter ever dared refer to Thanksgiving as “Turkey Day.”

Behnke was a stickler for detail and standards during his four-decade career at the Wisconsin State Journal.

(I managed to pull off a minor miracle once in a weather story when I used the phrase “a white, wintery mix” and Cliff never said a word.)

The cliches really did tell the tale of Cliff, as everyone in Barry Adams’ fantastic obituary seemed to use one now that Cliff could no longer stop them.

He was an “old-school editor,” in that he prized big-picture accuracy, clarity and value while simultaneously picking at the details that would rob a piece of any of those things. He was “no nonsense” in that staffers knew him to be serious and direct, focused and fair as he kept the newsroom moving forward. He was a “newspaperman in the best sense,” spending far more time in his college newsroom than his classes and helping to shepherd the state’s official newspaper throughout the salad days of print journalism.

In reading Cliff’s obituary, one fact discombobulated me: His age. I was in my early 20s during the three years I spent working the night desk at the State Journal. That would have put Cliff in his early 50s back then, which is where I find myself now. I can’t square those numbers, given that I have neither the skills, the seriousness or the stature that Cliff had at this age, never mind how he terrified staffers in a way that is almost impossible to explain.

I feared Cliff, as did a number of the folks quoted in Adams’ piece, but not in the cliche way usually associated with “old school” editors. He never yelled at me, nor did he have a large physical presence that had me afraid of violence. He didn’t break out a string of colorful curse words when dressing me down.

(Cliff was always on the lookout for stray curses making it into the paper. I remember him calling out a sports story that contained a quote like, “We played a hell of a game.” Cliff’s restrictions on cussing in print would make a 1950s all-girls boarding school look like a biker bar. It took at least three phone calls for us to run a quote in one of my stories about a riot with the quote “F— the pigs!” in it. And, yes, that was WITH the dashes.)

Listening to Cliff’s assessment of my screw ups was like watching a ninja throwing razor blades at me. It was just slice, slice, slice until I fell into 1,000 pieces. It could be about something big or about something small, but I still remember (and refer to) a number of them.

In one case, it was a redundancy. I was writing a photo caption about a model train railroad show when I felt the presence of Cliff lurking behind me. He began simply enough:

“Can you imagine if there were 88 model railroad layouts that were EXACTLY the same?” he asked.

“Huh?” I replied, unsure as to if I was having an out-of-body experience because Cliff was talking to me.

“Do you think it would be possible for a group of people to build 88 IDENTICAL model railroad layouts?” he said in that calm, metered voice of his.

“Uh… No?”

“Right. So why are you telling me that there are 88 DIFFERENT model railroad layouts in this cutline? Of course they’re different. That’s redundant.”

He then disappeared almost as quickly as he showed up and I still haven’t forgotten that lesson.

I also never forgot the time I should have been fired for screwing up a brief, in which I reported that a guy was dead when he wasn’t.

It wasn’t bad enough that I screwed it up, but then the local radio stations did their “rip and read” journalism on the air, letting EVERYONE know the guy was dead when he wasn’t. Our competing paper also used to love to crib our stories and then claim they had an “unnamed source” that confirmed the info, so those folks also amplified the story. It turns out everyone was wrong because I was wrong.

The man’s wife was getting condolence calls from people who saw or heard the “news” and she freaked out that the news people knew about his death before she did. After a complete clustermess of a situation, I got called into Cliff’s office for what I assumed would be the end of my journalism career.

After slowly and calmly walking me through every stupid thing I had done and every way a reasonably competent biped could have avoided that stupidity, he told me that the woman wasn’t going to sue us, but she had several demands. Aside from a correction for the paper, I had to write a letter apologizing to the man’s children for screwing up and then I had to hand-deliver it to his wife and talk to her for as long as she wanted.

“You need to go to the hospital at 10 a.m.,” Cliff said. “You will not justify your mistake. You will not discuss your feelings. If anything comes out of your mouth other than, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ‘No, ma’am’ or “I’m sorry, ma’am.’ You are gone. Do you have any questions?”

I was both young and stupid enough to have one: “Yeah. Why don’t you just fire me now instead?”

His response was perfectly Cliff: “I honestly don’t know, so get out of my office before I figure it out.”

What he taught me that day was responsibility for my actions, the importance of paranoia-level accuracy and that I needed to tough out this painful lesson if I was ever going to be much of anything in this world. As another editor explained to me when I said I should just quit, “How are you ever going to teach a student to do something tough if you won’t do it yourself?”

I didn’t work for Cliff as long as many other people did, nor did I spend much time in contact with him during my time at the paper. In reading some of the online tributes to him, he was both everything his obit said and so much more. He was generous with his time to Daily Cardinal kids, serving on the board and kindly mentoring staffers as they gained their legs in journalism. He was a giving person to friends and family who knew him less as a mythological editor and more as a human being.

What I can say is that there will never be another editor like Cliff, as the confluence of events that made him could not exist today. Nobody is going to spend four decades in journalism anymore, least of all in one state or at one publication. That means we won’t have someone like Cliff who can capture the culture and soul of the audience the media outlet serves. It also means no one will have a firm grasp on all the details that add clarity to local stories, such as if Devil’s Lake gets an apostrophe or where the East Side stops and Downtown starts. He was like Google in a shirt and tie.

Accuracy, the driving force behind Cliff’s work at the State Journal, now seems to be as antiquated as the term “newspaperman,” with people caring more about being first, getting views and making sure “their side” is winning. In the days of newspapers, mistakes were permanent and you couldn’t undo your failures. That fact helped Cliff drive the rest of us to obsess over being right. As much as I still obsess, I know that if someone finds a mistake in this thing, two quick clicks and it’s like the error never happened. As nice as it is to be able to erase public errors, it does make for some lazy journalism.

Above all else, I do wonder how this generation would take to Cliff’s brand of leadership, as to cause fear these days is hate crime and to criticize is a soul-crushing micro-aggression. I wonder how Cliff would work with people who have been known to bring a parent with them on a job interview. Not every 22-year-old who rolls off the college assembly line these days is the stereotype of an entitled snowflake, but I’ve seen a significant crop of emotional hemophiliacs who complain about everything from making deadlines to not getting enough praise for things they’re just supposed to do. The amazing thing about working for Cliff was that we knew he was reserved with his praise and generous with his critiques. That’s why his praise really meant something, unlike the vast sums of participation trophies that line the bookshelves of “kids these days.”

What I do know is that if anyone could have found a way to make all of this work well and get the best out of people in this current environment, it would have been Cliff. He just wouldn’t quit until he did.

 

Sieve! Sieve! Sieve! AG Pam Bondi green-lights the harassment of journalists as a result of Trump administration leaks

(Rare footage of Wisconsin Badger Hockey fans either taunting an opposing goalie for failing to make a save or mocking Pam Bondi for not running a tighter ship when it comes to stopping sources from leaking information to the media… )

THE LEAD: Attorney General Pam Bondi decided the best way to stop the sieve-like nature of the Trump administration’s leaking problem was to go after the journalists who received the information instead of the people leaking it.

To do that, she issued a memo late last month that made it easier for the government to subpoena reporters, their notes and other documents.

[T]he Bondi memo appears to have rescinded a specific provision protecting journalists from Justice Department subpoenas, court orders and search warrants based on the “receipt, possession, or publication” of classified information.

This change would make it easier for Justice Department attorneys to pursue journalists to identify confidential sources in reporting that involves leaks — like the Pentagon Papers or Watergate. And that could chill news reporting in the public interest.

THE MEMO: Bondi’s four-page explanation for her rollback of the protections put in place more than a decade ago under Merrick Garland offers both shot across the bow at journalists who receive and use leaked material as well as a general disdain for journalists generally:

Without question, it is a bedrock principle that a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy. The Department of Justice will defend that principle, despite the lack of independence of certain members of the legacy news media.

My takeaway is bloggers, as non-legacy news media, are safe to be completely dependent upon whomever they want for cash and prizes while taking leaked documents. So… Send your cryptocurrency bribes and emails about TrumpCoin to the email address linked on the blog’s About Us page…

Also, this feels more like an angry wedding party host giving a toast more than a serious memo at this point: “I’d like to say congratulations to Jill, the bride, my sister and my best friend. I will always be there for you, even though you slept with my prom date while I was throwing up in the bathroom at after prom. Still, love you, Jill! Jack, welcome to our family, and you might want to get a blood test… ”

And then there’s this…

This Justice Department will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people. “Where a Government employee improperly discloses sensitive information for the purposes of personal enrichment and undermining our foreign policy, national security, and Government effectiveness—all ultimately designed to sow chaos and distrust in Government—this conduct could properly be characterized as treasonous.”8 

A lot of suppositions there, not the least of which is that stuff “could” be treasonous or that all disclosures they want to attack are also definitely meant to undermine policies, victimize agencies and hurt people. By the way, the quote is from one of Trump’s executive orders, as are several other footnoted passages. Just one more reason to read the footnotes before assuming the content is valid.

The memo demonstrated why she probably should have hired one of those journalists she is now targeting to do some proofreading and copy editing:

The Attorney General must also approve efforts to question or arrest members of thew news media.

(Emphasis mine)

 

SO HOW FREAKED OUT SHOULD YOU BE? I wanted to run this past a couple of my “legal eagle” friends to basically get two questions answered before I posted about this:

  1. What is essentially going on here?
  2. How freaked out should journalism folks be about this and why?

Starting with the answer to number one, the legal folks explained that we do not have a nationwide press-shield law, nor an unfettered reporter’s privilege to legally keep the government at bay indefinitely. The case of Branzburg v. Hayes (1972) established that reporters can be compelled to break confidentiality agreements with sources if the government feels it is important that they do so.

As one of the legal folks noted, this isn’t just Trump being Trump about stuff he doesn’t like. Other administrations have also poked the media in a similar fashion when the situation benefited them:

“Many admins have used their federal investigative powers to harass journalists — Nixon famously, but definitely GW Bush and even Obama and certainly the Trump 1 admin. Merrick Garland as AG issued a memo saying his justice department wouldn’t do that, but that’s just guidance, it’s not binding. Congress had a chance to pass the PRESS Act in December provide more protection by law, but Trump told the GOP to kill it, and they did.”

As for number two, the answer basically comes down to, “Be as freaked out as you normally would be about dealing with leaks, because you never really had a lot of protection to begin with.” As one of those legal eagles put it:

“Congress has never passed a shield law, or Free Flow of Information Act, so our legal protection has always been in that weird middle space left by Powell’s concurring opinion in Branzburg.

“We still have a little bit of protection if there’s evidence the government is acting in bad faith or retaliation or harassment against journalists instead of having a bona fide need to get information they can’t get otherwise.

“I think this is more about undoing anything the Biden admin did than anything practically different. We all knew Trump and his admin would go after journalists — he’s been clear about that since before he was elected the first time.”

Essentially, the law itself hasn’t really changed, nor has anyone really stood up for journalists on the federal level (states have passed shield laws here and there, but that doesn’t apply when the fed comes calling). That said, it’s the enforcement that’s likely to be more of a concern.

“Trump and anyone serving in his administration see journalists who report things they don’t like as the enemy. They will target them for retaliation and force their newsrooms (if they work for one) to invest resources to fight in court. Bondi just gave the green light for that. Nixon would be proud.”

(SNIP)

“If anything, I think it’s aimed at trying to scare journalists from publishing leaks — or to scare leakers that journalists may not be able to protect them.”

“I’m not sure that’s gonna work, but it’s definitely the message Trump wants to send.”

DISCUSSION STARTER: What are your thoughts on the Bondi memo as well as the history of the government not solidifying a national media-protection act of some kind? Would that make you more or less worried about what to do if you received important information via a leak?

 

6 thoughts for new journalism graduates on the job hunt that have nothing to do with actually getting a job (A Throwback Post)

It’s not quite graduation time yet, but given the palpable anxiety I am sensing from my students, the job hunt for soon-to-be graduates is clearly underway. A young woman with a great set of experience showed up in my office this week with that “frustrated nnnnnggghhhh” vibe about her, as she had put multiple resumes into the field and gotten few responses.

“Should I call them or something?” she asked. “They’re not getting back to me and I’m worried.”

“When did you apply?” I asked.

“Last week…”

So that was a “No” on my end, as well as a reminder that as to how she needed to look at this whole situation. As I began to say it, she cut me off.

“I know, I know,” she said. “You were right. This is like bad dating. I need to be patient.”

Along with that pearl of weird-dom, here are a few other thoughts for your graduates looking for some help on life beyond the ivory towers and dive bars that formed their college experience.

 

6 thoughts for new journalism graduates on the job hunt that have nothing to do with actually getting a job

Graduation swept through town this weekend, and along with it came the speeches, the pomp, the circumstance and academic regalia (When I wear mine, I look like Henry the VIII got a Mr. T starter kit for Christmas).

img_5057.jpg

I no longer have the beard, but the medals are still pretty sweet…

Along with all this comes the anxiety of, “OK, now what?” Some students have jobs and they’re worried about how well they’ll do at them. Others have no jobs and wonder if they’ll ever get one. Parents worry that their children will be happy. Some probably also wonder if they’ll have to give up the home gym or a spot in the basement for a returning grad who hasn’t “found it” yet (whatever “it” is). What comes next?

For journalism grads, the anxiety can be even more palpable, as everyone seems to be telling you that your field is dead and you should have gone into business. Other fields can spend months or even years cultivating students for a job that’s waiting for them upon graduation. Journalism? I’ve been told once during a first interview, “We’d like to offer you the job today (Saturday). Could you start Monday?”

I asked the hivemind of pros and profs what advice they had for you all and it was really a mixed bag this time. Usually, everyone chimes in and it’s all in the same vein. This time, things were all over the place. One professor friend of mine noted:

My adult daughter just moved back home, soooo I got nuthin’.

I have often relied on the famous William Golden quote about Hollywood as well: “Nobody knows anything.” Whoever tells you, “This is how to get your perfect job” is either lying to you or trying to recruit you into a cult. Unlike all of those multiple-choice tests you’ve taken over the years, this question doesn’t have a right answer. That said, here are a few to think about as you try to game up for the next stage of life:

  • You have to be idealistic, but you have to be practical: U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks once said this in explaining his team’s chance to do well in the 1980 Olympics. His point was you should shoot for the best possible outcome, but you shouldn’t do so without a reality check. In the case of the job search, take a shot. You want to work at a top five newspaper, in a top 10 TV market, a Fortune 500 company or whatever right away? Toss an application out there. What’s the WORST that can happen? They say no and you don’t get the job, which is right where you are right now.
    That said, a 22-year-old journalism graduate with five clips from an internship at the Tamany Tattler and a year’s experience at the student newspaper isn’t likely to land at one of those spots right away, so feel free to look elsewhere. Apply to starter jobs, smaller firms and other places that have openings and you think would be worth a shot. You have to eat. You have to pay rent. And, as they mentioned in “Bull Durham,” it beats selling Lady Kenmore’s at Sears.

 

  • Don’t become a desperate psycho-hose-beast: As Tom Petty noted, the waiting is the hardest part. For you, this is the most important thing ever, especially if you’re searching at this time of the year. Even if it’s not cold, snowy and gray where you are, a winter job search can be danged depressing. You know that you don’t want to go home for the holiday where every well-meaning relative will ask, “So, what are you doing now that you’re graduated? Do you have a job?” (Side note 1: When you say “No” and they look at you like you just came down with an incurable disease, remember that look so that you never give it to anyone else ever. Side note 2: Realize that these people will always ask you questions like this that will sap your will to live, even after you get a job. “Do you have a job?” will become “Are you dating anyone special?” will become “So when are you getting married?” will become “Don’t you two want kids?” will become “Are you sure you only want (1, 2, 3…) kids?” Your only hope is to outlive this person so you don’t have to hear, “Are you sure you want to be buried here?”)
    This can drive you crazy and it can manifest itself in a number of ways, none of which are good. The worst thing you can do is take it out on potential employers as you decide to call, email or text repeatedly to find out exactly WHERE they are in the hiring process. Most people can smell desperation a mile away and it naturally repels them. Think about the guy at the bar who is insistently trying to buy a gal a drink, a shot, an appetizer, a game of darts or a 1979 Chrysler Cordoba. Does that interaction ever end well for that guy? If you ever need a reminder of how bad this can get, catch the classic “Mike from ‘Swingers’” scene (NSFW- some cussing) or the “Wayne’s World” look at Stacy’s unrequited love.
    In short, don’t push it. Breathe.

 

  • Look more deeply into your toolbox: The premise of both of these books is that we’re putting tools in your toolbox that you can use in a variety of ways. If you can find the perfect job that  makes you happy right away, that’s great. If not, don’t be afraid to apply those tools elsewhere. A recent grad sent me this note, which touched on something I never considered:

    After I graduated while I was looking for work I hooked up with a temp agency. It’s a great way to try different stuff without major commitment, you gain experience (and interview skills), you get to network, and you get a weekly paycheck. And some positions are temp-hire.

    A journalism professor noted something similar:

    Think creatively about ways you can use your journalism skills for other professions, such as PR, teaching, trade publications, advertising, web producer and social media manager jobs. Many more people cross back and forth into journalism and other careers these days than they did back when we were journalists.’

    Look around you and see what kinds of places need your skills and don’t fret if they don’t have your exact degree specified in the requirements. You will bounce a lot in this day and age (sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, sometimes against your will), so look for things that you think might pay the bills and give you a leg up the next time your perfect job comes around.

 

  • Remember the Johnny Sain Axiom on Old-Timers Day: Sain, a longtime pitcher and pitching coach, used to disdain Old-Timers Day. It wasn’t the concept he opposed, but rather that banter among the older players. Sain used to note that “The older these guys get, the better they used to be.”
    The same thing can be true for you when dealing with people who are more than happy to tell you that when they were “your age” they got a job right out of school or they had a perfect job waiting for them or whatever. In their mind, they had it all figured out perfectly and made a seamless transition between their education and a career, so why can’t you?
    The truth is, it wasn’t that easy for most of them. Some people just got a fortuitous bounce, a lucky break or a family connection. Others don’t work in your field, so comparing your search to theirs is like comparing apples and Hondas. It’s not that they’re better or stronger or faster or whatever. It’s just the way it happened for them. Each search and each job is unique (and I mean that in the truest sense of the word), so don’t let what other people tell you about how great life is get you down.
    Even more, don’t presuppose that people you see as your role models nailed the perfect job on the first take. I met with a couple students last week who kept referring to a recent grad as “having it all worked out.” She was their role model who, according to them, interned at Company X, graduated into a full-time job at Company X and then got promoted at Company X in less than a year. She was their Golden Goddess.
    What they didn’t know was all the anxiety she had about getting ANY internship, how she had been rejected twice by Company X for an internship and how she ended up sobbing in my office multiple times after that. They also didn’t know about the office fights and other less-pleasant aspects of Company X. In short, the grass isn’t always greener.

 

  • Don’t keep up with the Joneses: The easiest way to make you hate yourself and your job search is to compare yourself to other people in a constant game of one-upmanship. If Billy gets a job in a top 75 market, you shouldn’t try to get one at a top 50 market. If Jane gets a job as a writer at a 50,000 circulation newspaper, don’t just go looking for a job at a 100,000-circ paper to prove a point.
    I watched this happen constantly among peer groups of students at several of my previous stops, in which it wasn’t enough to get A job, but rather it was crucial to get a job that was better than someone else’s job. Here’s the problem: Just because a job is at a bigger place or somewhere with more cachet, it doesn’t follow it’s a good fit for you. This was how one of my former students ended up in Kentucky doing night-cops, despite not wanting anything to do with Kentucky or a night-cops beat, simply so he could look more impressive. It didn’t work out and he was miserable, before eventually going back to a job that was more “him.”
    I know it’s hard to push back against that competitive thinking. (Trust me, it happens everywhere, even in my gig. Former professors will tell their former doctoral students, “Oh, I see you’re at (less prestigious university)… Did you know that James is now at (mega-university) and he’s a dean?”) However, if you find something you like doing, you’ll never really work a day in your life.

 

  • Never forget this moment: You will eventually get a job and  you will do well. You will get older and get more responsibility. You might change jobs or careers or whatever. However, what should never change is your memory of this moment right now, when you’re scared out of your mind about getting any job at all, making rent, dodging Aunt Ethyl and her questions at the family holiday party, trying to avoid calling the Beaver County Tidbit 1,002 times to find out if they are still interested in you and everything else you feel.
    If you can remember the feeling you have at this moment, you will never lose your empathy for the future generations who are going through it. It might help you in little ways like not asking the “Aunt Ethyl” questions of your younger family members or hustling a bit more to get through that stack of resumes you need to read. It might help you in big ways as well, like thinking a little better about the next generation instead of a little worse of it. (People  more than occasionally ask me if being around younger people all the time doesn’t make me kind of envious of their youth. My answer is always, “Hell, NO!!!!!” I survived my 20s the first time and made it this far. There’s not enough of anything in the world to make me want to go back to that point in time).
    When it comes to getting employed, things almost always work out. I know that sounds ridiculous, but my batting average on things like is pretty good and in the end, you’ll have some great stories to tell.
    And thanks to your journalism education, you’ll tell them well.

“It gave me a purpose and quite literally saved my life a few times.” Why Student Media Matters (A Throwback Post_

With Friday being the Daily Cardinal’s anniversary day (133 years and counting), I decided to dig up this look at student media and why it matters to so many people for so long.

These days, I check in on the Cardinal website from time to time, read articles of various student media outlets that their college media advisers share and often sit with a print copy of the Advance-Titan (the UWO student publication). I also find myself thinking about how student media are leading the way these days when it comes to important issues.

Tufts University’s student publication, The Tufts Daily, has been on top of the story about Rumeysa Öztürk, a graduate student detained on March 25 by Homeland Security as part of a “pro-Palestine” sweep in Boston. The Minnesota Daily on the U of M campus has covered similar issues, including a lawsuit a student filed as the result of ICE detention. The Daily Northwestern has looked into the denial of tenure for a professor who had spoken in favor of Palestine.

(And not to let my bias show, but the Daily Cardinal is nailing down significant stories about how the federal government’s cuts to the Fulbright program have bigger consequences in some lesser-known areas, the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and more.)

Without free and independent student journalism, we’re not going to see these kinds of stories getting covered as honestly and fervently. When friends say something like, “Hey, the chancellor is giving us a big new building for student media because we’re getting moved under the umbrella of UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS AND OUTREACH!” I start to develop a twitch.

Sure, you can still write stories about the cool new clubs or the professor who won a major award, but you’re going to have a hard time running stories about sexual assault reports, football player misconduct or hazing attacks. That’s one of the many reasons why I still support my student media friends and causes to this day.

(SPOILER ALERT: The post below starts with a look at Doane University and a problem related to student media. The situation at Doane University got worked out and Doane Student Media kept on rolling.  You can see all the great work students there continue to do through this link.)

Enjoy this look why student media matters so much to so many people.

“It gave me a purpose and quite literally saved my life a few times.” Why Student Media Matters

The Board of Trustees at Doane University approved of President Jacque Carter’s suggested cuts and mergers during its Monday meeting, meaning that Doane Student Media is on a downward spiral to financial insolvency. Editor in chief Meaghan Stout has been covering the situation since the cuts were first announced, which is a lot like being asked to serve as a pall bearer for your own funeral.

According to former Doane student media adviser David Swartzlander, the cuts don’t go into effect until July 1, which gives Stout and others about nine months to raise unholy hell about them, something we’ve asked you all to do throughout the week.

If you’re thinking, “None of this makes any sense. She’s graduating in a month, so she’s done with this place. And why are you dedicating so much time and energy blathering on about student media cuts at a university the size of your high school? You don’t have a horse in this race….,” well, I get it.

From the outside, this looks pathologically stupid.

If you’ve ever spent any time in student media, this makes all the sense in the world.

I asked people I know who have gone in myriad directions after their educational careers came to a close if they ever worked in student media and, if so, why it mattered to them. One of the best journalists I’ve ever been lucky enough to work with, a wordsmith and a storyteller unlike any other, didn’t disappoint:

My high school had no paper. I started one, called “The Cardinal Chirps.” There was news, sports and jokes on four mimeographed pages. (Smelled great!) It may have lasted three issues. The jokes were filler and I learned that not everyone has the same sense of humor. Don’t print jokes. Working at that paper was a revelation. I could find something that didn’t make sense – a section of the lockers were inexplicably located in a dark room with one narrow door – and write about it. It wasn’t safe for those who had their lockers in there. The principal and school board took note and changed it. No had ever brought it to their attention. The learning was true: You can’t fix something if you don’t know it is broken.

I expected a few responses from a few other people, but not much.

I was stunned when I got dozens, like this one from a journalism professor with a background in news:

I graduated from a small rural high school that didn’t even have a school paper. My interest in news grew from my mom’s obsessive consumption of newspapers (we subscribed to two and sometimes three), news magazines (I think we got four), news talk radio (on constantly), morning/noon/evening local and national TV news, public affairs shows on PBS and all the Sunday morning news talk shows, and my own growing awareness that there were other places in the world far from Tonganoxie, Kansas, that I dreamed of seeing someday. It seemed wise to understand what was going on in them before going. And before going, I had to have money. I understood from my good friend that one could be paid actual money for fixing errors in news writing by being something called a copy editor. The University Daily Kansan and my professors with newsroom experience showed me how to be that.

Another higher-ed friend who works as a student media adviser had a similar life experience:

Working in college media was the step for me that solidified how I could attain my dream to work as a professional journalist. Before my college media experience, the concept was very abstract. Moving from dreaming to doing via my student newspaper made it real for me. I am forever grateful to those who gave me the opportunity and helped me see I could do it.

Folks who took the path out of news and into corporate communications, consulting and other similar fields found that student media benefited them as well:

I wanted to write books before I signed up for journalism class in high school on kind of a whim. In that class, I found that I had a knack for journalistic writing, most likely from reading the local paper and my dad’s influence as a TV journalist. Taking that class and continuing that path led me to attend J-School at MU and altered my career path. It also gave me an understanding of and appreciation for the importance of LOCAL journalism.

These responses made sense: Student media was like an internship and a training center for going on to do great and mighty things in the field itself. However, I also saw how the people who went into fields that had nothing to do with news or PR still found amazing value in student media:

I draw from my experience at the DN almost every day. I’ve worked for two law firms and a dental office since college. I’m comfortable asking questions, I’ve learned how to build relationships and I have a better understanding of how government works. The most important thing I have learned is that no matter how much effort you put toward your day, something could change and you need to be ready to shift your priorities and maybe undo all you’ve just done.
My boss at SAGE, who puts up with an awful lot from me, apparently found her muse through student media as well:
Basically shaped my entire college experience. Learned the basic responsibilities, ethical implications, and work ethic of a journalist. Being on the paper motivated me to write about things I was interested in, when I already had to write so much for school…Also I got to interview some really interesting people!
The one common thread, I saw overall, however, was that student media was more than a thing people did. It was who they were. The newsroom wasn’t like a classroom where they HAD to go. It was a place that gave them something special and they WANTED to be there:
It was my happy place. The place where I always knew what I was doing, and why. The place where everything just made sense. Why else would someone finish a shift, go home, get their books and go back to the newsroom to study. Because that’s where I was always focused.

And…

It was my home away from home. And it allowed me to experiment with what I wanted to do.
And…

 

Genuinely don’t know where to start. The friends, the experiences, now I’m working in media. Joined junior year of high school and haven’t looked back since. It gave me a purpose and quite literally saved my life a few times. I could go on and on.
And so many other people did as well, sharing stories of life-long friendships that developed thanks to pressure-packed deadlines, no sleep and a sense of belonging they never found before or since. At the risk of becoming hyperbolic, student media provides people with something that borders on magical, a familial bond forged in a way that never truly seems to break.

 

I understand why Meaghan Stout is fighting like hell, against all common sense, for her student media family, because 25 years ago, I was her.

 

I remember sitting in my journalism adviser’s office six weeks after our student newspaper closed under the weight of $137,700 in debt. My adviser was also my teaching assistant for Media Law, a course I was essentially flunking because I had poured all of my time into fixing the Daily Cardinal.

 

“You need to quit the paper,” she told me. “You’re going to fail.”

 

In retrospect, I think she meant the law class, but that’s not how I heard it.

 

I then listened as she told me how when she was in college, her student newspaper was moving from a weekly to a daily and how she was pressured to put the paper first and everything else second. Instead, she stuck with her classwork and got her degree. Besides, she explained, even if I managed to fix the problems, the paper was likely to shrivel up and die after I left, so what was the point?

 

In the abstract, she was right. Take care of yourself. Get the grades. Besides, there was another student newspaper on campus I could work for, so what made this Quixotic journey so important? I couldn’t explain it, but even if I could, I doubt she would have understood.

 

So, I let her finish, told her I’d think about it and then I went back down to the newsroom and kept working on fixing the paper. By the next semester, we’d pulled it back from the brink of collapse and started printing again.

 

It’s still running to this day.

 

For me, my student media experience wasn’t about the articles I wrote or the editorial positions I held or the arguments we had. (We often joked that we were a family in the newsroom, in that we drank a lot and hurt each other…)

 

It wasn’t that, without that paper, there’s no way I would have gotten this far in life, and I’d probably have had a heck of a career as a fairly decent auto mechanic. It also wasn’t the life experiences it gave me either, although without the paper my kid would likely have different godparents and I would have been deprived of the opportunity to return the favor.

 

I still can’t adequately explain what it is that makes student media matter so much, whether it’s the paper I worked for, the papers I advised or the papers I never ever knew of before a crisis threatened them.

 

What I can say is that I love reading the articles the students write, as I wonder how much blood, sweat and tears went into just getting that inverted-pyramid piece to hold together. I love seeing those 20-somethings I knew through my media conference presentations or newsroom visits doing great and mighty things as reporters, editors, copy editors and more. I love it even more when I see them finding joy in life outside of the field, moving into politics, social work or psychology.

 

I treasure the photos I see of engagements and weddings that bloomed from seeds planted on a production night. The houses they buy, the babies they have, the lives they develop… Somehow, it all comes back to that moment they found someone else who had the weird sense of humor that grew from spending too much time in a windowless bunker that smelled of old newsprint and burnt coffee.

 

In all my time at all these institutions of higher learning, I’ve yet to come across another student organization or activity that even came close to what student media does, both for the campus and for its practitioners. This is something people like Jacque Carter don’t understand, because to them, it’s a pain in the ass that costs money and points out things they don’t want pointed out.

 

To us, it’s life.

 

P.S. – I passed law with a C that semester. Even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Welcome back to “The Midterm From Hell” (A throwback post)

The reporting kids got a look this week at the legend of the reporting midterm. The legend has grown over the years, with each generation of kids telling the next group of reporting kids about it.

The difficulty level, the unrelenting problems and the general anxiety students regale each other with continues to make this thing take on an almost mythic status. I’m sure they’ll come in expecting that they’ll have to slay a dragon with a pickleball paddle while reciting the “Gettysburg Address.”

The point of this midterm is to do a couple things:

  1. Teach them how to operate under a tight deadline, in which they can’t just sit back and wait for people to email them back.
  2. Help them learn how to improvise, adapt and overcome when problems show up and failure is not an option.
  3. Show them that they are capable of things they didn’t think they were.

In the end, most of the students tend to get it done and have a general sense of amazement that they pulled it off. As much as they don’t like it, I think it does the job.

See what you think on this Throwback Thursday.

—

“The Midterm From Hell”

I often get to hear students complaining about classes and professors, as that comes with the territory of being an academic adviser, a  former newsroom adviser and having an office right next to the computer lab. When they don’t think I’m listening, I’ve heard students mutter about the amount of reading I assign in Feature Writing or the way that AP style is way too big of a deal in the Writing for the Media class.

However, two grievances have been repeated about two specific things I force students to do that are both points of annoyance and points of pride for them. When they gripe about these things, they do so loudly and with an odd tone like someone in a really bad 1980s movie yelling, “I was in ‘NAM, man! You don’t even know!” It’s a mix of irritation and self-congratulations.

The first we’ve discussed here before: The Feel-It Lab.

The second is what one student referred to as “The Midterm from Hell.”

Conceptually speaking, it’s reporting in its purest form: You get an assignment you know nothing about, you research it, you find sources and you turn the story in for publication immediately. Maybe working night desk where asking “Can I get this done tomorrow?” would have gotten me mocked and then fired and then mocked again has jaded me to the difficulty of this, but I doubt it.

Below is the outline for “The Midterm from Hell” as it is presented to the students. Feel free to use it as you see fit or adapt it as you need. Consider it a “share the hate” moment from me to you.

——-

Reporting Midterm Assignment

The 24-Hour Story

As promised, this isn’t going to be your standard “memorize some facts, regurgitate them and move on” type of midterm. Reporting is a skill that you hone over time and in many cases, you don’t have a lot of time to do the honing. You will be responsible for your own fate and the fate of your colleagues in this midterm exercise.

Part I: The Pitch

As per your syllabus, you will have to email me a midterm pitch no later than Sunday at noon. If you do not turn in your pitch, you will not be able to participate in the midterm itself on Tuesday.

(UPDATE NOTE: About one student every other year fails the midterm before it even launches because of this. I guess if I had this threat hanging over my head, I’d make it a priority to beat the deadline by several days.)

What you are attempting to pitch is a story that you believe you could accomplish within a 24-hour period. The pitch itself should include the following things:

  • Your name
  • Your contact information (phone number, email address etc.)
  • An introductory paragraph of about five or six sentences that outlines what the story is about, what makes it worth doing and why it matters to a specific readership.
  • A list of at least THREE human sources, including contact information and rationale behind these people being used as sources.

You should attempt to create a quality pitch, obviously. If your pitch is too weak or fails to meet the basic elements of the assignment, your pitch will be discarded and you will not be allowed to participate in the midterm.

 

Part II: The Story

Everyone who turns in a pitch will be expected to be in class ready to go on Tuesday. I will print off all of the acceptable pitches and give each pitch a random number. Each participant will select a number and thus receive the associated pitch. YOU CANNOT RECEIVE YOUR OWN PITCH. I will read the pitch to the class and give you a copy of the pitch. The person responsible for the pitch can then augment the pitch with additional information or suggestions. We then open the floor for other people to suggest other sources or other places for information. Once you feel comfortable with your pitch, we move on to the next person.

When all the pitches are handed out, you will then have approximately 24 hours to complete a solid news story on that topic. It must be at least 2 pages, typed, double-spaced. It must contain no fewer than three human sources. You do not need to use any or all of the sources suggested to you in the pitch. You can augment the list or stick to it. The pitch is merely meant to guide you.

Your story must be in at noon on Wednesday.  If you are late, you fail the assignment, so remember the old line we repeat in here: Journalism is never done. It’s just due. Your completed work will be graded along the same lines as your previous stories, with one-third of the grade being assigned to each of the three main areas: Reporting, Writing and Style.

This is going to typify the quote on the front of your syllabus: You have to improvise. You have to adapt. You have to overcome. Stuff can go wrong. People might not get back to you. Sources might be out of town.  Your job is to be a reporter and figure out how to get the best possible version of the story out of the assignment based on what you have available to you at the time. Perfection is unattainable, so don’t panic about that. Make sure you’re accurate, clear, concise and balanced. Work on smoothing out your writing without obsessing about how perfect it is.

You can do this. We’ve been preparing for it all term.

Questions? Ask ‘em.

A Mississippi newspaper can criticize the city once again after a judge lifts her suppression order

The paper’s banner says, “We are patriotic blues lovers on buckle of the Cotton Belt.” The editorial says, “Don’t mess with the First Amendment.” The approach to website design says, “This site will download easily with your AOL free trial.”

THE LEAD: A judge in Mississippi, who had forced a local newspaper to remove an editorial critical of the city government from its website, reversed her decision on Wednesday, after the city dropped its lawsuit against the paper and the entire Fourth Estate lost its mind on her.

The judge, Crystal Wise Martin of Hinds County Chancery Court, lifted the order after Clarksdale city officials voted earlier this week to abandon their libel lawsuit against the local paper, The Clarksdale Press Register.

On Thursday, Wyatt Emmerich, the president of Emmerich Newspapers, which owns the The Press Register, said that he planned to republish the editorial at the center of the case.

 

THE BACKGROUND: The Clarksdale Press Register wrote that the city was being shifty in not notifying the publication that it planned to ask for a 2 percent “sin tax” at a Feb. 4 special meeting. The editorial also alleged the city leaders might have ulterior, personal motives for keeping the press ignorant of the event to give the proposal a smoother ride.

It turned out, the city clerk drafted the notice, but forgot to send it to the paper. The clerk apologized, but the horse was already out of the barn. The city voted at its next meeting to sue for libel, and that the editorial was likely to create problems at the legislative level for the bill.

As part of the suit, the city asked the court to force the paper to remove the editorial from its website, which the judge did, prior to her subsequent reversal.

 

STUPIDITY ON PARADE: First Amendment proponents (and college students cramming for their media law midterms) can easily point to why both parts of the city’s claims are stupid.

First, a city can’t sue for libel like Clarksdale was doing and get away with it. The 1964 NY Times v. Sullivan case set the standard for this issue, in that a public figure must demonstrate that the publication acted with “actual malice,” meaning it knew it was wrong and did something anyway. In this case, it was clear the paper DIDN’T have the document and that was the crux of the argument.

The only place it comes close to being problematic is in the paragraph: “Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kickback from the community?” it asked. “Until Tuesday we had not heard of any. Maybe they just want a few nights in Jackson to lobby for this idea — at public expense.” However, you can’t libel someone with a question, which is how all those talking heads on B-list “news” outlets have gotten away with their outlandish crap for years.

(I’d love to try this some time for marketing purposes: “Can we assume that using textbooks other than those written by Vince Filak means your media instructor is a psychopathic pedophile with several dead bodies in their garage?” I think I just heard one of the folks at Sage drop like a stone…)

Second, nothing says, “Let’s keep this quiet,” like starting a lawsuit against a newspaper, thus GUARANTEEING everyone on Earth is going to find out about this and want to read it. In fact, the paper reestablished the editorial on its website after the court ruling, and you can read the paper’s piece here.

The Press Register claims a weekly readership of 7,750. To put that in context, we were cranking out about 14,000 DAILY COPIES of the Ball State Daily News in Muncie, Indiana when I was advising that student newspaper back in the 2000s. Still, something tells me the Google searches for that place could draw enough energy to dim the sun after this ham-handed censorship effort and it’s not because people were excited to learn about “the birthplace of the blues” all of a sudden.

 

QUOTE OF THE YEAR: This one comes from Wyatt Emmerich, whose company owns the Press Register, talking about the city’s approach to this whole debacle:

“As I warned them, it blew up in their face and it created a national outcry,” he said. “It embarrassed the city, and they realized what they had done was a mistake.”