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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Help them learn how to improvise, adapt and overcome when problems show up and failure is not an option.
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.
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“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 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.
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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.
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.
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.
“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.”
THE LEAD: The Trump administration barred several journalists from the Associated Press from reporting opportunities in and around the White House over the past week for not calling the body of water to the south of the country the Gulf of America.
“This is now the third day AP reporters have been barred from covering the president — first as a member of the pool, and now from a formal press conference — an incredible disservice to the billions of people who rely on The Associated Press for nonpartisan news,” Pace said.
The dispute began Tuesday, when the AP was informed that it would be barred from attending White House events because of the organization’s decision to continue using the name Gulf of Mexico, not the Gulf of America, as Trump decreed in an executive order last month.
BRIEF RECAP OF THE SITUATION: President Donald Trump declared that the Gulf of Mexico should actually be named the Gulf of America, a declaration he codified with an executive order on Jan. 20. He doubled down on this declaration, when he deemed Feb. 9 the first “Gulf of America Day.”
Apple and Google maps have made the switch to this nomenclature, even as media outlets and foreign officials have pushed back on this move. (Apparently Bing followed suit, but nobody really noticed because… I mean… c’mon… It’s Bing.) The president of Mexico has threatened to sue Google over this change, while the AP and the White House apparently remain in a standoff over the issue.
In this case, the AP tried to “split the baby” by both acknowledging Trump’s actions while also not letting 400 years of history and global tradition get scrapped with the stroke of a pen:
Screenshot
In short, “Here’s what we’ve always called it, here’s how it now impacts U.S. government stuff, here’s who can ignore it and here’s our best way forward.” Apparently, that wasn’t good enough for the Trump administration.
CAN TRUMP DO THIS (Part I) ?: The larger question of Trump’s right to rename the gulf unilaterally depends on the specific question being asked. As far as the U.S. government is concerned, yes, he can really do this and has. Reports indicate that both the Department of the Interior and the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), the official federal database of all U.S. geographic names, are moving in this direction.
In terms of what can be enforced upon the rest of the world, no. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea essentially established that countries have control of things like this only as far as 12 nautical miles from the coastline. (Mexico essentially makes this argument in its lawsuit against Google.) Also, as much as he might like it to be true, Trump does not dictate what everyone on the planet does. Therefore, his declaration has no jurisdiction beyond certain borders.
Generally speaking, the law dictates that the denial of a pass is within the rights of an administration, provided there is “an explicit and meaningful standard” to support its actions and “afford procedural protections.” That case did not say what it would take to revoke a pass, nor did it provide any clarity here in regard to who gets to go into the Oval Office or the Rose Garden or whatever.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: There’s a lot to unpack here and it’s not entirely one-sided. As much as I hate having to discuss the First Amendment an “it depends” kind of way, at least this time, it doesn’t involve porn.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is not entirely wrong in saying that a) covering the White House isn’t something everyone gets to do and b) the administration does have some leeway in how it controls who gets to go where when space is limited. I know I can’t just hop on a plane and demand access to the press room, let alone slide into the Oval Office for a chinwag with DJT, just because I’m writing a blog that dozens of people read.
It’s also no big secret that sources have always played favorites with media outlets. It would piss me off to no end when one of my reporters at the Columbia Missourian would call a police source about some story we had heard about and be told, “Nope… Nothing like that going on.” Then, miraculously, the Columbia Daily Tribune’s ancient cops reporter would somehow manage to break THAT EXACT STORY as an “exclusive” within two days.
I also used to hate the way that the Muncie Star-Press managed to have a great “buddy-buddy” relationship with the Ball State athletic office, so whenever something important would be going on (adding lights to the stadium, scheduling a nationally televised game), the Daily News kids would get shut out and the Star-Press would slather it all over the front page. To think the Trump administration would play more fairly with the national press than some yokel sources in the Midwest would with the local press seems to strain credulity.
Hell, it was so obvious he played favorites during his first term, John Oliver had some fun with it:
These kinds of things aren’t a blatant violation of the First Amendment, even if they feel petty and unfair.
All of that being said, I hate what Trump did here and I totally support AP’s position in regard to the coercive nature of this exclusionary maneuver. It does smack of favoritism, it does undermine their ability to spread information and it reeks of petty bull-pucky. I have a long-standing hatred for bullying, and that’s just what is happening here: “Do what we tell you to do, or else.”
This isn’t a new thing for Trump, nor will it be the only instance of it. I imagine there will be more than a few press passes getting yanked over the next few years, along with the obligatory lawsuits to get the Trump administration to back down. I also imagine that there will be additional significant efforts to cow the media throughout Trump’s reign. If there’s one thing this administration has consistently blessed with favor, it’s those who lavish unrelenting and uncritical praise upon the Dear Leader.
AP right now is in a game of “chicken” with the White House and I certainly don’t want the AP to back down. We could argue that nomenclature of this nature is petty and stupid (see the “freedom fries” debacle), but the bigger issue would be the press caving to power to curry favor. That’s the kind of loss of credibility that the AP could never get back once their reporters lost it. So, please, AP folks, for the sake of all of us out here trying to teach students how to do quality, unbiased journalism, fight like hell to get back what you have lost.
That said, the establishment doesn’t owe the AP a Snickers bar simply because they’re used to getting top-shelf treatment. I would argue that if you work for AP, you’re probably among some of the best, most-resourceful and dedicated reporters on the planet. You don’t get to the top of the heap like that be being spoon-fed and softly petted, so treat this slight like any other obstacle you would need to overcome.
I’d suggest you follow the lead from the folks getting the shaft at the Pentagon: “We’re going to work around this cheap ploy, because that’s what we do and we will not be deterred in holding the administration to account for its actions because that’s our job.”
I don’t know what compelled you to castigate the media at large in that press conference. It might have been just the stress of the day or it might have been previous experiences with a few bad folks in the field. I can tell you for sure that, just like in politics, there are good and bad people in journalism. And, just like in politics, the lousy ones tend to make the biggest impressions and do the most damage for the whole lot of folks. If I had to wager, I’d say that most of the people in that media cluster would have gladly been covering ANYTHING ELSE that day than a school shooting.
I let this post sit for a day or two, in the hopes that you would issue some sort of apology for this, even if it were completely insincere, so that we could all go back to doing what we’re good at: Media folks covering the news, you not pretending to be a journalism expert. Unfortunately, the PR people who advise you are apparently no better than you are, so I thought I’d offer a few insights on what this situation is like for news people.
I spent three years as a reporter, another five as an editor and then about 15 as a newsroom adviser, and in every case, I’ve had to deal with stories involving dead kids. This is not a morbid flex, but rather a chance to help you understand where I’m coming from.
All those things you said at the press conference? Hell, I’ve been told worse and more loudly by far more traumatized people than you. I’ve been called a vulture, a scumbag, a waste of life and a few other things that could peel the paint off of a car. The hardest one was the lady who told me that “Your mother must not have raised you right, if you think what you’re doing is appropriate.”
Believe it or not, journalists are actually human. Sure, we’re really good at hiding it a lot, but we have the same emotional range as most other bipeds you’ve encountered. If you felt pain, agony, shock, angst or anything along those lines, it’s safe to say that the people who were asking questions of you that day did as well.
If you think that reporters in that gaggle are going to enjoy talking to sobbing parents and bothering traumatized kids before heading home for a nice casserole supper, you’re delusional. This kind of thing sticks with most people for a long time, and journalists are no exception.
When my students would ask me about my experiences writing about death and mayhem, I told them that I could remember the name, age and cause of death of every dead kid I ever covered. It’s been decades since I was reporting and editing, but it’s still true.
Casey Rowin, Shawn Magrane, Matthew Dunn, Deanna Turner… those names and a dozen more stick with me every day. I think about Rachael Himmelberg, the infant who died after receiving what should have been life-saving open heart surgery. She would be in her late 20s now and I wonder what she would be doing. I think of Jordan Sosa, who died at 22 months old when he wandered out of his grandparents’ house and fell into the Black Earth Creek. He might have been a college student of mine, if he hadn’t drown that day.
My first year at Ball State, we had five college kids die of various causes: Michael McKinney was shot to death by a cop, Karl Harford was robbed and executed after giving some guys a ride… accidents, suicides and more… I remember one of the more veteran editors of the paper, who had lived in Muncie his entire life telling me, “This is not normal for us around here…” like he was trying to convince both of us that what he was saying was true.
The editor also asked me, “How did you get so good at covering stuff like this?”
My answer was simple and I think most journalists would be on board with it: “You don’t get good at doing this. You become more experienced in doing the best you can. If you ever get to a point where you feel you’re good at covering dead kids, it means you are really broken and you need to walk away for a good, long while.”
Each dead kid we cover is like a wound we receive, the scar a permanent reminder of what it was to be there in the worst moment of someone else’s life. Each mistake we made in how we phrased a question or how we approached a source still stings. Each time we did the best we could and still faced the wrath of a pained family member or friend brings about a wince and grimace.
You mentioned that reporters should go away and give people a chance to grieve. Despite your apparent thoughts on the state of media today, reporters can be a crucial component of that grieving process. I go back to what Kelly Furnas, the adviser of student media at Virginia Tech, said to his students as they went out to cover what remains the deadliest shooting on a college campus:
“The students I talked to were terrified of the fact that they would need to call these families and I said, ‘You don’t assume that these families don’t want to talk,’” Furnas said, recalling that day at a college media conference a few months after the shooting. “That’s a very important thing to these families to tell the story of their son’s or daughter’s lives. That’s a very important thing. A lot of people not only want to do it, but expect to do it.”
I can tell you for sure that this holds water. When it came to the dead people I covered in one way or another, I got one of three reactions 99% of the time:
“I just can’t… I’m sorry…” These people were already at the maximum level of stress and pain and they were just incapable of dealing with anything else at that point. I would apologize for intruding on their grief and then leave them alone.
“You #%*%ing VULTURE!”Yep, we talked about that already. This reaction gave me a ton of anxiety and pain, but I understood. It was like putting your hand out toward a wounded animal: They just hurt so badly, they lashed out, regardless of your intent. Again, I’d apologize and back away.
“The pressure-release valve” This is what Kelly was talking about. These people are so full of emotion and they have nowhere to go with it. Everyone around them is feeling the same pain, misery, stress and more… All they want to do is talk about how great their kid was, or how amazing their parent was or whatever stories make them feel less hurt. As a journalist, we’re that opportunity to not only help, but to share their thoughts with others.
So in the future, please feel free not to tell journalists how to do their jobs at a time like this. It’s a job nobody wants, no one revels in and few people can do and remain unscathed.
If someone asks a particularly crappy question like, “Are there plans to call it ‘Less-Abundant Life’ now that people have died there?” or “Don’t you find it ironic that there was a lot of thoughts and prayers happening in there but the kids still got shot?” go ahead and release your inner scold. That kind of person deserves your wrath.
However, the basic “5Ws and 1H” questions are normal, even if the situation is not and you lack the answers. Everyone is frayed to the nth degree, so you need to operate above the fray. If you can’t, don’t hold the press conference or send someone out there who is actually skilled at PR to do the work for you.
I hope this helps, because I somehow doubt this will be the last time you and the media will spend time together discussing a devastating death or two.
The view from my driveway this morning told me two things: 1) It wasn’t going to be an easy trip to the office and 2) at least 75% of my students would suddenly come down with food poisoning and couldn’t possibly make the 8 a.m. class.
The first decent snow of the year in Wisconsin provided me with the impetus for this week’s Throwback Thursday Post.
When it comes to weather like this, we generally have two types of drivers that account for 95 percent of the people on the road:
The driver who goes 12 mph, is constantly sliding all over the road, can’t avoid skids on curves and practically stops about every quarter mile. In spite of this, they will continue down the road and drive just fast enough to prevent you from passing them.
The driver who has the philosophy of “I got my jacked up 4 x 4 with brass truck nuts on it and God is my co-pilot, now let’s DO THIS!” as they fly past everyone at 95 mph on a two-lane road.
I spent my morning behind the former and noted a few of the latter had landed in the ditch all along Highway 21. (Dad’s theory on four-wheel drive was always, “It just means you get stuck deeper in the ditch.) Throughout my drive, I found myself going back to my days of driver’s ed, where I learned how to reverse the gas and brake process while making sure I didn’t stomp on a puppy. (It makes sense if you read the rest of this, I swear.)
I thought this post might also help those of us who are near the end of the semester and feeling a bit vexed by the students who STILL can’t seem to figure out how an attribution works, what a fact really is or why they should not have 21 adjectives in the average media-writing sentence.
As much as it seems like a good time to throw our hands up and say, “Screw it. Write however you want.” it’s actually a good time to double down on those “driver’s ed rules” of writing and pound them in even harder. The kids might not like it now, but they’ll come to value it later.
Teaching the Driver’s Ed Rules of Journalism
The guy who taught me driver’s ed at the “Easy Method” school was a balding man with a ginger mustache and sideburns to match. He told us to call him “Derkowski.” Not Mr. Derkowski or Professor Derkowski. Just Derkowski.
I remember a lot from that class, as he basically beat certain things into us like the company would murder his children if we didn’t have these rules down pat.
Hands on the wheel? 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock.
Pedals? Release the brake to go, release the gas to slow.
Feet? One foot only. We were required to tuck our left foot so far back into the seat that we could feel the seat lever with the heel of our shoe.
Seat belt? You touch that before you touch anything else in the car or you fail the test. (Or as one of my dad’s friends told me just before the exam, “Get in the car. Put on your seat belt. Then, have your mom hand you the keys through the window.”)
There are a dozen other things that still stick with me, ranging from the left-right-left view of the mirrors to the probably-now-unspeakable way to look behind you when backing up. (“Put your arm across the back of the seat and grab the head rest like you’re putting a move on your girl at the drive-in,” he told me once, I swear…)
After 30 years behind the wheel, I still can’t shake some of this stuff, and most of it is still really helpful. Do I use it all the time? No. (I’m sure the man would be having a stroke if he saw me eating a hash brown, drinking a Diet Coke and flipping through the radio all at the same time while flying down Highway 21 at 10 over…) However, it was important to have that stuff drilled into my brain so that I knew, when things got iffy, how best to drive safely.
When I had to drive 30 miles up I-94 in a white out, in a 1991 Pontiac Firebird that had no business being a winter car, you better believe I abided by the gospel of Derkowski.
I had my hands in the right spots, I was looking left-right-left before a lane change and I treated those pedals like I was stepping on puppies (Another one of his euphemisms, I believe; “You wouldn’t stomp on a puppy!” he’d yell at someone who did a jack-rabbit start or a bootlegger brake.)
It took two hours, more than four times what Mapquest would have predicted, as I slowly passed among the littering of cars and semis that had slid into ditches and side rails. Still, I got there alive.
The reason I bring all of this up is because with the advent of another semester (we still don’t start for two weeks, but I figure you all are up and running), many folks reading this blog will be teaching the intro to writing and/or reporting courses. That means in a lot of cases, students will be coming in to learn how to write the same way I came into that driver’s ed class so many years ago: All we know is what we have observed from other people.
My folks were good drivers, but even they were like lapsed Catholics when it came to the finicky points of the rules: Five miles over the limit was fine, seat belts were pretty optional and one hand on the wheel did the trick. Outside of them, the world looked like a mix of “Death Race” and “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Gunning engines at stop lights, squealing tires, the “Detroit Lean” and more were what I saw.
Students coming into writing classes have been writing for years, so they figure they’ll be fine at it. They also figure writing is writing, so what’s the big deal if I throw 345 adjectives into this hyperbolic word salad of a sentence and call it good? Nobody ever said it was a problem before…
The students need some basic “rules” pounded into the curriculum, repeated over and over like a mantra, to emphasize the things that we find to be most important to keeping them out of trouble in the years to follow. Mine are simple things: Noun-verb-object, check every fact like you’re disarming a bomb, attributions are your friend, one sentence of paraphrase per paragraph… It’s as close to a tattoo on their soul as they’re ever going to get.
It’s around this time I often get into random disagreements with fellow instructors about this stuff. Some are polite, while others react like I accused them of pulling a “Falwell Campari” moment. In most cases, the argument centers on the idea that there aren’t really rules for writing or that “Big Name Publication X” writes in 128-word sentences or that paragraphs often go beyond one sentence, so why am I teaching students these “rules” this way?
It’s taken me a long time to figure out how best to explain it, but here’s it is: I’m teaching driver’s ed for journalism.
In other words, you will eventually be on your own out there and you won’t have your instructor yelling at you about where your hands are or if you looked at the right mirror at the right time. You probably won’t die if you drive without your foot all the way back against the seat, nor will not maintaining a “car-length-per-10-mph” spacing gap lead to a 42-car pile up on the interstate.
In that same vein, you won’t automatically lose a reader if your lead is 36 words, or confuse the hell out of them if you don’t have perfect pronoun-antecedent agreement. Libel suits aren’t waiting around every corner if you don’t attribute every paragraph and if you accidentally (or occasionally deliberately) tweak a quote, you won’t end up in the unemployment line.
However, if the basics get “The Big Lebowski” treatment up front, there’s no chance of those students being able to operate effectively when the chips are down. (There’s a reason the military teaches people to march before it teaches people how to drive a tank.) Until those basics are mastered, the students will never know when it’s acceptable to break a rule or why it makes sense to do so.
Of all the things I remember about Derkowski (other than that godawful straw cowboy-looking hat thing he wore) was that even though he enforced the rules with an iron fist, he could always tell us WHY the rule mattered and WHY we needed to abide by it. Say what you want to about the items listed in my “this is a rule” diatribe above, but I can explain WHY those things are important in a clear and coherent way. Even if the students didn’t like them, they at least understood them.
We also know that we’re not going to be there to press the point when a former student at a big-name publication uses “allegedly” in a lead. (That doesn’t mean we still don’t. Just ask any of my former students and they can tell you about conversations we’ve had about quote leads and lazy second-person writing.)
I tell the students once they get off of “Filak Island,” they can do it however they want or however their boss wants. (I also tell them to ask their bosses WHY they want to use allegedly or randomly capitalize certain words. In most cases, the answer is silence mixed with “duh face,” I’m told.) However, my job is to teach them the rules of the road, and I think that’s how a lot of us view things in those early classes.
I will admit, however, that it’s fun when I hear back from a long-graduated student who tells me how they can still hear my voice in the back of their head when they’re writing something. (It’s even more fun when they tell me how shorter leads or noun-verb attributions are now the rule at work.)
If we do it right, enough of the important things will stick, they’ll revert to the basics when in danger and they’ll be just fine, even without us there to pump the brakes.
It seems like a good time to do one of these, as we need to catch up on a few things, starting with the situation at Indiana University…
FROM THE “YOU CAN’T SPELL ‘YOU IDIOT’ WITHOUT ‘IU'” DEPARTMENT
As we noted in a previous post, the incoming lieutenant governor of Indiana, Micah Beckwith, threatened the Indiana Daily Student for its coverage of the election.
Beckwith, who looks like if Seth MacFarlane and Josh Duggar ever entered into a “Twins Experiment” together, didn’t like the Donald Trump cover, in which the paper listed all the things people who worked with Trump had said about him and then noted how we just elected this guy anyway.
The IDS caught up with Beckwith for a protracted interview about his “we will be happy to stop them” comment about the paper as well as what he actually knows about how free speech works. You can find the transcript here. I’ve read it three times and it’s basically like someone bought a box of “Ranting Uncle At Thanksgiving Magnetic Poetry” and threw it into a blender.
Making things even better for the man who will soon be one heartbeat away from running Indiana, the Society for Professional Journalists has decided to up the ante.
Michael Koretzky posted on the SPJ blog about the situation and has worked with the IDS staff to create T-shirts that have the front page of the paper on them, as well as a “Come Get Some” call out to Beckwith on the back.
As we mentioned at the start of the week, the social media platform for the blog shifted from X to Bluesky. As promised, I’ve started a “starter pack” of journalists, journalism educators, media nerds and friends of the blog. If you are interested in seeing who’s in the mix, feel free to click the link here
Also, you can feel free to hit me up and ask to be added to our motley crew.
GOODNIGHT, GRANDPA JOE
One of the things I tell my students a lot when they take my reporting class is that the skill I can almost guarantee they’ll use is obituary writing. Not only did I write a ton of these as a cub reporter, I’ve had the unfortunate honor of helping former students write them to honor family members who have died.
This week, I found myself at a keyboard, practicing what I preach.
My last grandparent died on Friday at the age of 101. Grandpa Joe was a lot of things, including a veteran of World War II, a police chief and a loyal rotary member. He was also a former pinball machine repairman, an avid sheepshead player and a great joke teller.
(This is one of my favorite pictures of him, as he taught my daughter, Zoe, how to play backgammon during one Thanksgiving visit. The photo basically says, “What a sweet moment between a great-grandfather and his great-granddaughter.” If you look closer at Zoe’s face, it is a mask of determination that basically says, “I’m gonna beat you this time, old man!”)
Aside from the astronomical costs some papers charge for placing basic memorials (the average cost for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel was about $5 per word), I was also stunned at the level of verification the company required of me.
The obituary form required me to have digital verification of who I was, my relationship to the deceased and contact information so they could verify who I was. In addition, they required the name of the funeral home/crematorium that was handling the remains, as well as contact information for someone who could verify the death had occurred.
A few hours after I submitted the form, I received an email explaining that they had confirmed the information with the organization I listed and that the obituary would be allowed to run.
Two things dawned on me, having gone through this process. First, this kind of thing is apparently necessary because some chuckleheads file false death reports on other people, either as a joke or as a threat. Second, this might be the most fact-checking of something that goes into a publication these days.
AS YOGI BERRA WOULD SAY, “THANK YOU ALL FOR MAKING THIS NECESSARY.”
Finally, I wanted to end on a positive note and thank everyone who has been reviewing and using my introductory/media-literacy text, “Exploring Mass Communication.” Whenever I try something new, I always do my best to make sure it’s useful and helpful to the people I’m trying to reach.
Apparently, it works well, as I found out it’s up for a major award:
To be fair, when I first saw the email, I thought it was one of those fake society things, where they tell you that you’re a “Teacher of the Year,” with the goal of getting you to buy overpriced coffee mugs with your name and award status on them. After I did some digging and bothered some people at Sage, it turned out to be a real thing.
I can’t thank you all enough for being part of this process with me, whether you were reviewing early chapters, helping me rework some features or using the book in your classes. A book without readers is like a tree that falls in the forest with nobody around and I know this book wouldn’t be anything without you.
Honestly, I’ve seen the things that have won in the past and I do not expect to win at all. The announcement for this will be in March 2025, so it’s far enough away for me to dream about it, but not close enough where I’m checking my email every 5.2 seconds.
(I don’t think Indiana Lieutenant Governor-elect and far-right pastor Micah Beckwith understands how the First Amendment works. I could teach him, but I’d have to charge…)
THE LEAD: Shortly after being elected as Indiana’s next lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith decided to take his newfound power out for a test drive by threatening the Indiana Daily Student newspaper with censorship:
WHO IS THIS GUY? Beckwith is a 42-year-old, hard-right Republican, who has never held any political office prior to winning the lieutenant governor position. He came in third in 2020 while running for a U.S. house seat in Indiana. He graduated from Huntington University, a private college affiliated with the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.
A QUICK BREAKDOWN: Here’s a quick look of how this situation is dumber than a bucketful of hair:
First, the students did not call Donald Trump these things. They literally QUOTED people who WORKED WITH TRUMP on the cover of the paper to make a point. If he looked at the people who said this stuff, I have a hard time believing Beckwith could get away with calling ANY of them “woke.”
Even more, people who are more politically aligned with Beckwith are pointing out on X how he completely misread this situation:
Screenshot
(Let’s also sidestep the whole “this is what your taxes are paying for” thing, as a) they are not, b) even if they were, financing a free press isn’t a bad thing and c) there are far dumber things tax money goes toward…)
Finally, the First Amendment guarantees the right to a free press, unfettered by the whims of governmental figures. Punishment for free speech of this kind is not allowed in this country (whether we’re truly a “democracy” or not). It’s unclear how Beckwith will “stop it for them” but I doubt it would be legal.
COMMENTS ON THE SITUATION: I reached out to co-EICs Marissa Meador and Jacob Spudich for a comment on the controversy and they were nice enough to respond:
“While we welcome criticism of our newspaper and its content, we are staunch defenders of the First Amendment and the freedom it grants to the press — including student journalism. Our front page clearly attributes the quotes to former allies of Donald Trump, which we collected from several articles across the New York Times and CNN. Beckwith’s statement implying he will attempt to control or suppress what we publish is deeply concerning, not just for staffers at the Indiana Daily Student but for our constitutional principles overall.”
I messaged Beckwith’s office with several questions and a request for comment. I received nothing to this point, but if I do I’ll post it here. (Don’t hold your breath on this one…)
When asked if IU had any comment on Beckwith’s claims about IU and his potential action toward the IDS, IU spokesperson Mark Bode said “The Indiana Daily Student is editorially independent from Indiana University.”
In case you are unfamiliar, that’s what it sounds like when someone jumps ship…
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: This is the kind of ham-handed, saber-rattling stupidity that comes from people who claim to love this country but consistently fail to understand what our country actually protects and allows. The same freedom of speech that allowed Donald Trump to call Kamala Harris “a shitty vice president” and allowed Beckwith to refer to his opponents as having the “Jezebel spirit” also protects speech that Beckwith DOESN’T like.
I could also go back to that famous line about never picking a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, and add that you shouldn’t take on a media outlet that has 10 times the number of followers you do on X.
I often get responses to posts like this calling me “an academic liberal” or a “lefty professor,” both of which are not only untrue, but so far afield they’re likely to make my mother laugh so hard she could pass an entire Subway footlong through her nose.
In truth, I’m neither left or right, but I am definitely anti-bully and anti-hypocrite. I see this guy as being in both zones, so that’s why he really needs a reality check.
ACTION OFFER: If you want to tell Beckwith what you think about this, you can hit him up on Twitter/X, or email him through his campaign website here. Maybe if he hears enough from enough people, he’ll learn something.
That said, the guy literally thinks that Jesus pushed him to take the Beckwith Model of Intolerance and Stupidity ™ to the political sphere, so I somehow doubt he’s going to back off.
People in the journalism educational community have been asking a variety of questions related to their students and the outcome of the 2024 election. Although they vary in tone, concern and topic, they basically boil down to these types of questions:
What should I be telling my students about the outcome of the election?
What should journalism for them look like now that Trump is president again?
What should they do, as journalists, in this current environment?
I’m often accused of being reductive in cases like this, but I believe that we overthink the heck out of stuff like this.
For example, my answer to the first one would be pretty basic:
Trump won the election, both the electoral college and the popular vote. If you like that, fine. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, too. However, facts are facts and people need to learn how to accept them.
You live in a country where people get to choose a leader, and sometimes people make choices you don’t like or can’t understand. That’s the risk of living in a society like ours, but it is how things work.
If you don’t like what happened this time, you can easily use the skills you garnered in any journalism class to be part of a political campaign and try to move the needle in the direction you prefer. If you like what happened this time, you can use those same skills to maintain this new status quo. However, you can’t do these things and be a news journalist at the same time.
I can already think of at least six people who are furiously writing a five-page email to me, condemning that simplicity. So, if you hated that, you’re really going to hate the rest of this.
Journalism is a lot of things, but at its most basic, it’s about finding out what’s going on, making sense of that and then telling it to people who need to know this stuff in a way that makes sense to them. It requires you to keep the door of objectivity open, at least a crack, when you talk to people and to do your best to understand what’s happening, why it’s happening and what it means to your audience.
So, with that as the backdrop, here are three basic things I would tell students about doing the job in this current state of being:
Stick to the facts in your reporting: When I said this to a few Harris supporters, I got the expected response: “This is stupid! Trump and his followers never accepted facts!”
First of all, Trump secured nearly 76 million votes, so to assume that every one of his followers won’t accept a fact is problematic and stereotypical. I can’t get four faculty members with the same level of education, same Midwestern roots, same area of study and same views on child rearing to all think the same way about where we should go to lunch half the time, so to assume 76 million people are exactly alike in a pretty problematic way is relatively stupid.
Second, the goal of journalism isn’t a race to the bottom or fighting stupid with stupid. You do things the way you’re brought up to do them, like finding facts, interviewing key sources, telling stories and so forth in this field. Even if you do all that, there will be people who don’t believe you, whether it’s about the Jan. 6 riot or that you know someone who has six toes.
As I used to tell Zoe when some kid was trying to set fire to the McDonald’s Playland or throwing a tantrum in the middle of Walmart, “I’m not that kid’s parent. I’m your parent. This is not how you behave.”
If you signed up to do a job, you do the job the way it needs to be done. As far as journalism is concerned, that’s relying on facts and presenting perspectives. You aren’t a superhero, set out to right wrongs or showcase what you “feel people should think.” Doing that has led to some of the biggest disasters in our field.
Understand your audience and work for those people: If you are working for a traditional media outlet, you will likely have a mix of people who voted in the past election. Those people might consider politics the only thing that matters, or they might be low-involvement voters who have a little more than a passing interest on elections. Some of each may have voted for Trump and Harris for one of a dozen reasons.
To assume that the audience thinks exactly as you do is to doom yourself to failure, so instead of doing that, go actually interact with people in your readership area and figure out what matters most to them.
This can be things that have very little to do with the major elections, or they might be tied directly to them. Where people live, what types of jobs they hold and what challenges they face can be crucial to keeping your eye on the ball when picking stories to write.
For example, the issue of tariffs came up multiple times in the election. The talking heads on various national news programs have come up with a variety of reasons why these are good or bad or whatever. Instead of looking at a large national story, look at things that your local community needs and how specific changes to financial policies have impacted them.
If you are covering a rural community, see how things like the costs of fertilizer, feed, veterinary medication and so forth have changed before, during and after tariffs are imposed. If countries are reciprocating by taxing incoming products, see how the things the farms produce that traditionally get exported are impacted. If all politics is truly local, so is the impact of political decisions.
Beyond that, look at the things that people are actually saying impact their lives and see what can be done about that. Not everything is Watergate, but everything we do can reach people in an important and effective fashion.
I often go back to the story a student wrote for me decades ago at the Columbia Missourian. She found out from a wheelchair user that this person had to ride in the road and risk getting hit by cars because the sidewalks were so lousy. The student wrote the story and caught hell from the city manager, who demanded she retract the story. She kind of freaked out and asked what we should do.
“You hit a nerve,” I told her. “Keep going.”
Later that day, a large group of wheelchair users were gathering for a “Wheelie Rally” in the park to discuss this issue. The student reported on that, further ticking off the city manager. Still, she kept going on this story, covering the events and making people aware of the issue.
About six months later, the city manager stood up at a city council meeting and said he wanted to reopen the budget to deal with the condition of the city’s sidewalks. It was just something he’d been thinking about, he explained, so now seemed like a good time. He never once mentioned the student or her reporting, but every time I saw a chunk of sidewalk being repaired anywhere I went in life, I thought of this kid.
Get reacquainted with the attribution verb “said”: This one is going to be crucial going forward, because we have long seen what happens when the wind changes politically and people have made statements. I think half of the late-night comedy shows after the election were of Republicans denouncing Trump in 2021, juxtaposed with their unwavering support for him now.
I don’t know what Donald Trump (or any other politician for that matter) believes, knows, thinks, assumes, understands or feels. What I do know is that he opens his mouth from time to time and words fall out of it. The word for that is “said” (or says if you’re in broadcast).
Do I know that any of those things will happen? No. Do I know exactly what it means for the future? No. What I do know is that he said them, so I’m going to tell people that and then follow the breadcrumbs along the trail to see where “said” becomes “does” and go from there.
Even if you aren’t directly covering Trump, it bears repeating that people often say one thing and do something different. Report what they say and also what they do and go from there.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the final part of a multi-part series on the decision of the IU Media School to unilaterally converge its student media outlets, the Indiana Daily Student, WIUX and Indiana University Student Television. Part of the plan calls for the elimination of the final print edition of the IDS, something upsetting to the students.
If you want to help the students keep their print paper, they have listed this link as a way to do this: https://forms.gle/cisJyhvAxuQbC4co7.
If you want to tell Dean David Tolchinsky what you think about this situation, you can email him here: mschdean@iu.edu
Dynamics of Writing has obtained this exclusive footage of the IU Media School announcing and attempting to implement its plan to converge student media without consulting the student media outlets.
One of the questions I had for Dean David Tolchinsky involved the mechanism by which the Media School could impose this plan. The radio station and the TV station both have club status at the university, meaning they get housed under a department or college. They can also beholden to whoever holds their FCC license and their status makes them unable to earn revenue in the way a student newspaper can.
In short, someone else holds the leash on these media outlets and the staff knows it.
“They just expect us to change, but none of them are brave enough to be like, ‘You need to have the IDS on your NewsHour,’ or ‘You guys need to do music on the TV station,’ or ‘You need to do this,'” Trevor Emery, the president of WIUX radio, said. “And while they do have a point (that) it is quite wasteful and confusing when everyone has their own equipment and everyone has to move money differently for that, that’s not a problem that we have any control over.”
But does the Media School have control over the fate of the IDS?
“We’ve kind of been wondering that as well,” IDS co-Editor-in-Chief Marissa Meador said in a recent interview. “We aren’t even sure what authority they have to make that decision. Our organization, it has a charter that was developed by the Board of Trustees, and so I could understand the Board of Trustees potentially having the authority to do this, but the media school, I’m not completely sure how that happens… We are asking those questions as well, and haven’t gotten an answer so far.”
Several media reports have referred to the IDS Charter as the controlling document. The charter refers to the board of trustees approving the agreement and the dean of the school appointing the director of student media in consultation with the faculty. Aside from that, it’s difficult to see who is in charge of what outside of the IDS ecosystem.
The IDS doesn’t receive funds from the university. In fact, it is required to pay some sort of financial tithing that a previous president created, so it’s basically paying rent. It pays its full-time professional staff both salary and benefits. (Tolchinsky mentioned something about the Media School chipping in on bennies in one of his letters, but the students assured me that the paper is on the hook for the brunt of the bill.) The IDS also covers student wages, equipment purchases and travel costs.
I could imagine the Media School could claim some sort of investment in the place, having helped clear the $1 million debt the IDS had on the books. As part of an hour-long panel discussion on Indiana Public Media’s Noon Hour, Associate Dean Galen Clavio mentioned that the Media School had taken financial responsibility for the paper’s accounts, although how that all worked was not clearly discussed. That said, that’s not the same as owning a controlling interest in the actions of an organization.
The only real “authority” that is clear from the documents provided here appears to be at the board of trustees level. This is why I asked Tolchinsky for some sort of document or agreement that provided the school with the right to do this. I’d try to make an open records request for whatever they’ve got on this, but given IU’s track record on transparency, I’ll probably be dead and buried before I get something back.
So that leads to the next question: What if the IDS just said “no” to all this?
“We are kind of wondering the same thing,” Meador said. “We’re thinking, you know, what, if we just said no. I don’t know if it’ll come down to this, but we’re even thinking, ‘Is there a way that we can, as students, independently fund-raise or pay with our own money?’ … I think the key thing that they have, the key bargaining chip that they have is that I believe that they have the power to discipline our professional staff members. And our professional staff members are the ones who sell the ads and, you know, handle the print contracts and all those things. So that’s kind of our one concern there.”
SO WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY KNOW?
When I decided to put a week’s worth of blog posts into this, I wasn’t entirely sure what the best answers were, but as I talked to the students and got the runaround from the administration, a lot of things came into focus.
Here are the things I clearly know:
Student media outlets at IU are starving: The radio station, and presumably the TV station, don’t get enough money to fully thrive in the ways they once did. Emery told me his staff doesn’t get paid and that an adviser is getting a tiny stipend to keep everything afloat. When the place went from getting 70 cents per student to zero, it was just a matter of time before the clock ran out on them. During that Noon Hour panel discussion, IUSTV news director Ashton Hackman said the TV station just recently gained space in the media school, operates without professional staff help and generally has to subsist on crumbs. Why this happened is beyond me, but that’s the situation and the center can’t continue to hold.
The IDS still generates money, but it’s unable to continue to spend what it currently spends without some level of assistance from the university. That assistance could come in the form of a student fee, removing some of the red tape that prevents them from tapping other streams of revenue or even allowing work-study money into the newsroom in some way. The April report on the IDS was clear: You can’t keep expecting them to do more with less and it’s not fair to force this place to run at a profit in this current environment.
Print, at this level, still matters: The one-day-per-week model for the IDS makes money, according to the information I was provided. It also connects the IDS to the larger community it serves, provides the community with a signpost to let folks know they’re still working and helps draw eyes to their content. Even more, it teaches students how to design traditional print products and keeps those skills sharp. For all the excitement the Media School seems to be putting forward about retaining special issues in print, it’ll be a pretty ugly set of special issues if the students’ design skills atrophy.
One of the arguments Clavio made about cutting print (aside from cost, which we’ll get to later) was that newspapers keep dying at a pretty steady clip. He cites a Northwestern University study that says these are going away at the rate of about 2.5 per day. True, but that means there are still approximately 6,000 papers out there that need people who can design to spec, write headlines in holes and generally publish something relatively well composed. That doesn’t account for the hundreds of other jobs in which students could bring to bear design skills for printed or print-related items.
Beyond that, it matters to the students right now. They have a connection to this print edition that might not make sense to other people, but it is a motivating and galvanizing factor for this staff. Any alleged financial savings this generates will be dwarfed by the loss in morale this ham-handed approach to killing it has created.
These organizations are extremely incongruent: To say these organizations have little in common is a massive understatement. The IDS is really the news driver here, while the entertainment comes from the radio station in the form of events and on-air music/shows. The TV folks declined to respond to requests for interviews, so it’s unclear to me what they do and the information I got from the folks I did interview was as clear as mud in this regard.
When the positives of the plan were discussed by students, it was primarily Hackman who noted the benefits that would come to his media outlet through this approach. That’s not the same as embracing the new cross-platform, digital-primacy model the Media School is touting.
In a lot of cases, it makes sense to put certain operations together. Most of the convergence efforts I saw were of news-oriented operations, in which all of the participants valued the idea of putting out news content across multiple platforms. This was also helped by the ability for each organization to bring something particularly important to the table that the others were unable to bring. When all of the organizations saw the benefits each other brought to the table, in that shared senses of congruity, things worked out. When they didn’t, it got bad quite quickly.
As I said in an earlier post, this isn’t like putting a bunch of soup cans from three shelves onto one shelf. This is more difficult than that.
This could not have been done in a worse way: People are far more likely to agree to things, and be motivated to participate in them, when given an opportunity to participate and they are treated with respect. In the Self-Determination Theory, autonomy is a primary cog in making people feel like they’re engaged, valued and part of a process.
In one study we did involving SDT, we had people doing a Boggle grid and they were in one of several conditions. In one situation, they were given the ability to pick either a blue, a pink or a yellow grid without seeing what was on the grid. In another, they were told which grid they had to take, also without seeing what was on the grid.
The people in the group that got a choice felt better about the experience, tended to do better in finding words and felt like they would enjoy persisting in the activity, even after they were no longer required to do so.
The kicker? All of the grids were exactly the same. What mattered was the perception of choice and autonomy.
In the radio show, IDS Co-Editor-in-Chief Jacob Spudich made the case that he and his co-EIC were never consulted about the changes, let alone the cut to print, as part of the process. Clavio rather derisively noted that previous IDS students had been part of the plan back in April and that to expect the university to just keep rebooting its plans every time the IDS had leadership turnover was not feasible.
To his point, the original report from April included the names of the co-EICs from the newspaper and, no, you can’t start from scratch each time someone new comes in. However, Spudich’s larger point was that a lot happened between that April report and the one issued in October, none of which involved IDS student input (or input from any other students, it would seem).
Clavio noted that much of the work was done over the summer, when students weren’t present. Back in my student media days, we called this the “Dump the Garbage Time,” as it was a lot easier to do things that might upset students when they aren’t around to make a fuss. I’ve seen people hired and fired, attempts to cut athletic teams and generally unpopular “restructuring” occur during the summer. It’s like going on vacation for a week and finding out your roommate sold all your furniture and redecorated.
Even more, they had TWO MONTHS after school started to call in the students and say, “Here’s what we’re thinking, this is why we’re thinking it and we want to know what you think.” That, of course, is if they actually WANTED input. As co-EIC Marissa Meador noted in an earlier post, the IDS was supposed to find out about all these changes an hour before they went public.
That’s not a good-faith effort and unless Clavio is a total idiot, he knows that to be true.
A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR THE IU MEDIA SCHOOL
I know it’s easy to sit back in Snarkville and lob shots at people who are actually attempting to do something. It’s a lot harder to actually find ways to fix things.
I lack a time machine, so I can’t technically undo this. I also am still stuck on the whole “Can the Media School mandate what the IDS does or not?” aspect of this. Even more, I have no actual authority here whatsoever, which might actually be the exact same level of authority the Media School has, but I’m not going to pretend I have any.
That said, here are a few things I would recommend going forward:
Money comes first: Before you think about engaging in anything you have planned here, get a handle on the money. Whatever requests the Media School needs to make to the university to get funding should be done now. Whatever requests it needs to do to loosen some of the red tape on outside earning potential should be done now. Whatever decisions need to be made to make sure the budgeting works should be made now. Technically, it should have been done well before the plan was released, but, again, I have no time machine.
In short, if the money isn’t in the proper places it needs to be, moving forward makes no sense.
Too often, and believe me I’ve seen this a lot, academics make these broad-based plans or grandiose project outlines with the idea that money somehow will arrive as needed at some time in the future. Promises are vaguely made about “being supportive,” but the admin never locks down specifics, and thus everything ends up falling to pieces rather quickly.
To quote a Jean Shepherd book title: In God we trust, all others must pay cash.
Get hard numbers with in-writing commitments from people authorized to say “yes” or slam the brakes on this whole thing.
Make a hard budget decision at the IDS: This is likely to be as popular as bacon on Good Friday, but I’d recommend a serious look at where most of the money for the IDS goes. I was told that about $300K goes to the professional staff, and that can’t be wiggled. I also know print costs and web costs are pretty well fixed, but likely they represent a small fraction of the budget.
I would imagine a large swath of cash goes to student employees, which is where the cut would need to happen. In listening to Tyler Emery, I heard that IDS students get a certain amount of money per story or per piece they create. I’d cut that, as it’s likely something that would go a goodly way to biting into the budget deficit. I’d also strongly consider where the other editorial salaries are and see if there are ways to cut them down, either by eliminating additional positions (assistant, assistant editors) or by whacking down on the payroll per position.
I hate the idea of students doing work for free and I surely hate the idea of cutting student wages in general. That said, if the IDS wants to make the statement that all sorts of other student newspapers get X, Y or Z from the university, they also have to understand that most of them don’t pay staffers at the lowest levels. In addition, most editorial salaries are more of a gesture of goodwill than they are actual salaries. Based on what I’ve seen at other places, and given what the radio station kids are doing, it is possible to get quality help without having to cough up an inordinate amount of cash for it.
If you can make the budget work that way, it could be a chance to keep the ball in your court moving forward while you figure out other revenue streams to augment your finances.
Leave print alone: I get why the Media School wants to kill the print edition as part of this: It gives them some sort of “convergence cred” by shedding the “old media” as part of what’s going on with this merger. It also has that surface-level look of saving money, as printing a dead-tree edition of a publication always costs more than just sticking stuff online.
One problem is that they’re not really killing print, but rather attempting to cream-skim some special issues while dumping the weekly issue for that “cred” they want. A second problem is that this isn’t really saving money at all, given the way the math works outs.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of this entire argument about the print edition came on Noon Hour. When the hosts asked about the cost vs. revenue associated with the print edition, Clavio did the whole, “That’s almost impossible to quantify” thing, but assured everyone that it was a money pit. Student Media Director Jim Rodenbush didn’t have much in the way of a concrete answer either, keeping his focus elsewhere.
Spudich then said, “Here are the numbers” and laid out what it cost to print (about $60K) and what the revenue associated with print was ($90K). He also explained how he got the numbers and that he checked them with both the IDS and Media School’s finance people.
Clavio then said something to the effect of, “Those numbers are not accurate, based on the data we have.”
Did he present that data? No.
Have they presented that data elsewhere? Not that I can find.
Could he explain it now? “This requires more than a five-minute discussion here,” he said in a tone I’d characterize as part annoyance, part bluster. It kind of felt like this to me.
A lot of what he said on the air fits this same approach of applying vague generalities and deflections to the concrete questions people asked of him.
Even if none of those other concerns about print were taken into account, killing the print edition is doing more harm than good to the overall morale of the IDS.
Call it a mulligan and back off of print.
Less convergence, more JOA: Based on what I’ve been able to ascertain, these three media outlets have almost nothing in common. That might be something that could change, but not here, not now and not with this plan being crammed down everyone’s throat.
In addition, it’s clear there’s a financial imbalance in terms of revenue generation, expenditures and even student pay. These things are likely to cause friction throughout any process to bring everyone together to sing kumbaya in a converged newsroom. Add in the idea that these people have almost nothing in common in terms of background and goals, this forced editorial connection is going to short circuit at best and blow up at worst.
That said, I’d recommend the idea of creating kind of a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) that covers the business ends of these programs. I know our newspapers in Madison had one, in which everything from ads to bills got handled by the Madison Newspapers Incorporated (I’m sure the name has changed over time). Meanwhile, the Cap Times and State Journal newsrooms operated independently and were freely capable of trying to beat the crap out of each other each and every news cycle. A couple times a year, there were joint projects that were based on finance, like a graduation tab that ran in both publications. However, for the most part, the places were left to their own devices.
A JOA would get the finances in order without having to make the more uncomfortable part of convergence work as well at this point, particularly since the pieces, as they stand, don’t fit well.
I somehow doubt any of this will get through to the people in charge, but my hope is that if the staffs at these places see these options, it might give them some ammunition to fight the fight as they see best.
This clip is both an accurate assessment of the IU situation with the exact level of specificity the university seems to be offering as to how this will all work.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third part of a multi-part series on the decision of the IU Media School to unilaterally converge its student media outlets, the Indiana Daily Student, WIUX and Indiana University Student Television. Part of the plan calls for the elimination of the final print edition of the IDS, something upsetting to the students.
If you want to help the students keep their print paper, they have listed this link as a way to do this: https://forms.gle/cisJyhvAxuQbC4co7.
If you want to tell Dean David Tolchinsky what you think about this situation, you can email him here: mschdean@iu.edu
In case you missed them, here are Part I and Part II.)
THE CULTURAL CONCERNS
In looking into the convergence model decades ago, it became readily apparent to me that this wasn’t a situation where technology or news values would be the sticking point. It would be the culture of the newsrooms and the social identity those newsrooms created.
The general gist of all of this comes down to the idea that you can’t just pour a bunch of people together into a media operation and assume this is going to work. In fact, the opposite is true, as we reaffirmed more than a decade after that first look. A few things have to happen if this kind of convergence is to work:
It has to be a self-directed, organic movement.The few operations on the student level that have worked out tend to be those in which the staffs themselves decide this is a good idea and want to participate. Outside influence and demand tends to dramatically undermine convergent operations.
There must be a heavy investment in new resources. One of the easiest ways to get kids to play together is to give everybody new, cool toys. That works for my 3-year-old nieces and it works for most corporate organizations. If you come to the party feeling like you have “your toys” and that people want to take them from you, things are going to get ugly. Even more, in a situation in which resources are limited, groups tend to hoard things for themselves, even when a more equitable distribution might benefit the greater whole. Although university officials insist there will be investment in additional professional help, most of this is aimed at adding master’s students with professional backgrounds to the mix. As both a former grad student and someone working through a project that involves the use of grad-student labor, I can assure you it isn’t the same thing as dedicated, trained professional staff.
The groups must have the appropriate shared goals and vision. One of the primary reasons early convergence operations hit some significant rough patches was that the newsrooms tended to have mutually exclusive goals. In the world of journalism, being first (a.k.a. getting the scoop on the competition) is a primary goal.
At the time, television had the advantage of going live first, so when newspaper people found out something of value, they tended to keep it quiet so they could publish it in print the next day. Instead of seeing the goal of getting information out to the audience in a timely fashion, regardless of platform, it became, “I want to be first.” This was a microcosm of what tended to go wrong due to a lack of shared goals and vision.
People must value and appreciate the importance each group brings to the collective. The best way I have found to describe how this works is like this: I, as a writer, don’t have to do what you, a videojournalist, does to make this operation work. I do have to understand what you do, appreciate what it brings to the table and find ways to augment what you do in a meaningful way.
This last one might be one of the biggest sticking points for this IU effort, based on how the students explained their own operations and those of their potential convergence-mates.
WIUX President Trevor Emery said that the media operations tend to remain siloed and that they don’t have any sense of what each of them could do for the other.
“Us and the newspaper, don’t talk about it. Us and the TV station don’t really talk about it,” Emery said. “These guys are kind of on their own game, creatively, for sure, like we are. I’m gonna be completely honest. We’re primarily music station and that is our main focus. And the newspaper mainly does news. Their arts column is kind of piddly, and the TV station is, I don’t know, they do like everything. I’m not super familiar with them… sometimes (The IDS will) interview an artist that we booked or something, but other than like news and sports, there’s not a whole lot of crossover that’s possible because we mainly do music and entertainment.”
IDS co-Editor-in-Chief Marissa Meador said she had brief contact with members of the radio station and the TV station after the announcement broke. Although she hasn’t had a lot of interaction with the broadcasters, she said what she does know doesn’t fit the model established at the IDS.
“From what I’ve heard, I feel like WIUX, the radio station, is kind of fundamentally different,” she said. “They put on a music festival, and a lot of their people are just interested in music. They aren’t journalism majors at all, and so the idea that they’re now supposed to be generating a profit or generating revenue and selling advertisements? From what I’ve heard from the few representatives I’ve spoken to, they aren’t super excited about that idea.”
In terms of convergence efforts, Emery said the specifics have been horribly lacking.
“They really want us to combine all the podcasts,” he said. “They want us to be on an app together. It’s very, very confusing, and they’re kind of like, “You guys are going to be steering the ship for this thing you don’t want to do, but we’re also not going to fully support anything you’re doing, either. It’s very confusing.”
The student leader of IU Student Television did not respond to interview requests for this piece, so it’s unclear how engaged or enthusiastic the staff there feels about this situation. As part of an hour-long talk show on IPM’s Noon Edition, IUSTV news director Ashton Hackman spoke in favor of the plan, in large part because of the resources the TV station would be getting.
Hackman said the station has often operated in an inequitable position, only in recent years getting studio space in the Media School and having no professional staff to help them. Although Hackman praised the plan, he rarely mentioned the editorial convergence opportunities the school has been pitching and mostly focused on the benefits the TV station would obtain in this model.
Meador said earlier that she could understand why some aspects of this plan look great for IUSTV.
“I think that they’re, at least publicly, their organization is taking a positive position,” she said. “They seem to be publicly very supportive and celebrating this decision, which, to an extent, I think makes a lot of sense. They started with no professional staff members, and now we’re going to share the professional staff members’ work and time among all three organizations… I do see how this would be a step in the right direction for them.”
Speaking of people who see this as a step in the right direction…
THE UNIVERSITY SPEAKS (SORT OF)
IU Media School Dean David Tolchinsky seemed extremely happy and excited to announce this master plan to converge the student media outlets when he put out this press release.
“Successful media organizations are not afraid to reinvent themselves, and we have big dreams for student media at IU,” said Media School Dean David Tolchinsky. “We are proud of our tradition of excellence in student media. Through innovation, we will amplify the storytelling our students already do so well by reaching audiences where they consume content and generating revenue to support the organizations, enabling them to become the best learning labs they can be.”
In spite of student disagreement, Tolchinsky doubled down in a letter to the editor of the IDS, as he gave the “rah-rah” speech to end all such speeches:
We acknowledge the loss the IDS community feels for its weekly print edition. “Journalist” is not just a job; it’s an identity.
We hear you: Why can’t IU just give student media more money? Actually, that would be a lot easier than what we’re doing. But subsidizing a business model on campus that does not reflect the ecosystem off campus won’t adequately prepare students for the career landscape they’re entering.
Remember those vanishing newsrooms? Someone has to do something about those. And our goal is to turn out creative and bold graduates equipped to solve that problem — and many more.
You can do this. WE can do this. The Media School will always support student media.
The letter says, “‘Friday Night Lights’ with Coach Taylor telling us, ‘Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.'” The photo says, “Joe Pantoliano’s character, Cypher, in ‘The Matrix.'” Y’know, the guy who sold out the whole crew.
Given all that, I figured he’s be more than happy to answer a few questions, so I offered him a phone interview, but included a half-dozen questions in case he or his associate deans were too busy to chat.
The response was underwhelming:
Thank you for your interest. I’m going to primarily refer you to the web story, FAQs, and plan on our website, and will add that our ad hoc committee that presented the recommendations this plan draws from included representatives from the IDS, WIUX, and IUSTV. Many operational details, such as the questions you raise in #6, remain to be decided under the purview of Director of Student Media Jim Rodenbush.
I did reach out to Jim Rodenbush, whom I’ve known for a number of years through various student media organizations. He’s a good guy, a strong free-press advocate and really invested in the IDS newsroom. That said, I didn’t get much from him either. He politely declined to talk about this, noting that they were “working through the process” and that the details “would come into focus over time.”
It felt like this in some ways:
I don’t blame him for not talking, because a) if he really loved the thing and told me, the newsroom kids would probably consider him a heretic or b) if he really hated the thing and told me, he’d be going directly against his boss without the protections of tenure or a guaranteed job.
What I didn’t account for was c), which emerged when Rodenbush asked a question of his fellow media advisers on a group’s listserv, explaining that his dean had asked him to draft a confidentialy agreement for the two of them:
Quick background: The recent announcement by the Media School was leaked in advance to the IDS, and my Dean is largely trying to avoid this sort of thing from happening again. I wasn’t the person who leaked the announcement, but here were are regardless. All that said… Are any of you aware of similar agreements existing at any other university between a Dean and Student Media director? Are any of your part of such an agreement? If so, could I see the language? Overall, is there anything I should be concerned about?
So let’s see if I have this right: The dean is so excited about this whole convergence thing that he’s basically declined to comment to a blogger about it and then the guy he has charged with commenting on behalf of the entire process is now being asked to sign a confidentiality agreement?
I wonder what background and relevant experience gave him the idea this was smart…
THE IMDB DEAN
According to the bio on the Media School website, Tolchinsky is pretty impressive: Degrees from Yale and USC, former position at Northwestern University and a content-creation background.
He also has a wicked IMDB.com page, as the entirety of his career prior to landing the dean gig at IU has been linked to cinema. That might be great for some things, but not when it comes to understanding how student newspapers, radio stations and television stations work.
I don’t think Tolchinsky needed to be long-time journalist, a war correspondent or even a local newspaper publisher to understand that this entire approach was bass-ackwards. Any degree in a news-related field would have told him that you can’t hide stuff from journalists, and that journalism folks tend not to like being pushed around by “the man.” In addition, all research related to newsroom culture found that a) it exists and b) it persists beyond any one individual or group. In short, things don’t just change in a newsroom because you want them to.
A degree in public relations would have helped him see that you can’t just Jedi-mind-trick everyone into thinking the way you do by issuing a few blanket statements and then hiding under the bed when people come to ask real questions. You also can’t tell someone they need to be “confidential” and then have them speak on your behalf. (That’s especially true if you want them to be believable.)
In this field, you can’t just call for a script doctor or some CGI to bail you out when things aren’t to your liking.
