Interviewing

Couldn’t have said it better myself: How a great quote can grab your readers by the eyes

Direct quotes are an important part of journalistic storytelling. They allow the sources to speak directly to the readers in the sources’ own words, providing both information and a “feel” for the topic with the choice of their vocabulary.

Unfortunately, some journalists view quotes as just “meat” between the slices of bread that are “paraphrase” in their stories, and the writers care very little about the quality of that meat. Just because someone said something, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a good quote. It’s our job to separate the trash from the treasures when it comes to that word-for-word component of our stories.

When you get great quotes, they can really grab your reader’s attention as they just nail the underlying concept of a story in a way that few other things can. Here is a series of quotes that fit the bill and that make reading the whole piece worthwhile:

 

“Showing up to a school with zip ties is not a way to solve a problem.”
-Vail Unified School District Superintendent John Carruth

The story behind this one comes from a story about the “mask battles” we have seen during the pandemic. An Arizona man was contacted by a school employee and told his son had to quarantine at home after being in close contact with a person infected with the coronavirus.

Instead, the father and two “other men” (the words “dudes,” “buddies,” and “idgits” would seem to be more on point here, but then again this is Washington Post) went to the kid’s school to demand the kid be taken back:

“Apparently Mesquite Elementary thinks they can break the law and act like the covid Gestapo,” the man wrote, referencing Nazi Germany’s secret police. “We will be headed over there shortly to disagree. Come join us because we won’t have this in OUR community!”

Later that morning, the father and his son arrived at the school. The other two men met them in the school’s parking lot, Carruth said.

In a live video posted to Instagram, one of the two men who joined the dad told his followers that they were about to “confront this administration” for “breaking the law.

“If necessary, we’ll do a citizen’s arrest,” the man said before showing off the “law enforcement zip ties” they brought.

So these three yahoos end up in Principal Dianne Vargo’s office, threatening her with arrest if she didn’t let the kid back in school. The whole thing escalated until Vargo left the office and called the police. The men, who moments earlier were so certain of the legality of their actions, left before the cops showed up.

In reviewing the incident for the Post, Carruth mentioned the need to model good behavior for kids and such, before delivering a great closing quote.

 

“I’m like Gerard Butler in ‘300.’ I’m in the hot gates at Thermopylae, holding the pass against the million-man Persian army.”
-Lawyer John Pierce

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj11Pj2T7Bw

Quick question: He does know that Leonidas ended up with about 1,085 arrows through him at the end of that movie, right?

Pierce is the now-missing attorney for defendants associated with the Washington, D.C., riot on Jan. 6. Aside from his comparison to the leader of the Spartan resistance, he has offered up some insight as to how he planned to get his clients off:

A self-described pro-Trump populist, Mr. Pierce has promised, for example, to force the government to give him video footage of the Capitol for several days before and after Jan. 6, and has said he will demand information about every police officer working at the building that day. He has also vowed to subpoena hostile witnesses like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ostensibly to learn what she may have known about security at the Capitol before the attack.

Without citing evidence, Mr. Pierce has said he intends to implicate the F.B.I. and the intelligence community by showing that the riot was something like a grand act of entrapment or an inside job. He has often talked about his cases with a conspiratorial zeal, painting himself as something like a lonely legal warrior out to save his clients from an overreaching government.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HVejEB5uVk

All of the words the New York Times puts together to explain and describe this guy don’t do half as good of a job as Pierce’s own quote does.

 

“The defendant stated he was trying to show off for his date. The female said she was screaming at him to stop, but he refused. This was their first date.”
– Police Report, Clearwater, Florida

Some of the greatest quotes ever come from police officers trying to explain something completely insane in a report that requires them to be clear, concise and even-handed in the description. (My personal favorite was a road rage incident in which the combatants “exchanged hand gestures,” according to the report.)

In this case, a 22-year-old man apparently eyed up a cop at a stoplight and then decided to lead the officer on a high-speed chase. The reason? He wanted to impress the woman riding on the motorcycle with him:

Police temporarily broke off the chase while Beverly darted through traffic, running multiple additional red lights and traveling “at well over 100 [miles per hour].” They were able to apprehend him at an intersection minutes later. Court records indicate that Beverly also refused to slow down as his date was “screaming at him to stop.”

The article did not note if the couple had planned a second date…

 

“Mr. Lee was incredibly stupid, felony stupid but, I think given the situation and the fact that he has absolutely no record I am going to listen to pretrial services.”
– Arizona Judge Rosemary Panuco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yScR9ngQLyI

(“My client’s a moron. That’s not against the law…”)

Judges operate under what is called “absolute privilege,” which means they can say stuff the rest of us would really like to but can’t for fear of being sued. Thus, they tend to have some of the best quotes when it comes to summing up situations like this one:

Tucson police released surveillance video from a Suntran bus showing Zachary Lee just before he got off the bus and approached the police officer last Friday at 29th and Swan.

The video showed the sergeant’s vehicle parked.

The risk assessment form read, “According to the arresting agency, the defendant got into a verbal exchange with a Tucson Police Department Sergeant, who was conducting unrelated surveillance in an unmarked car.”

Mike Storie represents the Tucson Police Officer’s Association of which the sergeant is a member. He said the assessment is incorrect.

“Actually, there were no words exchanged. The sergeant was in a vehicle with the windows rolled up and never spoke to this person,” Storie said.

The video showed Lee using hand gestures. Storie said lee was throwing gang signs, shortly after that he added Lee began firing at the officer. Tucson police said they found a gun on Lee when he was arrested, and casings at the scene that matched the gun.

The judge in this case released Lee prior to the trial without requiring him to post bail, something that drew the ire of the prosecutor and the police. To explain her rationale as to why a man accused of trying to kill a cop could go home for the day, she relied on a pretrial report and a sense of the man’s own stupidity.

I don’t know what kind of judge she is, but I would love to interview her if these are the kinds of quotes she comes up with.

“Don’t Take No From Someone Who Isn’t Empowered To Say Yes”

My friend Allison used the quote in the headline this weekend when we were teaching her daughter/my goddaughter how to negotiate for better prices at a flea market in South Haven, Michigan. It turned out to be a golden bit of advice she learned from Peter Greenberg, a Emmy-award-winning journalist who was talking to the students at our old college newspaper.

Here’s the story as relayed by Allison (Greenberg himself recalled this story during a guest appearance on the “Destination Everywhere” Podcast):

Greenberg was explaining how to get an important story and how to persist when people didn’t want to be helpful.

He wanted access to a nuclear attack sub as part of a story he was working on. This was in the late 1980s when this was happening, which happened to be when we were still in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, so letting a journalist wander around a nuclear sub was laughable at best.

Greenberg kept poking at Naval officials for access, each one basically telling him, “There is no way this is happening.” At one point he asked, “OK, if this COULD be done, who would be the one person who could allow it to happen?” It turned out to be the commander-in-chief in the Pacific, stationed in Pearl Harbor.

Greenberg got the Navy to agree to give him the meeting, which was supposed to be kind of a 10-minute, “we had a meeting” meeting. Instead, Greenberg noticed a photo of a ship on the admiral’s wall and Greenberg knew a lot about that particular ship. Instead of talking about sub access, they started talking about the boat. By the time the 10 minutes had ended, the admiral invited Greenberg to lunch and eventually granted him the permission he sought.

“Don’t take ‘No’ from someone who isn’t empowered to say ‘Yes,'” he told the group.

At the heart of his story were three key things that can be helpful to you as a journalist:

TAKE A SHOT: When Greenberg kept hearing “no,” he asked for a meeting that the people essentially told him wasn’t going to lead anywhere. In the podcast mentioned earlier in this post, Greenberg said the people setting up the meeting for him basically asked him why he’d want to fly all the way to Pearl Harbor just to hear “no” from one more person. He figured he had nothing at this point, so he might as well take a shot in person with the one person who could get him what he needed. What was the worst thing that could happen? He might have no story and a case of jet lag and that’s about it.

If the story is important enough to you, you need to take a shot at it before deciding it’s not going to happen. You never know what you might get if you give up before you give it a chance to succeed.

FIND COMMON GROUND: The thing that made this work was a bit of serendipity. If the admiral had a picture of a sunset, a poster of Porsche or a velvet Elvis on his wall, Greenberg might have not found his in. However, as he explained in the podcast, he realized he needed a connection and he found it:

They gave me a ten-minute appointment at 9:00 in the morning on a Monday. I flew up on a Saturday. I walked in to see him. He could care less about me. I was told to have a meeting. He didn’t want to be there. It was an office the size of Grand Central Station. Everybody was in their dress whites. They didn’t want me to be there. It was like a courtesy call, give him a commemorative coin and get him out.

This is the difference. You seek out common ground and I knew that I had maybe fifteen seconds to figure out what the common ground was. I got lucky because behind his desk was a photograph of a boat and it turned out I knew the boat well.

I said to him, “Is that a Bertram 31?” He said, “Damn straight.” I said, “That’s the best boat they ever built.” He said, “You’re not kidding?” I said, “Let me guess. When you make a hard right turn, the engine cavitates and the water pump overflows?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Here’s how you fix it. You’re going to do a bypass on the impeller.”

We start talking like that and ten minutes later, the officer is going to say, “Admiral, your time is up.” He looked at me and said, “Do you got lunch plans?” I said, “I’m all yours.”

<SNIP>

That’s called chutzpah and luck.

If I’d walked into his office for that ten-minute meeting, he’s like, “Can I go on a sub?” “Get the hell out of here.”

You want to look for ways to connect with a source during an interview. That’s why doing it in person is often so valuable. You can look around and see things that they have around them to help you size up your subject. Starting with a discussion about a picture or a plaque or even a baseball card they have on display can get you an “in” that makes them see you as a kindred spirit as opposed to a pain the butt.

GO TO WHO CAN SAY YES: I think I’m going to use that quote with every interviewing class for as long as I live now, in that it perfectly captures what we should be doing when it comes to getting key information.

“Don’t take ‘No’ from someone who isn’t empowered to say ‘Yes'” is simple, direct and yet amazingly mind-blowing, as it dawns on me that I’ve probably failed in this regard myriad times in my journalism career and my daily life.

When you want permission for something, you need to go to the person who can grant it. Unfortunately, there are often underlings, minions and other pencil-pushers who get put in your path and try to dissuade you from getting that permission. If it’s important enough for you to pursue that permission, get past those people and go find the person who is empowered to grant it.

Like many things, this can be taken too far or in the wrong way. I am in no way saying you should become the snotty person who is holding up the line at the store, loudly proclaiming, “I need to speak to your manager!” because the bananas are ringing up at 39 cents per pound when the sign clearly said 36 cents per pound. However, I am saying most folks take the first “no” as a reason to give up far too easily.

Find the person empowered to say yes and see what that person says. If it’s still “no” at least you’ll know that nobody else is getting your story. If it’s “yes,” you got what you came here to get.

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

TeachingVest

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

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

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

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

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

“Wear Kevlar.”

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Vince,

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<SNIP>

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accuracy vs. Honesty: A look at the New York Times correction on “Women for Trump”

The difference between  honesty (or truthfulness, if you’d rather) and accuracy can come down to the answers to this question:

“Do you know what time it is?”

Answer A: “It’s 7:30 a.m.”

Answer B: “Yes.”

The first answer is more honest and helpful while the second is simply accurate. This scenario is one that lawyers in TV shows use to explain how defendants should testify to keep themselves out of trouble: Answer the question, but volunteer nothing more. This kind of demarcation in the answers led to a correction on a New York Times story about “Women who still back Trump” late last week:

(h/t Diego Aparicio for the correction and the info.)

You can skip past the bottom two points, as they’re clearly just dumb mistakes that should not have gotten past a rookie reporter for the Beaverton Shopper-Ledger, let alone a political reporter for the country’s “paper of record.” The first two concerns have led to questions regarding the way in which the Times approached its story.

Dan Froomkin of Salon noted that this wasn’t the first time the Times had quoted Republican movers and shakers as just regular folks in one of its stories. Froomkin’s position is that this approach wasn’t accidental:

The New York Times has been caught, once again, passing off Republican operatives as “regular” Republican voters in an article intended to show how effectively Donald Trump is maintaining his support.

It raises serious questions about whether Times editors and reporters, rather than actually trying to determine how voters feel, are setting out to find people to mouth the words they need for predetermined story lines that, not coincidentally, echo the Trump campaign’s propaganda.

In the latest case, an article posted on Wednesday headlined “Around Atlanta, Many White Suburbanites Are Sticking With Trump” by Times national reporter Elaina Plott initially misidentified two of the four allegedly run-of-the-mill voters who supported the article’s thesis: That Trump’s unfounded fear-mongering along the lines that “ANTIFA THUGS WILL RUIN THE SUBURBS!” is working.

The problem with that thesis is that there ARE actually women who support Donald Trump’s run for the presidency. And to be fair to Elaina Plott, she DID actually find a few that apparently weren’t running the Republican Party of Greater Atlanta or whatever, like this woman:

Mr. Biden has said that he has no desire to defund the police, and Amanda Newman acknowledges that. But Ms. Newman, 51, who lives in the suburbs and works at a law firm in midtown Atlanta, also thinks Mr. Biden’s personal views are irrelevant — that a vote for Mr. Biden is in fact a vote for his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, as well as for progressives in the Democratic Party like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have pushed for policies like the Green New Deal. “I don’t think Joe Biden has an opinion until somebody tells him what it is,” she said.

Ms. Newman said she’s been put off by Mr. Trump at multiple moments in the past four years, calling him at times “unpresidential” and comparing him to “a 2-year-old pitching a fit in a candy store.” But she said she feared how “radical” and “crazy” the Democrats had become.

And this one…

“It’s been very unnerving,” said Lori Mullee, 54, referring not to police brutality or Mr. Arbery’s death but the “riots in my backyard.” Ms. Mullee, a University of Georgia graduate, works in marketing and lives in Stone Mountain, a small city in the Atlanta suburbs that in August was essentially put on lockdown as white supremacist groups and far-left counterprotesters clashed at the city’s Confederate monument.

Ms. Mullee said she used to exercise in the state park surrounding the monument, but no longer feels comfortable doing so. (As for the monument itself, she said she did not support efforts to “take down history.”) She is voting for Mr. Trump in part, she said, because she feels the left has stoked division in cities like hers and beyond.

Also, if you take a look at any Trump rally, you do see women, as well as a spectrum of people from other groups that you wouldn’t necessarily consider the hard-core, stereotypical angry, straight, white male Trump supporter. A story that looked into why these folks are supporting this guy would seem to be in the wheelhouse of a political reporter for a major media outlet.

In short, if I had to put money on what happened here, I’d be more on the “We screwed up” end of this as opposed to the “nefarious plot to parrot deeply entrenched Republicans to further their agenda” end of it.

In acknowledging biases, I suppose it would be important to acknowledge my own: I’ve had to cover random weird-ass events that required me to go find “regular people” who were willing to talk to me. That part of the job absolutely sucked, as people who were at Fourth of July parades or county fairs seemed to view me as a KGB operative or worse. As we mentioned in previous posts, some reporters have even faked the “real people” to get out of the drudgery of this part of the job.

Me? I would try to find the people who looked like the most obvious candidates to talk and get what I could get out of them. For example, I once covered the final day of operation for the Lake Delton dog-racing track. I needed to find people who worked there and bet on dogs for this “color” piece. The workers were easy, as I knew a couple people in advance from a previous story, who helped me find others as well.

In terms of “regular people,” I started looking around and found the journalistic equivalent of fast food. This guy was a mountain of a man, probably at least 6-foot-5 with a barrel-shaped body. He had on a really loud shirt and a hat that said something about dog racing. He also wore a license plate on a string around his neck. The plate read: “I BET K9S.”

He was talking to people making bets, roaring with laughter and drinking a beer. That might have been the easiest “real person” interview I ever conducted.

Did I think he might be an investor in the dog track or somehow tied to a larger representative collective that might undermine his credibility as a regular guy? No.

Did I consider that he was a white man, likely straight, and might not be representative of a broader spectrum of potential sources? No.

Did I ask the guy a dozen questions about himself like I was doing an “OK Cupid” profile on him to make sure I hadn’t missed any entangling alliances he might have? No.

I was just grateful to have a human source that said something quote-worthy.

Granted, this was in the time before everyone had the internet and we had a cottage industry of people digging into the work of other people for sport. However, I would be willing to bet I’m not alone in the, “OK, thank God I got that done” vein of journalism that likely exists still today.

I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that I’ve use the “B” answer a few times to keep conversations friendly. A lot of my neighbors in various stops were quite conservative and didn’t think highly of commie, liberal, pinko professors who were in their ivory towers at whatever university was in town. When we moved into a given neighborhood, they’d often see me working on my car or doing yard work and stop by to say hello.

When they asked me what I did, I’d respond with, “I work at the U.”

It was accurate, but the truth was, I had hoped they assumed I was a janitor or something. If they got to know me and liked me, I figured the topic would come up in a future conversation and my “professoring” would be unveiled.

In the end, there are limits to what you can do as a journalist when it comes to this stuff. Your hope always is that people will be honest and truthful. It would have been great if the person had said, “I’m involved in politics in XYZ ways,” so the reporter had a fuller version of reality. However, she wasn’t lying to the reporter when she said she was an interior decorator or a graduate from the University of Georgia, so she was accurate.

I’m sure I could turn this into a cautionary tale on how to avoid this problem in the first place, but it seems to be like trying to take out a fly with a rocket launcher. I would wager that, at best, there are three things I could tell you that you probably already know if you’ve read the blog and/or stayed alive during any journalism writing class:

The other two stupid mistakes we skipped past earlier would indicate that the reporter was sloppy, so… y’know… don’t be sloppy in your reporting.

The fact other people were able to figure out who these people were in about six seconds on Google tells us… Do a quick Google search of sources before putting them in your story… I guess?

The correction set the record straight, so when you do screw up, make sure you own it. So there’s that…

 

3 things Jonathan Swan did in his interview with President Trump that you can do as a student journalist (and that, quite frankly, aren’t that hard)

An interview between Axios’ Jonathan Swan and President Donald Trump is being heralded throughout the media world these days as a beacon of amazing journalism. When you add in the viral spread of certain clips of the interview, the attention it’s gotten on late-night talk shows and the memes it has inspired, you would tend to think Swan got Trump to admit to blowing up the Hindenburg while choking out Jeffrey Epstein after planting blood in O.J. Simpson’s Ford Bronco.

The truth of the matter is that it was a great interview compared to what we normally see in interactions between the media and Trump, but it wasn’t the second coming of Christ, either. It is also true that Swan is a heck of a good reporter and journalist, although I’m not buying his claim of longevity at Axios, per his LinkedIn page. (He hasn’t worked for Axios for 110 years, but I bet covering the Trump campaign and presidency has made him feel like he aged that much…)

However, Swan’s efforts here come down to three simple things that you can do as a newer journalist that will improve your interviewing in some pretty major ways.

KNOW THE TOPICS WELL: One of the clearest things that comes through in this interview is that Swan came loaded for bear. He knew the topics he wished to discuss with the president better than the president did. He had data with citations that supported his questions. He pinpointed specific concerns he had with the president’s answers and as well as Trump’s approach to the topics.

In one key exchange, Swan is talking about the people who were dying of the coronavirus and Trump responded by telling him how the U.S. was better than “the world and we’re lower than Europe.” Trump then provided a chart to support his claims.

A lesser journalist would have folded under this response, figuring the president had data that refuted his claims. Swan quickly examined the chart, knew what was involved and pointed out how that chart wasn’t relevant to the question.

Swan: “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany et cetra.”

Trump: “Wha… You can’t do that!”

Swan: “Why can’t I do that?”

Trump then fumbles around with other charts and sputters a bit without ever really answering either question. (“How is it that we’re so far behind everyone else when it comes to keeping people from dying?” and “Why can’t Swan use the data in this way?”)

Swan did things like this repeatedly because he could. He knew the material, the data and the approaches that Trump was taking to the questions (and why those were irrelevant, immaterial or just plain wrong). Swan KNEW things because he had worked on knowing more than anyone else when he went into that interview and what probable counterpunches the president would throw. From the first question to the last, Swan was just better prepared.

PLAY THE PERSON: One of the better binge-worthy shows I picked up really late in its run was the TV drama-dy “Suits.” The key attorney in the show is Harvey Specter, the slick, know-it-all, closer of closers. He always manages to win the hand, get the girl and save the day with the dashing flourish of Sean Connery’s version of James Bond and the “I TOLD YOU” self-confidence of his hero, Muhammad Ali. One of his favorite explanations as to why he always wins is this: “I don’t play the odds. I play the man.”

Here’s Example 101 of this:

 

At one point in the interview, Swan notes that he has covered Trump for more than five years in his capacity as a political figure. That level of intimate knowledge about Trump gave him a decided advantage in his approach to the interview. He knew how Trump would approach the topics. He knew that he couldn’t sit back and wait for the president to finish talking before asking another question. He knew that he had to challenge key points at the time in which Trump made them, or he’d be overwhelmed by the sea of word salad that the president was pouring forth.

You might not have five years to figure out what makes each one of your sources tick, but you can make sure you don’t go into an interview uninformed in this regard. A good interviewer is not only familiar with the topics and questions that will be involved in the discussion, but also the person with whom the interview will be conducted.

For example, we have talked about how silence can be an ally in some interviews. When someone drops a weak answer on you, you can sit there silently and force them to fill the awkward silence with some improved elaboration. Swan knew that Trump would never stop talking, nor would he need any prompting to elaborate on a topic. He also knew that the elaboration was likely to be filled with what could generously be called vague statements and ego-driven puffery.

Swan steps in at key moments and breaks through to force clarification on specific issues. In discussing the coronavirus outbreak, the president says that “some people say you can test too much.” Swan immediately comes in with the question of “Who says that?” Instead of giving names, Trump tells Swan to “read the manuals, read the books.” Swan then comes back in with “What manuals?” This gets no real response, as it’s pretty clear that Chilton doesn’t have a guide for how to know if you’re testing too much.

He pushes aside the puffery in simple ways. When Trump is flustered regarding a question, he pivots to talking about all the other great things he has done as president, both real and imagined. Swan interjects by telling him that he’s not debating those points and he has given Trump credit for those things, but they have nothing to do with the issue at question. He then digs back into the question.

Other journalists who have interviewed Trump over the last five years have failed to do these kinds of things because they haven’t understood Trump as well as Swan has. Swan knows the plays the offense is running on Trump’s team, so he’s building a defense meant to stop them and put his team in a better position to have a competitive advantage.

When you interview someone for the first time, ask other journalists you know as much as you can about that person and how that person reacts. Read anything you can find about this person to see how he or she deals with the media or certain topics. If previous video interview exist, watch them and look for patterns and themes in their approach to content and the interviewer.

If you know the person you are going to interview well enough, you will know how to conduct the interview in an effective way. You will know if you have to push harder to get better answers or if pushing harder will make your subject clam up. You will know if you should toss a question out and let the source roll or if you need to grab the interview by the scruff and keep pulling it back to where it needs to go.

Don’t just play the interview. Play the person.

GET IN THE CORNER AND FIGHT FOR THE PUCK: An old-time hockey journalist who covered games back during the times in which the NHL only had six teams and nobody wore a helmet explained the difference between run-of-the-mill scorers and the great Gordie Howe:

“A lot of those goal scorers would watch the puck go into the corner and watch everyone fight and claw for it. Once it came out, they went and got it and then they scored. Gordie would go into the corner and get the puck. THEN, he would score on you.”

The point is, if something’s worth anything, it’s worth fighting for it.

A number of critics noted that Swan could be more combative in his approach to the interview because he didn’t have to risk anything in the long term. Other reporters who cover the White House or other networks that rely on access to keep the grist mill rolling don’t want to upset Trump, lest they lose their ability to suckle at the administrative news teat.

CNN and FOX and MSNBC and others seem to have an implicit arrangement those in power in Washington, D.C.: We treat you nicely and you treat us nicely. You give us access, and we tell people what you let us see. It’s a simple symbiotic relationship that works well and there’s no need to upset the apple cart. Swan is part of that “outsider” fringe that doesn’t have to do the daily grind, so he can do things like this without paying a penalty.

If you are a reporter making that argument, find another job.

Swan didn’t go in there to piss anyone off. He didn’t come in like Sean Hannity interviewing a hippie selling homemade anti-Trump soap at a farmer’s market with the proceeds going to benefit Antifa. He came in there as a person who wanted answers that would matter to his audience.

He starts the way anyone should when an interview begins. He was decent, polite and clear. Eventually, the puck went into the corner, and Trump started throwing elbows in there, trying to win the fight.

Journalists tend to go to the opposite extremes when this kind of thing happens: They back off and let the person swinging elbows have a wide berth or they start swinging back, which leads to the whole thing devolving into a fist-fight.

Instead, Swan scrapped back in an effective, goal-oriented approach. The more the president started swinging wildly, the more Swan focused on the puck. He understood why he was there and where the value was. If he wins a fight, who cares? If he gets the puck, he has a chance to score.

In short, non-hockey parlance, when an interview starts getting a little rough, remember why you’re there in the first place and stay focused on that goal. Don’t back off or overreact out of instinct. Keep your eye on the prize and push forward.

 

Welcome to the field of journalism: Pen? Check. Recorder? Check. Bulletproof vest?

As I was working on book chapters Sunday and planning our move to a new house, a Facebook message from a former student brought me back to reality:

“Did you ever get around to putting that vest in the mail?”

Almost two years ago, I borrowed a bulletproof vest from him so that I could work on my First-Person Target series. I wore the vest everywhere for a week and then did some interviewing to help me understand the issues of guns, safety and fear in this country. I used the vest in November 2018, but I didn’t finish the series until January 2019. I hung onto it in case I needed a sequel or a follow-up piece.

Like the absent-minded professor I am, I eventually boxed it up, addressed it and managed to forget it in the basement for another year. He should get it back, no doubt, but I wondered why he thought about it on that given day. Was he OK?

“I’m doing fine, not covering riots…yet. I was thinking about it and watching the world burn last night and realized I had no idea where it was. But as long as you’re safe and don’t need it, that would be great.”

He lives in Florida, more than 1,500 miles from the rioting’s flashpoint of Minnesota, but the riots aren’t just in the Land of 10,000 Lakes (and for good reason). George Floyd died Monday in Minneapolis while police arrested him on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 to buy cigarettes. A video of the arrest shows a police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck, as Floyd pleads with him for minute after minute to let him breathe. Bystanders begged officer Derek Chauvin to stop as well. Instead, he continued his assault on Floyd. He has since been fired and charged with murder.

I don’t know if my former student will need to cover these spasms of violence, but I do worry his safety and that of so many others in the field who need to ply their trade during this unfathomable time in history.

Safety has always been a watchword within journalism, even as we learn how to go against our natural instincts when it comes to fear and security. Like many folks in other fields, we have to learn how to run TOWARD danger instead of running away from it. We need to learn how to see a house fire and think, “That looks dangerous. I need to go over there.” We develop a sense that says, “People are shooting at each other on Smith Street. I need to get out there.” The goal for good journalists isn’t gold and glory (clearly not the case, if you’ve been following the cuts, furloughs and bloodletting in the field these days).

The goal is to help the readers and viewers experience real life as it is unfolding, regardless of if that reality is safe or not.

I usually like to start each academic term on the blog with something inspirational, but it’s not easy to do that today. The people in our field are covering pandemics from their own homes. They are covering protesters who are begging… literally begging… for some level of accountability that will make it a little less likely that black people will be killed for the “crime” of being black.  They are covering violent clashes between rioters and police, often getting caught in the crossfire for their trouble.

CNN reporter Omar Jimenez was covering the events in Minnesota with a camera crew on Friday. He showed the police his press pass. He had a microphone and a camera that probably cost more than my first car, so there was no “confusion” over who he was and that he was a national reporter.

He was standing where police told him to stand. He was complying with the orders police had given him before he went out there. He repeatedly told the police he was more than willing to go wherever they wanted him to go and do whatever they wanted him to do.

Instead, this happened live on the air:

The governor issued an apology and the crew was released after a short time in jail, but none of this makes any sense. If one of my students had told me, “I need to cover this thing in Minnesota. What should I do to be safe?” I would have told that student to do EVERYTHING Jimenez did. It was the perfect example of how to be safe and not get hurt or arrested.

It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter for WAVE 3 News reporter Kaitlin Rust and photojournalist James Dobson either, who were covering protests in Kentucky. They had their gear, their press passes and they were LIVE ON AIR when an officer opened fire on them with “less lethal rounds.”

At first, Rust thought the police officer was actually shooting live rounds at her. She then noted they were “rubber bullets.” In responding to this situation, police officials stepped up and made something important abundantly clear:

It was previously reported that the officer was firing rubber bullets, but LMPD spokeswoman Jessie Halladay said the department’s officers do not use rubber bullets, and it was likely that was Rust and Dobson were hit with pepper balls.

Right. Because that’s the important thing. Semantics over exactly WHAT this chucklehead was shooting at two journalists from less than 20 feet away for no good reason. Glad we cleared that up…

Also, in case you are unfamiliar with pepper bullets, here’s the Pepperball company website. It promotes these types of items noting the following frightening statement:

With multiple payload options and a proprietary chemical irritant that’s proven more effective from even greater distances, PepperBall® projectiles offer the protection and versatility for any situation. Available in both round and VXR versions, PepperBall projectiles can be operated at virtually any temperature from as far away as 150 feet and with an area saturation of up to 50 meters.

In other words, this thing can drill you hard enough at 150 feet to deploy a giant pepper-spray bomb about the size of the Arc de Triomphe.  And this officer not only fired it at the journalists, but he or she reloaded and fired again. And again. And THEN told the crew to move back.

It was clear these people were journalists. They were not making any threatening moves or acting in a way that would indicate their desire to antagonize the police.

It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter to police who pepper sprayed Andrea Sahouri, of the Des Moines Register, after she repeatedly told police, “I’m press! I’m press! I’m press!” It didn’t matter to police who pepper sprayed Detroit Free Press reporter JC Reindl, who was showing his press credentials to an officer at the time. It didn’t matter to the dozens of other people who decided journalists were good targets for violence and anger.

It is impossible to explain to any sane individual why it is that journalists would put up with any of this, all while being called the “enemy of the people” by people in power. It makes no sense that they are risking their health and their lives to enter an area of total danger, just so other people could safely see what was happening around them. It makes even less sense when you realize that every day, they fear getting fired in a cost-cutting maneuver because some hedge fund manager will decide it’s time to tweak the company’s stock portfolio.

Those that remain will do more work, over longer hours and for insultingly meager pay.

Why?

Because these strong, brave and decent individuals know in their hearts that what they do provides a record of reality. Their work captures things that some people would like to wash away and forget happened. Their efforts add them to the fraternity of people who refuse to be cowed into submission or look the other way out of expedience.

What they do DOES matter.

Somehow. In some way. For someone.

And for that moment, that’s enough for them to press on.

Welcome to journalism.

Former WSU student newspaper editor earns Polk Award for political writing two years out of school

Two years ago, Chance Swaim was fighting for the future of his student newspaper at Wichita State University. This week, he was honored for his fight against corruption as a journalist with the Wichita Eagle:

Three Wichita Eagle staff members won one of the nation’s top journalism awards for work that included investigations into how former Mayor Jeff Longwell steered a lucrative city contract to friends and supporters.

The George Polk Award for political reporting was shared by Chance Swaim, Jonathan Shorman and Dion Lefler of The Eagle and Luke Broadwater of The Baltimore Sun, it was announced Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

The reporters were cited “for turning journalistic intuition into deep dives into public records that revealed municipal misconduct,” according to a news release.

I remember interviewing Swaim after the student government at WSU slashed the paper’s budget, something he noted would lead to “an inelegant death for a 123-year-old student-run newspaper.” In talking with him and emailing with him, I never got the sense he was panicked. Instead, he seemed to have both a sense of the situation and a sense that his staff would somehow find a way to make this work.

At the core of the fight over The Sunflower’s funding was a fundamental failure of the student government to a) understand the importance of a good student newspaper and b) a failure to abide by open-meeting rules and legal procedures to conduct its business. Swaim and his staff consistently pushed on those issues throughout the battle against these cuts, making the case that it wasn’t all about his folks, but about the needs of the campus community.

The Sunflower eventually won, avoiding the funding cut that year and receiving full funding the next. Swaim graduated and took a job at the Eagle, where he continued his efforts to dig into things that mattered and feed his need to be nosy for his readers.

Congratulations to Swaim and his colleagues for this prestigious honor on an important story.

4 Things Beginning Journalists Can Learn From the Steve King vs. “Success Kid” Mom Story

Bloch Head shot

Emily Bloch of the Florida Times-Union has long been one of my favorite journalists because of her news sense, her ability to understand an audience and her unyielding dedication to her craft.

Back in 2018, we wrote about how Bloch broke major news about several Florida politicians breaking the law by taking pictures of their ballots and posting them on social media.

In a strange twist of irony, the story ran the same day she was officially “restructured” out of her job at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. She spent her “two-weeks notice” banging out that piece, something I still don’t think I’d have the intestinal fortitude to do.

Between then and now, she did freelance work before taking an education reporter position at the Times-Union.

And she’s still hitting home runs with her work, like Tuesday’s piece about a local mom threatening to sue Iowa Congressman Steve King for using her son’s photo in his campaign efforts.

Laney Griner was on Facebook when she received a notification. She was tagged in a post. It’s not a new occurrence for her. A photo she took of her son, Sam, 13 years ago, became a commonly used meme.

“Success Kid,” as it’s been deemed online, features a then-infant Sam, staring straight on at the camera, clutching a fistful of sand. The meme has been widely used over the years, Sam’s withering stare being featured by Coca-Cola, the White House and President Barack Obama’s administration, to name a few.

But last week, when Success Kid was featured in an ad for Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, Griner wasn’t having it.

Her attorney sent the congressman a cease-and-desist letter early Monday, requesting the meme featuring Sam be removed from all platforms associated with King as well as for a public apology. By Tuesday, the post was taken down.

Bloch’s story is a great one for many reasons, but here are four things you can learn from her efforts on this piece:

READ PAST THE HEADLINE: Here’s the head that ran on the top of Bloch’s story:

KidHead

If you read the lead of Bloch’s story, you can see how this isn’t accurate:

A Jacksonville mom is threatening to sue an Iowa Congressman for using photos of her son to raise money.

Griner sent King a cease-and-desist letter, which means she’s telling him to knock it off or she WILL sue him. As the update to the story notes, King pulled the “Success Kid” memes from his ads, so the letter had the desired effect.

“There’s a small percentage of folks who don’t understand copyright law, and, of course aren’t reading the whole story that are peeved,” Bloch said in an online interview Wednesday. ” ‘Does she sue everyone that uses the meme?’ She’s not suing. ‘Should I delete my posts that use the meme?’ Obviously not.“

(As we’ve pointed out a dozen or more times here, a lawsuit isn’t a lawsuit until it’s filed.)

When you run into a story on any platform, it always bodes well for you (and anyone else) to read beyond the headline. In trying to crunch a nuanced concept (cease-and-desist letter) into headline specs, sometimes a shorter, but inaccurate, word shows up (sues). Always give something like this a deeper look, or at least read two paragraphs into the story.

FIND THE LOCAL ANGLE: Bloch said she saw the story in the Washington Post’s “Morning Mix” and the word “Jacksonville” caught her eye. While every other outlet was focusing on King and the meme, Bloch saw the local angle and figured this would draw her readers to the story.

“So in 2013 a bunch of local outlets actually wrote about him, but then it died down again…,” Bloch said. “In 2013 I wasn’t living in (Jacksonville) yet, so them being local was news to me.”

Bloch’s nose for news is important, but so was the idea that this story is more important to local folks who don’t just know of “Success Kid” as a meme, but rather as Sam, the local kid who became an internet legend. Even though other people had touched on the local angle before, both the time that had passed and the time peg of the cease-and-desist letter made for a good reason to punch down a local story here.

“Like I said, everyone wrote about them being from (Jacksonville) in 2013,” Bloch said. “So unless you’re an editor, you had no clue. So most of my Twitter feed is ‘I HAD NO CLUE SUCCESS KID WAS FROM JACKSONVILLE!'”

 

ASK. IT CAN’T HURT: Bloch could have easily written this story without an interview. The court documents have plenty in there for her to quote and plenty of people have written extensively on the meme and King, so she had no shortage of background from which to draw. However, she decided to take a shot at an interview.

“(I) immediately found the mom’s twitter account and DM’d her,” Bloch said. “Did the interview that afternoon.”

Bloch was able to get a good, strong local explanation from Griner about her experiences with the meme as well as why she wanted King to cease and desist. If you compare Bloch’s story to the national ones, you can see how this not only localized the story, but helped it make more sense, as Griner spoke like a human being, not like a legal document.

The lesson here is that it never hurts to ask for what you need. Griner could have said she was too busy or that everything had to go through her lawyer. She also could have just ignored the “local press,” given the reach of this story. However, she was willing to talk to Bloch that day and really push the story forward for local and national readers.

It’s always easy to assume you can’t get an interview or someone won’t want to talk to you. Give it a shot. What’s the worst that can happen in most cases? Someone says “No,” which means you have no more and no less information than you did before you asked.

A GREAT STORY CAN BE A SIMPLE ONE: When I saw Bloch post this, I immediately sent her a handful of questions like an over-excited toddler who saw Santa for the first time. Her reaction seemed to be one of gracious bemusement:

“(It’s) not a sexy story, but hey, they’re not always sexy,” she wrote with an “LOL” to make her point.

I’d like to disagree on that point. It’s an amazing story for about a half dozen reasons:

  • It’s local (Let’s not belabor that, but it’s worth noting. If it’s in your backyard, you should own the story.)
  • It engaged and informed the audience (Her Twitter feed proves that point, as people are starting to realize this kid is in their area, something they didn’t know before.)
  • It grabs most of the FOCII elements: Fame (King and the meme), Oddity (A mom threatening to sue a congressman over a meme featuring her son is likely rare), Conflict (King vs. Griner) and Immediacy (The story was out shortly after the letter was filed).
  • It’s a simple, fun read. (Bloch didn’t try to blow this thing up into some sort of epic battle over copyright or layer on legal precedent. She just told people what was going on in a way they’d understand it.)
  • It inspired additional ideas in her. (In chatting about this, we talked about how old Sam is now, if he’s known around school as this kid, how life has been and so forth. She mentioned wanting to check in on him in 10 years. We then talked about maybe a high school graduation story in five years when he turns 18. Then, I stopped bothering her so she could go do actual work instead of dealing with me…)

I’m sure there’s more here, but the point is, you don’t have to catch the governor of your state funneling cash from the state budget to oversee a human trafficking and drug ring to have a great story. If you can develop a sense of wonder and a nose for what makes things interesting to other people, you’ll have plenty of great stories like this and keep readers wondering what you’ll write next.

How to be a “bad quote” for an obituary (and four good questions you can ask regular people while reporting for an obit)

As we mentioned in earlier posts, an obituary is supposed to be a reverent, yet factually accurate, recounting of someone’s life. We don’t have to make a saint out of a sinner or whitewash away any negative elements of the person’s life, but we do want to lean toward being decent and respectful, regardless of our thoughts.

When veteran journalist and political commentator Cokie Roberts died of breast cancer this week at age 75, multiple politicians and journalists provided glowing tributes to her. Some might have seemed over the top, while others appeared balanced and fair. Here is how the two previous presidents approached their offers of condolence:

Former President Barack Obama said Roberts was a role model for women at a time the journalism profession was still dominated by men, and was a constant over 40 years of a shifting media landscape and changing world. “She will be missed, and we send our condolences to her family,” Mr. Obama said.

Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, called Roberts a talented, tough and fair reporter. “We respected her drive and appreciated her humor,” the former president said. “She became a friend.”

 

Here’s the one President Donald Trump provided:

Flying from New Mexico to California on Air Force One Tuesday, President Trump told reporters Roberts “never treated me nicely” but that he respected her.

“I never met her,” Mr. Trump said. “She never treated me nicely, but I would like to wish her family well. She was a professional, and I respect professionals. I respect you guys a lot, you people a lot. She was a real professional. Never treated me well, but I certainly respect her as a professional.”

The degree to which you like or don’t like Donald Trump is irrelevant, as is how Roberts might or might not have treated him. (He never really clarifies how she wasn’t nice to him.) What matters is the context in which he is discussing her: She just died.

Had the president made a few mental editing trims before saying anything, this could have been a functional quote. Something like this would have worked:

“I never met her,” Mr. Trump said, “but I would like to wish her family well. She was a professional, and I respect professionals.”

Boom. Empathy, brevity and clarity while keeping the focus on the dead person.

I have been asked in numerous cases to offer quotes, memories and even eulogies on people I didn’t know that well or in some cases wasn’t that thrilled about (thankfully, that last part didn’t apply to any eulogies). In each case, I found something accurate and fair to say without essentially starting with, “Well, the weasel owed me five bucks and I bet I’m never gonna collect on that now…”

Although the president shouldn’t need this kind of hand-holding while dealing with the media, regular people who don’t deal with the media as much, or who don’t have a PR team to put out a statement, could use some help in coming up with good, honest quotes. Here are a few questions you can ask someone in an obituary interview that might improve the quotes you get:

  • “What are some of your favorite memories about (NAME)?” This one puts the source in the right frame of mind, focusing on memories of the person’s activities on Earth, as opposed to the person being dead. In addition, by noting “favorite” you provide the source with the ability to incorporate all sorts of things. Favorite memories might include those tearjerker moments where the person helped the homeless or dedicated himself or herself to a noble cause. They might also include the time he or she drove home backwards on the interstate because the transmission was screwed up and everyone in the car was out past curfew. (In one case, a favorite memory was of the deceased breaking up a hum-drum political meeting at someone’s house by climbing onto the table and dancing, while totally sober.)
  • “What words would you or other people use to describe (NAME)?” This again is more focused than just “What can you say about the person?” which leaves the source twisting in the wind and reaching for honorific terms and overwrought metaphors. It has a sharper angle to it and allows the person to pick at specific elements of the person much more clearly. Also, you set up an interesting opportunity for a moment of duality: The source might have known the deceased as kind, generous, decent and patient, but other people saw that person as rough, angry and difficult. It shows a layered look at the person through the eyes of people who knew him or her and demonstrates the idea that what everyone else saw might or might not have been on point.
  • “What kinds of things were important to (NAME)?” This helps you cast a stronger light on the individual in terms of life priorities. When people talked about coaching legend Vince Lombardi, they often recalled his famous speech about the only three things that mattered in life were God, your family and the Green Bay Packers. Everything else, he told his players, was a distraction. (David Maraniss, who wrote a biography on Lombardi, once noted that for the coach it was actually like God and The Packers as number one, then golf and then family somewhere down the road. For what it’s worth…)
  • “What would be the one thing you would want everyone to know about (NAME)?” This gives you the chance to help the person come up with a summary of the individual in a way that will also help you encapsulate who that person was. If you hear the same thing from multiple sources, you essentially have the core of your lead, if not your story, right there.

 

Throwback Thursday: The Four-Word Interview

(With the weather continually failing to cooperate with my desire to pull the Mustang out of storage, I decided to pine for “Betsy” openly with a throwback post to 2017. It’s a good reminder that the point of interviewing is to gain information that is important, to not overthink your interviews and that some day soon, summer is coming. — VFF)

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(The subject of a four-word interview.)

I stopped off to get gas this morning when a man in his 70s approached me.

“What year?” he asked, pointing to the Mustang.

“’68.” I told him.

He nodded. “Nice.” He then got in his truck and drove away.

In the simplest of terms, this was a perfect interview and the whole thing took four words.

In all the reporting and writing classes I have taught, the biggest problem students tell me they have is interviewing. They don’t know what to ask or how to ask it. They feel awkward talking to other people or they get the sense that they’re being pests. They would rather just email people and hope for answers instead of approaching people in public and talking to them. This is why interviewing features prominently in both the Dynamics of Media Writing and the Dynamics of News Reporting & Writing.

Interviewing is a skill and like any skill, you need to practice it to become better at it. That said, it is important to understand that every day, you conduct dozens of interviews, so you are probably better at it than you think you are. You ask your roommates how their day went, you ask the waitress what the special of the day is and you ask your professor, “Will this be on the test?” If you don’t think of these interactions as interviews, it’s because you are overthinking the concept of interviewing.

The purpose of an interview is to ask someone who knows something that you need to know for the information you seek. When you get that information, you do something with it. The guy at the gas station wanted to know one thing: What year Mustang was I driving? He figured the best source was me, the owner of the car. He asked a question that would elicit the answer he sought. He got his information and he moved on.

Interviewing as a journalist can seem much more complicated than that, mainly because you have to do a lot of preparation, you need to troll for quotes and you need to figure out how the answers fit in the broader context of your story. That’s all true, but if you start with the basic premise of “What do I need to know?” your interviews can feel more natural and less forced.

As student journalists, how do you report on rape allegations? Pretty much the same way you report on anything else.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article posted on a writing website that had her seriously concerned and had me grateful that I wasn’t in her shoes.

The college-aged woman who wrote the article stated that the head of a university’s student government had raped her. She outlined the history of their relationship, including previous consensual sexual interactions, discussed her own history of sexual encounters and detailed the incident in which she states the man had sex with her without using a condom and without her consent to do so.

In addition, she outlined specific allegations including:

  • She was not the only person with whom this man had non-consensual sex: “It appears that there are many more young women than just myself who have been assaulted or harassed by him,” she wrote.
  • She heard from another woman that this man had infected multiple partners with chlamydia. (She wrote that she underwent testing and her test came back negative.)
  • She heard from that same woman that this man had cheated on her with multiple partners.

My friend advises the student publication at the university where this woman attends (or attended) school and where this man serves as the head of the student government. In other words, this has massive ramifications for the audience her paper serves.

The question then becomes, “How does a student media outlet go about reporting on a rape allegation, made in this fashion, in a decent, fair and ethical way while also keeping a watchful eye on any legal ramifications?” The answer in the headline is a bit glib, but it is more true than not: Basically the same way you report on anything else.

Consider these basic building blocks:

Background research must come first: Nobody wants to look like an idiot when they get into a story where they have no prior knowledge of the topic. While really bad reporters kind of fake their way through a topic, good reporters dig deep to fully understand it well enough to speak intelligently on it. Consider this the first thing you must do for ALL stories, whether you’re trying to explain how the sport of curling works (my first “what the hell do I know about this?” story that required ridiculous amounts of research) or trying to figure out how to ask questions in an interview with a rape survivor.

No matter how scary the story, you are not the first person to cover any given topic. That means there are experts out there who can help you figure things out. In the case of a story on rape, the people at the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) and the folks at the Dart Center can provide you with information on the topic at hand and how to navigate your reporting. In many cases, organizations like these have put together guides, tips and hints, such as the Dart Center’s guide to covering sexual violence and trauma or its step-by-step outline of how to report on campus rapes and sexual assaults.

The best way to not feel like you’re going to do something stupid in your reporting and writing is to make yourself as smart as possible on the topic.

If your mother says she loves you, go check it out: This is the first rule of all good journalism. In other words, go do some digging for yourself before you rely on anything you hear second hand. Ask for an interview with the woman who wrote the story so you can hear her story first hand. Ask for an interview with other people directly attached to the story, such as the man accused in this story. Look for things elements of the story that can be verified without traumatizing anyone or making it look like you have already decided who is right and who is wrong.

Cases involving false rape allegations are quite rare, but the premier example of a story like this that went off the rails in a horrifying way was the Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus.” The piece told the story of “Jackie,” a University of Virginia student who told the writer she had been gang raped at a fraternity party. “Jackie” also stated that the administration wouldn’t do anything to help her and that it was more concerned in protecting the image of the school than investigating her situation.

The piece ended up being retracted and it led to multi-million-dollar lawsuits against the magazine. The fraternity reached a $1.65 million settlement with the magazine, while the administrator made out to be the “chief villain” of the story reached a confidential settlement, after a federal jury awarded her a $3 million judgment that the magazine was appealing.

A post-mortem analysis of the story by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and commissioned by Rolling Stone found that the magazine had failed to do basic reporting to verify the claims asserted in the story and that the piece had basic facts wrong. The report stated the reporter never interviewed the friends “Jackie” had mentioned, instead relying on her recollections of what they told her. It also noted that specific parties and dates of events didn’t fit with actual events or parties, something that would have been easy enough to verify. The report also outline other similar things like this that could have been done to help put the magazine on a stronger footing or better decide how to proceed with the piece.

Simply put, you are a reporter, so report. That doesn’t mean you don’t believe someone, but you have to make sure you can support the content you publish to the best of your ability.

Check your legal liabilities: The Student Press Law Center provides student journalists with free legal advice on a wide array of topics. If you have concerns that a story might libel someone, a call or email to SPLC is worth your time. The “Dynamics” textbooks list off the key elements of libel as:

  • Publication: Did you disseminate the content to someone other than the person claiming to be libeled?
  • Identification: Is the person claiming to be libeled named or otherwise easily known based on how he or she is described in the story?
  • Harm: Can the person claiming to be libeled demonstrate serious damage to his or her reputation? This usually involves being accused of a crime or associated with “unsavory” illnesses.
  • Fault: Can the person claiming to be libeled show that the person publishing the content either did something wrong or failed to do something that should have been done to prevent the libelous content from being published?

In case you’re wondering, a story like this would go four-for-four in terms of these items. That means you’re into the defenses against libel, including truth, privilege and so forth. What also makes this interesting is the issue of what level of fault the man in this story would have to prove. Ordinary citizens only have to prove negligence, which is easier to show, while public figures have to demonstrate actual malice. In that instance, the public figure has to show the material was false and that the publisher had a reckless disregard for the truth. The SPLC is your friend, so give the folks there a call with questions before you publish.

The duty to report is not the same as the duty to publish: If you do your reporting and you aren’t certain you have enough of the story to tell the story, wait until you can gather enough content to feel more secure. If you find that your reporting hasn’t revealed enough to support or refute conclusions crucial to the story itself, don’t feel pressured to publish something because you are worried about “how it would look.” You are responsible for what you publish, so you need to feel confident you can stand behind what you put out there.

It’s always better to be late than wrong.

 

Once you get deeper into the writing, you should pay additional attention to style, word choice and clarity to avoid creating problems for your sources and your readers. In addition, having a legal eagle and an expert in the field give you a quick review for some thoughts and polish points to consider won’t hurt either.

This is obviously a serious and delicate topic, which means tact matters as does basic human decency. That said you can do all of this and adhere to quality reporting standards to make sure you put your best possible story forward.