Journalists and burnout: A pre-semester plea

School starts back this week or next week or, in my case, after Labor Day, so the drum beat of readings, homework, quizzes and tests is about to begin once again. For a lot of you, so will the career-based extra-curricular activities you have come to love, such as student publications, student broadcast or student professional groups. Even though a lot of us could really do with another month of summer, we tend to feel refreshed and ready to go once again, diving into these things with vigor and a backpack full of new office supplies.

The hard part comes about six weeks later when tests come crashing down, the paper that was “so far away” is due tomorrow and everything at the student media outlets is spinning out of control. The stress, the anxiety and, yes, the burnout begins.

The Columbia Journalism Review looked at this from a professional perspective recently, with writer Bailey Dick outlining how professionals in journalism tended to blow off stress and such until self-destructive behaviors kicked in. A good friend of mine, Scott Reinardy from the University of Kansas, has published a wide array of studies that have outlined and supported these concerns in all sorts of journalists. His book on “Journalism’s Lost Generation” showcases how burnout has created serious problems in our field.

What’s important to understand is that burnout isn’t something that happens overnight or something that is inevitable. It’s like when the “oil change” light comes on in your car. It means, “Hey, you might want to look at this…” If you get things handled right then and there, you’ll probably be OK. If you wait 50,000 miles to look into this situation, it should come as no surprise to you if your engine explodes and your car becomes useful only as a 3,000-pound paperweight. The build starts now (or even earlier) in the field. You need to look at what is happening to you and how you can work through it.

Fighting it starts with the understanding of what you can handle, what you can’t handle and how best to react when facing either of those situations. It starts by acknowledging your strengths and limitations. It also helps to examine what you want to prioritize and what can wait for another day. It forces you to see how certain things are affecting you and pushing you toward unhealthy changes and coping strategies.

The problem with burnout is that we only tend to see it when it hits and hits hard. It’s like that oil change example: Suddenly your engine’s on fire while you’re driving 70 mph on the freeway and you start to think, “Oh crap, NOW I have to deal with this.” It often takes a breakdown for us to come to grips with the idea that we have a problem. We talk about disaster in the past tense, not as something we’re building toward that could be avoided.

With that in mind, consider this post as a plea of sorts. Start monitoring yourself now at the beginning of the term for the early signs of burnout. If you’re wondering what they are, Scott’s got some great thoughts in here as well as in some of his other research. Give yourself that baseline from which you can figure out how you’re actually doing along the way.

As for me, I’m taking the official summer break now. I’ll be back with the regular daily (Monday-Thursday ish) schedule starting after Labor Day when my classes resume.

Thanks for reading,

Vince

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

Don’t Believe the Hype: Why weaving tiny bits of opinion into stories can undermine your purpose

A group of my sports writing students were asked to write a story about a football game between two fictional college rivals, in which one comes back from a huge deficit to win on the last play of the fourth quarter. A good number of them attempted to hype the story rather than tell it, especially in the lead:

Thanks to an unbelievable fourth quarter capped by a 28-0 run, (WINNERS) came back to defeat (LOSERS), 31-28.

It seemed like (LOSERS)had the game wrapped up going into the fourth quarter, but in football, you must play all four quarters to the best of your ability if you want to win the game, no matter what level you’re playing at.

In Wild and Wonderful fashion, (WINNER) roars back to score 31 unanswered as they knock off (LOSER) in the closing seconds of regulation.

The (GAME) ended in extraordinary fashion with a last second touchdown.

Others wrote about it being “incredible,” “super,” “amazing” and so forth. And, yes, according to the information they received it was the largest comeback in conference history, so it might well have been all of those things.

However, your job is to show the readers what is going on by presenting factual information, not trying to sell them something by hyping it up. If you do the former, you’ll notice that your readers will come to the conclusion you want them to all by themselves. If you do the latter, you’ll find that the readers will resist your efforts to get them to see the situation in the way you want them to.

Don’t believe me? Consider the Joke Theory.

My wife and I laugh about how we’re always so competitive. But I know I always laugh more.

OK, that’s a lame joke, but I was hamstrung a bit by trying not to insult men, women, college students, professors, animals, trees and some frat kid named Chad’s little brother. That said, a few of you might have laughed at that. I at least had a chance.

Now consider if I started it this way instead:

I’m going to tell you a really funny joke. It’s probably one of the best jokes you’re ever going to hear. You’re going to be laughing so hard, you’ll cry. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you retell it to everyone you know. OK, here we go…

The hype kills the hope that I’m getting a laugh, just like the hype undercuts your position with your readers. Don’t tell them something is funny, amazing or whatever else. Show them the thing as it is and let them come to that conclusion.

Here’s an example of how this works:

Read this version of a story about a man caught breaking into a couple’s home, eating their food, wearing the wife’s Christmas “onesie” and dressing his cat, named Spaghetti, in a cashmere sweater he stole. What drives this story is the straight-up fact-based reporting that has you wondering, “What the heck is wrong with this guy?” (Well that and quotes like this: “No one leaves a dressed cat in a crawl space unless they’re coming back or they’re still here,” Smith told the paper. “So I got out and shut the door.”)

Now, if the writer, instead of doing this, had started commenting on this throughout the story, here’s what you might get:

“In the most bizarre case of burglary and home invasion ever known, a 38-year-old man was arrested Sunday night.

The odd fellow, who named his cat Spaghetti, which makes no sense, was caught in a crawl space in the home. A creepy crawler, indeed!

The weirdo put on the wife’s “onesie” night dress, which the woman obviously said she didn’t want the police to bring back for her. He also dressed Spaghetti in a cashmere outlet the couple had for one of its Chihuahuas, just adding to the weirdness of the night.”

Which version does the job better? Clearly the first one.

The point is that you need to have faith in your readers that they’ll see what you see when you write, without having to poke or prod them via commentary or hype. You also need to have faith in your own writing that you’ll get your point across well enough without having to use hype as a crutch to do the job.

Burying the lead (or “Man shoots self in scrotum, see sentence six.”)

In terms of press releases, this one clearly puts the thing you would probably most want to know near the end. This is one of the main reasons why you should learn to write in the inverted pyramid instead of simply recounting things chronologically.

To be fair, a “self-inflicted gunshot wound” does sound terrible, but it only gets worse:

PenisRelease

Press releases like this make me miss working on the police beat.

(Instructors: A good exercise with this one would be to write a lead based on the release. The content has a pretty good number of the FOCII elements in there and a rewrite could create a better emphasis on them.)

3 teachable moments for media students from the Gov. Ralph Northam “blackface” controversy

In case you missed it, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam spent the weekend under pressure to resign after his association with a racist photo during medical school came to light. Northam, a Democrat, had a photo on his 1984 medical school yearbook page with a person wearing a KKK hood and robe and another other in blackface:

Follow-up stories also found that while at VMI, Northam had the nickname “Coonman,” which has racist overtones, to say the least. Northam has stated he will not resign, even as pretty much everyone else on the planet is telling him he has no choice.

In terms of “teachable moments,” we could easily list about 1,023,324 of them starting with “don’t be a racist idiot.” However, since this is a journalism-based blog, let’s stick to three items related to media concerns:

Student media leaves a long trail: When Brett Kavanaugh was up for his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, we talked about this issue at length, but it bears repeating here: Student media can be eternal. In that earlier post, we cited at least a half-dozen cases in which politicians, jurists and others had something they wrote as an under-informed undergrad come back to haunt them. What makes this case interesting is that this was from Northam’s days in medical school, which pushes his age much further into adulthood when his page hit the press.

Sure, it might seem cute to put something in press that you find to be “funny” at the time, like a drinking quote, a puffery-based quote about your virility or something else that would make you wince later, but consequences do emerge. Consider this “hysterical” moment from a college paper and its senior sendoff columns:

I never was a huge fan of drop caps, but this made them worse…

I suppose, if you were inclined to give someone the benefit of the doubt, you could argue that this was a random lottery of accidental ordering, but five other senior sendoff columns on the subsequent page had drop caps that spelled out “PENIS.” I can’t recall what happened to the students in this case, but I’m guessing it wasn’t good. It also isn’t great that this happened in the internet age, so I’m sure I’m not the only person with this photo.

As both media practitioners and people who plan to live a fruitful life past the age of 22, take a good, hard look at what you publish. The association you have with those choices doesn’t seem like it ever really goes away.

Before you open your mouth, figure out what you should say: Public relations and crisis communication experts get an unfair bad rap in many cases. The whole “Covington Catholic MAGA kids vs. Native-American drummer” situation had a contingency of people complaining that at least one of the kids involved hired RunSwitch PR, a firm linked to heavy hitters in the Republican Party, including Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney. The argument was that the kids knew they were wrong, racist and evil, so the PR firm came in to soften their image and “spin” this whole thing for them.

I’m not in any position to comment on that particular case, because I honestly don’t know what happened there in regard to the firm or the kids. I can tell you that people often argue that hiring a PR firm makes you look slimy, in the way that demanding a lawyer when you get accused of a crime makes you look guilty. I’ll disagree on that point because this is clearly a case where some quality public relations practitioners and crisis communication experts could have made a big difference in a positive and clarifying way.

PR experts will tell you that before you make a public statement, you need to know what you want to say. In addition, you need to have a handle on ALL the facts of the case before you take a stand. This is akin to the news rule that you need to report before you publish. Regardless of what happens next, that approach makes sense, and a good PR firm would have told Northam this. It also would have kept him away from the press until he knew what the heck was happening with this situation and what he wanted to say.

Sure, you can argue that we might not know the truth about the situation if Northam had time to “shape his message,” but how much do we actually know now? At first it was, “I’m very sorry I did this” and then it was, “I’m not saying which of these racist figures was me,” and then it was “I don’t think that was me in the photo,” and now it’s “I never put that photo on my page.” We’re about 10 seconds away from him doing a press conference run by Shaggy.

If Northam had taken a couple hours, met with a good group of PR practitioners, he could have formed the best possible message for himself going forward. Even if that message ended up being, “I was a racist chucklehead and I’m sorry,” at least it would have been a single message from a single voice that allowed him and the rest of Virginia to move forward.

Trust, but verify: The original story about the yearbook page broke on a website called Big League Politics, a right-wing website with ties to Breitbart News and other similarly inclined publications:

Virginia Democrat governor Ralph Northam posed for a blackface photograph.

Big League Politics has obtained photos from Northam’s time at the Eastern Virginia Medical School, from which he graduated in 1984.

Northam and a friend were photographed together — one in blackface, one in Klan robes.

Two things come to mind upon seeing this:

The publication clearly has a conservative viewpoint, so there’s always a risk that simply taking the negative information it published about a Democrat as gospel and running with it could lead to the spread of misinformation.
The publication doesn’t cite a source to explain HOW it verified that Northam was in that photo, a charge that Northam now denies (while copping to something he somehow thinks is better, namely using shoe polish to “darken” himself as part of a Michael Jackson contest).

This is a case where the journalistic rule of “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out” applies. In other words, don’t ignore the story, but do find out for yourself if it’s true before you publish anything. CBS noted its efforts in this regard:

A reporter from CBS News affiliate News 3, Brendan Ponton, went to the Eastern Virginia Medical School library in Norfolk Friday afternoon and found the page on which the photo appears.

The Washington Post made a similar notation in its story:

The Washington Post independently confirmed the authenticity of the yearbook by viewing it in the medical school library in Norfolk.

You will also notice the nuances in the description these outlets use in regard to the photo. While BLP says Northam is in the photo, the others make it clearer that it appeared on his page, but Northam denies it’s him and no one can prove that it is at this point.

When it comes to something like this, it’s always important to make sure you have your facts straight and that you can demonstrate how you verified the information.

3 things you can learn from Florida Atlantic University’s decision to “Photoshop” away crack cocaine

Student newsrooms usually maintain an inexplicable sense of humor that would appall most of polite society and mentally scar most human resources officials. One newsroom I visited had a “Wall O’ Creepy,” where staffers would post odd pictures or weird stories. Others had inside jokes, Photoshopped images and random quotes written, stapled or stenciled on walls, computer monitors and desks.

In the newsrooms I worked in and oversaw, we had all manner of oddity posted about. My boss at Ball State would usually call or email me to let me know if an important alumnus or big-name journalism personality was visiting the area that day, asking me to “sanitize” the newsroom. I know I failed at this at least once, as one of the top editors at the Indianapolis Star stopped by and happened to notice a photo of a monkey performing a sex act on itself that was glued to a computer monitor in our design pod. The conversation was awkward:

Him: Is that monkey (EXPLETIVE) itself?
Me: Yes, sir, I believe so… Over here is our photography desk…

Like I said, we’re all a bit weird.

Even as administrators wince at our idiosyncrasies, they often like to promote the newspapers on their website, thus leading to the issue for today’s post: How to handle the weirdness when promoting an inherently weird operation.

Florida Atlantic University has a long, awkward history in dealing with its amazingly good student newspaper, the University Press. The school once fired the paper’s adviser, Michael Koretzky, only to have him continue to volunteer to help the students, thus leading the school to try to fire him again. The student government also tried to get rid of a student editor because he pointed at someone. The paper has broken numerous stories on student government misdeeds, reported on campus concerns and generally been a pain in the keester to the university through strong journalistic practices. However, as a successful and valuable entity, the school included a photo of the newsroom on its website, albeit one that didn’t quite reflect the actual state of the newsroom.

“When the photographer visited our newsroom, the editors were in a meeting,” Koretzky explained in an email. “She told us to ‘act naturally,’ but apparently, our natural state isn’t photogenic. So she asked us to pose as if we were critiquing the paper – which was months old because we don’t print over summer.”

The photographer took several shots of the posed staffers, as well as a random woman who just came in to ask questions about how the paper worked. However, the background included a not-so-PR quote, as shown in a photo Koretzky shared:

Crack

When the image the photographer shot appeared on the FAU website, however, the quote was gone:

NoCrack

“The photographer then said she’d Photoshop out the Dan Rather quote,” Koretzky said. “I don’t think we believed her, because that seemed silly and FAU’s administration doesn’t have a reputation for completing tasks it touts. Weirdly, the photog shot only that angle, not the other walls that have no crack cocaine quotes.”

(Side note: I wasn’t clear if this was the photographer’s own sense of what to do or if this was a FAU marketing policy. I shudder to think what would happen to the photographer if she just did this, handed it over to an editor who ran it with the understanding it wasn’t Photoshopped and then caught the brunt of the backlash. This is why being on the same page as the boss matters.)

The fields of news, marketing and PR have different standards of what is and isn’t acceptable in a case like this. In addition, visual journalists have specific ethical standards as well that mandate what can and can’t be done to manipulate reality.

Generally speaking, in news, it would be a large ethical breach to manipulate images and news outlets have fired photographers for doing this in some cases. Marketing, advertising and public relations have more leeway in some cases, but in some cases, professionals in these areas have been excoriated for some Photoshop manipulations.

In the case of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, the school had to reprint its entire run of freshman welcome guides and apologize to the public after officials manipulated a photo to make the student body appear more diverse.

(Note the one guy’s head on the left behind the woman in white’s arm.)

To get a fuller grasp on this, I asked several people who have worked on both sides of the fence to get a handle on the FAU’s approach to the “crack quote” in the image.

The most basic answer was one Koretzky noted earlier: Don’t shoot toward the wall with the quote on it.

“Two words: different angle,” a former news photographer and current visual journalism professor said. “Shooting the room at a different angle could resolve any ethical dilemma.”

Although the professor said marketing materials, including photos for advertisements, do alter images, the subject of the photo makes this manipulation a bit more concerning.

“I don’t mind elements being edited out for most advertising–that’s the nature of it, like taking out a street sign for a car on road ad,” he said. “Except in this case the promo is for a real tangible place, whose mission is the truth. The university is just asking for attention and not the kind they desire.”

One pro, who has served as a communications director for multiple organizations and who also worked as a newspaper journalist, said the university didn’t do anything to violate basic tenets of marketing.

“I think the university acted within bounds,” he said. “Marketing is about presenting things in the best light to the most people. So while students will find that quote inspiring, parents and donors might not. As long as the photo was not used in a journalistic capacity, which by your description it wasn’t, then it’s totally in bounds.”

Another pro, who wrote for the editorial side of magazines and also served in the marketing department of a major university, said she disliked both the shot and the alteration.

“I don’t think the PhotoShopping is a good idea, BUT i wouldn’t use that quote OR that photo,” she wrote. “Personally, I’d just use something altogether different.”

Whether this is an acceptable practice often lies in the eye of the beholder, the ethical standards of the organization and the common sense of the media professionals involved. However, here are a couple points to consider when you find yourself in a similar situation:

Get more than you need: This is a mantra of most broadcast journalists when it comes to gathering video and audio. The idea is to make sure you have enough content to cover your needs so you don’t end up having to cut a corner to make something work, thus opening yourself up to an awkward situation like this. The photographer could have shot in multiple directions, taken various types of shots and done more to avoid the quote on the wall. It wasn’t as if she didn’t notice it. When you see that something might create a problem, get some backup options to keep yourself out of trouble.

Don’t be lazy: The photographing of this newsroom wasn’t a one-time-only deal, like a photographer capturing the first moon landing or a random explosion in a small town. It’s a newsroom that exists on the campus and is probably within walking distance of wherever the FAU marketing organization resides. Once she realized the words “crack cocaine” were going to be in the shot no matter how she cropped it, she could have probably found another 15 minutes to walk back to the newsroom and shoot some other shots. Photoshopping, while an important skill, was a crutch for laziness in this case. It was so much easier to just “blue-out” the background than to go shoot more images. Don’t be lazy. Go back and do the job right.

Know your code of ethics: I am uncertain as to which code this individual or the FAU marketing department adheres, but understanding that one exists and what it says about certain things can’t hurt. The Public Relations Society of America’s code includes a line about honesty: “We adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in advancing the interests of those we represent and in communicating with the public.” The American Marketing Association has similar language pertaining to honesty, transparency and fairness in its code. Does a staged photo fit that level of accuracy and truth? Probably, as posed images are a standard element of most marketing materials and even some posed shots (environmental portraits, group shots) make their way into newspapers and magazines. Is the Photoshopping here accurate and truthful? Eh… Maybe yes, maybe no. The point is that understanding what your particular code has to say about certain activities might give you pause before simply saying something like, “I’ll just PhotoShop that out.”

“Buy the damned AP Stylebook:” Helpful hints for students hoping to succeed in their media classes

At the start of each year, I ask my collection of professionals, educators and just relatively smart folks to offer you some advice or provide some sort of thoughtful discourse. Last year, I asked them what they remembered about their first journalism course. The answer from most of them? “I was scared out of my mind.”

This year, I asked my “hivemind” to offer you some helpful advice to kick off your writing, reporting and editing courses on the right foot. The suggestions actually started with a story from a magazine editor who offered this after lunch with an intern:

She’d come in thinking fashion journalism was her thing, and now she’d like to explore more widely. It’s not true in every case, but I feel like this is something that happens a lot. A young person gets interested in journalism largely because they’re interested in a subject – and usually one of the cool subjects. They want to be a sportswriter, or a fashion writer, or a music writer. Rarely does anybody get into journalism with a burning desire to cover the Possum Hollow board of aldermen. So then, my advice: think about journalism as a general condition and not a conduit to a subject you really love… Branch out and think less about subject matter, more about the craft itself.

While working on that craft, some folks offered a few basics:

Call your sources. Phones are your friends.

To be fair, I realized how much time I spend using my phone for non-calling functions dwarfs the amount of time I spend calling people, so I feel your pain on this.

In terms of writing and editing, some suggestions were pretty blunt:

Buy the damn AP Stylebook.

The purpose of a style book is to serve as a reference guide. I don’t think any professor expects you to memorize this thing from top to bottom. Even if you do, AP is now changing rules faster than the Catholic church during Vatican II, so don’t expect to ever fully get a handle on the book. The point of owning the book is so you can figure out what kinds of things you need to look up. Within both the media writing book and the reporting book are Fred Vultee’s 5-Minute AP Style Guide, which should be a good starting point for you, if you feel overwhelmed.

Learning to adhere to style will also help you get used to editing your own work carefully, a suggestion offered by more than one person, including a recent graduate who now works as a reporter:

Proofread all of your work. The work entails you explaining something to another person. If you can’t understand a sentence, how is somebody else going to figure it out?

(By the way, I had to edit at least three parts of that clip to make it make sense… Nobody’s perfect.)

Another person, who works as a professor and media adviser, offered this advice for editing your own work:

Pretend every word costs $1. Save your money.

My two favorite suggestions come from opposite ends of the spectrum. First, a graduate student and former editor at some major daily newspapers, provided this gem:

Learn the rules, then get good enough to break them.

This echoes one of the earliest posts I wrote about writing: You earn the fungus on your shower shoes. I would also note that even people who earn the right to break the rules have to be smart enough to know when it’s not working. There is nothing wrong with backing off some weird lead or turn of phrase if all it’s doing is bogging down your copy or annoying your readers.

Finally, a “fall back plan” from a pro who worked on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in multiple media formats:

Journalism’s screwed and they should also learn welding.

Maybe, but if we all give up on writing, who is going to write those compelling stories about welders?

In any case, have a great semester and we’ll see you here from time to time. If you ever have a topic of interest you want me to cover or a question to ask about anything, just feel free to reach out.

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

Following up on the Times Argus’ coverage of its coverage of the murder-suicide: 3 learning moments for all media students

EDITOR’S NOTE: The piece I ran Monday regarding the murder-suicide in Vermont was less about the people involved and more about lessons to learn from the situation. The subsequent discussions that followed seemed to shift that focus, so I thought it was important to update and revisit the issue. In doing so, I wanted to make it clear that I know Adam Silverman well. I’ve known him for almost half my life as a student, a colleague and a friend. He contributed to my books and he stood up for my wedding.

I didn’t really think this disclosure was necessary before, as the post was more about the issue than it was about him. Still, it’s worth pointing out. It’s also worth pointing out that I’ve known Chris Evans, who is quoted in the VTDigger piece, for many years as a student media adviser and friend. Chris, however, did not stand up for my wedding. I’m sure he would have if I asked. Now, on with the post…

—

The apology the Times Argus issued Monday in the wake of its coverage of a murder-suicide in Vermont should have capped the issue entirely. Unfortunately, the leaders of the paper apparently never heard of Filak’s First Rule of Holes: “When you find yourself in one, stop digging.”

In a brief recap, the paper published an article on Luke LaCroix and Courtney Gaboriault, a young couple who died in a murder-suicide when LaCroix shot Gaboriault and then himself in her apartment last week. The follow-up story included many details on LaCroix, including his status as “a popular lacrosse coach” at an area high school and how he was “well-known and generally well-liked in the greater Barre area.”

The details on Gaboriault were limited and thus some folks felt the story leaned toward favoring LaCroix. I referred to this as “He-was-such-a-good-boy” syndrome, where everyone always praises someone who died in a horrible way, never seeing anything bad the person did or at least not expressing it.

Gaboriault worked for the Department of Public Safety, as does Adam Silverman, who took to Twitter to deconstruct the story and to demand some sort of remedy from the paper. Rob Mitchell, the editor-in-chief of the paper, issued an ombudsman’s column on this issue Sunday, explaining the rationale behind what the paper published and offering an apology to people who took umbrage with the story.

It felt like the story arc was over until two things happened:

Silverman took to Twitter to deconstruct and respond to the apology.
The Vermont Digger, a statewide news organization, published a piece on the situation and the editors of the Times Argus spoke.

In both cases, it was like two people wanted to have “the last word” in an argument, so rather than let sleeping dogs lie, both sides picked at the tenuously healing wound.

Silverman’s Twitter feed on this did acknowledge the apology, although it also continued to note the paper’s need to do better. Yes, but it’s hard to “do better” 12 seconds after screwing up and apologizing for it. It’s also pokes at the assertion that the story was a mess but the writer and editor were not to blame for this, which he calls “a paradox.” I can’t make a call on this one either way, but I don’t know a lot of EICs who would dump a reporter or editor under the bus in a public column unless egregious fact errors emerged.

The Digger’s piece did the “media looks at media” approach, which makes sense, in that this is a public spat between a public information officer and a media outlet, who will likely need symbiosis at some point in life. The reporter gave Mitchell a chance to “fire back” (a term journalists have somehow taken to using for no good reason) at Silverman and Mitchell took it:

However, Mitchell said in an interview Monday that he does not believe criticizing newspapers is the public information officer’s role.

“It puts him and the state police in the position of becoming ombudsman of every article about crime,” Mitchell said. “That’s not to say we can’t learn something from his criticism. But there’s a line there that he needs to be careful about. There are many victims of crime in this state. It can’t just be about one or another.”

And so did editor Steve Pappas:

Times-Argus Editor Steve Pappas said Monday that the newspaper received no warning that the Department of Public Safety planned to publicly lambaste the paper.

“Bottom line is, I felt like it was a cheap shot,” Pappas said about Silverman’s social media posts.

This has led to additional Twitter outrage, arguments and other such kerfuffles, thus shifting the focus away from the dead people and the initial problem with the reporting.

So why talk about it here? Because there are a couple things you all can learn, regardless of which area of media you plan to enter:

Don’t take the bait: If you go into public relations, you will have plenty of chances to either stoke a story or let it die. When you already find yourself in an awkward position, the last thing you want is for that story to continue. Thus, when the reporter for the Vermont Digger asked Pappas and Mitchell for comments on this, the smart move would have been to say something like, “We always appreciate feedback from all of our readers with the hope of constantly improving our service to the greater Barre area.” It’s simple, true and it gets you off the dime on this. Statements like “There’s a line he needs to be careful about” are going to keep the story rolling the same way that “Yeah? So’s your mother!” will keep a schoolyard fight at DEFCON 1.

Consider the platform: I often espouse the Filak-ism of “A hammer is a great tool but I wouldn’t use it to change a light bulb,” and that applies nicely here when it comes to Twitter. I agreed with a number of the statements Silverman made on the initial coverage and I disagreed with some of the other ones both there and in the follow up he did. However, I didn’t like the use of Twitter here because the platform seemed wrong.
If you have to use a dozen or more 280-character bursts to make a point, it can feel like a deluge of information pouring out into the public. Several folks in the Digger story seemed to reflect that issue, including Chris Evans and Pappas. I’m not sure a press release would have been the way to go here, as it wouldn’t get as much public play, but considering other platform options might have been a good idea. Twitter is more like a lead and/or a headline. If you start lapsing into soliloquies, Twitter isn’t the right platform.

Is the juice worth the squeeze?: I always ask this whenever dealing with a tough decision, in that I want to figure out if what I’m about to do is worth whatever I’m going to get out of it. It’s akin to the “Is this the hill you’re willing to die on?” question my friend Allison and I used to ask of ourselves when doing something that had heavy good and bad potential. Both sides really needed to look at this here:
Silverman made his points and got out there on the issue, garnering an apology and a sense that the newspaper understood enough of what upset people to make the staff rethink its processes. Was it worth it to go back and re-litigate the issue in digging through the ombudsman column and thus pushing harder on it?
The paper has to work with the state police and to at least some extent, I would guess, Silverman throughout his tenure as the PIO. Was it really worth it grousing to another media outlet about this, ticking him off again and extending the shelf life of the story? I know him well enough to know he’s not going to spite the paper, but the paper did make stuff awkward for the reporters who have to call Silverman for stories in the future. Was it worth it?
I have my own theory on both of those, but what really matters is to what extent both parties considered these issues and then made their choices. You should also have a similar mental conversation before you make any moves as a media professional.

“He’s dying anyway.” (A primer on how not to do PR)

If I had a nickel for every stupid thing I ever said, I’d wouldn’t need to work anymore and I could probably eradicate world hunger. This is one of the many reasons I have a lot of respect for good public relations practitioners: They manage to keep on message, make key points clear and connect with an audience in some of the more difficult situations out there.

In discussing public relations with my buddy Pritch (a member of the College of Fellows and a decades-long PR professional and instructor) a number of years ago, he told me that one of the more underrated elements of PR is honest empathy. It’s hard to get across a message while still realizing that there are other forces at play, many of which can be painful for others. I translated this into “be humane” in one of the books and several lectures, and I think it sticks well.

I thought about this when this story broke about a White House staffer’s reaction to Sen. John McCain’s stand against confirming CIA nominee Gina Haspel:

“It doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyway,” press aide Kelly Sadler said about McCain’s opposition to CIA nominee Gina Haspel at a meeting of White House communications staffers, according to an unnamed source cited by The Hill’s Jordan Fabian.

McCain is battling brain cancer and is unlikely to win that fight, according to all available information. As we noted in the book, the accuracy of a statement like “He’s dying anyway” isn’t the issue, but rather the fact it makes Sadler sound cold and calloused. Even worse from a PR perspective, she has now become the news and that news is clearly negative.

Consider the following thoughts as a short primer on the idea of keeping yourself out of trouble:

You are like plumbing: We talk in most of my classes about good media professionals being conduits of information, moving content from valuable sources to interested audiences. I often equate this to being like plumbing: The water exists at Point A and you want to drink it at Point B. You don’t really know how every single thing works, but you just want it to work.

Perhaps more to the point, the only time people notice plumbing any more is when something goes wrong. If the water in your tap comes out in a lovely shade of beige, like mine did in my first college apartment, you notice it. When a pipe breaks under the house and starts spraying water all over the crawl space, like it did when we lived in Indiana, you notice it. When it’s running fine? I don’t think, “Man, that toilet can FLUSH! So awesome!”

Get the information that matters from Point A to Point B in its best possible form and you’re doing the job well.

You aren’t the news: The 1980s show “The Fall Guy” follows the adventures of a TV and movie stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter, thus getting into all sorts of danger and wacky mishaps.

Perhaps the only enduring thing about this program was the theme song, in which the show’s star, Lee Majors, sings about life as an “Unknown Stuntman” with lyrics like:

I might fall from a tall building,
I might roll a brand new car.
‘Cause I’m the unknown stuntman that made Redford such a star.

If you do your job well, people behind the scenes will know your name, appreciate your professionalism and use the information you provide to them. However, you will never BE the news. Your clients may bask in the spotlight thanks to your hard work. Your organization might succeed because you did the dirty work. Your company may have a sterling image that you built, brick by brick. However, you are the unknown stuntperson who needs to make them look so fine.

Stop. Think. Then Speak: One of the hardest things in the 24/7 news cycle and the constant demand for information is the ability to pause before communicating without looking like a weasel. It often feels like if we don’t have an answer RIGHT NOW, we are clearly scrambling for some well-worn cliche or a bit of BS. However, once you open your mouth or send a release or do anything else, you can’t get it back, so it pays to be on top of your game.

Collect yourself before you speak on something. Think about who might hear what you have to say or share what you publish. Some PR professionals have told me when they have something they have to say, they imagine their grandmother was in the audience. I often tell students that there is no crime in not knowing something, so instead of going rogue, tell the people, “I don’t know the answer, but I will find it out for you.” As long as you live up to that promise (and it isn’t the answer to every question), you should be OK.

Stupid is eternal: Mardela Springs, Maryland is town of about 350 people in the western part of the state and the only reason I remember it is because of Norman Christopher, who was a town official in the early 1990s. Christopher famously brought attention to this tiny hamlet with his explanation as to why he couldn’t reach county officials on Martin Luther King Day:

He reportedly was explaining to other commission members why he could not reach county workers by telephone Jan. 20, the King holiday. “I forgot no one was working. Everyone had Buckwheat’s birthday off,” he was quoted as saying in the Daily Times in Salisbury. Buckwheat was the stage name of a black child who starred in the “Our Gang” comedy films of the 1930s and 1940s.

It’s been more than a quarter century since he made that comment and I still remember it as a “What the hell was THAT?” moment when it became news. In a similar way, I will never forget Justine Sacco and her “hope I don’t get AIDS” tweet, that we feature in the book.

Sacco has managed to find work recently, as IAC brought her back on board for a separate venture. In looking back at all of this, she had a pretty decent observation for anyone involved in any form of media:

“Unfortunately, I am not a character on ‘South Park’ or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform,” she wrote. “To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS or piss off the world or ruin my life.”

Kelly Sadler worked on a number of projects before and will likely have many more years of professional work in the future, but this might hang around her neck like an albatross for a while. If you think about anything stupid you have ever said, imagine that being the one thing people remember about you and then act accordingly.

A few more things PR students wanted to know but were afraid to ask…

Last semester, our PR guru Kristine Nicolini asked if I’d sit with her PR techniques class (a small group of about 20 student or so) and answer questions for them based on my experiences in news and working with PR folk. What came out of our discussion can be found here.

This semester, she was nice enough to ask me back, so here are a few more questions from her PR students and some moderately decent answers I managed to cobble together for them:

What are your pet peeve when it comes to PR professionals?

Liars and weasels are my pet peeves about ALL people with whom I interact, not just PR folks. If I feel like I should check my wallet or wash my hands after talking to you, I’m not all that inclined to spend time with you.

When everything about you feels like a performance or a veneer, I really get annoyed. It’s why I feel like I’m better as a press agent for myself in some cases and so does my book publisher when they tell me to call on a potential adopter of the book. I’m like, “Hey, here’s who I am, here’s what I honestly believe and at the end of the day, I understand if you don’t agree.” Honesty is refreshing, but so is honest enthusiasm. I can tell when you like what you’re doing and I can tell when you’re faking it.

How do you communicate/deal with pushy PR people?
How much is “too much” when it comes to contacting a journalist about a story? (Assuming the reporter hasn’t answered)
What’s something that you should absolutely not do?
What should you avoid when contacting a journalist with a press release?

I grouped the four of these things together because they all fit the same basic paradigm. The premise I espouse here is the “Guy at the Bar” thing. All of us have seen the “Guy at the Bar” who is really too damned desperate for his own good. He offers to buy a woman a drink, an appetizer, a game of darts, a steak dinner and a 1998 Honda Civic, shortly before she calls the cops on him.

You don’t want to be the “Guy at the Bar” when it comes to approaching journalists about the story you want to pitch. They’re either going to be interested or they aren’t and that’s part of the process, so you have to understand that some times, they’re just going to say no. That doesn’t mean “no” forever, but it means “no” now. However, the more you start pressuring them, the more they’re going to try to wriggle away out of panic and just “eeew.” It’s like a fist full of Jell-O. The harder you squeeze, the less you have.

To that end, don’t grip it so tight. Just let things go. People in general, journalists in particular, can just SMELL desperation.

Do you have any NO moments when reading a pitch or email from a PR professional?

Yes:

It’s clear I’m part of a laundry list of emails/faxes/phone numbers/addresses that somebody left you and said, “Go spread this generic crap to these random people.”
They make a fact error that lets me know they don’t know anything. A person pitching me on a charity event kept telling me about how great the Advance-Titan was as our student newspaper, but she kept saying we were at UW-Superior.
You’re trying too hard. Don’t tell me. Show me. If you come across like a crappy used car salesman, I’m dodging you.

How do you handle negative feedback/move forward from it

Negative feedback sucks. Here are some things that help me kind of “partition” it a little bit.

Is the negative feedback part of a pattern or is it a one-off. I got feedback on my book when they put it in the field. Of the 24 responses, 23 were positive. The one-off told me that I didn’t know how to write and that I clearly didn’t understand journalism. (I, of course, obsessed about this with the hope that I would somehow meet this yutz in a back alley and scream, “Who can’t write now? HUH?”) If it’s a pattern, let’s go to point two.
Is the feedback negative because of me, my client, my approach or the person on the other end of the feedback? If it’s me or my approach, it goes in one pile. If it’s my client or the other person, it goes in another pile.

The “me” pile: I look at the feedback and see what’s there that’s actually workable in terms of me and my approach. What did I do that the person didn’t like and how much of this is alterable behavior? If the feedback is, “God, he’s so ugly I couldn’t focus on his pitch.” Well, I guess I’m bald, old and ugly. Screw you anyway, Bucky. If it’s “The whole presentation felt like nothing but hype” then I look at what I did and see how likely it is that this is true, what I can do to dial it back and what else I can do to improve this?

The client/that guy pile: Some things can’t be fixed. If this person constantly hates you because “PR people suck,” forget them. The more you suck up, the more they’ll beat you like a dog.

What was your favorite article you wrote based off a PR pitch?

A jewelry store sent us one that gave away a diamond ring as part of a Christmas Promotion. The winner was a lady who wasn’t rich and had lost her diamond out of her engagement ring a few years back. The reason it worked was that a) the store was local, not a chain, b) the winner was the exact person you’d want to win the thing, c) the timing was right for a “Christmas Miracle” story and d) the owners were friendly and helpful in the whole process. In other words, it was perfect in a PR moment: Planning that led to luck and the confluence of events that just screamed “WRITE ME!”

Five helpful thoughts as you panic about not having an internship yet

When March turns to April, summer seems only a few short weeks away. For those of us in Wisconsin, that means the snow might finally finish melting and we can finally put away our shovels and salt spreaders for the year. For journalism students everywhere, however, April means moving from “Hey, I applied for this internship” to “Why haven’t I heard back from the internship?” to “GOD, WHY?!? WHAT HAVE I DONE IN LIFE THAT IS SO FOUL AS TO NOT GOTTEN AN INTERNSHIP YET?!?!”

I asked some folks I know who hire interns in the field what thoughts they had about this time of year, working through the hiring process and so forth. I also dug through the old file of rejection letters and such to come up with some advice for those of you who are somewhere between moderate concern and psychotic panic.

The Most Basic Advice:

You aren’t doing yourself or anyone else any good freaking out. The process is going to be the process, so don’t get yourself so wired that you’re tied up in knots and likely to send a horribly embarrassing text or email to a potential employer, begging for information. Cooler heads prevail, so YOU MUST CHILL. As one person who has worked for everything from top 20 circulation newspapers to promotions for the UFC explained:

My favorite quote: Patience is not absence of ambition. #EverybodyChill

This Takes Time

I remember working night desk at the State Journal one night when we were looking to hire a swing-shift reporter. My boss, Teryl, was responsible for reviewing the candidates. It was the end of a hellish night and I had just finished the midnight cop calls and settled in near the scanner to keep an ear out for any breaking news. Teryl sat down and pulled this giant stack of folders out of her desk drawer and dropped them on her desk with that clanging THUD that only half-metal, half-Formica desks can emit. There had to be 50 or more folders there, easy. She picked up the first one and with a heavy sigh, she started going through them. I thought it would take longer for her to get through them than it took for Andy Dufresne to make his way to freedom. I’m sure it felt just about as fun for her as it did for him.

Even now, these things take time and there is a ton of work involved. Even if you are the perfect candidate, it’s going to take a while to dig through the pile to find you. Or as one of the pros I talked to who is currently hiring interns said:

I’m at a very small agency and my colleague and I also have SO many of these things to sift through. We received more than 50 resumes for our one internship, and there’s only two of us to read them through. The process of trying to line up schedules and find a time for interviews is an absolute nightmare. Even once we do that, we’ve usually gone through 2-3 rounds of candidate interviews before we find someone we like. We try to put a dedicated effort into finding someone quickly and it still takes us about 3 weeks per hiring cycle.

You need to have reasonable expectations of how long this will take and understand there are actual human beings on the other end of this process who are likely doing their level best. Your best bet is to check in when you submit your material and find out what their general plan is for contacting people and then add about two weeks to that. Once that time has ended, you should give them another week and then contact them. But only do it once and do it in a, “I know you’re insanely busy but I wanted to check in” way. As a guy who works for Facebook explained to me:

Have the students ask what the typical turnaround times are so they have the right expectations and use the time spent waiting for one internship to apply to 3 more.

That said, if you have important updates, it helps to let the people know about that so you stay at the forefront of their minds in a positive way, according to a top PR pro who has worked for major players all across the country:

I also think that continuous follow up always keeps you ahead of the game. If it means thanking them for their time, sharing a story about the news they heard about the company (recent awards or otherwise) or writing a letter about how they are the ideal candidate and list specific strong reasons why… it goes a long way. I’m currently helping hire our interns for Baird and those are just a couple of things that stand out to our Directors/Managers.

Have a Plan B (and C…)

What might be the perfect internship for you might not make you the perfect candidate for the company. With that in mind, it helps to cultivate multiple options. If you are afraid that you might not get THE internship, keep an eye out and toss your hat in the ring for others that come open. One former newspaper editor who hired interns explained why this is a good idea:

I’d also recommend that students not put all their eggs in one basket when it comes to jobs and internships. Take the time to apply for a variety of internships. At best, you have a few great options to choose from. At worst, you got practice with the application process that will help you for years to come.

Another pro, who has worked in news, PR and university marketing, said not only should you be applying for multiple internships, but you should look for every opportunity to get experience if you get one:

Don’t sit tight waiting for one or two opportunities to pan out. Keep searching and keep applying. And be willing to seek and do work that gets you access to watch and learn, not necessarily do the “intern-version” of the “full-time thing.” Be a clerk. Tackle phones and backstage stuff if it gets you a front row seat. Bottom line: apply, apply and apply some more.

Take Advantage of Bad Situation

It helps to keep your ear to the ground for just-posted internships right about now and here’s why:

Media outlets don’t always have their acts together when it comes to an internship program. Some places will get involved late in the game because they finally got permission to hire or because the money was finally available for the position. This means right about now, another wave of internships might be cresting and it could be yours to ride.
Don’t feel bad about this, but it is possible that other candidates out there are viewed as being better than you are. As you sit at home, in a panicking dervish of anxious hope, those “better candidates” are taking internship offers and planning an awesome summer. Yes, this eliminates a few internship possibilities for you, but it also means that several other places that were banking on the Golden God/Goddess candidate are now looking for their Plan B. In some cases, you might be that Plan B. In other cases, they run out of options that are available and they might re-post the position. This gives you another shot to apply for something you might have missed or bypassed on your first salvo of applications.
(You might not like it if you think your next internship sees you like this, but consider it a chance to prove them wrong.)

I know this all sounds like, “Hey, you might not be all that good, but you might be the best of the really lousy candidates left after all the good kids take the good jobs,” but that’s not the point. Yeah, you can look at this like you’re some kind of damaged goods if you want, but it’s better to think about it this way: You want the internship and the experience that goes with it, so suck it up, check your ego and apply to be someone else’s “good enough” option. There’s a huge benefit to this: The ceiling on how impressive you can be is really unlimited. You have the ability to prove to them that you are awesome and you probably are better than whoever it was from the Almighty Deity School of Journalism and Perfection that turned them down. Plus, nothing makes someone work harder, stronger and faster than a really big chip on the shoulder.

Don’t Be This Candidate:

You might find yourself wondering “Why?” when it comes to the lack of communication from your potential internship suitors. This is where it helps to go back through your materials. In one case, someone didn’t get the gig because they mis-typed their phone number on their resume and people couldn’t get a hold of her. In another case, the applicant’s package never made it and he was too bashful to check in on the process. Then there are candidates like the ones this pro described:

And for the love of all things holy, please ask them to read their resumes over numerous times for errors, have someone else do it, and then do it again. I just threw out one for calling the Huffington Post the Huntington Post and another for spelling her own school’s name incorrectly.

This is why it pays to edit the hell out of your resume and cover letter before you send it off. (I screwed up and misspelled the name of editor on my cover letter, but he hired me anyway. Conversely, I saw Teryl toss one of the applications away when the person wrote “Dear Mr. Franklin” to her in the salutation. It’s dicey out there.) It also would help to have someone look over it for you, preferably someone whose not just going to say, “Wow! You’re great! Now can we go to the bar?”

If you turned out to be the person who screwed up in one of these ways, it will be in your best interest to figure that out before you have to send stuff out again.

News versus PR: “Who tells the story?”

When I started working on the “Dynamics of Media Writing” book, my goal was to outline the key tools valuable to ALL media practitioners and then explain how each discipline could use them as part of daily work routines to reach valued audiences.

Along the way, I found that professionals who agreed to be part of this book had woven in and out of those various disciplines and that the core tools remained valuable to them. Some moved from news to PR while others went from PR to news. Some started in radio or TV before flipping to print or web-based publications. A few had visited almost every discipline I covered in the text. They all agreed that the tools mattered, as did the desire to reach an audience of interest while behaving ethically.

How that all works out is obviously in the eye of the beholder.

The Student Press Law Center ran an interesting article about the push and pull between student news reporters and university public relations operations. The writing here clearly comes from a point of view, one that sides with the student news publications, so it can be a bit difficult to read for anyone interested in PR. That said, it’s worth a read.

My experiences with public relations practitioners has been similar to my experiences with news reporters: There are good ones and bad ones and you can find plenty of each without having to look too hard. I had the head of PR at one university lie right to a reporter’s face. When I found out and confronted her about this, she told me, “I didn’t feel it was appropriate to share that information with her.” I have also had reporters who have falsified interviews and lied to sources. When confronted, they, too, tried to worm out of taking responsibility for their actions.

Conversely, some of my best friends sit on opposite sides of the supposed news/PR divide. Marketing communication folks at various universities provided me with an immense amount of support and help, even when it didn’t benefit them to do so. News reporters have shared a lot of their work with me and my students, again, when they didn’t have to do so.

To be honest, I often feel like Winona Ryder in this dinner scene when trying to explain this to people I work with or former students who are overly zealous about the PR/News divide:

Long story short: The relationship between news and public relations professionals can be complicated and you can always find an example of how “they” screwed “us” over when you want to. That said, there’s no reason you can’t behave in the most decent and ethical way possible, regardless of your area of the field, to serve as a good example of how things ought to be.

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