Reporting Basics

The New York Times 144-word correction on a prominent politician’s obituary and what you can learn from the situation

When Indiana’s legendary Richard Lugar died last week, the New York Times managed to crank out this 48-word monstrosity of a lead:

Richard G. Lugar, who represented Indiana in the Senate for 36 years and whose mastery of foreign affairs made him one of only a handful of senators in modern history to exercise substantial influence on the nation’s international relations, died on Sunday in Annandale, Va. He was 87.

And yet, that paled in comparison to the 144-word mea culpa the paper had to write once the folks there realized they massively botched the piece:

LugarFail

I imagined this to be the conversation at the New York Times last week around the obituary desk:

Obit Writer 1: Man, we’ll never screw up another obituary any worse than we did when John McCain died…

Obit Writer 2: Hold my beer.

If you look at the mistakes in there, you can see that a lot of this came down to fact checking. People can argue about nuance, such as if someone “resigned” or merely “left a job,” but the date something happened is one of those things we can all figure out if we try really, really hard.

With that in mind, let’s look back at a few of the points we made when the times ran its mega-fail obit of John McCain and see how they still apply here:

Assume everything is wrong. Fact check accordingly: This one still works wonders here, especially up at the top of this thing. The date he entered the service, his rank and the date of his marriage are all fact-based items that could easily have been checked against a dozen sources or digital documents. As noted in the McCain piece, when a person takes on a particularly important level of distinction in the world, newspapers like the NYT will usually start an obituary file for that person, so this thing has been on hand for a while.

That said, who knows who actually wrote that first draft of it or to when it was last reviewed? You shouldn’t grab something out of an old file and figure, “Well someone wrote it so it must be right” any more than you would grab an unmarked pill bottle out of a stranger’s medicine cabinet and figure, “Well, I’m sure a couple of these will probably help my headache.” As much as we venerate the “golden era” of the press, which consisted of a lot of typewriters clicking, lead-type machines and the concept of smoking indoors, those folks were people, just like us. They could have screwed up, just as easily as we can.

How you state something matters: When I taught sports writing, I provided students with statements to prove true or false and two of my favorites were:

  • “In the Open Era, which runs from 1968 to present, the person holding the most Wimbledon singles titles is Roger Federer with eight wins.”
  • “The team with the most NFL championships is the Pittsburgh Steelers, winners of six Super Bowls.”

The first one is something half of the students get wrong because they look up Federer, see he won eight singles titles, see no one above him on the list of winners for men and say it’s true. However, the word “person” isn’t synonymous with “men.” The athlete (or person) with the most is Martina Navratilova, who won nine singles titles. The second one is wrong because the Green Bay Packers won 13 NFL titles (most of them in the pre-Super Bowl era), so even thought Steelers have more Super Bowls, the Packers have more titles.

The line in the obituary for Lugar that got some criticism falls along these lines. Lugar pushing for something didn’t mean it encountered heavy resistance. That’s probably at least part of the problem associated with the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program correction, although I’m not entirely sure how they missed by more than a decade.

Beware of “-est” statements: The obit’s correction didn’t have any of these errors, which was the case with McCain’s, but that might have just been a fortunate bounce, given the use of “-est” statements:

His greatest legacy, though, remains his work toward reducing the threat of nuclear arms.

Security was upgraded at nuclear weapons sites, at a time when the greatest fear was that a terror group would take advantage of the chaos in Russia or in one of the former Soviet states and buy or steal a weapon.

Friends said that this was Mr. Lugar’s most significant exposure to geopolitical thinking, and probably the single greatest source of his fascination with foreign policy.

In these statements, the writer’s good luck had him attempting to quantify things that could not be accurately quantified, such as a “greatest” fear” or “greatest source.” People can quibble with those. In the case of the McCain obit, calling the fire on the Forrestal the “deadliest” incident could be measured (and proven wrong, as it was).

As a word of warning, you need to make sure that you have something nailed down perfectly before you issue an “-est” statement. The “deadliest” attack. The “longest” game. The “greatest” comeback. Those things need to be quantified and verified. Any time you see an “-est” in a story you are editing or you include one in a story you are writing, make absolutely sure you are correct.

Ask for help: One of the many benefits of newsrooms is the presence of other people who know stuff. You might worry that asking for help or having someone look over your should could make you look stupid or weak. However, what’s a worse crime: Looking dumb in a newsroom (and spoiler alert- you won’t look like that when you ask for help) or looking dumb in the general public? If you don’t know something, ask. It really works.

No comment or late comment: How long should you wait for people to speak up on their own behalf?

Student media adviser and blogging guru Kenna Griffin sent this out on Twitter today and it got me thinking about our rights and responsibilities regarding fairness to sources:

Griffin1

Her blog post, which you can read in its entirety here, touches on a lot of good issues in regard to fairness, transparency, accuracy and the importance of the story. She also makes some good points about how things have changed in the digital age versus the newspaper’s “hard” deadline.

I often found that the hard deadline was a double-edged sword: I got more time to wait for someone to call me back because I didn’t have to send the story to press until 1 a.m.. That said, it also meant that if I caught a late-breaking story and only had until 1 a.m. to get it out the door, some people weren’t going to be around for comment, thus leaving me with a weaker piece.

Digital deadlines mean you can send stuff to your readers whenever you want, which is great when you have content worth sending. However, I know from personal experience, that when I’m waiting for a quote from someone and I have the ability to just hit “publish” and move on, I get really twitchy. Patience is a virtue, but not one with which I have been endowed…

Griffin lists some key thoughts about the best practices for deciding when to wait and when to pull the trigger. Here are a couple others that I’d add, especially for those of you working in a digital field:

  • Will waiting longer likely lead to a comment? In some cases, you have worked with a source and that source is usually pretty good about getting back to you, so the wait makes sense. In other cases, you are more likely to find a unicorn playing bass in a punk band than you are to get a quote back from a source from which you requested an interview. If you think time is likely to lead to success, hold on to the piece. If not, publish it as soon as it’s as good as it’s going to get.
  • Is this a case of “ostrich syndrome” on the part of the source? The legend involving ostriches is that when they become afraid, they stick their head in the sand, thus not seeing the danger, but clearly being no safer than they were before they did it. It’s not true, but it does provide us with a good jumping off point for how sources can be delusional regarding their interactions with reporters.
    A number of times, a source has tried to dodge a reporter’s call with the idea that if they can avoid saying anything about the topic, the reporter won’t be able to run the story. In those cases, I tended to tell people to run the story anyway, with an explanation that we tried to give this person a chance to say something. Just like any other form of bad behavior, you shouldn’t reward sources who try to kill stories by dodging you.
  • How permanent is your choice? This is a tough issue that tends to lend itself more toward student media outlets. When a publication comes out once per week, an unanswered claim or a one-sided story can become codified in the minds of readers before another source gets a chance to say something. Even more, if it the last paper of semester or school year, that decision not to hold a story for a comment can seem almost vindictive. However, if you run your media on a digital platform and you can update at a moment’s notice, the choice seems a lot less painful. When it came to the Oshkosh North Star situation, I felt pretty solid about publishing whatever it was I had in hand, even if I was still hoping for another quote or comment. I knew that if something popped up, I could tweak what I had. If I worked at a newspaper and it was going out this week only, on actual paper and I would never get another chance at it, I’d probably feel a lot more anxious about my choice to publish.

 

One last thing about the “no comment” issue: People who tell you “no comment” and then continue to talk are, in fact, commenting, so feel free to use whatever they tell you. It’s not your fault they can’t shut up. When people don’t comment, we used to joke about how to translate the way in which the “no comment” was listed in the story:

  • “Smith declined to comment:”  This essentially means you got a hold of the person, the person was decent to you and told you something along the lines of, “Look, I really can’t say anything or my boss/my manager/my spouse will kill me.” You feel bad for the source and you kind of understand.
  • “Smith refused to comment:” You reached the person who told you “Go (INSERT ACTION THAT DEFIES PHYSICS HERE) yourself and the horse you rode in on!” The person might also have been running down a flight of stairs, screaming “FAKE NEWS!” at you.
  • “Repeated attempts to reach Smith on his mobile phone, home phone, congressional email account, two fundraising dinners and his house in Yonkers were unsuccessful.” That weasel is dodging us…
  • “Smith’s whereabouts are unknown at this time and the Journal was unable to find him.” This guy might be dead.

Three things student journalists can learn from the coverage of the Covington Catholic Kids vs. Native-American drummer situation

The video of a white, male high school student wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, facing off against a 64-year-old Native-American man, who was drumming and singing went way beyond “viral” this weekend. In case you missed it, even though I have no idea how that would be possible, here is some background from the early stories on this situation.

From Indian Country Today’s website came one of the first looks at this:

Yesterday, following the first annual Indigenous People’s March in Washington D.C., YouTube user KC NOLAND released a video showing a large group of youths wearing “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) hats and other Trump paraphernalia taunting a Native American elder playing a ceremonial drum and singing a song.

According to reports, the youths were in attendance for the March for Life, a pro-life action occurring at the same time as the Indigenous People’s March. According to organizers of the Indigenous Peoples March present for the exchange, Phillips was aggressively surrounded by more than 30 counter-protesters.

Many, like the Washington Post, relied on an Associated Press wire report, to outline the conflict:

The Indigenous Peoples March in Washington on Friday coincided with the March for Life, which drew thousands of anti-abortion protesters, including a group from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills.

Videos circulating online show a youth staring at and standing extremely close to Nathan Phillips, a 64-year-old Native American man singing and playing a drum.

Other students, some wearing Covington clothing and many wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and sweatshirts, surrounded them, chanting, laughing and jeering.

The New York Times followed with a narrative approach to the story, using movement and tension to lead into the main topic:

They were Catholic high school students who came to Washington on a field trip to rally at the March for Life.

He was a Native American veteran of the Vietnam War who was there to raise awareness at the Indigenous Peoples March.

They intersected on Friday in an unsettling encounter outside the Lincoln Memorial — a throng of cheering and jeering high school boys, predominantly white and wearing “Make America Great Again” gear, surrounding a Native American elder.

The episode was being investigated and the students could face punishment, up to and including expulsion, their school said in a statement on Saturday afternoon.

In video footage that was shared widely on social media, one boy, wearing the red hat that has become a signature of President Trump, stood directly in front of the elder, who stared impassively ahead while playing a ceremonial drum.

What followed was not surprising: Politicians decried the incident, thousands of people signed an online petition that called for the school’s principal to be fired and memes comparing these students to all sorts of unsavory things hit the internet.
What also followed was the news media starting to reconfigure its position a day later, as you can see in this add to the top of the NYT’s original news story:

Interviews and additional video footage have offered a fuller picture of what happened in this encounter, including the context that the Native American man approached the students amid broader tensions outside the Lincoln Memorial. Read the latest article here.

The Times then followed with this story:

A fuller and more complicated picture emerged on Sunday of the videotaped encounter between a Native American man and a throng of high school boys wearing “Make America Great Again” gear outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

Interviews and additional video footage suggest that an explosive convergence of race, religion and ideological beliefs — against a national backdrop of political tension — set the stage for the viral moment. Early video excerpts from the encounter obscured the larger context, inflaming outrage.

Other media outlets also did something between a backpedal and a retraction, now seeking “nuance” or “a broader understanding” for the incident.  Nick Sandmann, the student who is now infamous for his face-to-face encounter with Omaha elder Nathan Phillips, issued a lengthy statement to media outlets on Sunday, in which he states that he was not mocking or insulting Phillips. A longer video from another vantage point includes the interactions between the students and a third group, which had made hate-filled and racist comments toward the students.

As news consumers, the degree to which you believe any particular position taken by any of the groups or individuals in terms of who did what to whom is entirely up to you. That said, as student journalists, there are three learning moments you can take from the media coverage of this event:

 

Fast is good, accurate is better

The speed at which this whole story hit mainstream media makes the adrenaline shot in “Pulp Fiction” look measured and nuanced by comparison. The NY Times, the Washington Post and other venerable outlets seemed to run from pillar to post, looking for reaction from everyone who ever touched a keyboard or attended Catholic school.

As that happened, everyone tangentially attached to this, from the school’s administration to the mayor of a city that doesn’t actually contain that school, issued statements condemning the unholy hell out of the students as quickly as possible. People tried to identify as many of the students as possible online. Each outlet appeared to try to add something “extra” to the story, relying on tidbits of varying value.

The problem? A lot of stuff wasn’t accurate. For example, a publication quickly identified the wrong student as being involved in the face-to-face moment, only to have the Lexington Herald Leader issue a correction for the internet at large. In addition, an internet troll claiming to be Nick Sandmann’s mother made disparaging comments via the @gauchoguacamole Twitter account about Native Americans and smallpox, which led to more confusion. Twitter also suspended an account that purported to be from a California teacher, but was not, that made “deliberate attempts to manipulate the public conversation on Twitter by using misleading account information.”

Who was “legit” and who was trying to just mess with people? Nobody seemed to know, but a lot of it managed to leak into varying media outlets on the web. Even more, the Times and others tried to excuse themselves from their roles in this disaster-bacle by stating “a fuller and more complicated picture emerged.” (Saying something “emerged” is a nice way of absolving yourself of something and roughly translates to, “Hey, we didn’t find everything necessary to understand the whole story, but now that everything is a toxic waste dump out there, let’s slow up and take another shot at this.”)

Even the March for Life, the organization the students arrived to support, had to issue a statement backing off of its original condemnation, noting, “We will refrain from commenting further until the truth is understood.”

That’s a pretty good policy for people in general and journalists in particular: Don’t write something if you don’t know it to be accurate. It’s easy to figure, “Hell, the information is out there so it MUST be true enough to use for my piece,” but that’s not how journalism works. Your job is to find out what actually happened, write as much of it as you possibly can in a coherent and accurate way and, when you’re sure your work is ready to undergo the crucible of public scrutiny, publish it.

If you can do all that quickly, fine. If not, slow down and get it right first.

 

The duty to report is not the same as the duty to publish

One of the big debates online was if the students in the video, particularly Sandmann, should be identified. Some media outlets chose not to do this, while others seemed to treat this as sport:

Namethekids

(It’s “Allegedly Racist Pokemon!” Gotta catch ’em all!)

One particularly long Twitter thread outlines the way in which the author got information on Sandmann and then chose not to “out” him by name. The rambling (and somewhat sanctimonious) nature of this thread aside, the author does bring to bear a bigger issue: Just because you get the information, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you should publish it.

Each time you write a story, you are actively engaging with the material in a way that leads to a particular “frame.” You provide your readers with certain information and discard other information that may not see the light of day anywhere else. In many cases, these choices are easy or run very little risk.

However, in cases like these, you can find yourself battling different instincts. You want to add something to a story, but you don’t want to hurt someone. You want to shine a light on something important, but you aren’t sure about the quality of a source. You feel pressure to “get the story out” but you don’t know if you have adequately considered all the ramifications of your actions.

Those thoughts, and others like them, are all completely normal and do not make you a bad journalist. In fact, they make you a pretty good human being.

This doesn’t mean you should be a wimp when it comes to your reporting, nor does it mean you should go all Vic Mackey from “The Shield” on people. Report to the best of your ability and ask whatever questions you need to get as much information as you can. However, before you put anything before the public, review what you have and decide how important you think it is. Then, make choices about what gets published and what doesn’t. Just because you got the information doesn’t mean you should publish it. That’s what we call editorial discretion.

 

Objectivity is still an admirable goal

This is a truly odd time to be a journalist. The term “fake news” gets tossed around a lot. The public seems to have less trust in us than at any other point in recent history. Media outlets (and I use that term loosely) do not always abide by the same ethical and professional norms you learned in your Intro to Mass Media class. “Everyone” is an expert and yet “nobody” knows what they’re talking about. The idea of “gathering information from all sides” seems quaint to some and almost villainous to others. To say, “I’m not sure yet” or “We need to hear from everyone” will sound to some people like you’re an apologist, a coward or a hypocrite.

Don’t worry about all that. Stick to the basic tenets of journalism and you’ll be fine.

Objectivity is like perfection: You will never truly attain it. However, as Vince Lombardi once noted, it’s important to relentlessly pursue it, because you’ll get something pretty good along the way: Excellence. It can seem pointless to hold back a name if “everyone” is publishing it or to “balance” a story when the truth seems so clear.

That said, journalists are paid to be fact-finders and skeptics. The job is to be nosy, find the facts and give them to your readers and viewers. They may not like it and they may not entirely believe you because “other people” have said more or have woven in stronger bits of unsubstantiated content. However, when you turn out to be right more often than not and the other sources implode, thanks to their own hubris, people will come around.

When is a smile a smirk? When is a cheer a jeer? When is contact a confrontation? I have no idea, but what I did know was that some people extrapolated based on their own preconceptions and ended up regretting it later.

The goal here is not to pick sides and fight for only the people on it. You need to figure out what happened and report the content. In a standard news article, you should stick to the facts, gather as many of them as you can and present them to your readers in the most direct way possible. Then, THEY can decide for THEMSELVES if the kid was smirking or trying to defuse a situation or if the noises the students were making were in the furtherance of school pride or blatant racism.

You’re not Superman. You’re Clark Kent.

“What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?” A good approach to accuracy in reporting and writing

Accuracy is key in everything we do, and that includes the proper use of terminology to describe crimes, accusations and other dicey topics. I groused about this a long while ago when I noted that the use of “allegedly” makes me twitchy.

As a night-cops reporter, and later a cops editor, I found myself parsing the language a lot, arguing with people who wanted to “simplify” headlines or sentence construction. As I grew into those roles, I realized that big differences exist between certain terms and that I’d rather have ugly sentences than wrong ones. If I’m a grump about this, it’s nice to know that I’m not alone. Here’s Mark Memmott at NPR on the topic of legal terms:

There were several Web summaries posted over the weekend that flatly said Jamal Khashoggi was murdered. We should not be doing that in any stories, online or on air. NPR agrees with the AP that:

“Homicide is a legal term for slaying or killing.

“Murder is malicious, premeditated homicide. …

“A homicide should not be described as murder unless a person has been convicted of that charge.”

This kind of thing always takes me back to a great scene in the movie, “And The Band Played On,” which describes the Centers for Disease Control and its staff’s attempts in the early 1980s to understand how AIDS behaved and spread. Each time they would gather to analyze some data or discuss some infection patterns, they had to remind each other to stick to the facts, using a simple phrase: “What do we think, what do we know and what can we prove?” In other words, they thought they understood how the illness was transmitted, they knew about how certain people contracted it, but until they could prove something concrete, they had to work harder to nail things down.

Based on the facts available, we know Jamal Khashoggi is dead, as multiple agencies have confirmed this and provided evidence to that effect. We think Khashoggi was murdered, given that multiple accounts of this indicate that the attack on him was planned at least 12 days in advance of the incident. That said, until this is proven in a court of law, we cannot PROVE a charge of murder on any of the individuals involved. For now, we can say he is dead, someone killed him or that there is an investigation into a homicide. It may seem like splitting hairs, but that’s why we have AP as a rule book to help us out.

Memmott also goes into a discussion about the phrase “arrested for” in describing an individual and a crime:

Compare these headlines and you’ll see why “for” is a problem:

  • – “Former USA Gymnastics President Arrested For Tampering With Nassar Evidence.”
  • – “Former USA Gymnastics President Arrested, Accused Of Tampering With Nassar Evidence.

And these:

  • – “House Intern Arrested For Reportedly Doxing Senator During Kavanaugh Hearing.”
  • – “House Intern Arrested, Charged With Doxing Senator During Kavanaugh Hearing.”

His point, which I thoroughly support and frequently make, is that saying someone is “arrested for” something means we know they did it and they have been convicted at some point. It conveys guilt when something isn’t proven, much in the same way “allegedly” or “alleged” do.

Think about it this way: Your professor sees you messing around with your phone during a test and assumes you are cheating, thus he kicks you out of class. It turns out you just got a text from your mom that your dad was in a serious accident and is being rushed to the hospital. Thus, you were understandably worried and trying to find out more information.

In this scenario, you are an “alleged cheater,” in that “allegedly” means you are said to have been a cheater by someone (in this case the professor). It would be even worse if the professor announced that he kicked you out of class “for cheating on the exam.” Clearly in this scenario, you haven’t cheated, but either use of verbiage doesn’t make you look all that great.

In applying the “Band” approach, your professor thought you were cheating, he knew you were messing with your phone during a test, but he couldn’t prove you used your phone to cheat (and he would turn out to be wrong once he tried).

This is why attributions (see the “said” post from the other day) matter and it’s a much better way to go: “Beth cheated on the exam, professor Bill Jones said.” or “Professor Bill Jones accused Beth of cheating on the exam.” Both cases demonstrate the “innocent until proven guilty” mantra we espouse around here. The attributions keep you on the side of accuracy and prevent you from getting into trouble if something turns out to be not what it seemed.

The “What do we think, what do we know, what can we prove” approach goes a long way in helping journalists remain accurate, so give it a chance the next time you find yourself digging around in some murky territory.

 

A serial toilet clogger, school land purchases and a tour of a “Vulcan” mine: Look for local impact in your news reporting

Roseanne’s racist tweet, Trump’s attacks on his own attorney general and the tenuous nature of North Korea’s potential disarmament dominated the news this morning.

Question: How much does any one of those events impact readers in your area?
Answer: Somewhere between “very little” and “not at all.”

When it comes to how you should fashion your news judgment, stick to the idea of audience centricity and look for local pieces that will matter just as much, if not more, to people in the area. This isn’t to say ABC cancelling “Roseanne” isn’t important, but it is to say you’re probably better off letting someone else carry the water on that one as you go out and do some digging into local matters.

Here’s an example of a local story in a small town that affects people: A school board is looking into a $600,000 land purchase:

The Oconto Falls School Board continues to explore a parcel of land that is going up for sale near the high school and elementary school as a possible site for a future middle school.

Superintendent Dean Hess told the board at its May 14 meeting that the property is across County Road I from the high school and elementary school complex.

“Recently, I was contacted by counsel for the Gauthier family to let me know that they would be working with a third-party representative and also a Realtor to offer that land, make it available, and the school district would be one of the parties that they would be contacting specifically for that potential purchase,” Hess said.

The board first learned about the property’s availability a few months ago. Although a decision is at least five years away, the aging Washington Middle School will need to be extensively renovated or replaced, and the proximity to the existing schools makes the property attractive for a new school.

It’s not exactly the most earth-shattering writing, and the issue of the money, the need for a public vote and other goodies are tucked way down in the story. Still, it’s an important topic for an area like this and it’s likely to have local folks talking.

Local pride is also something good local publications should pay attention to. Consider this 60th anniversary piece on the Iron Mountain Iron Mine:

VULCAN — For six decades, visitors from all over the world have taken a train ride 2,600 feet underground to experience part of the region’s heritage.

The Iron Mountain Iron Mine this year is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the first walking tour at the popular tourism attraction in Dickinson County.

Karen Secinaro, who is starting her fifth year as manager, couldn’t be prouder of the business started in 1956 by both her father, Eugene Carollo, who will be 90 this year, and her late uncle, Albert Carollo.

“It’s wonderful. It’s been an honor managing the family-owned business for the last four years. We have lots planned for our 60th year,” Secinaro said.

The family angle needed to be explored more in this write up, but I couldn’t pass up a mining story with the dateline of “Vulcan.”

One of the biggest things locally owned, locally based media outlets used to have going for them was that sense of knowing what really mattered in a community. It could be school boards and farm land or it could be tornado shelter regulations and hunting season. Even more, they were intrigued at the local level when things happened that had people talking. Unfortunately, a lot of that eroded with mergers, conglomeration and the proliferation of 24/7 talking head TV. Your job is to find things that matter to the folks around you who read your coverage and watch your local news and report on them.

Case in point, another weird Sheboygan County story. We might finally learn what compels a man to repeatedly clog a women’s public toilet with 20-ounce soda bottles for more than a year. Police arrested a suspect on Memorial Day.

Can’t wait to hear the answer.

Oy vey: How to avoid being a shmendrik or a schmo when working with Jewish terms and topics

I often joke that one of the best Easters I ever had was the time I celebrated Passover.

It was one of my first years living alone in Missouri when my friend Adam asked if I’d be interested in coming over for Passover Seder, a traditional meal with family and friends often held on the first night of Passover.

I spent half the night asking two basic questions: “What does X thing we’re doing now mean?” and “Is there meat in this?” (The Seder took place on Good Friday, so I had that no-meat thing happening as a Catholic kid.) Adam, Lee and all the folks who had done this before were more than happy to help me figure things out. My only regret is that they let me eat too much matzoh, which felt like it was expanding in my stomach and making me want to die.

This week marks the end of Passover for this year, so in honor of the timing of this event, I thought I’d roll out some of the worst media errors tied to misunderstanding, misinterpreting or just just screwing up things associated with Judaism and a couple basic rules to prevent making these mistakes in the first place.

 

If it doesn’t make sense, ask again

A lot of people will have trouble capturing quotes from sources who use terms that are unfamiliar to them. This is why it’s always important to ask the person to either repeat the quote or clarify it. If you don’t know something for sure or it’s not making sense, don’t use the quote. That will help you avoid a correction like this one:

SittingShiva.jpeg

The term “sitting shiva” refers to a week-long period of mourning in the Jewish faith. Close relatives of a person who died stay at home and greet family and friends. According to Forward.com, the New York Times similarly screwed up a shiva-related item in its coverage of “JSwipe,” an app for Jewish singles that is akin to Tinder. (The paper also misused another Jewish term, yentas.) If the reporter didn’t know that was what the sheriff was referring to, that might be fine. However, I have no idea who thought people would “sit and shiver.”

The Wall Street Journal made a similar gaffe in quoting someone, who was discussing a story from the Old Testament:

IraqARock

The story at issue came from the Book of Numbers, in which the Israelites had become angry with Moses for bringing them out of Egypt to a place with no food or water. God instructed Moses to strike a rock with his staff and when Moses did, water flowed from it. (I’m paraphrasing a bit here.) However, the Journal reporter referenced a country that didn’t get any version of that name until the third century (at the earliest) and wasn’t modernly defined until the 20th century. Even if it had been around, it’s unclear why the reporter thought Moses decided to undertake a 500-mile irrigation plan.

Basic rule: If you’re not sure, ask again. If it still makes no sense, don’t use it.

 

“Like a Christmas tree to celebrate Easter”

Just because something is associated with a group, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you can just slap it on anything you’re doing about that group and call it good. One of my friends pointed me to this photo that was used in a tweet by a political organization in Canada to wish people a “Happy Passover:”

ndp_passover_tweet_cropweb.jpg.size-custom-crop.1086x0.jpg

As news reports on the issue pointed out, the two people here are making challah, a braided egg-bread that is eaten on almost every Jewish holiday. The problem? Passover is one of those outside of the “almost every” holiday list, as leavened items are banned. It took several hours for this tweet and image to come down, as the one person who had access to the group’s social media account couldn’t be reached.

A fellow educator pointed out a similar problem when it comes to the use of menorah photos in ads or with news stories:

(This is like) using the wrong menorah for Chanukah on the promo. There are two kinds of menorahs: the Chanukah one has 9 candles and the weekly one has 7.

Basic rule: Not all symbols are created equal, so don’t try to “spruce up” your coverage of something based on a limited understanding of the topic. It’s akin to having someone who doesn’t understand Christianity say, “Happy Easter! I brought you a pine tree!”

 

Look it up

The initial title for this post involved the word “putz.” I looked it up and found out that, although the colloquial version of this word roughly translates to dummy, twerp or idiot, it literally means “penis.” I then moved on to shmuck (or schmuck in some cases), only to find that this word, too, literally means “penis.” In short, I learned two things:

  1. My knowledge of Jewish insults isn’t as great as I thought it was.
  2. It seems most of the insults I knew had something to do with male genitalia.

The point is that I looked these things up before assuming I knew what it meant so I didn’t embarrass myself when I misused the word. I also found that there are multiple spellings and some difficult pronunciations to some words. (The Jewish-English Lexicon was a real lifesaver.)

This revelation could be helpful for people who are in broadcast and might not be able to sound out the words they want to use:

Chutzpah refers to things like nerve, gall and shamelessness. I would argue it takes some serious chutzpah to try to fake your way through a pronunciation on live TV.

Or to just “guess” at a word because it sounds close, as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker did in a letter to a Jewish constituent. Walker signed off the letter with the line, “Thank you again and Molotov!”

Walker was trying to come up with “mazel tov,” a term that means “congratulations” or “good fortune.”

On the other hand, Molotov is generally used as a shortened reference to a “Molotov cocktail,” which is a bottle-and-wick fire bomb:

 

Molotov-cocktail-design

Basic rule: The dictionary never hurt anyone, so don’t be afraid to use it.

In picking through these various levels of disaster-bacles, I hit up a bunch of people I know who have a better overall understanding of the faith, the traditions and more to see what they thought when they saw this. Adam, who ended up being the best man at my wedding years later, chipped in to the conversation with some good advice that I thought would bring this post full circle:

To me this just gets back to fact-checking 101. If you don’t understand a court hearing you went to, ask a veteran lawyer or judge or even a reporting colleague to explain what just happened. Don’t understand a Jewish ritual? Same deal. Ask a rabbi, or somebody at your local campus Hillel, or a Jewish colleague, etc.

When I covered Roman Catholic services or other news events, I double- and triple-checked every dang detail, even the ones I thought I was pretty sure about. And nobody with the diocese, or my Catholic colleagues, minded that I asked and asked and asked again. They were happy I was trying to be accurate.

In my view, there’s no more or less of an excuse for screwing up a Jewish fact as any other fact.

 

 

 

 

3 lessons beginning sports writers should learn from the 16-seeded UMBC Retrievers win over No. 1 Virginia

Sports journalism thrives on record-setting performances, amazing finishes and moments when the impossible occurs. As the NCAA men’s Division I tournament began last week, one “unbreakable” record appeared safe: No 16 seed in that tournament had ever defeated a 1 seed in the tournament. In 135 chances, the 16 seed was 0-135.

The Retrievers of the University of Maryland Baltimore County ended that streak on Friday, defeating the top-ranked team in the tournament, the Virginia Cavaliers, by 20 points. People poured on to social media to relish the moment and celebrate the “David” who just took down “Goliath.” However, in calling the Retrievers the “first 16 seed to ever defeat a 1 seed,” people were factually inaccurate.

The women’s team at Harvard came to the NCAA tournament in 1998 as a 16 seed and defeated the number one team from Stanford, 71-67. Thus, the Retrievers were the first men to accomplish this task and yet not the first team to pull it off.

This leads to three simple lessons to take forward:

  • Don’t assume only men play: In a number of sports, men and women participate and women have the edge when it comes to records. For example, the person with the most open-era singles wins at Wimbledon isn’t Roger Federer with eight, but rather Martina Navratilova with nine. The person with the most goals in Olympic soccer history is Cristiane, a player for the Brazilian women’s national team. If you think something is a first, a last or an only, make sure to check both sides of the gender ledger before calling it a one-of-a-kind event.

 

  • Don’t assume  your level of competition is the only level out there: Sports have multiple divisions at the collegiate level (D-I, D-II and D-III), so just because a D-I team hasn’t pulled something off, don’t assume no one else ever has. When an NFL record is broken, keep in mind it isn’t the only “pro” league to ever exist, so if you are making a statement about all professional football history, make sure to check back on things like the WFL and the USFL. Or, just stick to calling it an NFL record.

 

  • Don’t assume that because “everybody said” something that “everybody is right: Watching the “first-ever 16 seed” (a redundancy that was almost as bad as the error itself) story fly around the internet had people piling on until someone decided to set the record straight:Harvard2

 

This leads to the main point of this post and the bigger overall lesson: Say ONLY what you KNOW for SURE. Don’t get caught up in the hype or assume something has NEVER happened just because you don’t know that it happened before or because “everyone knows” that something hasn’t happened. Instead, write what you can prove: No 16-seeded men’s team in this history of the NCAA D-I tournament had beaten a 1 seed in 135 attempts before UMBC defeated Virginia.

Your readers will still enjoy your work, the outcome is still impressive and you will have the benefit of being accurate.

The “Tragic Trib” and learning how to compete in an old two-newspaper town

In every phase of my news career, I was lucky enough (relatively speaking) to work in two-newspaper environments. As much as we didn’t like the idea that TV would occasionally beat us to the punch, we always feared what the afternoon edition of our competing paper would bring. It has been years since I had to worry about getting scooped, but I could easily recall that fear this week when a story began popping up in my social media. Several former students from the Columbia Missourian shared this story about the “tragic” gutting of the paper’s competitor, the Columbia Daily Tribune.

When I took an editing job at the Missourian, the city’s a.m. paper, we’d send someone running down the street around 2 p.m. to a newspaper box that contained still-moist editions of the Tribune. When the reporter would return with the paper, we’d tear the thing into sections, looking for stories that we had that were absent from the paper or something “they” got that “we” didn’t.

When the internet became more prevalent, the Tribune would post all of its stories online just before we had our news budget meeting. Our newsroom would be filled with reporters at computers, clicking the “refresh” button on their web browsers, trying to get the first look at what the Trib had. More often than not, we were on the short end of the stick and we had to scramble to catch up.

Working for the Missourian presented a unique challenge. The University of Missouri owned the paper and staffed it with professional-practice faculty as editors and students at the J-school as reporters, photographers and other staffers. The Tribune, on the other hand, was a professional, family-owned publication.

Reporters there had years of experience under their belts, along with an extensive set of relationships with sources throughout the area. Our staffers had trouble figuring out how to transfer a phone call.

Making things worse, sources on certain beats actively undermined some of our student reporters. It was infuriating to have a reporter catch a rare tip, work on it for days and then get a “no comment” or some other denial from a source, only to have the source turn around and give the story to a Tribune staffer. It was a sick feeling to read “your story” on the front page of the Trib with the writer slathering “told the Columbia Daily Tribune” attributions all over it.

As much as I really, really hated getting our butts handed to us on a semi-regular basis, it really helped me drive the reporters working for me on the crime beat to hustle like crazy. Living with the Tribune was like being a little brother: Your older sibling kicked your keester over and over and over again at EVERYTHING you both did. But, when you managed to pull off a win, it was like a Christmas miracle, a first kiss and hitting a game-winning home run all at once.

I know that the media environment is much more diverse these days when it comes to social media, citizen journalists and news-driven websites. Turf battles over a city or town by two monolithic traditional news operations doesn’t happen anymore and there’s something good to be said about a more diverse set of niche voices gaining volume.

However, the competition that existed between the two papers in that town helped shape and grow some of the best journalists I’ve ever been lucky enough to know. The Missourian reporters knew nothing would be easy, nothing would be handed to them and they had to hustle just to tie that damned Tribune every, single day.

I don’t know if it’s possible to replicate that kind of environment any more and I think in many ways, news consumers are the worse for it.

 

Obituary Writing: Telling truths, not tales, in a reverent recounting of a life

In a discussion among student media advisers, one person noted that obituaries are probably the second-hardest things journalists have to do frequently. (The hardest? Interviewing family members about dead kids.) When a person dies, media outlets often serve as both town criers and official record keepers. They tell us who this person was, what made him or her important and what kind of life this person led. This is a difficult proposition, especially given that people have many facets and the public face of an individual isn’t always how those who knew the person best see him or her. Couple these concerns with the shock and grief the person’s loved ones and friends have experienced in the wake of the death and this has all the makings of a rough journalistic experience.

The New York Times experienced this earlier in the week when it published an obituary on Thomas Monson, the president of the Mormon Church. The Times produced a news obituary that focused on multiple facets of Monson and his affect on the church. This included references to his work to expand the reach and the population of its missionary forces as well as his unwillingness to ordain women and acknowledge same-sex marriages. The obituary drew criticism from many inside the church, leading the obituary editor to defend the choices the paper made in how it covered Monson. (For a sense of comparison, here is the official obituary/notification of death that the church itself wrote for Monson.)

You will likely find yourself writing an obituary at some point in time if you go into a news-related field.  Some of my favorite stories have been obituaries, including one I did on a professor who was stricken by polio shortly after he was married in the 1950s. I interviewed his wife, who was so generous with her recollections that I was really upset when we had to cut the hell out of the piece to make it fit the space we had for it. Still, she loved it and sent me a card thanking me for my time.

Some of my most painful stories have also been obituaries. The one that comes to mind is one I wrote about a 4-year-old boy who died of complications from AIDS. His mother, his father and one of his siblings also had AIDS at a time in which the illness brought you an almost immediate death sentence and status as a societal pariah. I spoke to the mother on the phone multiple times that night, including once around my deadline when she called me sobbing. Word about the 4-year-old’s death had become public knowledge and thus she was told that her older son, who did not have AIDS, would not be allowed to return to his daycare school. Other things, including some really bad choices by my editor, made for a truly horrific overall situation in which the woman called me up after the piece I co-wrote ran and told me what a miserable human being I was. She told me the boy’s father was so distraught by what we published that he would not leave the house to mourn his own son and that she held me responsible for that. Like I said, these things can be painful.

No matter the situation, there are some things you need to keep in mind when you are writing obituaries:

  • Don’t dodge the tough stuff: Your job as a journalist is to provide an objective, fair and balanced recounting of a person’s life. The Times’ editor makes a good point in noting that the paper’s job is to recount the person’s life, not to pay tribute or to serve as a eulogist. This means that you have to tell the story, however pleasant or unpleasant that might be. One of my favorite moments of honesty came from hockey legend Gordie Howe who was recalling the tight-fisted, cheap-as-heck former owner of the Detroit Red Wings:

    “I was a pallbearer for Jack,” says Howe. “We were all in the limousine, on the way to the cemetery, and everyone was saying something nice, toasting him. Then finally one of the pallbearers said, `I played for him, and he was a miserable sonofabitch. Now he’s … a dead, miserable sonofabitch.'”

    It’s not your fault if the person got arrested for something or treated people poorly. If these things are in the public record and they are a large part of how someone was known, you can’t just dodge them because you feel weird. Check out the Times’ obituary on Richard Nixon and you’ll notice that Watergate makes the headline and the lead. As much as that was likely unpleasant for the people who were closest to Nixon, it was a central point of his life and needed to be discussed. In short, don’t smooth off the rough edges because you are worried about how other people might feel. Tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.

 

  • Avoid euphemisms: This goes back to the first point about being a journalist. You don’t want to soften the language or use euphemisms. People don’t “pass on” or “expire.” NFL quarterbacks pass and magazine subscriptions expire. People die. Also, unless you can prove it, don’t tell your readers that the person is “among the angels” or “resting in the arms of Jesus.” (Both of these euphemisms ended up in obituaries I edited at one point or another. They obviously didn’t make it to publication.) Say what you know for sure: The person died.

 

  • Double down on accuracy efforts: People who are reading obituaries about loved ones and friends are already on edge, so the last thing you want to do is tick them off by screwing up an obituary. I don’t know if this was just a matter of newspaper lore or if it was a real thing, but I was told more than once at a paper where I worked that there were only two things that would get us to “stop the presses:” 1) we printed the wrong lottery numbers and 2) we screwed up an obituary.
    True or not, the point was clear to me: Don’t screw up an obituary.
    Go back through your piece before you put it out for public consumption and check proper nouns for spelling and accuracy. Do the math yourself when it comes to the age (date of birth subtracted from date of death) and review each fact you possess to make sure you are sure about each one. If you need to make an extra call or something to verify information, do it. It’s better to be slightly annoying than wrong.

 

  • Accuracy cuts both ways: As much as you need to be accurate for the sake of the family, you also need to be accurate for the sake of the public record. This means verifying key information in the obituary before publishing it. The person who died might told family and friends about winning a medal during World War II or graduating at the top of her class at Harvard Law School. These could be accurate pieces of information or they could be tall tales meant to impress people. Before you publish things that could be factually inaccurate, you need to be sure you feel confident in your sourcing.
    Common sense dictates that you shouldn’t be shaking the family down for evidence on certain things (“OK, you say she liked to knit. Now, how do we KNOW she REALLY liked knitting? Do you have some sort of support for that?”) but you should try to verify fact-based elements with as many people as possible or check the information against publicly available information. Don’t get snowed by legends and myths. Publish only what you know for sure.

 

  • Don’t take things personally: Calling family, friends and colleagues of someone who just died can be really awkward and difficult for you as a reporter. Interviews with these people can be hard on them as well as hard on you. I found that when I did obituaries, I got one of three responses from people that I contacted:
    1. The source told me, “I’m sorry, but I really just can’t talk about this right now.” At that point, I apologized for intruding upon the person’s grief and left that person alone.
    2. The source is a fount of information and wanted to tell me EVERYTHING about the dead person. I found that for some of them, it was cathartic to share and eulogize and commemorate. It was like I was a new person in their circle of grief and they wanted to make sure I knew exactly why the person who died was someone worth knowing.
    3. The source was like a wounded animal and I made the mistake of sticking my hand where it didn’t belong. I have been called a vulture, a scumbag and other words I’ve been asked to avoid posting on this blog. One person even told me, “Your mother didn’t raise you right” because I had the audacity to make this phone call. I apologized profusely and once I hung up, I needed a couple minutes to shake it off. I knew it wasn’t my fault but it wasn’t easy either.

Your goal in an obituary is always to be respectful and decent while still retaining your journalistic sensibilities. It’s a fine line to walk, but if you do an obituary well, you will tell an interesting story about someone who had an impact on the world in some way. I like to think a story about this person who died should be good enough to make people wish they’d known that person while he or she was alive.

3 things journalism folk should learn from a troll during the Las Vegas shooting

Many people awoke Monday to the news that a gunman had killed 50 people and injured 400 more in Las Vegas. Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old man from Mesquite, Nevada who police have named as the shooter, was killed on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel after the attack.

Police said he fired repeatedly from the hotel onto a country western music festival happening across the street along the Las Vegas Strip. Witnesses said the shooting was relentless and police have no motive for the attack at this time.

For some people, it was a time to question who we are as a nation. For others, it was frantic search for loved ones and a time to mourn those they knew who died or who cling to life.

For still others, it was time to be an a-hole.

A Twitter user posting under the name “Jack Sins” posted that he was desperately seeking his father, who was missing after the attack:

JackSins

It turns out that this was a fraud. The profile photo was the same one used elsewhere to pull the same stunt during the Manchester attack. In addition, it’s an internet meme. The “lost dad?” He’s porn star Johnny Sins.

Mashable reached out to this user to find out why he would use a horrific shooting to do something like this. His answer is almost more repugnant than his actions:

Mashable reached out to the troll to ask why he’s spreading misinformation during such a critical time.

“I think you know why,” he replied. “For the retweets :)”

He also said he’d probably do it again.

The point of the post isn’t to shame this guy, as that’s got to be impossible, but rather to provide a learning moment for journalism students who are starting off in the field and might be inclined to rely on social media for information. Consider these three takeaways from this situations:

  1. If your mother says she love you, go check it out: Part of the thing that separates journalism folk from some other media users is a dedication to separating fact from fiction and providing accurate information. Early reports in the wake of a chaotic event are almost always inaccurate at some level, so journalists always have to proceed with caution. Even in this case, media reports note erroneous reports about additional shooters at other properties along the strip. Some of those are based on honest errors while others are simply rumors that spread. Your job is to go out there and figure out what is right and what isn’t before publishing it. That’s especially true of things you see from sources you don’t know, which leads to point two…
  2. Sources matter: One of the big things we push in J-school is the use of official sources acting in an official capacity for a couple reasons: a) It protects you in case of information being erroneous or potentially libelous, thanks to the issue of privilege; b) Official sources have names and titles you can verify and they also tend to be much more conservative with what they say because they know they will be held to account for it. However, in cases like this, it’s not possible to ignore the human angle and simply churn out police-report-level data. This is why interviewing people who survived, people who escaped and other similar “real people.” The biggest thing you should do is verify your sources before you publish them. The people at the scene have a somewhat easier time doing this, as many reports noted people covered in blood or hunkering near injured friends. It’s hard to fake that, even if they wanted to. However, social media users can be sending information from anywhere and can do so with impunity.
    To that end, you really need to fact check the heck out of your sources when you can’t do a face-to-face interview. Look at how long the source has been on that platform, how many followers they have, what other posts/tweets they have made and what other topics they have covered. Treat this vetting the way you would any other “anonymous tip” that comes to you from a source you don’t know. Unless you are sure, don’t repost it. It’s your reputation and the reputation of your news organization on the line.
  3. People can be a-holes: If you read the interview between this troll and Mashable, it’s a pretty safe bet your thoughts will be somewhere along the lines of, “What the hell is wrong with this guy?” Most people have gotten some level of internet hoax or email blast where a king in Naganaworkhere has a squillion dollars in gold that he wants to give you, once you send him your bank account numbers and we know that’s crap. It’s also a pretty easy thing to explain: Somebody wants to dupe rubes out of their money.
    When it comes to something like this, the question of “Why?” is less obvious. The retweets aren’t going to be all that helpful in a lot of ways. Sure, there are ways to monetize heavily trafficked social media accounts, but beyond that’s going to be a one-hit wonder at best.
    As much as many people want to believe in the best in people and help people in a time of crisis, there are some folks out there who just want to screw with you for no good reason. As an individual, that can feel like a sting when you realize you contributed to the spreading of false information on a “gotcha” prank. As a journalist, there are far larger impacts. It never feels good to question people in the time of crisis, but if you remember that not everyone has the best of intentions, you can reasonably and tactfully apply a healthy level of skepticism to claims like this.

Five “hurricane stories” you can write if it’s not even raining on your campus

When I worked in Mizzou at the Columbia Missourian, we would have our 3 p.m. editorial budget meetings each day where people from all of the desks of the paper would discuss the next day’s issue. Most of the content was local, as our reporters (students) scoured the area for whatever was happening within the confines of Boone County. However, we also had a wire/national editor who was responsible for pitching pieces that AP pushed out that day.

Every time a natural disaster would hit some part of the world, we always had the same conversation. The wire editor (a student) would pitch the story about it: “Hurricane (whatever one) just hit land (wherever it hit land). Officials say you have (whatever amount of damage and deaths). The senior member of our staff (a faculty member with decades of professional and educational experience) would always respond the same way: “When it starts raining on Cherry Street, let me know and we’ll run it.”

Her point was that until we had a local angle on something like that, our audience was likely to get news of the event elsewhere and that our job was to stick to stuff in our area. It was a bit deflating for the student wire editors, but the point remains a good one: You need to serve your audience, and in most cases, that’s going to be something local.

With that in mind, here are five basic “hurricane-related stories” you can dig into if your campus isn’t cleaning up from Harvey or in the path of Irma:

LOCAL ASSISTANCE EFFORTS: This is among the easiest stories to do as a localization, in that the urge to help people who are hurt is a natural one. You can look to your school itself to see if it’s taking donations of food, money or other needed items to send to the victims of the hurricanes. You can also look to see if any student groups are doing anything of a similar nature. Fraternities and sororities often have national offices that can coordinate larger efforts among their member chapters, especially if they have chapters on campuses in the path of the storm. Look at any student organization that is usually doing some sort of “help-based” initiative like working with Habitat for Humanity or doing Alternative Spring Breaks, as they might have a plan to head to the area and assist in the recovery efforts.

LOCAL CONNECTIONS: Another smart localization opportunity comes from finding local people who have connections with the area of the disaster. Students in some cases live in those areas but are going to school on your campus. (During Hurricane Katrina, it turned out my TA for the newsroom lived in the path of the storm and still had tons of family down there. She actually watched her home wash away on CNN.) You might have faculty who have colleagues working in that area or students with friends attending schools affected by the disaster. Put out the Bat Signal on your various social media channels and see if you can find people willing to tell you what has happened to their friends and family and if they are planning to do anything in response to this. (After she got back from helping her family work through the aftermath of Katrina, Kim did a “first-person, as-told-to” piece that won several awards and helped her sort through her experience.)

YOU GOT A PLAN?: Not every campus will experience a hurricane, but most spots in this country have their own types of disasters that need a plan. You don’t want to hear this from your campus administration:

Some places deal with tornadoes, while other places deal with earthquakes. Some places get frozen  while other places get scorched. What plans are in place for your campus when the disaster du jour hits? How often does the campus review these plans and how much effort does the administration make in letting students know about them?

 

ARE YOU COVERED? Much of the discussion after a disaster is how how can people recover from it. From friends and former colleagues in the area, I’m hearing about how “wind coverage” isn’t the same as “water coverage” or “flood coverage” when it comes to insurance. Most people I knew in college were lucky enough to think about getting any kind of coverage for any kind of disaster, ranging from a tornado hitting their apartment complex to a roommate who escaped under the cover of night with their laptop.

Renters insurance is always an interesting topic in terms of cost and value. It’s also worth a look into seeing what kinds of coverage kids who live in dorms have. So, if a pipe explodes in the dorm, some idiot with a homemade waffle iron burns down half of Smith hall or the “there’s no way a tornado hits us” proclamation turns out to be false, how safe is their stuff? Some places have limitations on how much money they’ll cover or what can be replaced. Clothing, in particular can be a costly thing:

Look into what mechanisms are in place to help people recover if something bad happens in your area or what precautions they should take in terms of insuring their stuff to make recovery more possible.

 

A SHARED EXPERIENCE: I have never lived through a hurricane or an earthquake, but I once experienced a tornado running nearby. The two-inch-thick galvanized-glass windows in my apartment were bowing in and it was one of the first times I really wondered why I moved into a “tornado alley” area.

Many people in your area might not know what the disaster actually FEELS like in terms of the actual event, the devastation, the losses and the recovery. However, some people in your area might have lived through a similar disaster to the one you are covering, so go talk to them. You can learn a lot from watching CNN and hearing Wolf Blitzer use the word “devastating” in all of its iterations, but having a person known to your community explain what it’s like wading through chest-deep water in her living room has a completely different feel. Again, reach out and see who is available and what they can share.

Many other stories matter and will pop up through brainstorming, so if you think of something worth noting, feel free to chip in on the comment list below.

And for those of you in the area of Harvey, Irma and whatever the heck is behind Irma, please be safe. We need you.