The paper’s banner says, “We are patriotic blues lovers on buckle of the Cotton Belt.” The editorial says, “Don’t mess with the First Amendment.” The approach to website design says, “This site will download easily with your AOL free trial.”
THE LEAD: A judge in Mississippi, who had forced a local newspaper to remove an editorial critical of the city government from its website, reversed her decision on Wednesday, after the city dropped its lawsuit against the paper and the entire Fourth Estate lost its mind on her.
The judge, Crystal Wise Martin of Hinds County Chancery Court, lifted the order after Clarksdale city officials voted earlier this week to abandon their libel lawsuit against the local paper, The Clarksdale Press Register.
On Thursday, Wyatt Emmerich, the president of Emmerich Newspapers, which owns the The Press Register, said that he planned to republish the editorial at the center of the case.
It turned out, the city clerk drafted the notice, but forgot to send it to the paper. The clerk apologized, but the horse was already out of the barn. The city voted at its next meeting to sue for libel, and that the editorial was likely to create problems at the legislative level for the bill.
As part of the suit, the city asked the court to force the paper to remove the editorial from its website, which the judge did, prior to her subsequent reversal.
STUPIDITY ON PARADE: First Amendment proponents (and college students cramming for their media law midterms) can easily point to why both parts of the city’s claims are stupid.
First, a city can’t sue for libel like Clarksdale was doing and get away with it. The 1964 NY Times v. Sullivan case set the standard for this issue, in that a public figure must demonstrate that the publication acted with “actual malice,” meaning it knew it was wrong and did something anyway. In this case, it was clear the paper DIDN’T have the document and that was the crux of the argument.
The only place it comes close to being problematic is in the paragraph: “Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kickback from the community?” it asked. “Until Tuesday we had not heard of any. Maybe they just want a few nights in Jackson to lobby for this idea — at public expense.” However, you can’t libel someone with a question, which is how all those talking heads on B-list “news” outlets have gotten away with their outlandish crap for years.
(I’d love to try this some time for marketing purposes: “Can we assume that using textbooks other than those written by Vince Filak means your media instructor is a psychopathic pedophile with several dead bodies in their garage?” I think I just heard one of the folks at Sage drop like a stone…)
Second, nothing says, “Let’s keep this quiet,” like starting a lawsuit against a newspaper, thus GUARANTEEING everyone on Earth is going to find out about this and want to read it. In fact, the paper reestablished the editorial on its website after the court ruling, and you can read the paper’s piece here.
The Press Register claims a weekly readership of 7,750. To put that in context, we were cranking out about 14,000 DAILY COPIES of the Ball State Daily News in Muncie, Indiana when I was advising that student newspaper back in the 2000s. Still, something tells me the Google searches for that place could draw enough energy to dim the sun after this ham-handed censorship effort and it’s not because people were excited to learn about “the birthplace of the blues” all of a sudden.
“As I warned them, it blew up in their face and it created a national outcry,” he said. “It embarrassed the city, and they realized what they had done was a mistake.”
THE LEAD: The Trump administration barred several journalists from the Associated Press from reporting opportunities in and around the White House over the past week for not calling the body of water to the south of the country the Gulf of America.
“This is now the third day AP reporters have been barred from covering the president — first as a member of the pool, and now from a formal press conference — an incredible disservice to the billions of people who rely on The Associated Press for nonpartisan news,” Pace said.
The dispute began Tuesday, when the AP was informed that it would be barred from attending White House events because of the organization’s decision to continue using the name Gulf of Mexico, not the Gulf of America, as Trump decreed in an executive order last month.
BRIEF RECAP OF THE SITUATION: President Donald Trump declared that the Gulf of Mexico should actually be named the Gulf of America, a declaration he codified with an executive order on Jan. 20. He doubled down on this declaration, when he deemed Feb. 9 the first “Gulf of America Day.”
Apple and Google maps have made the switch to this nomenclature, even as media outlets and foreign officials have pushed back on this move. (Apparently Bing followed suit, but nobody really noticed because… I mean… c’mon… It’s Bing.) The president of Mexico has threatened to sue Google over this change, while the AP and the White House apparently remain in a standoff over the issue.
In this case, the AP tried to “split the baby” by both acknowledging Trump’s actions while also not letting 400 years of history and global tradition get scrapped with the stroke of a pen:
Screenshot
In short, “Here’s what we’ve always called it, here’s how it now impacts U.S. government stuff, here’s who can ignore it and here’s our best way forward.” Apparently, that wasn’t good enough for the Trump administration.
CAN TRUMP DO THIS (Part I) ?: The larger question of Trump’s right to rename the gulf unilaterally depends on the specific question being asked. As far as the U.S. government is concerned, yes, he can really do this and has. Reports indicate that both the Department of the Interior and the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), the official federal database of all U.S. geographic names, are moving in this direction.
In terms of what can be enforced upon the rest of the world, no. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea essentially established that countries have control of things like this only as far as 12 nautical miles from the coastline. (Mexico essentially makes this argument in its lawsuit against Google.) Also, as much as he might like it to be true, Trump does not dictate what everyone on the planet does. Therefore, his declaration has no jurisdiction beyond certain borders.
Generally speaking, the law dictates that the denial of a pass is within the rights of an administration, provided there is “an explicit and meaningful standard” to support its actions and “afford procedural protections.” That case did not say what it would take to revoke a pass, nor did it provide any clarity here in regard to who gets to go into the Oval Office or the Rose Garden or whatever.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: There’s a lot to unpack here and it’s not entirely one-sided. As much as I hate having to discuss the First Amendment an “it depends” kind of way, at least this time, it doesn’t involve porn.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is not entirely wrong in saying that a) covering the White House isn’t something everyone gets to do and b) the administration does have some leeway in how it controls who gets to go where when space is limited. I know I can’t just hop on a plane and demand access to the press room, let alone slide into the Oval Office for a chinwag with DJT, just because I’m writing a blog that dozens of people read.
It’s also no big secret that sources have always played favorites with media outlets. It would piss me off to no end when one of my reporters at the Columbia Missourian would call a police source about some story we had heard about and be told, “Nope… Nothing like that going on.” Then, miraculously, the Columbia Daily Tribune’s ancient cops reporter would somehow manage to break THAT EXACT STORY as an “exclusive” within two days.
I also used to hate the way that the Muncie Star-Press managed to have a great “buddy-buddy” relationship with the Ball State athletic office, so whenever something important would be going on (adding lights to the stadium, scheduling a nationally televised game), the Daily News kids would get shut out and the Star-Press would slather it all over the front page. To think the Trump administration would play more fairly with the national press than some yokel sources in the Midwest would with the local press seems to strain credulity.
Hell, it was so obvious he played favorites during his first term, John Oliver had some fun with it:
These kinds of things aren’t a blatant violation of the First Amendment, even if they feel petty and unfair.
All of that being said, I hate what Trump did here and I totally support AP’s position in regard to the coercive nature of this exclusionary maneuver. It does smack of favoritism, it does undermine their ability to spread information and it reeks of petty bull-pucky. I have a long-standing hatred for bullying, and that’s just what is happening here: “Do what we tell you to do, or else.”
This isn’t a new thing for Trump, nor will it be the only instance of it. I imagine there will be more than a few press passes getting yanked over the next few years, along with the obligatory lawsuits to get the Trump administration to back down. I also imagine that there will be additional significant efforts to cow the media throughout Trump’s reign. If there’s one thing this administration has consistently blessed with favor, it’s those who lavish unrelenting and uncritical praise upon the Dear Leader.
AP right now is in a game of “chicken” with the White House and I certainly don’t want the AP to back down. We could argue that nomenclature of this nature is petty and stupid (see the “freedom fries” debacle), but the bigger issue would be the press caving to power to curry favor. That’s the kind of loss of credibility that the AP could never get back once their reporters lost it. So, please, AP folks, for the sake of all of us out here trying to teach students how to do quality, unbiased journalism, fight like hell to get back what you have lost.
That said, the establishment doesn’t owe the AP a Snickers bar simply because they’re used to getting top-shelf treatment. I would argue that if you work for AP, you’re probably among some of the best, most-resourceful and dedicated reporters on the planet. You don’t get to the top of the heap like that be being spoon-fed and softly petted, so treat this slight like any other obstacle you would need to overcome.
I’d suggest you follow the lead from the folks getting the shaft at the Pentagon: “We’re going to work around this cheap ploy, because that’s what we do and we will not be deterred in holding the administration to account for its actions because that’s our job.”
This was the most traffic I got on a single post in one day since the opening of the blog. By 6 a.m. Thursday, I had more visitors than I have on most normal days. A former student hit me up on Facebook to let me know his friends had found it while Googling this topic and that my post was pretty high on the list. So, I took a look on Google and found this:
I’m now famous for all people who Google “Gorman Thomas” and “fart.” Mom would be so proud…
My post was at the very top of a Google search, something I never thought could happen on anything not sponsored. Apparently, I should have pivoted the blog away from journalism years ago and focused primarily on fact-checking retro-claims of the farts produced by athletes…
I guess if there are a couple key points to make about all this, they are:
I’m thrilled that so many people took the time to try to fact check the claim about Gorman Thomas, as it gives me hope that maybe we aren’t all digital lemmings. I’d be even more thrilled if folks were digging into things with a little more societal gravitas, but we all have to start somewhere, so let’s be happy for a moment on this one.
Oddity still remains a key interest element. Every time I rework the books for subsequent editions, I try to make sure that they’re aging well. When I pitched the FOCII mnemonic for knowing what tends to draw people to information (Fame, Oddity, Conflict, Immediacy and Impact), I could point to specific examples I was seeing to support each element. In each subsequent edition, things in the world kept getting weirder and weirder, so it wasn’t always clear if we had become kind of numb to Oddity. Apparently, we haven’t. Or we all just like the idea of lighting farts.
If someone out there knows Gorman Thomas and is reading this, tell the man I’ve got his back.
And tell him I’ve still got the ball he signed for me.
I hadn’t intended to turn the first week back into a First Amendment showcase of sorts, but real life has a way of dictating content, which leads us to today’s installment of “Weird Free Speech Situations Theater.”
A month after Kimberly Diei enrolled as a doctor of pharmacy student at the University of Tennessee, the college’s professional conduct committee received an anonymous complaint about her posts on social media.
The college reviewed her posts, which included racy rap lyrics and tight dresses, and concluded that they were vulgar and unprofessional. It threatened to expel her.
For the last four years, Ms. Diei has been fighting her school in court, arguing that her posts were fun and sex-positive, and unconnected to her status as a student. Now she has won a settlement: On either Wednesday or Thursday, she expects to receive a check for $250,000 — both vindication and relief, she said.
This situation, as well as the ones involving Joe Gow and Sam Kuffel had me thinking back to previous posts about the support of free speech and how the court cases involving it never are about benign speech. As Zach Greenberg noted in his interview with the blog, nobody tends to throw a fit when someone comes out as “pro-cute puppy photo,” so most free speech situations tend to be about things people find beyond the pale.
Thus, free speech advocates tend to end up with the “worst heroes ever,” to borrow a phrase from “The Suicide Squad” movie trailer. Here’s a look back at the first time we made that argument on the blog.
A rock star with a heroin problem, the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” guy and a foul-mouthed cheerleader: The Suicide Squad of free speech court cases
A frequent joke told among lawyers is that the best case is the one with a carload of nuns as your client and a busload of priests as your witnesses. In most cases, however, it seems more like this scene from “The Wire.”
When it comes to First Amendment law, it would be great if we had more cases in which polite, articulate young people like Mary Beth Tinker who quietly wore a black armband to school to protest the Vietnam War. Her choice led to hate mail and threats, but also a ground-breaking Supreme Court case regarding student free-speech rights. And, looking back on it now, people can understand better her underlying concerns about the war as well as her relatively mild statement against it.
Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) established that students do not shed their Constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. It also provided protections for students who wish to express themselves against intrusion from school overreach.
In 2017, ninth-grader Brandi Levy said on Snapchat some version of what stressed-out students have been saying on the back of the school bus since the invention of buses: “Fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything.”
The post was shared on a Saturday afternoon during a trip to the local convenience store, disappeared from Snapchat by Sunday afternoon, and caused no disturbance at school whatsoever—except to irritate the cheerleading coach, who banned Levy from the squad for a year.
She filed suit, and in June 2020, a federal appeals court ruled that school authorities violated the First Amendment by disciplining her for the off-campus speech. Now, the Mahanoy district is asking the Supreme Court to overturn that ruling.
The case doesn’t matter in regard to that single incident anymore. Levy is now a college student, the cheer team has had a complete turnover in terms of membership and nothing the court could do would change what happened in regard to the punishment levied at the time.
However, if the court decides to overturn that appeals court’s ruling, it could mean that schools can now actively monitor social media and punish students for ANYTHING that appears to be “objectionable.” If that doesn’t scare you, you probably had one of the six “really cool” high school principals I was always told existed somewhere.
Me? I dealt with a lot of nuns and balding guys who wore short-sleeve shirts with brown ties. This is terrifying…
This leads to the point of the post: It seems like we NEVER get the perfect Supreme Court case that perfectly showcases speech that deserves to be protected for the betterment of society. It’s never the student newspaper that was censored for reporting that the principal had stolen money or the kid with the bullhorn outside the school telling people not to eat cafeteria food because the workers were being abused.
It’s always something with an F-bomb, a nude pick or a drug reference that we get to stand behind and say, “Hey, look… You CAN’T censor this because… well… geez…”
We don’t get Superman, Batman, Aquaman or Wonder Woman as our defenders of freedom.
We get The Suicide Squad:
In other words, we get a “mental defective dressed as a court jester,” a “guy who wears a toilet seat on his head” and a “shark with hands,” to quote the red-band trailer I’m not allowed to show you here…
If you think I’m kidding about this, consider the following court cases on important topics:
A crucial Supreme Court case regarding speech at school sponsored events? Morse v. Frederick, also known as the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case. A student held up a sign at an event proclaiming the cryptic message. When the sign was taken away by school administrators, the student later sued claiming his First-Amendment rights had been violated. The SCOTUS ruled that schools have the right to remove pro-drug messages, even though students have some free speech rights at school.
Now, the question of whether students can get smacked around for writing things on their own time on their own social media that school officials dislike comes down to one foul-mouthed 14-year-old cheerleader.
The problem with all of these cases is that it becomes so much easier to suppress speech that is unpopular, vulgar or otherwise disagreeable.
If the reporters in Branzburg were protecting whistleblowers who had uncovered some sort of dark plot by a foreign government to go all “Red Dawn” on the U.S., it would likely feel better to the courts to support their interests in remaining anonymous.
If the school was trying to suppress speech about the superintendent stealing money from the district to buy weed, maybe a “No Bong Hits 4 Superintendent Smith” sign would have garnered a different outcome.
If the cheerleader had done her rant without the f-bomb, maybe the courts would be more inclined to side with her at every level.
However, we don’t get to choose the cases that decide our fate, which is why it’s important to make sure that we stand up for all speech because what one person thinks is a felony charge, others might consider a misdemeanor at best. In the mean time, keep an eye on this one, as it’s got a lot more at stake than a lot of people think.
The lawsuit argues the UW System’s decision to terminate Gow violated the First Amendment and flouted the UW System’s commitment to free expression.
“I think this is an important moment for free speech and I’d like to think this will result in a court saying you can’t fire someone for what they do on the internet on their own time,” Gow, 64, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It sounds grandiose but maybe we can get people to rethink pornography.”
Milwaukee-based attorney Mark Leitner filed the lawsuit on Gow’s behalf on Monday, the first day of spring semester classes at UW-La Crosse.
The regents apparently decided that the idea of Gow teaching students at a university he led for almost 17 years with few problems was going to be a bridge too far, so they stripped him of his tenure and fired him in 2024. At the time, Gow was in contact with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which helped him find legal counsel for a potential suit.
BLOG FLASHBACK: In September, we did a Q and A with Zach Greenberg of FIRE, who was nice enough to walk through the issues associated with the case as well as why FIRE felt this was a First Amendment issue. You can give that a read here.
A FEW UNPLEASANT REMINDERS ABOUT THE FIRST AMENDMENT:
To overcome the protections afforded in that amendment, it requires some very specific things: Fighting words, true threats and child porn are among the most clear cut. Something making someone feel uncomfortable or what might happen at some distant point in the future doesn’t clear that bar.
The First Amendment is about governmental action, which includes public institutions. As part of the First Amendment to the Constitution, the government generally does not possess the right to curtail free speech or free press. If Gow were working at Marquette University when this happened, he’d be out on his ass, no questions asked.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Long story short, this is essentially a game of “chicken” and has been since Gow’s porn stuff first became public knowledge.
Gow almost HAD TO sue, as to let things sit as they were would essentially be saying, “The UW System was right and I shouldn’t have been doing the porn thing.” In the same way, the university system almost HAD TO fire him and then brace for impact, because it’s not like the folks at the State House and State Senate aren’t already looking for 10,002 reasons to cut higher-ed funding in Wisconsin. To let this go would have every fire-and-brimstone legislator screaming about how not a dime of state money should fund “the UW Porn System!”
I also think the idea of him doing porn just makes the regents and Gow’s colleagues feel awkward and icky, so they don’t want to have to deal with him any more. I get it, in that nobody with a half-dozen siblings likes looking at their parents and being forced to think, “Wow, Mom and Dad really got busy a lot…”
Let me be clear: I have no problem with two consenting adults doing whatever they want to do together, so long as it’s not breaking the law. I also wouldn’t want to think about my boss doing a Porn Hub channel, nor would I want to see it. However, just because I don’t like something, it doesn’t follow that it shouldn’t exist and the First Amendment serves to protect the rights of all people in that regard.
I understand that certain things can and should lead to people being fired, but I tend to think of most of those as legal matters. Felonies tend to reflect poorly on individuals and therefore the companies that employ them, so that makes sense. Misdemeanors? I guess it depends on what it is, but it is up for debate. If I fail to yield the right of way to a roaming cow out here, I could be fined, but I don’t think I should be fired. Public urination? Yeah, that doesn’t look so great, so maybe…
From the 1940s to the 1970s, laws prohibited the silver-ball games due to their influence of “juvenile delinquency” as well as fear that they were morally bankrupt and would lead to gambling and other vices. In fact, it wasn’t until 1974 that the Supreme Court ruled that pinball was fine and it took until 1976 for New York City to start acting right. That was after both the Stanley v. Georgia ruling and the Miller v. California rulings that made porn passable in the country.
Back then, both were criminal offenses. Today, it’s totally cool for me to tell my students, “Hey, I’m working on a pinball machine I just bought,” while it’s less acceptable for Gow to announce in a classroom, “Hey, I’m working on a new film for Only Fans!”
The one thing I’m constantly left wondering in situations like this one, and the Sam Kuffel case we discussed Monday, is this: Exactly how much of my life does my employer have a right to control and who draws those lines?
The 31-year-old graduate of UWM had been doing TV weather reporting around the state of Wisconsin since about 2016. The posts she made after the inauguration were being lambasted on Milwaukee conservative talk radio.
In one post on her personal Instagram account, Kuffel posted a picture of Musk at the podium, saying, “Dude Nazi saluted twice. TWICE. During the inauguration.”
She added, “You (expletive) with this and this man, I don’t (expletive) with you. Full stop.”
Kuffel then posted a GIF from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” on Instagram along with the saying, “Screw that old (expletive). He’s a Nazi.”
By late Tuesday, she had made her Instagram account private.
Kuffel told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on Friday that she was, in fact, fired for the posts. She noted that she was “just voicing my personal opinion” on her private Instagram account, adding she was still processing the situation and weighing her options.
BACKGROUND: In case you were on Mars or one of the other planets Musk is apparently planning to conquer and missed it, Musk spoke after President Donald Trump’s swearing in and made two sweeping arm gestures.
For the sake of bending over backwards to provide a benefit of the doubt, let’s just say that those gestures had the same movement, angle, finger-stretch and general stridency associated with the “Sieg Heil” salute used during the Nazi Regime.
Unless there is a guy out of frame getting ready to hi-five Musk for an “and one” play during the NBA playoffs, this doesn’t look all that great.
Musk previously took heat for the antisemitism he allowed to foment on his Twitter/X platform, as well as his retweeting (or whatever we’re calling it now) of antisemitism. In 2023-24, as part of his “apology tour,” he ended up visiting Israel as well as taking a tour of the Auschwitz death camp.
A FEW BASIC (POSSIBLY UNPLEASANT) REMINDERS ABOUT FREE SPEECH: When a situation like Sam Kuffel’s hits the public eye, comments related to free speech, free press and other similar “rights” start flying all over the web and social media. To better deal with the situation, it’s important to keep a few basic rules of the game in mind:
The First Amendment is about the government: As part of the First Amendment to the Constitution, the government generally does not possess the right to curtail free speech or free press. What we’re talking about in the Kuffel case is a private enterprise making a decision about the activities of one of its employees. That’s different.
Law and ethics are completely different things: People have complained in various forums that the station should have stuck up for one of its own and kept Kuffel on the air. The question of if the news station SHOULD have fired her is one of ethics. The question of CAN the station fire her is one of the law. (See point one)
SOME ADDITIONAL UNPLEASANT REMINDERS: This situation mixes several key reminders I have to give my students each semester. These include:
Free speech (even when properly understood vis a vis the First Amendment) does not mean consequence-free speech. You can publish without fear of government intervention, but many other things can happen to you in court or the court of public opinion in terms of consequences for what you say.
Despite Kuffel’s contention that it was a “private” account, there is no such thing as private social media. Just ask this person. Or this person. Social media is available to EVERYONE and even if you have your settings locked on “double-super-secret-private pinky swear,” there is still a good chance it’s not going to remain “just among friends.”
In most cases, where you work has a social media policy in place that is meant to keep your posts as sanitized as a bleach bath and as sharp as a bag of cotton balls. Know what it says before you violate it and find yourself looking for work.
Think before you post.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Getting rid of Kuffel probably did a lot more harm than good in a number of obvious and oblique ways. I could do this for days, but let’s pick out a few key ones:
The optics are bad: Nothing says, “We are a proud member of the Fourth Estate,” like tossing the WEATHER PERSON under the bus after she made a stupid social media post. What? Were the higher-ups at the station worried that her disdain for Musk might lead to inaccurate forecasts over the next few months? (Spoiler Alert: She’s doing the weather in Wisconsin. It’s cold, colder and “holy crap, are your nostrils freezing together?” frigid.)
Seriously, you’re talking about a person best known for a weird weather beef with Erin Andrews. Her most recent piece for the station was about “pancake ice.” If you really worry about bias on the staff, start by getting Lance Allen to ask harder questions at the Packers press conferences.
If the theory is that if anyone at the station does something bad, then everyone at the station comes into question, OK. However, how is it that the station was totally cool hiring a journalist who got arrested at a Brewers game after a fistfight with another reporter? (Side note: Don’t include the phrase “is no stranger to Milwaukee, though” in his official station bio.)
Also, if you’re willing to dump the weather person, what happens when a news reporter wants to do a story that might lead to some upset people? If I worked there, I’d be asking for the “puppy and kitten beat” for the next few years.
You essentially killed a fly with a sledgehammer:Most of the experts that the news reports tried to find a balance in their comments. That said, they tended to agree that a) if there’s a policy that says “don’t call someone a Nazi on social media, even if they are a Nazi or we will fire you,” Kuffel likely had no cover and b) firing her seemed like overkill.
On point a, it’s likely not a policy like that. It’s probably some mushy “morals and standards” thing that the lawyers built into everyone’s contract to give them the right to fire anyone that the station felt did the company dirty. In those cases, it’s “fire her and let’s see if she’ll fight it.”
On point b, the station really did try to kill a fly with a sledgehammer. Kuffel was essentially saying what a lot of people were saying, although she used some “saltier” language to do it. It wasn’t on air, it wasn’t on the station’s social media and it probably wouldn’t have been a huge deal if we hadn’t suddenly become “Snitch Nation.” (More on that later.)
Google “reporter suspended” and “reporter fired” and you’ll a good number of examples to decide which category Kuffel’s situation best mirrors.
You embolden Snitch Nation: This is the kind of thing that probably wouldn’t have gotten much traction, if not for the amplification of outrage that is local talk radio. Conservative media host Dan O’Donnell basically lit the “Bat Signal” in this case, criticizing Kuffel’s posts and working his audience into a lather over it. At that point, the station decided it had to do something to move out of the crosshairs of O’Donnell and crew, so they canned Kuffel.
This sets a precedent that any decent third-grade teacher will tell you is bad: Someone does something that’s maybe not all that great and a giant tattletale starts yelling “OOOHHHH! MS. SMITH! MS. SMITH! MS. SMITH! DID YOU SEE WHAT SAM DID?????,” thus getting everyone else to start yelling, “OOOOHHH!!! SAM’S IN TROUBLE!!!” Thus, rather than apply grown-up logic, you overreact and whip out the punishment stick to get the noise to stop.
What that does is a) make everyone afraid of the loud tattletale and b) make it seem like being a tattletale is how everyone should act. Not a great idea. I can’t wait to find out what happens if O’Donnell gets a whiff of this blog post…
Letting loud idiots dictate your behavior doesn’t eliminate the problem. It literally leads to much bigger ones.
A MODEST PROPOSAL: As I was talking to Mom last night, she asked when the blog would be coming back and if I’d be covering this. After I assured her it was already half written, she asked what I thought would happen next on this. My answer is probably too logical and easy to make happen, but here it is:
If I had control of Weigel Broadcasting Co., CBS 58’s parent company, I’d quietly approach Kuffel and offer her another job at one of the other affiliates in the network, with the promise that Kuffel won’t sue for wrongful termination. This takes a potentially ugly legal battle off the table, gives Kuffel essentially a “suspension” instead of the death penalty and the company gets to keep a solid broadcast meteorologist.
I would also review the social media policies for the entire company and make sure a) they’re air tight, b) everyone gets a refresher course and c) the penalties for whatever will happen get spelled out clearly. This might also be a good time to let the news staff know where the network stands on backing its reporters if things get dicey or if anyone throws up a hissy fit. Or a Nazi salute.
Fresh off the press, I got my stack of the third edition of “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing.” Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I’d be lucky enough to get this far.
(NOTE: I’m still on break for a bit, but I needed to break the seal on the blog because a) some of you are already back at the classroom grind and b) I promised Sage I’d let people know what’s up with the textbooks I’m doing. I’ll probably pick up again after a week or so, or whenever the pinball machine I’m working on really ticks me off… — VFF)
THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS NECESSARY: I got home last night to find a heavy box on the porch from Sage. Inside were my author copies of the third edition of “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing,” which pressed over the holiday break.
I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you out there for, as Yogi Berra once put it, making this edition necessary. Somewhere along the way, you all made a choice to give me and this book a chance, and for that, I’ll be forever grateful. I know it’s not easy changing books for a class, adopting a new textbook or assigning any textbook in today’s “Textbooks are the overpriced devil, man…” world.
My goal in every textbook is to practice what I preach: Focus on audience-centricity. I want you and your students to get a ton out of these books and I want to make sure I never lose sight of who is out there and what you want/need out of me.
(The second goal is to adhere to my Polish-Catholic roots of feeding you as much as humanly possible. Whether it’s pierogi or information, we’re going to stuff you to the gills. Thus, the book updates and the blog: If you need ANYTHING I didn’t cover, tell me and it’s going up on the blog.)
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT THIS EDITION: Well, for starters, the cover is wicked cool… OK, maybe I’m the only one who cares about that. Let’s look into this a bit:
Artificial intelligence: This is the 800-pound gorilla in the room these days when it comes to anything having to do with content creation. Chapter 2 has been completely revamped to deal with how best to think about AI, what it’s good for in terms of media and why we aren’t ready to let RoboCop 2 take the keyboards out of our hands. In addition, more on AI and critically thinking about it are infused in the remainder of the chapters. We do more than a broad overview, instead focusing on how the tools can benefit you in the field and what you need to watch out for.
Audience Centricity:Not only has Chapter 1 gotten a refresh, but the rest of the book has gotten some additional elements that will help you figure out how best to use media tools to reach your audience, whatever that audience may be. Now, more than ever, we see shifts in what social media platforms can do, how news outlets provide content and who pays attention to our work. To make sure we’re all doing the best we can, we need to know who we’re trying to serve, what they want from us and how they prefer to receive it. Chapter 1 gives you the goods on the first part of that sentence, while the remaining chapters focus on the latter two parts.
Thoughts from a Pro:We have some of our tried-and-true pros back to offer their thoughts on what you need to know and why you need it, as well as some fresh faces with some new ideas. In addition, each pro gives us a few thoughts they have on AI as it relates to their work and the field as a whole. That should be helpful in demonstrating how significant (or maybe insignificant) AI is in various parts of the field, along with suggestions from professionals as to how best to use it.
Legal Wranglings: The law has been changing quite a bit (and apparently will continue to change in the upcoming few years), so keeping media operations on the right side of the law continues to be an ongoing challenge. With fresh examples and updates to legal outcomes, we give you a look at where things tend to stand in regard to reporting and writing as of this publication. (And I’m sure by the time I’m done writing this post, TikTok will be dead, brought back, challenged again and killed again like Jason Voorhees, so that’s why we have the blog…)
More goodies: As always, Sage is a treasure trove of add-ons and extra stuff for every book I do. The folks there have tons of lecture stuff, PowerPoints, test banks, exercises and more at the ready beyond what I’ve put into the book and the blog.
If you are interested in getting access to the new edition (digital, print or otherwise), along with all the extra stuff Sage has added, feel free to hit me up through the contact page or go directly to Staci Wittek at: staci.wittek@sagepub.com
She is truly the best person I’ve ever worked with in terms of sales and marketing and generally being awesome at book stuff.
But wait, there’s more…
TIME TO GET (MEDIA) LIT(ERATE): Back in August, “Exploring Mass Communication” hit the market, once again proving I either have too much time on my hands or I’m too stupid to say no to a project. In any case, this intro-level textbook turned into what I would like to say is the best book I’ve done to date.
I get the best mail from Sage…
This book is GREAT for any introduction to mass media/mass com class, but it’s even BETTER if you’re trying to teach media literacy to a nation of freshmen and sophomores. I didn’t realize that until someone told me, “Hey, why did you tell me you wrote a media-literacy text?” Turns out, it’s become popular in all sorts of classes for a number of reasons:
It’s cheaper than the other leading brand: In going through 128 reviews Sage sent me, I realized that the only thing all 128 reviewers agreed on was that price was a factor. I asked Sage if I could just write whatever I wanted if we re-titled the book: “Filak’s Five Dollar Book of Mass Com Stuff.” The answer was a hard “no,” but we did get the print edition to come in below other books like it. Even BETTER, the rental costs for digital copies are less than one-third of the cost of the print edition (especially if you go through Sage reps) and then there’s an even BETTER version of this….
The Vantage Advantage: “Nobody reads textbooks,” is what I keep hearing from instructors, who are actually desperate to get students to read the stuff in the book. Sage has built an entire digital system called Vantage that can plug into your Learning Management System (BlackBoard, Canvas, D2L or whatever people are calling it) so you can assign kids stuff digitally, track their efforts and generally oversee the class like the guy in “Sliver.” In addition, you can toggle how you want to spot-check the kids on their reading. There are quiz questions attached to various sections of the readings and other analytics that help you help them to learn. Even better? It’s cheaper than a print book. By a lot.
If you’re interested in giving this book a look, feel free to hit me up through the contact page or go directly to Staci Wittek at: staci.wittek@sagepub.com
This leads us to the upcoming edition of “Dynamics of Media Writing.” The “OG” book in the “Dynamics” series is in process as we speak. The goal is to have it to a copy editor by February, proofs done by April and out the door by August of this year. As is the case with the Reporting book, there will be AI additions, new pros and a ton of extra stuff. I’ll keep you posted as we go.
Thanks again for all of this. Without you all, these books would be dead after one edition and serving as a coffee coaster in the grad-student lounge.
(The system says, “We would never look to diminish your rights or take your hard-earned work away from you.” What the system actually does is more accurately depicted in the scene above.)
If you think this is as stupid as I do, please email system President Jay Rothman at president@wisconsin.edu and tell him not to let this policy pass.
THE LONGER, MORE NUANCED VERSION: Here’s a deep dive on the way the system is trying to recreate its copyright policy in a way that disenfranchises its faculty:
The UW System is proposing a new copyright policy that professors say would eliminate faculty ownership of instructional materials. The revisions are stoking alarm among professors statewide who say such a move would cheapen higher education into a mass-produced commodity.
“This policy change is nothing less than a drastic redefinition of the employment contract, one that represents a massive seizing of our intellectual property on a grand scale,” professors from nine of the 13 UW campuses wrote in a recent letter to UW System President Jay Rothman. “It would allow any UW campuses to fire any employee and nonetheless continue teaching their courses in perpetuity with no obligation to continue paying the employee for their work.”
Aside from owning faculty syllabi, lecture notes and exam materials, UW would also have ownership rights over the scholarship faculty create:
A draft of the new policy, obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, would eliminate existing copyright language and replace it with the assertion that UW System holds ownership of both “institutional work” and “scholarly work.”
<SNIP>
“Scholarly work” includes most of what professors produce, such as lecture notes, course materials, journal articles and books. The UW System transfers copyright ownership to the author, as is customary in higher education, but notes that it “reserves” the right to use the works for purposes “consistent with its educational mission and academic norms.”
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Given that I’ve got about a dozen textbooks in the field, I edit a journal that needs scholarly work to keep it running, I spent seven years crafting hundreds of blog posts and that I’ve built a ton of courses over my nearly 30 years of teaching, this was basically my calm, metered reaction:
I’ve already sent a copy of the proposal to Sage for its team of lawyers to go over, so I’m hopeful that I receive an answer along the lines of, “Calm down… Have a Diet Coke… This isn’t going to destroy what you’ve spent decades creating…”
In the meantime, let’s lay out how stupid and problematic this is:
The quality of your courses depend on the people you’re pissing off: We essentially went through this in my media-writing class today and a collection of sophomores and juniors understood it, so I’m hoping it might make sense to the Board of Regents.
I proposed the following scenario to one kid in the class: Let’s say you turned in a really good story as an assignment for this class. In fact, I thought it was so good, I took your name off of it, put my name on it and submitted it to the local paper. The paper then paid me $50 for the story.
I then asked the kid, “So, given that every time you turn in something good, I’m going to take it, put my name on it and make money from it, how likely are you to put forth your best effort in this class?”
The kid said, “There’s no way I’m going to do anything good for you anymore.”
Right. So, let’s play that out here: If every time I work REALLY hard on making good stuff for my class, the U is just going to claim it as its own, why would I bother to do anything more than the bare minimum to make my class work?
I guess you could make the argument that pride in our work and a desire to make things better for our students could inspire us to do great things, even in the face of a naked power grab by the system, but if you’re going to treat us like mercenaries, we’re going to behave that way.
This will stifle innovation, limit interest in developing new courses and create a general sense of animosity among faculty. It will also likely inspire professors to find new ways to hide stuff from the administration folks, as one person on social media suggested to me:
This stuff isn’t a product, but rather a process: Inherent to the system’s argument is the basic premise of work product: You built this stuff while you were employed by us and required to do so. Therefore, since we paid you for this, the stuff is ours.
That works in the private sector, where we’re tasked with specific outcomes and granted special provisions to create this kind of work product. For example, I know that when I worked at the Wisconsin State Journal, I wrote a lot of articles that the paper published. Implicit in my employment agreement was the premise that I was acting on behalf of the paper, writing things that the paper tasked me to write and publishing those things in a copyrighted publication. They own that stuff and I’m cool with that. I don’t think I’m ever going to want to republish a weather story I wrote in 1996, and if I did something cool I wanted to show my students, that’s acceptable use.
However, when it comes to my media-writing class, I didn’t get hired to write lecture notes and syllabi for that class. In fact, what I wrote was a tweaked version of something I’d been working on for decades. I’d drafted some of this conceptual stuff when I was working at UW-Madison, improved upon it when I was at Mizzou, reconfigured it at Ball State and then adapted it here. This isn’t like you hired me to bake a cake for your birthday. This is a tree I’ve been growing and tending for years and years.
The material might not be UW’s to steal: Even if you don’t buy the argument above, the instructors might not own the material they’re using in the first place.
Textbook publishers aren’t just sending out desk copies of a dead-tree books and telling fledgling professors, “Vaya con Dios.” They actually build a ton of back-end stuff into the educational packages they provide these days, which includes a lot of the stuff the system is trying to get its grubby little paws on.
I know for my books at Sage, we have sample syllabi, PowerPoint slides for lectures, notes for instructors, exercises and test banks crammed with questions. I might even be forgetting some of the stuff we provide.
(Shameless Plug: Sage really is amazing when it comes to this kind of stuff. If you ever need a book, check these folks out first, especially if you need some help with the shaping and molding of the entire class experience.)
These things are available to instructors because Sage built them to go along with the authors’ textbooks. The professors can use them as they are, add stuff, cut stuff or otherwise tweak what they receive. That said, it’s not theirs to sell or give away. Sage holds the copyright for this stuff and I imagine Sage and the other book publishers who pour a ton of time and resources into building these things would be more than a bit peeved if the UW System tried to claim it as its own.
The Coy and Vance Duke Theory of Education: When I was a kid, I loved “The Dukes of Hazzard” television show, which ran every Friday for about seven or eight years. The show involved two cousins, Bo and Luke Duke, getting into scrapes with the corrupt law enforcement of Hazzard County and doing amazing car chases in their 1969 Dodge Charger. Along with patriarch Uncle Jesse Duke and the lovely cousin Daisy Duke, the boys were “makin’ their way, the only way they know how,” to quote the theme song.
It was a simple show that drew a good audience and it seemed to work well. However, around the fifth season, John Schneider and Tom Wopat (who played Bo and Luke, respectively) got into a contract dispute with the studio over salaries. Rather than pay them and move on with life, the studio had the idea in its head that the car (the General Lee) was actually the star of the show, so it didn’t matter who was driving it and that they didn’t need these two pretty boys at all.
If ever there was a knock-off of a brand name, this was it. Like the original Duke Boys, one was blonde, one was brunette. They essentially wore the same wardrobe, had the same catch phrases and did the same insane driving stuff. That said, the ratings took a dump and after one season, Bo and Luke “returned from driving the NASCAR circuit” and Coy and Vance ended up fading from memory.
What the universities are doing here is essentially the same kind of thing. They figure, “Well, hell, if we have the notes, the syllabus and the PowerPoint slides, we don’t really need the professor who created them at the front of the room.” These folks assume that once we decide to leave, retire or whatever, they can just plug in an adjunct at a fraction of the cost and things will run like a Swiss watch. And that’s not just me being paranoid, as other folks see it as well:
I pretty much know my notes aren’t going to be helpful to other people as I wrote them based on a lot of my experiences in the field. Notes like (BUS FIRE STORY GOES HERE) or (EXPLAIN DRUG DEALER SHOT THING) probably won’t work for a random Coy or Vance they bring in to teach my class after they decide they don’t need me anymore.
HERE’S WHY YOU SHOULD CARE (AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT): One of the biggest reasons I’m worried about this is because it impacts what I can do with my materials. That’s also the main reason why I think you should care about it, too.
I never took this job to get rich and I certainly don’t like the idea of coming across like Daffy Duck when he found the treasure room:
However, when I know stuff is mine to do with as I please, that tends to benefit a lot of other people as well. Whenever someone shoots me an email and says, “Hey, how do you organize your class?” I’m always happy to give them a copy of my syllabus. When someone needs an assignment I’ve built, I’m glad to share it with them or on the blog.
When we went into COVID lock down, I basically dumped everything I ever did that I thought would help people into the Corona Hotline section of the blog for free. All those goodies remain there to this day, so feel free to help yourself.
If this policy passes, I might not be as free to offer that kind of generosity any more, and that would really tick me off.
So, here’s how you can help me remain capable of helping you. The university system has extended comments on this until Dec. 13. If you are part of the UW system, you can use this link for sure to register your thoughts. (Not sure if it works for those of you elsewhere.)
If you can’t use that link, here is another option:
This is Jay Rothman, the president of the Universities of Wisconsin system. Feel free to call him at the number above or email him at president@wisconsin.edu and tell him to leave the copyright in the hands of the professors, instructors and students.
I appreciate the help and I’m sure my colleagues throughout the system do as well.
Apparently one of my favorite errors has been making the rounds on social media, as several students have come running up to me with their Instagram or TikTok accounts open and a “Have you seen THIS?” look on their faces.
“The minute I saw this, I thought about you!” one young lady said excitedly, before realizing exactly what she said.
“I mean… I saw the head thing and… I thought about…,” she said, continuing to turn a brighter shade of red as she fumbled her way through trying to explain what she meant. Eventually, we both burst out laughing.
That was just one moment that made me remember how thankful I am for the kids I teach. They actually think to share things with me and I apparently make some sort of an impact on them that they can’t wait to do so. Sure, it’s about pseudo-pornographic headlines or stories about people who stored dead bodies in an abandoned mall or something, but it’s nice nonetheless.
I remember telling one group of students that they kind of got screwed having me as a teacher, because if they had a normal person who covered something like the education beat, they’d hear stories about board meetings and first-graders who made hand-print turkeys for Thanksgiving. Instead, I’m starting every other story off with some reference to a dead body.
The next class, just before the Thanksgiving break, one of the more artistic students slipped this to be before she left class:
That’s still on my corkboard to this day, despite that student being long graduated and it’s highly unlike she remembers doing it at all.
With this week ending in a tidal wave of football and food, I wanted to start the break with a big thank you to all of you out there who read the blog and who use the books that it supports. I’m always amazed when I meet someone that I have long admired for their work and they turn around and say, “Hey! I’m using your book!”
(The feeling is only slightly undercut by the awkward feeling I get when I have to ask, “Nice! Which one?”)
I’m so happy to know that so many of you were interested in last year’s “Filak Furlough Tour” and can’t wait until the next edition of the “Dynamics of News Reporting” and “Dynamics of Media Writing” come out (Early next year for the former and August 2025 for the latter, God willing). I’m also eternally grateful to those of you who took a chance on “Exploring Mass Communication” for your pit classes and group sessions. It’s never easy to rewrite a course for a book, so when people actually do it and find that it was worth it, it really does make me feel great.
I’m grateful for my family and friends, who have somehow managed to tolerate me all these years through the weird work schedules and other general weirdness I produce. Amy is due for a canonization for sainthood any day now, I’m sure.
This break I’ll be trying to finish the last touches on the draft of a book and maybe even get a little family time in. It’s Thanksgiving at my brother-in-law’s house, which means twin 3-year-olds doing their ballet dance routine over and over again in the living room.
(I don’t think Indiana Lieutenant Governor-elect and far-right pastor Micah Beckwith understands how the First Amendment works. I could teach him, but I’d have to charge…)
THE LEAD: Shortly after being elected as Indiana’s next lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith decided to take his newfound power out for a test drive by threatening the Indiana Daily Student newspaper with censorship:
WHO IS THIS GUY? Beckwith is a 42-year-old, hard-right Republican, who has never held any political office prior to winning the lieutenant governor position. He came in third in 2020 while running for a U.S. house seat in Indiana. He graduated from Huntington University, a private college affiliated with the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.
A QUICK BREAKDOWN: Here’s a quick look of how this situation is dumber than a bucketful of hair:
First, the students did not call Donald Trump these things. They literally QUOTED people who WORKED WITH TRUMP on the cover of the paper to make a point. If he looked at the people who said this stuff, I have a hard time believing Beckwith could get away with calling ANY of them “woke.”
Even more, people who are more politically aligned with Beckwith are pointing out on X how he completely misread this situation:
Screenshot
(Let’s also sidestep the whole “this is what your taxes are paying for” thing, as a) they are not, b) even if they were, financing a free press isn’t a bad thing and c) there are far dumber things tax money goes toward…)
Finally, the First Amendment guarantees the right to a free press, unfettered by the whims of governmental figures. Punishment for free speech of this kind is not allowed in this country (whether we’re truly a “democracy” or not). It’s unclear how Beckwith will “stop it for them” but I doubt it would be legal.
COMMENTS ON THE SITUATION: I reached out to co-EICs Marissa Meador and Jacob Spudich for a comment on the controversy and they were nice enough to respond:
“While we welcome criticism of our newspaper and its content, we are staunch defenders of the First Amendment and the freedom it grants to the press — including student journalism. Our front page clearly attributes the quotes to former allies of Donald Trump, which we collected from several articles across the New York Times and CNN. Beckwith’s statement implying he will attempt to control or suppress what we publish is deeply concerning, not just for staffers at the Indiana Daily Student but for our constitutional principles overall.”
I messaged Beckwith’s office with several questions and a request for comment. I received nothing to this point, but if I do I’ll post it here. (Don’t hold your breath on this one…)
When asked if IU had any comment on Beckwith’s claims about IU and his potential action toward the IDS, IU spokesperson Mark Bode said “The Indiana Daily Student is editorially independent from Indiana University.”
In case you are unfamiliar, that’s what it sounds like when someone jumps ship…
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: This is the kind of ham-handed, saber-rattling stupidity that comes from people who claim to love this country but consistently fail to understand what our country actually protects and allows. The same freedom of speech that allowed Donald Trump to call Kamala Harris “a shitty vice president” and allowed Beckwith to refer to his opponents as having the “Jezebel spirit” also protects speech that Beckwith DOESN’T like.
I could also go back to that famous line about never picking a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, and add that you shouldn’t take on a media outlet that has 10 times the number of followers you do on X.
I often get responses to posts like this calling me “an academic liberal” or a “lefty professor,” both of which are not only untrue, but so far afield they’re likely to make my mother laugh so hard she could pass an entire Subway footlong through her nose.
In truth, I’m neither left or right, but I am definitely anti-bully and anti-hypocrite. I see this guy as being in both zones, so that’s why he really needs a reality check.
ACTION OFFER: If you want to tell Beckwith what you think about this, you can hit him up on Twitter/X, or email him through his campaign website here. Maybe if he hears enough from enough people, he’ll learn something.
That said, the guy literally thinks that Jesus pushed him to take the Beckwith Model of Intolerance and Stupidity ™ to the political sphere, so I somehow doubt he’s going to back off.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the final part of a multi-part series on the decision of the IU Media School to unilaterally converge its student media outlets, the Indiana Daily Student, WIUX and Indiana University Student Television. Part of the plan calls for the elimination of the final print edition of the IDS, something upsetting to the students.
If you want to help the students keep their print paper, they have listed this link as a way to do this: https://forms.gle/cisJyhvAxuQbC4co7.
If you want to tell Dean David Tolchinsky what you think about this situation, you can email him here: mschdean@iu.edu
Dynamics of Writing has obtained this exclusive footage of the IU Media School announcing and attempting to implement its plan to converge student media without consulting the student media outlets.
One of the questions I had for Dean David Tolchinsky involved the mechanism by which the Media School could impose this plan. The radio station and the TV station both have club status at the university, meaning they get housed under a department or college. They can also beholden to whoever holds their FCC license and their status makes them unable to earn revenue in the way a student newspaper can.
In short, someone else holds the leash on these media outlets and the staff knows it.
“They just expect us to change, but none of them are brave enough to be like, ‘You need to have the IDS on your NewsHour,’ or ‘You guys need to do music on the TV station,’ or ‘You need to do this,'” Trevor Emery, the president of WIUX radio, said. “And while they do have a point (that) it is quite wasteful and confusing when everyone has their own equipment and everyone has to move money differently for that, that’s not a problem that we have any control over.”
But does the Media School have control over the fate of the IDS?
“We’ve kind of been wondering that as well,” IDS co-Editor-in-Chief Marissa Meador said in a recent interview. “We aren’t even sure what authority they have to make that decision. Our organization, it has a charter that was developed by the Board of Trustees, and so I could understand the Board of Trustees potentially having the authority to do this, but the media school, I’m not completely sure how that happens… We are asking those questions as well, and haven’t gotten an answer so far.”
Several media reports have referred to the IDS Charter as the controlling document. The charter refers to the board of trustees approving the agreement and the dean of the school appointing the director of student media in consultation with the faculty. Aside from that, it’s difficult to see who is in charge of what outside of the IDS ecosystem.
The IDS doesn’t receive funds from the university. In fact, it is required to pay some sort of financial tithing that a previous president created, so it’s basically paying rent. It pays its full-time professional staff both salary and benefits. (Tolchinsky mentioned something about the Media School chipping in on bennies in one of his letters, but the students assured me that the paper is on the hook for the brunt of the bill.) The IDS also covers student wages, equipment purchases and travel costs.
I could imagine the Media School could claim some sort of investment in the place, having helped clear the $1 million debt the IDS had on the books. As part of an hour-long panel discussion on Indiana Public Media’s Noon Hour, Associate Dean Galen Clavio mentioned that the Media School had taken financial responsibility for the paper’s accounts, although how that all worked was not clearly discussed. That said, that’s not the same as owning a controlling interest in the actions of an organization.
The only real “authority” that is clear from the documents provided here appears to be at the board of trustees level. This is why I asked Tolchinsky for some sort of document or agreement that provided the school with the right to do this. I’d try to make an open records request for whatever they’ve got on this, but given IU’s track record on transparency, I’ll probably be dead and buried before I get something back.
So that leads to the next question: What if the IDS just said “no” to all this?
“We are kind of wondering the same thing,” Meador said. “We’re thinking, you know, what, if we just said no. I don’t know if it’ll come down to this, but we’re even thinking, ‘Is there a way that we can, as students, independently fund-raise or pay with our own money?’ … I think the key thing that they have, the key bargaining chip that they have is that I believe that they have the power to discipline our professional staff members. And our professional staff members are the ones who sell the ads and, you know, handle the print contracts and all those things. So that’s kind of our one concern there.”
SO WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY KNOW?
When I decided to put a week’s worth of blog posts into this, I wasn’t entirely sure what the best answers were, but as I talked to the students and got the runaround from the administration, a lot of things came into focus.
Here are the things I clearly know:
Student media outlets at IU are starving: The radio station, and presumably the TV station, don’t get enough money to fully thrive in the ways they once did. Emery told me his staff doesn’t get paid and that an adviser is getting a tiny stipend to keep everything afloat. When the place went from getting 70 cents per student to zero, it was just a matter of time before the clock ran out on them. During that Noon Hour panel discussion, IUSTV news director Ashton Hackman said the TV station just recently gained space in the media school, operates without professional staff help and generally has to subsist on crumbs. Why this happened is beyond me, but that’s the situation and the center can’t continue to hold.
The IDS still generates money, but it’s unable to continue to spend what it currently spends without some level of assistance from the university. That assistance could come in the form of a student fee, removing some of the red tape that prevents them from tapping other streams of revenue or even allowing work-study money into the newsroom in some way. The April report on the IDS was clear: You can’t keep expecting them to do more with less and it’s not fair to force this place to run at a profit in this current environment.
Print, at this level, still matters: The one-day-per-week model for the IDS makes money, according to the information I was provided. It also connects the IDS to the larger community it serves, provides the community with a signpost to let folks know they’re still working and helps draw eyes to their content. Even more, it teaches students how to design traditional print products and keeps those skills sharp. For all the excitement the Media School seems to be putting forward about retaining special issues in print, it’ll be a pretty ugly set of special issues if the students’ design skills atrophy.
One of the arguments Clavio made about cutting print (aside from cost, which we’ll get to later) was that newspapers keep dying at a pretty steady clip. He cites a Northwestern University study that says these are going away at the rate of about 2.5 per day. True, but that means there are still approximately 6,000 papers out there that need people who can design to spec, write headlines in holes and generally publish something relatively well composed. That doesn’t account for the hundreds of other jobs in which students could bring to bear design skills for printed or print-related items.
Beyond that, it matters to the students right now. They have a connection to this print edition that might not make sense to other people, but it is a motivating and galvanizing factor for this staff. Any alleged financial savings this generates will be dwarfed by the loss in morale this ham-handed approach to killing it has created.
These organizations are extremely incongruent: To say these organizations have little in common is a massive understatement. The IDS is really the news driver here, while the entertainment comes from the radio station in the form of events and on-air music/shows. The TV folks declined to respond to requests for interviews, so it’s unclear to me what they do and the information I got from the folks I did interview was as clear as mud in this regard.
When the positives of the plan were discussed by students, it was primarily Hackman who noted the benefits that would come to his media outlet through this approach. That’s not the same as embracing the new cross-platform, digital-primacy model the Media School is touting.
In a lot of cases, it makes sense to put certain operations together. Most of the convergence efforts I saw were of news-oriented operations, in which all of the participants valued the idea of putting out news content across multiple platforms. This was also helped by the ability for each organization to bring something particularly important to the table that the others were unable to bring. When all of the organizations saw the benefits each other brought to the table, in that shared senses of congruity, things worked out. When they didn’t, it got bad quite quickly.
As I said in an earlier post, this isn’t like putting a bunch of soup cans from three shelves onto one shelf. This is more difficult than that.
This could not have been done in a worse way: People are far more likely to agree to things, and be motivated to participate in them, when given an opportunity to participate and they are treated with respect. In the Self-Determination Theory, autonomy is a primary cog in making people feel like they’re engaged, valued and part of a process.
In one study we did involving SDT, we had people doing a Boggle grid and they were in one of several conditions. In one situation, they were given the ability to pick either a blue, a pink or a yellow grid without seeing what was on the grid. In another, they were told which grid they had to take, also without seeing what was on the grid.
The people in the group that got a choice felt better about the experience, tended to do better in finding words and felt like they would enjoy persisting in the activity, even after they were no longer required to do so.
The kicker? All of the grids were exactly the same. What mattered was the perception of choice and autonomy.
In the radio show, IDS Co-Editor-in-Chief Jacob Spudich made the case that he and his co-EIC were never consulted about the changes, let alone the cut to print, as part of the process. Clavio rather derisively noted that previous IDS students had been part of the plan back in April and that to expect the university to just keep rebooting its plans every time the IDS had leadership turnover was not feasible.
To his point, the original report from April included the names of the co-EICs from the newspaper and, no, you can’t start from scratch each time someone new comes in. However, Spudich’s larger point was that a lot happened between that April report and the one issued in October, none of which involved IDS student input (or input from any other students, it would seem).
Clavio noted that much of the work was done over the summer, when students weren’t present. Back in my student media days, we called this the “Dump the Garbage Time,” as it was a lot easier to do things that might upset students when they aren’t around to make a fuss. I’ve seen people hired and fired, attempts to cut athletic teams and generally unpopular “restructuring” occur during the summer. It’s like going on vacation for a week and finding out your roommate sold all your furniture and redecorated.
Even more, they had TWO MONTHS after school started to call in the students and say, “Here’s what we’re thinking, this is why we’re thinking it and we want to know what you think.” That, of course, is if they actually WANTED input. As co-EIC Marissa Meador noted in an earlier post, the IDS was supposed to find out about all these changes an hour before they went public.
That’s not a good-faith effort and unless Clavio is a total idiot, he knows that to be true.
A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR THE IU MEDIA SCHOOL
I know it’s easy to sit back in Snarkville and lob shots at people who are actually attempting to do something. It’s a lot harder to actually find ways to fix things.
I lack a time machine, so I can’t technically undo this. I also am still stuck on the whole “Can the Media School mandate what the IDS does or not?” aspect of this. Even more, I have no actual authority here whatsoever, which might actually be the exact same level of authority the Media School has, but I’m not going to pretend I have any.
That said, here are a few things I would recommend going forward:
Money comes first: Before you think about engaging in anything you have planned here, get a handle on the money. Whatever requests the Media School needs to make to the university to get funding should be done now. Whatever requests it needs to do to loosen some of the red tape on outside earning potential should be done now. Whatever decisions need to be made to make sure the budgeting works should be made now. Technically, it should have been done well before the plan was released, but, again, I have no time machine.
In short, if the money isn’t in the proper places it needs to be, moving forward makes no sense.
Too often, and believe me I’ve seen this a lot, academics make these broad-based plans or grandiose project outlines with the idea that money somehow will arrive as needed at some time in the future. Promises are vaguely made about “being supportive,” but the admin never locks down specifics, and thus everything ends up falling to pieces rather quickly.
To quote a Jean Shepherd book title: In God we trust, all others must pay cash.
Get hard numbers with in-writing commitments from people authorized to say “yes” or slam the brakes on this whole thing.
Make a hard budget decision at the IDS: This is likely to be as popular as bacon on Good Friday, but I’d recommend a serious look at where most of the money for the IDS goes. I was told that about $300K goes to the professional staff, and that can’t be wiggled. I also know print costs and web costs are pretty well fixed, but likely they represent a small fraction of the budget.
I would imagine a large swath of cash goes to student employees, which is where the cut would need to happen. In listening to Tyler Emery, I heard that IDS students get a certain amount of money per story or per piece they create. I’d cut that, as it’s likely something that would go a goodly way to biting into the budget deficit. I’d also strongly consider where the other editorial salaries are and see if there are ways to cut them down, either by eliminating additional positions (assistant, assistant editors) or by whacking down on the payroll per position.
I hate the idea of students doing work for free and I surely hate the idea of cutting student wages in general. That said, if the IDS wants to make the statement that all sorts of other student newspapers get X, Y or Z from the university, they also have to understand that most of them don’t pay staffers at the lowest levels. In addition, most editorial salaries are more of a gesture of goodwill than they are actual salaries. Based on what I’ve seen at other places, and given what the radio station kids are doing, it is possible to get quality help without having to cough up an inordinate amount of cash for it.
If you can make the budget work that way, it could be a chance to keep the ball in your court moving forward while you figure out other revenue streams to augment your finances.
Leave print alone: I get why the Media School wants to kill the print edition as part of this: It gives them some sort of “convergence cred” by shedding the “old media” as part of what’s going on with this merger. It also has that surface-level look of saving money, as printing a dead-tree edition of a publication always costs more than just sticking stuff online.
One problem is that they’re not really killing print, but rather attempting to cream-skim some special issues while dumping the weekly issue for that “cred” they want. A second problem is that this isn’t really saving money at all, given the way the math works outs.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of this entire argument about the print edition came on Noon Hour. When the hosts asked about the cost vs. revenue associated with the print edition, Clavio did the whole, “That’s almost impossible to quantify” thing, but assured everyone that it was a money pit. Student Media Director Jim Rodenbush didn’t have much in the way of a concrete answer either, keeping his focus elsewhere.
Spudich then said, “Here are the numbers” and laid out what it cost to print (about $60K) and what the revenue associated with print was ($90K). He also explained how he got the numbers and that he checked them with both the IDS and Media School’s finance people.
Clavio then said something to the effect of, “Those numbers are not accurate, based on the data we have.”
Did he present that data? No.
Have they presented that data elsewhere? Not that I can find.
Could he explain it now? “This requires more than a five-minute discussion here,” he said in a tone I’d characterize as part annoyance, part bluster. It kind of felt like this to me.
A lot of what he said on the air fits this same approach of applying vague generalities and deflections to the concrete questions people asked of him.
Even if none of those other concerns about print were taken into account, killing the print edition is doing more harm than good to the overall morale of the IDS.
Call it a mulligan and back off of print.
Less convergence, more JOA: Based on what I’ve been able to ascertain, these three media outlets have almost nothing in common. That might be something that could change, but not here, not now and not with this plan being crammed down everyone’s throat.
In addition, it’s clear there’s a financial imbalance in terms of revenue generation, expenditures and even student pay. These things are likely to cause friction throughout any process to bring everyone together to sing kumbaya in a converged newsroom. Add in the idea that these people have almost nothing in common in terms of background and goals, this forced editorial connection is going to short circuit at best and blow up at worst.
That said, I’d recommend the idea of creating kind of a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) that covers the business ends of these programs. I know our newspapers in Madison had one, in which everything from ads to bills got handled by the Madison Newspapers Incorporated (I’m sure the name has changed over time). Meanwhile, the Cap Times and State Journal newsrooms operated independently and were freely capable of trying to beat the crap out of each other each and every news cycle. A couple times a year, there were joint projects that were based on finance, like a graduation tab that ran in both publications. However, for the most part, the places were left to their own devices.
A JOA would get the finances in order without having to make the more uncomfortable part of convergence work as well at this point, particularly since the pieces, as they stand, don’t fit well.
I somehow doubt any of this will get through to the people in charge, but my hope is that if the staffs at these places see these options, it might give them some ammunition to fight the fight as they see best.
Sam Kuffel via the station’s old Facebook post. 
