THE LEAD: The Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published a story about how the system president, Jay Rothman, had emailed the chancellors at the UW schools with some thoughts about the future. In that email, Rothman noted his support for several changes, including moving away from liberal arts programs at certain campuses:
As the University of Wisconsin System faced a dire fiscal situation, system President Jay Rothman suggested chancellors consider “shifting away” from liberal arts programs, particularly at campuses with low-income students.
In emails obtained by The Daily Cardinal, Rothman, a former law firm chairman and CEO with no higher education background before leading the UW System, told campus chancellors UW schools should seek a long-term path “to return to financial stability.”
“Consider shifting away from liberal arts programs to programs that are more career specific, particularly if the institution serves a large number of low-income students,” Rothman wrote in a list of recommendations sent Sept. 1.
THE FALLOUT: Rothman was not pleased with this reporting and took to Twitter/X to express that displeasure:
Interestingly enough this “egregiously false headline” and problematic “framing of its story” has not led anyone in the UW hierarchy to demand the Cardinal fix specific errors in the piece, according to the folks at the Cardinal:
(SIDE NOTE: The System has never been shy about asking for things to be fixed when a story is factually inaccurate. I remember a story that ran when I was at the Cardinal with the headline “Negligence Haunts Regents.” The public affairs guy called up our campus editor and politely asked for a fix, saying, “There’s really only two things wrong with the story. It’s in the headline: The word “negligence” and the word “haunts.”)
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE ON THE STORY:
First, it’s awesome journalism. I have no idea how the reporter got that piece of paper, but it speaks volumes about the importance of things like FOIA and open records acts, as well as having good sources. People have the ability to lie to you. Documents have an uncanny way of telling the truth. It’s a great story, a solid read and well sourced.
Second, the headline is not “egregiously false” based on exactly what Rothman wrote. It was “private” (email usually is, compared to him putting stuff on Twitter/X or making a public speech). It was a suggestion, not a mandate. It included the phrase “shift away.” It did say liberal arts was the thing from which shifting away should occur. The only MINOR argument might be between “low-income campuses” and those that serve low-income students, but at that point, you’re arguing about the type of bark that’s on the tree and ignoring the fact you’re in the forest.
Third, the story does contain a response from system spokesperson Mark Pitsch that put in Rothman’s two cents:
UW System spokesperson Mark Pitsch said Rothman has “consistently” stated he valued liberal arts education and shared the report having acknowledged some of its lessons “would not be applicable to the Universities of Wisconsin.”
“He did not suggest that chancellors move away from liberal arts programs,” Pitsch said. “However, as evidenced by the $32 million workforce proposal, the universities are seeking to expand capacity in high-growth STEM, health care, and business disciplines to meet workforce needs.”
As the story then notes, the email says something entirely different. As much as I don’t want to argue semantics, Pitsch is wrong here. Rothman DID suggest that in the email. To what degree he meant something else or failed to make something clear could be debated. Arguing that something didn’t happen when people can see the thing with their own eyes strains credulity.
Finally, there is a huge difference between “I don’t like the story” and “The story is wrong.” I can’t tell you how many people have called me over the years, screaming up a blue streak over a story that ran in the DN or the A-T or the Missourian, demanding we fix the mistakes in it. When I asked them to explain the errors that needed correcting, 99.99% of the time it came down to them not liking that we reported they cheated on their taxes, stole money, shot someone at a Taco Bell drive thru or some other thing that actually happened.
In one case, a student demanded a retraction because she had made several disparaging comments about the LGBTQ community in relation to changes made to Homecoming court. She threatened to sue because people were all over social media and email, telling her how horrible she was based on our reporting. When we dug into it, it turned out she said the stuff IN AN EMAIL TO THE PAPER and the reporter had actually done her a favor by not including some of the more egregious stuff she’d written.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE ON THE SITUATION: This is probably going to be a really unpopular position, but if you read the entirety of Rothman’s emails, he’s right about a lot of stuff he suggested in terms of how to do certain things and what needs to be done to re-calibrate the UW schools.
If you read the whole email (skipping the now-infamous item 13), you get a clear sense of a smart business person who is telling a bunch of people that it’s time to be smart about your approach to your campus.
Here is a basic summary of his points in a simple fashion that I think most folks with common sense would agree with:
FISCAL:
Don’t build out insane, pie-in-the-sky programs and figure the money will come from somewhere.
Plan based on what money you have, not what you hope to have.
Collect money you’re owed.
Don’t plan one year at a time for a hand-to-mouth approach. Plan for the long term and hold to it.
If you’re going to keep stuff, make sure it’s worth it. That doesn’t mean everything has to be cost-neutral, but it does mean you can’t spend like a drunk sailor on leave and expect everything to be fine all the time.
TAKING ACTION:
Do the hard stuff right away because it’s not going to get better by putting it off. Also, do it in one big swoop so that you don’t have everyone looking around each time a shoe drops. Drop all the shoes at once wherever possible and then rebuild confidence for those who are left.
Tell people what is going on while it’s going on and be transparent. The more you hide, the worse it gets.
Read your policies to figure out what you can and can’t do before you try something. Also, if those policies are from the Stone Age, update them so you aren’t hamstrung by them.
That covers most of what he’s saying. It’s good advice. Does that mean the campuses are following it? No. Does that mean those who have made cuts etc. have done it the right way? Um… heck no. Is that Rothman’s fault? Not a chance.
In terms of his look at what should and shouldn’t be offered, that’s a whole other can of worms, but as I noted in another post, most of the students and families I’ve met here and while enrolling my kid at college are worried about jobs and the cost of this whole process. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have liberal arts, or a broader liberal-arts education.
What it does mean is that just like everything else, liberal arts courses should have their tires kicked from time to time, as should the structure of any program to make sure it’s giving students what they need. I think in a lot of cases, general education courses and the departments they’ve been based in got used to a huge influx of students each term by the dint of merely being part of that system. The level of scrutiny was not there in regard to value for the students (in any sense of the word) and the answer was always the silver bullet of “Kids need liberal arts, so stop asking so many questions and go away.”
I know I benefited from a lot of my general education courses, ranging from the history course I took to understand my parents’ generation to the race, gender and ethnicity course I took through women’s studies. I also know I had more than a few classes where it felt like the professor got a “no-show job” through a Soprano’s associate and didn’t give a damn because the class was required and we all had to take it. (I tried to find a link for a clip but gave up when I remembered how the dialogue in this show would make the heads of my editors at Sage explode.)
A strong examination of liberal arts is not a bad thing and reasonable people can agree or disagree about it. However, everything starts with honesty, accuracy and transparency, which is something the Cardinal article brought to bear.
It’s a weird thing seeing the cartoon version of yourself posted all over the place…
The Filak Furlough Tour landed in Ames, Iowa for a couple fun days of teaching classes and working with student journalists. This one was particularly neat for me because the first journalism teacher I ever had went here. Steve Lorenzo used to regale us with stories about his “sophomore year at Iowa State” when he would work for “The Daily.”
I remember one point where Steve did his “Back in (YEAR) when I was a sophomore at Iowa State…” thing and I chimed in with “Yeah, Steve, back in (YEAR) when I was in third grade…” I thought it was funny at the time because he was 30 and I was 19, but I have since gotten my “You Old” comeuppance, as students are now the same age as my kid…
Ugh. Let’s get on with Part II
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY – AMES, IOWA
Scientists aren’t sure what this represents…
THE TOPIC: Hanging out with the students at The Daily and learning about how they do student media.
(They also have a thing about them that makes Amy want to feed them constantly. We’ve done more than a few chili suppers, holiday dinners and other such “Eat! Eat!” events where we shovel food at them like it’s going out of style.)
The students asked a lot of good questions about how to find stories, how to make sure they’re covering the campus adequately and how to improve writing. The one thing that they asked that really hit home with me was this: How do you recruit and retain staff members?
Trying to find people to work at the various student media outlets I’ve worked with has been like trying to find volunteers muck out Port-A-Potties. They either refuse to come to work, agree and then bail or they try a little and leave. In most cases, students tell me they have too much other stuff to do, they don’t have the time in general or they “don’t plan to work for a newspaper. (That last one makes me crazy.)
Here are the best bits of advice I could come up with for the students there:
LOOK FOR SKILLS, NOT BODIES: In a lot of cases, we do the same thing we always do when it comes to recruiting: We go to the intro writing class, tell the kids there they need clips to get a job/internship and that we’re having a meeting that night. That can work in some cases but not most.
What we really should be looking for are skills that can benefit the newspaper and thus the readership, not people who seem to be majoring in the right field. So, start going to the places where those skills live.
You want better editorial cartoons? Check out the art department and see who has drawing classes you could talk to. Same thing is true if you want some different angles on photography.
You want some political coverage? Hey, poli sci people seem to grow on trees around most campuses. Everyone thinks they’re going to be the next political voice of a generation, so let’s see if they can make it work. This might be a great spot for coverage of the local student government, columns that deal with local politics or even a podcast that could give people a chance to hear about some topics they might otherwise miss.
Speaking of podcasts, see if there are people with interests in a field that would be willing to do one or two for publication on your site. Back when podcasting was really new, we had a couple kids who majored in science areas (I can’t remember what that major was, nor can I remember how we ended up with science kids in the newsroom… It might have been a fever dream…). They wanted to do a weekly podcast, so we let them. Turned out to be one of the better elements of our digital presence.
Think about the computer science or information services people who love computers for improvements to your digital end. Design folks might find an interest in reworking your color palettes or your home page structure. See who’s out there and bring them in.
LOOK FOR PROFESSORS WHO CAN BRIBE KIDS: One of the best bribes in the world is extra credit. I think I could probably solve world hunger if I had access to a big enough class and enough thirst for extra credit in it. Use that to your advantage.
Talk to professors in the media departments to see if they’d be willing to offer extra credit for various things that would benefit the newsroom. That could be getting a story they wrote for class published, working a copy desk shift for credit in an editing class, doing a ride along with sales reps for an ad/marketing class or a dozen other things. If so, you have a great opportunity to get some extra stuff for your publication while simultaneously getting fresh blood into your newsroom.
Sure, maybe those people only do one thing and leave, but you at least get a chance to convince them to stay. Even more, if the bug does bite them, you’ll have a staffer for quite some time.
SHARE YOUR PASSION: In going through this whole thing with the staff, I asked a bunch of them, “Why did you come to the Daily in the first place?” Most of them gave the standard answers: I needed clips, I wanted experience, It looks good on a resume etc.
Then I asked the second question: “OK, so why are you still here?” That one took a bit longer.
My point was this: If you came here for those clips and that experience, you have that already. A number of kids were there for several years. A couple actually had other media gigs they were working in the pro scene while still working at the Daily. If the goal was to get the goods, you are done. Leave. Move on.
The answer that they eventually came up with was the one that they didn’t think about every day but was as much of a part of them as their own hearts: They fell in love with this place and the people and even though there were days they’d rather eat ground glass than track down the head of student government for a stupid quote about a stupid thing, they found this place to be their home. They got a lot more out of this than just a line on a resume.
THAT is what you need to imbue in the newbies if you want them to come in and stay for a while. If you can connect with people when they come in, make them see what makes the place tick, help them understand what this place is beyond just a bunch of old desks and a whiteboard full of inside jokes, you’ll get them and they’ll hang around much longer than those who don’t see it.
It’s OK to love the place. Show them that and they’ll love it too.
ONE LAST THING:
I made a bat for the journalism school as part of the Furlough Tour Gift package and the people there really seemed to love it. They asked me to put the Jack Trice logo on it. If you don’t know who that is, well, I didn’t either but in learning about him, I was in awe. I was thrilled that they liked it:
When we passed it around the newsroom, I explained how and why the bat thing came to be. The EIC was really interested so I told him if he emailed me and asked for something specific, I’d do it. When I got back, I had the request:
Hello, it is Andrew Harrington from the Iowa State Daily. Thank you again for coming in to visit the Iowa State Daily, we learned a lot and had a great time.
People were extremely entertained by the bat that was brought in, and I was wondering if there was a chance we could get a bat with our logo on it sent to us?
Once again I appreciate it, and let me know either way.
Andrew Harrington
It wasn’t as hard as the mule from UCM, but it was a bit of a challenge. Still, I think it turned out OK. I asked if they wanted a slogan on it as well. I loved what they asked for:
Please put this on blast: The State of Wisconsin is moving toward passing New Voices legislation. Assembly Bill 551 will have a hearing on Thursday, Oct. 26 (see below) and they need your help.
New Voices is a student-powered nonpartisan grassroots movement of state-based activists who seek to protect student press freedom with state laws. These laws counteract the impact of the 1988 Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier Supreme Court decision, which dramatically changed the balance of student press rights. New Voices supporters include advocates in law, education, journalism and civics who want schools and colleges to be more welcoming places for student voices.
Seventeen states have this legislation passed in some form, which guarantees student press rights Not only will this free high school media outlets from significant censorship, but it will codify the rights of college student media outlets and voices as well. In short, ham-handed administrators who just don’t like things that fail to paint the rosiest of pictures about their institution can’t crush student media for reporting the facts.
Please read the information forwarded to me last night via Matt Smith, the Wisconsin JEA president about this important hearing and how you can help get this law moving in the right direction
After years of waiting, Wisconsin finally has movement on a New Voices bill that protects student First Amendment rights by stipulating that student journalists are responsible for determining the content of student publications at public secondary schools and colleges! Assembly Bill 551 would prohibit administrative prior review and outline specific, legally defined forms of expression that are unprotected (such as libel, obscenity and invasion of privacy or speech that would cause a substantial disruption of school activities or violate other state or federal laws).
Students at every level need to know they can ask questions about and report on topics that are important to them and their communities without fear that their choices will be made for them or removed altogether. It’s more important than ever that our institutions put learning first and foster environments that develop critical thinking and communication skills our students will need to succeed in future workplaces and as future citizens in a democracy.
URGENT: This Thursday, Oct. 26, at 10 a.m. in Room 412 East of the Wisconsin State Capitol Building in Madison, the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities will hold a public hearing on the bill (Assembly Bill 551). The legislation is sponsored by several representatives, both Republican and Democratic, but it is IMPERATIVE that we show how important this bill is for our students. If at all possible, please help out by doing AT LEAST one of the following in the next couple days.
ATTEND THE HEARING
If it is at all possible for you (or any of your students or former students or anyone else who is supportive) to attend, it would mean a LOT to have more numbers involved. Those in attendance may share some brief testimony outlining their reasons for supporting the legislation. See some suggestions HERE and HERE.
EMAIL STATEMENTS TO THE COMMITTEE CHAIR AND OTHERS
The chair of the committee is Rep. David Murphy (R-Greenville). If you (or any of your students or former students or anyone else who is supportive) can send messages of support for the legislation to Rep. Murphy and any of the other committee members (and maybe your own legislators) prior to the hearing on Thursday, that would be amazing. Again, find some suggestions for points to make HERE and HERE. You can find your own legislators using THIS LINK, and contacts for the committee members are below:
PROVIDE VIRTUAL SUPPORT DURING THE HEARING ON THURSDAY
Starting at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday the window will open for online testimony that should allow everyone to virtually signal support for the bill. You (or, again, any of your students or former students, etc.) can click THIS LINK to access the legislative calendar. Starting at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday the listing for that day labeled “Colleges and Universities” should provide an option for online-only testimony. Please consider having anyone interested jump in, if they can.
USE THE BILL TO START OR CONTINUE DISCUSSIONS WITH YOUR STUDENTS
The hearing for the legislation may not only help enshrine their rights in state law but also provide a chance to discuss history in the making. Use this as an opportunity to have students research or discuss New Voices laws (the Student Press Law Center is an excellent resource for this). What are the benefits to such legislation? Why is it important? What are conditions like for students at your school?
If you or any students would like to write statements in support of the New Voices bill or explanations of ways they have experienced restrictions on their expression, feel free to send them along to New Voices Wisconsin (newvoiceswisconsin@gmail.com) or to the Wisconsin Journalism Education Association (wisconsinjea@gmail.com). Thoughts on this topic may also obviously just be written up and shared in-class, if you prefer.
In visiting multiple newsrooms and various classrooms through the Filak Furlough tour, one question that popped up a bit was how to get people to “do it right” when it came to writing stories. Editors spoke of frustration due to writers who wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t learn or otherwise made life vexing for the editors.
What was absent in this situation, however, were the writers, many of whom I would imagine had a completely opposite view of the situation. If I had to wager, I’d argue that they probably felt editors were demanding, picky or otherwise vexing.
In digging back for a Throwback Thursday post, I found this one that might be helpful to both sides: kind of a “peace with honor” thing that might make life easier in understanding how editing should work.
The battle of wills between writers and editors: Three tips to make the editing process more valuable
If you read Ruth Reichl’s column about her editor, Susan Kamil, you can get the idea of how a good editor can make all the difference. In reflecting on Kamil after her recent death, Reichl offered a wonderful assessment of her friend, colleague and editor in a way that is both honest and honorific.
I have been both the editor and the edit-ee throughout my life and I have found neither of them are a bowl of cherries. As the person being edited, I find myself vacillating between the desire to be told how awesome I am and the need to be told where I really screwed up. It’s almost a borderline disorder of personality: When someone tells me I’m perfect, I push back by saying, “No, I NEED feedback so I can improve before people who read the published version rip me to shreds.” When someone heaps “helpful suggestions” upon me, I often feel like saying, “OK, screw you and everyone who looks like you.”
Sounds dumb? Yep, but I bet I’m not the only one in that boat.
As an editor, the frustration is just as palpable: I can see what needs to happen so I’m pulling in one direction. However, the writer keeps thinking, “What the hell does this chucklehead know?” Having to edit strong-willed people has on occasion led to some of my worst moments, including once telling a student, “I’ve taken (bowel movements) that I would be more proud of than I would be of this lead.” It was like, “If you would just be reasonable and see it MY WAY, we’d get done with this a lot faster and better.”
Eventually, I found more equilibrium in the relationship. It also helped when I started finding editors who worked with me in a way that made sense to me. (As Harvey Spector says in “Suits,” you don’t want to play the case. You want to play the person.) It has gotten to a point where each book I do, I ask if Jim Kelly (the former journalist, not the football player) is available to be my copy editor. Otherwise, can we wait on this?
For those of you who don’t get the chance to pick your poison… er… editor… and for those editors who still don’t get why the writers suck at this, consider a few helpful hints that might make the relationship make more sense:
You’re both right, but in different ways: In most cases, reporters are the experts on their stories. They were in the field, they’ve done the research, they have the interviews and they collected additional information. When it comes to the “who did what to whom” elements of the story, the reporters are the experts on everything, which is why they can feel frustrated when an editor starts putzing around with their copy.
Conversely, the editors are the experts on what the readers are seeing, what they need to see and where the gaps exist in the stories they are editing. The reporters are hip-deep in the content and thus sometimes have trouble seeing the forest through the trees. The editors come to the content with fresh eyes, a general interest in the topic and limited background on what’s going on. That’s exactly how the readers will see it, so it pays to have the editors poking around and changing stuff.
Much like every other situation in life, if multiple people are involved in a collective task, the goal is to play to each person’s strength and away from each person’s weakness. Thus, the editor should get some leeway in terms of changing things that get in the way of the readers’ understanding of the content while the reporter should get more control over the general gist of the story.
You must be able to explain why: I often tell my students that little kids are amazing because they always want to understand what’s going on around them. This is why a 4-year-old’s favorite question is “Why?” They want to figure out how something works, how come something is the way it is and what reasons you have for doing something. It’s an innate element of their being.
Eventually we stop asking those questions, either because we start to figure things out on our own or for fear that an adult might push us into traffic out of frustration. That doesn’t mean we still don’t have those questions, but rather, we stop verbalizing them, so instead of getting decent answers to our concerns, we simply have to stew in our own displeasure.
As a writer or an editor, the goal of every decision you make should be to have a reason for whatever it is you are doing. Then, you need to be able to verbalize it in a clear and concise fashion for anyone who might need to know. For example, if you used a narrative lead on your story instead of a standard inverted-pyramid lead, your editor might ask, “Why does it take me three paragraphs to get to the point of the story?” If you have a good reason, like “I wanted to set up the lead more as a nut graf, because I keep weaving this guy in the opening back into the story as a thread,” your editor might see things the way you do and let it sit. If you have the “I just wanted to mix it up” or the dreaded “I dunno” answer, you’re probably not going to have things work out your way.
The same thing is true for an editor: If you want to change something, have a reason to do so. Also, it helps to ask the “why” question of the writer before you decide to make that change. It shows an interest in what the writer has done, and it provides you an opportunity to reconsider your change. As noted earlier, you’re both going to have strengths and weaknesses, so play to the strengths and explain why you think your position is stronger. If you have established trust with the writer, the writer should give you some leeway on this. If not, you need to start establishing trust, like, yesterday.
The goal is the same: In the end, the thing you both need to understand is that you both want the same thing: the best possible product. In some cases, this can be inordinately frustrating because you can’t fully agree on what that “best possible product” actually is. In addition, you might have different ways to get there.
This is where trust comes in and you both need to make a decision about the value of this relationship. In one of the most frustrating relationships of my life, my doctoral adviser and I butted heads constantly on the editing of my dissertation. I kept pushing for the “good enough” version of things and she kept pushing for the “best possible” version of things. It took a long time for me to admit she was right, but she was. Her goal was my goal, even when I couldn’t see it: Write a piece that was going to be easy to defend and that would help me complete my degree.
At the end of the day, if you are both honest with yourselves and care about the outcome, you will have the best interest of your readers in mind. That means you’ll care less about getting your way or making your changes than you will making sure the reader gets a good, strong, clear and valuable story.
If that’s not the case, and you just want to win, everyone involved is going to lose.
The Filak Furlough trip to the University of Central Missouri really needed a two-parter, in part because there were really two phases to this: The “dude-at-podium” part that we talked about on Monday and the more relaxed part, where I got to hang out with the staff of The Muleskinner.
I have always loved student media, even when student media didn’t really seem to love me. To understand why would take too long to explain, but I believe in the idea that you really can make a significant difference in the lives of many people if you are a student journalist. I also believe that there’s no better place to learn your craft than in a student newsroom that reeks of old pizza, sweaty anxiety and deadline fever.
Let’s get going…
University of Central Missouri – Warrensburg, MO
This is my happy place: In a student newsroom, talking shop with some great kids and critiquing a paper. Photo courtesy of Mingzhu Zhu, The Muleskinner.
THE TOPIC: Newspaper critique and editorial leadership discussion.
THE BASICS: One of the most important things I wanted the students (and you all) to know is that any critique I do is meant to look at things from a different perspective and help people get better. Yes, there might be some criticism in there, but it’s not about the workers. It’s about the work. As I said in the critique, “I have said to someone before, ‘That’s a terrible lead.’ but I’ve never said, “That’s a terrible lead and your haircut is even worse.'” The first one, albeit harsh, is about the work. The second one is a mean personal attack and I won’t ever go there.
So here we go…
A lot of what I talk about in critiques is based on critical thinking, particularly in terms of what people choose to cover and what they don’t choose to cover. In addition, I push a bit on the idea of how much space is dedicated to what kinds of things.
For example, we were talking about front page of the paper:
What I saw immediately was this amazing, locally drawn illustration that relates to the start of UCM’s welcome week. It was near the bottom of the page, while a photo of a ribbon-cutting on an aviation center that happened three weeks earlier was about the same size and near the top of the page. I asked why they went this route.
The answers were good in some cases: It’s a big project ($5.1 million), the area is really plugged into aviation and it made UCM the only university in the state to have its own public-use airport. These were all smart reasons for putting this story out front and getting it some major attention. On the down side, the image is well shot, but relatively common for a ribbon cutting and its also really old news. This is one of those moments where you might think, “How can I get the newsy stuff in the right spot while highlighting some very cool things that are unique to my publication?”
The suggestion I had was to push the illustration up near the top and package it as a centerpiece across the 4 or 4.5 columns of space available there, adding a little more information layering about the first week of school. Then you can run the airport thing down a 2 or 1.5 column rail that keeps the headline above the fold (kind of like what you have with the story in pink) and then strip the research story across the bottom, with the headline spanning all six columns and having the graphic breakout box in the last 1.5 columns of space next to the text.
If the airport story was really so important as to demand more attention, you could flip the whole concept a bit: Make a couple phone calls to airport folk to find out how things are going and give the story a quick refresh. Then, strip the airport story across the top, with a headline across all six columns, put the text below it across four columns and run the art in a two-column set up in the strip. Then centerpiece the illustration and run the research thing like you have it, but just lower on the page. Either way, you get more emphasis on one thing on the page that can really draw people’s attention: The local artwork.
We also talked about the arts page, which features reviews of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” My question was, again, why this and why now? The students mentioned that these were pretty big movies and they had people who like writing movie reviews. I agreed that they were big, but they were big three or four months earlier. Also, people could get this kind of thing anywhere, whereas readers could only get info about UCM from the Muleskinner. When it came to the paper, they got like one, 8-page edition per month to cover the entirety of the school, so is it a great idea to give away 1/8th of that space in this way?
This isn’t to say there wasn’t great content in this paper, as there clearly was. I loved the photos of the basketball team, the artwork out front, the features related to their sports fans and more. Even the BarbiHeimer page had a great local illustration on it. This isn’t about the idea of something being good or bad, but rather a question of asking why we’re doing what we’re doing. If you have good reasons for doing something, great. Do it. If you don’t, reconsider.
We also talked about life on staff and how people tend to burn out over time. The EIC was particularly stressed and I can understand why. The head editor has to deal with all the content, the people, the readers, the budget stuff, the administrators and more. This kind of “face of the franchise” stuff is precisely why I never wanted to be a chair, a dean or a chancellor. Well, that and I’d have to dress differently…
Rather than cover all that here, I’m providing some links to a few pieces we did back in the day about stress, burnout and college media.
In Part III, I have a link to the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which allows you to test yourself for burnout in three key categories. If you want to do that and then want a copy of the decoder sheet, just hit me up via the contact page.
BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: (This one came from the social media director Mingzhu Zhu, who was nice enough to share some photos of the events and make the promotional piece I put up on the previous post. She is a heck of a great media kid and any place out there would be lucky to have her after graduation.) I noticed that you’re only really on Twitter/X and LinkedIn for social media. Why are you using only those two platforms?
BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: I’m really only on those platforms (plus Facebook) because that’s where my audience is and that’s where I can spend the most time effectively.
Knowing your audience and what they use is a key component of being effective on social media. I know I have a lot of current and former students on LinkedIn, who still read my stuff and like to learn from it. I know that I have both a broad reach on my regular Facebook profile and access to teacher-specific groups like Teachapalooza on Facebook.
Twitter/X is becoming more of a wildcard, and I’ve started to shift over to BlueSky now (same handle: @DoctorOfPaper), but the idea is that I still have solid connections there, and using that platform is a good way to share headlines and links. I’m able to track blog traffic to see where people come from and who shows up a lot. That helps me keep my focus on specific targets.
Also, these platforms rely heavily on text-based sharing, which is kind of my bread and butter. I’m not on Instagram that much because my images tend to suck and most of what we do here isn’t visual. I’m also not on TikTok, as it’s more video driven and meant for entertainment in a lot of ways, so it’s not something that fits my niche. Same thing with YouTube: I’m not doing vlogging.
Finally, I believe in making sure that I’m keeping an active presence on whatever social media channels I use. At a certain point, picking out too many channels will lead to a weaker overall social media presence across all of them. Even more, I don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing five people across four platforms. There’s a law of diminishing returns when you start pouring tons of time into the social media landscape, so a more targeted approach that yields richer returns is what I feel is best for me and the folks who pay attention to me.
SPECIAL THANKS: I wanted to really thank the staff of The Muleskinner for making me feel like a part of the family. I do miss a lot of the best of student media and these folks really do represent the best of us:
ONE LAST THING: I have been working on the bats for people and have been making relatively steady progress. I not only managed to get the bat for UCM done before I got there, I managed to apply my extremely limited art skills and get a relatively decent recreation of their mule mascot:
I’m also waiting for mail supplies for the folks that got done earlier. We’re getting there…
A number of my good friends have been proudly announcing their students’ good fortunes recently, as the College Media Association has announced its list of finalists for the Pinnacle Awards and the Associated Collegiate Press has announced its list of finalists for the Pacemaker Awards. These accolades recognize high levels of achievement in student media and to win one means a great deal to everyone involved.
In watching the social media posts from these adviser folks slide through my various feeds, I felt especially grateful that I wasn’t advising any more. This time of the year was always ridiculously stressful for my student media staffs, each of which were desperately checking their emails or refreshing websites to see if the finalists had been announced. The anxiety levels of “Did we win?” were just far too much to bear in many cases.
As great as it was to win something, I often found that it meant less than it should have in some cases because people had come to expect greatness from certain staffs. It was like the old Soviet Red Army hockey team: They won and won and won, so there was nothing but either the status quo or true disaster.
I also know a lot of staffs put in a lot of effort and when their names don’t show up on these lists, it’s like getting stabbed in the heart. What did we do wrong? What should we have done differently? Why do we suck? (The answers are nothing, nothing and you don’t suck.)
Today’s throwback post is meant not to throw dirt on anyone’s accomplishments, but to better help the majority of folks out there who didn’t grasp the brass ring understand why they should still feel good about their work and not feel so bad that they didn’t get the awards. It might also be helpful in the future to those folks who “succeeded” this time but might end up “failing” next time.
“We lost. This sucks.” Why not making the cut for journalism awards shouldn’t bother you so much.
Fall convention and awards season for college media is officially in the books, after the annual conference closed up shop in D.C. last week. ACP’s Pacemaker winners, CMA’s Pinnacle winners and the media convention’s best of show provided the student publications with a chance to strut their stuff and get recognized for their hard work.
You seem to hate awards even as you worked for places that won boatloads of them. What gives?
It’s great for the people who won, sure, but we lost. This sucks.
I never liked awards much, even when we were winning them, because they don’t mean what people think they mean. Even worse, administrators placed far too high of a value on them, equating award-winning publications with valuable publications. I watched as my students fell under that assumption as well, with the concept of “must-win” casting millstones around their necks and dragging them down into fear and anxiety.
The most vivid convention memory I have is one in which we were up for a major national award. My editor, a young woman with a brilliant track record and an impeccable intellect, sat quietly in the ballroom with me and several staffers. As the announcer began to read off names of winners and “not-quite winners,” I saw her hunched over, almost in pain as she rocked back and forth mumbling something. A student later told me, he heard her saying, “Please… Please… Please…” over and over again.
When our school was announced as a winner, she managed to straighten up and walk up to the front like a newborn deer that was just gaining its legs. She produced a wan smile for the photographer who shot a grip-and-grin image, and she retreated to spot in the audience. She smiled for about three seconds and then said, “What happens if we don’t win NEXT year?” The moment was over. It was already about doing it again.
This isn’t a one-off thing either. A good friend of mine mentioned that he still occasionally feels the sting of being the “one who broke the streak” when it came to winning his state’s “College Paper of the Year” contest. He’s in his 30s, he has a wife and a kid and he lives a wonderful life. Still, it’s the one that got away.
When it comes to contests, I’ve been on all three sides of this: The person putting in for an award, the person judging who should get an award and the person running an organization that needs to provide the awards. With that background, I’ve been able to tell students something that they don’t want to hear, that never seems to make the loss any better and that still is accurate in every way possible:
“Awards are great things and you should be proud to win one. However, they aren’t the end-all and be-all of life. These contests border on being entirely random when it comes to what makes the cut and what doesn’t, so when you win something, you should be honored, but don’t let it get to your head. When you don’t win something, you should NOT let it make you feel inferior, as there’s often more at play than just who did the best work.”
Before you read on, this isn’t meant to denigrate places that win stuff or give you a bunch of excuses if you don’t win. Sometimes, other people are just better or we just don’t make the cut. I’d like to think that everything we sent was gold, but if I had to be fair about it, when we lost, we probably deserved to lose. (And if I wanted to be even fairer, we probably won a few times when we shouldn’t have.)
The reason I’m opening this can of worms is because I see the devastated look on students’ faces too often after they don’t win stuff like this. They can’t distinguish between “My entry wasn’t good enough to win this year” and “I personally suck and should go die in a fire somewhere.” No matter what advisers say or what professors say or even what Mom says about you being just as good and just as gifted, it’s hard to see things that way when someone else is hoisting the hardware.
Here’s a look at a few key things that should help you feel not so bad about not winning awards for your hard work:
Showcase Editions on Steroids: I read a book once in which the author referred to the Russian concept of pokazuka, a slang term that means “just for show.” The idea dated back to the Potemkin villages and the tours of them that Catherine the Great used to take. To puff up their status, restaurants would cram their menus with foods that they didn’t have, farms would be quickly put into the wasteland to showcase unreal agriculture and everyone wore their Sunday best like it was common. This impressed the great leader and she marveled at her kingdom. When she left, the place went back to the same craphole it always was.
A lot of publications rely on pokazuka when it comes to contests. For example, one convention’s “best of show” required that the schools enter their most recent copy of the paper. Naturally, everyone knew when the convention was, so some papers would save the big features, the photo essays, the double-truck spreads and more for that issue.
Then, if you were really lucky, an administrator would resign, someone would crash a car on campus or some other form of insane entropy would occur while you were working on the paper: Bam! Breaking news gets added to the mix. When my livelihood came down to winning these things, we’d run multi-section papers, full color and insane graphics projects. My feature class always had a feature or two that was insanely long or good (or hopefully both) and we’d dump that in there as well. It turned out OK in many cases and even better in others.
Thus, rest assured, it wasn’t that your regular Tuesday paper wasn’t good enough. You just didn’t feed it enough steroids.
Making it rain: It’s not always about the quality of your entry, but rather the quantity of your entries.
For one contest, (again, back when my livelihood depended on such things) I found that we could enter the main event for X dollars: Send your five best papers and see if you win the big prize. However, with that X dollars, you were able to enter a certain number of individual entries for free as well, such as best news story, best front-page design, best column and so forth. If you wanted to enter more than that, it was like two bucks per entry. I started doing the math and I realized that I could do a hell of a lot of entering at that nominal rate.
I would require the upper editors to come to the newsroom on one Saturday before the deadline and we would spend all day there finding entries, pasting them up (pre-digital stuff) and signing forms. I’d buy lunch and dinner because it usually took about 13 to 16 hours to do all of it, but in the end, we’d have hundreds of entries.
It wasn’t that I was entering crap, but I stopped debating the minor merits of Entry Candidate A as opposed to those of Entry Candidate B. I just sent them both, as well as Candidates C through Z. It was like the Lazlo Approach to the Frito-Lay Sweepstakes in “Real Genius:”
In other words, just keep shooting and eventually you’ll hit. And we did. Bigly.
I can’t remember what the record overall was, but we swept through categories like Grant going through Richmond, often taking first through third and all three honorable mentions. In other cases, we might only grab one honorable mention, but it was still an award and it still meant something to a kid who earned it.
I couldn’t be certain that people weren’t just giving us an award because we had so damned many entries in each area and they felt a duty to give us SOMETHING. After all, it might have backfired on us if our massive presence meant people got annoyed. However, it didn’t seem to go that way, as we won more and more each year I did it.
So, you might be competing with a maniac out there like this, who essentially wipes out a forest of redwoods and overburdens the postal service with the idea of making it rain on a contest.
You hit into the shift: Baseball used to be relatively simple in terms of infield play: Two people on the left of second base, two on the right. Now, thanks to moneyball and advanced metrics, almost every pro game features more shifting than a fat guy trying to get comfortable in an airplane seat. You get three on the left or the right. You get right fielder playing like a deep roving second baseman. If they could let the peanut vendor stand to the left of the first baseman, I’d imagine we’d see that, too.
Thus, what used to be hits aren’t hits anymore. You essentially get unlucky in some truly unfair ways. That said, sometimes you get lucky and the shift benefits you, like when a left-handed power hitter accidentally check-swings a double down the left-field line while everyone on Earth (including the peanut vendor) is crowded on the right side of the diamond.
For example, one national convention tried to prevent people from steroiding up their editions for entry, so they set it up that you had to submit a certain number of issues from certain time periods. In one case, they kept those time periods so consistent that people could do the “steroids” thing and just pour resources into those papers during those time periods and then cycle off for another month or two. However, what tended to happen was that a few people got fortunate and other people got unfortunate. That giant scandal you covered for five weeks that brought down an administration? Yeah. Wrong weeks. The National Championship your school won, which you covered in glowing visual and graphic detail? Wrong weeks.
However, for some people, the ball bounced the other way: Their big stories synced up beautifully with the selected weeks and they get lucky as hell.
Luck plays a pretty big role in some of these things…
The Greg Maddux Theory of Being Great: Reputation matters an unfortunate amount when it comes to contests. That’s not to say that the reputations are unearned or that those are the only reasons why people from “Name Programs” win stuff, but reputations add a lot to the mix.
It’s a lot like when Greg Maddux used to pitch in the majors. He established himself as a guy who was always able to throw the ball EXACTLY where he wanted and that he was always able to hit the corners of the plate. He earned the reputation fair and square. However, Maddux didn’t ALWAYS hit the corner on every pitch. However, since he had the reputation of always throwing strikes, the umps gave him the benefit of the doubt and called a lot of balls strikes, thus making Maddux happy and pissing off the rest of the league.
The unfortunate comparative here is that when the “Name Programs” enter contests, they get the benefit of the doubt. They get the second look. They get the, “Oh, that’s OK” pass on a minor misstep here or there. They also get judges thinking they’re seeing something “groundbreaking” when it really might just be crap.
I worked at a couple of the “best” schools when it came to writers and designers and we had some great kids. However, the truth is that we had just as many kids who couldn’t find their asses with two hands and a flashlight as anywhere else. We had kids who designed pages that looked like a ransom note mated with a Rorschach test. We had kids who wrote narrative leads that sounded like they were conceived on acid. Still, having that “Name Program” rep got their work a second look.
In one case of judging, I was picking through publications to see who would make the cut for a collection of national awards. As Koretzky noted, a lot of the first pass is about skimming out stuff that’s not good, so my job was to eliminate stuff before a group of us would come together to and debate the merits of what was left. I kept tossing the ones that didn’t make the cut on the floor next to me and eventually the contest coordinators came by to scoop them up.
At one point, one of them picked up a paper and handed it to the other with a worried look. They both murmured something like, “Uh.. Uh-oh…” I asked what the problem was and they said, “Well, this paper ALWAYS wins an award so we’re just surprised…”
OK, but that year it sucked and I started laying out why I thought it wasn’t going to make it. They both backed off immediately, but as they walked away, I heard one of them say something to the effect of how upset the adviser at that publication was going to be.
Part of me wanted to give it another look because I started to doubt myself, even though I knew I was right. The other part of me got pissed that I was second-guessing myself because of the reputation other people had conferred upon this publication. It stayed out of the stack, but that bugged me. And it still does.
Judges are human… : The word “judge” seems to communicate fairness, clarity, wisdom and more. For most of the media contests, however, the word “judge” seems to translate to “person who answered the email plea for help.” Koretzky does more than an adequate job of going over this, so I won’t belabor it here. What I will talk about is the ways in which human failings can lead you to miss out on the prize you covet.
We get tired, so we might glaze over an error that should have bounced out a competitor or we might glaze over while reading your amazing prose. We can get grumpy about something in particular that leads us to be overly harsh in making the first cut. (Personal beef: I hate verb-noun attributions. When I see them I start to twitch. I try to push past it in judging contest entries, but it does take a toll. I know I’m not the only one with a personal gripe that can nudge something to the “pitch” pile.)
We also don’t all have the same experiences, which can lead to vastly different readings of pieces. Case in point: I was judging a pro contest with two other people and we individually needed to pull our personal finalists that we would then debate as a group. In the column-writing category, the best column out of the entire pack, in my opinion, was this one that reflected on how getting the one thing you always wanted sometimes was more about the memories it created than the item itself.
The guy who wrote it was in his mid-50s and he used the analogy of how he and his brothers begged for Electric Football for Christmas.
His parents kept saying no, but eventually they relented and that Christmas was a joyful one. However, it went beyond that to explain how that game and that joy and that experience became their sibling touchstone for years to come.
For me, it was the slam-dunk winner. For the other two people? It didn’t even make it out of the junk pile.
“I never heard of this stupid game,” one judge said. “Why would people watch little plastic guys vibrate on a table?”
The other judge added, “Did kids really play with that?”
Um… YES! It was the greatest game on Earth at the time and it was something we all desperately wanted. Even if it wasn’t, it was more of a metaphor for the connectivity of siblings. Hell, even I knew that and I was an only child. Still, the more I tried to explain this, the less they seemed to see the value in it.
Another point was why didn’t the kids just go out and buy it themselves? Well, because not all of us were rich, so we had to beg for stuff for Christmas.
It was clear that my experiences didn’t match theirs and it was an impediment in the judging process.
The column didn’t win first prize, but with a lot of argumentation, it made the top five.
…And occasionally biased as hell: In some cases, judges play favorites. This can be because they know a program, they worked some place or they are friends with an adviser. The converse can also be true, if a program, place or adviser really pissed off the judge. We do our best to ignore those things and if we’re really ethical, we spend a lot of time trying to make sure we don’t fall into that trap.
In college media, a lot of state contests get judged by people who used to be in student media, so they carry those battle scars with them. If you think I’m kidding, ask someone who worked for the Daily Cardinal what they think about the Badger Herald. These two papers competed as dailies at UW-Madison for decades and if you find someone in his or her 30s, 50s or 70s today who worked on one side of the newspaper war, they STILL hold grudges.
I also know that when I needed judges, I always went to former students who were currently in the field. At first, this made sense because they’re pros, they tend to owe me a favor and I can hold their feet to the fire in case they let the thing slide. However, in retrospect, I wondered if the judges held on to little biases based on how snotty bigger schools had been to them or been more open minded when it came to schools like the ones they attended.
That can make for some difficult judging decisions.
Then there are cases like this one that I experienced on a “shared judging” assignment:
We were looking at high school papers to determine which ones would be finalists for a set of national awards. Again, the goal was to cut down the stack to a predetermined number so that a bunch of us could debate the merits of the survivors. The rule was each person got say over a specific stack. If they had a concern, they could call in another judge for help, but it was basically one person’s say and that was that.
Another judge came by and looked at my stack of rejects. “What’s this one doing in here?” he demanded.
I told him it didn’t make the cut and that I had others that were better and that’s about it.
He stormed off in a huff and I heard him loudly talking to the contest coordinator about this. How he knew the adviser and she was a friend of his and how this was CLEARLY a judging error and on and on…
The contest coordinator asked a second judge to give this a second look. The judge concurred with my opinion that, no, it wasn’t horrible, but it didn’t make the cut and that it wasn’t as good as the others she had seen in her stacks (or assumed were in mine).
The guy then flew into a series of histrionics about how unfair this was and how neither of us understood the greatness of this school’s program and on and on. The next day, they had a THIRD judge read it, who was a friend of both the coordinator and the apoplectic judge. He said that it would just be better if we moved it into the “finalists” stack.
Which they did.
The kicker was that after all that, this judge STILL wasn’t satisfied because not only did it deserve finalist status, in his estimation, but it deserved one of the awards we were giving out. That’s when I put my foot down and basically said to the coordinator, “Look, there is no way this thing is a winner. We had TWO judges look at it and it wasn’t even supposed to get this far. Now that we jury-rigged the system to get it this far, you think we should go even a step further?”
After I threatened to name names on all this in public, it remained just a “finalist.”
The front page of the Daily Tarheel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina, captured the chaos of the active-shooter situation on that campus this week through an amazing “type-attack” approach comprised of text messages sent during the event:
The staff’s efforts on this are commendable, even as the situation that spurred their efforts has become far too common. I realized this when I typed “shooting” into the search engine for the blog and came back with far too many posts on the topic.
For today’s “Throwback Thursday” post, we go to late 2021 and go through a primer on covering shootings and chaos I put together at an educator’s request. As much as I hope it will help folks who need it, I really hope a lot fewer people will need it in the future…
How to cover a shooting or other chaotic event as a beginning journalist
I want to get your Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing to read your thoughts on covering shootings.
I teach near Philadelphia, the City if Brotherly Love, that surpassed an annual record of 500 people shot and killed—in 11 months. I am very sad a Temple University student returning from Thanksgiving weekend was shot twice in the chest in broad daylight by a 19-year-old who was trying to carjack him.
Whether shootings are individual or en masse, we must be sensitive to victims and families while seeking answers to curb the killings.
As I’ve said before, if someone asks for something, I will gladly blog about it, so here we go…
I teach crime reporting and breaking news as part of my junior-level reporting class, but I always include a caveat up front:
Reporting on things like shootings, hurricanes, car crashes and other sorts of mayhem doesn’t really lend itself to a lot of guidelines. I can tell you what I’ve done or what I’ve seen, but at the end of the day, how you react to something is entirely your own doing. While we can read press releases and talk about crime, you never know how you’ll react once you’re on the scene of something.
Until you’ve seen a man get pulled out of a thresher or stood 3 feet from a shooting victim’s dead body, you really don’t know how it will impact you in the short term or the long term.
That said, experience has been a pretty good teacher for me, as a crime reporter, a criminal justice editor and a student media adviser, so here is my best advice on how to work a shooting or other chaotic event for the first time.
We’ll look at what to do (or not do) during your reporting phase, your writing phase and your “afterward” phase.
REPORTING PHASE:
PRIMARY REPORTING ADVICE:
Here are two key pieces of advice when it comes to covering these types of events:
Stay Calm: Things can be blowing up all around you or you might never have seen that much blood before in your life. You may be fighting the urge to throw up. Whatever it is, you need to keep your head about you.
A panicking reporter is a useless reporter. You need to take a deep breath and focus on the task at hand.
Stay Safe: Police and fire rescue folks are trying to do their job. You are trying to do your job. Sometimes, those efforts conflict with each other. Regardless of how important you feel you are, you need to realize that their needs trump your needs at the scene of a shooting or other similar event. In many cases, they put up special tape to keep you out of harm’s way. In other cases, they tell you where to stand or where not to stand.
You need to understand that the shooter might still be out there, which can be dangerous or deadly for you or other people. Even if the shooter is dead or captured, police are likely still in a state of high tension, looking for other shooters or dangerous devices. You wandering around where you’re not supposed to be can create serious problems for them and you might be mistakenly viewed as a danger to them or others. Adrenaline and watching too many “journalism movies” can make us feel emboldened to break the rules to get a major scoop.
Don’t.
Even when the authorities aren’t there to tell you what to do, you need to make sure you use common sense. Don’t stand up against a burning building to do your stand up. Don’t drive into a flood zone and then expect people to bail you out.
Whatever is going on around you, you need to make sure you’re safe and sound. A dead reporter isn’t much more useful than a panicking one.
OTHER REPORTING ADVICE
Use official sources when possible: When we talk about privilege in law, what we are talking about is the right to quote official sources, who are acting in their official capacity, without fear. This generally applies to judges rendering verdicts, congress-folks making proclamations from the floor and probably the pope. In some cases, it also applies to law-enforcement officials and fire folks who are working the scene of what’s going on. Relying on those folks can keep you out of trouble if facts turn out to be less than accurate.
Even if the law itself isn’t providing you with a shield, interviewing these folks can be better than relying on witnesses or participants when it comes to the big-picture items. Regular folks get rattled when a shooting occurs or a car slams into a wall in front of them. They’re pumping adrenaline and freaking out, so their version of reality isn’t as solid as a crime scene investigator who has seen all this before. Even more, officials tend to have more of the entire picture in hand before they speak, which is beneficial to you as you try to make sense of this.
(Again, this doesn’t mean you won’t get screwed over by the officials at some level, especially if they’re hiding something. However, you can REALLY get screwed over if a regular citizen decides to accuse someone of murder on live air. Yes, that actually happened…)
Engage in empathy during interviews with those involved: Trying to interview someone who is the victim of a shooting, a bystander/would-be victim of a shooting or those who are essentially collateral damage (family, friends etc. of a victim) is a ridiculously difficult proposition.
It can feel ugly and vulture-esque to bother people who just went through a chaotic and traumatic event. In some cases, a reporter’s desire to get the story can get them to push sources for information and exacerbate the trauma. Some publications have lousy editors who lean on reporters to dig into the situation with grace and dignity of frisking a dead body for valuables.
I have had a number of interviews in which I’ve had to approach a family member or friend of someone who just died or was injured in a terrible way. In one case, it was the family of a 13-year-old boy who was accidentally shot by his best friend. In another case, it was the mother of a 17-year-old girl who died after slamming her car into a tree while drunken driving. The first family wanted nothing to do with me; the second talked to me at length. Neither was a pleasant experience.
Empathy and caution go a long way to making this less painful for everyone involved. I tell my students that we’re like waiters at a fancy cocktail party who walk around with hors d’oeuvres on a tray: We offer people something and if they don’t want it, we walk away quickly and politely.
The best example of how to think about this came from Kelly Furnas, a professor of journalism, who was advising student media at Virginia Tech during the 2007 campus shooting. More than 30 people died during an attack in which a student opened fire on campus. Furnas and his staff at the Collegiate Times had to not only cover the story, but eventually write obituaries for each of the fallen.
A quote he gave me years ago still sticks with me:
“The students I talked to were terrified of the fact that they would need to call these families and I said, ‘You don’t assume that these families don’t want to talk.’ That’s a very important thing to these families to tell the story of their son’s or daughter’s lives. That’s a very important thing. A lot of people not only want to do it, but expect to do it.”
He said the students were told to do their best and just give people a chance to speak. If they were outraged by the reporter’s questions, the reporter was to apologize and walk away.
In the end, however, very few people rejected the request for an interview, he said.
Don’t bail out on your duty to report because you are afraid of what people might say. Give them the chance to say no before you do it for them.
WRITING PHASE
Primary Writing Advice
The duty to report is not the same as the duty to publish: When you are working against the clock, trying to break news and pushing back against competitors and social media folks, it can feel like the weight of the world is on you to get SOMETHING out there.
In the olden days, as in before everyone could be online in 3 seconds after they saw something, we could hang on for a bit before having to produce content for public consumption. Broadcasters got the 5, 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts to inform folks. Print journalists could wait until press time to get the best version of reality, or update things between editions.
Today, you are live 24-7, so it can feel like you’re always under pressure to convert whatever you gathered into something for the public.
In the case of chaos, you need to balance that urge against your journalistic training to be accurate above all else. Fast and wrong isn’t doing anyone any good.
If you don’t have something you feel is accurate, supported and clear, don’t pump it out there and figure you’ll fix it later. You can always publish something later. Once you toss something out there, you can never really get it back.
Additional Writing Advice
Play it straight: You are likely living through an emotionally turbulent situation, one unlike anything you’ve faced to this point in your career. Your emotions can run the gamut of fear and anxiety to the sense that you’re about to write the Greatest Piece of Journalism Ever ™ so it’s time to shine.
There’s a reason we teach you the Driver’s Ed Rules of Journalism, namely so that when faced with something completely out of the ordinary, you can rely on your training to do things right. This is one of those times, so don’t overdo anything.
Tell the people what happened and why they care in the most direct way possible. It’s what good pros do:
A 15-year-old opened fire at his Michigan high school Tuesday, killing at least three people and wounding eight others, authorities said, in what appears to be the deadliest episode of on-campus violence in more than 18 months.
Don’t start slathering on adverbs. Don’t hype it with opinions. Don’t turn this into a narrative lead that shifts the focus toward “dig my writing” and away from what happened.
Tell people what happened in the most direct and clear way possible, based on what you can prove.
Speaking of which…
Stick to the facts: In the film “And the Band Played On,” researchers at the CDC are trying to pinpoint the cause of a strange malady that is killing primarily gay men. Their quest to identify the AIDS virus as well as its cause and spread had the virus hunters relying on a simple mantra: “What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?” Unless they could hit the “prove” stage, they refused to state something publicly with certainty.
This approach is a good one for anyone covering chaos, especially something that continues to unfold, like an active shooter situation.
If you can stick to the facts and the material provided to you from reliable sources, you can keep your readers informed and avoid spreading misinformation. If you don’t know how many people were shot, don’t guess. Don’t rely on terms like “arguably” to cover over your limited knowledge, saying things like “This is arguably the worst shooting in U.S. history.”
Say only what you can prove at the time, and that also means taking care with how you are stating something.
For example, police can say something like, “The shooter is no longer a threat.”
OK, does that mean he’s been captured? He was killed? He ran out of bullets? Also are we sure the shooter is a “he?” (Make sure in the reporting phase to check these things, as well as other details before publishing.)
Good work on the front end and sticking to what you know on the back end can lead to simple statements like: “Police Chief John Smith said the shooter, a 15-year-old male student at the school, is ‘no longer a threat.’”
Attribute everything you can: One of the key things you should note in the Washington Post lead was the attribution. Even though “authorities said” is vague, the rest of the story was able to fill in specifically who those authorities are and why we should trust them.
I always try to make the point that attributions are like anchor points when you’re climbing a rock formation: You might not need all of them, but it’s better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them. I also note that I’ve never met anyone who has been fired or sued for over-attributing, but more than a few people have ended up on the short end of the stick for under attributing.
When you are writing a story like this, it’s important to look at each statement you type and ask, “Says who?” If the answer is a specific person, include that in the attribution (County Coroner Jill Smith, Police Chief Doug Jones, Superintendent Raul Allegre etc.). If the information is more general, as in you got the same story from multiple people or documents, make that clear as well (Several police officers said the hallway was littered with spent shell casings from an AR-15; Court documents state Principal Helen Carter repeatedly filed reports with the district on this issue; An email chain between the boy’s parents and teachers show that while school officials were worried about his behavior, the parents said ‘Guns are part of his life, so back off.’”)
If you DON’T have a specific source or collective source, where did you get this stuff and how sure are you that it’s right? That’s where people usually screw up, because they assume they know more than they do and they fail to look it up or find a source worthy of attribution.
If you can’t find a source worthy of an attribution, wait until you can before you publish it.
Have someone else read it before it goes out: After you read and reread and reread something again, you can find yourself blind to your work. You also probably cut and pasted a half-dozen things in a half-dozen spots and then undid at least half of that. By the time you think you’re done, you lack any sense of what is actually in there and what you SWEAR you wrote instead.
A fresh set of eyes are a godsend in this kind of situation.
An editor or a colleague who hasn’t read this before will give you a good chance of catching things like if you swapped the name of a victim and the shooter or if you skipped a first reference to a source. It’s something worth doing because you want to make sure you’re right.
My personal stupid thing was that I always got the day wrong for every story I did. For reasons past my understanding, I always wrote that something happened Monday. Didn’t matter what day, week, month or year something happened, I always made it a Monday.
I caught a lot of those on second or third reads, but it was usually up to my editor or a colleague to ask, “Are you sure this happened on Monday?”
Again, you can’t beat a fresh set of eyes.
AFTERWARD PHASE
Never assume you’re done reporting: The thing about chaos is that it doesn’t operate on a schedule. It doesn’t show up as expected or finish up neatly at the end of an hour, like a TV crime drama. You have to make sure you’re frequently checking in to see what’s going on and if you’re still telling people the most accurate and up-to-date information.
Whatever was right as rain at 9 a.m. is completely wrong at 2 p.m.
The arrest that happened last night turned out to be a case of mistaken identity the next morning.
An early body count ends up being much larger or smaller than once was thought.
Assumptions become facts or become worthless as police continue to investigate.
I remember once following up on a story for a fellow reporter who had filed and gone home after her shift was done. The story was about a toddler clinging to life after falling into a creek. The whole story was about hope and prayer and this boy’s will to live. She was a great reporter and a great writer and this was one of those amazing stories she always told.
My job was “just to make sure” if something changed, so about 10:30 p.m., I called the hospital to get an update that might or might not make the paper.
The PR person was kind of half talking to me and half talking to someone nearby when I heard her say, “So… We can tell him then?”
The kid died five minutes earlier when they took him off life support.
I asked about four really bad questions, that ended up having this woman shouting at me something like, “Everything possible was done to save this child’s life!” (which sounds a lot better in print without the anger in her voice). As she’s talking/yelling, I wrote “KID DIED” on a legal pad and held it up for my editor who was across the room.
He saw it and came rushing over as I finished the interview.
“Oh shit,” he told me. “You have four minutes to rewrite the story.”
Long story short, it got done and we got it subbed in for the first edition of the paper. I didn’t get a byline, but I got a hell of an experience and a valuable lesson: Chaos doesn’t operate on your schedule. Make sure you’re constantly checking in.
Engage in self-care activities: One of the easiest things to forget when you’re in the middle of a chaotic event is that you are human and that things do affect you. The job allows you a kind of shield against feeling things or coming to grips with what you’re witnessing at the time.
Don’t kid yourself. You’re taking a beating, whether you know it or not, and you need to heal yourself a bit.
The truth is, you will see things that will gag a maggot, horrors that will haunt you for years and truly inexplicable acts that have you asking “Why?” more times than a 4-year-old after ingesting a pound of sugar. Those things DO leave a scar, whether you want them to or not. They’re there, whether you realize it or not.
You will need to do some serious self-care activities to keep from sustaining serious damage.
This can be simple decompression things like clearing your mind or coming to grips with things you’ve seen or written. It can be talking through your feelings and emotions with colleagues or looking for things that can help you reset your mind and body.
These things can also include therapy or professional help. Acknowledging and coping with what your work has done to you does not make you weak or soft.
It makes you a human being who wants to take care of their own needs before they can take care of their audience’s.
I’m mystified when I hear that so many of our 20-something news assistants prefer to work from home. At that age, I would have had a hard time finding mentors or friends or boyfriends if I hadn’t been in the newsroom, and I never could have latched onto so many breaking stories if I hadn’t raised my hand and said, “I’ll go.”
Mary McGrory, the liberal lioness columnist, never would have gotten to know me at The Star, so I never would have gotten invitations from her years later like this one: “Let’s go see Yasir Arafat at the White House and go shopping!”
As Mayer recalled, when a big story broke at The Star: “You could see history happening. People would cluster over a reporter’s desk, pile into the boss’s office, and sometimes break into incredibly loud fights. There were weirdos in newsrooms, and fabulous role models occasionally, and the spirit of being part of a motley entourage. Now, it’s just you and the little cursor on your screen.”
Dowd’s column toasts a lot of the things that I loved about newsrooms: The weird quirkiness of working with a group of people just this side of the cantina scene from “Star Wars,” the post-work drink/cuss sessions, the adrenaline pulsing through the entire building when a major story was in the works.
All of these things were fun, although I often wonder if most of them would exist today in our sterile, HR-driven, “watch these videos on (fill in the topic of the day that people fear getting sued over) so we can say we told you not to do X” environment. A veteran reporter once told me about his time as a newsroom cub when he got to know the veteran cops reporter. The woman, a rarity at that time, used to bring a six-pack of Pabst to the police station to loosen the tongues the cops she knew. She also carried a two-shot Derringer in her purse.
(I’d be more skeptical, except the source is one of the best journalists I’ve ever met. I’m still not good enough to carry that guy’s typewriter. Oh, and at one point when I complained of a headache and asked if he had something to ease the pain, he directed me to one of his desk drawers, which contained a fifth of some rot-gut vodka.)
Although it’s easy to look at the past with rose-colored glasses, I’m sure the newsrooms from “back in the day” weren’t all that great for women, people of color, non-Christians and other folks along those lines. However, the concept of a newsroom, that central junction point for people and ideas to germinate, remains essential to journalism for a number of reasons:
SIMPLE CONNECTIONS: As much as the internet connects us, it also allows us to be isolated in ways not possible in the newsroom of old. Yes, we can look up much more information online than we could get from a grouchy old copy editor who memorized the AP style guide and still remembers who won the mayoral run-off election back in 1963.
That said, I know that when I was working on a story that crossed news and sports boundaries, for example, I could walk 10 feet across the room to one of the sports folks and ask a couple questions about how they would approach a specific aspect of the story. The same was true when one of them needed some help on a story that involved an aspect of crime.
When I needed more context for a photo for which I had to write a caption, I could duck back into the photo bubble and ask the shooter what caught their eye. When the shooter had some information that mattered to the captions, I often got a visit at my desk. (I could always tell when something was important to Joe Jackson, one of my favorite photo folks, because he’d quietly place his hand softly on my shoulder before saying, “When I was taking this shot, I was seeing/thinking/feeling…” It made my job much easier and it helped me to better understand what to look for in quality photos.)
Years later, as an adviser, I knew that if I was in the newsroom, the kids would ask me to look at a layout or check a headline. They’d also yell, “Hey, Vince, is (X) a real word?” and I could yell back, “Not unless the dictionary’s changed in the last 5 minutes.” I also knew that they wouldn’t bother to call my house or email me to get those answers if I hadn’t been there.
COLLECTIVE WISDOM: Again, not to harp on how technology has changed us, but knowledge and wisdom aren’t the same thing. By merely being around good people who were doing their jobs well, I was better able to improve my own craft.
As I mentioned in a previous post, my desk at the State Journal was jammed up against the one Pat Simms occupied, putting me in the perfect position to basically get smarter through osmosis. I could hear how she used strong questions to quash BS answers before they could get started. I listened to how she worked a source until she was sure she had the best version of whatever the story was from that person. I also learned how to turn a story around quickly, with limited time and even less flab.
Spending time near editors like Phil Glende and Teryl Franklin (to name only a few) gave me a sense of how to find holes in a story and how to fix them if the reporter couldn’t. I watched the copy desk clean the copy thoroughly and quickly by figuring out who could do what the best and making sure that person got that specific job. In a lot of ways, watching the pros operate in person was like watching an orchestra perform live. (Some days it looked like Cirque du Soleil being performed with chainsaws on an oil-slicked linoleum floor, to be fair.)
It’s not the same when it’s not live.
SOCIAL NORMS: One of the best journal articles I ever read for my doctoral program was Warren Breed’s 1955 study of social norming within a newsroom. Breed examined the ways in which knowledge and practice was shared among those in a newsroom and found that journalists tended to eschew formal documents or written policies. Instead, they shared information one to another as a way of training younger generations to behave as those before them had.
Reflecting on his seminal study more than 40 years later, Breed recalled how he was writing about a parade of some kind and an older journalist advised him to hype up the patriotism. The vet mentioned that he should start with something about the bands playing and the flags flying. Breed did as he had been advised and was later praised for his effort. A few years later, he found himself doling out similar advice to a novice writer, who also led his story with the image of flags waving and bands performing.
The idea can seem a little problematic in some ways, especially if you realize that this can really narrow the view of what makes for “news” or how to “do news right.” However, a lot of the norms that I picked up in the newsroom meant a lot in terms of imbuing me with some important lessons.
For example, it’s easy to blow off a deadline (or a demanding editor, who is steaming over your inability to make a deadline) if you’re in your home 50 miles from the editor in question. However, when I watched a person blow a deadline by five minutes and then saw that five minutes turn into 10 more at the editor’s desk and 15 more at the copy desk, I saw the chain reaction associated with that failure. In addition, I knew when an editor was circling my desk like a shark, I stepped on the gas pedal a little harder in banging out whatever I was working on.
Even more, a lot of social norms that matter more now than ever get passed down from our mentors in a one-on-one situation. I know that journalistic malfeasance has happened as long as journalism has been around, but I know that feeling a stronger collective “we” made any one person less likely to take the easy way out. I can’t imagine having to see Teryl every day if I had faked a source, got caught and had to live with it in that newsroom. A random editor halfway across the country that I never met? I’d like to think I’d be just as honest, but I can’t say for sure.
I learned from folks like George Hesselberg that we get stuff right all the time. That’s a value that came from his mentor and I’m sure it came from someone else all the way back into an even further bygone era. The norms we shared remain in my mind to this day as well as the bonds of friendship we still share today.
FAMILY: This may be a bit more Polly-Anna-ish and more like what Dowd was talking about, but I have to admit, newsrooms and the people I met in them became like a second family to me.
(We used to joke at the Daily Cardinal that we were a family, in that we all drank and hurt one another, but I digress… Besides, the godparents of my kid came from that newsroom, so it couldn’t have been all bad…)
I’ve yet to hear a student come back to campus for a “Reporting Class” reunion or a “J-412 Tenth Anniversary Celebration,” but they come back for student media events. They reconnect with people who chewed the same dirt as they did in the windowless bunker that the university provided as a newsroom, where the coffee pot always burned everything to a crisp and the carpet smelled like wet feet.
They also connect with others from previous generations who have been through the same kinds of things. Just having lived through that experience makes them kindred spirits.
To lose those connective threads seems so sad to me, and I’m not even a people person.
A colleague who is advising a student media operation asked a question in an internet group setting after a kid on his staff admitted to fabricating a story for the publication:
Does anyone have any experience or policies to shed light on how such a person might be given a path to redemption?
The old editor in me says, “That’s it. Your journalism career is over.” But these days I see too many long-lasting severe consequences for young people who do dumb things, including criminal activity. TBH, I’m not really trying to open the philosophical debate here. I’m interested in options I can present to the student EIC, who will make the decision.
I thought about the question the guy was asking and put together what I thought was a pretty reasonable answer based on what he wanted to know: How do you give the kid a path to redemption? After I posted, several other folks chimed in with the idea that the kid SHOULDN’T get a path, given that this was likely not a one-off and that keeping the kid is borrowing trouble.
Truth be told, that’s actually the better instinct, based on a lot of things we’ve seen in the media world lately. We’ve covered this topic here and here and here where we had professional journalists get caught after years of making crap up. It’s never a one-time deal and the journalist’s whole career comes apart like when you pull a loose thread on a sweater once someone starts digging into the past.
The sad part was that the colleague updated us a couple days later:
Probably because of posts I’d read on this list about earlier situations, on Sunday I started emailing all the sources named in the reporter’s earlier stories. This morning, I started calling businesses where some of the sources allegedly worked. By lunchtime, there were several cases where no such person could be found to exist. After trying to come up with explanations for the first couple, the reporter finally admitted this had been a pattern. The reporter resigned.
This brings me to today’s throwback post, which looks at a similar situation involving a young reporter at USA Today. It’s not meant to “tsk tsk” people, but rather as a reminder, this kind of thing can happen to anyone in the right (or wrong) circumstances, so it is important to remain personally vigilant.
Whenever a situation like this comes up, I think back to the first episode of the Netflix show “Ozark” and the issue of how to deal with someone who has cheated. The main character is involved with a drug cartel in a money-laundering scheme out of Chicago.
Del, the connection south of the border, makes an unexpected visit, accusing the laundering crew of stealing from him. He tells a story about his father’s grocery store and how his dad spotted a loyal cashier (a woman so close to the family, you call her aunt, he remarks) stealing $5 from the till one day.
She begged for forgiveness, saying she needed the money for a child’s medicine and that she’d never do it again. Del then asks each of the four men in the operation what his father should have done. Three of the men say he should forgive her, give her a second chance. After all, one mistake after 15 years of loyalty? The three men are brutally killed shortly after that. The fourth, Marty, doesn’t answer, but he manages to worm his way out of getting killed.
Later, Del asks Marty question again:
As much as people want to believe something like this was just a one-off, it rarely turns out to be the case. After someone pulls on the first loose thread on sweater, others began to do so as well, and we see everything unravel.
The Gainesville Times, where Miranda worked for three months as a freelancer and a reporter, published a piece on her USA Today situation and audited her work. The paper stated it pulled only one story just to be on the safe side, noting Miranda had produced “only a small volume of work” for the publication.
Her college paper, the Red and Black at the University of Georgia began conducting its own audit of Miranda’s work after the USA Today situation came to light. That paper flagged 14 articles of concern of the 121 articles associated with Miranda. The publication then made the appropriate corrections or clarifications to six articles that didn’t pass muster after they were reexamined.
(If anyone wants to see perhaps the best example of transparency, thoroughness and honesty in the face of a potential disaster, read this write up on the Red and Black’s website that details the work the staff went through to address the problem. These folks essentially wrote the book on how to self-audit in a situation like this.)
To ask “why” is a pointless exercise. Each time a journalistic fraud emerges, we get a different story, none of which excuse the actions of the individual or fully satisfy the readers. It also provides us with an undeserved sense of superiority, as if “we” could never be capable of such a thing.
We all are.
Some of us deal with pressure better. Some of us grew up with a guilt complex. Some of us have a pathological fear of getting caught that keeps “bad things” in check for the most part.
But rest assured, not one of us is any less capable of cutting a corner or fudging a source. We just haven’t done it. Yet.
For journalists, journalism teachers and students who want to keep that demon at bay, go to the Red and Black and USA Today websites and look up the stories Miranda wrote in her brief journalism career. They are powerful, engaging and interesting pieces that run the gamut of social justice explorations to fun news features.
Now, just do a Google search on “Gabriela Miranda.”
Almost every link comes back to a story about her journalistic transgressions.
A couple students were in my office Wednesday, concerned that they couldn’t find an internship yet or that internship folks had turned them down. In one case, the place rejected her and then reposted the internship. This is like being told, “I’m sorry I can’t go to the prom with you” just moments before you hear that same person telling everyone around the lunch room, “I really want to go to prom and I’ll literally go with ANYONE!”
More than a few other folks have been stopping by with crises of confidence, so I made the kids a deal: I’d dig out this post for a Throwback Thursday if they promised to read it. It’s a look back about five years ago, but the core of this is still spot-on.
Here’s a look at me living up to my end of the bargain:
Five helpful thoughts as you panic about not having an internship yet
When March turns to April, summer seems only a few short weeks away. For those of us in Wisconsin, that means the snow might finally finish melting and we can finally put away our shovels and salt spreaders for the year. For journalism students everywhere, however, April means moving from “Hey, I applied for this internship” to “Why haven’t I heard back from the internship?” to “GOD, WHY?!? WHAT HAVE I DONE IN LIFE THAT IS SO FOUL AS TO NOT GOTTEN AN INTERNSHIP YET?!?!”
I asked some folks I know who hire interns in the field what thoughts they had about this time of year, working through the hiring process and so forth. I also dug through the old file of rejection letters and such to come up with some advice for those of you who are somewhere between moderate concern and psychotic panic.
The Most Basic Advice:
You aren’t doing yourself or anyone else any good freaking out. The process is going to be the process, so don’t get yourself so wired that you’re tied up in knots and likely to send a horribly embarrassing text or email to a potential employer, begging for information. Cooler heads prevail, so YOU MUST CHILL. As one person who has worked for everything from top 20 circulation newspapers to promotions for the UFC explained:
My favorite quote: Patience is not absence of ambition. #EverybodyChill
This Takes Time
I remember working night desk at the State Journal one night when we were looking to hire a swing-shift reporter. My boss, Teryl, was responsible for reviewing the candidates. It was the end of a hellish night and I had just finished the midnight cop calls and settled in near the scanner to keep an ear out for any breaking news. Teryl sat down and pulled this giant stack of folders out of her desk drawer and dropped them on her desk with that clanging THUD that only half-metal, half-Formica desks can emit. There had to be 50 or more folders there, easy. She picked up the first one and with a heavy sigh, she started going through them. I thought it would take longer for her to get through them than it took for Andy Dufresne to make his way to freedom. I’m sure it felt just about as fun for her as it did for him.
Even now, these things take time and there is a ton of work involved. Even if you are the perfect candidate, it’s going to take a while to dig through the pile to find you. Or as one of the pros I talked to who is currently hiring interns said:
I’m at a very small agency and my colleague and I also have SO many of these things to sift through. We received more than 50 resumes for our one internship, and there’s only two of us to read them through. The process of trying to line up schedules and find a time for interviews is an absolute nightmare. Even once we do that, we’ve usually gone through 2-3 rounds of candidate interviews before we find someone we like. We try to put a dedicated effort into finding someone quickly and it still takes us about 3 weeks per hiring cycle.
You need to have reasonable expectations of how long this will take and understand there are actual human beings on the other end of this process who are likely doing their level best. Your best bet is to check in when you submit your material and find out what their general plan is for contacting people and then add about two weeks to that. Once that time has ended, you should give them another week and then contact them. But only do it once and do it in a, “I know you’re insanely busy but I wanted to check in” way. As a guy who works for Facebook explained to me:
Have the students ask what the typical turnaround times are so they have the right expectations and use the time spent waiting for one internship to apply to 3 more.
That said, if you have important updates, it helps to let the people know about that so you stay at the forefront of their minds in a positive way, according to a top PR pro who has worked for major players all across the country:
I also think that continuous follow up always keeps you ahead of the game. If it means thanking them for their time, sharing a story about the news they heard about the company (recent awards or otherwise) or writing a letter about how they are the ideal candidate and list specific strong reasons why… it goes a long way. I’m currently helping hire our interns for Baird and those are just a couple of things that stand out to our Directors/Managers.
Have a Plan B (and C…)
What might be the perfect internship for you might not make you the perfect candidate for the company. With that in mind, it helps to cultivate multiple options. If you are afraid that you might not get THE internship, keep an eye out and toss your hat in the ring for others that come open. One former newspaper editor who hired interns explained why this is a good idea:
I’d also recommend that students not put all their eggs in one basket when it comes to jobs and internships. Take the time to apply for a variety of internships. At best, you have a few great options to choose from. At worst, you got practice with the application process that will help you for years to come.
Another pro, who has worked in news, PR and university marketing, said not only should you be applying for multiple internships, but you should look for every opportunity to get experience if you get one:
Don’t sit tight waiting for one or two opportunities to pan out. Keep searching and keep applying. And be willing to seek and do work that gets you access to watch and learn, not necessarily do the “intern-version” of the “full-time thing.” Be a clerk. Tackle phones and backstage stuff if it gets you a front row seat. Bottom line: apply, apply and apply some more.
Take Advantage of Bad Situation
It helps to keep your ear to the ground for just-posted internships right about now and here’s why:
Media outlets don’t always have their acts together when it comes to an internship program. Some places will get involved late in the game because they finally got permission to hire or because the money was finally available for the position. This means right about now, another wave of internships might be cresting and it could be yours to ride.
Don’t feel bad about this, but it is possible that other candidates out there are viewed as being better than you are. As you sit at home, in a panicking dervish of anxious hope, those “better candidates” are taking internship offers and planning an awesome summer. Yes, this eliminates a few internship possibilities for you, but it also means that several other places that were banking on the Golden God/Goddess candidate are now looking for their Plan B. In some cases, you might be that Plan B. In other cases, they run out of options that are available and they might re-post the position. This gives you another shot to apply for something you might have missed or bypassed on your first salvo of applications.
(You might not like it if you think your next internship sees you like this, but consider it a chance to prove them wrong.)
I know this all sounds like, “Hey, you might not be all that good, but you might be the best of the really lousy candidates left after all the good kids take the good jobs,” but that’s not the point. Yeah, you can look at this like you’re some kind of damaged goods if you want, but it’s better to think about it this way: You want the internship and the experience that goes with it, so suck it up, check your ego and apply to be someone else’s “good enough” option.
There’s a huge benefit to this: The ceiling on how impressive you can be is really unlimited. You have the ability to prove to them that you are awesome and you probably are better than whoever it was from the Almighty Deity School of Journalism and Perfection that turned them down. Plus, nothing makes someone work harder, stronger and faster than a really big chip on the shoulder.
Don’t Be This Candidate:
You might find yourself wondering “Why?” when it comes to the lack of communication from your potential internship suitors. This is where it helps to go back through your materials. In one case, someone didn’t get the gig because they mis-typed their phone number on their resume and people couldn’t get a hold of her. In another case, the applicant’s package never made it and he was too bashful to check in on the process. Then there are candidates like the ones this pro described:
And for the love of all things holy, please ask them to read their resumes over numerous times for errors, have someone else do it, and then do it again. I just threw out one for calling the Huffington Post the Huntington Post and another for spelling her own school’s name incorrectly.
This is why it pays to edit the hell out of your resume and cover letter before you send it off. (I screwed up and misspelled the name of editor on my cover letter, but he hired me anyway. Conversely, I saw Teryl toss one of the applications away when the person wrote “Dear Mr. Franklin” to her in the salutation. It’s dicey out there.) It also would help to have someone look over it for you, preferably someone whose not just going to say, “Wow! You’re great! Now can we go to the bar?”
If you turned out to be the person who screwed up in one of these ways, it will be in your best interest to figure that out before you have to send stuff out again.
(I know adviser Doug Pils probably DIDN’T approach the situation this way, but I still like to imagine this is how he and his newsroom reacted when the administration dropped the bomb on them, declaring their print days to be over.)
Good news seems to be in short supply these days, so it’s nice to see a reminder that once in a while, the good folks win.
The Battalion at Texas A&M University celebrated the fact they are still printing one year after the university declared print on campus dead and demanded the paper stop putting out a dead-tree edition.
The editors wrote a fantastic piece on their opinion page recently to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the event by showcasing all the great stuff they had done since that point in time:
Our own coverage of the Memorial Student Center losing its status as an early-voting location last year informed the local community and directed eyes from all across the state to College Station and the importance of ballot access.
But The Battalion, and student journalism more broadly, is about so much more than the headlines that reach national proportions — it’s about telling the story of our community, Aggieland, authentically.
Being run by students, for students, allows us to pinpoint the stories that matter most to our audience, explore these issues with passion and sharing it to Aggies everywhere.
Pils said the continued support from a variety of sources has helped buoy the staff members’ spirits as they persist in their efforts to save the print edition. He also said he doesn’t know what it will take to get Banks to fully retract her order.
“Do I have honest hope for it? I don’t know I think we raised enough ruckus that we might have a chance, but not knowing this person at all, and only knowing a few people who do know her, I’m not certain… but I certainly do hope.”
After getting a brief reprieve to the end of the semester, the situation kind of just kept on keeping on. The editorial reflects that and it’s a great way to capture everything student press should entail:
While our staff is committed to embracing new mediums and ways to reach our audience, make no mistake; Print is not dead until we say it is.
The Battalion has been printing for 130 years, and today, we are committing to yet another. So here’s to another year of print journalism, of commemorating Aggieland and telling stories about students, by students, for students.
Here’s to another 130 years. Congratulations and thanks for the inspiration!
THE LEAD: The Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published a story about how the system president, Jay Rothman, had emailed the chancellors at the UW schools with some thoughts about the future. In that email, Rothman noted his support for several changes, including moving away from liberal arts programs at certain campuses:
The 
