Throwback Thursday

Using AI to cheat on writing assignments is bad. Doing it in journalism classes is downright stupid (A Throwback Post)

Me to kids who use AI to cheat: “What I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you…”

I often wonder when I’m reading some of the essay work I get these days that is clearly written by generative artificial intelligence if my students are lazy and stupid or if they think I am.

Truth be told, I usually don’t have a lot of problems in this area because AI has yet to master the art of writing for the media, as it has clearly and repeatedly demonstrated. However, from time to time, I have a class that requires a reflection paper or personal essay, and suddenly, the students who couldn’t find a coherent sentence with a searchlight and a posse have managed to put Shakespeare to shame.

In one case, I found about 20 percent of the kids had completely or mostly written their ETHICS assignment using artificial intelligence programs. The irony on that is so thick, you couldn’t cut through it with a chainsaw.

In another case, I gave students a 1-1.5 page, typed, double-spaced reflection paper before each test that is there to do nothing but make them think about what we covered in the chunk of the class leading up to the test. I did this so that the kids who suck at multiple choice could have a chance to express themselves and to also defray the overall impact of each test.

The prompt was laughably simple. Tell me briefly:

  • What we covered that you already knew before you took the class
  • What we covered that you didn’t know before you took the class
  • What we touched on that you would want to know more about.

That’s it. If you can fog a mirror, it’s almost a guaranteed B+. If you can write a word or two in the mirror fog with your finger, it’s practically an A.

Caught at least one kid AI-ing it, through basic common sense, journalistic skepticism and checking through multiple detection programs. I’ve gotten to the point that I can almost tell exactly WHICH program they used to write it.

And, yes, it’s really quite upsetting. (I’d use other words to describe my feelings on this, but Sage is trying to sell a book or two here.)

As friends and colleagues have told me that this kind of thing is “rampant” on their campuses as well, I figured I’d break out this throwback post on why cheating in journalism (especially in terms of AI stuff) is a really, really bad idea:

 

4 Self-Serving Reasons Not to Cheat in a Journalism Course

At the beginning of each semester, most professors I know give some version of the “Don’t Cheat” lecture. We explain the university policies about cheating and how we can make your life so miserable that you will wish you had never been born. We outline the logical reasoning behind avoiding unethical behavior and try to guilt you into acting right.

And right about now is where we start to notice that none of that really sunk in for some of our students.

Somewhere between midterms and finals week is where I tend to find whatever cheating I’m likely to notice over the span of a semester. It’s always the same: The student who couldn’t write a sentence with a subject and a verb is suddenly putting Bob Woodward to shame. The kid who spent the last two weeks in our “draft” sessions with nothing done suddenly produces a magnum opus in two days. The story I get from a student that seems shockingly familiar for some reason, mainly because his roommate turned in the same thing last semester.

It’s also the same when the students are confronted. They go through all five stages of grief in about three minutes: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. (Or, in at least one case, a note from a parent that told me “The family lawyer will be in touch.) It’s gotten so bad that I keep tissues hidden in my office for that exact moment when a student suddenly realizes there is no way out and tears begin flowing. (For the record, men cry as much or more than women do when the stuff hits the fan like this.)

Since journalism is always about telling people “What’s in it for me?”, consider these four self-serving reasons why you shouldn’t cheat, least of all in a journalism course:

You have much worse odds of getting away with it: Students have come up with so many great ways of cheating on various tests, projects, quizzes and assignments, it gives me hope for the future in terms of innovation. There are the water bottle labels with the answers printed on them. There is the “phone/texting” thing that students have developed over the years. There are “cheat sheets” and “crib notes” written in places that defy logic.
Many journalism classes, however, are performance based and skill structured, so it’s not about memorizing things and regurgitating them, so those tricks don’t always apply. Instead, students tend to plagiarize from published material, use stuff from sources that don’t exist or otherwise “improvise” their ways around their writing assignments and tests.
Here’s the problem with that: Journalists and journalism professors (a.k.a. former journalists) are naturally suspicious, so they have a harder time believing that you managed to track down the governor for a sit-down interview on deadline. They are trained researchers, so they know how to fact check and verify stuff through a number of platforms beyond “TurnItIn.” They usually have connections with sources in the area, so it’s not a stretch to imagine them calling up a city council rep, a high school football coach or an administrator and asking, “Hey, did you have an interview with someone in my course and say XYZ?”
The whole purpose of being a journalist is to dig past the BS veneer that people show us and get to the heart of the truth.
We live for this. And trust me, our ability to dig is better than your ability to hide at this point in your career.

 

You really piss us off and trust us, you don’t want that: When journalists dig into something, we are like a dog with a Frisbee: We just don’t let go. Most of the time, when someone lies to us, we are desperate to dig even deeper to determine how bad this is and what else that person might be lying about.
We will be bound and determined to dig into EVERY, SINGLE, OTHER thing you have EVER written for us and see if there is ANYTHING you did that fits this pattern of plagiarism. We will talk to colleagues about you to see if you were in their classes and see if they had any inclination that you might not be producing work that is on the level. We will look to see what penalties are available and how far this can all go.
The reason is that we operate in a field where trust is earned and all you have is your reputation. If you throw that all away over a crappy assignment in a single college course, what’s going to happen when you get out in the field? Even more, if you go out there with a degree from our institution and people know you had us as professors, how will that reflect on us when you do something this pathologically stupid on the job? Those kinds of thoughts keep a lot of us up at night, not out of fear but out of anger. We are not about to let our field slide into the Dumpster (or further into the Dumpster) because you cheated when you felt “overwhelmed” by your six extracurricular activities and the death of your goldfish. In most cases, professors will be far more forgiving if you essentially tell them everything up front when you can’t complete an assignment. If you cheat, we have a burning desire to make sure you don’t get away with it.

 

Two degrees of separation: The concept of “Six Degrees of Separation” explains that we are all somehow connected to every other person on Earth through no more than six links. In the field of journalism, however, that linkage is a lot shorter.
I have done no definitive work on this, but if I had to guess, I’d say those of us in journalism are probably operating within two or three degrees. Case in point happened this weekend at the college media convention I attended: I was reviewing a student newspaper from Florida when I mentioned that I had a number of former students working in the state. One of the students said that she was in frequent contact with an editor of a particular newspaper. I recognized the name immediately as one of my former students and did the old “humblebrag” thing about it. “Really?” the student asked, her eyes lighting up. “Could you tell her you met me and that I’m really interested in the paper?” She was a smart kid and I liked what I had read in her stories I was critiquing, so I said sure. I dashed off a simple email to my former student about this woman and moved on with life. Today, I got this message back:

Vince,

Small world!

We are considering her for a spring internship. Your recommendation just put her at the top of list.

Hope you are doing well.

I honestly don’t know if my email helped or if maybe the editor was trying to make me feel good about myself, but the underlying point remains: In the most random place and set of circumstances possible in journalism, I was linked to two people in the field like that. This kind of connection is invaluable in our field if the word on the street about you is good. If you plagiarize and get caught, the word on the street spreads as well and, simply put, everybody in this field seems to know everybody else somehow. The “A” you got on that plagiarized assignment better be worth knowing that you will never get a job because everywhere you go, someone will know someone who knows about it.

 

You will never really recover: My dad was fond of telling me that if I ever planned to steal something, I shouldn’t steal a candy bar from a store. Instead, I should steal the whole store, as in when the owner came back the next day, all that was left would be a basement and some wires sticking out of the ground. The reason Dad had for this was simple: If you steal something, no matter how big or small, you’re a thief. If you’re going to steal and ruin your life, you might as well do it for something that matters.
Obviously, his point wasn’t that I should go big or go home, but rather that if I took that path of thievery, I’d never be able to recover everything I lost because of the stupid choice I made. The same is true in plagiarism, cheating and more.
The famous cases are always the ones your professors roll out for you during the semester: Stephen Glass, the wunderkind of the New Republic, who falsified dozens of stories before being forced out in disgrace. He is now a graduate of law school who still can’t practice law because of his prior transgressions. Jayson Blair, the rising star at the New York Times, who supposedly broke stories about the D.C. sniper case, turned out to be a serial liar. He now lives in Virginia and said he knows he could never go back to journalism because of the trust he broke. Janet Cooke, who wrote a compelling tale of an 8-year-old heroin addict name Jimmy, returned the Pulitzer Prize she won after it turned out she made him up. Today, as the story linked above notes, she lives in the U.S. and works in a field not associated with writing.
Beyond those “big names” are the day-in, day-out foul ups that cost people everything. I was on an ethics panel last week when one of my fellow panelists told a story of a student who made things up or plagiarized content. His name was so clearly bad in the field, he ended up legally changing it.
I still have the “ethical agreement” one of our writers signed at the student paper shortly before he made up an entire softball story. We only caught him because someone on the sports desk was roommates with a guy who was dating a softball player and she mentioned it in passing. I have no idea what ever happened to that guy after we fired him, but I do pull out that agreement from time to time and show students. His name is etched in their minds as a cautionary tale.

 

Interestingly for me, I find that this kind of stuff happens most with my upper-level classes. Freshmen and sophomores screw up occasionally by bumping into a problem when they don’t know any better. However, it’s the seniors who are getting ready to graduate that actively cheat. Why? My theories vary.
Look, we all get it. Everyone in journalism has felt the pressure at one point in time. Deadline is approaching, we get caught short and we figure, “If I can just cut this corner this one time, I’ll survive.” The truth is, it’s not worth it. If you screw up that assignment, the worst that happens to you is that you fail that one piece or that one test. If you cheat on that assignment, everything gets so much worse.

Read your stories for holes and plug them before you publish (A Throwback Post)

This is the last minute of what Sports Illustrated called the greatest sports moment of the 20th century and I remember watching it live as a kid. Today, it turns 44 years old, making me feel even older than I already feel…

On Feb. 22, 1980, the U.S. Olympic Hockey team, comprised of college kids and amateurs, took on the greatest team of hockey players ever assembled, The Soviet Union’s Red Army Club in the semi-final game of the medal round.

The 4-3 U.S. victory became known as the Miracle on Ice and after the U.S. beat Finland two days later, the “Boys of Winter” became the second U.S. Hockey team ever to win a gold medal.

Why do I tell you this?

  1. I love telling that story, so I’ll tell it every chance I get.
  2. It showcases the point of this throwback post: Don’t leave a hole in a story.

If you’re like most people reading this, and you hit that final statement about only being the second U.S. Hockey team to win gold, you might wonder, “OK, but when did they win the first gold?” In short, I teased some information and didn’t follow through.

(For the record, it was the 1960 team, which performed its own “miracle on ice” by defeating half the Communist countries on Earth, it seemed, en route to the gold. The captain of that team was a 34-year-old named Jack Kirrane, a firefighter from Brookline, Massachusetts, who sold his truck to pay for his travel to the tryout site and then went unemployed for four months for the privilege of being an Olympian. I could talk about this stuff for days…)

The point is, you need to look through your stories and figure out if you have left people hanging or if you have filled in every key hole that could pop up in your piece.

Take a read:

 

Stories with holes: It’s not really journalism if you leave me with more questions than answers

10 Cities With the Big Bad Pothole Problems | Firestone Complete Auto Care

If your story looks like this, you’ve got problems.

Sunday morning had me facing my own level of mortality when my dad flashed the obituary section of the paper in front of me and asked, “Did you know this guy?”

Sure enough, I did.

Peter and I had gone to high school together and even been on the debate team at the same time. He was a year ahead of me and was wicked smart. He tutored me in geometry, a Herculean task to say the least, and he was the school’s valedictorian the year he graduated.

He went off to two Ivy League schools, earning a law degree and spending much of his career in patent law out on the West Coast. He died far too young, at age 47, which left me with the question I’m sure most people would have asked:

“How did he die?”

Despite my best googling and research skills, I couldn’t figure this out. I asked a couple people we held in common over the years, only to have them asking the same question I had. I even emailed his law firm and they didn’t have anything to tell me.

Which leads us to the point of this piece: Journalistic content shouldn’t have your readers asking crucial questions when they are done with the story. When I teach editing, I refer to stories that have this problem as having holes. The job of reporters and editors is to make sure the holes get filled or discussed before a story is published.

In the case of obituaries, we’ve discussed this before and explaining that they’re more for the living than the dead, so we need to make sure they serve as a complete telling of the person’s life. It should be clear that the story of the person’s life is the most important portion of the story, but it also remains the case that the only reason we’re telling it now is because the person has died.

(Side note: When I worked at a newspaper a long time ago, the local style guide dictated that an obituary written on anyone under the age of 70 included the cause of death whenever possible, as most people would be curious of what caused this person’s too-soon demise. I found an older edition of the style guide, which required the COD for those older than 60. Several of us surmised that our boss changed it when he got older, as he didn’t want to be in the “acceptable to be dead” demographic.)

(Second side note: I have told Amy that when I die, however I die, she needs to include the cause of death in my obituary. I don’t care if I died breaking my neck by falling off the couch trying to kiss my own butt as part of a TikTok challenge. If it mattered enough for me to die while doing it, tell people. I don’t need folks speculating…)

In the case of larger investigative stories, holes can unintentionally undermine the credibility of sources. When something is missing and readers have questions, they can become suspicious of the entire story.

Case in point: The Kansas City Star dropped a bombshell story of a former KU football player who stated that several of his former teammates harassed and threatened him and his family. The allegations included a teammate loosening the lug nuts of one of his car’s tires, teammates bursting into his apartment to threaten his family and the athletic department trying to buy his silence to the tune of $50,000.

The story mentions four players, but never names them.

I spent half the story wondering who these former KU football players were.

I spent the other half of the story why, if these allegations were credible, the paper didn’t name these dudes who attacked and threatened this kid.

Neither question got answered in the text, leading me to wonder more about the kid making the allegations and the author of the piece than anything else.

Filling in holes like this can allow the readers to make up their own minds about the credibility of sources, the seriousness of a situation and a dozen other things. However, when they are left hanging, they can’t exercise proper judgment.

I recall reading a story more than a dozen years ago about a small-town beef between a mayor and a city administrator over something the mayor had said. The administrator called it something like “the most offensive slur I have ever heard” while the mayor said it was something like “just a plain-folks saying that was being misinterpreted.”

I read the whole story, waiting to see what was said. The writer didn’t include it, didn’t clue me in on what it might be (a racial slur, a demeaning phrase describing people with disabilities, a sexist remark) and also didn’t tell me why that wasn’t included.

The fact I remember this, while I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, clearly demonstrates that holes can stick with a reader for quite some time.

Here are a few things you can do to find and fill holes that will have your readers thanking you:

CONVERSE WITH THE READER AS YOU WRITE: Journalism has long had a tradition of filling in 5W’s and 1H or checking off news values and considering the job done. Those elements still have value, but we really should be spending more time focusing on the needs of the audience.

After all, when those tenets were crafted, journalists usually knew their audiences intimately and the number of sources of information were far more limited than they are now. Audience-centricity was baked into the process back then and people couldn’t just hop on the internet and find answers to their questions elsewhere.

A good way to make sure that you’re working for the audience is to imagine a conversation with the readers when you are writing. You tell them the most important thing you can and then follow the thread of how you imagine that conversation will go:

You: Hey, your mom called. There was a fire at your house around 2 a.m.

Reader: OH NO! Is everyone OK?

You: No one got hurt because the smoke detector woke them up and they got out right away.

Reader: How bad was the fire?

You: The house is a total loss. Firefighters say more than $200,000 in damage.

Reader: How did this happen?

You: The water heater in the basement got a short circuit and started some oily rags on fire…

When you’re done going through the process, see if what you’ve written does what it needs to or if there are holes. Also, you can review the ordering of your content to see if it follows the pattern of what you think they’ll want to know first. This helps you avoid starting the story with “The Berlin Fire Department, assisted by volunteer firefighters from the town of Aurora, responded to a report of a fire at 111 S. Main St. around 2 a.m. Sunday…”

IF YOU GIVE THE READERS DIRECTIONS, MAKE SURE THEY CAN FOLLOW THEM: A number of stories will tell people to do something or avoid something or respond to something. These stories become problematic when people aren’t told how to do these things.

Back when the illness we were all freaking out about was the Swine Flu (H1N1), a local daycare had an outbreak and had to shut down. The people at the daycare told parents to watch their kids carefully for symptoms of the illness. In fact, the story on the outbreak mentioned this important activity at least three times in six paragraphs.

The problem? The story never said what the symptoms were, so that wasn’t really helpful at all.

A similar story I remember reading was back when Zoe was about 4 and she really had an interest in Santa. The local paper reported that breakfast with Santa, which was in danger of being cancelled, had been green-lit, thanks to a generous donor. The whole story talked about how kids were going to have breakfast with Santa and that it was so great we didn’t lose breakfast with Santa and how important breakfast with Santa was.

The story never once mentioned when and where the event was taking place. Did the writer expect parents to wander the streets of Omro, looking for a fat guy in a red suit?

In the digital age, we can, obviously, look up things like H1N1 symptoms or local events on a city website, but that’s not the point. If we’re supposed to inform readers about important things, we need to go all the way. Saying, “Well, they can look it up” is akin to listing Chicken Kiev on the menu at a nice restaurant, and then serving patrons bunch of raw ingredients and a recipe card.

IF YOU CAN’T (OR WON’T) FILL THE HOLE, ACKNOWLEDGE IT: Not all holes in stories come from poor writing and reporting. In some cases, information isn’t available. In other cases, a publication decides to err on the side of caution while reporting. Even more, the publication might have a policy that prohibits the publication of certain content.

In those cases, you’re going to leave a hole. When you do, explain what’s going on so your readers can follow along:

“At the family’s request, the name of the MegaJackpot winner will not be released.”

“The cause of death has not been determined, the medical examiner stated.”

“In accordance with the Daily Tattler’s policies, stories do not name assault victims and instead provide a first-name-only pseudonym.”

Explaining WHY the paper wasn’t naming names could have been really helpful Kansas City Star story:

“Due to the lack of supporting legal documents/At the request of the paper’s legal team/Because we believed the kid enough to run the story, but not enough to risk a libel suit, The Kansas City Star is not naming the four players accused of harassing Caperton Humphrey…”

At that point, I could figure out if this was a case of “The lawyers won’t let us, even though we have the goods” or a case of “This story’s hanging by a thread anyway, so let’s not make it collapse.” Knowing which way the wind is blowing on this story would not only satisfy my own curiosity, but it would also make me feel more or less willing to share it on my social media.

In the end, make sure you’re giving the readers the most complete picture possible, even if that means explaining why that picture is incomplete.

Dealing with interview subjects and memory lapses in telling your stories (A Throwback Post)

In discussing interviewing today in class, a student asked me a question that should bother more folks than it probably does:

“What if a source is wrong about something, but it’s not a big factual thing you can check? What do you do?”

It’s a good question, in that I’m sure I’ve told the same story 10,001 times to various classes with variations on a theme. In some cases, I’m often wondering if I’m accurately remembering the car I was driving when I went to the scene of a shooting, the editor who told me to “check on that fatality” that turned out not to be dead or a dozen other things that pretty much anybody involved might remember in some other way, but in no way does a big book of facts help settle the issue.

Case in point: This Christmas, I was at a family gathering where the time I somehow volunteered my dad to be a grade school soccer coach came up. The story was that Dad agreed to go to a meeting where this whole thing would be discussed and he then agreed to coach with a bunch of other dads.

The memory I had was of Dad putting on his nice brown suit to go to this meeting, where it turned out all the other dads were told that they’d be playing the game a bit. So my dad, being the awesome guy he is/was, ended up playing a bit in his dressed up clothes. To me, that story was burned in my head, as I remembered him coming home sweaty and carrying his coat. It also was a great touchstone for me about how much Dad loved me, in that he’s out there banging around a soccer ball in his good suit.

Dad looked at me and said, “That never happened.”

I explained my memory about it and said, “I know it happened because of (XYZ).”

He said, “No, that never happened that way. I never played soccer in a suit. I don’t know where you’re getting that from…”

We both immediately turned to Mom as the arbiter, and she couldn’t remember any of this, so for the rest of the night, I kept thinking, “I know I’m right” and I’m sure my Dad thought the same thing, too.

The point is, not everyone remembers everything the right way, so what happens when you’re supposed to tell stories that revolve around facts and not everyone agrees with what those are?

Here’s a look at how to help work through that issue:

 

How to avoid letting a source’s memory lapses or outright lies destroy your stories

I’ve made a point of telling anyone who will listen that if they need ANYTHING from me in terms of content to help their students or their student newsrooms, all they have to do is ask. Thus, the following request came from a fellow journalism teacher:

Do you have any great lessons or content on how to analyze if a source, esp a source for a profile, is lying or misrepresenting information (either purposefully or due to memory erosion)?

It’s difficult to know for sure when someone is lying or if there are memory gaps that make for some problematic moments within the story you want to tell. As I’ve often told folks in my classes, it’s not always about being perfectly successful in your efforts when it comes to something like this, but rather avoiding the things that can really screw you over that matters most.

With that said, here are a few things beginning reporters can do to mitigate disaster when dealing with a source that might not have the facts 100% perfect:

GET A SENSE OF THE SOURCE: One of the primary reasons I tell students they need to conduct interviews in person is so they can capture more observational elements to add color and feel to their pieces. A good side benefit of being in person is you can get the vibe of the source and decide how much you really want to trust them.

Some sources are great at hyping themselves up like they’re trying to sell you the Bass-O-Matic ’76. Others do some great “humblebrag” stuff that really can sound like they’re important and vaguely decent people. In spending time with these people, you can find out who is likely worth trusting and who you can’t trust any further than you’d trust a pyromaniac at a gas station.

The one thing to understand is that there is a crucial difference between people who are full of crap and people who literally have lost track of things over time. Honestly, I have told a number of stories over and over again to the point that I’m not sure if they’re perfectly accurate, slightly altered or complete BS. (I am grateful, however, that I found support for the famous “Olde Un Theatre” robbery and the “Mraz, where’s Mrefund?” headline.)

I had one student who SWORE she wrote an obituary that had a particularly awkward headline on it. I found the piece, with the headline she described, and it wasn’t her byline. Maybe she wrote the headline, or edited the piece or something else, but it wasn’t her byline. This is why it’s important to fact check basically everything when it comes to people telling you stuff that you plan to use in your work.

Once you get that vibe, you can do more work with the questions you have and the level of insistence you enact when dealing with your questions.

IN GOD WE TRUST, ALL OTHERS MUST PAY CASH: Even in profiles, there is a benefit to becoming what I call a “non-denominational skeptic” about the information you received. Whether you like the source or you wouldn’t believe them if they came into your house, soaking wet, and told you, “It’s raining out there,” apply a similar level of rigor to your questioning. This is particularly important when it comes to things you really plan to focus on as part of your story.

Let’s say you’re doing a profile on a business person who turned his life around after a rather rough patch in his 20s and now helps ex-convicts find work. You likely are going to ask what was the turning point that got this guy on the right path, and here’s the answer you get:

“I wasn’t a good person back then. I was arrested for a series of burglaries back in ’85 around the Cleveland area. I was supposed to get 6 years, but the judge gave me 12 and shipped me off to Folsom prison, way across the country. Being that far from home, in a prison like that, well, it changes a man. About 50 prisoners were killed while I was there for those 12 years and I always thought I’d be one. I told God, ‘If I ever get out of here alive, I’ll make my life right for whoever else gets out of here.’”

Sounds compelling and amazing. Now, how much of that is stuff you NEED to check? A goodly amount:

  • Check arrest records from “the Cleveland area” in 1985 and find out if this guy was ever arrested.
  • Check court records to find out if he did get sentenced to 12 years.
  • Check prison records to find out if he went to prison, let alone Folsom
  • Check prison records (and others) to find out if 50 people REALLY got killed out there from about 1985 to 1997.

This is just smart reporting and it will help you fill in some of the key details about the source’s live. Also, the more of this you can verify, the better off you are. The less you can verify, the less you should trust this source.

Clearly, you can’t verify if he “wasn’t a good person” or if he had a conversation with God. (“Hello, St. Peter? Yes, this is Vince Filak with the Dynamics of Writing blog. Is God there? I need to confirm a conversation He had back in 1985 or so…”) But you can check out enough stuff to feel like you’re not getting fed a line.

TRUST, BUT VERIFY: Another key way to poke back at people is to show interest and engagement with their stories while offering them ways to help verify this information for you.

If you’re interviewing someone and they say, “I was amazed when I received my Silver Star for my tour in Vietnam, but I really was just doing the same job as everybody else…” you could check a database when you get done with the interview. However, you could also try this approach during the interview:

“That is truly incredible! Could you show me the medal? I’d love to see it!”

or

“Do you have any pictures of the ceremony? My editor would love to put something visual with the story!”

If the answer is yes, you’re in decent shape. If the answer is a dodge or something like, “Nah, I threw it away.” then you are probably going to want to push back a bit more with stuff like, “So where was the incident that took place that got you considered for the honor?” or “I would love to talk to anyone who was in your platoon at the time for more on this…”

In other words, you’re giving the person an opportunity to verify this stuff for you. If they can’t or won’t, tread cautiously.

WEIGH COST VERSUS VALUE: Journalism in a lot of ways is like catching sand in a sieve. You’re never going to catch everything, but you want to make sure you don’t lose too much of the small stuff or any of the big stuff. To that end, you want to weigh the cost versus value of the amount of work you’re doing on any particular fact-finding dig.

Let’s say you’ve got a source that was paralyzed from the waist down during a car accident in high school. After that, he went into a deep depression, but found God and now goes on speaking tours throughout the country to explain how to overcome obstacles in life. The source tells you this:

“I was driving a 1979 Ford Thunderbird with this great V-8 351 Cleveland in it when I had the accident. The truck that hit me mangled that car like you wouldn’t believe. I honestly feel that if I had been driving something smaller, I’d be dead.”

The guy shows you a picture of the wreck, so you can see what happened to the car. He’s clearly paralyzed or has been faking it well for decades. The opinion is his that he might have died in a Toyota Camry. is it really important to fact check whether that car had the 351 Cleveland engine in it or if it might have had a 302 or a 351 Windsor? Probably not.

Look at what matters most and make sure those things are solid. The random fringe stuff can be checked if you have time and if it’s easy. However, it’s not going to behoove you to go plowing through thousands of DOT and Ford Factory Sheets to figure out what engine landed in what car in a case like this.

RESEARCH BEFORE, FACT CHECK AFTER: The goal of quality research in advance of talking to a source is to make sure you ask good questions and that you don’t get turned around if the source tries to BS you. The goal of a quality fact check is to make sure what the source told you makes sense before you publish the piece.

You then can decide to what degree you want to keep certain bits of information and what degree you feel the need to actively fact check with in a story. Ted Bridis, a fellow journalism prof, shared this example with a bunch of us to outline the ways in which a “personal tale” can have enough bullcrap in it to fertilize the back 40 acres. The writer of the piece literally takes each element that this source outlines as “fact” and checks it out with people after the fact to show what is clearly not true and why it matters.

If you ask the right questions, you’ll find that many sources will try to snow you less, as it’s clear you aren’t coming to them fresh off a turnip truck. However, there are still people out there who will try to convince you that they were the one who convinced Lin-Manuel Miranda to go with Hamilton instead of “Aaron Burr: The Death Metal Musical!”

That’s where the fact check really comes in.

FIND OTHER PEOPLE TO HELP: I remember certain things about my childhood that might or might not be true. Some of them, Mom or Dad might have an angle on (and judging by how we kept pretty much everything I ever did in the file cabinet in my folks’ back room at the house, we might actually have physical proof of that thing).

REPORTER: “Hey, I was talking to your mom and she said you never scored a basket in your fifth-grade season. She still has all the box scores. You did almost foul out of nine games, thought.”
ME: “I’ll be darned. I swear I hit a basket at least once. Anyway, I’m sure that foul out thing is right, as I played basketball like Danny from ‘Grease’ that year…”

If you can get verification from people who would likely know, it’s probably a safe bet you can go with that information. If you can’t or the information seems to contradict, go back to the original source for verification:

REPORTER: “Hey, I was talking to your mom and she said she thinks that story about Mrs. Schutten screaming at your class was from fifth grade, not third grade. She said the woman taught you in both grades. I just wanted to know if you’re sure on what you told me.”
ME: “Oh, yeah… I forgot that she got us twice… After I had Sr. Kenneth in fourth grade, the beatings we all took from that nun basically scrambled my memory for some things…  Mom’s probably right, then.”

The goal of asking other people for things is to help solidify things that are important to telling your story. In some cases, you’ll have conflicting reports from key sources and it’s up to you to determine who you believe and how important those conflicting elements are.

A great example of this is in the book “Loose Balls” by Terry Pluto, where he outlines the wild life of the old American Basketball Association. He tells this one story about Marvin “Bad News” Barnes and how he missed a team flight to Norfolk, where Barnes and the Spirits of St. Louis were supposed to play the Virginia Squires.

Barnes blows off the flight and figures he’ll catch a later one, but it turns out he missed the last commercial flight to Norfolk. So he chartered a plane (something unheard of at the time) and got down there at the last minute. He shows up to the locker room with like 10 minutes to go before game time wearing a full-length fur coat, carrying a couple bags of McDonald’s burgers and a big smile. He opens his coat to reveal his uniform like he was changing from Clark Kent to Superman and declares, “Have no fear, BB (his nickname) is here.”

The story was verified by a number of people who all told essentially the same story. However, people deviated on one detail. During the game, the pilot supposedly showed up in the team huddle and demanded to be paid for the flight, so someone had to run back to the locker room and get Marvin’s checkbook so he could write the guy a check. The amount of the check varied widely from about $700 to more than $1,500, depending on who told it.

Pluto recognizes that the story perfectly captures the insanity that was Marvin Barnes and this team of weirdos. He knows that it is mostly true and pretty solid in its confirmation. He also knows people want to know what it cost to do this little stunt and that he doesn’t have the goods. He acknowledges that by including that information and the variations in his chapter. Something like that is easy enough to do if you have a few inconsistencies that don’t undermine the larger truth you’re trying to convey.

THE DUTY TO REPORT VERSUS THE DUTY TO PUBLISH: No matter how much effort a reporter puts into a story, there is never a guarantee that the story is absolutely right. Mistakes happen, memories fade, BS intrudes and more. The goal is to try to put forth the best version of reality, regardless of how difficult that is.

This is where we separate the duty to report and the duty to publish. As journalists, we need to ask questions and poke at facts to figure out what happened and why our readers should care. Not every effort we make in that realm will give us the results we feel comfortable with. To that end, we have to be OK with the decision not to publish something if we’re not 100% certain on the issue.

It’s better to have something missing or come up a little thin in a story than it is to publish something that is flat-out wrong.

A great example of this is an article Bethany McLean, a financial journalist, wrote in 2001 about Enron. The company basically had stock that just kept going up and up and up for no real reason and the company big wigs couldn’t explain to her in any meaningful way how money moved through the company. She knew something wasn’t right, but she wasn’t 100% sure of what it was.

 

In several interviews, she noted that there were several partnerships that were doing deals with Enron that appeared to be owned or operated by Enron executive Andy Fastow. She saw them disclosed, but she never mentioned them in her article. In the documentary, “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” she explained:

“There were these partnerships that were run by Andy Fastow that were doing business with Enron and they were disclosed in the company’s financial statements, but I didn’t mention them in the story because I thought, ‘Well, the accountants and the board of directors have said this is OK so I must be crazy to think there’s anything wrong with this.’ The story I ran was actually pretty meek. The title was “Is Enron Overpriced?” (because) in the end, I couldn’t prove that it was anything more than an overvalued stock and I was probably too naive to suspect there was anything more than that.”

She realized she had the duty to dig in hard on this. When she couldn’t make it work perfectly on the first pass, she understood that she didn’t want to screw this up, so she went with what she could prove.

As it turned out, the partnerships were a large component of a major financial fraud and the company was a house of cards, things McLean and others found out after she put out that first article. However, at the time, she couldn’t go beyond what she had, so she stuck to what she could prove and lived to fight another day.

How to react when a student asks, “Which classes do I really need to attend?” (A Throwback Post)

A good friend and fellow professor inspired this Throwback Post, after a student reached out to her near the beginning of the semester with this request:

“I have a lot going on this semester. Can you tell me which classes are the most important so I can try to attend those?”
She politely responded to the student that she could not classify any one class period as more or less important than any other. That level of restraint means she needs to be involved in the next round of global peace talks.
Of course, the rest of us started chiming in with some of the better dumb things we’ve been asked or told over the years by students, including one person posting this gem:
I had a student who raised his hand on the first day going — this class is a lot of work. Why? It’s supposed to be a blow off course!
Yup. I’m here just to give you three credits and a side-order of fries…
So without further ado, here’s a look at some potentially useful comebacks for generally stupid questions…

Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions: Journalism Educator edition

Despite my parents’ best efforts, I got addicted to Mad magazine as a kid and fell in love with Al Jaffee’s acerbic wit. I’m sorry, all my former, current and future students…

Al Jaffee probably had a bigger influence on me than most people wished he’d had. The longtime cartoonist for Mad Magazine who died earlier this month at age 102, was both a gifted artist and a gifted humorist.

During his time at the publication, Mad had an amazing collection of talent, and each artist brought their own special vibe to the publication. Paul Coker drew his “horrifying cliches,” movie parodies and single-panel pieces. Sergio Aragones literally filled the magazine with his dialogue-free sketches, as he drew in the margins of the various spreads. Don Martin did some truly ridiculous cartoons, of which my favorite was the detective-wannabe Lance Parkertip, Noted Notary Public.

Jaffee, however, wrote his way into history with his “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” which did exactly what the title promised. He’d present one of the dumber questions people tend to ask, and follow it with a series of sarcastic, snide or otherwise snappy responses, intended on laying low the idiot inquisitor.

As a kid, I took to Jaffee’s biting snap-backs like a fish to water, using his style of humor to keep bullies at bay in grade school and dabble in some class-clowning in high school. As I got older, I was told this kind of thing wasn’t age-appropriate for me but hey, if a guy can do this kind of stuff until he’s 102, I’ve got some time left on the clock.

In honor of Jaffee’s passing, here are a few Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions most of us tend to get as journalism educators:

 

“Sorry, I overslept. Did I miss anything important in class today?”

  • “No, we only did a bunch of unimportant stuff, like we do most days.”
  • “No, we just sat here and thought about how much we missed you.”
  • “Yeah, it was the best! We didn’t have to slow down and reexplain everything to this one kid who never pays attention and is constantly missing stuff while he’s Snapchatting the class period away.”

 

“Is this going to be on the test?”

  • “No, I enjoy throwing random facts at you for the sake of seeing how you react. It’s like my own little version of giving a lab rat an electric shock.”
  • “I’m not sure yet, but God forbid you be presented with information that might be valuable in its own right.”
  • “Probably not, because even though I said, ‘You want to write this down, because it’s going to be on the test,’ at least 912 times, I’m still debating how to handle this.”

 

“Why did I get an F on this assignment?”

  • “Because the university hasn’t figured out a way for me to give you anything lower.”
  • “Because given your writing ability, I figured this was as far as you ever got in learning the alphabet.”
  • “I understand that it’s probably a mystery, shrouded in the 20 or so sentences of feedback I wrote at the bottom of your paper, clearly outlining every point deduction.”

 

“Can I get an extension on this paper?”

  • “If you mean you want me to make the paper longer, sure.”
  • “Absolutely, because the six weeks I gave everyone else to accomplish it clearly wasn’t enough time for you to craft your incredibly expansive effort.”
  • “But what will I do in the meantime, as I wait to consume your exquisite prose? How will I pass the time as I await the dawning of your genius?”

 

“Can I do some extra credit to make up some points?”

  • “Given the effort you put into your ‘regular’ credit, giving you extra credit right now would seem to be an exercise in futility.”
  • “Sure, because when I said at the beginning of the year, and at least 12 times since, that the class will offer NO EXTRA CREDIT, I only meant that for other people who didn’t have the chutzpah to ask for it.”

 

“Do I HAVE to take the final exam?”

  • “I lack subpoena power and the university doesn’t equip me with a gun, so I can’t force you to do much of anything. That said, you probably won’t pass the class without at least a decent attempt.”
  • “Given that it won’t save your grade, no matter how well you do, I’d actually prefer you avoid wasting both of our times.”

 

“You know I’m graduating in two weeks, right?”

  • “Well, not if you need this class to do it…”
  • “That puts me in a quandary, as to pass you would mean I gave up on any standard I had for this class whatsoever, but to fail you would mean I’d need to tolerate your pointless presence again for a whole semester. Let me think about how much I hate myself right now and I’ll get back to you.”

 

“Is there ANYTHING I can do to pass this course at this point in the semester?”

  • “Can you invent a time machine and travel back to the start of the term when I told you to make sure you kept up with the reading and the assignments and kick your own ass to make sure you did so? If not, probably not.”
  • “Well, I’d ask for a bribe, but given your performance in class to this point, you’d probably screw that up, too.”

 

“Do you know who my father is?”

  • “Does HE know how to build a time machine to fix things for you? If not, I’m not sure how this is relevant to your grade.”
  • “No, but that’s probably because he found out how poorly you’re doing in school and immediately entered some form of witness protection.”
  • “No, but maybe a “23 and Me” kit could help.”

If any other pathologically stupid questions have come your way and you’d like some snappy answers, feel free to hit me up here and I’ll do my best to put together another list at some point.

A mostly true look at something we jazzed up (A Throwback Post)

With the Super Bowl and awards season in the air, we decided to take a look back at a post about a movie launch during a previous Super Bowl. The “based on a true story” thing is still happening quite a bit these days, from “The Boys in the Boat” to “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” As much as I love the stories, I find myself occasionally wondering to what degree things were fluffed up a bit for dramatic purposes.

Here’s a peek back at the last time we dug into this:

Based on a true story = We made up some stuff

Amazon spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $14 million during the Super Bowl for a minute-long teaser trailer of “Air,” a movie that tells the story of how Nike came to land Michael Jordan as a client. The Ben Affleck/Matt Damon flick follows a familiar trend these days, as it is “inspired by true events,” which is just a fancy way of saying, “We made up a bunch of stuff.”

Movies like “Elvis,” “Blonde,” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” have seen varying levels of post-hoc fact checking that call into question certain parts of the films, with film buffs rebuffing these concerns as mere “dramatization of controversial and contested historical events.” Still, these situations are small potatoes when compared to how some films and limited series have taken liberties with reality.

“Winning Time,” HBO’s look at the late 1970s/early 1980s rise of the L.A. Lakers, created massive amounts of controversy with the way in which it played fast and loose with the truth. Given the relatively recent era in which the events took place, the degree to which sports information is retained and a quality text from which to draw, it seemed almost purposeful that the series got so many things factually wrong, including places, dates, opponents and scores. This isn’t even accounting for how the athletes, including Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar , publicly denounced the way in which they were portrayed.

Even more, Jerry West and his legal team have demanded an apology and retraction for the way in which the series portrayed the Laker legend, noting that the producers engaged in “legal malice.”

The New York Times did a deep dive on the cottage industry that has streaming services building mini-series around actual events, but then jazzing up reality to make life seem cooler than it was. The piece cites West’s portrayal as a “rage-aholic” as one of the more egregious cases of taking liberties with reality. It also points out that Linda Fairstein, the prosecutor in the “Central Park Five” case, is currently engaged in a lawsuit against HBO for its portrayal of her in the series “When They See Us.”

The defamation attorneys the Times quoted made it clear that these cases aren’t always easy to win, because the First Amendment does provide folks with the ability to create fiction based on true people. However, there are limits to this kind of thing:

Sometimes disclaimers are enough to protect a studio from legal liability, especially if they are prominently displayed in the opening credits and offer detail of what has been fictionalized — beyond a generic acknowledgment such as “based on real events,” legal experts say. The First Amendment offers broad protections for expressive works like film and television productions that depict real people by their real names.

But if someone can convincingly claim that he or she was harmed by what screenwriters made up, that is grounds for a strong defamation suit, said Jean-Paul Jassy, a lawyer who works on media and First Amendment cases in Los Angeles.

“A disclaimer is not a silver bullet,” he said.

This is in some ways akin to the way courts have afforded opinion pieces and reviews protection under the fair comment privilege. This allows writers to provide “pure opinion” that cannot be proven true or false without fear of falling afoul of defamation laws. That said, merely stating something is opinion isn’t a silver bullet either.

If you say, “In my opinion, Vince Filak is a lousy professor,” it falls into that opinion realm. It’s stated as such and there’s no way to define “lousy” so that a court could determine if I fit that definition or not. Plus, in defamation suits, the plaintiff (in this case, me) would have to show harm: Did I get fired? Did my classes shrink to the point I had to teach Medieval Basketweaving to maintain the course load in my contract? Did a group of random professors follow me around and mock me to the point I needed therapy? Probably not, so I’m not going anywhere with this.

However, if you say, “In my opinion, Vince Filak stabbed a student in the face with a fork during his 8 a.m. Writing for the Media Class on Feb. 20,” now you’re in trouble. It’s not an opinion, for starters, as we can prove it either happened or didn’t happen. It’s accusing me of a crime, which furthers my case. Plus, if that thing gains steam, I’m likely to get fired.

Writers, editors, producers and directors have always taken SOME liberties with reality when it comes to how they portray real people in fictional or semi-fictional stories. What makes this recent set of efforts more concerning is the degree to which they are bending the truth and the ways in which the fictionalization has the ability to warp public perception of real people in some harmful ways.

As for me, I’m looking forward to “Air” for the bad 1980s clothing and the Affleck/Damon banter that most of their collaborations pull off quite well. I’m also looking to see if anything gets dinged on a fact check, especially because, as anyone with any experience with Michael Jordan will tell you, he’ll take it personally.

Helpful Hints and Tips on Writing Obituaries (A Throwback Post)

Former basketball coach Bob Knight died this week at the age of 83. His family released the information on Wednesday, noting he had been in poor health for some time.

Actor Matthew Perry died over the weekend at the age of 54. Police reports state he drown in a hot tub at his home.

Both men were well-known and both men accomplished a good amount of incredible things. Knight won three NCAA championships and won more games than anyone in history when he retired. He was a hall of fame inductee and coached the last undefeated NCAA D-I college basketball team (the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers). Perry was an award-winning and Emmy-nominated actor, who had multiple film roles and published a best-selling memoir.

Both men had demons. Knight’s temper was always his undoing, whether it was throwing a chair across the court during a game or choking a player during practice. He was also hostile and belligerent in dealing with almost everything on earth at one time or another. Perry’s drug addiction was well chronicled in his book, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.” Between huge weight swings, rehab and trying to find dozens of opioids each day just to keep himself going, Perry made life extremely difficult on himself and others around him.

These two deaths made me reach back into the Wayback Machine and pull up this throwback post about obituary writing. To write about either without showcasing all of their best and worst aspects would be disingenuous and inaccurate. When we have to write about people who have died, keeping that in mind is crucial:

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

How to cover a shooting or other chaotic event as a beginning journalist (A Throwback Thursday Post)

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

After I ran Thursday’s post on the mass-shooting event in Michigan, a fellow journalism educator posted a note and a request:

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.

(The law can get squishy here, so it’s always wise to check the rules.)

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.