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Blog Post No. 1,000: A Bit of Heartfelt Gratitude to Sage

When Sage had me start this blog eight years ago to promote my reporting book, I did so under two strict conditions:

  1. I had total control over the content. They couldn’t demand, require or censor anything I decided to post here.
  2. This was not going to be a “rah-rah site” that just pimped out my books or blindly praised the company that published them.

With those two things in mind, I decided to dedicate the 1000th post of this blog to the company that changed my life 12 years ago and that has my loyalty for as long as they’re willing to have it. Please consider this an honest, heart-felt endorsement. 

My bookshelf the day I got my very first copy of my very first book for Sage. At the time, I couldn’t believe I had three titles with my name on them, and one with my name only on it. 

 

I can still see the strange confluence of events that happened at an AEJMC convention in Washington, D.C. that really altered the trajectory of my life and led me down a path that has made me ridiculously happy as a teacher, a writer and a colleague.

I was a few years into what seemed to be a terrible professional decision to come home to Wisconsin and teach at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. I had given up a job where people loved me, I had a sparse teaching load and I advised one of the best college newspapers in the country for a position that required me to give up rank, take a pay cut and work with at least one “colleague” who had publicly expressed disdain for my hiring.

(Another colleague told me that in the meeting where my hiring was announce, at a pay level that was a 25 percent cut from where I was coming, mind you, this individual stated, “For that kind of money, we could have gotten someone good.” Eeesh.)

The biggest problem I was facing was teaching basic media writing to students across a wide array of disciplines, including advertising, public relations, print-style news, broadcast, interactive web management and more. My background in news was seen as a bias and the books I could offer as texts basically crapped all over everything that wasn’t a newspaper reporting job. Thus, I set out to find a text that would make for a more equitable discussion of media while still imbuing students with the core elements of media writing that most news-writing texts professed.

Matt Byrnie, who was an acquisitions editor staffing the Sage booth at AEJ that year, asked me to sketch out a concept for a book like the one I needed and then meet with him later in the conference. Despite having my name on two books already at that point in time, I had no idea what to do here. That said, in the middle of an interminable panel session, I found a bit of hotel stationary and started scratching out a few concepts. The idea wasn’t necessarily WHAT needed to be taught, but rather HOW to approach this concept.

The rough sketch of what I pitched to Matt Byrnie still hangs in front of me every day in the office. It reminds me of what I promised I’d do and how important it felt to do it well at that point.

After our meeting, Matt seemed enthused, but I’d been there before with people in publishing: At first they’re all excited and then they ghost you like you owe them money. Still, I reached out to Matt and pitched the book. He not only agreed to do this one, but he also had me pitch a second book at that point as well.

He hung in there with me as I fumbled about the process of meeting the needs of his production team while I tried to stick as close as I could to the “rules of the road” I built on that bit of scratch paper. He was enthusiastic and supportive, kind and decent. He made me feel like what I was doing mattered, not just because it could sell X units for a corporate overlord, but because he thought it could add value to the field.

If it had all started and stopped with Matt showing faith in me, I would be fine with Sage, but not nearly as loyal as I am. Shortly before “Dynamics of Media Writing” launched, Matt reached out to me and told me he had been promoted and that my book would now be in the hands of some Terri person I’d never met. I lost my mind, thinking, “Here we go again. I’m totally screwed.”

Instead, Terri turned out to be every bit the partner Matt was. So was the person who followed her when she left the field, and so was the next person after that person got promoted. And on and on it went. Each editor I worked with from Janae to Lily to Anna to Charles and more gave me the sense that I was the most important thing in the world at that moment and that they’d do anything to help me get where I thought my work should go.

They encouraged me to try new things like the blog, guesting on podcasts, doing videos and more. They also provided financial support to keep the lights on at the blog, professional support to make sure the podcasts didn’t sound stupid and strong editors to make my videos look a lot less like a guy filming a hostage video in Saw’s kill room.

They also supported me in some of my more insane ideas, even as I’m sure they had to endure a few moments like this in explaining me to their bosses. When I decided to wear a bulletproof vest around for a week and write about it on the blog, they didn’t try to talk me out of it.

When I referred to promotional efforts as “book pimping,” they winced, but didn’t tell me to knock it off. When I decided to take the 11-day forced vacation from UWO and turn it into a John-Oliver-esque “furlough tour” complete with T-shirts to commemorate the event, Sage not only supported it, but they bought T-shirts for their staffers.

The person who bought the shirts for her team was Staci Wittek, probably the best person I’ve ever had the privilege of working with at any level, anywhere. Staci’s official title is Senior Product Specialist, Communication and Media Studies at SAGE Publications, but that doesn’t come close to what she has done for me (and I’m sure many others) who have books under her watchful marketing eye.

She’s had me do videos for her reps to explain the book, reach out to potential leads on behalf of reps, build additional resources for people who need them and more. She’s also so willing to do pretty much any ridiculous promotional idea that comes rolling out of the junk drawer that is my brain.

Without Staci, none of my books would have succeeded because she put so much work, energy and faith into what I’ve built. She’s the difference-maker, like Michael Jordan was with the Bulls.

The reps for Sage stop by my office for a chat every time they’re on campus. It’s always, “What can I do for you, Vince?” not “Here’s how you need to help me sell your stuff.” We laugh about various things, share stories and get to know each other. It really does have that family vibe, a rarity in a day and age where corporate culture and survival of the fittest seem to rule the roost.

Every time I part company with someone from Sage, I always say the same thing: “Thanks for everything, and if you ever need anything, just tell me what it is and you’ll get it.” It’s the same thing I say to my students, my colleagues and everyone else who matters to me in life.

And by the way, here’s that same bookshelf, 10 years later…

The books in Chinese and Arabic are two translations of one of my textbooks. You have to take my word for it, as I had to take someone else’s word for it. If you read either language, and it turns out they’re actually “Mein Kampf” or something, please tell me so I can fix this…

Thanks for everything, Sage folks. I look forward to the next great adventure.

Most sincerely,

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

Four Questions To Help Journalism Professors Rethink Finals

I’m sure it really feels like this when taking the exams in some courses, particularly when you forget that just because you didn’t show up for 21 class periods, it doesn’t mean we didn’t talk about anything that day… 

Whoever said this is the “most wonderful time of the year” clearly wasn’t a college student or professor. As the winter semester comes to a crashing conclusion, papers come flying in at the last minute, pleas for extensions clog email in-boxes and exam cheating operations make James Bond plots look simplistic by comparison.

If you could bottle the tension and stress in your average college at this point in the term, you could power every car Elon ever built for the rest of time.

Finals week always bothered me for a number of reasons, which I explained to a student last week:

“Essentially, each class you take is choosing the exact same time to have you complete one of the most difficult and comprehensive parts of the class, thus spreading you incredibly thin and almost guaranteeing you won’t be capable of putting forth your best effort. In addition, each of these parts carry with them an extremely high percentage of your grade, all at a time in which you have the least amount of time or motivation to complete them. Oh, and it’s highly likely you’re either sick or getting sick and you have everyone on earth asking you to tell them when they can expect to see you for the holidays.”

I get that comprehensive finals in a single time period is a tradition, but then again so was throwing a virgin into a volcano for a while. I also understand that these kinds of exams are crucial for certain fields, like nursing. The last thing you want is to be assigned a nurse who tells you, “Oh, yeah, I bombed the final on passing medication to patients, but it was only 10 percent of my grade and I made up for it with some extra discussion points. Now, which of these little blue thingies am I supposed to give you?”

That said, in journalism and other media-related fields, we aren’t in a life-or-death situation and I often wonder why we feel it necessary to back load courses with these monstrous projects, papers and exams. As a result, many years ago, I shifted a few things around when it came to finals in an attempt to address some of the flaws in the system I listed above.

Here are a few questions that led me to certain choices I made, especially in regard to my media writing and reporting courses. I don’t know if they’ll change anyone else’s mind but I’d like to think they’re worth pondering:

 

Should it be a paper, a project or a test? Ask 100 students what they prefer for a final assessment of their work and you’ll get a wide array of answers. Professors tend to break things down into final papers, final projects or final exams, each of which can be dialed in based on the type of class they are teaching and to what degree each method best assesses learning.

And of course there are those of us who do whatever requires us to do the least amount of grading while we’re grading 112,001 other things at that point in the semester.

There are a number of reasons to reconsider whatever it is we’re doing for this grand finale. Term papers used to be a bulwark against cheating on tests, but with AI, that’s no longer the case.

Exams used to give professors more control, but with the broad range of special accommodations available to students, it can feel more variable than ever.

Group projects always seem like a good idea, until the whole process feels like trying to herd cats and there always ends up being one kid who basically has to “LeBron” the whole thing to get it over the finish line.

Given all of this, it’s a pretty good idea to do a few pro/con lists on these options.

 

Does this need to be cumulative? In a lot of cases, tests do need to be a full recounting of the entire semester. However, not every class has that need, and to make a test cumulative actually draws attention away from whatever you were doing in the second half or final third of the course (depending on if you do midterm and final or five-week, 10-week, final exams).

In my media-writing classes, we don’t do cumulative exams, per se, in that if they ask for multiple choice questions, they don’t have to cover the entire pile of content we discussed. Obviously, there is some level of “culmination” going on, in that when they’re writing, it takes into account all the things we learned about writing. I can’t have a kid writing sentences without a verb in them because, “Well, we covered verbs in the first half of class and you said this wasn’t cumulative.”

 

How much should this be worth? When I was an undergrad many years ago, I took a class I absolutely loved on Greek mythology. The professor was engaging, the TAs were great and I still have the text packets in my house somewhere to this day.

What I didn’t love was the final, as it was somewhere in the range of 50-60 percent of the course grade and it was insane. The guy brought in 100 slides for a slide projector and each slide contained a piece of pottery, a sculpture or a mural that depicted some aspect of Greek myth. We had to write a short block of text for each one that identified and explained each myth.

About 100 slides, 120 minutes and several blue books later, I realized that I could itch my right elbow with my right hand, thanks to the massive writing cramps I had just experienced.

To this day, I still see almost no point in doing this to a group of students. A class that covered 16 weeks basically came down to a two-hour block of time for no real reason. Also, the professor had people scouting the place like Secret Service agents, seeking out potential cheaters because so much of the grade relied on this one element.

So there were three inherent problems associated with this approach:

  1. Students could either save or kill their grade with one “Hail Mary” throw to the heavens.
  2. The incentive to cheat was magnified because this thing was worth so much of the grade.
  3. Nothing I was asked to do in that exam proved anything, other than I could write with my hand in excruciating pain.

Once I became a professor, I identified another problem: Me.

For starters, I realized as much as the kids weren’t on their game, thanks to the deluge of work they were facing, neither was I. After digging through a massive mound of exams or papers or whatever, I found that after 85 kids did a specific stupid thing, I was really likely to take out my frustration on the 86th kid who did it as well.

I might have been sharp on the first couple dozen papers while spotting AP errors, but some tired eyes might let a few compound modifier issues slip later. Maybe a spelling issue slipped by on the first couple, but I figured it out later and thus there was an imbalance of fairness.

All of this led me to decide having a mega-final wasn’t really a great idea, so I started cutting back on the percentage of the course value any final project was worth. It made it easier on the kids, who could then dedicate more time to other finals that were significantly overvalued. It also made it easier on me, so that I didn’t feel like I was disarming a bomb with every point I was deducting or adding.

 

What’s the value in the exercise? I have found over the years that students will dislike a lot of things I do. It’s the nature of the beast, particularly when I’m teaching media writing to people who either a) hate writing and don’t want to do it or b) have always been told they are god-like in their writing, only to find out that they aren’t.

Still, in spite of all of the complaints, I’ve rarely gotten students saying what I had them do was unfair or pointless. I’d like to think the reason for that is because I make sure to tell them the point of what they’re doing as they’re doing it.

My reporting kids have called my midterm “The Midterm from Hell,” but they all seem to survive it and they learn something. In this case, they learn how to operate under tight deadline constraints, work around unforeseen problems and generally that journalism is never done, it’s just due. They aren’t thrilled, but they get it.

One of the PR classes I took over had a group project built into it and I thought about scrapping it due to issues of fairness. (Read: I was always the kid who had to “LeBron” the thing at the last minute because I wasn’t going to lose my grade because Beavis McGee decided he wanted to repeatedly clear a six-foot bong  this weekend instead of writing up his part of the project.)

However, in talking to the professor of the class, she explained that group-based work (particularly when forced to work with people you don’t agree with) in PR was crucial to being a functional member of an agency. So, I kept it and explained that to the kids. It seems to have worked, as there was less grumbling than I would have expected.

I tend to think that everything I do in class has a purpose, which is why I hold myself to the standard that I need to tell a student why something is valuable if they ask why they need to do it. If I can’t fully explain why I’m doing what I’m doing, I can’t expect buy in from the students at any level. At that point, it just feels like I’m a kid chasing ants around with a magnifying glass on a sunny day.

So, in the case of an exam, what’s the point? Do I want them memorizing things so they can recite them on the spot? If so, why is that important? Do I want them analyzing a social media post for errors. If so, what can they do with that later in their school or professional careers? Do I want them writing under deadline pressure? If so, how will this improve them as they prepare for life outside of school?

A final exam, paper or project needs to have that “This matters because…” explanation or the whole thing is likely doomed from the start.

 

I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on this or if you have a strategy for finals that goes a different way. Feel free to post in the comments below.

Tell me how to help people with money I might not actually get: A look at the Anthropic AI lawsuit and its $1.5 billion settlement

As if this semester hasn’t been weird enough, I got this email from a colleague on Monday:

In case you hadn’t seen this, Anthropic is being sued for copyright infringement.  Two of your books were swept up by them, and you are entitled to file a claim for damages: https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/ 

 

Abiding by the “if your mother says she loves you, go check it out rule,”  I did a search on the site and found that he was right.

I’m honored that someone considers my work worthy of theft…

It’s Doctor of Paper 2, AI Pirates 0, apparently:

In one of the largest copyright settlements involving generative artificial intelligence, Anthropic AI, a leading company in the generative AI space, has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by a group of authors.

<SNIP>

The settlement, which U.S. Senior District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco will consider approving next week, is in a case that involved the first substantive decision on how fair use applies to generative AI systems. It also suggests an inflection point in the ongoing legal fights between the creative industries and the AI companies accused of illegally using artistic works to train the large language models that underpin their widely-used AI systems.

 

BACKGROUND: Anthropic trained its AI using a ton of content, including a boatload of books and other copyrighted material. In the case of things that were open to the public or properly purchased, this was apparently fine, based on the “fair use” doctrine associated with copyright.

The argument the lawyers for Anthropic made was that the training of AI on these books was a transformative effort, meaning that the books themselves were changed into something else entirely through this process. Transformative acts have often been protected as fair use for years and it’s why Google could digitize books as part of a search-engine service and Andy Warhol could present Campbell’s soup cans to the world.

(It’s also why Roy Orbison is likely spinning in his grave over 2 Live Crew’s version of “Oh, Pretty Woman” or why we get thumbnail images before clicking on a link to visit “Perfect 10” magazine, so maybe it hasn’t always been the greatest of things… )

That worked for a lot of the content they fed the AI beast, but unfortunately some of the stuff they fed it came from sites that pirated copies of texts:

(The judge) also found that Anthropic had illegally acquired millions of books through online libraries like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror that many tech companies have used to supplement the huge amounts of digital text needed to train A.I. technologies. When Anthropic downloaded these libraries, the judge ruled, its executives knew they contained pirated books.

Anthropic could have purchased the books from many sellers, the judge said, but instead preferred to “steal” them to avoid what the company’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, called “legal/practice/business slog” in court documents. Companies and individuals who willfully infringe on copyright can face significantly higher damages — up to $150,000 per work — than those who are not aware they are breaking the law.

 

If this dude thought getting the books the legal way was a “slog,” he should try writing a book once…

In any case, I reached out to Sage and they are on this, noting I should be getting a letter or email from them to explain what to do and how to fill out a claim form. News stories noted that authors could get up to $3,000 per text, but I’m pretty darned certain there’s no way I’m getting that.

Sage is really the aggrieved party in this, given that the folks there put in the “slog” to get this book built, shipped, marketed and in the stores in time for the Christmas rush. There’s a mention of royalty percentages, so I might get like 5-10% or whatever of whatever the actual amount is. Then again, I might get nothing.

That said, let’s do the thing we all do when we buy that Mega-Millions ticket: Plan to spend money we might never get…

FUN WITH MONEY: As I noted on the “About” page, comedian John Oliver is my spirit guide in everything I do here. One of the things I love most about “Last Week Tonight” is when Oliver does something incredibly weird to sponsor something he finds particularly important.

It’s why he bought Russell Crowe’s leather jockstrap from the movie “Cinderella Man” and stationed it in one of the last remaining Blockbuster Video stores in the country. It’s why he wrote a book about Vice President Mike Pence’s pet rabbit (Marlon Bundo) and turned it into a fundraiser for the Trevor Project and AIDS United. He even managed to buy the website “John Oliver’s Junk” and use it for an auction that raised more than $1.5 million to support public broadcasting.

I’m sure I lack that kind of star power and I might end up getting $50 and a ham sandwich out of this, at best. Still, not for nothing, but Oliver’s weird fundraising efforts got a Koala Chlamydia Ward named after him, so let’s reach for the stars on this one…

Here’s the deal: Whatever I get, I’ll see if Sage would be willing to match it. Then, whatever we scrape together, we’re gonna do something with it that you think is fun, weird, good or all three and more.

Either post below or use the contact form on the website to tell me what you want me to do with my pirate’s booty, whatever of that I actually get.

A few thoughts came to mind already:

Honestly, it could be anything, or nothing if we get shut out. The point is, let’s plan to do something to commemorate this one time where the words “Vince Filak” and “lawsuit” is a cause for celebration, as we make a point to help someone or something important in a random and oblique way.

Thanks for reading as always.

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

Gone Fishin’: Thanksgiving Edition

Still one of the best gifts I’ve gotten from a student.

Just a brief note to let folks know the blog is taking the week off for Thanksgiving. We’ll be back early if something earth-shattering happens that needs our attention.

Otherwise, enjoy your week and we’ll catch you for the final run to the end of the semester.

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

 

It’s time for some unpleasant honesty for journalism folks based on the Olivia Nuzzi/Ryan Lizza/RFK Jr. debacle

Believe it or not, this post is still up on Olivia Nuzzi’s X account… 

THE LEAD: As much as I wished this weren’t the case, we aren’t finished learning all the lurid details of the Olivia Nuzzi/Ryan Lizza/RFK Jr. debacle: 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote disgraced political reporter Olivia Nuzzi an outrageously raunchy “poem,” which was dramatically revealed by her ex-fiancé and reporter Ryan Lizza in the second part of his series exposing the secrets of his ethics-challenged ex.

“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,” Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, wrote to Nuzzi in undated texts recounted by Lizza in a piece published on his Substack early Saturday.

The poem was included in Lizza’s second part of his series about the affair between his former fiancee and the current Health and Human Services secretary. The post titled “Part 2: She did it again” is available on Lizza’s Substack.

I’m not linking to it here for three specific reasons:

  1. The piece is behind a paywall and I can’t in good conscience promote this as journalism or something worth spending $10 on. I would rather set fire to a ten dollar bill than pay for whatever the hell is back there.
  2. The teaser paragraphs alone introduced enough “explicit content” that would have my editors at Sage literally having aneurysms.
  3. My mother reads this blog and I don’t know what would be worse if she clicked that link: Having her asking me what certain sexual terms Lizza uses mean or having her tell tell me she completely understood everything and didn’t need a translator.

    Either way, it’d feel like this:

 

THE BACKGROUND: Oh, hell, where to begin?

Nuzzi was booted from her job with New York magazine after her “inappropriate relationship” with RFK Jr. came to light. Nuzzi had written a glowing profile of the Kennedy offspring, while also finding herself infatuated with him to the point of having a long-distance-messaging-with-sexy-photos-but-we-pinky-swear-we-didn’t-bang relationship.

Lizza, Nuzzi’s fiance at the time, who has his own history of icky sex allegations, broke off the engagement and made some very public statements about Nuzzi and this situation.

Both mercifully dropped off the map until this month, when Nuzzi’s “American Canto” book hit the shelves, leading to a “little girl lost” style profile on her by the NY Times. In response to some of the stuff in the book, Lizza took to his Substack to publish a response titled, “Part 1: How I found out.”  In that post, he pulled a “Sixth Sense” twist at the end to reveal his whole “I can’t believe she’s cheating on me” build up wasn’t about RFK, but instead about former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

Meanwhile, Nuzzi is now working for Vanity Fair, and media folks are a-flutter discussing this situation.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: It’s too easy to crap all over Nuzzi, Lizza and everyone else involved in this situation. Right now, this feels like staring at a multiple-vehicle car wreck on the interstate. Instead of taking the easy path, consider the following difficult advice:

 

BASIC ADVICE TO FELLOW EDUCATORS AND MEDIA PROS: We need to be honest with ourselves, the public and our students, even though it really sucks.

Whenever a situation like Nuzzi-gate (as we’re apparently calling it now) pops up, a common refrain that emerges is, “Female journalists don’t sleep with sources.” I know a number of professors, former journalists and current journalists who hate it when this kind of thing happens, because it reinforces thread-bare stereotypes about women and it debases the work quality female journalists have done.

Here’s the problem: Lousy examples exist in almost every field and they create misery for the rest of the folks in that field. I don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s the reality of our surroundings.

Trust me, every time some jagwad professor decides to treat his undergraduates like a sexual charcuterie board, I want to die inside a little. I hate that I find myself second-guessing every interaction I have with students for at least two weeks, wondering if they think I might be “one of those.”

That said, I can’t tell students, “Professors don’t sleep with students,” because despite the ever-present blank stares they give me in class, I know they aren’t completely unaware of reality. I’ve even overheard students I know talking among themselves about skeezy professors hitting on them or their friends.

I also can’t just say, “Well, I don’t do that…” because that’s just really creepy to make them think that I’m thinking that I have to tell them that and too damned specific to make anyone feel better about it. It’s usually why I just shake my head and say, “What the hell is wrong with people?”

In regard to journalism, I’ve met multiple former and current journalists who “engaged in inappropriate sexual relationships” with people they cover. In one case, a local reporter who also worked at a local university was accused of sleeping with someone she had profiled. A friend told me that his wife worked with her years earlier, so I asked what she recalled about the reporter. The response: “Tell Vince she was a whore who occasionally wrote stuff.”

Another friend who worked with this journalist in another newsroom told me the majority of the staff knew about multiple similar indiscretions, so they referred to her by a nickname that merged part of her last name with the word “rabbit.”

In another case, one guy confessed to me that as a student journalist he “accidentally” slept with a student athlete while he was a sports reporter and editor at the student newspaper. The following is my recollection of the conversation:

Him: “Um…” Blank stare. “This is not good, right?”

Me: “Well, I wouldn’t add it to my resume… I don’t get how you “accidentally” slept with her. Did you trip and fall on something?”

Him: “No, I mean I didn’t know she was on the team until just before we… you know…”

Me: “I’ve got so many questions, not the least of which would be, ‘How did her athletic affiliation come up at that exact moment?’ ‘How little did you know about her before you decided to sleep with her that this nugget of information didn’t come up?’ and ‘Did you maybe think about not doing this when you became aware of this situation?'”

It went downhill from there…

I don’t think I’m that special that I knew at least a handful of people who had violated this basic tenet of journalism, so I imagine more than a few other folks reading this have a “Hooo boy…. not good…” story of this nature.

We need to stop pretending that this kind of thing doesn’t happen and be more on point about what we want to say here:

  1. Most journalists do not sleep with sources period, let alone to gain special access for stories. A small number of journalists are bad actors, but to paint all journalists with a wide brush because of them is unfair to those who aren’t.
  2. None of us who don’t violate the rules are thrilled by the people who do, particularly when their actions reinforce negative stereotypes against people who have already had to work harder than they should to make it in the field.
  3. Those of us who take this job seriously are not going to pretend that those people don’t exist, but we are going to make damned sure you know we aren’t like them.

I’m sure there’s a better way to say this, but at least we’re being honest and letting people we aren’t thrilled by this, either.

 

BASIC ADVICE FOR STUDENT JOURNALISTS:  I can’t stress this enough, but for every situation like this, where it seems like the world turns out great by flouting the rules, there are dozens more that are just god-awful disasterbacles that never get a book deal.

Colby Hall of Media-ite made the case that Nuzzi, his DM buddy, really just learned how to play the game based on the way the system has shifted, so we can’t really hold it against her:

The glamorous photo shoots, the Lana Del Rey cosplay with the white Mustang convertible on PCH, the literary ambiguity about Kennedy’s identity in her book, the defiant framing that positions her as a victim bearing witness to power.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: This isn’t tone-deaf. It’s the only move that makes economic sense in 2025.

Nuzzi has correctly read our current media ecosystem. There is no path back to institutional credibility for her—those institutions are dying anyway, and they were never going to reward rule-following in the first place. But there IS a path forward through celebrity, through controversy, through the monetization of scandal itself.

The Vanity Fair job. The book deal. The rehabilitation tour that’s a Klieg light away from what it really wants to be. She’s not trying to rebuild her reputation as a journalist—she’s building a different kind of brand entirely, one where being interesting matters more than being ethical, where attention is the only currency that still spends.

Please don’t buy into that line of thinking. She’s the “it” thing at the moment, but that fades pretty quickly and even if it doesn’t for her, it doesn’t follow it will work for you. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who tried to become a millionaire starting an “Only Fans” account.

As much as it might seem like a great idea to be that rule-breaking, cool-as-hell rebel in the moment, these things don’t end well. As someone who has watched almost every VH1’s “Behind the Music” episode, I can pretty much guarantee short-term career thinking leads to some long-term misery. And unlike video games, you can’t just hit the reset button once things start going bad.

Follow the rules, behave better than the attention-seeking toddler at the grocery store and do the job to the best of your ability. You might not become famous, but that’s likely to be a good thing.

 

BASIC ADVICE TO PROFESSIONAL MEDIA OUTLETS: Watching Vanity Fair hire Nuzzi is like watching pro sports teams picking up troubled players who have talent, arguing that, in their system, the player will thrive. What they fail to realize is that even if the talent is in there somewhere, the human foibles are going to massively undercut it and you’re essentially just buying trouble.

With that in mind, I’m begging you. Stop buying trouble.

First, the juice is rarely ever worth the squeeze. Everyone is out there thinking they are buying the next Hunter S. Thompson. Instead, they’re buying the next Ruth S. Barrett. Hiring people like this has the same internal logic of cashing in your 401K and using it to buy lottery tickets to secure your retirement.

Second, you’ll make my job a lot easier as a professor because I won’t have explain to students that to get their dream job, they should work hard, play by the rules, and then pray they don’t lose out to someone who banged a source and now has 2.3 million followers on Instagram.

I’m having a hard enough time getting them avoid bias in their writing, abide by grammar rules and attribute the hell out of things, what with all the god-awful crap that’s passing journalism these days. I don’t want to have this conversation:

ME: You can’t write a profile story about your best friend. It’s not ethically sound.

STUDENT: So, why can (REPORTER X) sleep with a profile subject and land a job with a six-figure salary?

ME: Go read your AP style book.

Third, you need to understand the “Cockroach Theory of Terrible Behavior.” When you see one cockroach in a house, rest assured it’s not the only one around, like he’s on vacation or something. For every one you see, there are several more just waiting to show up.

I remember being at my college newspaper during an editor election, where one candidate was trying to justify some bad behavior, explaining, “Oh, that was an isolated incident.” Once we retired to debate his candidacy, the one guy piped up with, “I counted 10 or 11 ‘isolated incidents.’ How many does it take to make a trend?”

Vanity Fair is already playing defense on the hiring, as they were “take by surprise” at Lizza’s accusations about Nuzzi’s nuzzling with Sanford. The magazine is “looking at all the facts” in this situation as it decides how the hell it’s going to get out of this situation before another cockroach comes crawling out of the corner.

If you want to see the best of journalism, hire good quality people. Promote and showcase them as what’s worth doing in the field. Let us in the classroom highlight the good work done in the right circumstances.

None of this will stop another Nuzzi situation, but at least you can help us point to this as a cautionary tale and not a smooth career move.

The Junk Drawer: The Big, Beautiful Edition

Hey! There’s my big, beautiful tape dispenser!

Welcome to this edition of the junk drawer. As we have outlined in previous junk drawer posts, this is a random collection of stuff that is important but didn’t fit anywhere else, much like that drawer in the kitchen of most of our homes.

 

SCORE ONE FOR THE GOOD GUYS

Officials in Marion County, Kansas agreed to pay approximately $3 million dollars to a small local newspaper after it assisted in raiding the paper’s office in 2023. The settlement also included an apology from the county.

We covered this back when the raid happened, but as a brief recap: City and county law enforcement executed a search warrant at the Marion County Record in search of information that a reporter had illegally searched criminal records. The raid was a blatant violation of the First Amendment and led to a series of lawsuits.

Suits against the city and other individuals are ongoing.

 

“QUIET PIGGY” IS GOING TO BE THE NAME OF MY “FASTER PUSSYCAT” COVER BAND:

President Donald Trump went 2-for-2 in reminding me I lack the proper restraint to be a reporter any more. On Tuesday, he went into a tirade against ABC journalist Mary Bruce for asking questions about the release of the Epstein files and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Aside from calling her a “terrible journalist,” he noted that she asked a “horrible, insubordinate and just a terrible question.” I’d argue that’s not possible, in that to be insubordinate, she’d have to be working for him or for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was the target of the question.

On Friday, Trump essentially did more insult in less space when he told BBC reporter Catherine Lucey “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy!” after she asked a question on Air Force One.

In both cases, the journalists and their institutions refused to counter punch, with the BBC issuing a statement about its commitment to “asking questions without fear or favor,” while ABC remained silent.

Neither journalist has made a fuss about the situation, speaking either to their amazing professionalism, the way they’ve gotten used to these temper tantrums or both. If that happened to me, I’d probably be in the middle of a Secret Service-led cavity search due to my lack of decorum.

 

HEY CHATGPT, WRITE A CATCHY SUBHEAD HERE FOR ME BECAUSE I’M AS LAZY AS THIS SOURCE IN THE NEXT SEGMENT:

A former student sent me this one with a note: “This has gotta be up there with your students’ terrible chatgpt emails asking for extra credit and leaving [Enter Professor Name] at the start.”

 

STOP TRYING TO MAKE “FETCH” HAPPEN:

When are people going to get the message that simply repeating a phrase doesn’t make it a thing? President Donald Trump often starts a trend in how he refers to something in a weird way, only to have a bunch of imitators jump on the bandwagon, making it awkward for those of us trying to write about his stuff.

Case in point, his use of “Big, Beautiful” to describe the centerpiece of his current administration’s bill that dealt with tax cuts. He kept it up to the point that everyone, including the IRS’s own website, finds itself having to parrot this line. Now, Texas is in on this thing, as it’s referring to its redistricting attempt in a similar fashion:

“We are running under the lines lawfully passed by the Big Beautiful map and the courts will not thwart the will of Texas voters and their Representatives,” Cain said. “We are confident this temporary court obstruction will be swiftly overcome.”

<SNIP>

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican

“The radical left is once again trying to undermine the will of the people. The Big Beautiful Map was entirely legal and passed for partisan purposes to better represent the political affiliations of Texas. For years, Democrats have engaged in partisan redistricting intended to eliminate Republican representation.”

I’m not commenting on the intent, actions or outcome of either of these things, but I can say I feel for the reporters who have to ask questions using this nomenclature. It sounds either like we’re trying to engage a small child (“Who’s my big, beautiful boy?”) or it’s part of a particularly niche fetish site (“Click Here for Hot Videos of Big, Beautiful Bill!”)

This clearly must stop.

PERHAPS THEY’LL RELOCATE TO NEW JERERSEY:

 

And finally… 

A student who was doing a survey in my Writing for the Media course was chatting with me about a few things when she said she was going to be taking that class next semester.

“People who have taken this class are like, ‘Good luck with that,'” she said.

She then explained that she heard the class is hard, it requires a ton of writing and that a lot of people fail it.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to think about that, so I told the student this:

“Go back to the people who said they failed the class and ask them two questions: “Did you turn in every assignment on time?” and “Did you ask for help when you were confused?” I’d bet my house that the answer to one, if not both, of those questions is ‘No.'”

She also said something that kind of broke my brain a little bit:

“What’s weird is all the people I know who failed your class said they loved it and thought you were a great professor. They said it was really hard but they enjoyed it. It’s usually not what I hear from my friends about a class. It’s usually, ‘I got an A. It was a great class.’ or ‘I failed and the professor was an asshole.'”

So… Thanks? I guess… for whatever that says about me and my teaching acumen.

Breaking (or Broken) News: The pros and cons of keeping track of what’s going on in small towns via social media during the decline of legacy media

While driving home from Milwaukee this weekend, I could see a haze of smoke in the distance that just kept getting bigger the closer I got to the house. I first spotted it about 20 miles south of where I exit I-41 and about 30 miles to the east of the farm.

Smoke like this isn’t rare out by us, as farmers and land owners will often burn brush piles the size of a Winnebago, but this seemed like it might be something more than an average Sunday burn after the Packers game.

When I pulled up to the intersection about three-tenths of a mile from my house, the road was blocked with barricades and squad cars. I managed to weasel my way past the blockade and pull into my drive way, all along wondering, “What in the hell is going on out here?”

A quick check on social media filled me in a bit:

On Facebook and Instagram (at least), a number of people were posting bits of information about what they saw or what they heard:

To be fair to local media, there was some basic coverage, both from the ABC affiliate out of Green Bay, and the area newspaper, the Waushara Argus:

Even after reading all of the posts I could get my hands on and scouring the local media for more than what the local EMS folks put out, I found myself thinking about the pros and cons of how we get information these days. According to a 2025 study by the Reuters Institute, 54% of Americans get their news from social media today, pushing it past all forms of traditional legacy media. The discussion of partisanship, limited focus and the waning of traditional media power on the national or global level are assessed in this thing, which is great for the big picture.

That said, most of the time, we are likely more concerned with what’s going on around us, which falls to a lot of local media outlets or people around you with internet access. With that in mind, here are a few ways in which that can be a good thing or a bad thing on the local level like what I was dealing with Sunday:

THE PROS:

TONS OF INFORMATION: To be fair to the local social media folks, I got far more, volumewise, out of their work than I ever would have received from TV, radio or a newspaper. The videos, the photos and even the mapping gave me a lot to consume:

I also heard from people who were actively being evacuated from their homes in real time:

These are just a few screen shots of the hundreds of messages that were being shared at this time. Granted, a lot of stuff was repetitive, but I could pick up little nuggets here and there with a careful read of these forums.

 

CONTINUAL COVERAGE: The local media did the quick check in, put out some information and moved on. The local folks were a lot more interested in keeping an eye on things. At one point, a news outlet noted that everything was under control, but the social media folks (and my own eyeballs) pushed back on that. It seemed as though the wind (which we get a lot of out in our area) had stoked some of the fire in a part of the marsh that wasn’t fully extinguished, and things kicked up again.

By relying on the info from the fire folks, neighborly chatter and nosy folks like me who were willing to ask a cop at a cross street a thing or two, we all kept up to date on how risky things were and what was really going on. Those bits of info were continuing to be posted and shared on social media, as were some updates on when Highway 21 reopened, if the fire had moved any farther south and if additional fire folks were being called to the scene.

When I was a reporter, I found that I did a lot of “hit-and-run” journalism, in that I saw the disaster, wrote about the disaster and moved on from the disaster in a relatively short period of time. That’s kind of the nature of trying to cover everything in a large geographic area. These folks were more concerned about a specific disaster in a specific area and they could dedicate more resources to keeping people up to date.

 

MINOR NEWS FOR MOST, MAJOR CONCERNS FOR SOME: Social media has the ability to help niche audiences in the ways that traditional media never could. In the case of this fire, that came to the forefront in a few key ways.

For starters, as a lot of people were being driven from their homes and farms, some folks had concerns related to what to do with their pets. A local business up the road from us posted on this topic to help people who were in need:

Other folks felt it important to recognize the people doing the work to keep their homes safe:

These and a lot of other somewhat tangential issues were addressed on the social media platforms that were providing coverage on the fire. From a news-outlet perspective, a lot of these would be somewhat minor concerns, as they don’t impact the entirety of the circulation area or media market. However, to the people who were in the middle of all of this, keeping animals safe and finding ways to help each other in a time of crisis was the No. 1 priority.

This is really where social media, with its niche-level connections, really shines.

 

CONS:

SAYS WHO? One of the things I’ve found myself scrawling on news stories a lot these days is, “Says who?” My students know that this means they failed to attribute important content that is not a “water is wet” kind of fact to a particular source.

In this case, I found that some issues really didn’t matter to me in terms of who was posting. The videos and photos were relatively similar, so I was pretty sure that they all weren’t the work of AI trying to blame some political policy for a wildfire. In addition, I could triangulate some issues, using multiple platforms to get a handle on the situation.

For example, I knew where Highway 21 was closed by me, I had a couple maps from social media that represented where the fire had spread and I used my map app to look for specific areas where traffic was either light, heavy or prohibited.

However, when I saw this post, I found myself really wondering about source credibility:

My concerns on resharing this on social media (with the guy’s name attached) or believing what he had to say were as follows:

  • He’s essentially stating on social media that he started this fire. I don’t know if what he did was criminal, in that it sounds like an accidental ignition, but there might be rules about using ATVs in that area or during certain time periods. In making this public, he could not only open himself up to some legal issues, but also let some potentially irate folks know who he is, thus leading to some possible online harassment or worse.
  • I have no way of knowing if he is telling the truth. In journalism, we tell you that, “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out.” I did some minor sleuthing on this guy’s social media and didn’t find any terrible red flags that he was a bot or a troll, but that’s conjecture, not facts. Given my experiences with people who liked to insert themselves into dramatic police events, I’m erring on the side of caution. (One day, I’m going to write a post about “Whacko Wayne,” but until, then you can feel free to trust me as much as you normally do…)
  • I have no way of knowing if this guy is who he says he is. This might be someone using this guy’s account to make a statement or it might be some troll deciding it would be hilarious to mess with people. As we found out during the Las Vegas shooting, some people are completely fine using a tragedy for “the likes.”

There are a dozen other things I am paranoid about here, as I am someone who was held to account for what appeared under my byline. In the case of social media, this kind of paranoia is unlikely to exist.

Which brings us to another big concern…

 

UNTRAINED, UNREADY AND UNAFRAID: The concept of the Dunning-Krueger Effect has become exceptionally popular in the past decade or so. The broader theoretical and sociological aspects of it are often beyond what most of us consider discussion-worthy, but the long and short of it is that people who have a little experience in an issue are irrationally overconfident in what they are doing:

It took me a lot of time and a lot of disasters to become good at covering things like this fire, and even now, I’m not entirely sure I have it nailed down perfectly. That said, the people on social media have access to the same kinds of broad-based communication tools as I would have back in the day, and are completely untrained as to what kinds of things they can/can’t or should/shouldn’t say for legal, professional or ethical reasons.

They’re also completely fine in sharing information without thinking twice about those things, because they were never trained in the way we train media students, who then become media professionals. For example, I don’t know if the guy who said he started the fire actually did it, nor do I know how much consideration he gave to “outing” himself. However, a media professional with experience in this area would have considered those things and had discussions with other professionals before putting that information into the public sphere.

Beyond this issue, I find a lot of accusations on social media that have me breaking out into hives, not because of the accused’s alleged actions, but because of the legal hell-scape that can befall the accuser if things aren’t dead-on accurate. I keep hearing Cliff Behnke’s voice in my head as I see this stuff and imagine what he’d do to me if I just kind of spit-balled things like these people seem to be doing in some cases.

If you don’t know what the risks are when you do something, you tend to be unafraid of those risks. That doesn’t mean those risks aren’t real and can’t hurt you. That’s why we train students to be aware and prepared for these things.

In the end, I’m sure I missed a few more negatives and positives, but the bigger issue is that this kind of approach to locally newsworthy events is likely to continue to slide more toward the social media end and away from the legacy media. I’m not sure what can be done to prepare folks for this or to help them stay out of trouble, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

“The Tool Doesn’t Know It’s Hurting You:” Learning user responsibilities in working with Artificial Intelligence

(I’ve done a number of dumb things with tools. This one, thankfully, has never occurred to me.)

On a relatively frequent basis, I find myself with a new cut, ding, gash, burn or other similar wound as a result of my hobbies. I nearly clipped the top of my thumb off with a Dremel, put a nice slice through the back of my calf with a carpet cutter and slammed my hand onto a piece of sheet metal so hard, Amy could see the tendon that manipulates my thumb.

I’m not alone in my quest for inadvertent body modification, as two of my uncles managed to saw off their thumbs while reaching across table saws. One got his reattached, while the other ended up being only able to count to 9.5 for the rest of his life.

These and other similar moments remind me of something my father told me that his father told him about needing to respect the tools of our trades: The tool doesn’t know it’s hurting you.

In other words, a sander is going to sand when you power it up, regardless of if it’s sanding off a layer of wood or a layer of your fingers. The drill is going to drill a hole through something, whether it’s helping you remove a spot weld on a piece of sheet metal or giving your hand the look of stigmata. And saws are going to cut, and they won’t really know the difference between a tree limb or one of your limbs.

That’s why you always have to understand the purpose of the tool, treat the tool with respect and protect yourself from the harm that the tool can do to you, because it really doesn’t have any skin in the game, unless it’s cutting through yours.

In teaching media writing, I’ve often made the analogy that every skill we cover is another tool that the students get to put in their toolbox. The more tools they have and the better they practice with them, the stronger their work output will become. In covering AI this week, I reinforced that concept with the the analogy outlined above: AI is a tool, neither good nor bad, and you need to understand what it does or doesn’t do before you start playing around with it.

To that end, here are a few suggestions I gave to the students regarding the proper use of AI that I hope might help your folks as well:

USE THE TOOL AS INTENDED: I’ve had a number of bad breaks along the way when it came to trying to use a tool in a way other than it was intended. I’ve broken countless drill bits when I used them on material that was too strong for their composition or tried to widen a hole by rocking the drill around. Neither of these moves were very bright, as I knew better.

That said, I’ve also used tools without thinking twice about how they were actually supposed to be used. For example, it took me a while to figure out why the glass kept breaking in some cabinets I’d refinished before I understood the point of using push-points instead of epoxy.

When someone develops a tool, that tool usually has a specific intended use. When you try to outstrip that purpose or make the tool operate in a way it was never intended to operate, bad things can happen. This is why it’s important to understand what each AI tool is intended to do.

For example, models of OpenAI were criticized for short-term responses and an inherent need to please people. In responding to each question or statement without a larger understanding of context, along with a stated goal of providing encouragement (while obviously trying to extend user conversations), the models led to a number of problematic outcomes.

When you are building content for consumption as a media professional, AI tools can be great things, but you have to understand what each one does and doesn’t do, lest you find yourself doing more harm than good.

USE THE TOOL, DON’T RELY ON THE TOOL: My great-grandfather was a carpenter and he actually built the house he lived in for the majority of his life. The ability to do this boggles my mind, as I can’t cut on a straight line worth a damn.

The even more incredible thing is that he did it in the early 1920s without the benefit of power saws, battery-powered drills or air-driven nail guns.

If he had those items, I’m quite certain he could have done the job even faster, but he was still skilled without them, making his work less about reliance on a tool.

As with most technological advances, AI can make things easier on us when we want to get things done. People who have mastered tasks like writing, photography, graphic development and more can now do things faster and better thanks to AI, but that’s mainly due to applying their underlying skills to these new tools

The folks who have mastered these tasks without AI are concerned about what will happen to people who CAN’T function without the AI doing the work for them. These are reasonable concerns, in that it’s never a good thing to become completely dependent on a tool of any kind, lest that tool become unavailable or in some other way problematic.

The best thing you can do in learning media skills is to use AI as one of your many tools, but not let it do the work for you. You need to pair your human nature with those tools to create things that go beyond whatever AI can spit out.

Learn the way in which you can make the tool work for you, and then apply it appropriately.

DO DIFFERENT WORK, NOT LESS OF IT: One of the most tedious tasks for me as a reporter was transcribing recorded notes. It seemed to take forever to get through a small section of an interview and I found myself having to go back repeatedly to get the quotes exactly right. When I learned of true transcription AI, like Otter.ai and others, I found myself falling in love.

The technology was great, it did a reasonably decent job and it took away a task that wasn’t really at the core of what my job entailed. That didn’t mean, however, that I saved myself from doing any work related to this task.

On more than a few occasions, the translation wasn’t perfect. Fortunately, I was able to play the recording again as I watched the text, so I could make changes to the quotes. In other cases, the quotes didn’t pan out as well as I thought, because they weren’t as pure as they likely would have been if I’d have been scrawling text and guessing at a few words. Thus, I had to find better quotes to fit the bill, knowing as I did what was and wasn’t entirely accurate. Although the net benefit was heavily in my favor, it wasn’t a 100-0 sum game.

AI tools do some forms of work for you, which is great, but it doesn’t absolve you of all responsibility. In many cases, it just shifts the work you have to do to something else. Think about moving from being a reporter to an editor in a student newsroom: You are no longer out there gathering facts or bugging people for interviews. Instead, you are asking questions of the reporter, poking holes in the story and generally making sure the reporter is sure.

Take the same approach to AI when you are employing a tool: Check the transcript carefully to be sure it wrote what someone actually said. Check each fact the same way you would if Johnny or Janie Freshman wrote it in their first story for the paper. Scour the material for holes based on your own understanding of the concept, rather than accepting the AI version as gospel.

There are obviously more things you can do to keep yourself on the right side of AI, but like the application of most tools, practice will improve performance and care will limit unintended consequences.

And probably save your credibility from needing a bandage or two.

An Open Letter to the Staff of the Indiana Daily Student: Thank you for reminding us of what we used to be

Screenshot of the IDS website, announcing the paper version will print again.

Dear Mia Hilkowitz, Andrew Miller and the rest of the IDS crew,

First and foremost, I want to congratulate you on your success in demanding the press freedoms your university sought to steal from you. It was heartening to see how you refused to back down when they fired your adviser, killed your print run and tried to shut you up. After the uproar that came from every corner of the media world, IU’s leadership finally decided to back off and let you start the presses once again.

As much as I would like to call this a win, it’s clear to anyone with half a brain that this isn’t over by a damned sight and that there are still significant problems with the leadership at the IU Media School. I know you know this and I know you’ll remain vigilant against the next stupid thing these folks try to pull on you. They clearly can’t help themselves, so I hope you know that all the people who have your back now will continue to do so.

But the main reason for this open letter is that I want you to know is how grateful I am for your strength and courage at time in which media operations all around us seem to be folding like cheap tents in the rain and so-called adults are more willing to quietly acquiesce to outrageous demands than to stand up for what’s right.

There is a concept in finance that one reporter told me about called “F— You Money.” It basically meant that some people are so rich, they literally don’t have to care about what anyone thinks and they can do whatever they want, regardless of the cost.

For example, if two people in an auction setting want the same thing, the person with “F— You Money” can radically overpay to get the item, even if doing so makes no sense. Another example would be what a lot of us thought would happen when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post: The paper could courageously cover anyone and everyone because Bezos had “F— You Money,” and he didn’t need to worry about ad revenue or currying political favor.

However, a funny thing happened on the way to fiscal freedom. A lot of people with “F— You Money” decided it would be easier to just give up and pay off whatever loud idiot seemed to want to start a fuss rather than using it to stick up for what was right. It was ABC kicking in $15 million to avoid a lawsuit regarding who was mean to whom in a TV show, YouTube ponying up even more for suspending accounts after the Jan. 6 riots, Paramount paying $16 million for exercising editorial discretion on “60 Minutes” in a way that displeased Donald Trump and more.

Even though a boatload of legal experts said these cases had literally no merit,  these media giants came up small and just settled the cases. They essentially decided it was better to give the mouthy kid in the grocery store the candy they screamed for instead of putting a stop to this once and for all.

This is the reason we owe the IDS staff a debt of gratitude. You did what others refused to do and stood up for what’s right, even though you were at a decided disadvantage in this power dynamic. You chose not to think about all the scary things that might happen if didn’t cow tow to the powers that be. You fought for your rights, even if it meant you might get crushed by the academic behemoth that is the IU Media School, because you couldn’t live with yourselves if you didn’t.

You told the bully, “F— you. You’re not getting my lunch money. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”

The reason so many people came running to your aid and voicing support for you wasn’t just because you are right, which you are. It wasn’t just because what was happening to you is unadulterated bullying, which it is. In so many ways, we appreciate you for one simple fact:

You help us remember who we used to be, so many years ago, and what we wish we could be again.

In all honesty, I don’t miss my sleep-deprived college years of subsisting on ramen and cheap beer. I also don’t miss the rundown apartments, the anxiety-driven dating scene or cobbling together several part-time jobs to make ends meet. What I do miss, however, is the courage that all of those experiences seemed to embolden in me, a courage I feel I lost somewhere along the way to middle age.

When I was in college, I was working at the Daily Cardinal student newspaper, trying to dig the place out of $137,700 in debt with nothing but a few bucks in the checking account and a gung-ho iguana’s attitude about my odds. We did some truly adorably naive things, like asking banks for loans against future advertising sales, negotiating debts for pennies on the dollar and sending out hundreds of billing statements with a “we think this is right” letter attached.

Some of those things worked, while other failed, but we were as unrelenting as a toothache and as stubborn as an ink spot on white carpeting. As time went on, we won more than we lost, after we kind of figured out how the game itself worked. Basically, we realized that the adult on the other end of whatever we were trying to do had a job that came with a boss who had bigger bosses and nobody wanted to get in trouble. It was much easier for that person to just go along with us, make some concessions, spin it for their boss and move on.

Now, I am that adult in so many ways and so are so many of us out there. For every journalist who quits because a newsroom situation is untenable, there are dozens more who stay put because the mortgage isn’t going to pay itself. For every journalist who quits because their bosses are bowing to outside pressure that is forcing content changes, there are dozens more who know how hard it is to get another job these days, especially when you’re too old to be young, but not old enough to retire. For every adviser like Jim Rodenbush who is willing to lose a job rather than sell out their student media operation, there are many folks who would try to massage the situation in an effort to find “peace with honor” and avoid getting canned.

(SIDE NOTE: Rodenbush is suing the university over his termination and I’m pulling for him all the way. If I were running things at IU, I’d pay the man rather than have all of the blatant illegality and stupidity that happened here laid bare in the public. Then again, if I were running things at IU, this situation wouldn’t have happened in the first place…) 

I don’t know if I’m the only one who does this, but sometimes I look at myself and think, “This is a heck of a good life you’ve built here. Don’t screw it up.” I love so much of what I do and what I’ve been lucky enough to accomplish, that it feels like any risk of upsetting that apple cart might not be worth it, even if I know I’m right or even if I see something wrong happening.

The cliche of how “with age comes wisdom,” is a hollow platitude that gives us a pass when we decide not to put ourselves on the line and call out wrongdoing. The winds of time erode our certainty of purpose and wear away our willingness to fight. We learn to self-censor, rather than be censored. We bite our tongues, nod along and keep the trains running on time. It’s easier that way and guarantees less of a personal cost.

You folks at the IDS are special because you don’t just fight the fights you can win. You fight the fights that need to be fought, regardless of outcome. You understand absolute right and absolute wrong, and refuse to convince yourself that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze when it comes to standing up for what matters. You say, “I know what’s happening here. I can’t stand by and let it happen. This is the hill I’m willing to die on if that’s what it takes to fix this situation.”

When people like me see this, we can’t help but rush right in and do our best to help. We admire the hell out of your courage and wonder if we were ever that young and that brave, or if it was just a hazy bit of self-mythologizing that puts us in your company. We are grateful to see that what we really liked about ourselves back then is alive and well in this oft-maligned generation of students.

We do this for you, because we support you, but we also do it because you give us something much more important in return. You help us reach back to a time where we didn’t politely apologize and then go stand in the corner, awaiting our punishment. You help us remember that the best of us isn’t gone for good. It’s just waiting for the inspiration you provide.

Thanks for this. It means more than you know.

With admiration,

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

Money Talks: IU alumni express their displeasure over the censoring of the IDS by cutting off donations

It’s important to track these things… 

THE LEAD: If money talks, IU alumni are screaming their disapproval of what the Media School has done to the Indiana Daily Student. After news broke regarding the firing of adviser Jim Rodenbush and the killing of the print edition, all in an effort to censor the students, donors have retracted pledged funds or vowed to cease future donations:

Patricia Esgate, who graduated from IU with a journalism degree in 1973, told IndyStar that the university angered her enough to cancel $1.5 million in bequests she was planning to leave in honor of one of her former classmates, Mary Whitaker. Whitaker was murdered in her home in 2014.

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Toby Cole, a fourth-generation graduate and third-generation IU football player, told IndyStar over email that his family was ceasing their monthly contributions and working to cancel a $300,000 planned gift to support scholarships.

“If IU can pay our FB coach almost $100mm we can fund our IDS,” he said in an email. “Problem is ‘they’ don’t want an independent free speaking print newspaper because students actually wield power with it.”

Other folks mentioned in the story also either cancelled their ongoing donations or have stated intentions to do so.

HAMSTRUNG BY THE PURSE STRINGS: One of the complaints noted earlier by the Media School folks was that the paper kept losing money, so the school needed to step in and enforce some financial responsibility. However, the paper had managed to fundraise a six-figure pile of cash that was meant for IDS use:

Many alumni of IU’s prominent journalism program have contributed to the IDS Legacy Fund, which “ensures the financial viability of our editorial operations.” The fund has been used for costs like student pay, conference fees and other operation costs, according to the donation page.

However, reports about how the university has controlled the use of that money has worried some alumni.

The fund has north of $400,000, according to Rodenbush, but he said he was hamstrung from using those funds for operations. An administrator told him to think more strategically and of “better uses,” he said.

In short, the Media School had to greenlight the ways that money was used, even though it was meant to be used by the IDS.

(SIDE NOTE: I would give basically anything to have a really good investigative journalist just FOIA the heck out of the money trails that run through the IDS and the Media School in relation to this kind of stuff. I have heard that other institutions have “gotten creative” in how they took large donations that were earmarked for student media and somehow funneled it into department, school or college pockets. I’m obviously not accusing anyone of anything in this situation, but I’d be reeeeeeeaaaallly interested in seeing the books at IU.)

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: If alumni continue to put up a stink and the foundation can see its coffers get a little sparser, this situation is going to go one of two ways moving forward.

WAY ONE: The university continues to back Tolchinsky and everything else the Media School is doing, with the goal of running clock on the kids, normalizing the “no-print IDS” and generally remaining stubborn. This is the way in which academics work once they convince themselves they are right about something, much to the dismay of those of us who have a normal sense of reality.

WAY TWO: The university goes all “Casino” on the Media School, cleaning house and doing so in a way as to leave no doubt that this kind of thing WILL NOT be tolerated. They’ll ship Tolchinsky off to a nice farm upstate where he can work on his films and keep getting paid whatever you pay someone not to put up a fuss. They’ll put Galen Clavio in some podcasting class in a place where he can’t really do any damage. Then, they’ll make a big show of hiring someone with a great First Amendment background and use it as a way to jump start some fundraising.

Under normal circumstances, I don’t see this happening and I don’t know IU well enough to know if the people in charge are really this level of mercenary. That said, we aren’t talking about a few journalists pulling their $25 a month donation to a beer fund. If the money keeps falling off the table, the university might decide that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze when it comes to the leadership of the school.

“This was never about money, and I think that their actions prove it.” A Q and A With Fired Indiana Daily Student Media Adviser Jim Rodenbush (Part I)

Jim Rodenbush from the IU website

In the span of one week, the Indiana University attempted to censor the Indiana Daily Student newspaper, fired student media adviser Jim Rodenbush for not enforcing the censorship and killed the IDS’s print publications when it was clear the students would not yield.

The story of this has blown up beyond the confines of Bloomington, with The New York Times, NBC News, The Guardian and others following the situation. The Indiana media, including the Indy Star, and WTHR keeping track of things as well.

Rodenbush was nice enough to have about a 45-minute chat during an airport layover, as he was flying to Washington, D.C. for the college media convention MediaFest25. Instead of hearing ABOUT Rodenbush, we thought it would be better to hear FROM Rodenbush, allowing him to walk everyone through what he has gone through this week.

Below is part one of a transcription of our Q and A, with edits to the material to tighten and clarify parts of our discussion, as well as make more sense of my questions, which somehow Rodenbush understood among the many Midwestern “Yeah… Yeah… No…” interjections I put in there.

I don’t even know where the hell to start, I’ll be real honest with you, but can you give me a sense of what the last week has been like? Start me off with (Monday), the day before you got fired.

JIM RODENBUSH: “Literally, nothing happened on Monday. Not a word about anything.”

“It was Tuesday morning that I went to go get my IU fleet vehicle because I was going to drive to DC, my reservation was still active, and so I’m like, ‘Well, that’s good.’ So then I get to work, and then I learned about the email that my editors had sent, either like the night before or that day. And I didn’t actually see the email, but my general understanding was it was one of those, like, ‘Hey, we know what you’re wanting us to do. We have a print publication coming up this week. We’d kind of like for you to roll that back.’”

“So, I knew that that email had been sent, so I was thinking, I’m going to email my supervisor, the Director of Public Media, and just remind him that I’m going to be out of town the rest of the week. I sent that email to him, and then I did, just did a bunch of things to get ready to not be in the office. Around 12:30, I got an email from a human resources representative at the IU level, telling me that I needed to be in a meeting with her and (Dean) David (Tolchinsky) at 4:30 that afternoon.”

“And I wish I had connected the dots. I swear to you that, in my brain, the idea (of being fired) was a possibility. But I wasn’t locked into that, because I had literally just learned about the editors’ email. Every time, the IDS editors said anything to anybody upstairs, I had to go into a meeting to explain journalism to them. So, I just thought that maybe this whole, ‘We need you to roll this back, or else,’ email the students sent led to this situation escalating.”

“But I was wrong.”

“I did reply to the human resources person asking for clarification that maybe, could you let me know about an agenda? Could you maybe let me know what’s going on so I could be prepared? And she wrote back that David had concerns he wanted to share. So, I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer, but that’s standard reply. So, I just continue getting ready to leave town because I was scheduled to drive to Washington (Wednesday) morning.”

“When 4:30 came, I went to the meeting, and I made small talk with the HR representative. I saw that she was from the St Louis area, so we talked St Louis for a couple minutes, and then David showed up, and he began with, ‘This is going to be an uncomfortable meeting.’ Then he just read from the termination letter. That’s it. He just read from the termination letter.”

“When he was done, my response was, ‘Is that it?’ And then the human resources person, on the spot, collected my keys, collected my IU ID, told me I had to be escorted from the building and that my personal belongings would be sent to me. She also said that I needed also hand over my IU laptop, but my IU laptop was at home because I was packed to leave. So, I had I had to drive in my IU rental that I already picked up over to my apartment to pick up the laptop and then drive back to campus to give this HR representative my laptop and the IU rental keys.”

 

Given the way you were fired and then removed from campus, were you also given any ultimatum about not talking to the kids at the IDS or any of the staff? Were you told not to reach out or were the kids told to shun you or anything?

JIM RODENBUSH: “I wasn’t given any, ‘Stay away from campus’ statement. I wasn’t getting any ‘Don’t talk to anyone’ thing. I have a daughter who is an IU student, so the whole time I’m processing being fired, I was in the back of my brain thinking, ‘If you tell me I can’t talk to students, that might be a little weird.’ But there was (no demand regarding communication). I have been in communication with the students, and the professional staff. I stayed in touch with everybody.”

“What’s funny is that I went back on campus and the public media outlet called me for an interview, and they said they wanted to put me on camera. And I said to the guy, ‘You want me to go into the into the TV building?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah!’ I’m like, ‘Are you sure?’ They were like, ‘Yeah! If they say anything to us, we’ll just pitch a fit.’”

 

The day after you get fired, the second shoe drops and the Media School folks announce that they’re killing the print edition. Every indication I’ve gotten from anything I’ve seen is that the special print editions were making money, so what does this decision really say about the school’s motives here?

JIM RODENBUSH: “This proves that this was never about money, because you have effectively killed a massive amount of revenue-generating opportunities at this time. You’ve also done severe damage to the IDS’s relationship with the housing community, a big collective of advertisers. So much of my advertising director’s foothold that he has made here has to do with some of the print products that are produced. And so, you have made his job both harder and easier in a weird way. You just eliminated half of the half of his work. That’s the easier part. The harder part is you have eliminated massive revenue opportunities. So, this was never about money, and I think that their actions prove it.”

 

I still can’t figure out why the school wanted to do all of this to the IDS. I never got a sense that there was a particular like moment of, “Well, you guys ran X story, so we’re coming after you.” It just kind of seemed like there was this overwhelming push to get rid of true reporting overall. Am I reading this situation right?

JIM RODENBUSH: “I was not aware of any particular story that caused this situation to accelerate. We had an update this semester on (accusations that the IU president plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation). The story that ran was really good, but it was nothing more than kind of an update on where we are right now. It wasn’t anything particularly scandalous or something that people didn’t know. Otherwise, I’m not aware of anything problematic.”

“Almost every media outlet is asking a version of this question because it’s rational. The immediate thought is, ‘What are they trying to squash?’ Or ‘What story are they trying to prevent from coming out?’ And there’s nothing. This just appears to be about the media school not wanting traditional newspapers on the newsstands anymore.”

 

Maybe my brain is going in the wrong direction, but by saying, “Get rid of the print edition,” the Media School basically made it so that everything is digital and their actions are drawing way more attention than anything that could run in the print publication. I guess the simple question is:  What is their beef with print? 

JIM RODENBUSH: “I would be speculating, because through all of this, I’ve never been in these meetings. I told people that a lot of my job toward the end was middle management. I simply took orders from the media school administration and did what I could do with them. I was not in the room when these things were being talked about.”

“So I’m lacking even some sort of explanation as to the motivation behind this. The general idea has just been, ‘We need to transform to digital, and we need to eliminate prints, and we need to coincide with the real world.’ That’s been the message, and that’s hard to take, because, of course, newspapers are still being printed, and we had already transformed the digital first.”

“Newspapers are a lot like malls. The general idea is that malls are dead, but if you go to certain communities, the malls thriving. It’s not a black and white kind of thing. And when it comes to the printed newspaper, it all depends on your community, and it all depends on your audience.”

“We were down to a weekly paper, but we still had an audience for that. We still had pickup rates. We still had a strong print audience, particularly in the general business area that’s right off campus. We couldn’t keep the paper on the stands. So, them saying, ‘You must get rid of print’ was a sweeping order that still doesn’t make any sense to me, because if it’s about money, then why would you halve your revenue?”

 

In looking back to the discussions we had last year, when the school was launching its media plan, I remember several of the folks involved being on a radio show, talking about money. Your editor said, “It costs us 60 grand to print and we’re making 90 grand on the deal, so we’re making money,” something (an administrator) disputed without being able to support his disagreement. Tell me, based on your experience, was the paper was making money as a standalone product? 

JIM RODENBUSH: The paper alone as a standalone product, debits and credits, looking at a spreadsheet, it’s in the black. The cuts that we made, I’m comfortable saying that the savings we actually realized from the spring was possibly $20,000 by printing seven times instead of weekly.”

 

By cutting print, they cut the revenue, but not all of the costs associated with running the whole operation. I mean, you still have expenses like payroll, web stuff, travel and all that. I guess the question then becomes, what other revenue streams does the IDS have that will help meet all those expenses?

JIM RODENBUSH: “You’ve got professional staff there that are working, that are still getting paid, and they’re still getting benefits. You’ve got the students still getting paid. So, salary is part of the process. And as everyone with experience knows, you don’t sell digital advertising at the same rates that you do print advertising. I don’t see an immediate replacement for what amounts to half of the revenue.”

“The blanket response has always been, ‘Think innovatively! Think new ways! Think enterprise!’ and that’s great to say, but in in reality, you’re still operating in Bloomington, Indiana.  It is a wonderful town, but it’s still a midsized town in southern Indiana. There’s only so much money available there and (the ad manager) has done a wonderful job in the advertising community, building relationships all by himself, and making more money than I would ever would have expected. But now, he can only sell a certain thing, and there are going to be people that won’t be interested in that. So, he’s really been given a difficult task at this point. And you can piecemeal some things that could bring in additional money but cutting print? That was a tremendous amount of money that you just let walk away.”

“A homecoming section that was supposed to print today was sold, and so, they’re going to have to refund people. It’s not just this issue, but the other three that were scheduled for this year. We have health and religious directories in these printed products, and these people aren’t going to want to go online, so all these things are going to have to be refunded.”

 

NEXT: Part II